 
THE TOWER

Worlds of Yifan Book 3

by J L Blenkinsop

Copyright 2017 J L Blenkinsop

The Tower

For Veronica

Contents

Prologue

The Tower

The Cliff

The Island

Assassination

The Clown

Journeys

The Dutchman

Angel Hair

Kidnap

The Ruins of Paris

Meetings

Escape

Destination
Prologue

Tomass stood at the edge of the high road that circled the island above its terraces and plantations, staring up at the magnificence of the night sky. There were no man-made lights to fade the wheeling glory of the galaxy, no clouds to obscure his enjoyment and awe. The early-evening rain was long gone; all that remained were some rapidly-shrinking puddles.

A steep slope rose up before him to a plateau, the mountain-top the Chinese had removed to build their tower. Above that the crowded band of the Milky Way strode past, every star but one moving slowly in the same direction.

The one star never moved. It stayed exactly where it had been put.

Tomass shifted his feet, and mud squelched between his toes. He wriggled them, enjoying the squishiness. Feet in the ground, head in the sky, his grandfather always said. Stargazing made him feel tall, though he was short for his twelve years.

A sudden light blossomed above him, beneath the fixed star. It grew, like a chrysanthemum firework, and faded just as quickly. There was no sound; it was many miles above, and when, hours later, the concussion came, it was too faint to notice.

The spectacle wiped out his night vision, and when that had gone, so had his view of the stars. Tomass made his careful way back to the shack he shared with his mother and father and went to bed.
The Tower

A Chinese-flagged C-17 Globemaster flew in from the east. Behind it, the sky was darkening; before it, the bruised sun approached the ocean. Pulau Batu stretched ahead and behind on the plane's starboard side, but the destination was the far smaller island of Pulau Masin.

When it started its descent, Ji Ye, standing behind the pilots, gripping the backs of their seats, took in the island as it slowly filled the view from the cockpit windows. Up to a point it was standard for the region; a thin coastal rim dotted with small harbours and fishing villages, a steep slope of forests and terraces, and a steeper cliff up to a central peak. But on Pulau Masin the top of the island had been sliced off, like the top of a boiled egg. There was nothing natural there, only a flat grey plain scattered with low square buildings and bounded by six tall pylons topped with red lights to warn away aircraft. The long scratch of a runway started just short of the precipitous cliff-top and stretched almost all the way west to the other side of the plateau. As she watched, the runway lights came on.

The pilot, Temi, talked calmly over the radio to the ground controller. Her co-pilot Bernard pushed buttons on his electronic checklist, then pulled back a set of levers. The undercarriage came down, with bumps and whirrs.

The transparent plastic shell on Ji Ye's face reflected the colours of the instrument lights. When she turned to look back to the enormous black cargo that filled the load space, her friend Sophie Ailes, the Vietnamese-French nanotechnician, was strapped in in front of it, but Yifan wasn't in her seat. She was probably behind the cargo in the toilet, or in the galley getting more Coke. There was no time to go get her. She'd be all right staying where she was.

The engineer looked back out over the pilots' shoulders. A grey fuzzy mass piled up around the south-east corner of the terminal buildings. Much too close to the runway, she thought.

"Sit down," Temi commanded, and Ji Ye obediently took the few steps back to her seat beside Sophie, who took her hand after she'd belted in.

Sitting down, she realised later, saved her life.

Temi brought the huge aircraft in to land. The descent appeared slow at first, but when the ground came up it seemed too fast. Ji Ye, who had flown all around China in some very dubious planes, felt apprehensive.

The nose-wheels cleared the lip of the cliff by a few metres when disaster struck. Above the pilots' heads the top of the cockpit peeled away. The aircraft opened like a tin can, fast air tumbling around them, roaring, the airframe shuddering wildly. Temi fought the controls and managed to keep level until the rip reached the cargo, when a high-pitched squeal deafened them and the plane suddenly tipped nose-up.

From above it would have looked as if the aircraft was being sliced with an invisible knife. It tipped back for an instant then lurched forward, its nose ploughing into the runway, slewing it around. As it span and slid, first one wing then the other was sliced off, the pieces cartwheeling over the flat ground; and then the tail section fell away, cut through, and tumbled down the cliff.

*

"We can't go down there in the dark," said Temi. Ji Ye hung her head, her mouth full of ashes. Sophie stroked her neck with a black-gloved hand. They had all changed into their carbon armour: flexible outfits the same light-sucking black as the cargo. Heat pumps ticked at the edge of hearing, shifting body heat to the exhausts in the equipment hump on their backs, and when Ji Ye hugged Sophie the frequency and volume increased as the suits sucked warmth in.

They'd stood at the exposed back of the aircraft, shouting into the dark, listening for Ji Ye's daughter, hoping she had the sense to lie still, hoping she would reply, that she was alive. No response had come back. They went out with torches and walked carefully back over the skid-track of the plane. It was a long way to the cliff edge, and there were too many opportunities for a child to become lost, to blunder over the drop or to encounter more of the Angel Hair that had cut their transport to pieces.

"We have to check the vehicle," Sophie advised gently when they were back in the aircraft. Ji Ye nodded mutely. "Do you need cream?" Ji Ye refused. Her eyes strayed to a suit still in its plastic package, the last one in the crate.

Ji Ye kept herself busy, ran through her checklist three times, powering up the huge cargo, flicking through the status screens on a holopad. Everything checked out. She shut her mind to the possibility of her daughter's death, and started the checklist again from the top. The cargo twitched its legs, buzzed, lifted, settled. Its reactor was nominal, its sensors one hundred percent. Perfect.

She started the checklist again.

Bernard brought out self-heating ration packs around ten and they ate. Ji Ye could taste nothing except aviation fuel; its stink was everywhere. Behind her the cargo's heat exchangers fizzed loudly in the tropic night. Outside, cicadas echoed back. Temi returned from the cockpit. "Give me a can." She took a ration pack from Bernard and pulled the tab. Her dark face shone from the surrounding blackness of her hood, long-lashed dark eyes and a mouth used to smiling. She pulled off the top of the ration and peeled the spoon from the side. "Eugh. This tastes like kerosene."

"There's fuel all around us," Bernard sighed. "And I'm dying for a cigarette." He looked up into the open sky where the top of the aircraft had been.

Temi tossed her empty can into a corner and stood up. "What are we using as a toilet?" she demanded. Bernard gestured to the sheared-off rear of the plane. She made her way aft, stooping beneath a bracing strut, and disappeared behind the huge machine.

The armour was in six pieces – skin-tight leggings that sealed with boots, a sleeved tabard that came with a deep tight-fitting hood, and thin gloves. The bottom of the tabard reached almost to the knee, allowing the leggings to have a sealable split that let the wearer go to the toilet without compromising safety. Temi stared out of the back of the plane where the tail had been, looking toward the cliff edge a couple of miles away. In the dim light from the faraway stars she strained her eyes, hoping to see Ji Ye's daughter. There was no movement out there. She wiped herself with some blue utility tissue Bernard had left for the purpose, stood, sealed up the leggings and rolled down the hem of the tabard. In the darkness she became almost invisible. She turned to face the cargo, sighed, and made her way back to the others.

When she emerged into the weak light she looked at them. Bernard Coxhead was a military pilot and computer systems expert from England. Sophie, originally from Paris, had spent the last four years in Nanjing devising the tiny atomic assemblies that made up the cargo's payload. Ji Ye, an engineer and computer scientist from what remained of Changchun in north-east China, was responsible for the cargo's articulation software. If anything went wrong on the long journey up the Tower, she was the only one capable of fixing it.

And Yifan Shen, Ji Ye's daughter, ten years old, who had no relevant expertise. She had been allowed to come with them only because there was nowhere else for her to be. A sweet child. Their first casualty.

*

The Sun rose. The iron spot was close to the middle of its disk, the pupil of a huge eye glaring at them over the eastern horizon. Dawn light flowed like syrup across the plateau and glinted off the crippled aircraft.

A huge black shape rose from the ruin. An enormous spider, unfolding its eight limbs, flexing its joints. After a pause, two of the long legs arched over the fuselage and touched the fuel-sodden ground. Two more did the same on the other side and then the body of the cargo rose up. It high-stepped out of the smashed plane, walking on knee-joints to keep its delicate feet from damage, and came clear.

In the cabin, cramped from squeezing four into a space meant for two, Ji Ye fired up the sensors and begin a sweep for her missing child. She followed the trail of wreckage to the edge of the plateau and nodded the front of the spider over the edge, but saw no-one; debris scattered down the steep slope but there was no movement, she saw no crumpled body. The salt from her tears made her face itch, but she was not able to soothe it.

She turned the spider and made for the complex of buildings at the centre of the plateau. From time to time, and more frequently the closer they got, the same shrieking noise that had sounded during the crash clamoured from the spider, like fingernails down a blackboard. There was no obvious reason, but inside the vehicle the team winced each time they heard it.
The Cliff

John, normally a brave, sane and well-balanced individual, was nevertheless very, very frightened of heights. On this bright warm morning he felt panicky and sick as he watched his precious daughter Yifan Shen flirt with death by walking along the edge of a cliff.

"Please keep back, Yifan," he pleaded, but she took no notice.

Ji Ye, strolling between her husband and her daughter, didn't mind heights, and thought that John's nervousness might make Yifan take more risks. But she was concerned about something else. "What if you go off somewhere?" she pointed out. "You'll fall off the cliff and die, then you'd have to stay there." Yifan shrugged, and John shuddered.

The family was on a break. John had taken Friday and Monday off to accompany the girls down to the coast. It was a crisp and sunny February day, and the English Channel sparkled. Yifan's school was out for half-term, and Bart the cat had expressed an interest in being looked after by their friend Rachel. This morning, against his better judgement, John had been persuaded to go with the girls for a walk on top of the White Cliffs of Dover. Although he was more than five metres away from the edge, he was still scared of falling off. He was even more scared that Yifan might.

Yifan and her family had a secret. She was able to 'go off somewhere' – to move between the multitude of Universes, so long as there was a version of herself to move into. It wasn't something she could control. At the age of eleven she'd shared the mind of an older self called Vicky in a very similar Universe, and from that meeting discovered and later proved that she and her mother were Princess and Queen of China, descended from the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang.

After that adventure she swapped minds with Shen Teal, a male version of herself in an Eighteenth-Century parallel World. She had to learn to behave like a swashbuckling Korean Prince, while poor Teal had been coerced into skirts and an all-girls school, which Ji Ye hoped had given him a new and welcome perspective.

The problem was that Yifan didn't know when she might suddenly 'go off'. John was working with a Professor of Physics, Alan Baer, from Imperial College in London, to try to find a solution and keep her from wandering, but so far they'd had no success.

It wasn't any wonder, then, that Yifan cavorting on the edge of a lethal drop should make John nervous.

"Please come away from the edge," he called again. Yifan stuck her tongue out at him, turned to look out over the sea, and slipped.

Rachel, cat-sitter of choice to those in the know, put down a bowl of food for Bart. He looked at the food, then up at her.

"It's to eat," she urged, and sighed. His eyes just became more round. She bent down again and rattled the bowl. Bart immediately started to eat.

Rachel shook her head and searched for tea-bags. She selected a mug and switched on the kettle. Behind her the regular crunching stopped suddenly. She turned and saw Bart standing by his bowl, quivering, eyes wide with terror. He let out a plaintive cry and fell into a stiff-legged faint, spilling the dry food on the way down.

Ji Ye lurched toward Yifan as she teetered on the edge of the cliff, stretching out her hand to catch her daughter's wrist, but Yifan's falling weight and her own momentum pulled her off balance. John ran for them, stretching out to grab Ji Ye, when suddenly the two women started to crumple. His rush carried him past Ji Ye and he gripped Yifan's arm and pulled her while pushing his wife in the chest. Ji Ye's hold on her daughter did not break; they fell to the ground together, unconscious, while John, arms windmilling, dropped out of sight over the cliff.

Rachel wrapped Bart in a blanket and stroked his head while he shook. She made soothing noises. Eventually he settled and the quivering stopped. He turned his face to her and mewed sadly.

Rachel, wondering whether she was doing the right thing, reached for her mobile and rang John.

People came running. They dragged two women back from the edge of the cliff. One was gripping the wrist of the other, and although some of the rescuers tried they couldn't prise her fingers away. Two of those who ran up used their phones to call an ambulance; others took selfies with the unconscious bodies in the background.

A phone rang distantly. People looked at one another. They checked theirs. They looked at others. Then someone peered over the cliff.

Five metres or so down John was clinging to a slim ledge of white rock. He looked up, his face even whiter, and whimpered.

A Coastguard rescue team arrived and set up a tripod hoist, then sent down a serious-looking young woman in a fluorescent vest and a hard hat. She tried to get John into a harness but he wouldn't let go of the ledge. She was forced to get behind him and press him into the cliff face before she could cinch it around his chest under his arms. Then she clipped it to her own harness and the line and put her arms around him, and the team at the top pulled them up.

By this time two ambulances had arrived and the medics were puzzling over how to get Ji Ye and Yifan onto the same trolley, since Ji Ye's fingers were still tight around her daughter's wrist. John, trembling with shock, was assessed and pronounced uninjured. They put him into an ambulance with his girls while the other went to another call, and the family were taken off to the hospital.

Rachel gave up calling John. Bart had recovered, and there no longer seemed to be any emergency. She unwrapped the cat, went back into the kitchen and put the kettle on again.

*

John knew what had happened, and he was scared.

"Please, don't," he pleaded when the doctors tried to separate his wife and daughter. But they ignored him. A staff nurse tried to get him out of the curtained bay but he refused to go.

"They appear to be in coma," one of the doctors remarked. He prised Ji Ye's forefinger up and inserted a slip of stiff plastic between it and Yifan's wrist, then started on her middle finger.

They're somewhere else, John thought, but he couldn't say it out loud. He'd been holding Yifan when she went off to Vicky during her first adventure, and found himself in his own body in that other World, sharing a mind with that other John while he fell into sleep, and then into death. John knew that Ji Ye was with Yifan in another Universe. But he didn't know when they would come back.

The doctor finished separating the girls and each in turn was taken off for brain scans. Their breathing was regular, their heartbeats slow but unremarkable. It was as if they were asleep, but when the scan results came back it was obvious that neither was dreaming. There was no activity, save for the regular waves that showed brains just ticking over.

Wherever they were, they were wholly there, and no-one had come from that other side to take their places.

John was fine except for a few cuts and bruises, but shaken. He allowed himself to be shooed out of the hospital while more tests were conducted and spent his time replying to Rachel's missed call – Bart had had a fright but was now all right – and making a call to Professor Baer, which was not answered. On Monday he would contact work to beg more time off, and then try the Professor again. He checked back with the hospital staff, who told him to go get a coffee. He bought a dubious drink from an expensive machine and phoned Mister Ji, Yifan's grandfather. It was a difficult conversation. Then he called his own father, and, finally, he cried.

*

"There's no material damage to the brain," the surgeon said, pointing to the scans clipped up on a light-box. The colour images meant very little to John, who was sitting in an uncomfortable metal-framed chair nursing a cup of cold vending machine coffee. "Really, we're stumped. If only one of them had fallen into a coma, it would be reasonable to suppose an aneurysm, or a stroke; that sort of thing. Or a mental fugue. But there was no physical trauma to their heads, and there aren't any indications of stroke."

John nodded stupidly. He knew what was happening. He was waiting for Alan Baer, who had returned his call the previous evening and should have been at the hospital by now.

The surgeon sighed, sad that there was nothing to stick his knife into. "This sort of coma is difficult. We have no treatments – surgical, I mean, but I'm sure the medical people will also be talking to you. All we can do is keep them warm and stable. They're breathing normally and their bodies are working properly. Sometimes patients recover spontaneously from these states. Sometimes they don't. It comes down, in the end, to how long we can keep them in a bed."

The door to the surgeon's office opened and Professor Baer came in, red-faced, flustered and panting. Running was not something a physicist did very often.

"Sorry, sorry I'm late," he puffed, and collapsed into a chair. John passed him the cold coffee, which he grasped gratefully and drained, then grimaced. "Do please go on."

The surgeon blinked, then repeated what he had just told John, rather more quickly. Alan nodded at the end of each sentence.

"And you are?" the surgeon ended.

Alan introduced himself and asked the question he had been nursing for ages. "May I have the complete data from the scans?"

"What good would that do? You're a physics Professor," the surgeon complained. "We don't give private medical information to just anybody."

"You have my permission," John stated flatly. "Professor Baer is working on medical imaging applications, and he might be able to spot something."

The surgeon shot a sharp glance at Alan. "Can you read the files?"

"Of course. Stick them on a USB and I'll take them up to Imperial. If you don't know how to download them I'll work with your technical team." Alan looked at John. "I'll see you in my office tomorrow at noon."

John thanked the surgeon, and left for the long trip home by bus. Ji Ye had been the driver in his family.
The Island

The spider arrived at the terminal complex at the base of the Tower, shrieking almost constantly as it stepped through the final hundred metres. Radio communication between it and the Command Centre depended upon a vulnerable metal antenna which Ji Ye refused to use, keeping it inside the protection of the vehicle, so it wasn't until they reached the building and extended a probe into a socket beside a door on the south side that they were able to receive a report from inside. The news was not good.

"We've got breaches in the south-eastern quadrant," said the Station Chief. His image was steady on the spider's screens, but his voice was cracking. "Every hour or so there's another alarm. The stuff is settling and it's coming closer to the Command Centre. We may have to fall back to the secondary."

"What about this entrance?" Ji Ye asked, and the Chief checked a display.

"It's not affected directly, but the path from there to here is. I recommend you go to the northern side, there's a hangar. Look; can you do something right now to help?"

"No, sorry. We're overcrowded. We have to drop off surplus people. When we've done that we can inoculate the bottom few metres of the Tower before Sophie and I come in. Getting rid of the filaments has to wait – we haven't got that gel loaded."

The Chief nodded. "Better than nothing, I guess. How far can you get?"

Sophie looked at Ji Ye, who shrugged. "We've got gel for a hundred metres or so. It's enough to start with and then we can spray the ground-level filaments tomorrow without damaging the Tower. We'll be back to you by the end of the day."

Sophie closed the connection. The probe disengaged and retracted. Ji Ye piloted the spider to the northern side, settled the vehicle and opened its hatch. With profound expressions of relief their armoured passengers, Temi and Bernard, scrambled down to the ground and into the facility.

Sophie checked her spraying systems while Ji Ye reached the spider up the twenty-metre wall – an easy stretch for a giant with twenty-metre legs – and pulled it onto a flat roof, from the centre of which the Tower itself sprang.

The Tower rose up into the sky, but could not easily be seen. Now it was three separate cables, each less than three centimetres in diameter and twenty metres apart. Beside them, spilling over the south-east corner, there was a fuzzy black mass that hurt the eye. This was the remains of the fourth cable. The sabotaged cable.

The cables rose from holes in the roof and led down to anchor points fixed deep into the rock beneath the island. The holes were capped with large doors made from the same black material from which the cables, the spider's skin and the armoured safety suits were made – spun carbon nanofibres, stronger than steel, and flexible as silk.

When the bomb had gone off three weeks earlier, part of the severed cable had fallen back to Earth. Most of it was braided carbon, and harmless. But the frayed end was atomic carbon filament, sharper than the most perfect sword, capable of cutting everything except another filament. Now this invisible scalpel was settling slowly under gravity, cutting into whatever lay beneath it.

The spider rose and unfolded its forelegs. When they touched two of the taut black cables of the Tower they gripped, and it began to power smoothly up. Its back legs engaged with the cables and began exuding an orange liquid that coated them completely.

Slowly the spider rose. Sophie plotted screens which showed the coverage of her protective liquid, making sure that nothing was missed. As the spider ascended filaments of the fallen cable dragged across it, squealing.

It took almost two hours to spray the first ninety metres. Sophie called a halt while gel remained for the third cable. Both women were sweating, tired and hungry by this point, and Ji Ye was aching for her lost child. She was at the end of her endurance; but she brought the spider safely back down to the northern hangar entrance, spraying the third cable as they descended, and three hours after their conversation with the Station Chief the women tumbled out of the spider and into a stable, horizontal world of light and space.

*

Yifan, falling from the cliff to her certain death, slammed into a new body with a force that, if she had had her own breath, would have taken it away.

The body didn't notice.

She didn't have her own heart; this one was not thumping with terror. These lungs were not heaving for the breath to scream. It took her a minute or two to calm down before she began to notice what was being seen, felt the stifling, damp heat, the pain across her shoulders and in her feet.

She was walking slowly along a dusty track through a village built from mud brick, bamboo and corrugated iron, with palm-thatch and plastic sheeting roofs. Electricity cables looped through trees. On one side the land rose steep and bare; on the other it fell away to rice paddies, plantation and dense green jungle. The sea curved like a bow, hazy in the distance, dotted with container ships.

She tried to turn her head and look around, but she couldn't. She wanted to stop walking and relieve the pain across her shoulders, but she couldn't. She had no control.

A boy, maybe ten or eleven, called to her from a doorway. "Hi hi! Selamat datang! China!" He started toward her but a sharp voice from inside the house stopped him. The language was just gibberish to Yifan. The boy smiled, white teeth flashing, rolled his eyes and shrugged. "Bye-bye, China."

