Be My Enemy (3 page)

“Should you not be building that power supply?” Everett threw back at Mchynlyth. The idea was simple. Simplicity was a fundamental of physics, like mass and charge and spin. The more simple a thing is, the more likely it is to be true, Tejendra had once said. The jumpgun was a pocket-sized Heisenberg Gate. The Infundibulum was a control mechanism. All that was needed to turn them into a fully programmable go-anywhere machine was a way of hooking them together. Everett could hack the operating system in his tab computer to interface with the jumpgun—Mchynlyth had
even custom built cables and connectors—but the jumpgun spoke a language unlike anything he had ever seen before. Deep down, it was the same—it must always be the same, a universal computer language of ones and zeroes—but getting the devices to talk to each other meant going down into the code and rewriting every line, digit by digit. Code by code, Everett was turning Dr. Quantum into a translator between two computer languages that were so different that they might have come from alien worlds. Everett suspected they had. What it meant was slow, painstaking labor, with the cold seeping through the ship's skin into his fingers, his bones, his brain.

Mchynlyth grinned.

“All done and dusted. I just need some power to hook it to. But tell me, what do you think of these beauties?”

The two drones hung from cables hooked to the engineering bay's grid roof. They swayed slightly as
Everness
shifted in the wind. They were white bug machines, four propulsion fans held out like dragonfly wings above a stubby body holding sensor pods, communications, and power. Mchynlyth had rigged a drop line harness under each one, and he'd welded long handlebars to the propulsion-fan mountings. To operate the machines, the pilot would sit in the harness and grab the handlebars that reach down on either side to steer.

“I can see what you're thinking Mr. Singh. It's look a wee touch brute force engineering. Weld a bit of pig iron on and have done with it. It works. It's simple. Let go and the thing will go into hover. Simple. Safe.”

“Bonaroo,” Sen said. She ran her fingers over the metal, dewed with condensation. “Can I have a go?”

Mchynlyth slapped her hand away.

“Dinnae touch what ye cannae afford. If we havenae the power for a hot shower, we certainly haven't enough to send you gallivanting all over the sky, wee polone.”

Sen thought about looking hurt and sulky and realized this would cut no ice with the ship's engineer.

“How fast?” she asked brightly.

“Well, I had to rejig the power-to-weight ratios,” Mchynlyth said. “They were never designed to carry lard arses like you.”

Everett thought,
I would have asked about the battery life.
That was the difference between him and Sen. One of many, many differences.

“I'm going to call them bumblebees,” Sen declared.

Mchynlyth stared at her in horror.

“Hedgehoppers,” Everett said. He didn't know where the name had come from or where he had heard the expression; it was just there on his tongue. It felt right. Mchynlyth nodded, weighing the name in his head. It was sticky, it clicked. Everett could see that it had even stuck and clicked with Sen. She glared at Everett.

“Shouldn't you be working on getting my dolly dish out of here?” she said fiercely and snatched the Yubileo card out of Everett's shoulder strap.

Alarms bells sang out the length of
Everness
's two hundred meter hull. Mchynlyth threw down his welding gun and bolted from the cubby. Sen was on his heels.

“What is it?” Everett shouted over the din of a dozen competing alarms.

“Call to quarters!” Sen shouted over her shoulder. “Come on come on.”

“There's only one thing'll get Sharkey pealing the bells like that,” Mchynlyth shouted. “Something's come through the Heisenberg Gate.”

H
e could see no end to the white. There were no sharp angles, no clear joins between floor and wall, wall and ceiling. The light came from everywhere. It even seemed to shine from his own white clothing, a simple, soft sleeveless T-shirt and baggy cotton track pants. He held his hand up. His skin looked very dark in the white glow that came from everywhere. He thought he could just make out the lines in his hand and on his forearm where he had been put back together again. There was no pain. But the cold was still there, coiled inside him. He knew it would always be there. The old lady beside him saw what he was doing and turned to look at him. She said nothing. She might have been smiling. He found her emotions hard to read. His skin, the grey lady, and the upright black circle in the center of the room were the only things that weren't white. The white robbed the room of any sense of size. It could be kilometers across or he might be able to reach out and touch the opposite wall. But he sensed that the black ring was big, bigger than human sized.

The center of the ring suddenly blazed with light, whiter than white, painfully bright. Two men in dark suits stepped out of the light. The first was a sharp-faced white man with fair, curly hair. The second was the prime minister. Their steps, begun on another world, carried them a long way in the Moon's low gravity. The prime minister lost his footing for a moment but recovered with dignity. Madam Moon stepped forward to meet them. A nod indicated that he should do the same. He had worked out a way of walking on the Moon that didn't send him bounding into the air looking stupid. It was a kind of low shuffling. It was not very elegant, but it kept him on the floor. The fair-haired man had the trick of it but the prime minister did not. Every stride took him up into the air and down again.

The fair-haired man bowed to Madam Moon. She cupped her pearl-grey hands together in a gesture that was half prayer, half Indian namaste. Then he shook hands with Everett M.

