Empress of the Sun (7 page)

‘My bebe gave me her halva recipe,’ Everett said. ‘Any sort of special occasion, she’d make halva.’

‘Oh aye, it was the same when I was a wain,’ Mchynlyth answered. ‘Holi, Christmas, good exam grades, dog has puppies, third cousin twice removed gets engaged; lash round the halva. Hers was different from yours; she made it from besan flour so it was more like fudge, and it was green, and
it had this kind of herb taste. It was only after she died I found out she made it with bhang – that’s cannabis to you goras. No wonder all those wains were rolling around grinning – they were off their tits.’

‘I didn’t know your family were from Govan,’ Captain Anastasia said.

‘Aye, well, there’s things I tell you and things you never ask about,’ Mchynlyth said. ‘I must have been the only Desi boy in Govan couldn’t cook. Always a matter of some regret.’

Everett thought,
I could teach you
, but he did not say it. Mchynlyth had his own world of engines and electrics and there he was master. He would not go back to being an apprentice in another world.

‘Mr Mchynlyth, I notice you have your shush-bag with you,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Any chance of a bijou tune?’

Mchynlyth opened the elaborate brass clasps of the cracked leather case and took out a set of bagpipes. The galley was too small to deploy all the pipes so he stepped on to the catwalk, blew up the bag and adjusted the drones comfortably against his shoulder. Then he blasted into ‘Scotland the Brave’ at a volume that rattled plates in their racks and cups on their hooks. He followed with ‘The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’ and ‘The Tangle of the Isles’. Captain Anastasia thumped her fist on the table in time to the music.

‘Tune, sir, tune!’ she said.

‘I used to pipe the Master and Commander of the
Royal
Oak
in to formal dinners,’ Mchynlyth said to Everett. ‘And none o’ them “Och Aye the Noo” music-hall tunes: proper pipe music – pibrochs and everything.’

‘Thank you, Mr Mchynlyth,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Sen, the floor is yours.’

Sen leaned over the table to Everett. ‘Is you watching closely?’ she asked.

She held the fingers of her right hand in front of Everett’s face and snapped them. An Everness tarot card appeared in them: a man in a striped circus costume on a unicycle, juggling planets. Sen held up a finger on her left hand. When Everett looked back the card had vanished from her right hand.

‘You’ll bring it back,’ he said. ‘It’s only half the trick, making it disappear. The clever bit is bringing it back again. The prestige. I saw the movie. See? I’s watching closely.’

Sen snapped her right hand. She produced not the card, but Everett’s phone.

‘Not closely enough, Everett Singh.’ The rest of the crew applauded. Sharkey looked pale and in pain. ‘But you’re right. It has to come back again. Look in your pocket.’

Everett grinned – Sen had fooled him completely and brilliantly – and from the pocket of his ship shorts produced the card. Everyone applauded. Sen curtsied. ‘That’s for the Hackney train,’ she whispered to Everett as she went back to her seat. ‘If I’d really wanted, I would have had your dilly comptator and you would never have known. Prestige
that
.’

‘Mr Singh?’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘The floor is yours. Entertain us.’

Everett got to his feet. From the moment Mchynlyth picked up his bagpipes he had been dreading this moment. He could make the funniest joke sound like a term report, had people peeping through their fingers if he danced, could clear a room if he sang. But Captain Anastasia’s stern expression said that
Everness
Expected Every Omi and Polone to zhoosh up and let the bona temps roll. It was part of the forgiving. Captain Anastasia had orchestrated this whole dinner complete with party pieces to bring everyone together, knit them back together again. Disunity could kill. But what to do? Apart from cooking, there was one thing, two things he was good at. And he had an idea.

Everett swapped places in the corridor with Mchynlyth. He stripped off the T-shirt Sen had mutilated. He tied it into a soft, firm ball, like the ones he had seen kids play with in his father’s village in India.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Count with me.’ And he flipped the T-shirt ball into the air, caught it on his knee, bounced it into the air again, flipped it up with his foot, catch flip catch flip catch flip. Ten eleven twelve thirteen … Keepy-uppy. Twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five. ‘Now someone ask me to multiply two numbers. Big numbers.’

‘Twenty-four and fifty-three!’ Sen shouted.

‘Big numbers. Like three thousand two hundred and
twenty-seven.’ He caught the ball on the right side of his head, flipped it over to the left.

‘Five thousand and three!’ Sen said.