The body she inhabited just kept on trudging along the street. Aside from one short glance at the boy, it completely ignored him.

Yifan tried to connect to the personality in the mind she shared, but found – not nothing, but a barrier. A wall. And she was on the outside.

A few houses further on the body stopped and the weight of a wooden yoke was relieved as it was lifted from the aching shoulders and hung over a pair of wooden pegs. Pails of water balanced at each end were detached and taken into the house, where a slim, severe-looking woman sat on a huge wood-framed sofa watching TV. Neither looked at the other, and Yifan's body took the pails to the back room, which was the kitchen.

The woman, without looking away from the television, called back over her shoulder, but the words were not in any language Yifan knew. The woman tsk'd and got up, took Yifan roughly by the shoulder and pointed to a sink, making gestures that unmistakably meant washing up dishes.

Yifan's small new hands heated water on a propane gas range, filled the zinc sink and, powerless, she found herself doing the hated washing-up.

*

"I don't know!" Alan insisted, red in the face. The College's small imaging laboratory was crowded with equipment, hot and stuffy, an ideal environment for frustration and annoyance. John was acutely conscious of the sweat soaking into his clothing, and of the edge in his friend's voice.

"Well, there are things that look the same in both their brains," he said.

Alan, sweat dripping from his chin, made a disgusted sound. "Of course there are. In all the areas where there's no activity, for a start. The dark bits. It's where there IS activity we're interested in. And yes, there are lots of commonalities, but we're looking for something unusual. Something you wouldn't get in a normal coma."

"Is there such a thing as a normal coma? And if there is – what if, in all comas, the person was actually away in another World?"

"Well, then we wouldn't be able to spot anything." Alan sighed and pointed to the door. Out in the open air the pair headed for the Queens Arms, and lunch.

"What's in the raw data?" John asked. Despite his exhaustion and depression he was enjoying the steak and kidney pie and Guinness.

Alan dabbed gravy from his chin and sighed. "The signals received from the detectors in the machines. We don't get anything like particle spins, if that's what you mean."

"If you had that data?"

"It might help. The more detail we get, the more we can compare to other similar scans and spot differences that could lead us to some sort of conclusion. All we know at the moment is your girls are away with the fairies in some other world, but we can't point to anything that would convince anyone half-way sane." He speared a chip. "You know that I've found a hot spot in the background radiation?"

John didn't know, but he knew how important that was for their quest for the alternate Universes that Yifan and now Ji Ye had gone off to.

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is the remains of the radiation from the Big Bang, the explosion that created the Universe we all inhabit. After more than thirteen billion years of expansion this radiation was almost, but not quite, smooth. Finding a hot spot could mean that Alan had identified a place where another Universe was almost touching ours. And in Physics, finding something could be very close to understanding it.

For the remainder of their lunch Alan Baer expounded on his discovery, which suited John very well. He wanted something to take his thoughts away from the plight of his girls. And he was able to contribute to the conversation, since it had been his idea that the other Universes occupied mathematical zero-points in a function in Riemann space.

"I'm half-way through writing a program to calculate where a Universe lies in relation to ours, in that mathematical space," Alan explained. "Given two points, we can calculate other points, other Universes. And then we can see whether they have an effect on the CBR at the places we predict. This is Nobel Prize work, John; you could end up being the first non-scientist to share the Nobel Prize for Physics."

For a while that day John was walking on air. But later, at home, alone, it all felt like ashes.
Assassination

Ji Ye was in the toilet, having an argument in Chinese.

\-- Get out of my head.

\-- I can't. I'd love to, but it doesn't work like that. John said –

\-- John. John. Who is this John? Can't you think for yourself?

The other voice fell silent for a little while. Ji Ye could tell she was incandescently annoyed. She would have been too, in her situation. She used the brief silence to think about the speaker in her head. The shock of a voice – her voice – screaming "Yifan!" had jarred her from an already disturbed sleep, shooting her upright in the narrow bunk so that she cracked her head on the frame. Sophie, sleeping above, hadn't stirred. And now Ji Ye was sitting on the pot, having an insane conversation with something that claimed to be her.

The voice, when it first spoke, shouted only "Yifan!" Yifan is gone, Ji Ye thought dully. This is guilt speaking. Just a nightmare. But the voice went on, and on. I'm here, it said. I'm where Yifan was. This is what it's like. This is where John was too. Hey! Hey! Is there anybody there?

\-- I'm here, Ji Ye 'said', directing her internal voice toward the madness. And the madness replied.

\-- Oh! Thank God! Who... You must be me. That's how it works.

\-- How what works?

\-- This. Being in a different Universe. Yifan does it. She brought me here.

\-- Yifan's not here. Yifan couldn't bring you here, because Yifan's dead. Ji Ye clamped down on the bitter tears.

\-- No! She can't be. She isn't. She couldn't bring me here if she's dead!

Ah, thought Ji Ye. This is the point of it. A way to believe my daughter hasn't died. My mind's found a way to relieve the guilt. Poor mind – it's not going to work.

But the voice wouldn't stop. It kept on about travelling between Universes, about people called John and Alan, about Yifan being a boy sometimes. It sounded like nonsense, and it didn't have any connection with her own life, memories or experience.

\-- Yifan is not dead, said the voice, firmly. And then, shockingly, it started crying with Ji Ye's own eyes, and it reached out Ji Ye's own hands to pull off a huge ream of toilet paper to dab at the tears.

Then Ji Ye started thinking that maybe this was real.

*

Yifan was trapped, and very scared. The mind she was inhabiting seemed empty. There was no-one to talk to; but she did not have control of the body. It just wandered around doing what it was made to do by the hatchet-faced woman – washing dishes, bringing in water, collecting dirty clothes for the wash. It was like being in an Asian version of Cinderella.

Yifan saw through this girl's eyes, heard through her ears, felt through her fingers. They were roughened and chapped from the constant menial work. A fleeting glimpse in a mirror had shown her a younger version of herself, maybe ten years old, blank-faced and dull-eyed, plodding around the four-roomed shack at the command of the woman, whose dark skin and incomprehensible language showed to be no relation. Yifan tried turning around in her head and found nothing. She looked for memories and found nothing. All there was was an all-pervading sense of hurt and loss. The body moved like a zombie through all the commands it was given, and Yifan was powerless to move a finger.

It had been hours since she'd fallen off the cliff at Dover, and she had tried everything she could think of to gain control, but nothing worked. Was the Yifan whose mind she was trapped in also trapped in hers back there? Perhaps that Yifan was dead, crumpled at the bottom of the cliff, and now this was her only life, a robot, a drudge, a nothing.

The heat in the air was oppressive. The dark woman left the house in the afternoon, but the body that held Yifan prisoner continued in its programmed route, cleaning the cooking pots, washing the clothes. No glimmer of intelligence; but something must be operating this body.

The woman returned after a few hours with raffia bags full of groceries. She inspected the work the zombie had done, tutted, gabbled a long speech in foreign and then smacked Yifan around the head. It hurt. Yifan seethed with the desire to punch her in the face, but could not.

A girl of around fourteen came in, carrying a school bag full of books. She replied to her mother's questions with monosyllables, dropped the bag in the middle of the floor and slammed the door of her room behind her. Yifan picked up the heavy bag and moved it out of the way.

Vegetable preparation. Yifan's hands did what Yifan herself did not know how to do, husking corncobs, scrubbing sweet potato, rinsing rice. The woman prepared fish and meat. While they were busy with this the door opened again and a man came in, exhausted from a full day's work. The woman immediately started complaining to him, probably about the zombie. He nodded at every point she made, and eventually he turned to look at Yifan.

Fear, unbidden, washed through her brain. She was paralysed by a chilling terror that brought no information, had no apparent cause. She bathed in cold horror at that man's disinterested gaze; and rising in her mind came the image of a clown, giggling and furious and impotent, and suddenly curious about this new thing. About Yifan.

Her body hung its head and turned back to the vegetables. But her mind was a cliff, from which she hung by her fingertips, and the face of the clown rose above her like a spider, and it smiled an awful painted smile, and its white-gloved hand reached down through the sky toward her...

The zombie washed rice. The man went into his daughter's room. The woman set oil to heat in a wok. Outside, the brief tropical twilight flickered into darkness.

*

Almost three weeks had gone by since Dover, and John and Alan were having lunch together in the cafeteria at the hospital.

"This mince is quite nice," Alan observed, chewing slowly. John grunted, poking at his own food with a fork that had memories of its last meal clinging to it.

"We should have gone to a pub."

"No, no; we're better off here. It's cheaper, and we need to keep clear heads."

Alan had called in a few favours from a medical Professor of his acquaintance, and since the beginning of this week both Yifan and Ji Ye were having their brain waves recorded by very sensitive and experimental equipment. John thought they looked like a robot's bad hair day with the number of coloured wires sprouting from the caps on their heads. Alan was excited by what they might find from the data. At the end of the week he was going to analyse the results.

"Hmm. Actually," said John, examining a chip, "I've been thinking about what Yifan told us when she got back from Teal's World." He paused, sighed, and ate the chip. It crunched nastily. "The Dutch guy, Captain de Vlieger. He's the key. He knew she wasn't Teal. He knew she was from another World. He more or less implied that he was too."

"Yes, that's very interesting. De Vlieger seemed to be telling Yifan that he could get her back home."

"And so he's able to travel through these Worlds at will."

Alan thought for a few seconds. "She said he wasn't near her when she came back."

"Maybe someone else was. Another traveller. One of his crew. Yifan and Shur were surrounded by people at the wedding. Perhaps all that was needed was skin contact. Yifan and the toucher would have switched. Yifan returns to her body and Teal goes back to his. The toucher goes back to his body, somewhere in this World."

"Which means that there's a group of people in our World who can travel at their whim. They know how to do it."

John pushed his plate away and picked up a heavy mug of lukewarm tea. "So we need to find them."

Outside in the hospital grounds they strolled in the sunshine and discussed the matter further.

"What'll we do when we find them?" Alan flung his arms around, getting excited. "This is amazing! They can answer so many questions about the Universe! Really, I'm close to getting the equations together, but there's a difference between mathematically modelling a thing and actually doing it... What's the matter?"

John was shaking his head.

"They're not interested in the science of it. Their aims are elsewhere. Maybe money or power. Something that's not going to incline them to help us, anyway. If they have the science, then why hide it?"

A pair of tired nurses passed them, coming off shift. John kept silent until they trudged out of earshot.

"This de Vlieger helped her. But that's all. He didn't give her any information. He certainly didn't teach her how to control her travelling. And now she's off again, with Ji Ye, and their bodies are back there," – he pointed to the hospital – "and if they don't come back, those bodies will eventually die. How long do you think the health service will let me keep them in valuable beds when there's no brain activity?"

"Well, then try to track down the Dutchman, John. I'll get on with my research, and maybe we can have something more positive in a week or two."

"Yeah. I guess." John didn't sound very positive. "Go on, then – you go for your Nobel Prize, and I'll start hunting Dutch Captains."

*

Sleep, after dinner eaten somewhat apart from the family, was a surcease from pain and fatigue, and an opportunity for Yifan to explore. She slept in the daughter's room, sharing her bed. The older girl was a noisy sleeper, grunting and mumbling and sometimes making small sad cries. But as Yifan turned her attention into her borrowed mind, all distractions melted away.

There had to be an intelligence in here. This body was her, Yifan, in another World. Something was moving it about, something saw through the eyes and listened through the ears.

She looked around inside the sleeping brain. Darkness, a sense of confinement. Her mental fingertips touched dank rough stone. She shouted, slapped her hand against the wall. For a few moments it seemed that nothing happened. But suddenly, and far away, a hunched and grotesque figure appeared, outlined against a greyish light.

"Be still. Don't draw attention," it whispered in Chinese, placing a long finger against its lips. Its features couldn't be seen; it was a silhouette of a caricature of a – well, a human. But...

"What's happening?" Yifan demanded in English, whispering in her turn. The figure stiffened, leaning forward.

"Quiet!" it commanded. "Alone is all there is. She turned away. She left you." The figure bowed its head. Its shoulders slumped. "The spider watched and turned away. Left you here, and here you stay. Stay inside and silent be. Nothing hear, and nothing see."

The words repeated all around her, as if a chorus of speakers was chanting. Suddenly a hideous face pressed up against hers, powder white, mouth a red unhappy slash of paint, discoloured teeth bared as the apparition yelled, "It's not you! Where is she? You aren't –" And just as suddenly the figure was back in the distance. It wagged its long finger at her. "She is safe. Safe here. Safe from you and from her, and from THEM. Don't try to fool us. We are not fools."

It turned its crooked back on her and faded into the encompassing dark, and Yifan, shaken, finally fell asleep from the sheer physical exhaustion of the day.

*

There was any number of de Vliegers on the Internet, but none who advertised that they could travel between the Worlds of the Multiverse. This was not, of course, surprising.

John flapped a hand at Bart, who had jumped up onto the desk and was about to step on the keyboard, and pondered his next move. The Dutch Captain's forename was Theo, Tjo in Dutch, and searches showed several de Vliegers with that name. Most were in the Netherlands, which made sense. One was in Scotland, and there were five in North America.

John delved deeper, using databases that only computer professionals knew, and even a rather old one that no ordinary citizen should even have known existed, and managed to get phone numbers for some of them and email addresses for a few more. He started with the emails, sending messages asking whether the recipient knew anyone called Yifan Shen or Shen Teal. He clicked the box to request a notification when the emails were received and read and then turned to the phone.

"Ja?"

"Hello..."

"Ah, English."

"Er, yes. My name is Sebastian Tombs..."

"Good. And?"

"Well, I was wondering whether you know anyone by the name of Yifan Shen, or Shen Teal."

"Does not sound like English names. Or Dutch. Who are these people?"

"So you don't know anyone with either name?"

"No."

"Well, thank you for your attention, Mister de Vlieger."

"If I should suddenly find I do know, how would I contact you?"

John paused, until he remembered a mobile phone that Ji Ye used for her tuition business. He gave that number and rang off. Then he went to the next de Vlieger on the list, with much the same results.

After an hour he had four de Vliegers who had responded. Three on the phone and one by email. There were six who hadn't answered their phones and four who hadn't come back by mail. Bart was making mewing noises and quite effectively conveying the sense that he was dying of hunger, so John turned off the laptop, pointed the cat at a full bowl of food and went out to the nearby pizza place to order himself an American Hot.

After dinner John sat in silence. He missed the sounds his girls made – the arguments in Chinese, the laughter, the tinny music from their phones, the complaints about his hair, his clothes, his choice of TV programme.

He looked at Ji Ye's tuition phone. No messages; no missed calls. He fired up the laptop. No emails from any de Vliegers.

He went to bed, and Bart, after a while, followed.

*

Her cuckoo voice was awed by the Spider.

It stood in the hangar soaking up the lights. Huge and cold and black, like a hole in the world, the machine squatted, its heat exchangers ticking like crickets. Sophie unhooked the black hose that filled the tanks with her nanomachines while Ji Ye checked the externals and then unplugged the water and air umbilical and reeled it into a recess in the hangar wall. They climbed into the cabin forward of the engine module that powered its long legs and started their internal checks. This took up the first hour of the new day.

"I want to look back at the wreckage," Ji Ye said while Sophie unwrapped a nut bar for her breakfast.

The Frenchwoman nodded absently. "If you like," she said. Ji Ye, expecting a rational argument against her suggestion, was speechless. Inside her head the voice radiated silent joy.

In the week since they had arrived on Pulau Masin they'd sprayed the walls of the Facility and the ground out to twenty metres around. Today's plan was to spray essential outbuildings and routes, including the runway. The nanomachines Sophie was using for this would eat any stray filaments, building more of themselves from the carbon and the components in the carrier liquid and turning the rest to a harmless grey dust. The first thousand metres of the Tower's cables had been protected, during their work of the first few days, by the application of the orange spray, itself a smart swarm of nanomachines.

\-- Sophie's the expert in her field, Ji Ye explained. And I'm the best spider pilot. So please don't jog my arm.

\-- What's it all for? I mean, this is amazing!

\-- I'll tell you more this evening. In the meantime, I've got to work.

The hangar door rolled open onto blinding brilliance. The equatorial sun lit the plateau like a stage set, revealing a smooth grey surface dotted with squat concrete buildings and criss-crossed by rails and marked roads. When the spider turned the corner the runway stretched from left to right, with the front half of the crashed transport aircraft more or less in the middle of its length.

They spent the first few hours spraying outbuildings. The goo was a very nasty shade of day-glo green, which like the orange goo made it easy to see whether anything had been missed. Then Ji Ye turned the spider toward the runway and, spraying as they went along, took the machine to the edge of the plateau. Several times the shriek of carbon on carbon set their teeth on edge, but nothing could be seen – the filaments were only a few atoms in diameter, effectively invisible, although around the plateau there were hazy green clouds from the bulk of the fallen cable that had been sprayed and was now decomposing.

Walking on plates that protected its knees, the spider reached the cliff and bent its front legs until the pair inside could see down the steep slope to the jungle below. It was a long way. Wreckage from the tail section was strewn down the mountain in chunks. The largest was about a hundred metres down.

"If she was in that part, she might have survived," said Sophie.

"That's where they installed the toilet and galley," Ji Ye began to hope. "And do you see? It's a road."

Sophie looked dubious. "Yeah, well. It's a track. And that piece is just above it."

"Anyone passing would have investigated," Ji Ye continued. "They would have found her. They'll be keeping her safe."

"Let's hope so. She's so young – she wouldn't survive without help."

\-- She's got MY Yifan to help her now, came the voice in Ji Ye's head, which irritated her.

\-- MY Yifan is perfectly capable of looking after herself, she responded. But all she got back was a deeply sceptical feeling that she couldn't shake off for the rest of the day.

*

Two more emails arrived, denying any knowledge of Yifan Shen or Shen Teal. John closed the laptop, finished his dinner and settled down to watch a cookery show on TV. He was sleepy from takeaway pizza and a large glass of red wine. Beside his chair was the bottle, which Bart the cat was investigating in case it was a fine vintage mouse. On the TV a mortgage adviser was cooking a deconstructed duck in orange sauce; John's head was nodding. Then everything suddenly got a lot more exciting.

Bart jumped up onto John's lap, using his claws to hang on. John's eyes opened wide and his head jerked back. The air where his head had been cracked like a whip and John's treasured CD player exploded.

John heaved his weight against the armchair and toppled it onto its side, throwing off Bart and knocking over the bottle. He lay still, watching wine glug out and spread out over the blonde stripwood floor. Bart confirmed it was not made from mice, shot John a withering glance, and left by the open lounge door to investigate the kitchen.

Well. Now things are getting interesting, thought John as he lay next to the bottle. He'd just been shot at. He imagined the view from the window and recalled a couple of commercial buildings which overlooked this side of the house. A rifle. A sniper. His face hurt from the concussion of the passing bullet. Saved by Bart. Saved, too, by the wine – it looked exactly like a pool of blood spreading from a fatal head wound. The shooter wouldn't be able to see anything through the window except John's legs, but if he wanted to he could estimate a second shot that would breeze through the toppled chair and into where John's head must be.

So John lay very still, until a chilling thought occurred to him.

If he was being eliminated, what about Ji Ye and Yifan?

Bile rose in his throat. His head swam with panic and indecision. If he called the police they would come here first. There wasn't enough time, and if the sniper was hanging around he'd be shot when he got up to answer the door.

There was one hope, but for John it was a bitter pill to swallow. He would have to fall on the mercy of his previous employer.

Making sure not to let his legs move the merest millimetre he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his phone. The number he knew was old, years old, but with a slight adjustment for an area code change it would, he knew, still work.

He dialled.

"Universal Exports." The male voice was English, uninflected and smooth.

"Have you anything I can use for festivals?" John asked. It was a very old code by now. There was silence at the other end, for several seconds.

"We have a number of packages. If you've got our catalogue you'll know what we offer."

"Fireworks. Silver Rain. Suitable for women and children. It's a rush order, I'm sorry. I haven't even got my credit card here. Name of Tombs, Sebastian Tombs."

"Good grief. Wait on the line – I'm going to see whether we can come up with a prompt delivery." The line started to beep slowly. It seemed a long time before the Duty Officer picked up again.

"We have your account, Mister Tombs. Seems you've got some family problems?"

"Yes, my wife and daughter are in hospital. I need something to cheer them up."

"We've got it. On to it. You know you're going to have to come in tomorrow and pay, don't you?"

"Yes," said John, wearily. He knew exactly what he would have to do in the morning, and he wasn't looking forward to it; and he certainly wasn't looking forward to explaining it to Ji Ye, when eventually she woke up.

*

It had been a long and boring day. Yifan's body was bone-tired. It picked automatically at rice and vegetables while the family around it chattered and laughed. None of them – the mother, weary, the father, bowed from whatever work it was he did outside the home, and the daughter, dark and bright-eyed, back from school – bothered to look at her or include her in their incomprehensible conversation. The aches in her body's limbs seeped into Yifan's consciousness. The pain in feet that stood all day, the numbness in fingers that steeped in cold water preparing these vegetables, washing the grit from this rice, cleaning the floors, the windows; Yifan was tired in her borrowed bones. But she had to sit by while the family evening continued, excluding her. She might as well have been furniture. The girl played with her father. The mother made sweet rice snacks, which were not shared with her. A favourite television programme was watched in the language Yifan could not understand.

