by Ian McDonald
“Forty guineas for the wedding band, tenner for the engagement ring.”
“Ten pounds? Those are diamonds, those are.”
“They're marquesites, they are.”
Anything less than diamonds in her engagement ring and Angela Spinetti would have called the entire wedding off. Everett took the ring, touched the jewel to the glass countertop and lightly left a two-centimetre scratch.
“Diamonds.”
“All right, smart arse. Thirty for the sparkler.”
“Guineas.”
Nevin looked Everett up and down, seemed on the verge of asking a question, then shook his head and took out a docket book.
“I'm too bloody soft, that's my problem. Standard terms, thirty three percent APR, no redemption fee, over six weeks. Right with you, son? Sign here and here.”
He signed with a beautiful metal fountain pen. Of course, Everett thought. Not so easy to make plastics from coal. He'd never used a nib pen before. It scratched and squeaked on the paper. His signature looked like a spider car crash. Nevin tore along the dotted line and gave Everett the docket. He took out a large, complicated leather wallet, polished smooth from decades of passage from hip pocket to hand. Nevin turned it this way, that way, opened up different pockets and pouches. He marshalled the notes and coins on the glass counter like troops. Sparks from the dodgy neon lit the room nightmare blue. As Everett reached for the money, Nevin flicked out a finger, snake-quick, and dragged one coin back.
“Going to have to get the scratch professionally removed, ain't I?”
Everett glanced over his shoulder from the shop door. Nevin was setting the two rings in a glass case, his receipt folded through them.
I'll be back for you, however many universes I have to cross.
Money in his pocket. It didn't feel exactly clean, but he could look at it without thinking of Mrs. Spinetti fretting over her lost rings. One hundred pence made a pound, like home, but like US currency, the coins all had names. Guessing from American coinage, Everett estimated a shilling was ten pence, a half-crown twenty-five pence, a crown fifty pence. A tanner was five pence, and there was a rare little coin called a florin that seemed to be the equivalent of the twenty pence piece. Money in his pocket. It wouldn't last long. And while Everett was in the pawnshop the streets had emptied. A sudden flaw of wind edged with sleet sent papers tumbling down the street. It blew harsh December through Everett's sportswear. It was December everywhere in the multiverse. Suddenly he felt terrifyingly alone. A stranger in an alien world. Nothing was the same here. Nothing. He couldn't go back. He couldn't suddenly declare game over, switch off and go back to tea and chocolate HobNobs. He couldn't whip out his phone and call home and the car would be there in half an hour. He was farther from home than anyone of his world had ever been. He was the most alone person in the multiverse. No—and the realisation sent a thrill of hope and at the same time, of fear at what he must do. He was not alone. Out there, in there, in the Tyrone Tower, was his father. But home was so far, and there was so much to do, and he was tired. So tired. Tired in every cell; tired in every atom. The only way home was to follow his plan through. And there were so many holes in it, so many flaws, so much reliance on lucky breaks. It was hopeless. It was the only plan that had a chance of working. But it had no chance of ever working if he froze to death trying to sleep in a doorway, or got picked up by the police for vagrancy wandering the streets. But one night in any of the hotels he had seen, their windows bright and their lobbies loud with gorgeously dressed people gathering for Christmas dinners and jamborees and balls, would wipe out all his hard-won money. These were the bits he hadn't thought out. The fact was that he needed to sleep—and right now needed to eat.
A train clanged and roared overhead like a battle. Did they run all night? Could he just buy a ticket to the next stop and ride round and round, lulled to sleep by the clack of the rails and the jostle of the points? Everett had ridden night trains at home. He didn't expect them to be any less scary in this London. He looked up at the figures softly silhouetted behind the misted-up windows. People going home. Home to Barnet and Earlsfield, Harrow and Wealdstone, Hackney and Stoke Newington. The idea seized him so sudden and hard it was painful. Go there. It's the territory you know. The street names may be different, but the geography they're laid along is the same. There may be a 43 Roding Road. There may be a summer-house out the back of Number 27, that would make a winter bedroom for an inter-universal traveller. There may be a Dogs' Delight and allotments at the end of it, allotments with garden sheds and chair and sofas and all the things allotmenteers brought to make their gardens like outdoor living rooms. If there are none of those there may even be a Victorian cemetery with an old chapel in the middle. Everett didn't mind the dead. They slept deep and sound and never snored. Another train passed over on the down-line. Everett walked purposely toward the red neon circle-and-V symbol of the London Overground through a shower of soft blue sparks. The wind of another London sent newspapers flying around him like birds.