‘Sixteen million, one hundred and fourteen thousand, six hundred and eighty one,’ Everett said.

‘You just made that up,’ Sen accused.

‘No, it’s the right answer,’ Everett said.

He flipped the ball on to the back of his neck, caught it there, dropped it into his hand. Mchynlyth was writing furiously in a small notebook.

‘Just a wee minute … Aye. He’s right.’

‘How did you do it?’ Sen asked.

‘There’s tricks to it,’ Everett said. ‘Like rounding things up and rounding things down. Five thousand is a lot easier to multiply by than five thousand and three … then I just add three times the first number at the end. And three thousand two hundred and twenty-seven is just over three thousand two hundred and twenty-five. Fives are easy to multiply. Lots of tricks, but mostly I’m just good with numbers.’

‘Impressed, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Mr Sharkey, a rebel tune, if you will. Rouse us – all that carbohydrate has made us lethargic.’

Sharkey got to his feet. His eyes bulged. His face went grey. He reached for the edge of the table to steady himself. He swallowed hard, trying not to throw up. His face contorted, he bent double, stabbed by stomach pain.

‘Permission … to be … excused, ma’am,’ he said and ran out of the galley.

‘Mr Mchynlyth, maybe one of those pibrochs now,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘And play it loud.’

Mchynlyth indeed played loud, but it was still not enough to mask the groans and retching and other more liquid noises from the ship’s jax. Sharkey returned pale and sweating. Everett tried not to giggle.

‘Both ends,’ he said. ‘“The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words,” Proverbs 23:8. Meat is definitely off the menu.’

*

Everett woke in his latty; eyes wide, every sense electric, his body alert and awake and ready for activity. Pitch blackness. He looked at his clock. Seven thirty – half an hour later than his usual waking time. The day on this flat world was six hours longer than on the round worlds. The sun would not rise for another two and a half hours.

Diskworld
, he thought, and giggled in his hammock at the joke. Everett was a big Terry Pratchett fan. His dad had hovered impatiently, waiting for Everett to finish each book so he could pounce and snatch it, whisk it away into his study and read it in a single evening, giggling away. No one else on the ship would get the joke. That was all right. It was a thing between Everett and Tejendra. Wherever he was, out there among the worlds.

He had been almost sick with relief when he found out
that the corpse in the forest had not been his Dad. He had been both glad and sad that it had been ’Appening Ed, someone he had seen, almost known. Disappointed but hopeful, because the search would have to go on. Scared and tired, because stumbling into what was left of ’Appening Ed had reminded Everett that there was no guarantee that his dad was alive. Lying in his hammock in the creaking dark, Everett saw his dad vanish, taken out of the universe by Charlotte Villiers’s jumpgun. The last thing he remembered was the look of surprise.

He saw that other Tejendra Singh from Earth 1, who had lost everything he had ever loved to the Nahn. He saw the look on his face as the Nahn took him, a few short steps from the top of the Imperial College bell tower and safety. Peace.

He saw his mum, that day that seemed so long ago but was only just over a month, when he had gone out to school, but taken that other turn that led him to Charlotte Villiers and the Heisenberg Gate, and all the worlds beyond it. That tired but strong smile.
Take care, love
.

He saw his face, that was not his face, but the face of his alter, that other Everett Singh, that Charlotte Villiers had taken and twisted into the opposite of him. He saw him in the snow and the evening light at the gate of Abney Park Cemetery, looking straight at Everett as the weapons unfolded from his arms. But worse was what he saw in his imagination: his mum, giving that same ‘
Take care, love
’
strong-but-tired smile to anti-Everett, as he set off to Bourne Green. He saw the anti-Everett turn and return the smile, not to his mum, to him, Everett. It said,
Are you so sure you’re the hero here?

Everett leaped out of his hammock. He stood panting. Sleep was impossible now. He pulled on clothes and went out into the corridors and walkways of
Everness
, lit soft ghostly green by emergency lighting. Noises and groaning from the jax. Sharkey was still suffering. Everett took the staircase up to the High Mess. The beautiful room had been wrecked by the crash. Windows were smashed in, shipskin ripped by branches. The great Divano table had been overturned.

A patch of light focused on a torn section of hull, then rose up and turned on Everett. Everett shielded his eyes. The light went out.