Eventually the mother made noises and the girl stood up and beckoned to the shell that imprisoned Yifan. It rose, and the two girls went to bed in their small back room. A single faded sheet covered them after they stripped to their pants. Yifan saw little of anything, her body refusing to look at or focus on anything more interesting than the badly-painted wall. But before the girl of the house turned off the bedside lamp, her attention was forced to the door, and a bleak foreboding chilled her heart.

*

Ji Ye was asleep. Inside her mind the other Ji Ye was rummaging around like a bargain hunter during the summer sales.

There was a history here, but not a history she recognised.

Life in Changchun since the revelation of the iron sun had been hard. Hard work at the University, studying engineering and computer science. Hard work in the evenings, reading and revising, working in one of the Western-style coffee shops to help her budget. Falling asleep exhausted and waking again at six.

The friends she had were not the friends I had, thought Ji Ye. These were students, all working hard, all looking to science to beat the inexorable menace in the sky. Around the world despair was setting in as the full import of the changes to the sun became common knowledge. Some religious people called it a judgement, and then realised that if it was, they were going to be annihilated by it just as certainly as those they judged.

Science explained the phenomenon – iron nuclei were being generated inside the sun; that was not abnormal. But they were clumping together, which was. And the clumps were generating more iron. There were no models to explain this despite all the efforts of the theorists, and this gave rise to wild ideas of divine intervention, demonic activity and alien interference. But the bottom line was the same whatever was believed – the sun was changing, dying. It would explode, once the iron grew beyond a certain mass. The estimates ranged between ten and a thousand years, but either way humanity was doomed.

Several programmes were promoted to investigate whether the sun could be fixed. It could not. And many other programmes were started to get Humanity off the Earth and into space, to take the long cold trek through the darkness to the nearest pool of heat and light where a habitable planet could be found.

These were the drivers of the science boom in Universities around the globe. The youth of the world became physicists, chemists, materials scientists and engineers. Some studied Sociology and Psychology to gauge the effects of a thousand-year voyage on the passengers; others, the effect of being left behind on those for whom there would be no room. The human race began to panic, and groups sprang up everywhere to deliver their own certainties about the disaster in the form of guns and bombs.

Every day brought news of deaths. Scientists were targeted, as well as Universities; places of worship were firebombed, old scores were settled. America burned from coast to coast.

Then Russia's stockpiles of nuclear weapons disappeared. An inventory at a secure depot in Novosibirsk found that half of the warheads had been removed. Panic set in as audits showed a similar shortfall elsewhere. The weapons had been sold.

The first city to be blown up was Cape Town, where the University was working on genetic changes to humans to allow them to survive in a wide range of alien environments. Eighty thousand people died.

The second city was Adelaide.

The third was Changchun.

Ji Ye had been married for twelve years by this time. She was returning to Changchun from Shanghai, from visiting with her aunts and uncles during the Spring Festival. The train stopped at the edge of the city and announcements sent the passengers down onto the track with apologies and commands. There was a state of emergency. She took Yifan in her arms and stepped down with the rest, and picked her way with them across the tracks, a thousand people lined up on the berm with the long solid bulk of the train hiding the city from their eyes.

Almost hiding. Not completely. As she put her daughter down and urged her to scoot down the bank the sky brightened. Ji Ye turned. The searing flash of the atomic bomb scorched the far side of the train, bursting it into flames. People tumbled down the protecting bank, Ji Ye tumbling with them, but she was one of more than a hundred who took the pulse of unbearable light and heat and hard radiation in her face.

\-- I lost my husband, came her voice in Ji Ye's interloping mind. He was at the University. Ground Zero.

\-- And your face?

\-- The mask helps. The skin is tender. There's a cream that soothes.

Things were left unsaid in this mental conversation. Chief amongst them was how long this woman had left before the radiation she had absorbed overwhelmed her.

\-- I have drugs. They help. And I'm here. I'm helping.

\-- What happened here? Ji Ye asked.

\-- A bomb, of course. And there may be more.

*

Two men walked together through the quiet hallways of the sleeping hospital. They were big men, men of a certain type: tough, focused, intent on achieving their goal.

They had rendezvoused in the car park, the earlier greeting the later with a nod, and made their way together to the A&E Admissions desk, the only way in at that time of night. The receptionist pointed to a uniformed policewoman who was waiting nearby. They asked for a staff nurse to guide them, and all four set off toward the wing where the Chinese women were being cared for.

As they approached the room the nurse and the policewoman stayed back and one of the tough men took a peek in through a round glass window set in the one-and-a-half width door. His hand went instantly to the gun beneath his jacket and he burst into the room, followed by his companion. The nurse's hand flew to her mouth and the policewoman hurried to the doorway.

Inside were two beds, surrounded by both the paraphernalia of a modern hospital and by the jury-rigged electronics that Professor Baer's friend had installed. The girls lay, eyes closed, feeding tubes in one arm, medication lines in the other. Their heads were covered by cloth caps with wires leading into a jumble of electronics.

Beside Ji Ye's bed a thin small man in hospital greens looked round calmly, as if he had expected the interruption. His skin was sallow and his hair was gelled back. He held a slim syringe. He looked the very image of a psychotic killer.

The two guns pointing unwaveringly at him were Glock 17s, standard issue to police firearms officers and intelligence services. They had no safety catch. All the two men needed to do was squeeze the triggers.

One of the big men gestured with his pistol – get away from the bed.

The thin man smiled sadly. He held the syringe away from Ji Ye, away from his body, and dropped it onto a side table. The muzzle of the pistol jerked again.

He's Asian, thought the nurse, who was peeking over the shoulder of the policewoman blocking the doorway. She was Thai. She thought the man looked Vietnamese.

The constable thought that pretty soon he would look dead, if he didn't move away from the bed.

Nobody knew what the thin man was thinking. But his left hand moved, down toward the sleeping woman, brushing her hair as it passed, came to rest on her bare shoulder.

He smiled at the people who had come to catch him; and he gripped the flesh of the woman he had come to kill. Then, soundlessly, bonelessly, he fell to the floor.
The Clown

John arrived at the futuristic building on the Albert Embankment at eleven thirty in the morning. A slim young lady took him up to an office that overlooked the Thames. Across the river crouched the bulk of the headquarters of MI5, the domestic Intelligence Service.

A slim, elderly and perfectly groomed woman stood as he entered the room and came around an antique and uncluttered desk to shake his hand. "Welcome back."

"I've never been here. After my time."

She nodded and indicated a low table flanked by a pair of comfortable chairs. They sat.

"Well. Coffee? Tea?"

"Coffee, please. Black, sweet. Stirred, not shaken."

"I see you've still got the attitude."

"I'm not feeling particularly sunny right now."

A young and amazingly dreadlocked black man in a grey suit brought in a tray with coffee for John and tea for the woman. She smiled, "Thank you, Ralph," and he left the room.

"So. It was quite a surprise to hear from you last night. And you've dropped a pretty little mystery into our laps."

John sipped at the coffee. "There wasn't anything else I could do. I was shot at. I spent the night on the floor. I called because I thought my wife and daughter would be targets."

"They were. The perpetrator was carrying a syringe full of potassium cyanide. We got there just in time. But he touched your wife and fell unconscious. He's in our hospital now. The doctors say he's in a coma." She raised an eyebrow at John, inviting him to explain.

"It does seem that coma is contagious."

"John. We've known each other for many years."

"I've been out of here for many years, Veronica."

"You're up to your neck in it now. We know quite a lot about you and your family. Your wife, the Queen of China, foiled a plot against the Chinese government. You met Her Majesty last year, and President Xi – you've made some interesting friends."

"It wasn't anything to do with me."

"But nevertheless." She sipped her tea. "Our friends in Mil Five," – she waved her hand to indicate the rather older building across the river – "they keep tabs. Your wife and step-child are very popular. Five likes to keep an eye on popular foreigners. And they tell me you've been keeping company with a physicist recently. Care to explain?"

John stood and went to the window, looked out over the river. "Nosy buggers. It's nothing to do with them. I wanted to write a book. I was introduced by someone from the British Museum." He did not want to talk about Alan, or Yifan, but he was uncomfortably aware that the Director of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service wouldn't be satisfied with half-truths.

"You've been searching for someone online. Using our databases, too – you do know we could put you in jail for that?"

"Yes, yes, I know. It's complicated. A man called de Vlieger is the key to the mystery. He's implicated in the comas. I want to find him to get him to bring the girls back."

"How romantic."

"I love them. I'll do what it takes."

"Including getting your head blown off."

John turned and looked at the Director. Many years before he had been at her side when they faced down a terrorist who was clutching a terrified child to his chest as a shield. There was no clear shot.

She fired through the child to reach the man's heart. And that was the moment when John decided to resign.

If he asked her, what would you do in my situation, he suspected he would not get an answer he felt comfortable with.

"As it happens," Veronica continued, "We have had an approach from the Chinese. They would like us to accept one of their officers to investigate the situation. I think it would be an ideal opportunity for us to work together."

John nodded. It made sense. And he knew exactly what Veronica was going to suggest.

"Do I get paid?"

The Director almost laughed. She sipped tea, put her cup and saucer down and leaned back in the comfy chair. "Are you asking to come back?"

"No, I'm asking for expenses. If I'm going to be paired up with some Chinese guy who has a diplomatic visa and an unlimited budget, I'd like to know I can stand my round."

"We'll see what we can do. There are national security considerations – anyone who can put someone into a coma with a touch is a threat. It's not just we and China who are nervous. But right now it's our resources that are being used. You were once quite good. Perhaps your interest in the victims gives you an edge. But I'll be listening to our Chinese friend's reports; and if you are not the asset I believe you could be, you will be replaced."

The door opened and Ralph ushered in a slim, tall Chinese woman, elegantly dressed and carrying a Gucci purse.

"Meet Major Yuan Xue Mei. She's from the Ministry of State Security."

John, although he was married to a Chinese woman, nevertheless knew very little Mandarin. But he did know security services. "Ni hao, Shaoxiao Yuan."

The Major bowed. "I'm honoured to meet you. I understand you are a respected officer of the British Military Intelligence."

"No more, Major. I'm retired. But pleased indeed to be working with a respected officer of the Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Guojia Anquanbu."

"When you two have quite finished polishing one another's bottoms," Veronica interjected, "You will take lunch and you, John, will visit the ELINT officers in E9." She leaned back and fixed them both with a stare that, if they were juniors, would have frozen them.

"Right-O," said John, and the Major nodded.

They left.

*

This was not the first time, Yifan was certain. Whatever animated the body she lived in had experienced it before, in this small and airless room. Nothing new. But everything bad.

The door opened slowly in the middle of the night. Beside her the girl slept on. Yifan, who was dozing inside her sleeping body, came awake and alert. Her eyes opened and now she was an impotent spectator to events that had unfolded before, and which were playing out again.

He padded soundlessly into the room. His daughter's father, his wife's husband. He wasted no time, urgent as he was in his lust. Ignoring the sleeping daughter he lifted the sheet from the bottom of the bed, covering Yifan's face. Hands gripped and pinched her body, lifted it, placed it, pressed it down as if by some miracle it would suddenly spring to life and oppose him, but there was no opposition, just a total and lifeless abnegation. And so he did what it was he came to do, and Yifan railed in pain and anger at the helplessness that was being forced upon her. She had learnt how to fight. She knew how to kill. But these arms and her legs were not hers to command. She was a cloth doll, aware, unable to resist, appalled.

When he left, after wiping himself on the sheet, she realised that the girl beside her was sobbing.

*

Alan collected data from the detectors by phone; there was no need to go to the hospital. He loaded it onto Imperial's mainframe and ran his program. It was written in a variant of FORTRAN, an old language still used by scientists around the world. It was accurate, fast and efficient, and had the advantage of a huge library of algorithms accumulated over many years.

The first pass showed nothing of interest. The normal waves were behaving normally, for someone in a coma. There was no activity to show conscious thought. Not even dreaming.

Alan then stacked the seven days of recordings on top of each other, cancelling out the normal waves to reveal the differences. Then he extracted an algorithm and applied it to the data across the week, removing the normal waves to leave a seven-day recording of exceptional activity.

And it looked very odd.

He picked up his mobile and called the neuroscience Professor who'd lent the equipment, and had a very long and interesting conversation.

*

"You were shot at, and your family was put in danger," the girl said, her hands dancing across a keyboard. Windows were opening over three very large screens in front of her. She was Sunitha, one of 6's electronic intelligence officers. John nodded and tried not to be distracted by the technology on show. The Chinese Major was not with them, there being a very definite limit to what one Intelligence agency would reveal to another.

"It shows I'm on the right track," he said. "One of the de Vliegers I contacted must be the one I want. He found me, he knew about Yifan, and my family's problems have been in the newspapers for a while now – Queen of China in brain death mystery was the headline I most hated."

Sunitha nodded without speaking. She had the contact list from John and was conducting deep searches using databases that John could never have imagined when he had been working there.

"According to Yifan," he continued, "the man she met was maybe about fifty. But she was only thirteen, and most adults look old to her. But we can discount anyone below the age of thirty."

Sunitha closed two windows.

John hadn't told Veronica about Yifan's travels. He had spun a story about the girls meeting a European man called de Vlieger in China during their last trip. De Vlieger, he lied, claimed to be able to induce coma at will, and demonstrated on Yifan, making her fall asleep with a mere touch, then waking her in the same way. It was, he claimed, a hypnotic technique that could be used instead of anaesthetic.

John's conjecture (as he span it to Veronica) was that in the shock of imminent death at the cliff edge Yifan had fallen back into a coma and took Ji Ye with her by an unconscious use of the Dutchman's technique.

"And the attacker?"

"A practitioner of the same method," John replied glibly. "He touched Ji Ye and used her coma to induce his own."

So far, John's bogus explanation was holding up. He almost wished it was the truth, because the reality was that his family, and an assassin, were suffering in an unknown World.

"There are three left on your list," Sunitha said. "The others are all irrelevant. Wait –" She pressed a mouse button and another window closed. "He's in a nursing home in Amsterdam. Been there eight years."

And now there were two.

Veronica, who as the head of MI6 was therefore vastly suspicious, had pressed John on the issue of motive.

"Why would this man want to kill you? Why would he want to kill your wife and child? There's nothing in this scenario that convinces me."

"You're right. I can't see why what is really just a parlour trick should require such drastic action," John replied, sweating slightly. "Unless he's hoping to become very rich from it. Then maybe having people around who can do it too might queer his pitch."

"What quaint, old-fashioned language. You've always talked like that. It was one of the things that attracted me to you."

John felt queasy. He remembered the eyes of the child in the terrorist's arms.

"This one," said Sunitha, breaking into his recollection. John focused his eyes on the remaining open window.

There was a photograph, next to biographical details. De Vlieger had a broad and open face. His eyes were calm and his face was crinkled with lines that indicated both a life in the open air and one filled with laughter. He looked trustworthy.

"This man was in China when they were."

"Well." John peered more closely. What Yifan told him and Ji Ye after her body-swap with Shen Teal had been vague in places. But her description of the Dutch Captain was fairly evocative. This de Vlieger looked like the man she had described.

"Let me see the other one."

She reopened a window. This candidate was thin-faced and sour. He looked like John's old headmaster, who had been a fair-minded man despite his unfortunate looks, but who had still wielded a whippy and painful cane.

"Okay. Close that. Thank you so much, Ms Dwarakanath. We have our man."

She sat back from the screens and rubbed her eyes. "So what happens now?"

"I need to go and see him. I want my family back. And he's the only man I know who can help."

Sunitha leaned forward again and typed some searches. It took a while. "Well, he's on a ship right now. It docks in Shanghai in four days. I'll print you his details and you can go to the finance office."

*

At the end of another monotonous day the body Yifan occupied sat down with the family and ate the meal it had spent several hours helping to prepare. Outside, rain poured down as the brief tropical twilight fell into night.

Yifan was scared, and bored. She couldn't look at anything that this body didn't want to look at. She couldn't refuse the unfamiliar food it slowly spooned into its mouth. Around her the family talked together in a language she did not know.

Somewhere inside this head there was a personality; a real person, not some twisted, painted gatekeeper. When dinner was finished and she was directed by gestures from the woman to go and wash the dishes, Yifan let her hands do what they did and tried again to find her.

The inside of her head was dank and grey. There was at once a feeling of vast space, where shadows loomed in the far dark distance, and a cramped and confining cell. Yifan imagined herself with her own arms and legs, her own eyes. She reached out and touched cold rough stone. She opened her eyes, and saw cratered and ancient rock.

Turning around on her new-formed feet she measured the extent of this interior world. A cold, small cell. No door, no barred window, only rough blocks of grey stone. She looked for differences between the blocks, reached out and touched a few, remembering Teal's memory palace where hosts of images could be stirred up from the brush of a mental finger; but there was nothing.

She opened her eyes again, as she had done when Teal's palace had first presented itself as a series of crowded shelves.

Now she stood in a courtyard. Still grey, cold stone, but wide and empty, open to a lowering troubled sky. Dark clouds scudded over crenellated battlements.

There were still no doors, no windows.

She opened her eyes again, and remembered to give herself ears.

*

Ji Ye and Sophie spent the day checking out the spider's systems in preparation for its trip up the Tower. The other inhabitants of the base were busy too. There were four permanent staff members, each essential to its smooth operation. Now they were accompanying Temi and Bernard in an ongoing task to spray the inner walls and chambers where the grey mists of filament melted through the concrete, to kill it off with green goo.

The visitors were the only ones who had the proper carbon armour, so they went ahead through the dark corridors, their suits shrieking from time to time as they made contact with a filament. They, and the spider, were pre-treated to be protected from the green gel.

The filaments were dangerous because they could cut through anything except other carbon filaments. Just as you could drop a silk handkerchief over the blade of a very sharp sword and watch it flutter to the ground in two pieces, anything that moved over the weightless threads would be sliced. Even the pressure of the wind had no effect on them, which was lucky – for the drifts of fibre would have been blown over the edge of the plateau, down into the forests and settlements below.

Out on the plain the scattering of square buildings and bunkers, and the tracks leading from the northern edge to the base, were now bright green. There was a faint green mist in places where clumps of filament had been sprayed. The wreckage of the C-17 had been bulldozed off to the side of the green-stained runway.

Ji Ye ran through the physical and software testing three times over a period of eight hours. Occasionally she grimaced at the feelings as the other woman rifled through her memories. At least she was doing it quietly, but it did sometimes itch.

The other Ji Ye was building up a picture of this world that was threatening to overwhelm her. Far from bringing Humanity together to fight the menace of the iron sun, the catastrophe fuelled nationalism and bigotry. Many groups, some religious and others purely political, either denied what their eyes could plainly see or refused to countenance any attempt by humans to flee the Earth. Others clamoured to escape. The richest brought out the trillions of dollars they had hidden away and were trying to buy passage, financing the building of starships up in space, close to the four space elevators that had been constructed so far. National governments collapsed, wars sprang up, old scores were settled. The United States had bombed itself back to the Stone Age and was effectively quarantined, with armies defending Mexico and Canada from floods of armed and desperate refugees.

Europe, Australasia and the Far East were relatively unscathed, although terrorism was rife. As well as a second nuclear strike in China, Madrid had been bombed just two days ago.

Tens of thousands of people so far had been selected to be saved. There was no warning of their exalted status – they were just picked up, whole families, in the light of day or the dark of night, taken to be processed into the cold hibernation pods and shipped in convoy to their closest elevator. No government or organisation admitted that they were the agency making these selections.

The tactical nuclear weapon that destroyed the cable had been hidden in a hibernation pod. Delays in the loading schedule meant that the bomb exploded partway up the line rather than in the receiving station thirty thousand miles up. The cable, breaking, triggered a series of emergency actions high up above the atmosphere. Rocket packs clamped onto the cable at the receiving station to push it away to a safe distance, and a signal was sent to the terminal counterweight at the far end, sixty thousand miles above the Earth. It released the cable's connector and the broken assembly flew out into space at twenty thousand miles an hour. The bottom end had fallen back to the ground. It lay in a mass on the east side of the plateau, safe enough since it was still braided and intact. But the frayed end, with its dangerous unravelled filaments, had to be neutralised before operations could resume.

There were twenty ships waiting in the straits between the islands, each filled with containers, each container filled with pods containing chilled and hibernating humans.

The scale of the thing appalled her.

In the evening, after dinner, Ji Ye took off her semi-transparent mask, washed it carefully, and had a shower. When she glanced into a mirror her other self saw her true face. Half looked melted, thick with scar tissue that itched and ached. She applied her prescription cream in a thin layer and put the protective mask back on. In the back of her mind she could hear her unwanted guest weeping.

"Get some sleep," she said out loud. "Tomorrow we're going up the line. It's going to take days." She put on a robe and left the bathroom, back to the bunk she shared with Sophie.