The girl got on at St. Paul's. Everett would not have noticed her except that she came up the carriage and sat down opposite him. She didn't need to do that. The carriage was almost empty. Everett had been checking the map on Dr. Quantum. He slipped the pad as secretively as he could into his backpack. Warnings beeped, the doors closed, the train accelerated in a shriek of wheels along the high line that looped around the floodlit mass of the great domed cathedral. Everett was suddenly paralysed with homesickness. St. Paul's—identical in every detail to the one he knew—seemed like a piece of his own world dropped into this one.
“What you gawping at?”
Everett's face reddened. The girl thought he had been staring at her.
“Just St. Paul's.”
“Ain't you seen it before?”
“Well, yes, of course. But it was the cathedral really. Not you.”
“So is I not worth a gawp?”
She was, Everett had to admit. The girl was extraordinary. Extraordinary her clothes: leggings tucked into pixie boots, a military-style jacket pulled over a T-shirt slashed to navel-height. Extraordinary her hair: a big afro of pure white. Extraordinary her face: Everett had never seen skin so pale, eyes so arctic blue. She looked like she was carved from ice.
“I'm sorry if you thought I was staring.”
“Doesn't matter to me.”
The girl turned away from him, flipped up the collar of her jacket, and slid down into her seat. She pulled a deck of cards from a satchel she wore at her side and leafed through them, lips moving silently. It was warm in the carriage, and the rolling rhythm of the tracks lulled Everett into the half-hypnosis of the night train. He jolted himself out of sleep to see the girl snatch her gaze away from him again. She carefully laid out cards from her deck on the none-too-clean upholstery. Extraordinary too the cards. They were illustrated like tarot cards, but the symbols and characters were strange to Everett. Gothy Emma, the Queen Bee of the Bourne Green emo girls, carried around a tarot deck and pretended to read love fortunes and call down curses on people who badmouthed her on Facebook. Those had hanged men and popes and fools with dogs at their heels. This was a different bestiary. Here was a brass man, and a man in a leotard on a unicycle juggling worlds. Here was a god with four faces and a woman with a sword in each hand and crowned with the sun. A serpent tied in a figure eight—or an infinity symbol—its tail in its mouth. An ancient man on crutches outside a door that led into blackness. A single hand reaching out of a stormy sea. The girl muttered to herself as she laid each card in a careful pattern. House On Legs in the centre of the cross; Chariot Drawn by Swans laid at right angles across it.
“You're doing it again.”
Everett started. “What?”
“The gawp thing.”
“I'm sorry; it's, well, I've never seen cards like those before.”
“Course you ain't. No one has. These here cards is bespoke to me. Personalised, in person. Completely unique. The one and only Everness Tarot.”
<
br /> “What are you doing?”
“Look at ‘im. Not just gawping, but nosy with it. Since you ask, looking. Little up the ways, little down the ways, little out to the sides.”
“Like telling fortunes?”
The girl's eyes widened in affront. Everett had never seen such pale eyes. They were slivers of ice.
“It is not like telling fortunes. Not like that at all. It's like I said, it's looking. Seeing things how they is, how they really is deep down, under everything and everything.” She smiled. It transformed her. It turned her into another person. “Do you want me to show you?” She gathered up the cards and skipped across the carriage to sit beside Everett. She shuffled the fat deck. She had all the tricks and riffles. Bebe Ajeet had been able to do that. She was a demon at gin rummy. The girl held out the deck in the palm of her hand. “Tap it three times.”
“No magic words?” Everett said.
“This isn't magic.” She raised the deck to the level of her eyes. “Now cut it.”