‘Everett?’ Captain Anastasia’s voice. Everett’s vision returned through blobs of white and blindness: the Captain, with a headlamp, and a knife in her hand. A knife that could heal as well as cut. A skinripper: a scalpel for the nanocarbon skin of airships. She had been repairing her ship. Guilt, bitter and thick, welled up inside Everett, so strong it made him shudder.

‘Captain … Annie.’
Call me Annie
, the Captain had said, in this very room, before the fight against the Nahn.
You’ll know when you can
. ‘The ship … your ship … I’m sorry.’

The words were wrong. The words were stupid. The words could never be enough. Words were all he had.

The room was dark but he saw Captain Anastasia flinch, as if he had touched her with a needle of ice.

‘We’ll fix her bonaroo,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘We will.’

‘Have you been here long?’

‘Long enough. I can’t sleep. I should sleep – the Dear knows I’ve enough to do in the daylight – but I can’t, not while she’s this way.’

‘I don’t think I’ll ever be Airish enough to feel the way you do for your ship.’

‘It’s not an Airish feeling,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘What do you feel when you think about your father?’

Again Everett saw his dad, hands outstretched, knocking him out of the focus of the jumpgun. He saw again the look on Tejendra’s face. Surprise, but Everett now recalled another expression: triumph. He had saved his son.

‘It’s like that,’ Captain Anastasia said, and Everett knew that his face had said all he could not. ‘It’s the heart of you. Everett, make me some of that hot chocolate. The special stuff.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Everett,’ Captain Anastasia’s tone said that he was not fully forgiven yet. But he would be, when everything was healed and whole again. Her family was; her ship would be. ‘You don’t have to rush off. You don’t have to rush anywhere. I’ve been up here hours. Listen.’ She held a finger to her lips.

Everett held his breath. Sound by sound, the night made
itself heard. Whoops, whistles, chirps, metallic rasping, long dwindling hisses that morphed into tweets, hiccups and burps and barks and sounds like human sobbing. Voice upon voice it built. And not just noises. Winged things darted and dashed past the smashed window. Leaves thrashed, lights pulsed, like glow-worms the size of footballs. Swarms of sparks flocked like starlings in a winter evening sky, a whirl and dance of tiny lights. From the far distance came a deep moan like the cry of a migrating whale.

‘Look at the dark,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘There’s no moon. The stars are beautiful, and I know them like I know my own skin, but the moon, that’s part of me. I miss it.’

‘They couldn’t really have one,’ Everett said. ‘I think they must have used up every planet and moon in the solar system to build this. Even then, it wouldn’t have been enough. Because I was thinking, whoever built this place, they would have to have been around a long time, like a lot longer than human beings have on our world – worlds. And the things that hit the camp, I mean, I kind of only saw them for a moment, but what they looked like most was dinosaurs. And that got me thinking: what if the dinosaurs hadn’t died out? What if that asteroid hadn’t hit the Earth, or whatever – I don’t totally believe that it was one big catastrophe, but, anyway, what if the dinosaurs hadn’t died out but just kept evolving? And what if one of those dinosaurs had a big brain, and could use its hands, and
discovered tools and language and fire and got really, really smart? Smart dinosaurs, they could build something like this. They’d have a sixty-five-million year head start on us.’

‘Everett, you don’t have to try to explain everything,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Sometimes being there is plenty. I’ll take that hot chocolate now, I think.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Make it, Mr Singh. And bona breakfasts for everyone. Including Mr Sharkey. I imagine he’ll be pretty hungry.’

Hunting again. Not meat. Sharkey would not make that mistake again. He had been up all night, groaning and heaving. It was metal they were hunting. Engine. Sharkey hacked a path through thorned vines and feathery fronds that curled away at the touch of his machete blade. Everett was three steps behind him. They were following the line of
Everness
’s descent, away from the river where Sen had hidden Everett’s clothes, and the forest was dense and confusing. Everett couldn’t see more than five metres in any direction. There were no patterns, no shapes, nothing to steer by, just layer upon layer of vegetation. And sounds. Whistles and twitterings and musical trills and deep whooping noises that rose up into high screeches; clickings and tickings and scritchings and scratchings and hummings and bummings. All around, but never a glimpse of
the things that made the sounds. There were movements high in the tree canopy, or the flicker of what looked like the wings of a butterfly the size of a dog, or a shape moving against the unmoving background of the trees and leaves, glimpsed in the corner of the eye. But when Everett looked, there was never anything there.