by Ian McDonald
“Don't stare,” the girl said. “Makes you look like an amateur.”
But Everett couldn't help but stare, down at street level. Industry was king here, and people minded their manners. More than once the girl pulled Everett out of the way of a forklift, container raised high above them, or stopped him from stepping into the path of a shunting engine. They hopped over silver rails, scurried through labyrinths of stacked containers from which the wind, blowing over their angles, drew a melancholy wolf-howl. They hurried down sleet-lashed streets between the bright neon signs and windows of pubs and coffeeshops and Chinese noodle bars and Jamaican curry houses. From the open doorways came light and gusts of warmth and voices and music. The music made Everett think of ‘80s retro synthpop; the kind of thing dads asked for at wedding discos, but with a chunkier beat. Lots of singing. From one pub, a waft of beer, cigarette smoke, and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” Outside, the smell of old urine. Christmas lights sagged in the window and around the door, flickering fitfully. Mare Street; he was on Mare Street. And above, hauled in around their docking arms, the airships hung over him like the leaves of immense trees.
He would never have survived here alone.
The girl led him in under the hulls of the airships. Sleety rain fell in cascades from their skins. Two men stepped out of the waterfall. Water ran from ankle-length waxed coats and shapeless broad-brimmed hats. They were big, square, darkly silhouetted against the glow from the airship's interior, and the girl did not look at all pleased to see them.
“Where's your guv?” The man's voice was deep and guttural.
“You know, she comes, she goes,” the girl said. “Me, I'd be the last to find out.”
“Who's your cove?” The second man had a strong Dutch accent.
Everett sneaked his bag behind his legs.
“I'm trying to sneak him in so I can charver the arse off him,” the girl said.
The Dutchman creased over with laughter. Guttural Man was less amused.
“Well, see, here's a message, polone. Tell this to your captain: the Iddler's giving her to Christmas Eve to hear her proposals, no more. You got that? Christmas Eve.”
The Dutchman was still laughing as they walked past Everett and the girl into Hackney Great Port.
“The Iddler?”
“Iddle diddle davy, pig's bum and gravy,” the girl said nonchalantly, but Everett was not fooled. The two hoods had shaken her. But she wasn't going to tell him who or what the Iddler was.
“And Captain?”
“You know, Everett Singh, the reason I'd never ever even snog you let alone let you close enough for a charver is ‘cause you's always asking questions. Question question question. Captain. Yes. My Captain.” She ducked through the curtain of falling water. “You coming or do you want to stay out here all night?”
The airship's belly lay open, platforms and hoists and lifts lowered to the ground. Everett squinted up through the light. A name was stencilled on the underside of the nose. Everness.
The girl had called her cards the Everness Tarot.
The girl stood on the aft cargo platform. She pulled up her sleeve and tapped a watch-like device around her left wrist. Motors whirred overhead. Two cables descended from inside the airship. Loops were attached to the cables; the girl slipped wrist through one, foot through another and turned the dial on her watch-that-wasn't-a-watch. The cable hauled her up into the light.
“Hope your grip's good, Everett Singh!”
Everett slipped both arms through the straps of his backpack and grabbed for the cable as the loops rose past him. For a moment he dangled by the wrist; then his foot found the second loop.
“You still haven't told me your name!” he shouted up at the girl, vanishing into the light.
“Sen!” she shouted back, grinning down between the soles of her boots. “Sen, and I's a pilot!”
Everett felt the softness move under him and turned over and smiled and thought, that'll be the wind, moving the airship at its mooring. He sat up, electrically awake. Every nerve and hair awake. I am on an airship!
He remembered now. He had ridden the cable up into the open belly of the airship. He had gaped up in amazement. Gawp, that had been her word. So much bigger and yawning and stupid with amazement than gaped. Everything in the airship was in the key of vast. Vast the cargo holds. Vaster still the skeleton of arches and vaults, pierced through and through again with holes, that clasped the airship's skin to its ribs. Most vast of all, the roof of lift cells that ran the length of the airship's spine—a double row of gas-filled spheres each the size of an apartment block, lashed together with netting and webs of cables and flexing, pulsing pipes. The interior space of the airship was the size of a cathedral, with a cathedral's sense of height and space and lightness. No, that was not the image at all. It was more gooey and physical than that. A lung. He was inside a giant lung.
