Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (6 page)

R
yun's mum's kitchen was everything Everett's mum's wasn't: clean, ordered, bright, warm, with a dad in it. Everett had known Ryun Spinetti since primary school, and down all those years his memory of Mr. Spinetti was of him constantly laughing. He found huge, gut-shaking laughs in everything. Everett had seen him crying with laughter at the Spinetti cats, one in a cardboard box he had placed in the centre of the kitchen floor, the other prowling around it, dabbing paws at each other. Fun with Tejendra always seemed deliberate, thought out, never free-flowing and spontaneous. Even John Spinetti couldn't find it in him to laugh at Everett's ransacked home.

“You stay as long as you need. Open house here.”

“If your mum needs any help, Everett…” Ryun's mum shouted from the distances of the vast kitchen. “Anything at all. Horrible, just horrible. God save us it never happens to us.” She crossed herself and kissed her knuckles.

“Ryun, have you got that high-def monitor set up?” Everett asked.

In Year Five Everett Singh and Ryun Spinetti had recognised each other by a line from
Transformers
and realised they were not alone in the world. The geek of the earth are a tribe, and they are mighty. They had built a friendship in front of a screen.

“It's all set up.”

“There's something I want to take a look at.”

They took tea and Mrs. Spinetti's legendary M&M cookies up to Ryun's room. Since moving to Bourne Green school Everett and Ryun had found their interests drifting from the virtual to the physical: specifically into football. But the desk was still cluttered with old screens and USB ports and media readers, pushed aside by the new monitor, the size of a tabletop. Ryun closed down Facebook and a World of Warcraft screen. Everett unzipped the memory stick and pushed it into an empty USB slot.

“What is this?” Ryun asked.

“I don't know.”

Everett opened the folders. Video files, in a format unfamiliar to Ryun's computer. Everett went online, found a player that could handle them and installed it.

“Hey, that could be full of disgusting Russian viruses….”

Everett opened the first video clip. The time-code in the corner said that it had been shot on January 16th, 11:12 a.m.

“That's your dad.”

And Colette, and Paul McCabe, and some from the faculty Everett recognised, and some he did not recognise at all. This was a place he had never seen in the university: a long, windowless, low-ceilinged room. Bare metal pillars held up the roof. Fluorescent tubes were arrayed in precise lines across the ceiling; every third one was lit, casting a wan, grey, sick light. It looked like an underground car park, or a bunker. Was it even in the university at all? Desks laden with laptops and flatscreen monitors were arranged in a wide circle. Halogen desk lamps cast pools of illumination that caught the hands on the keyboards, the faces looking at the screens. In the outer shadows were bulky, boxy objects, person-tall. Everett wished he could move the camera, pan, and focus on those dark masses. Cables, gaffer-taped to the floor, ran through careful gaps in the circle of desks to the object toward which all the screens and faces were turned. At the centre of the circle stood a metal slab. Everett guessed it to be three metres tall, maybe one and a half wide. The camera gave little sense of depth, but he guessed its front to back dimension was the length of his forearm. Every square centimetre of the slab's surface was covered in circuitry cables, wiring and pipes. Yellow
Caution: laser
triangles were stuck next to cryohazard warnings. Superhot to supercold. In the centre of the slab was a hole. It was not a very big hole. Everett thought he could have thrown a tennis ball through it, nothing bigger. The edges of the hole smoked with vapour from supercooled liquid gasses.

“That must be a ring of superconducting ceramic,” Everett said.

Ryun understood these things. “Cool,” he said.

“Very.”

Parabolic radio dishes stood around the slab. One of the technicians Everett did not recognise moved among them, focusing them on the hole in the slab. The cables from the dishes led to what looked like a hi-fi radio receiver. An amplifier powered a bank of floor-standing speakers.

Tejendra spoke. His voice sounded tinny and artificial on the video. He said, “Okay this is radio frequency communication experiment eight. Can I have a twenty-second count on the gate? On my mark. Three, two, one. Count.” Screens sprang to life around the circle of desks. Digits counted down from 00:20. 00:19. The experimenters stared intently at their screens.

