Empress of the Sun (6 page)

‘Charlotte!’ Paul McCabe’s handshake was like a dead fish.

‘Miss Harte.’ Charlotte Villiers nodded to Colette Harte.

‘This is an extraordinary world,’ Paul McCabe said, not at all discouraged by the snub. ‘Extraordinary!’

‘Yes, some worlds are more ordinary than others. How do you find Heiden, Colette?’

‘It’s very beautiful.’

You answer carefully, Charlotte Villiers thought. I do not trust you, but you trust me even less.

Heiden’s beauty, like everything else on Earth 7, was twofold. The first beauty was its location: it stood where three rivers joined. On Earth 3, these would have been the Thames, the Seine and the Rhine. On Earth 3, those rivers ran into the English Channel and the North Sea. On Earth 7, the English Channel and the North Sea were gently rolling chalk downland, cut by the wide and wandering rivers. Britain was not an island, but a peninsula on the western edge of Europe. Where the three waterways joined, Heiden stood on a cluster of rivers and islands and canals, a city of bridges and embankments: gracious squares lined with steep-pitched roofs; church steeples hung with the city’s famous thousand bells; narrow, twisting streets loud with the hum of electric moped-cabs and the horns of tandem bicycles, the thrum
of barge engines echoing under the elegant bridges and the swish of taxi boats up and down the three rivers.

‘Heiden is the culinary capital of the Plenitude,’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘I have a favourite restaurant on Loud-engat in the Vereel Quarter. Bijou and charming.’

‘I was at a place in Raandplass last night,’ Paul McCabe said. ‘Good, but the portions were enormous.’

‘Yes, they find the concept of cooking for one person disturbing,’ Charlotte Villiers said.

Brilliant light illuminated the jump-room: a Heisenberg Gate opening. Ibrim Hoj Kerrim descended from the gate. One step had taken him from the strange England-off-the-coast-of-Morocco to this England-not-an-island-at-all. His brocade coat was immaculate, his turban pinned with a silver plume, beard precisely trimmed, nails manicured. He greeted his fellow Plenipotentiaries from the Plenitude and Earth 10, an Accession Candidate.

‘Good, we are all here …’ Jen Heer began.

‘… so I will show you the Plenipotentiary suites,’ Heer Fol finished.

Earth 7’s Praesidium buildings occupied the whole of one of the many small islands that lay at the confluence of the three rivers. The building had been a monastery – Heiden’s strange, two-headed saints and angels looked down from pillars and paintings as the Jen Heer Fol duo led the Plenipotentiaries through shaded courtyards and under baroque domes.

Charlotte Villiers fell into step beside Ibrim Hoj Kerrim.

‘I hear you’re thinking of standing for the Primarchy,’ she said.

‘Direct as ever, Ms Villiers.’

‘I consider it a virtue,’ Charlotte Villiers said. ‘The Plenitude of Known Worlds would be graced with you as its head.’

‘You flatter me.’

‘I understood that Al Buraqis value flattery.’

‘We like it to be genuine, Ms Villiers.’

‘Surely if it’s genuine then it’s not flattery?’

‘Exactly so, Ms Villiers.’

‘I just want to reassure you that you have my unqualified support, Ibrim,’ Charlotte Villiers said. E7 workers scurried in pairs with trolleys and electric carts, shifting the daunting piles of equipment and documents that accompanied a move of the Praesidium and all its many offices and ministries.

‘And your Order?’

‘We are concerned only with the security of the Plenitude.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen your concern, Ms Villiers. It cost me forty spahis. Forty men sent through that gate, and nothing ever came back, not even a rumour. They had families, wives, lovers … No, I’ve seen what you’re trying to do on Earth 10. I’ve seen your Order at work. I do not require its support.’

‘That’s direct, Ibrim.’

‘But not flattering, Ms Villiers.’

The two of them paused a moment on a covered stone bridge over a canal to allow a group of Plenitude staffers to pass.

‘You may not need us as supporters, Ibrim, but you certainly don’t want us enemies,’ Charlotte Villiers said.

‘What are you saying, Ms Villiers?’

Jen Heer Fol and the Earth 10 Plenipotentiaries were waiting at the end of the bridge.

‘There is damaging information we can keep to ourselves, Ibrim,’ Charlotte Villiers said.

‘This is blackmail.’

‘It is.’

‘What do you want?’

‘You don’t want to join the Order, that’s fine. But don’t interfere with my – our – work.’

‘Are you all right, Fro Villiers …’ Jen Heer began.