The girl—Sen, her name was Sen—had reached out and grabbed him by the waistband of his football shorts and hauled him in to the decking. He had disentangled his hand and foot just in time. In his state of amazement he could easily have been hauled high up among the gas cells.
“You bed down in here, omi.” Sen had shown Everett a nook where three cargo containers met. “I sometimes beds down here myself. I mean, I'm supposed to be on watch, but sometimes you just fancy a kip. See?” Webbing and gas-cell skin had been piled into a rat's nest. Sen offered two handfuls to Everett. “Snug as a bug.”
The fabric was soft as liquid, so flexible Everett thought it might run through his fingers, breath-soft. When he tugged at it, it snapped rigid, then relaxed again into softness.
“What is this stuff?”
“Them's carbon nanotubes,” Sen said. “Everything in Everness is carbon tubes. Strong as steel, light as a wish.”
“We don't have anything close to this,” Everett said.
“Something you don't have, Everett Singh?” Sen skipped away. “I'll come get you in the morning. You'll be all right in here—no one knows this is here—but don't go wandering about. Wait for me.”
She waggled her fingers in farewell and vanished. Everett gingerly lay down on the pile of webbing. It was deep; it was yielding. It was soft. He pulled it around him like a coat. Weariness fell on him like a landslide. Sleep pulled him down, but he fought himself awake to wrap Dr. Quantum up in airship silk like a fly in a web and lie down on top of it. He didn't trust Sen not to come slipping and sneaking in the night to the little hidey-hole. For the bona. Everett looked up at the vast spheres of the gas cells. An airship. He was on an airship. An airship in another world. A parallel universe. This morning he had woken in one Earth. Tonight he slept in another. A moment of panic jolted him, then he tumbled headlong into huge sleep.
And now he was awake and he was still on the airship on a parallel Earth. Morning light turned the open hatch into a swimming pool of light. The air in the hold was so cold he could see his breath. Everett looked up again at the lift cells. He marvelled at the way they were packed so efficiently into the space—a classic problem in mathematics, that—how the ribs and spars of the ship's skeleton respected them, the high catwalks and the scramble nets, the drop-lines dangling from the upper skin, the winches that ran along overhead rails. A sudden hissing vent of a pressure-release valve made Everett jump. Condensation dripped from the support spars. The cold was outrageous. But the engineering was thrilling. Everett clutched the backpack containing Dr. Quantum to him and followed his curiosity. The deck beneath his feet was metal mesh; below were ballast tanks and what looked like battery banks for the ducted fan engines. This must be a strange world to grow up in, Everett thought. A strange world within a strange world. Nothing was solid; nothing was substantial; nothing was anchored to the ground. A floating world, shifting at every whim of the wind. Here was a staircase that led up to the main catwalk that ran like a spine between the rows of gas cells. The steps looked frail and fragile as ice. They easily bore Everett's weight. He jumped up and down. N
ot even a creak. Strong as diamond. Up on the catwalk he looked back and forth along the central axis of the airship. One way bridge, the other way stern. Could he remember from the previous night how the ship was oriented? He went up to the nearest gas cell. It bulged tautly against the netting that connected it to the ship's skeleton. The skin looked as stretched and distended as a party balloon. Everett prodded it with a forefinger. The skin yielded. He pushed his finger into the cell all the way to the last knuckle. The skin deformed smoothly around him. This was how the people of this world had engineered out the frailties and fragilities that had doomed the old hydrogen-fuelled zeppelins of Everett's world. Carbon nanotubes, soft under gentle pressure, rigid under shock. Experiment time. Everett balled a fist and drew back to punch the skin as hard as he could.