Everett cut the deck in three, put the top in the middle, the middle on the bottom and the bottom on the top.
“Take the top three cards and lay them out in a row.”
Everett turned them up, one at a time. A man with a spear, wreathed in flame. Two flying figures blasting a field of wheat. A skyscraper with an eye at its summit. The girl waggled her head from side to the side in a way that was so like that Punjabi gesture for almost-yes that Everett almost laughed. Almost. The girl's icy seriousness was terrifying.
“Behind you, beneath you, before you,” the girl said. “Now, the next three.”
A man pulling a cart with a donkey in it. A struggling man entombed in rock. Two sisters with their tongues linked by a chain. As he turned over the last card the girl's eyes widened. A tiny gasp went out of her. She bent forward, peering at the cards. Spooked, Everett leaned forward too, and as he did he felt the tiniest tug on the backpack strap he had wound around his leg. He lunged forward just in time to stop Dr. Quantum from vanishing inside the girl's military jacket. She hugged the computer to her.
“I'll scream rape.”
Everett snatched up the cards, opened the ventilation window and held them out in to the slipstream. The girl shrieked.
“No!”
“Give it back,” Everett ordered.
“But I want it. It's bona. Give it to me.”
“Put it down.”
The girl only hugged it tighter.
“But I likes it. I'd be good to it. Where's the on switch?” She turned Dr. Quantum over and over in her hands. “Oh, this is fantabulosa bona. No magnifier, look how thin it is. This isn't from our world.”
Everett felt a spike of ice run through his stomach. His eyeballs, his brain, his heart throbbed. His belly muscles spasmed. He wobbled, woozy in the lurching train carriage.
“That gawp thing. You're doing it again. Sit your little self down, omi, before you go arse over tit.”
Numb with shock, Everett sat down. The girl gingerly set Dr. Quantum down on the seat.
“Cards. Now.”
Everett placed the deck of cards beside the machine. The girl's hand struck like a snake, snatched the Tarot back into the inside pocket of her jacket. Everett put Dr. Quantum back into his backpack and closed the zip. He saw how the girl never took her eyes off it.
“Nah, I mean it's obvious it ain't from this world,” she said. “We've nothing like that. It's plastic, ainit? Real genuine plastic. Got to love that. Where you get it from, eh? Did you nick it? Oh…oh…I get it. It ain't just the comptator. It's you, ain't it? You're cross-planes as well. What world? Ain't E2, they're proper zhooshy they are. And you, cove…Well. I don't think so. So where you from? Hey, are you one of those nano-assassins from E1?”
“A what from E1?”
“That's what they say. That they look exactly like us but inside they're this mass of nanotechnology. You can only tell if you look them right in the eye, right in the dark bit, and it's like fly's eyes. Of course, if you close enough to do that, they've already eaten your brain.”
“Is this true?”
“What true, omi?”
“About E1?”
“Nah. Just a story. No one knows. Are you from E1, cove?”
“Look into my eyes.”
The girl leaned forward. She smelled of patchouli, like Gothy Emma, and something muskier, earthier Everett could not identify. It seemed too mature a scent for her. Everett guessed her age at thirteen. He wasn't very good at guessing girls' ages. She held Everett's eyes for a moment, then looked away.
“Naah…Just zhooshing you. Where are you from? Honest?”
“E10.”
“E10? Where's that, what's that. Never heard of that. E10?”
“We made first contact with the Plenitude in February this year. We've exchanged plenipotentiaries.”
“Naah, never heard anything about that. Then again, like, it's all going on up in that big tower, and what's any of it got to do with the price of cheese.”
“Quite a lot if you wanted to steal my computer.”
The girl cringed back, embarrassed, but she let her hand lightly stroke Everett's backpack.
“Oh, but it is bona…Does everyone have toys like this where you come from?”
“It's new tech, but it's nothing special. Everyone has portable computing.” Everett pulled out his phone and turned it on. “I won't be able to get a signal here, but this is a mobile phone, a telephone. Except it's got all these apps, and I've got my music on it, and pictures, and what I think you call Interweb…and a decent camera.” Everett clicked a photograph of the wide-eyed girl and showed it to her. She covered her face with her hands, embarrassed again, then took the phone to look at herself. “You can zoom in and out with your fingers,” Everett said, showing her the gestures that navigated the screen.
