by Ian McDonald
“How do I operate the Heisenberg Gate?”
“Ah, now, Everett, I really do think…”
“I see no harm in letting the young gentleman access the gate controls,” Ibrim Kerrim said. Paul McCabe at once dipped his head and scuttled away from Everett and his computer. Colette showed Everett the interface.
“It's really pretty simple,” she said, calling up a window with input forms on it. “Just three numbers. When, how long, and where. The timer's basically a safety lock on gate-to-gate jumps, so you can't jump into a gate that's already open to somewhere else. We don't know what would happen in that scenario.”
“I'm not doing gate-to-gate jumps,” Everett said. He squeezed the Heisenberg Gate control panel into the bottom corner of Dr. Quantum and opened up the Infundibulum.
“Oh my God,” Colette whispered. Ms. Villiers brushed her aside in her haste to get a look at the map of all the universes, known and unknown. Screen-glow lit her face death blue. Her lips moved as she frowned at the multidimensional knotwork.
“Seven-dimensional third-order topological knots,” she murmured. “The farther in you go, the bigger it gets.”
Everett whipped Dr. Quantum away from her sharp eyes and turned to face the Heisenberg Gate. He set the timer to fifteen seconds, the duration to five seconds. Then he zoomed into the Infundibulum, grabbed a piece of code from deep inside the tangled mathematics and slotted it into the destination bar. The lights dimmed. The chamber hummed to a sudden surge of power. The Heisenberg Gate sparkled like a Christmas tree with LEDs. Yellow warning lights rotated and flashed. Paul McCabe bent to a computer monitor.
“Good God,” he said. “Good God.”
Ibrim Kerrim came to stand beside Everett. A new option appeared on Dr. Quantum, a big green button with the word JUMP written on it.
“E2,” Everett said. “Your world. Your city, five miles from your gate.”
He jabbed down on the JUMP button. The empty circle at the centre of the slab turned to light. Hands were thrown up to protect eyes. Charlotte Villiers took a pair of round-eye dark glasses from her bag and put them on.
The Heisenberg Gate opened. The wind from another world buffeted everyone, whirled a fragment of newspaper down the metal ramp. Everett's gate had opened on a shady arcade, shops on one side, a row of columns, and, beyond them, tall cars and long trams. A woman in a full-skirted, puff-sleeved dress had stopped, startled, staring. She dropped her parasol. Her hand went to her mouth in shock. Everett raised his hand in greeting.
The Heisenberg Gate closed. The generators powered down. The lighting returned to normal. Ibrim Kerrim stooped to retrieve the piece of newspaper.
“This is this morning's Daily Intimator,” Kerrim said. “This is what I read over my morning coffee.”
Everett rotated the Infundibulum and pulled up a new map. He dragged codes into the jump window. A red bar across the bottom of the screen filled: the Heisenberg Gate capacitors recharging. The JUMP button came to life.
“E8,” Everett said. “In three, two, one.”
Light again flooded the jump chamber. The Heisenberg Gate opened. Everett glimpsed the dome of St. Paul's, the ugly architecture of Paternoster Row like a mouth of bad teeth; then water surged out of the gate. Funnelled down the ramp, it swept Everett from his feet and drove Kerrim and Charlotte Villiers and Paul McCabe back against the desks. Everett fought to keep Dr. Quantum out of the deluge. Then the Heisenberg Gate slammed shut.
“That particular London flooded in a storm surge in 1972,” Paul McCabe said. “They moved the capital to Birmingham.”
Everett picked himself up. The water had drained through the mesh floor; drips and drops fell from the metal grille-work.
“We're all right,” Colette said, glancing from monitor to monitor. “We haven't lost anything important. All major systems are operational. We are good to jump.”
“Well, that's nice for you, but what about these shoes?” Charlotte Villiers hissed.
Everett spun up another set of coordinates. The Heisenberg Gate readied itself for an inter-universe jump.
“E1,” he said.
“No,” Ibrim Kerrim said. His voice filled the room. Everett's finger hesitated over the JUMP button. “No, young sir. That world is quarantined. Access is absolutely and permanently denied.”