‘… Her Kerrim?’ Heer Fol finished.

‘Just catching up,’ Charlotte Villiers said. The party moved on through the labyrinth of the Praesidium palace.

Jen Heer Fol stopped abruptly at a pair of vast, ornate doors.

‘I thought …’ Jen Heer began, swinging open one half of the doors.

‘… the Ambersaal,’ Heer Fol concluded, opening the other door.

The room beyond took away even Charlotte Villiers’s
breath. Every centimetre of wall was covered in amber. Decorative panels showed the miracles of angels in inlaid amber, from palest yellow to darkest brown. January light poured through window panels of translucent amber and turned it to gold. Everything was golden. It was like drowning in honey.

‘Exquisite!’ Charlotte Villiers said. As the other Plenipotentiaries gazed up in amazement at the delicate tracery of the roof vaults, all carved from paper-thin sheets of amber, her alter slipped in alongside Charlotte Villiers. ‘He’s not with us,’ Charlotte Villiers whispered. ‘But he’s not against us.’

‘Flat?’ Captain Anastasia said.

‘We’re on the surface of a disc,’ Everett said. ‘It could be upper or lower – I’d need to see the stars. To be honest it doesn’t really matter.’

Mchynlyth left off fastening the lifting cables to the impeller pod in its lowered position on the forest floor. He looked in stern disbelief at Everett and took a rotor disc from his pocket. He put his finger through the hole at the centre.

‘You’re telling me that my wee finger is the sun?’

‘Well, the hole would be a lot bigger, and the sun would be a lot smaller, but yes, that’s what I’m saying,’ Everett said. ‘We’re on an Alderson disk.’

‘Explain please, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Slowly and clearly, if you please.’

Everett read the faces around the impeller pod. Sen tried
to look interested to please Everett. Mchynlyth was surly and disbelieving; everything Everett said was a challenge to him. Sharkey was still out hunting. But Captain Anastasia’s face asked the most from him: will this help or hurt my ship and my family?

‘An Alderson disk is a mega-structure,’ Everett said. ‘It’s a solid disc of material that surrounds the sun, I’d guess from inside the orbit of Venus to just beyond the orbit of Mars. Or it would if those planets existed in this universe. Say ninety million miles from inside to outside, and an outer circumference of half a billion miles. That’s a lot of surface area.’

‘And I’ll just bet you’ve worked it all out,’ Mchynlyth said.

Snark if you like, but you’re paying attention to me now
, Everett thought.

‘I’ve done some mental arithmetic,’ Everett Singh. ‘It’s about a billion Earths. Both sides are habitable, you see. An Alderson disk could support a population of one thousand trillion people. With a thickness of two thousand miles, it would have about two-thirds Earth-normal gravity – you might have noticed that you don’t feel quite as firmly connected to the ground as usual.’

‘But the sun’s at the centre, right?’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘So how would you get night and day? The world turns – our world, I mean – to and away from the sun. But if the sun’s always at the centre …’

‘You move the sun,’ Everett said. This was the insight that
had come to him in the pool. This world must be this way, because it was the only way to make sense of what he had observed. The words – the ideas – sounded insane, but the numbers said there could be no other way. They had crash-landed on a massive artificial disc, like a giant DVD, that surrounded its sun. And the sun was moving. ‘It’s actually easier to move the star than it is to move the disc. In fact, the sun’s how I worked it out. I saw that the shadows were getting longer but the sun wasn’t moving across the sky. The sun was setting, but it was vertical. Straight up and down. And the only way you can get that is if the sun is moving. The maths is quite straightforward; it’s a form of simple harmonic motion, like a pendulum. The sun bobs up and down. The mass of the disc—’

‘I think our minds are sufficiently boggled, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said.

‘So a day here is about thirty hours. And once you know that we’re on a disc with the sun at the centre, you start to notice other things too. The trees, the branches, all lean in the direction of the sun. All the leaves are tilted at the same angle. And I know why we crashed too. It’s because we went from a rotating sphere to a stationary flat disc.’

‘Is there any way this … Alderson disk … could be a natural phenomenon?’ Captain Anastasia interrupted.

‘No way,’ Everett said.

‘I was afraid you’d say that. How would you go about building something like this?’

‘It would take a technology millions of years in advance of ours. Maybe tens of millions of years.’

‘Well, then they should be able to give us a wee helping hand with our terribly old-fashioned, totally bolloxed airship,’ Mchynlyth said.

‘Tens of millions of years,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘So: not us. Not … humans.’