*

Nothing moved on the undulating plain, not even the twisted branches of the skeletal trees that dotted the gloomed landscape. She turned around and found the castle behind her. There were no doors in its looming bulk. No windows. A chill wind gusted around her, moaning and crackling in her ears. At the edge of her hearing there were whispers which may have been the foreign talk of the family, but she suspected it was something else, something sentient. Something becoming aware that she had come back.

She opened her eyes again and now the castle was far away. But it looked like a tiny toy close by, rather than a massive edifice in the distance.

Yifan reached out and bracketed it with a finger and thumb. She squeezed, and the castle crumbled.

Behind her there was a sharp intake of breath; she spun and fell back in terror at the sight of the twisted and dishevelled clown, its eyes wide with astonishment. The face, plastered in makeup, curled in pain, bore a painted sad expression, painted tears falling down its sunken cheeks past a bulbous red nose, and it recognised her, white-gloved hands coming up in denial and this was wrong, all wrong, for beneath the whiteface and the fake green hair and the fear in its eyes, this was her mother.

The sky behind the apparition split and the scudding clouds rolled back. There was a cliff face with the wreckage of an aircraft strewn and dribbled down it. At the top of the cliff a huge spider peered down at the disaster, then turned away and slowly disappeared from view.

The clown crumpled down to sit on its heels, weeping, its misshapen head drooped in its large clown hands. Its fingers began to change, becoming grey and rough, and Yifan, alarmed, knowing that it was becoming stone, knowing (though how could she?) that it was becoming the castle, windowless and doorless, knelt on the sharp ground and reached out, touched its hands, leaned forward, put her arms around the monster and hugged.

Real tears trickled down the whitened cheeks. The clown sobbed and howled as Yifan held her tight. She discerned words tumbling from the torrent of wails; excuses, entreaties, beggar words that ached for Yifan's understanding. How had she been so cruel? How could she have abandoned her daughter? It ought to be she who was suffering among hated and hateful people, alone, unloved, she had not... had never...

Yifan simply held her as she changed. Her knees ached from the stony ground, but this was good. The internal world was brightening. Gradually the clown's sobs quieted and her arms encircled Yifan. Hands now normal and gloveless stroked her hair, and the paintless unravaged face buried itself into Yifan's shoulder.

She lifted up her eyes and saw a little girl standing behind her mother. Yifan, meet Yifan. Tears streaked the pretty grimy face. As Yifan watched, the girl whose mind encompassed all the crumbling and sombre world reached out her hands and stroked her mother's hair.

*

John wandered into Imperial College in a daze. He had a new bank card that guaranteed as much money as he needed to pursue the Dutch Captain. He had left the SIS building by a back door, leaving the Chinese Major behind. Now he was worried that the target Ms Dwarakanath had identified solely because he had been in China when the family were there might not be the man he wanted.

There was no response when he knocked on Alan's door, but he turned the handle and walked in anyway. The Professor was there, sitting on the only unencumbered chair, gazing at a scrawl of arithmetic that filled the huge blackboard.

"It's mathematics," Alan murmured. "Close the door."

John closed the door, making sure he was on the inside, and looked semi-intelligently at the board. Alan made a clucking sound and stood up, motioning John to take the chair.

"This is my equation for the distribution of universes based on a series in five-dimensional Riemann space. It's predictive, so we can look at particular parts of the Cosmic Microwave Background to see if there are anomalies. If there are, it's a good indication of its validity."

"I understand that, so far." John didn't say that he couldn't understand the mathematics on the board, but he didn't have to – Alan already knew his limits.

"Hmm. The equations bring up a very interesting set of formulae – down at the bottom right of the board. Those are coupling equations that show a relationship between the universes. Look how simple they are."

Well, John mused, peering closely; they don't look simple to me.

"Now, I think that we can do something with these equations. They have to show the method by which Yifan's mind moves between here and there. I need to look a bit deeper. It's tough. And I've got some ideas about the comas. Now – how are you getting on with finding the Captain?"

John had been dreading this. He took a deep breath, and said, "Come to the pub. I think you'll need a drink while I talk."

Alan nodded and picked up his jacket.

"More detail, please," John demanded, plonking down a brace of pints on a rickety table outside the Queens Arms. "What have you found out about the girls?"

Alan dipped his head in acquiescence and took a long pull of the Guinness. "There are normal brain waves, in both girls. It's just that they're extended in time. Stretched out. I believe," he took another sip, while John tapped his fingers on the table impatiently, "that the Universe they're in runs at a slower rate than ours."

"It also means," said John, "that what they're going through there is reflected in their brains here."

Alan nodded. "If we had the technology to decode brain waves, we'd be able to see what they were thinking. But of course, we don't."

John finally brought his glass to his lips, and gained an off-white moustache. "I've found de Vlieger," he said, when he emerged from the froth.

"Oh! That was quick. I'd expected it to take a while."

"I have... friends. A previous employer. They're taking an interest, so things should move quickly from now."

Alan paused in the act of drinking. His eyes showed a certain scepticism. "Do you think that's wise? Have you told them anything?"

John was poised to reassure his friend, but he was interrupted. A shadow fell over him. He looked up and met the eyes of Major Yuan Xue Mei.

"Good afternoon," she smiled. "You're a hard man to find. May I?"

"If you get the drinks, then yes," said John. The Major nodded, looked at the half-empty glasses and disappeared into the pub.

"Er... and that is your previous employer?"

"No!" said John. "Far from it. But I've got to work with her. The Chinese government has an interest in the situation. And," he swallowed, "British Intelligence. The girls are politically important." He drained his glass.

Alan sat back in the wooden chair, which shifted suddenly and rather spoilt the dramatic narrowing of his eyes. "Ooh – sorry. Hum. Well. Does this mean they know everything?"

"No. I've contained it, so far. You're just a friend, helping me to write a book, and by an amazing coincidence able to help to investigate the girls' comas. I'll be going off to China in a couple of days. We can meet tomorrow to talk more, but it's best not done over the phone."

Major Mei came back, carrying a tray with three pints of Guinness on it and three packets of nuts. And for a while the conversation was a confection of physics, spun over an unlikely plot in John's fictitious book. Eventually Alan, with a little difficulty, released himself from the folding chair and waved goodbye to John and the Major to make his way back to his room at Imperial College; and Major Mei turned her full attention to the ex-spy, who gulped a dose of stout and had to be slapped on the back.

*

When Yifan opened her eyes again she was in the bedroom she shared with the daughter of the house. She didn't know what time it was, but several hours must have passed since she'd taken the first steps into her borrowed mind. The girl in the bed beside her was asleep, dribbling on the thin pillow.

Yifan tentatively tried to wiggle a finger.

It moved.

And so did the door of the small room.

He wore only a faded T-shirt. Beside Yifan his daughter trembled. Bile rose in Yifan's throat. She flexed her fingers again beneath the thin sheet, confirming her freedom of movement. If she was given the opportunity things weren't going to play the way the rapist expected.

He stroked his daughter's hair before peeling away the sheet. The girl's teeth were audibly chattering. Even in the hot tropic night Yifan felt cold, exposed. In the imperfect darkness his teeth gleamed as he smiled, and his hands stroked both girls. With an effort of will Yifan lay still, biding her time, but revolted at the obscene touch, at the confidence and familiarity this man had in his acts. The girl beside her panted and arched her body. Yifan's heart pounded, but not with fear.

He straddled her on the creaking bed. His hands caressed her face, and Yifan froze as she realised just exactly what he was going to do.

The scream woke everyone in the shuttered and sleeping village. Wavering lights appeared behind windows as torches turned on and lamps were lit. The first few who stumbled out into the star-filled night identified the house from the continuous crescendo of sound tumbling from a seared throat. They pounded on the flimsy door until it sagged open and entered in a body, packing into the overstuffed living-room just as the wife of the house stormed into the back bedroom and yelled in outrage. Her husband flew out like a rocket, screaming and clutching his groin, followed by his wife and daughter.

"The witch!" he cried as he bounced off the kitchen range. "She bit me! She's killed me!"

Yifan, sat on the edge of the bed in the back room, spitting and heaving, didn't understand the shouts and clamours that grew in the tiny bungalow, but she knew that it spelt the end of sleep and the beginning, very probably, of a time of trouble. She wasn't, therefore, surprised when the door burst open again and hands grabbed her and dragged her off down the now-crowded street to a hut which served as the community's jail. She sighed as the door was bolted behind her, felt around and found – mostly by smell – a bucket of water for drinking and a bucket for pooing and a straw mattress on the beaten-earth floor. She washed the blood out of her mouth with stagnant water and sagged onto the noisome palliasse into a welcome and healing sleep.

*

When John eventually got back home he found a glazier replacing the broken window in the lounge and a cleaner polishing the floorboards. Ralph, the young officer from MI6, was supervising, mainly by petting Bart, who looked up at John as if to say, look – this is how you satisfy a cat.

John just shrugged. He noted the newly-plastered patch on the wall behind where his CD player had been.

"We got the bullet out the wall," Ralph explained in his relaxed Jamaican voice as John made coffee for him and tea for the others. "It was a standard NATO round, not match grade. We identified the firin' position, and the police have a SOC team up there right now. The range was about two hundred metres."

"So probably not a professional assassin," John noted, putting mugs on a tray. Bart tried to trip him as he made his way back to the lounge, but he was used to it and hardly stumbled. The glazier and the cleaner both stopped for tea and biscuits, and John excused himself to go into the garden, where he called Veronica.

"Can you get my family transferred to your secure hospital?" he asked, when he finally got through.

"It's in hand," she replied. "I have a team working with your tame Professor and his colleague to get the move sorted. We want to keep that peculiar rat's nest of electronics in place. What's it for, precisely – he didn't go into details."

John was prepared for this, having agreed with Alan on the phone on the way home. "It's tracing brain waves. We need to know why they both went into coma at the same time. Alan thinks we can get clues to how de Vlieger does it. And then maybe we can get them back."

"Another thing. You're going to Shanghai to see that man. The Major will of course be going with you."

"I guessed that. She'll be useful for clearing my path. And for translation."

"It's her home ground, John. Be careful. She'll be looking to steal a march on us."

"Ah, I love it when you use those old-fashioned phrases, Vez."

"Don't push it, hon. You know, I'm jealous of those girls. I couldn't imagine anyone better on their side. Stay safe. And bring back the goods." She rang off, and John went back inside to take orders for pizza from his unwanted guests.
Journeys

In the morning the door to the makeshift jail opened a crack and a plate of rice and plantains was slid in on a battered tin tray. Yifan drank and ate, peed in the bucket provided and sat cross-legged on the prickly mattress to await developments. In her mind, the other Yifan hugged her and told her what had happened to bring her to this situation.

~~ I went to get a Coke, and the plane fell apart. I got tumbled around a bit, and it slid down the hill. And in the morning I got found by – by that man. He was on his way to work. He took me to that house and they washed me and everything.

~~ What about the spider?

~~ It's Mum's. It's to help on the Tower. It looked over the edge, in the morning, before I got rescued, but she didn't see me... I think I went a bit mad.

Yifan wasn't surprised. The girl's mind had been bent almost to breaking by the experiences she had endured in the week since the crash. When the family had discovered that they had a pliant robot on their hands they had piled in with vicious abandon, making her a slave during the day and a toy in the long hot nights. She withdrew into herself, pushed down by the Clown, the impotent, useless version of her mother, and by the dark chorus of voices that kept her from becoming conscious of the abuse she was suffering.

Things were going to change. So long as there was someone in this community who could speak English or Mandarin.

There was a scuffling at the back of the hut. A corner of metal sheeting creaked and opened a crack, then further. A pair of bright eyes looked up at her from ground level.

"Hiya, China!"

"Hiya, boy."

She remembered the boy's wide grin. It could not have been anyone else. She smiled, knelt down and looked at what little she could see of his face.

"Can you get me out of here?"

"Ney, ney – not now. You wait, maybe I come night. You peak English! I peak English!"

"Yes – we both peak English! I am Yifan."

"I am Tomass. Peas to meet you, Ee-fan." The boy removed his face from the gap and a slim brown forearm came in in its place. Yifan solemnly shook the proffered hand. "Will see you later alligator!" The arm was withdrawn and the metal pushed back into place. Yifan felt heartened; she had found a friend in this community.

The other Yifan came up behind her and she felt a hug.

~~ He's nice, the young one said, and Yifan nodded.

*

The spider ascended the Tower on two cables, four of its legs locked on, its big black body hunched between them. It didn't need the bowl-shaped laser collectors that powered the shuttles; it had its own internal atomic power. Inside the cabin Sophie and Ji Ye checked their progress. It had taken less than twenty minutes to reach the spider's maximum speed of two hundred miles an hour, and now they were seven hundred miles above the earth, with vacuum outside and the world curved beneath them.

The machine began to slow. They were approaching one of the huge cars that had stalled on its descent when the bomb went off. Ji Ye stopped the spider then stretched out a leg to bridge the gap above it.

Both women wore space suits. When the cockpit had been depressurised Sophie opened the hatch and crawled twenty metres along the leg to the roof of the car.

"It's green," she told Ji Ye over the comms link when she got inside. "All systems check out. The grippers will be tripped once the north-west laser is turned on. I'm coming back."

When the car on the south-east cable was vaporised by the bomb, killing the two hundred hibernating people on board, systems in the space station sent a signal to cut the laser power to all the cables. There was an ascending car, as well as this one descending, and both had to be checked as the spider made its way to the space station thirty thousand miles up. It was a journey that would take almost a week.

When Sophie was back Ji Ye pressurised the cabin and they removed their helmets. After a squeeze of water and a food can each she signalled ground control and the north-east lasers started up, tripping the catches on the empty car, which fell away down the line at an alarming speed. The lasers powered electric motors on the capsule which would brake it to a soft landing at the terminal below.

The pilot and nanotechnician resumed their acceleration into space.

\-- HOW long?

\-- A week. It's a long way.

\-- What about Yifan?

\-- Look. I believe you. If Yifan is alive, she now has someone a bit older and wiser to help her. I'm happy with that. If she manages to get to the terminal, or to lift control down at the port, they'll know what to do with her. And you believe me – when this is all finished, you and I and both Yifans will be out of here. We've got promised berths on the Unicorn.

A brief chill communicated from the other Ji Ye. Fear; foreboding.

\-- The Unicorn?

\-- It's one of the starships at Midpoint station. It's the next to fly. Sophie and Yifan and I have spaces reserved. Our reward for a job well done. The spider will be picked up by a new crew being trained now in Beijing, ready for the next emergency. Because there's nothing more certain than that there will be one.

There was silence from the other. It lasted a very long time.

*

John left home early the next morning and arrived at Imperial College by half past nine. He signed in – by now he was a regular visitor and on the list – and was making his way toward Alan Baer's room when he spotted, looking bewildered in the middle of the mezzanine, the man himself.

"Alan," John began, but was startled when his friend gripped his shoulders and hissed,

"You know me!"

"Well, yes," said John, mildly, pulling Alan's hands away. "What's up?"

Alan, dressed as usual in chinos and a pastel shirt, nevertheless looked different. His hair was sticking up, he was trembling and his eyes were wide with fear. He looked as if he would collapse at any moment.

"Let's get you to your office," John suggested, and put his hand on Alan's back to propel him on.

"It's not there! I went. There's an Engineering Professor in it and she swears she's been there for years!" But at least he was moving, under John's direction.

"What..."

"And my flat. Everything changed. Yesterday it was – well, not tidy. Not exactly. But this morning..."

"I'm sure it..."

"And the tube. And this place. When did they change the mural in the atrium?"

"They haven't. Not for..."

"I'm going mad. I feel like a stranger here, but people know who I am. You know me."

"Yes," John agreed. "You're Professor Alan Baer."

"I know I am," said Alan, curtly. "But I don't know who you are."

John led the Professor gently up stairs and along corridors until they arrived at an unremarkable door.

"This is your room."

"No it's not."

"Just go in." John opened the door and propelled Alan inside, where the first thing he saw was the blackboard.

Alan stood and stared at the dense equations that covered the board. They were in his own hand, written in white chalk with occasional annotations in red. He stopped trembling. John softly closed the door and watched as his friend studied the mathematics.

"It's beautiful," breathed Alan. He stepped closer. "It's my writing."

"Yes. You wrote it. You explained it to me just a few days ago."

"A few days ago I was in Capetown at a conference... This is a set of field equations in Riemann space, but nothing I've ever seen before. They condense down into..." he looked at the bottom right of the board. "There. My god, this is amazing." He looked around, swept a pile of papers off a chair and sat down. "What's happening?"

"The equations describe a multiple-universe theory. A relationship between adjacent but distinct universes. They're dimensionally coupled – in certain circumstances a form of travel is possible between them. You got proof from WMAP data. And I have proof from my family."

"So when did I write this?"

"You didn't. You've been travelled. There are people who can travel at will between these universes, and they don't want to be exposed. So you've been taken from your own universe and my friend Alan Baer – the Alan who wrote that – is now in your universe having kittens."

"Why?"

"To discredit him. To slow us down. I'm surprised they didn't get in here and wipe the board."

"Maybe they did something more subtle," suggested the ersatz Alan, peering more closely at the writing on the wall. "Can you get me coffee? I'm going to go over this very carefully. There may be traps."

So John left the room, and Alan fumbled for the glasses his other self had only ever grudgingly used.

*

The huge container ship drove through the long swells of the South China Sea. Captain de Vlieger stood out in the open air, on the port wing of the bridge, gazing ahead to China. There would be a reckoning in Shanghai, he thought. Chickens would come home to be boiled for soup. It was his own fault, although in another sense it wasn't. It hadn't actually been him, in Teal's World, but he thought that if it had been, he would have done exactly the same. A young girl, doomed to life as a martial male in an Eighteenth-Century society – of course his self there had taken pity.

And now it was he, this de Vlieger, who was going to have to pay the price.

He knocked his pipe out on a large No Smoking sign, and, putting it still hot into the pocket of his pea-jacket, turned and went back into the lightly manned and high-tech bridge.

A few days, and then the cat would hit the pigeons.

*

The village elders gathered in an open area at the centre of the village, close to the makeshift jail. The injured man and his family were putting their case, watched by those of their neighbours who were not out at work. Chickens clucked and pecked around them.

"She's a witch," the man complained, his crotch bulging with bandages. He was standing, because sitting made him wince. His wife, perched on a stool behind him with their daughter holding her hand, nodded. The elders weren't impressed. The oldest stirred in the armchair that had been dragged out for his comfort.

"She is a lost girl. You found her and took her in. We thought that was a kindness, and we praised you for it. Now you blame her for defending herself?"

"She bewitched him!" cried his wife, rising and lurching forward to stand by her husband's side. "We gave her nothing but love and attention. We shared our food with her. We treated her as one of the family. And what does she do? She seduces my husband. She forced him to go to her. You just have to look at her to see that she's a witch. Bring her out – show her. See for yourselves." She flung her arm behind her to indicate the jail. A tear glistened in her husband's eye.

The youngest elder, a man of forty-five who would normally be tending his crops on a series of terraces down the hill, nodded to an idler who happened to be standing next to the hut. The door was opened and Yifan was brought out blinking into the sunlight.

"Get her something to wear," the elder demanded. She was dressed only in the pants she had on the night before. They pushed her gently back into the dark until someone came with a dress.

Outside again, and conscious of the state of her hair, which was full of tangles, she surveyed the crowd. Four men sat in chairs in the middle of the road, two smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Behind them were two women holding bottles of water. Dotted around were small groups of villagers, mostly women, some with children. She caught a glimpse of Tomass, grinning at her from behind someone who was probably his mother.

The family who had abused her stood stiffly in front of the seated men. The man and woman refused to look at her, but their daughter glared at Yifan, who couldn't have cared less. One of the men said something Yifan couldn't understand and beckoned her forward. She moved into the clear space before the elders, as far from the family as she could get. The shift dress she had been given smelt of someone else's sweat.

"Can any of you understand English?" she demanded. Her abuser's wife, startled, called her a witch again, but Yifan didn't understand and simply ignored her.

One of the elders stood up.

"I can speak and hear. Tell your tale."

Yifan paused, to get it all straight in her head, and then told how she had fallen when the aircraft had broken apart; how she had been found by a man on his way to work who had taken her back to his family. How she had been in shock and could not speak.

The elder translated for the others. So far there was nothing that the village did not already know.

Then there was an awkward silence. Everyone there knew something awful was coming. Yifan's mouth was dry and her voice was creaky. Someone gave her a plastic bottle of cool water, which she gulped down before she was able to continue.

"They made me work for them. From the moment I was dragged from bed" – Yifan much preferred lying in bed until noon, so this was a bitter injustice in her mind – "until it was time to sleep, I had to clean the house, wash the dishes, get water, do vegetables... They treated me like a slave."

There was commotion when this was translated. The family started shouting. The elders told them to be quiet. There was muttering in the crowd. Some of the women looked as if they would have loved to have had a mute servant to do the housework for them.

One of the girls behind the elders handed a water bottle to the translator, who thanked her, and took a long drink. It was a very hot morning. He motioned to Yifan to continue.