Everett challenged him with his glare. Kerrim's eyes held his. Everett dashed his hand across Dr. Quantum's touchscreen. “Round and round and round she goes…” He pulled a random piece of code onto the control panel. “Where she ends up no one knows.” He brought the heel of his hand down on the button. The Heisenberg Gate opened. The crew in the control room looked out across a red-sand dune-scape under an indigo sky. The moon stood huge and terrifyingly close on the horizon, the size of Everett's upheld hand. A handful of sand trickled out of the gate onto the ramp. The desolation was not absolute. In the distance, something disturbed the crest of a dune silhouetted against the monster moon. A ripple in the sand zigzagged across the dune faces at incredible speed. The soldiers stepped forward, assault rifles at the ready. The sand swelled; the thing beneath was coming to the surface. A dark object broke the sand. The gate closed.
“Where was that?” Ibrim Kerrim.
“I can't tell you,” Everett said. “But it's the same point in that world as the one I dialled up in your own world. There's no London there. I can do this for any Earth in the multiverse.” One final twist of the Infundibulum. He pulled out the code. “E3. Your world, Ms. Villiers.” The light dimmed, the air hummed, and the Heisenberg Gate opened inside a long, high-vaulted hall with a steel-ribbed panoramic window at one end. Beyond the window were clouds; the people in the hall were tiny dark insects against the vast skyscape. An enormous dark object was moving across the skyscape, huge as an approaching planet.
“And you are a very clever young man, Mr. Singh,” Charlotte Villiers said. The ice in her voice made everyone turn. The gun Everett had glimpsed in her bag was in her hand now. In her hand, pointing at him. “We've seen quite enough party tricks. I'll take the Infundibulum now.”
“What is the meaning of this, Plenipotentiary?” Ibrim Kerrim thundered. In the moment's hesitation, Colette moved. She lunged from her seat and slapped the gun away from its aim on Everett.
“Go Everett, go now!”
Everett Singh thrust the Infundibulum under his arm, nodded all the good-bye he would ever give to Colette, and dived through the circle at the centre of the black slab.
The Heisenberg Gate closed.
It didn't hurt a bit. That surprised Everett. He'd imagined that there would be some physical sensation to leaving one universe and arriving in another. Some wave of agonising transformation moving down his body, a wrench of every part of his being, the sensation of being broken apart down to the atoms, down to the super-strings, spread out to every part of every multiverse and then brought back together again. Even a mild dizziness and a pressing need to hurl. Nothing. Like walking from one room into another. Didn't hurt a bit. What hurt and hurt a lot was hitting the deck on the other side.
Everett hit E3 and hit it hard. People scattered as the kid from nowhere—where did he come from, did anyone see him?—went skidding across the tiled floor. He got groggily to his feet. There was something stabbing in the left side of his chest. Something felt loose in there. A rib. Not a rib. The Heisenberg Gate had closed while he was getting to his feet. He had only a few moments before E10 reopened it and sent someone through to find him. Get away, hide yourself. Which way? Where to go? Everett turned around and walked through the point in space where the gate had opened. Reverse psychology: if you go through in a certain direction, they'll naturally assume you'll keep going in that direction. Double-back on yourself.
His ankle hurt. But at least the people weren't staring. As much. He was, he had to admit, conspicuously dressed. Men in big-shouldered suits with wide laps and turned-up trousers. Shirts, no ties: instead, enamelled brooches of different geometric shapes at the collar. Some wore
greatcoats, tailored at the waist. Women too favoured long coats, trimmed with fur, wasp-waisted jackets, tight pencil-skirts that went to mid-calf. Girls' fashion was long, hooded cardigans over leggings. Boys ran to military-style jackets and knee-length shorts over long socks. Hats. This was a hat universe. Sharp trilbies with decorative bands for the men; the women dainty little pillboxes and fascinators perched at perilous angles, swathed in lace and net. Girls wore hoods, boys bandanas, which Everett thought made them look badass. Tweed and twill, cord and knitwear. Proper shoes, very shiny. Denim had never been invented in this universe. Everett in his jeans, his glowtube decorated North Face weather-proof, his thick-soled but very comfortable trainers, and his backpack, looked like an astronaut, Not an astronaut, a traveller from much farther away than that. A quantumnaut.
He was in another universe.