“Power is at one hundred percent,” Colette said. Paul McCabe pulled on a call-centre telephone headset. 00:08. He tapped the microphone. 00:05. The numbers flicked down. 00:00. And the empty circle at the heart of the slab of technology became a disc of white light.

“Oh, wow,” Ryun breathed. The white disc was bright enough to outshine any other light source in the room. It threw long shadows among the pillars. The faces of the watchers were bleached out.

“The Heisenberg Gate is open,” said Colette. “We are in inter-universal contact with E2. Professor McCabe?”

Paul McCabe cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice was thin and shaking.

“Hello, this is Imperial College London, Department of Physics.” The speakers hissed static. “E2 E2, this is Imperial College London, Department of Physics.” Paul McCabe's voice was stronger, more certain. Static. Everett could feel the tension in the room as if he were there, then. A third time Paul McCabe spoke. “E2, E2, this is Imperial College London.”

The speakers crackled; then a voice spoke. A man's voice, heavily accented, speaking words Everett did not understand but were at times on the edge of familiar. Was that Spanish, Portuguese? But those sounds were definitely not European; they were more like the Punjabi in which Bebe Ajeet would chatter away with her son, his dad. Or Arabic? He heard no more because the room erupted. Whooping, cheering, applause. High-fives and air-punches. Colette crushed Tejendra in a huge bear hug; Tejendra shook hands enthusiastically with Paul McCabe. The two men clapped each other on the back. Champagne corks popped. Glasses were raised against the light shining from the hole in the universe. The clip ended.

“What was that, what did we just see, who was talking?” Ryun asked.

Everett had already opened clip two. Setup: the same. The room, the laptops and screens, the radio dishes, the speakers, the pierced slab smoking with the vapours of liquid nitrogen. Date: one week after the first clip. The same people. Except…

“Is that David Cameron?”

“And that other guy's the minister for Employment and Learning,” Everett said. He couldn't remember his name. They changed so often, and they all looked the same.

“We've arranged a radio link with E2,” Paul McCabe said. His voice was oily with deference to the politicians. “Tejendra, could we have a countdown please?”

Tejendra silently punched up twenty seconds on the screens. Everett could see the resentment in the way his dad followed orders. When his dad was tense or angry or upset he went deadly quiet and moved slowly, as if he were in deep waters and any noise, any movement, might draw sharks. Everett understood his anger. This had gone from science to politics. It had been taken out of his hands. 00:00. Again the light from another universe flooded the room.

“Hello E2, hello E2. This is Professor Paul McCabe from Imperial College London calling.”

At once a voice came back; the same voice Everett had heard in the first clip, but speaking English with a strange, half-familiar accent.

“Hello Paul, hello Imperial; this is Ibrim Hoj Kerrim of the Chamber of a Thousand Worlds.”

“Ibrim, it's great to hear from you. I'm honoured today to have our prime minister, Mr. Cameron, with me.”

“The gift honours the giver. With me is Saide Husaen Eltebir, pre-eminence of the Pavilion of Felicities of Al Burak.”

“What's he talking about?” Ryun asked.

“I think he's their prime minister,” Everett whispered.

“Who's they?” Ryun whispered.

Everett watched the prime minister put on a headset.

“Hello?” he said uncertainly. “Hello? Mr. Eltebir?”

“If I may make so bold,” said the strange, singsong voice beyond the disc of light, “His Pre-eminence has not received the language implants. With your permission, I will translate.”

A new voice spoke, deeper toned, in that same language Everett had heard on the first clip. Ibrim Hoj Kerrim translated simultaneously.

“His Pre-eminence greets and salutes his esteemed trans-universal counterpart and extends the welcome of the many peoples of the Plenitude of Known Worlds.”

Prime Minister Cameron looked flustered for a moment, then started, “Thank you for your gracious words, Pre-eminence—”

The clip ended abruptly.

“Is this some kind of movie or something?” Ryun asked. “Was that really the prime minister or a lookie-likie?”

“It was the real prime minister. This isn't a movie. This is real.”

“Real what?” Ryun asked, but Everett had already clicked open clip three. They gasped simultaneously.