“Bonaroo,” the girl said. “You E10ers are good. Almost as good as them E4 coves, but they got that thing with the moon. Okay, well so I knows something about E10 now. Your tech is bona, but your togs are well vile. So where you going?”
Everett didn't answer. He didn't trust her yet.
“Oh, don't come that with me, omi. Them planesrunners, them scientists and businessmen and Plenitude coves, when they're here, they rides round in limos with bodyguards and jumpguns and everything. Here's you on the Trafalgar Line dressed like a dill with a million dinari of E10 tech on you. Do you know where you're going, omi?”
Still Everett didn't answer. The train hurtled into an archway in the face of a monstrous apartment block. The rattle of tracks and engines rose to a roar: they were in a tunnel. The carriage was flashlit by arcing electricity. Everett glimpsed windows beyond the windows, brief glimpses of other lives. The girl wiggled closer to him.
“Omi omi omi, I been counting the stops. ‘Less you get off at the next one, you're going the same place I am. Last stop. Terminus. All change. You ain't been there. You're going to need a guide.”
“Why should I trust you? You haven't even told me your name.”
The girl sat up, stiff and affronted.
“Well, I can say the same of you, planesrunner.”
“Everett. Everett Singh.”
“That's like an Airish name.”
“It's Punjabi.”
“God, you really don't know nothing, do you, Everett Singh? You see me…Nah. Let's put it this way; there's coves up there'll lift all your dally tech, and they'll even take your naff togs if they think they can get a shilling for them, and they cut your kidneys out as their way of saying a personalised thank-you. Everett Singh, Everett Singh, what you doing here?”
The train creaked to a halt at a blindingly lit station built inside the apartment unit. Cast iron balconies rose tier upon tier on either side of the tracks, the apartments sheer as cliff faces. Power cables and washing lines crisscrossed the canyon of brickwork. High above, another railway line crossed at right angles, higher even than that was a glass vault, ribbed with iron. Pigeons swooped down fro
m the heights, wings whirring, skimmed the platform. Doors opened. Passengers got off. No one got on. Everett and the girl were the only people in the carriage. Warnings shrieked; the doors closed.
“Next stop Hackney Great Port, Everett Singh….”
“I need somewhere to stay,” Everett blurted out as the train pulled out of the station.
“Course you do, omi. Why didn't you say so? You see, I may have tried to lift your toy, but at least I was honest about it, you know? Me you can trust, Everett Singh.”
Everett would have questioned her logic, but a place for the night was a place for the night. Then the train banged out of the brick-and-iron cavern—which Everett now realised was many buildings, grown together over decades, even centuries, a city within a city. The breath caught in his chest. Here was a greater wonder. Airships. Dozens of them; perhaps a hundred, moored in nose to nose around docking towers. So many airships they shut out the smoggy night sky. The train-line ran between the ceiling of airships and the ground. Down there were low, long warehouses; low-loaders and sleek electric trucks. Railway cars shunted along shining silver rails; between them darted forklift trucks, containers balanced in their prongs. The bellies of the airships were open; hull sections lowered on winch cables. Some offloaded cargo; others took on containers and pallets of freight. Everett watched an airship winch up its loading pallet and close its cargo bay. And from an open cargo bay, blinding with working lights, he saw a face as dark as his own look down. Everywhere was noise and activity and industry under steaming arc-lights.
“Sweet home Hackney Great Port,” the girl said. “Come on, planesrunner, we gets off here.”
The train slowed to a stop beneath a steel-and-glass vault and emptied its passengers onto the platform. End of the line indeed.
The elevated track stood above a marshalling yard. Freight trains and shunters clanged and groaned in cascades of sparks and flashes. The air smelled of grease and lightning. Everett would have watched for hours, but the girl pulled him on down the clattery steps. They were last through the turnstiles. Out in the street the wind whipped sleet around Everett's shoulders and legs