The hall curved around a central spine of ticket desks and chutes where porters dropped baggage. People milled around Everett, too busy on their businesses to spare more than a glance at the bizarro kid. A shout, a kid pointing and staring could change all that. Head up. Keep walking. Look like you belong here. The outer wall carried advertisements for hotels and banks and resorts. Blown-glass video tubes the size of cars hung from the ceiling at regular intervals; marked arrivals and departures. Some kind of a port. An airport? The people pushing past had anxious airport faces and carried clutch bags, tightly clutched, and leather briefcases and satchels. The outer wall opened into a panoramic window. Everett stopped, dizzy with wonder. The pain in his chest was forgotten. A metal and glass tube twenty metres long led from the centre of the curved window. At the end of the spoke an airship nosed in to the dock. This was the vast object he had glimpsed through the Heisenberg Gate from underneath Folkestone. Even from Everett's head-on perspective it dominated the skyline. The upper part of the nose cone carried a stylised coat-of-arms, lions and unicorns and shields. The lower part bore the words British Overseas Air Services, and a name, Sir Bedivere. Beneath the two sets of lettering was a band of windows. Everett held his breath in excitement. Behind the glass, uniformed figures in peaked caps moved, checking equipment. A shadow passed over him. Everett looked up. A cylinder of girders and conduits and pipes and elevator shafts rose a hundred metres above him and blossomed into four spokes, each set forty-five degrees out of phase with the docks on Everett's level. An airship had just cast off. An airbridge retracted, pipes were reeled in, dripping water that fell in smearing drops on the glass roof below. The airship was a sleek, streamlined flattened torpedo, much more sophisticated and elegant than the lumbering sausages Everett had seen on Discovery programmes. It must have been two hundred metres long, but it manoeuvred lightly and nimbly on its fan engines in their sleek pods. As it backed away from the dock it turned so that Everett could see the rows of windows that ran its entire length. People stood at the windows, looking down, waving. Deutsche Kaiserlich Luftservis was written in massive letters along the airship's lower flank. Then the engine pods swivelled, the rudder moved, and the airship drifted out of Everett's sight.
Enchanted, Everett moved through the crowds to the outward-curving window. He looked down. Vertigo made him sway on his feet. He was high, very high. As far beneath him as he was beneath the uppermost dock was another set of four docking-spokes, and that was the same height again above the ground. Airships were nosed in to each dock like piglets at the teat. Everett calculated: the entire tower was six hundred metres high. Even at this intermediate level, he was higher than any building in London. His London. He felt dizzy again. Maybe there was an aftereffect to the Heisenberg jump. Maybe it wasn't anything physical. Maybe it was philosophical; that moment when something tells you that you are farther from home than anyone in human history.
Everett looked down on this new London. He saw angels and brick. He saw the spires and domes, the saints and lions and Greek gods and cornices of Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor churches, all Portland stone and angel figures with their wings wrapped around them looking down into the teeming streets; and he saw the brutal sheer brick cliff-faces of Battersea Power Station and Bankside and even the daunting face of University College London, a building that always made Everett imagine Batman sweeping down from its heights. Baroque Gotham, that was the architecture of E3 London. Electricity cables swooped between the domes and the blank-faced brick monoliths. Rooftops carried ugly power pylons; the city lay beneath a spiderweb of power lines. Elevated railways veered between the ancient buildings. Here were the arched glass roofs of great railway stations. There were more parks than he remembered, though they were crisscrossed by elevated railway lines. From the landmarks he recognised Everett reckoned he was around Sadler's Wells. He could see fifty kilometres. Everett gasped. At the limit of his vision was a wall that stretched as far in each direction as he could see. A burning wall—smoke and vapour went up all along its length. Everett pressed his hands against the glass and leaned forwards. No—not a wall. Chimneys. Kilometre after kilometre of chimneys and cooling towers belching smoke and steam into the atmosphere. He didn't doubt that they circled the whole of London.
Noise: voices raised against the general background of passengers heading for flights. A disturbance in the crowd, back where he had come from around the curve in the corridor. Only one thing could do that. He had stayed gaping like a fool too long. Run. He stopped himself. Don't run. Walk sedately. There were the elevators. Elevators up, elevators down. Three car loads of passengers arrived through the shaft and still the down elevator remained up on the top level. Come on come on.
Ting. The diamond-shaped lights on the call panel went green. The doors opened. Everett apologised his way into the press of people. As the doors closed he saw Charlotte Villiers, her hat like the prow of a warship, moving through the crowd. A wedge of men in dark blue uniforms and headgear like white fireman helmets cleared the way for her. Police always look like police, whatever the universe. She turned her gaze on the lift as the doors closed. The lift started downwards with a speed that made Everett feel like the bottom had dropped out of his stomach. The Heisenberg jump had been less sick-making. Ting. Second tier: domestic flights. Ting. Ground level and transport. Everyone was heading for the exits and meeters and the greeters and the men in suits with travellers' names written on cards. And here was the trap, because beyond the meeters and greeters and the name holders and the world beyond the glass were more of the men in dark blue and white helmets. They had pieces of paper in their hands. They carefully checked the face of everyone leaving against the piece of paper. The crowd would propel him right under their eyes.