“That's right, you put your big ham fist right through it,” a voice said in the broadest Glasgow accent Everett had ever heard. “Ye thieving Iddler hellion ye.” Everett turned, glimpsed a figure. Orange jumpsuit. Cavalry-style jacket. Face: brown as his own. Object in the hand, pointed at him. Everett heard a soft coughing noise and something hit him solidly in the face, something huge and dark and heavy and yet soft as a sock filled with mince. He went down on to the catwalk. Down and straight out.
The woman looked down on him. She wore a man's—a man in this world's—ankle-length greatcoat smartly tailored at the waist, lapels embroidered in twining floral patterns of gold thread. A white shirt, high collared, tan riding breeches tucked into boots with lots of buckles and straps. At first Everett thought she was bald, then saw that the woman's hair was cropped within millimetres of her skull. Her left ear was hooped with piercings from top to bottom. Rings on every finger and both thumbs. Silver bangles around both wrists. Her skin was the deepest black, her eyes the largest Everett had ever seen, but they did not seem soft and trusting. They were wide to everything in the world; they missed nothing; they saw and judged all. They looked at Everett with contempt and wonder.
“What have we here?”
Everett tried to sit up. He slumped to the deck. Everything hurt, hurt down to the bones. His head felt like his brain had been slam-dunked into his skull. From a mighty height. Struggling on to his elbows, Everett could just focus on Orange Jumpsuit, perched at the top of a flight of stairs, knees pulled up to his chest.
“You shot me! In the face!”
“And I'd do it again.” The accent was pure Glasgow; the face was pure Punjab. The object resting on his knees looked like a weapon in any city, any culture.
“So the Iddler's sending kids to do his dirt, is he?”
Everett rolled painfully over to find the source of this new, American-accented voice. A white man, blue-eyed, axe-faced, with an Uncle Sam goatee that made him look older than he was. Pinstripe pants, a brocade waistcoat over a shirt closed at the neck with a cravat. His long coat had a half-cape. On his head he wore a wide-brimmed hat with a feather stuck jauntily into the band.
“What? Who?”
“What's your name, son?” said the woman. The two men seemed to defer to her.
“Everett,” Everett groaned. “Everett Singh. And who the hell are you?”
The woman's wide eyes widened farther at the boldness.
“I am, the hell, Anastasia Sixsmyth, and I am, the hell, master and commander of this airship, which you have been trying to sabotage.”
“No, wait wait wait wait, I haven't, I'm not trying to sabotage—”
“Is that so? Then what's this?” The master and commander held up Dr. Quantum. “Some kind of new explosive, I'd hazard. Just made to slip in under the charge capacitors and no one would ever notice.” She held up the smartphone. “And don't tell me this isn't a remote control.” She ran her thumb across the screen. “Ooh. Bona. Tell me this, how come the Iddler trusted all this shiny tech to an idiot like you?” She waved away any possible answer Everett could have given. “No, don't bother. You won't be around long enough for it to interest me. Mr. Sharkey, Mr. Mchynlyth, our uninvited guest is leaving now.”
The Punjabi-Scot unfolded from his perch and grabbed Everett's right shoulder. The tall American took the left. They hauled Everett to his feet.
“Goodbye, Mr. Singh,” Captain Anastasia said. “Oh, and as you won't be needing these, it would be a shame to let them go to waste.” She held up the smartphone and Dr. Quantum, then tucked them away inside the tails of her greatcoat.
“No, you mustn't!” Everett's toes kicked at the decking as the two men dragged him across the metal mesh. He struggled, but they were big, they were strong. He was damaged. He was alone. They dragged him to the open hatch and held him out over the edge. Everett looked down ten metres at the hard metal surface of the cargo deck. “You can't do this!”
“I think you'll find I can do whatever I like on my own ship,” Captain Sixsmyth said. “Or did you miss that ‘master and commander' bit? Gentlemen…”
The American and the Punjabi-Scot easily lifted Everett off the ground.
“And ah one…ah two…,” the Punjabi-Scot Mchynlyth chanted.
A single fleck of white fluttered down out of the vast high vaults of the airship, turning and tumbling, flashing as it caught the morning light spilling up through the open hold. The American Sharkey reached up and dexterously snatched it out of the air. A card. A white card with a pattern on it. An Everness Tarot card.