“Mr. Singh, I am E4 Plenipotentiary to the Plenitude of Known Worlds. My name is Charles Villiers.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

Then it was the prime minister. His handshake was firm and his look direct.

“Everett. Good to see you.”

“Thank you Mr. Portillo.”

“The prime minister would like a few words with you in private,” Charles Villiers said.

Madam Moon dipped her head. The slightest turn of a hand opened a door in the white. Beyond it was a small conversation room. A padded white bench ran the length of the circular wall. He followed the prime minister through the door and his breath caught in his throat. The little room was roofed with a transparent dome. Above the dome was the black of space. Hanging in the center of it, huge and impossibly blue, and so close he felt he could reach up and pluck it like fruit, was the Earth. One step had taken him right through the center of the Moon. The prime minister looked up for a long moment at the shining Earth.

“The mind rebels,” he said. “We can't trust what we see any more. It's all Photoshop and Hollywood special effects. The mind rebels, but the body believes. My body says, this is lunar gravity and I believe what I feel. The body doesn't lie.” Again he looked up at the full Earth. “They say that people who see the Earth like this, so far away you could blot it out with your hand, never see it the same way again. They see it as small and very beautiful and fragile. They see it as one thing, one world.” He sat down across the conversation pit from Everett M. “Extraordinary. The car takes me to the Shard, I take the lift to the Plenitude Embassy on the sixty-fifth floor. There's London Bridge, there's London Bridge Station, and the Tate Modern,
St. Paul's. You can see for forty miles, up there. I step through the Heisenberg Gate and I am on the Moon, looking up at the Earth, and I can see for two hundred and fifty thousand miles. They're everyday miracles now. Your generation grew up with them, Everett. For you, there has always been a Woman in the Moon. I was ten when they came.”

No
, Everett M thought.
I'm the generation that never had a “What Were You Doing When?” moment.
His mum always told him that if he hadn't been so comfortable and lazy inside her he would have been born on the day Princess Diana died. As he was, he waited until after the funeral to come into the world, which meant that Laura had been able to watch the national grief unroll across the BBC News uninterrupted for days on end. When the news had broken that the fast German car had crashed under Paris, that the Queen of Hearts was dead, the women in the maternity ward had all gathered together around the television in the day room, though they each had their own pay-TV screens. It had been a shared thing, a “What Were You Doing When?” thing. What was Laura Singh doing the day Diana died? Having you, Everett M.

It seemed to Everett M that prior the arrival of the Thryn, history had consisted of shared “What Were You Doing When?” moments. What were you doing when President Kennedy was assassinated? What were you doing when they landed on the Moon? What were you doing when John Lennon was murdered? What were you doing when the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island exploded? What were you doing when Margaret Thatcher was blown up by an IRA bomb? What were you doing when the secretary general of the United Nations announced that Earth had been in contact with alien intelligence? That it had been in contact with it for twenty years? That the aliens weren't thousands of light years away in space but right next door, on the Moon? That NASA had sent men to the Moon partly to make physical contact with these aliens? That the aliens had arrived in the Earth/Moon system in 1963, three months before the assassination of President Kennedy?

That, Everett M thought, gave older people big problems: making a “What Were You Doing When?” moment out of something that had been kept secret for twenty years. August 27, 1963: What were you doing? Anything to mark that date as different or extraordinary? Was it your birthday, a first date, a bank holiday? Was it the last good day of a great summer before you had to go back to school? Or was the day the aliens came just a day like any other? You went to school, to work, to the shops while at the back of the Moon the Thryn ship came out of sleep after thirty thousand years of travel and turned its senses on the blue world beneath it.

The size of a coffee can: that was what everyone knew about the Thryn probe. The size and shape of a coffee can. Coffee hadn't come in cans for years; now more people knew what a Thryn star-seed looked like than a coffee can. It was kind of small for a spaceship carrying aliens, but it was as big as it needed to be: the spaceship
was
the alien. Long before the probe had started its journey, the Thryn had passed from biological intelligence to a machine intelligence. The star from which the probe came—Epsilon Eridani—was not even the Thryn home world. They no longer had a home world. The probes were seeds, blown between the stars like dandelion down. Each contained all that was necessary to build a new Thryn Sentiency. Some fell on fertile worlds and sprouted and took root and grew a civilization. Some fell forever between the stars and never felt the tug of a sun's gravity to wake them up. Seeds were cheap and plentiful. But the seed waking up in the Earth/Moon system and searching for raw materials to convert into another Thryn Sentiency discovered a thing no Thryn seed-ship ever had before. It reached out with its intelligence and touched another intelligence. An intelligence that was not Thryn. This was something other, an alien intelligence.