Everett peeled out from the crowd. Porters scooted around him on electric trolleys piled high with luggage. He slipped into the washroom. In a cubicle he bolted the door and tried to think of a plan. It was a good place to think. He'd always had good ideas in places like this. Something about being alone, private, free from disturbance. He sorted through the travel kit in his backpack. It had been a hasty pack that morning, after he'd had the idea of using the Heisenberg Gate to go in search of his dad. While the Spinettis had banged around trying to get ready for school and work, he quietly pilfered things a guy might need in another universe. Screwdrivers. Plugs and adapters. Insulating tape. Pencils, paper. Knife fork spoon. Ryun's dad's multitool and mains tester. Gas lighter. Matches. Headache tablets. Torch and spare batteries. Guilt stabbed him again as he brought up the wedding and engagement rings from the bottom of the side pocket. If he had had time, he would have gone home and taken his mum's. She was always promising to throw them away or have a getting-rid-of ritual or just send them to one of those “We-Buy-Gold” people who advertised on afternoon television. Mrs. Spinetti always took her rings off when she worked in the kitchen and left them on the porcelain ring-tree beside the sink. Opportunity. One two. Gone. He hadn't felt guilty at the time. There was too much else pounding in his heart and his brain. Now he looked at them in his hand and felt sick with regret. He imagined Mrs. Spinetti looking for them on the ring-
holder and not being able to find them and tearing house and family apart to find them and when she couldn't find them being fretful and tearful and filled with a terrible sense of loss. Everett felt worse about those rings than being alone in a strange and perilous new universe.
“I need them,” he whispered under the sound of a cistern flushing in another cubicle. “I really need them.”
Football strip. He'd forgotten he was wearing it the night he came home and found the house ransacked. Charlotte Villiers had done that, he was certain, with her thug boyfriend. Probably those two cops too—Leah-Leanne-Leona and Moustache Milligan. Football shorts over compression tights and school blazer might have looked geeky in his home London. In this London he would blend right in. The shoes were an issue, but there was nothing he could do about them. He wished he'd stolen a bandana.
Changing clothes quickly and quietly in an airport toilet cubicle was more of a challenge than Everett had imagined. Not that he had ever imagined trying to slide off jeans and pull on sports gear with one knee jammed against the paper dispenser and one foot trapped under the U-bend while trying not to send the contents of his backpack sliding across the polished floor into the neighboring cubicles.
Everett shot the bolt, looked at himself in the mirror as he washed his hands. Passable. He wouldn't fool the police on the door—“the Missionaries,” he called them, from an old photo Tejendra had shown him, of his great-grandfather Narinder from the colonial days, pulling white men in white solar topees around in a rickshaw. Everett didn't intend to fool the Missionaries—not that way.
He held the matchbox in the palm of his hand as he walked through the arrivals hall. He was looking at waste bins. It took three before he found one stuffed with old newspaper. It was the work of a moment to light the match, stick the unlit end under the cover like a little wooden fuse, and drop the box into the trash. He heard the whole box of matches go up with a satisfying woosh as he walked casually away. There was an outcry. Someone hit an alarm. People panicked and fled from the blazing bin. The Missionaries on the door looked over. Everett knew so obvious a ruse wouldn't fool them either. But the consternation distracted enough people in the arrivals halls to give him the moment he needed. He quickly lifted cases off a laden luggage cart while the porter's back was turned, made a space, slipped into it and pulled the bags in around him. He pulled the final case over his head and wrapped his arms around his knees. After what seemed like an age oppressed by the smell of expensive leather, Everett felt the trolley jolt and move. He knew he was out of the terminal when he felt the regular click of paving slabs under his butt. Click click click and stop. Daylight, as the porter lifted the topmost cases. He stared dumbfounded at Everett. Then Everett pushed away the bags, leapt from the trolley, and without heed for cars buses taxis, whatever they drove in this London, ran as fast as he could away from the terminal entrance, ran until all he could see of it was the metal tower of the airport rising above the rooftops like a massively elongated Eiffel tower, and the airships nosed in around it.