She took a deep breath and described the first attack. She had not been there when it had happened, but the Yifan whose body this was had told her everything during the long night. Yifan could hardly get the words out without feeling sick, and when they were translated the commotion began again, revulsion in the crowd, astonishment on the faces of some, the elders shaking their heads slowly.

Her abuser shouted in their language, and his wife started laughing shrilly, pointing at Yifan and stamping her feet.

Their daughter was shaking uncontrollably behind them.

*

"They're good, but they're not as good as me," said Alan, sipping sweet coffee. He pointed to the blackboard. "There and there. Two terms that throw it into the long grass. They lead to a doubling of a term in the derived equations. That would be enough to give my peers a good laugh. So long and no Nobel."

"It's stupid," John protested. "Any mathematician might have seen that."

"Only with the WMAP data. I reviewed it while you were out. My – well, his – notes are on the computer. I wouldn't have spotted the changes without it. Did he tell you what these equations could do?"

"As far as I know, equations don't actually 'do' anything," John replied. "They describe something. But it's possible to create practical things from mathematics."

"Oh, yes. Very possible. And here we have a method for moving between points in a Riemann space. Essentially, we can move a map, an array of information, between chosen points. So long as there is a map with a similar topography in the other place."

"Moving minds, you mean."

"Yes. And the remarkable thing is, you can do it without equipment. It's all in the mind."

John pondered this. "But how do you identify which place is which? Or even where there is a mind with the same shape?"

Alan sat back in the chair. He was smiling. The glasses were perched on the end of his nose.

"I'm a mathematician and a physicist," he said. His smile got broader. "I can see things in numbers you can't. Trust me." He closed his eyes, and instantly fell asleep.

*

Major Yuan organised two First-Class seats on a China Eastern flight to Shanghai for the coming Thursday. The target's ship was due to dock on Saturday, and she would be there with the British ex-spy when the Captain came ashore.

She was annoyed by John. That someone from an enemy Intelligence Service could have married such an important icon of Chinese history was galling. That he could have lost her was infuriating. Still, she had to work with him, at least until the Dutch assassin had been identified and arrested. Then China would own the secret of this instant coma. It was a valuable tool, considering the state of international diplomacy nowadays.

MI6 was quite happy for her to save them money. Just like the British, she thought as she finalised the diplomatic booking. All about cost, and no thought for the consequences. Well, they would soon find out just how expensive their budgeting would be. They should have arranged to pick the Dutchman up using one of their agents in Shanghai – they could have done it without alerting her Bureau. But now it was far too late.

She hit the enter key. The bookings were confirmed. The tickets were being printed.

Maybe she could arrange John's arrest, too, as a foreign agent on Chinese soil.

Major Yuan smiled.

*

Almost twenty minutes had passed since Alan Baer had fallen asleep in his room at Imperial College, and John was becoming concerned. He had finished the flask of coffee, considered getting more, ruled that out in favour of being there when his friend – or at least this version of his friend – came back, and then just resigned himself to standing around. The room only had one usable chair, and Alan was slumped in it.

Then the physicist jerked slightly and woke up.

"Whuu... What a ride!" He looked around at John. "Hi, John. Miss me?"

"Which you?"

"Both of us." Alan's mouth twisted briefly and unattractively and he said, "Hi, John. I found him!"

"This means that you're asleep over in your world," John observed.

"Well, I wouldn't miss this for all the tea in China! It's phenomenal!"

Great, thought John. Now there are two of them.

*

Sophie's specialised nanotech was working hard for its creator. The spider was crawling over the lengths of the three cables that had received radiation and blast damage from the nuclear weapon.

The first slather of her machines checked for damage and reported what they found by changing colour. A pulsing blue told the scientist that the problem was a degradation of the regular atomic structure of the filaments due to hard radiation. If left untreated the cables could fail.

Sophie made a second pass with a special mix of tiny carbon robots. The larger ones would squeeze between the thin threads that made up the cables and then direct the smaller machines to nudge atomic bonds back into their optimal configuration.

"How long will it take?" asked Ji Ye.

"It should be finished by the time we get to Midpoint," Sophie replied, concentrating on her screens. "They spread at about walking speed, and they make more of themselves from the materials in the carrier liquid."

The spider moved slowly over the affected area, a twenty-kilometre patch of potential disaster, and when no more blue signals were received it accelerated toward their next objective.

*

The two Alans tried their best to explain the concept that understanding the mathematics could lead to real-world effects, but John still didn't quite get it. They promised him an English-language description of the maths that he would be able to get his head around and which could get him to the point of travelling himself, but privately he was terrified that if he tried it he might not be able to get back.

John took photos of the blackboard and gave Alan a brand-new notebook computer to work on. Then he washed the board, shredded the few paper notes Alan had written and transferred the Professor's files from the University mainframe and laptop to the new machine, wiping the data with an industrial-strength piece of software that meant no-one would be able to recover the files. Then he insisted that they both go shopping.

They changed all their clothes, underwear and shoes included, inside the store – using John's new MI6 credit card – and went to a bar off Oxford Street to talk.

"I don't trust Major Yuan," said John. Alan nodded. "And I don't trust my own people either. They may have fragments of your work already. They might be able to find someone almost as good as you to fill in the blanks. From now on, we stay shtum. We can talk about your brainwave project with the girls, but only in terms of finding some proof that their brains are working properly – that their signals are too weak to detect using normal equipment. No clue about the different rate of time."

"I understand. Look – I can work on this in my World. Your Alan agrees with me. Over here, it's difficult. Over there, there are no spies breathing down my neck, and no you either." He took a pull at a very expensive Guinness. "What about the Dutchman?"

"I'm supposed to be flying out to Shanghai with the Major the day after tomorrow. But I've had a chat with Veronica, and I'll be leaving today instead."

"Good luck. He could be dangerous."

"I don't think so," said John, draining his glass. He stood. "I think he's one of the good guys. But that means we still don't know who the bad guys are." He made for the exit, switching his phone back on. "I'll see you again next week."

Alan waved, then turned back to his drink. He stared at the remaining inch of black liquid, but inside he was having a conversation. Eventually both Alans left the bar, and returned to Imperial College.

*

A volcano was building, thought Yifan. The little girl whose head she shared was shaking with fear as her abuser tried to justify his actions, helped by his wife.

But behind them both stood their own daughter, and she was shaking too. Suddenly she ran forward, began hitting her mother with her clenched fists, sobbing and crying out words that neither Yifan could understand, but which stunned everyone else there.

"He loves me! Me! Not that devil! Mama – make him love me again!"

Mama gripped the girl's shoulders, tried to keep her daughter quiet, shushing her then talking loudly to try to drown out her words, but received kicks as well as blows. The father fell back and stepped away from the two women as if they were nothing to do with him. An elder signalled and a pair of men from the crowd came forward and restrained him. After a brief struggle he hung his head and accepted the inevitable.

The elders conferred together while the girl shouted and swore at her mother and father. Yifan stood and wondered how awful humanity could be, how someone so young could accept something so vile as normal, even desirable. Eventually women from the crowd were detailed to take the girl away, which she resisted, and her parents were bundled into the small jail.

Huh, thought Yifan, I wish I'd peed in the water bucket.

She got a smile and laughter from her younger self.
The Dutchman

"Captain – we've received a landing request from a US Navy helicopter. ETA is ten minutes."

De Vlieger sat up in the narrow bed. The officer, hanging around the door of his day room behind the bridge, looked worried. "What do they want?"

"I don't know. Maybe engine trouble?"

"Well, give them permission. Couldn't the First Officer have handled this?"

"They asked whether we had someone called de Vlieger, sir."

The Captain grunted and got out of bed. He waved the officer away and pulled on his clothes. It was five thirty in the morning – early for a Navy machine to be flying.

From the bridge the helicopter, a Huey UH-1N, appeared as a black dot and rapidly grew bigger. The sun was just a sliver in the east. The ship's helipad was at the stern, and by the time de Vlieger and a pair of seamen arrived there the machine was setting down. Its rotors kept turning as a man stepped out and approached them. He held out his hand to the Captain.

"Hi. My name is John. We need to talk, but it can't be here," he shouted over the clattering noise.

"You want me to go with you? I can't leave my ship."

"You'll have to. When you dock in Shanghai you're bound to be arrested. Please; we haven't much time. China has logged the flight, and when the right people get to know about it there'll be hell to pay, diplomatically. The Americans are taking a big risk for you – and for me. Do you need to get your sea-bag?"

De Vlieger felt in his pockets. He had his wallet, pipe and tobacco. "I've got all I need," he said, then turned to one of the sailors. "Tell James he's in charge. No shore leave in Shanghai. He must notify the Company and get their rep on board as soon as you tie up. Now – John – I'm ready."

As soon as they strapped in the helicopter lifted and made off east at speed toward the USS Wasp, an LHD-class amphibious assault ship sailing well over the horizon in international waters.

They wouldn't let him smoke.

*

\-- Geosynchronous orbit is 36,000 kilometres, Ji Ye explained to Ji Ye. And right now, we are at almost 20,000 kilometres, and I'm going outside, and you will NOT try to stop me!

The cuckoo inside her head was stunned into silence by this mental outburst. She had been commenting more frequently in the last few hours, about how uncomfortable it was in the spacesuit, the horrible feeling of peeing and pooing in it; about the heat, the squishy food; that her period was due and she had a headache.

Yes, I know, thought Ji Ye bitterly. Tell me about it. Her period was also and more germanely due, and although the suits were perfectly capable of coping she still didn't like the thought of it. But she wasn't going to give her other self the satisfaction, and she wasn't going to miss the chance of a lifetime just because the other was being squeamish about heights.

Because the spider was ascending the cables nose-up, all that could be seen through the thick window was space. It was magnificent, full of stars, with one right ahead that stayed still while all the others moved slowly past them. They were almost two-thirds of the way to the station now and on their approach to the second cable-car. It was Ji Ye's turn to go out and check it.

The car had stopped just below one of the debris defence systems, a ring of computer-guided lasers and railguns standing out two miles around the cables. It clung to them with a complex clamp arrangement that let the cable-cars pass through. When Ji Ye cracked the hatch on the spider and clambered up onto its hull she saw faint flashes as lasers picked off tiny meteors and junk left by sixty years of space exploration and exploitation. She hooked up her tether and made her way around the curve of the spider's head, which was liberally sprinkled with handholds.

The Earth lay below her like a jewel. A whole hemisphere, the mass of Asia, the scattered islands of Indonesia, the Pacific off to her right. She could see some of Australia, and India.

And suddenly it was above her. A whole world over her head, poised to drop. It was falling, rushing toward her, blotting her out...

The other Ji Ye shut her eyes.

"Don't worry," Sophie said over the communications link when Ji Ye got her nausea under control and reported it. "It's quite normal. I got a bit of it too, when I went out." Ji Ye wished that Sophie had bothered to mention it before, but it was too late to moan. She sipped some brackish water from a spigot in her helmet and reoriented herself so that the Earth was beneath her. She looked at the cable-car twenty metres away, one of the spider's legs extended and locked on just beside the access hatch under the upper laser power collector. She took her umbilical, clipped it beneath a cable clamp to stop it from tangling, and started across the long, fragile-looking limb.

\-- It's really quite fun, this, said the other her.

\-- Shut the heck up. I'm trying to concentrate.

When she opened the hatch and clambered inside she dropped very slowly to the floor of the huge cabin. It was stacked with grey boxes. Each, she knew, contained a human being in a deep state of suspended animation. There were over two hundred in this capsule. It had been going up to Midpoint station when the bomb had gone off far below.

Ji Ye checked the status panels at the end of each stack of boxes, and then the capsule's own panel. Only one lamp was red, and that was the one for the access hatch.

She typed a message to the ground station, reset the system and left, closing the hatch behind her.

On the trip back along the spider's leg she looked around and enjoyed the astonishing view, and her unwanted guest enjoyed it with her.

*

Brunch on the Wasp was a tasty and substantial meal, with excellent coffee and permission to smoke. It was taken in the open air on a balcony off the Officers' mess. De Vlieger and John were the only diners.

"You know what this is about. Yifan and Teal."

"It was only a matter of time," de Vlieger said, lighting his foul pipe and sending gusts of blue smoke into the air.

"You were there in Teal's World. You arranged for Yifan to get back here. For that, I thank you."

"It was another me, not me. That de Vlieger is a native of that World. Of course, I've met him. I know him well. A fine seaman, with a wonderful vessel.

"He had a few of my men with him, from here. One of them sent your Yifan back, which of course sent Teal back there. A commendable course of action, but it does make things difficult for me, here and now."

"For me too. Yifan and her mother are away in another World. They're both in a coma in hospital. There's an Asian man there too. He was sent to kill them but when he was cornered he touched my wife and collapsed. What do you know about that?"

De Vlieger puffed at the pipe, then took a sip of the excellent coffee. "He's nothing to do with me."

"So there are two groups who know how to travel."

"That I know of. Mine, and theirs. Whoever they are. My group – well, we don't have any real aims. We can do it, and it's interesting and fun. But they – we meet them from time to time. They are hostile. One of me died because of them. But I don't know who they are, how they are organised, or what their purpose is. The presumption in my group is that they don't like other travellers; that perhaps they are a sort of police force against travel."

"How do you travel between Worlds?"

"By thinking. There's a way of thinking." He wove his free hand around in the air. "A shape in the mind. Two confirmatory thoughts you bring together. Change the shape of one to change the destination." He let his hand fall. "If there's no-one there to receive your mind, of course it doesn't happen. But many times it does. Sometimes it's a swap where the other comes here. Other times I share with the other me. And sometimes, it can be fatal."

John wondered how much he should reveal about Alan's work. He decided to leave it for now. "What about the touching?"

"The thought for returning is a constant, and if you are touching someone who is travelled when you yourself return, they return to their own World too. To travel by touching is another thought construction. You share the other's destination. That is what would have happened to your Asian friend – he will be in your girls' World, where there was a 'him' to receive him." The Captain leaned forward and thrust the stem of his pipe at John. "Now – what do YOU know about this?"

*

Major Yuan was livid with rage. She'd suspected a problem when the British agent hadn't made the flight with her. And now in Shanghai her Bureau told her about the American helicopter flight to de Vlieger's ship. It was tied up at the quay in the container port, unloading, and no-one on board showed any signs of coming ashore. Their company representative was handling the paperwork and overseeing shoreside operations.

When the Major went aboard with the Customs officer and asked to see the Captain, she was told he was unavailable.

"He's wanted here," she spat. "Bring him now."

"He's not on board, I'm afraid," said the First Officer. "I'm in charge. What can I do to help you?"

It looked as if British Intelligence was rather more intelligent than she had suspected. And with the involvement of the Americans, too. This wasn't her brightest hour.

When she left the ship she thought hard about what she could possibly report. It wouldn't do her career any good to admit defeat. She decided to request to go back to Britain. The answer would be at the hospital where MI6 were now keeping the Queen and the Princess. And the key to getting in there would be Professor Alan Baer.

*

"Your mother is at the top of the mountain? Well, if you know that for sure, you have to go. It's a few days to find the easy way up. We can provide a guide and protector. Lamaeo can go with you." A young man nodded behind the elder.

Yifan wasn't having it. "I'd like Tomass, please."

The elder was blank for a few seconds. Then someone whispered in his ear.

"Tomass? Him? He's just a child."

"So am I. Anyway, he was nice to me. He talked to me when no-one else would." Yifan was pleased to see eyes glancing away from hers, and faces blushing red. They wouldn't be forgetting her in a hurry. "I guess he knows the way."

Tomass, summoned, grinned widely and nodded at every word the elders spoke. They went on at length, probably warning him about dragons, eagles, the dangers of tobacco, strangers and Yifan herself. When he spoke he interspersed his native tongue with English words – fun, adventure, China and yes were most of them, which unsettled the elders, but in the end they agreed; and Yifan, now back in her own clothes, and with a wide-brimmed hat made from banana leaves, was led by Tomass to his home. His mother, very proud, made up packs for both of them to carry. Bottled water, mostly, and cooked rice. The elders made a big thing of giving Tomass a small quantity of money, then the pair were escorted to the edge of town, which was five metres away from Tomass's house. Yifan felt like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, setting out down the Yellow Brick Road with – which one? Tomass was probably the Scarecrow.

~~ And I'm Toto, said little Yifan, as they set off to find their mothers.

*

John turned his mobile phone off before they transferred from the Wasp. He could buy an anonymous replacement in Taiwan if he needed to talk to Alan, and he wanted to disappear for a while with his prize, the Dutch Captain.

The ship's lighter took them ashore at Toucheng, a small fishing port on the east coast. De Vlieger and John both recognised it, John from Yifan's account, and de Vlieger from memories of his other self, in the World of Shen Teal. They set off up the hill and found the Golden Inn.

The Golden Inn still stood where it had been built more than three hundred years before. It looked much the same in this World as it had in Shen Teal's: an imposing three-story building, its colours now faded, with a wide doorway that led to the reception area and on out into a central cloister, shaded from the fierce sun with mature trees and tinkling with the sound of water from fountains, rills and miniature waterfalls. John and the Captain sat together at a low table in a secluded corner, accepted complimentary green tea and a refreshing drink of rum, lime and coconut water, and began to sound one another out.

"I'm not altogether sure I can trust you," began de Vlieger, stealing a march on John, who was just about to say the same thing. "It appears you're some sort of secret agent."

"I'm not an agent," began John, but then he remembered that he was no longer a paid-up member of the SIS. "Well, I am, actually, but sort of forced into it." Against his better judgement, because in his head he knew he shouldn't trust the weatherbeaten old sailor, John nevertheless told more or less the whole story. De Vlieger sat quietly, listening well, never taking his eyes off John even as he took tea, or a pull at his refresher, or filled, lit and smoked the small foul pipe he pulled from his pocket.

"So you see," John finished, after twenty minutes, "I need to get my wife and child back. And I only knew about you. So here we are."

A waiter came by and replaced his empty glass with a full one.

The Dutch Captain sat quietly for a bit, smoking, and then he nodded. "The others found you before you found me, and they were able to mobilise quickly to kill you and your family. Your girls being in hospital is big news. It would be clear, from their comas, that Yifan and her mother were travelling. So, you were automatically an enemy of theirs, and you are to my mind a friend of me." He stuck out a work-hardened hand and John, without hesitation, gripped it. "Now we will have lunch, and I'll tell you a bit more about travelling."

Over a light meal of rice with vegetables and sticky-fried chicken de Vlieger explained how he and the others in the rather loose association he called Travellers were able to move between the Worlds. Alan's complex mathematics was missing, but John could see the shape of it in the pictures his new friend Theo described.

"You set it up in your mind's eye. A shape for the destination, the shape to make it happen. You need both. You push them together in your mind – and you go. Well, if there's a 'you' there to receive you, otherwise you don't go."

"And touching someone uses something similar."

"Yes, that's what happened in Teal's World. A few of my friends were with de Vlieger there, on his crew. Their Teal-World partners were over here taking holidays in Rio. They had a wonderful time – spent all their hosts' pay. But I digress. De Vlieger asked one of them to swap back while touching your daughter. The return shape is quite simple, two constants you bring together when you want to come back. I'll teach it to you along with the others.

"Anyway, he touched her, he ended up face-down in a puddle near Copacabana beach and Yifan swapped back with Teal. You should have seen the look on the boy's face! My other self couldn't stop laughing at the sight of it...

"So she goes off without knowing how she does it. That's not so unusual. She's probably subconsciously bringing things together in her mind and, well, then it can happen. She got back the first time because the link keeps failing when there's a very variable difference in the rate time passes between Worlds. And of course, she came back when her host died, and the second time she returned because we helped her. But this third time..." De Vlieger pulled a small penknife from his pocket and started to clean the bowl of his pipe. "This time she has no-one there to help her."

"In fact, she may have people there to hurt her," said John. "Can't we get her back from this end?"

"No, her mind is in the other place. Can only work from there. When the assassin touched your wife, he made a connection that determined the shape of her destination in his mind. That shape is just there, it doesn't need a mind behind it. But the movement shape needs a directing mind, and he provided that himself."

"The shapes are mathematical," said John, helpfully. His companion nodded.

"Yes, we know. But it's not very relevant to travel. If you've got some equations we might like to have a look, for interest's sake. You could even maybe get a prize for it." His eyes twinkled as he said this. "If you could get anyone to believe you."

"I'm not sure it would be wise. Just imagine if everyone started zooming around between all the Worlds. It would be chaos." John chewed around a wing-bone and spat it delicately into the small pile of bones and gristle beside his plate, then took a sip of tea. "Now – will you start teaching me these shapes?"

*

Rain came down with such force it seemed that the gods must be emptying their baths. The children sheltered beneath a tree, but when rain started to seep down through the foliage and several very large insects and spiders joined them in their shelter they set off again in the downpour. It was still horribly hot, and when suddenly the rain stopped they began steaming.

They trudged along the muddy track toward what the boy could only describe as 'lift'. He was cheerful and chatty, practising his English with her and singing snatches of what must be popular songs in this World. Yifan was lumpy with mosquito bites, and despite her rapidly drying vegetable hat her nose was peeling from the sun.

The other Yifan, the little girl, was happy to stay in the background, letting Yifan handle the conversation – and the walking, and carrying the pack that held their drinking water. She said it would have been confusing for Tomass if he had to listen to two different Yifans on the journey.

