Free Planesrunner (Everness Book One) by Ian McDonald

internets. Have you finished with those plates and mugs? I'll throw them in the dishwasher overnight—I've found mugs in here with an inch of mould in the bottom, Ryun Spinetti.”
    They handed her the crockery in silence. When the door closed again, they breathed.
    “This is real,” Ryun said.
    “This is the most real thing there is,” Everett said.

 
    E verett called from the old telephone box at the bottom of Ryun's street. He no longer trusted his own phone. The world was full of listeners. There were watchers behind every door and wall and in every car. The telephone screen had been smeared with something red and sticky, and the box smelled of urine and something he couldn't identify
    “Colette, I watched it.” He didn't mention Ryun. Simpler not to. Already, the lies were spreading. “We need to meet.”
    The Piazza at Covent Garden was grey, rain-swept, and gusty with an umbrella-wrecking wind, but it was open and even on a foul morning there were people about. The rain had driven the street performers from the Piazza, but London shoppers were tougher. They huddled under umbrellas, pulled up hoods, turned up collars, dashed through the rain, hands busy with umbrella handles and paper carrier bags in Christmas colours. Christmas. I've seen a London where it doesn't rain like this, where there are no tattered decorations and last-minute dashes to the shops, Everett thought, looking across the Piazza to two women safe and dry in Costa coffee sipping cappuccinos. Are you in that other world too? Do you go out to drink coffee, are you friends, what kind of lives do you lead? He blew on the froth of his own cappuccino at the table under the glass roof of the Market Hall.
    “We've opened Heisenberg Gates to nine other parallel universes,” Colette Harte said, taking a spoonful of the foam from the top of her coffee. “Our term for them is ‘planes.' The first one we made contact with is the plane we call E2. That's the one you saw in the clips, Islamic Britain at the end of the Med. It's the one most of the other planes contact first—it's about seventy-five to a hundred years ahead of us technologically. Gate technology is a mature science there. The problem is, they only had one other plane they could gate into; a plane we call E3, another early adopter of Heisenberg Gate technology.
    “E2 and E3 were contacted back in 1995 by another plane that independently developed gate technology, E4. E2 and E3 are very different earths from ours; E4's almost identical to our plane. They have a theory on E2 that E4 and us—E10—are part of a cluster of similar parallel universes that split off recently. You could gate into E4 and not even know you were on a parallel earth. This would look the same—they might even be having the same weather. You're there, I'm there. But there are some differences: Al Gore is in his second term as US President, there wasn't a 9/11, the prime minister is Michael Portillo. Oh, and something happened to the moon, something they haven't told us about.”
    “So; my dad?” Everett said.
    Colette grimaced.
    “Let's start with the three P 's. Planes you know about. There are two more P 's to get your head around: Plenitude and Panoply. Plenitude— the Plenitude, the Plenitude of Known Worlds—is an alliance of planes in contact with each other. There are nine known worlds; ours is number 10. Things are moving fast, Everett, and I'm not central to it anymore—the politicians have taken over—but there are diplomats and negotiators coming through from the Plenitude. You heard Ibrim Hoj Kerrim from E2 on the audio recordings—he's part of the team. There's a woman from E3 and her counterpart from E4, who's a man. Like I said, I don't know what's going on anymore; it's politicians talking. We've appointed a government minister, there's an EU representative and a US envoy. The Russians are there, the Chinese, India. Think of the Plenitude as a United Nations for parallel