They were high over a city. Sun dazzled from domes, domes high and low, domes of white alabaster, domes covered in red terracotta, domes patterned with colourful ceramic tiles, domes of silver, domes sheathed in pure gold; dome after dome after dome, arcades of tiny domes arranged in lines and squares, domes a hundred metres across and a hundred metres tall topped with shining golden crescent moons, cascades of domes like waterfalls, domes shallow as saucers, bulbous onion domes. From between the domes rose towers; pencil-slim minarets and kilometre-high skyscrapers more like sculptures than buildings. They seemed crocheted from titanium and glass, too thin and delicate to support their own weight, but they stood in clusters and clumps like trees in a forest. The camera shifted. It must be on some kind of aerial drone, Everett thought. Now he looked down on wide avenues and boulevards shady with trees. The camera dived down between rows of tall apartment blocks, each level overhanging the one beneath. Deep arcades lined each side of the streets, shelter from a sun that was brighter than any that had ever shone on Stoke Newington. The camera only caught fleeting glimpses of the citizens of this other city, walking in the shade of the cool arcades. Everett saw men in elegantly cut, Indian-style round-collared suits, women in brightly coloured, dazzlingly patterned full dresses with puffy upper sleeves. Headgear was the norm: round caps and coloured fezzes and a wild range of turbans for the men, thin veils of white lace for the women, piled high on headpieces clipped into the hair so that they looked almost like halos. All in a glimpse before the camera drone swooped back up past the wrought-iron balconies and out from under the overhanging, shade-casting roofs. The apartment blocks enclosed private courtyards and gardens. Everett saw ponds, fountains, lush green spray-wet ferns and ornamental trees, the glitter of water-wet tiles. Then the camera wheeled across the sky. Clouds and cityscape. Everett thought he saw an aeroplane coming in to land; then there was a silver flash of water and the camera came to rest on a massive port complex on the bank of the river opposite the city. On the water hydrofoils and small fast ferries darted between tankers and bulk carriers the size of city blocks. Tugs manoeuvred the big ships into dock. The camera drifted over canals and wharves, cranes and container yards. It made a turn over a petrochemical works, tanks and pipes and fuelling piers. Everett tried to read the words painted tens of metres tall on the sides of the tanks, but they were in an alphabet unfamiliar to him. The curves and loops reminded him of Arabic. As the camera wheeled away he looked again at the oil plant. This was not an oil refinery. This was a loading terminal. The big tankers at the fuelling jetties were filling their tanks with crude. This was oil country. Then as the camera wheeled high above the bustling river, Everett saw the pattern. The slow turn in from the south, the long east-west reach, the sharp loop to the south that turned abruptly north around the narrow peninsula of green. He recognised this river-scape.

“It's the Thames,” Everett breathed. “It's the River Thames. This is London, or something like London, but in a parallel universe.”

Now the camera drifted toward the long tongue of the Isle of Dogs. In this London it was a green parkland, glittering with formal pools and fountains. Canals and water channels traced silver geometric lines between the precise parades of trees and clipped hedges. Domed pavilions and open-sided halls shaded by seashell roofs stood in open courts among the trees and hedging. At the centre of these pavilioned gardens, rising from the centre of an artificial lake, was a sprawling palace of courts and arcades rising up, dome upon dome, to a huge central dome sheeted in gold. From it rose a single enormous flag, plain white, bearing two red crescents back to back.

An edit, a jerky jump-cut to the dingy, pillared room. The two watchers gasped simultaneously. The slab with the hole into other universes at its centre was gone. In its place was a thick metal ring, draped in cables and warning signs, three metres in diameter. Everett sensed more and new machinery in the recesses of the room. Screen-glare suddenly hurt his eyes. The hole at the centre of the ring was a disc of white light. Out of the light came a spindly insect silhouette, hovering against the painful glare. The glow from the border between the universes went out. It was a moment or two before the camera adjusted to the ambient light; then Everett and Ryun saw a white plastic aerial reconnaissance drone holding position on its four ducted fans before unfolding landing gear and settling to the ground in front of the big ring.