Yeah, thought older Yifan – let ME do all the hard work.

They passed through a few villages, buying lunch at one. They skirted plantations and rice paddies terraced down the hillside. At times they had clear views out over the sea, and saw the waiting container ships anchored just offshore.

When evening neared Tomass asked for lodging at a quite prosperous-looking village whose main crop appeared to be plantains. There was a garage of sorts, with drums of fuel for vehicles they had not encountered on the road. The village's elders put them up with a local couple who fed them goat stew and mashed plantain. Yifan shared a bed with the young wife and Tomass slept with her husband, who snored almost as loudly as John, shaking the tin roof of the house.

At dawn, after a breakfast of fried plantain and pork washed down with a strong black sugared coffee that shook Yifan awake and made her nerves jangle, Tomass left some money with the couple, who seemed pleased enough, and they set off on the dusty road again.

Two more nights spent with families in other villages brought them to the north of the island, and their destination came into view around the shoulder of a hill. A dark red streak ran straight from the top of the mountain, slashing through terraces and jungle all the way down to the sea below. "Lift," explained Tomass, gesturing down and up. But if Yifan thought that it would save them any walking she was rudely mistaken. When they reached it an hour later it was obviously not moving.

The lift was a structure of dull red-painted steel, a framework supporting belts of cables which carried frames on which shipping containers had been placed. There was a belt leading up and another beside it leading down, but because it wasn't moving there was no way of knowing which was which, until Yifan saw that the containers on one belt had seals on their doors and those on the other hadn't.

Beside the belts was a walkway. After lunch from their packs the two children started the long climb to the top of the island, feet clanging on the metalwork, their heads protected from the fierce sun by the wide banana-leaf hats. It wasn't a pleasant walk. Even Tomass stopped singing and trudged alongside the two Yifans in silence. Altogether it took two hours of effort, with frequent breaks for water, to reach the top. And then they were presented with the astonishing sight of the whole mountain-top sliced off.

They sat in the shade beside the lift's engine house and ate. They were itching from mosquito bites. Night would fall in less than two hours. They were exhausted. The belts terminated close by, where a thicket of cranes stood ready to load and unload the containers in a huge yard. Rails led from the yard to end at a building, the largest they could see, which occupied the rough centre of the plateau. Everything was covered in a sickly green paint, and a grey-green dust that coated their ankles when they kicked it up. Little Yifan had some idea of what it might be, but she wasn't very clear about it; it was something to do with her mother's friend, Sophie.

"Come on," said Yifan eventually, heaving her exhausted body to its feet, and the pair set off toward their goal.

*

The shapes were very similar to the visualisations Alan had made of his equations. The formulae were expressions in five-dimensional space, with a variable time dimension added. John could 'see' the time dimension as a loop in the picture in his head. He could also see something else, that Alan hadn't mentioned.

"In this destination picture," he began, "there's a twist in the time strand. It's just appeared – I didn't do anything to make it happen."

De Vlieger nodded. "It's the connection. You've made contact with another Universe. The twist is the interaction between its time stream and ours. If your time loop stays flat, both Universes are running at the same rate. The twist shows that over there, time is running differently. It wouldn't be good to go there – you don't know if you could return in a reasonable period of time. You could be in coma here for days."

"And it seems to me," John surmised, discarding the image and leaning forward to get a handful of nuts, "if there is a flat time loop – if both Universes are in synch – then it's possible for both minds to swap. Like Yifan and Teal."

"That's how it looks to us too. We don't like to go where there can be no swapping. The coma is undesirable."

"Alan – Professor Baer, I told you about him – he thinks that the Universe my girls are in is running at about one-fifth to one-seventh the rate of ours. But it could be variable, like Yifan's first adventure." He took a pull at his Jolly Stout, the Taiwanese Guinness. "I spent months trying to work out how time flowed between this World and that one."

Theo looked at his wristwatch. "Time for me to get going," he said, standing up. "I've got a driver to take me to another port along the coast, no questions asked, and I'll be on board a coastal feeder before midnight. Are you sure you don't want your masters to know where I am?"

"Not right now," said John, standing too. "You need to get under cover for a while. I've got all I need from you, Theo, and I'll have to go back before any of the interested parties catch up with me. I have protection in Six, and I'll be with my girls."

The two men shook hands and de Vlieger strode out of the Inn without looking back. John sat down again, signalled for another beer and a menu, and looked forward to a quiet night before switching his phone back on and suffering the inevitable onslaught from Veronica.
Angel Hair

The sun still shone on Midpoint Station while the Earth below was moving toward night. The spider was slowing, though it would be another hour before they docked. In the meantime there was nothing much for Sophie and Ji Ye to do other than watch the station grow slowly larger.

Midpoint was almost a kilometre in diameter, a collection of cylinders and struts that clustered around the three remaining cables of the space elevator at the right distance from the planet to put it just above a geostationary orbit. The station had been built first, and at the start of its working life had consisted mainly of tanks of carbon soup spiced with nanomachines. The tower's cables had been spun down to the earth and up into space at the same time. It was a feat of engineering that would have been unthinkable without the driving need to escape the imminent destruction of humankind.

Sophie's nanomachines were similar to the machines that created the carbon cables. Those tiny mechanisms, smaller than the diameter of a hair, assembled and spliced tiny tubes of carbon atoms into perfect strands thousands of miles long. The filaments were braided together by larger arrays of machinery until a cable of hundreds of strands could be thrown out of the station at more than eighty miles an hour.

As they approached Midpoint they passed through another set of debris shields, and then they were within five miles and it suddenly flipped in both their heads at the same time: the station, which had been something they were moving toward, becoming in an instant a city of metal falling down on their heads.

"Oh, this is awful," Sophie groaned, closing her eyes. Ji Ye grunted, concentrating on not vomiting. But then, with an effort of will, they succeeded in seeing themselves as descending toward the station and managed to save their meagre lunches.

*

"What do you mean, you lost him?" Veronica was shouting; never a good sign. John shifted the phone to his left hand and used his right to sign the bill.

"He had help. I got jumped by a couple of guys just up the hill from the harbour. I woke up in a stinky little shack behind the fish market. I only got out when the owner came to fetch some bait buckets this morning. She wasn't amused."

"And your phone?"

"Ran out of power. I'm in an hotel now, and they've lent me a charger. I've got my passport. I'll get on a plane and be back as soon as I can."

"He didn't put you in a coma, then."

"I don't think it would have helped him to do that. It would only have proved he was our man. Anyway, Veronica – let me get some breakfast and I'll see you tomorrow morning." John clicked off his phone and sat back in the armchair. He was in the dining-room of the Toucheng Sheraton, full of sausages and bacon and eggs, and still had a very strong, sweet coffee to finish. He turned back to his phone and called the Professor.

"Hi, Alan."

"Uhh... Do you know what time it is? It's one in the morning."

"Well, my boss was still up."

"I wasn't."

"Hard luck. I'm in Taiwan, and I'll be getting a flight back soon. How are the girls?"

"Last time I looked the data were stable. It looks as if a six to one time difference is about right. Both girls are still producing slow waves. Look, can I brief you when you're back?"

"Sure. Sorry. Get back to sleep."

"Did you get your man?"

"Yes, but then he gave me the slip. I'll talk to you on Wednesday. Bye." John put the phone down, picked up his coffee and settled back in the comfy chair. There was no hurry.

*

The children were half-way to the central building. The stained sun was getting low in the sky. Yifan didn't notice; she was concentrating on putting one weary foot in front of the other, hoping to reach shelter before night came. Then, suddenly and quite literally, her hair fell in front of her eyes, along with part of her hat.

Her body locked. She couldn't move. Her mouth shouted, "Stop!" and Tomass stopped dead behind her. Little Yifan had taken over.

"My mama told me about this," she said through her own mouth. "It's Angel Hair. It's from the cable that got blown up. Tomass – step backwards."

Tomass stepped back. He didn't know about the two Yifans; he just obeyed the authority in her voice. Then little Yifan shuffled backward, hunched over, her head still bowed, until she had retreated about fifteen feet. Then she cautiously raised her head, swinging it slowly side to side to see whether more hair would be cut off. When it wasn't, she straightened up and spoke to big Yifan.

~~ It's bits of the cable that got blown up. Mama and Sophie came to get rid of it and fix the elevator so we can all go into space. But the bits of the cable can cut through anything. I think the green stuff is supposed to kill it.

She looked around. This part of the plain was not as green as others. Behind her Tomass was standing, bewildered, waiting for a sign to go on.

"Tomass – we're going back a bit, then over there –" Little Yifan pointed, and a red circle appeared around her finger. There was no pain, until the end of her finger drooped and fell off. Tomass wailed and made to step forward but Yifan barked at him to stay where he was. Then she stepped back a long way, back into the really green ground, and motioned him to follow her. Together they tracked right until an obvious and virulently green lane was found that led directly to the main building.

They shuffled slowly toward it. Off to the left tresses of Yifan's hair moved in the light breeze, and half of her right index finger lay on the gritty ground. Before long what remained attached to Yifan began to hurt, and blood started to drip. Tomass cut a strip from his shirt with a small knife from his pocket and bound it around the stump, and the children continued on.

*

The spider slid to a smooth stop beside an airlock in a large cylinder at the station's core. Twenty metres away on one of the other cables the pod that Ji Ye had checked out eighteen hours before was docked. Ji Ye rotated her vehicle until its hatch was as close as it could get to the airlock and the women, moving awkwardly in zero gravity, helped each other across the gap and cycled through into the station.

Down below, in the control centre on Pulau Masin, the transport director conferred with the port handling staff at the sea-level end of the lift and then restarted the job of moving hundreds of twenty-foot containers up through eight miles of steep jungle and into his marshaling yard. When the lift was moving and the cranes started shifting containers onto the railcars that carried the human cargo to the pod loading area he leaned back, reached for a can of fizzy mango, and breathed a sigh of relief.

*

The first flight John could get was Business Class on Cathay Pacific, which pleased him no end because he had a sort of a bed, free food and drink, and could charge it to MI6. As he expected an operative was waiting for him when he arrived – Ralph, the young man who had helped to fix his house almost two weeks before. Both men checked for tails as the Jaguar bounded toward Central London from Heathrow. They didn't talk, and the driver never once indicated that he knew they were there.

Things were different when John got into the building.

"I knew it was a mistake," railed Veronica, almost but not quite stamping her foot. "Just because you were good – once – long ago – I thought you might not QUITE have forgotten everything you ever learned. I was wrong." She stomped over to the window and looked out over the river. "We pulled in favours from the Americans. Do you know how much that will cost us? We pissed off the Chinese. Major Yuan is furious. She'll probably end up behind a desk in Mongolia because of you. And you have nothing to show for all the slack I – I, personally – cut for you except failure."

John sat with a cup of coffee, courtesy of Ralph, in front of him, and smiled inside. He had gotten exactly what he wanted. And he knew, now, exactly what he was going to do with the information the Flying Dutchman had given him.

*

When Temi slid open the huge hangar door and saw Yifan and her companion she shrieked. "Yifan! What? How did... Come in, come in..." She squeezed the girl so hard Yifan though she would pop, and then turned to Tomass, who couldn't get away in time and was hugged to within an inch of his life. "Come on, let's get you a bath and some food. What's wrong with your...? Oh, my God! Come along..."

They had battered on the hangar door with rocks until it opened. The booming noise they made could be heard even in the depths of the facility. When Temi brought the children into the living quarters the others stood up hastily and began to organise – variously to report, to prepare dinner and rooms and to start showers.

Temi dressed Yifan's wound while the station director took Tomass to a bathroom to clean up. Yifan hadn't dared to reach out to pick up her severed finger, but even if she had the medical facilities at the ground station weren't sufficiently advanced to reattach it. She would have to suffer an operation to stretch the skin over the severed end after a few days, when the flesh had shrunk down off the bone enough to make it possible, and Temi was qualified to do that.

"Where's mama?" little Yifan asked; big Yifan had withdrawn into the background now that her host was among friends. Temi gave her a cup of water and some painkillers and told her.

"Your mum and Sophie are up the cable. They docked at Midpoint a few hours ago. We've let them know you're here, and you can talk to her in a few minutes. Now – get those clothes off. Bernard's gone to get your backpack from the plane, so you'll have your own clothes to get into. And I'll put some cream on those mozzie bites."

Tomass loved the shower. It was half an hour before he emerged from the bathroom, swathed in a huge blue towel. Bernard, back from the wreck of the plane, took him to Temi for a check-up, which he found quite embarrassing.

"Stop squirming around," said Temi, crossly, as Tomass tried to hide from the female scrutiny. "Honestly, you haven't got anything I haven't seen before!"

Eventually she left the antiseptic cream with Bernard and made for the lounge, where she found Yifan watching a news program on TV. It showed the aftermath of another atomic bomb attack, this time on Paris. The little girl was hunched in an armchair, the tracks of tears drying on her face.

"It's like my mum," she said, in a small voice. "Will there be lots of people over there with masks on now?"

Temi sat on the arm of the chair and hugged the little girl. "You'll see your mum again in a few days, darling. Just rest. Your friend will be in soon, and we can all watch some cartoons. Shh... Shh..."

Yifan – both Yifans – buried their head in Temi's lap. There were no more tears; they had been through too much, were too tired. But when Tomass bounded in, dressed in clothes too big for him and spotted with mosquito cream, she perked up and they watched the cartoons with Temi, Bernard and the Station Director.

*

Up the line, Sophie pulled Ji Ye's dinner from the heating rack and tossed it to her. Ji Ye caught the slowly-spinning pack and pulled the plastic spork from the side, looked over the labels and peeled back the covers over a beef stew and a mashed potato.

"Can't be worse than John's," she remarked. Sophie's brows creased.

"Who's John?"

"Oh, just someone I know. He cooked for me once." She laughed, unconvincingly. "Anyway, it must have been pretty bad cooking for me to remember it." Ji Ye muttered darkly at her interloping twin as she took back control of her own voice. "Years ago." She spooned the gloopy stuff into her mouth, and looked a bit ill. "Or maybe his wasn't that bad."

She, Sophie, and one of the two Midpoint Station Controllers were catching some down time before they had to sleep. The next day the spider would go back down the line. Its mission – to inoculate the remaining cables, to check the integrity of the tower, to check and release the remaining pods and to deliver Sophie's offensive and defensive nanotech to the Station – had been completed. Once it returned to the ground a new transport plane would be waiting to pick it up ready for the next emergency.

"I'm so glad Yifan's all right," Sophie mumbled, around a mouthful of mushy peas. "You said she's found a friend?"

"Tomato, I think."

Sophie stopped sucking at her spork. "I don't think that could be his name."

"Something like that. Anyway, in five days I'll find out. Five days." She put her spork on the sticky pad at the side of her tray. "It's agony. I know she's all right, but she needs me."

"It can't be helped," Andre, the deputy Controller chipped in. "At least you get a chance to go back. We don't get relieved until the end of November."

"Must be lonely, just the two of you."

"Well, there are the Captains. We've got three starships hanging out the back. One still under construction, two completed with one almost loaded. If you've finished your delicious dinners, I'll show you."
Kidnap

When Alan met John on Wednesday he was at first astonished and then uncomfortable when John pulled him into a black cab and took him off to a Turkish bathhouse in Acton.

"It's an excellent idea," he complained, "if you're obsessed with bugs." He sat on slatted wood in a very hot and steamy room, clad in a threadbare towel. Sweat ran down his face, his chest, his back. John dripped beside him, equally shiny.

"I AM obsessed with bugs. Especially from my own side. I've got a lot to tell you about de Vlieger, and I'd rather keep my boss out of the loop."

After a few minutes of listening Alan began to forget his discomfort, and started imagining new Worlds.

Over the next month John visited the girls every day, sitting between their beds with his wife's hand in his right hand and his daughter's in his left. Sometimes Alan went with him to check the equipment. They didn't talk about other Worlds or the Dutch Captain. John saw in his mind's eye the complex swirl that represented the World his girls' minds were trapped in, when he held their hands. The pattern was the same for them both; and in both was the strange twist that showed how time ran differently between his World and theirs.

Sometimes the pattern representing movement came up unbidden in his head, but he resisted. Would it do any good for him to be there, probably thousands of miles away from them, not knowing where they were, whether they were even together...

It wasn't a sensible option. He would end up in a bed next to theirs, useless in both Worlds.

In Alan's other World the other Alan worked on the WMAP data and his variations on the Riemann equations. In this World John's Alan collected data from Ji Ye and Yifan every day and ran it through his programs. There seemed to be some variance in the rate in which time passed in the other World, but it wasn't significant. He moved out of his apartment, worried about bugs, and into a flat owned by a friend who was off on a lecture tour of Canada.

This fine Monday morning he started up the shallow steps to Imperial College, but was stopped by two large young men.

"It would be helpful if you'd come with us," said one. The other nodded. Alan's eyes narrowed.

"Helpful for whom?"

"For you and for us. I've been asked to mention Prince Teal?"

"Ah. Okay. Please – would you let me go to my office for a few minutes? I have to reschedule a lecture."

The two big men escorted him to his room, where he ducked inside then locked the door. Pulling out his mobile phone he dabbed on John. To his relief he got an instant response.

"Hi, Alan – what's up?"

"I've got two goons who want to take me away. Are they anything to do with you?"

"Let me check." the call ended. Alan waited for a few minutes, gazing at the blank blackboard. Then his phone rang.

"They're nothing to do with me. Mine are now on their way. If you hear any commotion outside your door, keep it locked. They'll identify themselves by saying 'Princess Yifan'."

"It's exciting, knowing you," Alan commented, and stood up to wedge the lone free chair under the handle of the door. Before long a scuffle did indeed break out, followed after a minute by a polite knock on the door.

"Who are you?" Alan shouted, and when the expected reply came he removed the chair, opened the door and went off with two new big young men, stepping over a pile of unconscious bodies on the way.

Five minutes later four large men from MI6 arrived, accompanied by two uniformed policemen. They swore profusely when they saw the pile of suited young men, and even more luridly when they discovered that the Professor was missing. One made a cellphone call to John, whose response forced the officer to hold the phone away from his delicate ear. More calls were made, and the comatose impostors were removed to a black van that drew up outside the University's freight entrance.

The leader of the MI6 group, gloomily considering a long afternoon being shouted at and filling in forms, drove off with his colleagues in the direction of Vauxhall.

"My men grabbed the impostors and they just fell down, both of them and two of mine," the officer explained to Alan. They were sitting together in the back of a black mini-van with heavily-tinted windows, on their way to what he had said was a safe house. The Professor was feeling safe enough, now that he was calming down from all the excitement. But then came a cautious voice in his ear – his own. The other Alan was back.

¬¬ How do you know these are the right people?

¬¬ Well, they came and saved me. John said they would.

¬¬ All right. So call John and tell him you're okay.

Alan groped for his phone, but the officer reached out a huge hand and took it from him.

"We don't want anyone tracking you," he said. Alan nodded.

"So give me yours. I need to call John."

"We'll call him when you're safe. Now, please, just sit back and enjoy the journey."

Parts of London he knew well flew by outside the van, then parts he recognised only from crime dramas. Eventually they stopped at an ancient brick-built warehouse. He was bundled out and escorted inside by the officer and the driver, through a maze of grimy plasterboard corridors and into a small room, once an office, windowless and lit only by a low-wattage bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a desk, and there were two chairs. In one was Major Yuan.

"Ni hao, Professor. Please sit. I think we have a lot to talk about."

*

John stood beside the bed in the MI6 medical facility, looking down on the woman he loved. Ji Ye lay with her eyes closed, the cloth cap stretched over her shaved head with thin wires sprouting from it like snakes. Her face was grey; her arms, lying outside the sheets, were thin and pallid. Tubes led from medical machinery to catheters in her veins. Things beeped regularly.

He suspected that the Professor had been abducted so that the enemy – whichever enemy it was, the Chinese or the aggressive traveller group – could find her.

The Department was looking through traffic videos, tracing the black people-carrier from Imperial College. The last word he'd had was that they'd lost it somewhere in Barking, but were casting around to see if they could pick it up again.

It must be Major Yuan's people. The Chinese had the technology to listen in to mobile phones, so they could have picked up the password he'd given Alan. But then, what could they do? The Professor wasn't ignorant, and he could disappear into another World, leaving only a shell behind. He hoped they would realise their failure. And he hoped Alan wouldn't do anything stupid.

John's hand hovered over his wife. He wanted to hold her, to hope she could feel his touch, would know that he was here for her. But he was scared. His mind swirled with Alan's equations and de Vlieger's shapes. He didn't want to find himself stranded in that other World by accident.

In the next bed Yifan lay pale-faced and mouth slightly open. Her lovely long hair had been shorn like her mother's, and medusa cables connected her to the brainwave recording apparatus. Where was she? What was she experiencing?

John left the room and went outside to call in for a progress report. The two girls slept on.

*

Behind Midpoint three huge spaceships stretched out, clamped around the cables and connected to the station by access tubes and cable shuttles. One had been fixed to the broken cable, but had detached safely and was now connected to another.