‘No. Humans haven’t been around long enough,’ Everett said.

‘People – things – that can build something like this,’ Captain Anastasia said, ‘do we really want to meet them?’

A shout from the edge of the clearing: ‘Scarper! Get on your lally-tappers and scarper!’ Sharkey burst from the trees. His guns were slung in their holsters on his back. Draped around his chest was a dead creature, the quarry of his hunt. Everett only got a glimpse of it because Sharkey was running for his life: long, lithe, lizard-like, rainbow-coloured, with small eyes and sharp claws. Behind him, flowing and leaping and bounding over roots and logs and branches, came a living tsunami of creatures identical to the one he wore around his neck. Very, very alive. Very, very angry.

‘Drop-lines!’ Captain Anastasia shouted. ‘Quick’s the word, sharp’s the action!’ Sen and Mchynlyth buckled and in an instant were up into the branches. Everett fumbled with his harness.

‘Mr Sharkey!’ Captain Anastasia bellowed. Both she
and Everett could see on his face that Sharkey knew he would never make it. Get to the empty harness, buckle in: impossible.

‘Sharkey!’ Everett yelled. He extended a hand. Sharkey grabbed his hand, hauled himself forward and seized fistfuls of Everett’s harness. The forest erupted in a stampede of hurtling bodies, long necks, darting heads, iridescent rainbow skins, raking clawed feet. Then Everett hit the button. High above the winch screamed, then jerked him and Sharkey into the air. Captain Anastasia was a split second behind. Lizard-things leaped and snapped at Sharkey’s heels until the drop-line took them up out of range. The herd broke over the impromptu camp, snapping and surging over the impeller.

‘Mah engine!’ Mchynlyth shouted from high above. Captain Anastasia tapped her wrist control. Lizard-things slid from the pod’s slick skin and fell into the swarm of surging bodies as the winches bit and hauled the impeller into the air.

Sharkey clung for life to Everett’s harness. They spun slowly as the winch lifted them higher. Their faces were centimetres apart.

‘Indebted, Mr Singh,’ Sharkey said. Everett grimaced at the dead creature pressed up close against his body. The animal was the length of Everett’s arm, four-legged, long-tailed, with yellow reptile eyes with a vertical slit of a pupil. Lithe as a weasel. Ears were tiny holes far back on the long,
curved skull. Pointed teeth were bared. The front paws had five digits, and the pale skin was as smooth and creased as a baby’s hand. The fingers were long. The skin was smooth, but arcs of rainbow colour, like oil on water, ran across it. Peering close, Everett saw that the smoothness was an illusion. The creature was covered in scales; smaller and smoother even than snakeskin. The spectrum colours came from the play of light along the edges of the scales. There was something in that skin that made Everett not want to touch it, and a shadow in its open eye he did not like, something too knowing.

‘What is that thing?’ he asked.

‘Supper,’ Sharkey said. ‘“For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat.”’

‘Nae offence,’ Mchynlyth said, ‘but I’ll take the vegetarian option.’

He passed the dish to Captain Anastasia. The crew sat elbow to elbow around the small table in the cramped galley. The smell of onions, garlic, cumin, chilli, curry leaves and coconut milk could not quite mask the smell of the meat. Captain Anastasia looked into the bowl and passed it to Sen. Sen gagged back a little sick in the back of her throat. Everett passed it straight to Sharkey. Sharkey had skinned, gutted and cleaned the creature, taken off its head and tail but left it to Everett to turn it into dinner. Everett had barely been able to touch the flesh. Its thin bones cracked and splintered under his knife. He scooped
the meat into the onions and frying masala paste, poured on coconut milk and clapped the lid on. Even after an hour it was still rubbery when he prodded it with a fork.

Every eye was on Sharkey. He spooned out a large serving and took a mouthful. He chewed. He chewed for a long time.

‘Bona manjarry. Nothing wrong with it. Kinda textured. Tastes like alligator.’

‘Is that naan?’ Mchynlyth said. ‘Gie us a whack of that.’

Everett passed the bread, still hot from the oven.

‘I stuck it on a stick and held it over the hotplate to puff it up,’ Everett said.

‘My gran used to do that with the coal fire,’ Mchynlyth said. ‘Just a wee show of the heat. Bugger all tandoori ovens in Govan. I’d take some of your dhal, Mr Singh.’

Everett passed the bowl of lentil curry. He was being forgiven. Not fully, not immediately, but the process had begun. They were all together on a wrecked ship on a world more alien than they could possibly imagine, with death and danger beneath their feet. They were family.