“Sen?”
Motors whined. Sen descended like an ice angel out of the lofty recess of Everness on a drop-line.
“Let him go. He's bona.”
“Oh so?” Captain Anastasia held up Dr. Quantum. “So you know what this does, then?”
“It's some kind of comptator, is what,” Sen said defiantly. She swung gently at the end of her line, the toes of her boots five centimetres from the decking. Captain Anastasia turned the rectangle of plastic over and over in her hands, looking for a way to operate it.
“Excuse me, ma'am, I could show you…,” Everett offered. Captain Anastasia nodded to the American and the Punjabi-Scot, who set Everett down but stayed close, one on each shoulder. She held the computer out to Everett as delicately and distastefully as if it were smeared in excrement. He found the tricky little on switch. When the welcome screen booted, he pressed his thumb to the biometric panel. Captain Anastasia leaned close over the screen, frowning at the desktop. This is where it stands or falls, Everett thought. These people can help me or they can throw me out. I have to get them to help me. But there's nothing I can do, except tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
“Now this is a mighty slick comptator,” Captain Anastasia said.
“That,” Sen declared, “is because that's not from anywhere on our world. That's cross-planes tech, that is.” She sounded very pleased with herself, but at the word “cross-planes” the American Sharkey, Mchynlyth the Punjabi-Scot, and Captain Anastasia all took a step back.
“I haven't got a disease, you know,” Everett said.
“No, you ain't. But what you got is special status,” Captain Anastasia said. “And what we got is trouble. Sen! What for you bringing this planesrunner back here? And you, Mr. Singh, what for you wandering round on your ownsome into Hackney Great Port without the usual truckload of sharpies and Security Service buffoons and the Dear knows what else behind you?”
“Sharpies?”
“'Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,'” Sharkey the American said.
“Mr. Sharkey, far be it from me to disrespect a man's religion, but this is perhaps not the most apposite time for the Word of the Dear. Sharpies, Mr. Singh. Police. There is no situation in life that cannot be made worse by the presence of police. And that leaves me in a delicate situation, because sure as eggs is eggs, them sharpies and special security agents will come looking for you, and, well, we keep our own customs here in Airish Town. Sharpies, the exciseman, the
tipstaff; we live well enough without them. But at the same time I can't simply dump a valuable piece of cargo off my ship. Sen, fix your guest a bite of breakfast.” She turned to leave, her coat tails flapping.
“Captain Sixsmyth!” Everett said.
She stopped but did not turn.
“You've still got my computer.”
“So I have.”
Captain Anastasia strode on, her boot-heels clicking from the decking,
“Thanks, Ma!” Sen shouted.
Ma? was the word on Everett's lips, but Captain Anastasia raised a dismissing hand.
“Don't thank me, I haven't decided what to do yet. But I shall require words with you, Mr. Singh, in my quarters. And Sen, get some hot water and soap around him. Teenage boys are rank; it's all those hormones.”
“Master and commander of Everness, and my mother,” Sen said. The galley was tucked into a cubby on the upper starboard side of the airship, so small Everett feared being spattered by hot fat from Sen's frying pan. The table folded down, the chairs folded up, and the air was blue with smoke, but the view from the curved window was magnificent. The night's rain was clearing, swept from the sky by a brisk wind that sent lines of clouds marching out of the west. It was the kind of day Everett loved, bright, cold, low winter sun striking glints and highlights from the hunched backs of the airships. As he watched, a ship lifted from its moorings, engine pods swivelling, turning as it rose to catch the westerly wind. And there was another, approaching low and slow over the Hackney Marshes, huge as a cathedral, cloud shadows moving over its skin. Where are you from, where are you going? Everett thought. What do you carry that is half as wonderful as you are?
The scrape of fork against pan brought him back down. Sen slid the plate of eggs across the narrow table. They were grey. Transparent liquid leaked from the rubbery scrambled mess.
“Do you do all the cooking?” Everett asked.
“Special occasions. Usually it's Mchynlyth. He's rubbish.”