Sophie and Ji Ye looked out through a thick window at the craft. They were miles long, shining like bracelets in the sunlight. A pod climbed into view along a cable and came to a halt next to one of the hundreds of loading bays that stretched along the ship. The pod locked on, detached from the cable and was swung into the bay.

"It's all automated," said the deputy station director. "That's the Unicorn. It's almost finished loading. We'll be saying goodbye to it in a couple of weeks, now the tower's working again."

"Then we set sail for the stars," said a voice behind them. They turned to see a large man in a blue jumpsuit drifting in the doorway. "Captain de Vlieger, at your service. I hear that you will be flying with us."

Ji Ye was astonished that her other self, normally so talkative, seemed to have shrunk inside her mind. She tried to find out why.

\-- It's the man Yifan met, when she was Teal.

\-- What do you mean?

\-- I told you. Yifan swapped her mind with a boy from another World. He was Yifan, but male. It was really weird having him with us, in Yifan's body. In his World, I was dead. Yifan had to behave like a boy. She had to use a sword...

Ji Ye was beginning to feel out of her depth. Her other self hadn't volunteered much information so far, although she had mentioned Teal, which just confused her more.

\-- So who is this man?

\-- In Teal's World he was a sea Captain. She couldn't get back to us, but he said he could help her. And the next day, at the wedding, she came back – just in time, because she would have to marry a little murderer –

\-- Stop! You're just making things worse! Hold on...

"Captain," Ji Ye began. He raised an eyebrow. "We... I would like to talk with you, in private, please."

"Certainly. Come with me. You can take the short tour of my ship. I'm always pleased to be able to show her off."

Sophie looked sharply at Ji Ye, but the spider pilot was already pushing off for the hatch, following the Captain toward the cable shuttles.

"Well!" the deputy director commented. Sophie's head snapped around to focus on him.

"Well what?"

"Er... Well, she's a fast worker."

Sophie glared. The man drooped. With a significant sniff, Sophie set off back to the crew lounge.

*

Professor Baer had a plan in mind. It required him to wait until one of the Major's henchmen unlocked the door of the defunct walk-in refrigerator that was serving as his prison, so he occupied the time going over some equations relating to the pressures inside neutron stars – the research John had interrupted when he had first contacted Alan with the bizarre concept of travel between Universes.

When the muscular young Chinese lady opened the door and proffered the tray, which held a can of cola and a small lukewarm pizza, he reached out as if to take it, grasped her wrist and sent her off with the other Alan to join her self in his twin's Universe. She crumpled to the floor. So did the pizza, which he regretted.

He set off confidently at first, padding as silently as he could along a corridor lined with decrepit offices until he reached a T-junction.

Which way?

He listened. No sounds from either direction.

He chose left, and there was a door at the end that looked promising.

It was locked.

Swearing under his breath Alan went back up to the T, took a cautious look before crossing it and found a similar door. This one was not locked, so instantly he decided it should not be trusted. He stood for a few seconds, dithering, then decided to take a chance.

Then he dithered again. His other-World self hadn't come back. Without him he didn't have the ability to move someone without dropping into a coma himself.

"So close," said the Major, behind him. "And yet you hesitate." Something cold touched the back of his neck. He was sure it wasn't any part of the pizza. "Put your hands on top of your head. I'll back away and you will turn around. It's back to the freezer for you."

Alan, feeling hollow, did as he was bidden and arrived at the freezer just as his twin came back.

¬¬ What the heck kept you?

¬¬ I needed a poo.

¬¬ What? This is urgent!

¬¬ So was that. Are we good to try again?

Alan turned around to face Major Yuan. "Can I have another pizza? Please?"

Major Yuan shook her head. She stayed well out of his reach. She waved the gun, and Alan, miserable, backed into the makeshift cell.

When the door locked he looked around. The girl had been removed, but the pizza was still on the floor. His stomach growled.

He ate.

*

The shuttle fell down the cable, away from Midpoint and Earth. De Vlieger turned from the panel where he had been checking the air pressure. He cracked his helmet and took it off, and held up a hand to indicate that his guest should speak. Ji Ye nodded, took off her own helmet, and with an admonition to her unwanted passenger gave her control over her body.

The foreign Ji Ye cleared her throat.

"Do you know that there are more Worlds than the one we live in?"

"Of course. We are going to a new world. That's the point of starships."

"No, no. I mean more universes. What did John call them? Multiple Universes?"

"I've heard the expression." The Captain's face was neutral. Ji Ye began to get nervous; perhaps he didn't know what she was talking about. But she cleared her throat again and felt tightness in the scar tissue on her face, and it came home to her that she was somewhere else, somewhere dangerous, and it settled her resolve.

"There are two Ji Yes in this body. The one talking to you comes from a different universe. I came here because my daughter, Yifan, brought me here with her. She has been to other universes before, and the last time she did it she couldn't get back."

Tears were trickling down her face inside the plastic mask, itching and intrusive, but she couldn't help it. In the back of her mind the other watched and listened. Ji Ye had the feeling that that one was close to tears herself. She too had almost lost her daughter.

De Vlieger floated next to the panel. Behind him the stern of a starship slid slowly past the shuttle's main window. He was frowning slightly.

"A man helped her there. A Captain of a ship. His name was Theo de Vlieger."

The starship Captain looked down at his feet. He may have been thinking, or he may have been worried that he was sharing a confined space with an obvious lunatic.

Seconds became a minute. He looked out at the starship, then back to Ji Ye.

"I have had this experience," he began. Relief flooded through Ji Ye. "But I've never met anyone called Yifan."

"Her name was Shen Teal, there, and she was a boy. A Prince."

"Never met him, either. I believe you. There are any number of Worlds, and it's true, I can go to some of them. But because there are so many, it's really unlikely that I, personally, have been to the World your daughter went to. And," he held up his hand as Ji Ye started to interrupt, "If that World runs at a different rate than this one, I would not go there. Please – come here."

Ji Ye unstuck her feet from the deck and pushed toward the Captain. He removed one of his gloves, and one of hers. He took her hand. She felt nothing, but he grimaced.

"Your time is very different to ours here. There's no way I can tell how different. If I tried to take you back, I could be trapped there forever. I would be in a fugue here, unconscious, unable to feed myself or have any sensible existence."

"You'd be with your other self there," she said, in a small voice. He nodded.

"Yes, maybe for ever. I can't take the risk. I have tens of thousands of people relying on me here. Do you want me to desert them?"

Ji Ye shook her head. The tears trickled from the mask and became small salty blobs in the air. Behind her the other woman came close and put her arms around her. "No."

\-- You can live here with me, the other said. You and Yifan are welcome.

\-- We'll die, back there. Where we belong. We could be dead already.

\-- Then what's there to go back to?

John, thought Ji Ye. And Bart, the cat she hated. And the real her, and the real Yifan, lying at the bottom of a cliff, or in a hospital somewhere, or dead. And what was so good about that life, anyway? Wasn't any form of life better than none at all? Being a guest in her own body, a spoilt body, but a body that had a good mind, that did good work, that was part of a great adventure.

But it wasn't her adventure.

"Let's go back," she said, and de Vlieger nodded and turned to the controls. "We've got to get down to Earth. We want to see our daughters."

The shuttle slowed to a stop, and began the short journey back up to the station.

De Vlieger, she saw in the reflection in the thick glass window, dashed his sleeve across his eyes. She turned around in her mind and hugged her sister, and for a while the whole shuttle was full of misery.

*

John had been given a new mobile phone from MI6, since either his or Alan's must have been compromised by the Chinese. It was smart and slim, and contained customised apps that Q Division were very proud of – mostly to do with encryption, bugging and burst transmission, but including a destruct mode that would blow someone's hand off if they weren't careful. It made him very nervous.

This morning, snug in a command post in the bowels of Vauxhall Cross, he pulled out his own familiar phone and called Alan. It was the day after the Professor's abduction, and with luck his phone would still be alive. John hoped its owner was too.

After five rings, he got voicemail.

"Hi, Major," John began. "We're quite sure we know where you are, and you're under surveillance as I speak. I'd like to put the past behind us and get back to being allies."

"Allies? When you behave in such uncivilised way?" the Major interrupted, picking up the call. She was incandescently angry, and her English reflected this. John smiled. His people were monitoring and could triangulate the position of Alan's phone to within two metres. He glanced over and got a thumbs-up from a technician. Out in East London teams were swinging into action, converging on a precise location.

"You cheated. You conspired with America. You collude with Taiwan. That is an act of war."

"By no means. My target was in international waters. He is not a Chinese national. At no point were China or Chinese interests involved. And I'd like to help you to avoid making a very big mistake on foreign soil."

Major Yuan growled a series of insults that John fortunately did not understand.

He heard the technician tapping on her desk and looked up to see another thumbs-up. The teams were in place around the building where the Major and the phone were located. Hopefully Alan would be there too.

"Major, Major – please. We would like Professor Baer back. He's entirely innocent in this matter. All he's been doing is helping me to look after the girls."

There was a lot of noise at the other end. John held the phone away from his ear for a moment. He raised a thumb to the technician, who typed the 'go' command on a console. In the target area armed officers swung into action.

"Well, all right, Major, maybe he has learnt something. It does seem to be infectious, this coma thing. Or perhaps he really does know how to do the Vulcan nerve pinch." More angry noise ensued. John let the Major get it out of her system while he queried the tech with a raised eyebrow, covering the microphone.

"They're in the building," she whispered, "but it's deserted so far. A bit of a maze." She listened to her earpiece. "There's a room with a desk with two mobile phones connected together. Q are going in to investigate"

John swore under his breath and took his finger off the microphone just as Major Yuan was winding down.

"Has that made you feel any better, Major?"

"No. But I guess you must not be feeling too good either. We've flown, and we've taken your colleague with us."

"We won't know whether you've flown until we go in," said John, playing for time. It didn't work; the phone went dead.

"Get on the street cameras, please, Sunitha. I'm going to have to go up to report." Sunitha nodded, and John, pocketing his phone, strode out toward the lifts, and Veronica.

Both Alans were in the other World, shopping for essentials. Major Yuan was being boring, and threatening torture, so it seemed to them that it would be better to be in a coma over there and have a feast over here.

¬¬ What kind of biscuits?

¬¬ Custard Creams, of course!

¬¬ That's the man! Everybody likes Custard Creams.

Alan was enjoying spending time with himself. They treated themselves to a slap-up meal in a pricey restaurant, seared scallops followed by a delicious steak and finishing with vanilla pannacotta. In the wake of the slight buzz from the accompanying wine and a terminal brandy they decided to stock up Alan's larder before going back to check on the Major's blood pressure.

Over in that World, Alan was slumped in a corner of another disused office, in a different building. He had been prodded there with sticks because none of the Major's people dared to touch him – the guard he had sent to this World had, of course, not got back, and never would. He felt a bit bad that her body would lie in a hospital bed until it died. But she herself would remain in this other place, sharing the mind here. Perhaps driving it into madness.

Alan was beginning to see just how dangerous this World-hopping thing could be, if it became common knowledge. When people could send someone off to an awful exile with a mere touch, as he had done, then nobody could be safe.

¬¬ So no Nobel Prize.

¬¬ Correct. We can't let this thing get out.

¬¬ It's only a matter of time. There are at least two other groups who know, and soon British Intelligence and the Chinese.

¬¬ Maybe we can find some way of stopping it?

¬¬ No. How? It's just something anyone can do, if they know how. It's not something we can create a cure for, or build a field generator to suppress.

They paid for the goodies and went back to their apartment. After tea and biscuits, and a necessary toilet break, Alan settled down on the bed and went back.

*

"You were a boy?" squeaked little Yifan, eyes wide.

"Yes! I was a Prince. I had muscles and everything. And a sword. And I had a brother, and my real dad was King."

"I miss my dad," the little girl said, sadly.

Yifan thought about speaking, but decided to stay silent for a minute. Even though in her World she and her mother were estranged from her birth father, in this girl's World they had been a family, and he had died in the fireball that engulfed their home town.

Little Yifan wiped her eyes and rubbed her snub nose on a sleeve. The shiny trail it left there was very realistic.

The girls were sitting on grassy hillocks in an idyllic landscape, a fabrication of the younger Yifan's mind. Once it had been a desolate and blasted plain. Now it was a meadow, scattered with flowers. A blue sky arched overhead, enlivened with white clouds that looked suspiciously like sheep. The sun was whole and warm. At their feet a little stream ran, clear and burbling and plopping with fish.

A square cloth lay between them, set with Chinese cakes and sweets and glasses of cold green tea and Coke. The spread was a dental nightmare, but since it wasn't really real, it didn't really matter. In the real World she was lying in bed, apparently asleep. But they were here, getting to know one another.

Little Yifan was proud of her internal space, once a prison to protect her against the horrors of the real world, now a playground, a place where she could heal. And she loved having a big sister to share it with.

"Did you have a... you-know?"

"What?"

"When you were a Prince. Did you –"

Yifan hastily assured her that she did have a you-know, but she didn't quite know what it was useful for, except for aiming.

"You bit his you-know off," the little girl observed.

"Yes. He was a bad, bad man," Yifan said. She felt a bit ill, thinking about it. But her actions had saved her and the little girl beside her. She felt a sudden upwelling of love for her new little sister.

"My mum saved me," the little one said, in a small voice. "I thought she'd left me, but she was with me and she built me a place to be safe."

The castle. The clown. But if Yifan hadn't come along, they would have swallowed the little girl. She would have curled up inside, and died.

Yifan poured Coke and offered it to her sister, who took the glass and looked up at the clouds. After a few seconds a pair of bluebirds flew down and perched on her and Yifan's shoulders. She smiled, then giggled, and wiggled her eyebrows. Yifan was impressed.

"Can you do Pokémon?" she asked, hopefully.

*

Britain has more cameras in its streets than any other country in the world. Most are in the control of local authorities and the government, and those are easy for the SIS to access. The rest belong to individual companies – pubs and clubs, fast-food restaurants and so on. These need the cooperation of the owners, which is usually forthcoming.

So if you are a kidnapper, trying to move your victim around in London, you must be especially careful. And Major Yuan was careful.

"Not careful enough," muttered Sunitha, in the semi-darkness of the ELINT suite. She showed John the camera views from around the disused warehouse. Some of the video was in colour, some black and white. "See here – there must be a tunnel between that building and this one. They think we'll concentrate on the area immediately around the warehouse. So they take the Professor through the tunnel and then across the alley to a third building. Well, we don't have any video of that, of course. But we do have a traffic camera on the High Street, and it looks down this road here."

John watched over her shoulder. A group of people hustled out of a side door in a nondescript office building and piled into a dark people carrier, which drove off toward the centre of London.

"That's very good," he said. "Now what happens?"

"Ten minutes after that a smaller group comes out of the alley and gets into a Volvo. I think that's the group with the Professor. We're on it, and we've already got a route to the South Coast. They're probably heading to a secluded bay for a pickup by boat. We'll have more information when we spot them at a motorway exit. I'll have something within an hour."

John stood and stretched. All the excitement of the job was coming back to him. The thrill of the chase.

"Go and get a coffee," Sunitha urged. "And bring me a chamomile tea and a blueberry muffin. Otherwise I'll wipe the tapes."

John hustled out.

*

"Something bad happened to Yifan," said Temi to Bernard. They were finishing lunch in the Blue lounge. Bernard mopped up some cream with his finger and raised his eyebrows.

"What?"

"I don't know. Tomass was talking about leaving his village. He was just going to say something about Yifan, but he stopped. Then I couldn't get him to talk any more."

"Would you like me to have a go?"

"No. It's best not to press it. Ji Ye will be back down in a few days. And Yifan is happy now. I don't think it'd be helpful to open a can of worms."

Bernard nodded. The spider was halfway down the space elevator now, moving under power and still well above the atmosphere. This was the fastest part of the descent. Ji Ye and Sophie would be strapped in and very uncomfortable. If he and Temi found out anything bad, it wouldn't be a good time to tell their friend.

"It can wait," he agreed.

*

It was a farmhouse, and it had been built in the eighteenth century. The stone walls had withstood storms for well over two hundred years. The windows that faced the sea were small and set deep to protect them from gales.

From the back door the ground sloped down to a narrow shingly beach. There the North Sea met the English Channel, and more often than not the waters were troubled with fast and swirling currents.

Major Yuan waited until the sun fell behind the rising land to the west, then called in the boat. She stood before the grimy kitchen window and watched the sea and the sky darken toward night. Behind her Alan Baer sat at the table, his hands gloved, a guard behind him. He was hungry. He thought he was going to die for want of a hamburger.

His stomach rumbled.

"I hope you like Chinese food," Major Yuan said, without turning. Alan grimaced. Many minutes passed. Then the Major stiffened.

"Come on. Let's go."

Her party of five left the farmhouse in the dark. The Major's pencil torch picked out the path down to the shore. The tide was coming in. The Professor was sandwiched between two Chinese agents, and behind him the last man clinked with weapons. Ahead of them the shingle made a shurring sound as a small fishing boat ran up into the shallows. Dark shapes stood up in front of the tiny deckhouse; one waved an arm.

"Get in the boat, Professor," Yuan hissed, illuminating her pistol with the torch.

"Sha'n't."

"Shall. Or we'll knock you unconscious and heave you in."

Alan sighed and gave up. He trudged toward the boat and was hauled up over the gunwale by one of the shadowy figures. The other pushed the craft back off the beach with a long pole. The engine fired, and they quickly reversed away. The man with the pole laid it by, waved his arm and called, "Thanks, Major!"

She froze. Then she howled. Her teeth bared, she fired the pistol at the receding boat until the pin clicked on an empty breech. Behind her the others were confused, unwilling to add firepower in an uncertain situation. Major Yuan threw the useless gun down.

"That bastard! That man! Why didn't you shoot? You – you – you're all useless!"

Then she saw the lights of cars approaching the house, and heard the growl of other craft approaching the shore.

John had got away with the prize. And she was going back to China, and disgrace.
The Ruins of Paris

Yifan was shaken awake by Temi at a time which, she felt, must have been the middle of the night but which the pilot assured her was almost seven in the morning. Temi put a glass of green tea down by Yifan's bed and waited patiently until she pulled herself together.

"You've got a call coming in, from one of the spaceships up at Midpoint station," Temi began. "It's a Captain Deef Leeger, I think."

Older Yifan, hoping that she could get away with a lie-in inside her host's head, jerked fully awake. Captain de Vlieger!

The Yifans dressed hurriedly and with some confusion, both being eager to get their clothes on, and followed Temi to the communications room. On one of the screens the face of the man she had met in quite another World waited. Temi sat Yifan down and left the room.

"Hello, Captain," said big Yifan. A long while passed, but it was really only a second or two, and then the big face broke into a smile.

"Hello, Miss Yifan! I understand that we've met before."

"Yes... Can you help us?"

A pause again. It was a long way up and then down, even for radio waves.

"Perhaps. I'm not the man you met. Your mother is on her way back, but I can't leave. Instead, I would like to talk with you about how you travel."

Yifan took a sip of the tea. Little Yifan sat back in her head and started creating butterflies; she was getting bored. But big Yifan listened intently as de Vlieger talked to her about shapes in her head. Did she remember, for example, anything that she felt or saw in her mind before she went to another World? Or before she came back?

She screwed her eyes shut and thought. There was a vague swirl in the back of her mind.

Under Tjo's careful instruction she sharpened her focus and was eventually able to describe something he appeared to be happy with. Then they talked for a long time, de Vlieger instructing, Yifan learning and confirming. Finally, the Dutchman stopped. After the usual two-second pause he sat back in his chair and puffed out his breath.

"Well, you've got it. Just be careful not to bring the return shapes together until you want to return. And you must stay here until your mother gets back to you – she'll only be a couple of days." He leaned forward. "You have the power to go back, but you must hold on to her when you do, otherwise she'll be trapped here. I could have tried to teach her how to travel, but she can't see the pattern you used to get here, and without that I can't describe the other shapes to her."

Yifan gulped. This was a responsibility she hadn't anticipated.

"I'll try," she said. Her voice wavered. A few seconds later, the Captain nodded.

"You can do it, Yifan. My friend the Captain in Teal's World had faith in you. Now, I have to go. Be confident. Wait for your mother. You'll make it, little girl."

The connection dropped while she was opening her mouth to thank him. Behind her, the little girl tugged at her sleeve.

~~ You're going to leave me?

~~ Your mum's coming back. Mine is too. We don't know what's happening, back where we come from...

~~ Please don't leave me!

Yifan, in control of the body, made her way slowly back to their room. In her mind, the younger Yifan wept, but she didn't listen.

Her mother was coming, and they would go home.

*

John and Alan stood beside Ji Ye's bed in the secret hospital. They had been brought by car from Vauxhall after an interview with Veronica that scared Alan spitless. He hadn't been expecting the Spanish Inquisition. He also hadn't expected the head of MI6 to actually foam at the mouth.

"Don't worry," said John, as they left the building in the company of Ralph and a driver. "Her bark is not as bad as her bite."

"What on earth does that mean?"

"It means be glad she only barked at you."

While the Professor checked the wires again, and Ralph stood uncomfortably at the end of Ji Ye's bed, John took up his accustomed position on the chair between the girls. He took their hands in his.

The complex mandala of the Universes blazed in his brain.

