Free Planesrunner (Everness Book One) by Ian McDonald Page B

performers had set up their act. Defying the weather, they rocked back and forth on the wet cobbles on unicycles, juggling blazing torches between them.

 
    T he timer on the oven in Ryun's kitchen read 03:45. Everett's mum had never been able to set any device with a clock in it. Every time Everett put them right for her she would do something and knock it wrong, sometimes within the hour. Mrs. Spinetti kept strict time: hob, oven, digital radio, microwave, all perfectly synchronised. The hum of the refrigerator pump seemed loud enough to rouse the entire house. Everett had tripped and banged and creaked his way out of the bedroom and down the stairs, but the Spinettis, being loud and noise-loving, heard nothing and slept soundly. Everett helped himself to juice from the fridge and by the light of a dozen digital clocks opened up Dr. Quantum.
    Everett brought his finger down on the Infundibulum icon. A flick would send it to the trash. Deleted. Erased from all the universes. He didn't doubt that this was the original, the one, the only. He had a theory now. His dad had seen something in the glowing clouds of data. He had turned it into a key that would open the gate to any world in the Panoply, safely, precisely. He had been kidnapped for what he knew. He'd feared that. So he'd made sure they took his insight, but hid the thing that insight applied to. How did he think they would fall for that? Colette was right. Everett would never be safe—none of his family and his friends would ever be safe—while the Infundibulum existed. Get rid of it. Everett's finger hovered over the touchscreen.
    He should delete it. He ought to delete it. He must delete it.
    Everett tapped the icon twice. Dr. Quantum filled with the glowing aura-veils of the multiverse. Tejendra could have deleted it himself. That would have been safe. But he sent it to Everett knowing it would put his family in danger. Tejendra was first and always a Punjabi dad. Family was everything. There must be something more in the dataset. Something hiding in the clouds of light that were the worlds of the Panoply.
    Everett felt the planes flock around him like winter starlings. Ghostworlds; other kitchens in other Londons. Only in this one did Everett Singh hold the key to all those other worlds. He reached out his hand, opened up the Infundibulum and grabbed a handful of universes. Everett turned the clouds of digits to the left, to the right, set them spinning, wove glowing ribbons of code together and parted them; he opened up a rift in reality and threw himself into an endless crevasse of light. Universes above him, universes beneath him, universes before and behind him and to each side. What did you see in there, Dad?
    Endless, endless numbers, universes. You could spin through it for centuries and never notice the thing that tied one code to another.
    Tied.
    A pair of hands. A pair of polished brown shoes. Tejendra had always taken good care of his shoes. A pair of straggling laces. Hands tying them in a bow. Tying. Why show me this? Everett had wondered in Ryun's bedroom. Vistas of parallel Earths, alien cityscapes, alternative geographies, then a man tying his shoelaces. Because it's a message.
    A knot. An object looped through itself in three dimensions. That was topology: the mathematics of shapes and surfaces and how seemingly different objects could be transformed into each other. Three dimensions was the least number you could make a knot in. One dimension was a straight line. There was no space to loop a line round and pull it back through itself. Forward and back, that was one dimension. A circle, that was two dimensional. Curve the line round and connect one end to the other. But you still could not tie a knot, because there was no way you could make the line cross over itself. Forward and back, left and right, but no up or down. Three dimensions—up, down, forward, back, left and right—were the least number you needed to be able to tie a knot. But you