The world of 1963 was a world on armed watch, of rival superpowers with daggers half drawn from sheaths. The United States and the Soviet Union eyed each other with spy planes and satellites and early warning radars, each wired to a hair trigger that could launch
enough nuclear warheads to smelt the surface of the planet to glowing glass. The Thryn probe's sensor sweep triggered alarms in both American and Russian early warning radars. It looked to each like the other was launching a strike. Panic cascaded upward. In the White House and the Kremlin fingers hovered over “launch” buttons. The world came within a breath of nuclear war. Then both the US and the USSR learned, like the Thryn, that this was something other.

Out at the Moon, the Thryn Sentiency saw what it had triggered, and hesitated. The Thryn Sentiency pondered. The Thryn Sentiency deliberated. The Thryn Sentiency thought deep and hard and long—long for a machine intelligence. In human terms, it was something in the region of three minutes. The Thryn Sentiency spoke.

The world of 1963 was nervous, paranoid, bad tempered—adolescent. It would have broken at the revelation that alien intelligence had arrived. The USSR, the USA, and the other permanent members of the UN Security Council made a deal with the Thryn Sentiency. Six years later, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the Moon, what the camera did not show was the figure waiting there to meet them, the figure of a little lady with kind eyes and grey skin. She wore no heavy space suit, her skin was bare to vacuum. Madam Moon, a construct of the Thryn Sentiency. She watched them plant the stars and stripes and salute it, but the Moon was not theirs. In the six years since the agreement, the Thryn coffee can had unfolded into replicators and fabricators and constructors and had dug deep into the dark side of the Moon, sending tendrils of Thryn technology down through the rock like a fungus. Solar collectors opened like mushrooms on an autumn morning all across the South Pole-Aitken Basin. By 1983, the agreed date for the conspiracy to end, the Thryn Sentiency had converted the entire far half of the moon into a terrifying warren of spires and pits and webs and fans that looked a little bit like a science fiction movie city and a little bit like a dead, white coral reef, but most of all like nothing anyone had ever seen or even imagined before. All the way down to the Moon's cold, dead core.

Laura and Tejendra had not been born when the Thryn star-seed arrived. In 1983 Laura had been in Year 9 at Rectory Road Comprehensive, writing
Duran Duran
and
Spandau Ballet
on her pencil case in felt marker. Tejendra had been choosing his A-Levels for Oxford while his mum and dad begged him to go to Imperial because it meant he wouldn't have to live away from home. August 27, 1983, twenty years to the minute after the Thryn seed-ship sensors almost touched off a nuclear war, that was the “What Were You Doing When?” moment. The great deception was exposed. There were protests and riots and outcries, but they died down, as they always do, and people realized that the alien was on the dark side of the Moon and quickly forgot about it. Out of sight was out of mind. And the occasional piece of Thryn tech that made it down and onto the streets made up for looking up at a huge harvest moon and never quite seeing it the same way. History stopped. There were no more “What Were You Doing When?” moments.

No
, Everett M thought. There are no more big moments like that, when everyone shares history. But there are small ones, private ones. What were you doing when your dad was killed in a stupid, needless traffic accident?

“It's always been like this for me, sir,” Everett M said.

“You don't need to call me sir,” the prime minister said. He paused. He seemed to chew over the words he was about to speak, as if they had an unpleasant taste. “Is there any pain at all?”

“I just feel cold all the time.”

“They—Madam Moon—has done an extraordinary job.”

“She told me I should be dead. She rebuilt almost every part of me.” Everett M turned his face up into the Earthshine. There was no warmth in it. “Mr. Portillo, why couldn't they save my dad?”

“I know what happened, Everett. I don't know why Madam Moon couldn't save him. The Thryn Sentiency can work wonders, but it can't work miracles. It can't bring back the dead.” Again, he
chewed bitter words. “Everett, the man who came with me is very powerful. You know what a Plenipotentiary is?”

“It's an ambassador of our entire planet to the Plenitude of Known Worlds.”

“That's right. He's much more powerful than I am—but don't let him think that. He'll be talking to you soon. He will ask you to do a thing for him. It's a big thing, but only you can do it. Everett, I need you to do what he asks. Everyone needs you. It will sound strange, but he wouldn't ask you if there was any other way. And I want to tell you, Everett, that I, and the whole government, we will support you. We will look after your mum and your sister, your dad's family—don't worry about any of those. Mr. Villiers is going to ask you to be a hero. Not just for the country, not even for the whole world, but for all the Known Worlds. Can you do it, Everett? Will you do it? For all of us?”

Everett M felt a touch of air on the back of his neck. He turned his head to see that the door back to the gate room was open. Madam Moon and Charles Villiers stood side by side, waiting for him. Prime Minister Portillo lightly touched Everett M on the shoulder as he let him go first through the door.

“Good man,” he whispered. “I know you can do it.”

“There is not one world,” Charles Villiers said.

“There are many worlds. Yeah, I know,” Everett M said. They stood on a balcony overlooking the great pit that Everett M had seen through the window of the room when he first woke up on the Moon. Madam Moon had opened another of her jump doors and walked through with them onto this high ledge.