"They're getting weak," murmured Alan, checking the hospital's readouts. Ralph shifted his feet, wishing he was somewhere else. John sighed.

"Ralph – go get a coffee," he said. Ralph, relieved, left the room in haste and headed for the canteen. Alan raised his eyebrows as John stood and approached him and leaned his head in as if he was about to give his friend a kiss.

"Whisper to Veronica. Ask for the Cone Of Silence. Then tell her everything."

Alan nodded, the muttered instructions not quite yet processed by his preoccupied brain. Then his head jerked as John made his way back to the chair and took the girls' hands again.

"What..."

John's head dropped, and his body sagged in the chair.

*

Captain de Vlieger turned from the communications console, picked up his helmet and strode toward the shuttle dock, as well as he could in Velcro boots. He cursed the other Captain who had rescued Yifan Shen from Teal's World. He cursed the accident that had left both Yifan and her mother in his.

He didn't know them. They lived in a time stream he would never willingly enter. They were here by accident, and he had no responsibility for them.

He hoped that Yifan would heed his instructions. He had too much to do to become distracted by the plight of a pair of Travellers.

The shuttle took him up alongside the spine of the enormous spacecraft, toward the drive module and Midpoint Station.

The Unicorn was his pride. It had been built using cash from a dozen trillionaires, money that had been stolen from the working people of the world and salted away into tax havens. Now that money was coming out. All it was useful for was as payment for an escape from the dying planet. And where were those trillionaires? Were they on his ship? He barked a laugh into the uncaring vacuum. Some, perhaps. But many were not. Snatch squads, a worldwide and unknown group, took people, whole families, and sent them to the space elevators. Money made no difference to them.

There had been threats from the rich to stop funding the starships and the elevators. But the response from the anonymous spokespeople was – what will you do with your money when the Sun burns it all up?

And some of the rich people and their children were taken, enough to keep their hopes alive.

A carrot, and a stick. In his opinion, it was only what those people had wielded for so many years. De Vlieger chuckled. It had taken the end of the world, but the exploiters were getting their come-uppance.

He cycled through an airlock and strode stickily to his breakfast with the staff at Midpoint.

Down below the spider was approaching the terminal. Sophie and Ji Ye were only aware of the nearness of their arrival from their instruments and the almost-imperceptible slowing of the machine, since it was travelling backwards down the line.

"Are you going to take up the offer?" Sophie asked again. Ji Ye, her face itching for a wash and a slather of the soothing cream, grimaced.

"You know I am. I've got Yifan to think of."

Sophie sighed. "What about me?"

"You can take it up too. Nobody would blame you."

"I can go on another one. I've got a conscience, Ji Ye. I'm top in my field. They need me. This isn't the only incident where nanotech can change the game."

"Is it a game?"

"It's what I do. Look – you and me. We work together. You're the brilliant engineer and pilot; I'm the genius nanotechnologist and applier of cream to ravaged faces. And I... I like you."

Ji Ye sat silent, feeling the seat press up beneath her as the craft decelerated. Sophie had met her in Beijing, after the bomb in Changchun. She'd suggested the mask, an American product that was stockpiled in several cities outside of the anarchic ruin that America had become. She persuaded the Beijing government to buy in thousands for the victims of Changchun, and as an investment in case other Chinese cities were bombed. Facial injuries were common amongst survivors; it was natural to look toward light. Natural, and disfiguring, and often fatal.

Ji Ye ended up relying on the French scientist. Sophie put her back together, with the help of little Yifan. The three grew close. They became, without anything being spoken, a family.

"Come with us. Sophie, it's close to leaving, the Unicorn. When we get where it's going, don't you think you'll be needed? Even more than you are here?"

Sophie sat in silence. The spider slowed to a halt and waited patiently for Ji Ye to take the controls.

"It's not just you. It's everyone. I have to stay, to help, until there's no-one left to be saved."

The Chinese engineer hugged the French scientist as she wept. And in time, they both wept.

*

Bart was furious. He'd been at Rachel's mother's house for far too long, and there were no signs that he would be going home any time soon. Rachel, back from College, rattled his food bowl. He ignored it. She stroked him, paying particular attention to the sweet spots behind his ears. He shook his head.

"Look, Bart – John's going to be away for a while. There's nobody at home to look after you. You'll have to stay here, with me. Do you understand?"

It's pointless asking cats whether they understand. Of course they do. But they never let on, unless you know a great deal about cats.

Bart's ears drooped. He hung his head. And Rachel knew that he understood. She offered the food bowl again and Bart, with a sigh, began at last to eat.

*

Alan moved into John's house. He started using Ji Ye's car. It was orders from Veronica. The house was already under protection; it made sense that he stay there in case either the Chinese or the other bad guys came for him.

It suited him. He liked John and Ji Ye's house. He liked the wine rack, and the nice kitchen. He wondered if he should ask Rachel to bring the cat back, but silence was helpful to his work, and he didn't think he could cope with a bored and moody animal.

He hovered in front of bottles, checking labels. All the wine was red, because Ji Ye didn't drink much and John didn't like white wine. Veronica's lined face came up in his thoughts as he selected a rich Cabernet to go with the vindaloo that was imminently to be delivered.

The magic words John had given him before he escaped into the other World had worked a treat. The head of MI6 had initially recoiled when Alan had bent close to whisper, but once he'd spoken she had nodded, put her finger to her lips and started talking about the medical condition of John and his family while she gathered some devices from her desk drawers. She led the Professor out of the building and down the road to Vauxhall Gardens and a car park. They got into a green Skoda and she drove to a hotel in Pimlico.

"A swim is called for," she declared, and a swim is what they had. She not only had her own swimsuit in a holdall in the car but several others, male and female and in different sizes. Within ten minutes of her handing her keys to a valet they were splashing around in an echoing and otherwise empty pool, waist-deep in chlorinated water and utterly free of bugs.

The revelations which Alan imparted floored her.

"We can't... There's no..."

"Quite," said Alan, who had already recognised the problem.

"I don't know how to squash this," she admitted. "Do you mean to say that he's gone there deliberately? He's gone after his family?"

"Yes."

"He's got no idea what he'll find there," Veronica said. She sounded rather wondering, as if looking after one's family was something strange. "And, from what you say, it could take weeks in our time for him to get anywhere at all."

"True."

She stood in the pool, looking her age, paddling the water with her hands. When she raised her head and looked Alan in the eyes he was electrocuted by the intensity of her stare.

"He'd better hit the ground running, or when he gets back I'll gut him and make him eat his own stomach."

Alan nodded weakly, and wished the other Alan was here to give him some support. And he was fervently glad that he wasn't John.

*

It was Paris.

He guessed immediately that he was in the Montparnasse Tower. To his left the Eiffel Tower stood broken. To the right Notre Dame, crumbled. Ahead of him the Grands Boulevards were rubble, the shattered dome of the Galeries Lafayette stark like the ribs of an animal. A scent of decay, of burning rubble and burnt meat filled his nostrils. The air was greasy, and the grease stuck to a fine dust that fell slowly from the grey sky.

The body he was in looked down. He saw immaculately trousered legs, expensive black shoes, their gloss slightly marred by dust. And beneath the feet, the face of the tower all the way – the very long way – down to the ground.

He gasped, and swayed back. The body lurched and grabbed the frame of the glassless window.

"What's up?"

"I... Vertigo, I think. Just looked down."

His own voice was familiar, of course. But so was the other. He tried to look up but didn't have control.

++ Hello? Er... I'm you. Please don't be frightened.

He felt no fright in the body, but he did sense a very large amount of anger.

++ Please, listen. I'm you, but from a different Universe. I'm sharing your mind.

++ (some words that need not concern a delicate spectator)

John paused. This was him, of course, but rather more robust than he'd expected. And, by the feel of the body, much healthier; and by the look of the clothes, a lot richer.

"I'll be all right in a minute."

++ What's going on? demanded the body's true John. He sounded very cross. The interloper started to feel nervous.

++ I've come from another Universe. It's similar to this one, but not the same. My wife and child are trapped here. I've come to get them back.

"John, you're beginning to worry me." The familiar voice; he'd heard it recently but in his present confusion its owner's name was just not coming. Female, and weak.

"You're not going to believe this, but I'm apparently being possessed by myself. He claims to be from another world."

He finally turned, and raised his head. It was an office, its furniture broken and tossed around by the blast that had burst on Paris a few days before. Against the back wall, behind her toppled desk and obviously dying, was Veronica.

"What does he want?" she asked, with a properly Veronica lift of an eyebrow. The true John stepped toward her, which at least got him away from the awful drop.

"He's looking for his family. Apparently they're over in this world and they ought to be back in his. I can't imagine that his is much worse than ours, so if they're not already dead he's harbouring unrealistic expectations of being able to find them."

"Can he talk?"

"Perhaps. Can you?"

++ I can use your mouth. I can do anything with your body if you don't resist.

The body shrugged, and John talked. He wanted to talk fast, to get all his points across, but he forced himself to speak slowly enough to be properly understood. He told them about Yifan, about Captain de Vlieger, about his own secondment back to MI6 and about Alan Baer's work on the physics of the multiverse.

At the end, he stopped. The mouth was dry and the other John pulled a bottle of water from a pack on the floor and swigged.

"What do you think?"

"What do YOU think," Veronica countered, smiling weakly. "He sounds mad enough to be you."

John, feeling a bit ill after making his pitch, was happy to let the other pace around for a while, thinking, although he tried to close their shared eyes when they approached the shattered window.

++ I wouldn't do that, if I were you – I might just walk out.

John would have gulped, if he had had the control. And THIS John stood right at the edge again, tapping his toes over the yawning void, just to make his point.

Eventually he turned back to Veronica.

"I'll give it a go. After all – how hard can it be, finding a single Chinese woman in a world that's going to hell?"

"Attaboy."

++ Thank you.

++ Don't push it, sunshine.

Veronica coughed. Blood sprayed from her lips. "Before you run off..."

He nodded. Before John could react his hand dipped under the left breast of his immaculately tailored jacket and reappeared with a pistol. The safety catch snicked off. The gun came up to aim.

Veronica blew a kiss. The gun bucked in his hand. It was loud. The wall behind her head blossomed with a scarlet rose of blood.

The head of MI6 returned the gun to its holster and left the room, making way for two young men carrying an aluminium stretcher and a body-bag neatly folded. Down the long stairwell, back to the convoy of black cars and the careful run to Orly, then the Learjet 75 to London. John sat stunned in the other's brain, unable to take in the enormity of what he had just witnessed.

++ She was dying. Injuries, radiation. I was there for her.

++ You killed her.

++ I saved her from a lingering, excruciating death. It was the least I could do for her. She saved my life many times. And I saved hers.

An image rose in the shared mind. John recognised it. The hostage-taker clutching the terrified child, her legs kicking, her head rocking furiously side to side, covering him, hiding him from the clean kill, his gun pointed at Veronica. Only seconds left to bring him down, to get to his mobile phone, to disarm a bomb that would kill hundreds.

The gun barked in John's hand.
Meetings

Sophie moved out of the small bedroom to bunk with Temi, leaving Ji Ye and Yifan to share together. Once the door closed behind her – with rather more of a slam than was perhaps warranted – the Ji Yes grabbed their daughter and hugged her until both Yifans began to feel dizzy and started complaining. Then they all sat on the bottom bunk and talked.

"Your mum, she's here," said Ji Ye. Yifan nodded.

"I knew she must be," she said. "There's nowhere else for her to be." Little Yifan lay down sideways, putting her head in her mother's lap, where the Ji Yes took it in turns to stroke her hair.

"I met the Captain," one ventured.

"He called me," replied big Yifan. "He showed me how we could go back. But I'm scared to try."

"Why?"

"What if we're dead there?"

Ji Ye, about to say something reassuring, hesitated. She really did not know what would happen if they tried to go back and they were dead. The last she knew, they had been heading over a cliff.

\-- You can stay here, just as I said before. We can be a family.

Ji Ye wondered how long the body she was inhabiting would live, given the radiation it had taken at Changchun; but then she thought about Yifan.

\-- It's a gamble. If we try to go back and can't, will we come back to you?

And if we stay, she thought, what have we got to look forward to? Cold sleep on de Vlieger's starship for hundreds of years, with an uncertain and probably brief period of wakefulness when they reached their destination. Nobody knew what was waiting at the end of the trip. There were planets, but they could be barren rocks.

\-- It's always a gamble, life, said the other.

They stroked their daughters' hair, and brooded. In a few days at least two of them would be getting into their sleep pods and the whole dreadful nightmare of the iron sun would recede mile by mile, over a thousand years of oblivion.

*

Alan grumpily accepted the cat, and the cat grumpily accepted Alan. Rachel, relieved, stood back from the front door and lifted an eyebrow.

"Where's John?"

"He had to go off. Business trip. I'm... er... looking after the house for him." Bart, by some cat magic, made the cat-carrier suddenly feel twice as heavy. Alan sagged.

"When's he back?"

"Er... Maybe next week. You know how it is, with, er, business trips."

Rachel looked at him with a very innocent and wide-eyed expression that made him feel like a burglar. Finally she nodded, smiled, and went back to her mother's car. Alan breathed a sigh of relief, and the weight of the cat-carrier tripled.

"I'm sorry, Bart," the Professor said gently as he released the cat from his prison. "They aren't here. I really don't know when they'll be back." Bart shrugged, put out a paw and gently but firmly shredded the knee of Alan's chinos, then sauntered out into the kitchen. After a few moments a plaintive wail rose like a siren. The Professor sighed, and went to rattle the food bowl.

*

Veronica politely enquired whether Sunitha would like to go for a swim. This was interpreted correctly by the young ELINT officer as a command.

The pool echoed with shouts and screams from a group of schoolchildren, and with that cover, plus the desperate whistles and cries of a PE teacher trying to impose some order, the senior and the junior spy held a conversation that astonished the latter.

"You want me to delete everything?"

"I want you to replace most of it," Veronica clarified. "Some of the transactions – movements, proofs, surveillance videos – they'll have to go. But the point is to make the investigation into a harmless dead end. I've got replacement data on a stick for you."

"There are backups, and journals. Changing the data would be spotted almost instantly – every month we do a check against the journals."

"I know. I helped to set that up. There's a back-door in the journal compare program. It's on the stick too. It will remove itself once it's been run. Then the only risk is that we would get a computer crash and have to restore from the backups."

"I would just run your stuff again," said Sunitha. "I've got a hiding place for the stick." She leaned back against the edge of the pool. "I really can't believe I'm being asked to do something so illegal!"

Veronica had told Sunitha more or less everything, to the point where she understood how destructive a general knowledge of how to move between Worlds could be. Veronica's plan was to make the details of the operation point in a different direction and she needed a computer expert in the Department to make it succeed. Nowadays it was all about data.

"If your hiding place is the false bottom in the sugar canister in your kitchen," she suggested, "I'd find another one."

Sunitha gulped. Working for MI6, it dawned on her, was even worse than sharing your house with students.

*

"It's a tremendous opportunity," said John, out loud. He was striding through Green Park in London. The air was clear, the sky was blue. The other John imagined he could still feel the greasy air of Paris coating his borrowed skin.

++ Please, try to talk internally – this is important.

++ I completely agree. You know, there are billions of people on Earth, and the vast majority will die when the sun blows up. And even those who fly away have no idea what they're going to find when they get there. This moving between minds – it's just what we need. A lifeboat.

++ But you can't! If you broadcast this, if you teach the method, people in other Worlds will be invaded. There'd be no consent. Sharing your mind with someone – even if they're essentially YOU – it's not normal. It would lead to mass psychosis. Madness.

++ I can understand that. I'm beginning to feel somewhat irritated myself. If you expect me to help you, then you'll just have to accept my terms. Take it or leave it.

They strode into the Ritz, to a table reserved for lunch with an officer from another Service.

++ Major Yuan. Of course; it would be.

++ You know her?

++ In my World, she was on the case because I'm married to the Queen of China.

John, the head of MI6, sat down with Major Yuan.

"You look a bit confused," she commented as a waiter draped a napkin over his lap. John shook his head, as if he was trying to dislodge something annoying.

"It's nothing. Just thinking two thoughts at the same time." He accepted a menu. "Have you got the information I requested?"

"Very businesslike today, Sir John."

"Well, it's quite urgent – Beetroot salad, please, and then the duck. A bottle of your Lafite, the '90."

"Ox cheek, please, and then the porterhouse, medium rare." The major returned her menu to the waiter, giving them about ten seconds before the sommelier came by with their wine. "How do you know so much about the Indonesian operation?"

"Is that what it is? I didn't know. I just know the names of the people I'm looking for... So they're over there, at the Tower?"

Major Yuan nodded. Wine was poured. They drank.

"Ji Ye is an engineer and computer technician. She programmed and piloted the Spider vehicle that fixed the remaining cables after the bomb. She's still there. As a reward for her actions we're letting her and her daughter board one of the arks."

++ I need to get there, John interrupted.

"I need to get there," the incumbent John said. The Major looked amused.

"You? Personally? What are you going to do – give her a medal? Aren't you busy enough here?"

"It's a secret."

"Everything's a secret. It doesn't mean I won't find out."

The starters arrived.

++ Beetroot salad? said John, who hadn't been paying attention to the menu.

++ It's healthy.

++ Yuck.

"I heard about Veronica. I'm sorry."

John was silent for a few moments, then he dipped his head.

"I'm sorry too. Thank you."

"You must have loved her very much."

"I was married to her for fifteen years. And yes, I did."

The other John was shocked. They'd been married?

"What about John, Paul, George and Ringo?"

"I'll look after them. Excuse me..."

++ You had children?

++ Yes, one. John. Named after someone not a million miles away. He's all grown up and working as a roboticist. WE are talking about Vez's CATS. And yes; I organised their rescue from her home in Montigny-le-Bretonneux and have them in my home now, and they are an absolute pain in the...

"Penny?"

"Pardon?"

"For your thoughts?"

"They will cost you a LOT more than a penny, Major Yuan."

*

In his secure room in the MI6 hospital, the would-be assassin woke up. His mouth was dry, his limbs were floppy and unresponsive. Alarms assaulted his ears. He was powerless to resist as a gang of nurses and intelligence officers burst in and busied themselves around him.

In this hospital, security had precedence. When a doctor arrived to examine her patient, she found him handcuffed to the bed and with three guns pointed at his head. She waved them back and made a visual inspection using thick latex-free gloves and wooden sticks, knowing that she should not make skin contact.

"Well, he's awake. Weak, of course, but aware. He'll need some physiotherapy to bring his muscle tone back; I'll arrange that. In the meantime, if you have to, you can transfer him to a cell. But I expect a constant watch."

The transfer took a little while to organise, but nobody got touched and the Asian, after his long coma looking very much like Gollum, was finally united with a nutritious meal in a comfortable and highly-monitored bed-sitting-room in an annexe of the hospital.

Veronica was on her way.

Sunitha watched the journal compare program run. It didn't seem to behave any differently to the way it normally did. At the end she wisely refrained from searching for Veronica's rogue program, because just the act of looking would be logged. She trusted that everything had gone as planned. If it didn't, then both she and her boss would be looking for new jobs, once they got out of prison.

Alan reclined in the chair John had been in when someone had tried to shoot him, and enjoyed a bottle of the same rich red wine. Remnants of a fish meal were beside the chair on a lap-tray, being investigated by Bart.

The curtains were closed, but any reasonable sniper would be able to make an educated guess. Alan didn't care.

He was thinking.

*

A Chinese-flagged C-17 Globemaster flew in from the east. Behind it, the sky was darkening; before it, the bruised sun approached the ocean. Pulau Batu stretched ahead and behind on the plane's starboard side, but the destination was the far smaller island of Pulau Masin.

The aircraft was coming in to pick up the Spider and take it back to Beijing to be made ready for the next inevitable emergency. In a seat behind the pilots, John was in conflict with himself.

++ You'll have to deliver on your end of the deal, said this World's John. The other was looking at the wreckage of a plane just off the runway's mid-point.

++ You'll get your information, if you still want it. Whether you understand it is another matter.

++ If you can understand it, I can. I could just dip into your mind right now and pluck it all out.

++ Go ahead.

John felt the other as an itch. Flakes of memory came up in front of him – his early life, looking up at his mother's face; his first day at Grammar School; his first fight...

++ Keep going. There's a lot more like this. A whole lifetime.

The plane landed without incident. John disembarked down the loading ramp with the Spider relief pilot and a pair of flight technicians, his face dark with fury. Dipping into another mind wasn't as simple as he'd imagined.

Behind his brain the other John smiled. While he was being read, he had been reading the other. This John was a survivor in a ruthless world – the world of spies and conspiracies, where treachery was a way of life. John had rejected that long ago, settling instead for a humdrum but stable career and a young and loving wife and daughter.

He sympathised with the other's problems, with his loneliness and the impact Veronica's death had had on him. But he knew that this other John would betray him without a thought.

John had no intention of keeping his promise. He would find his girls, and he would get them out.

*

Veronica used a bug-tracker to find the first device in the interrogation cell. She crushed it beneath her heel. Within ten seconds one of the suited young men came in.

"Is everything all right?" he asked

"No problems," she said, and he left the room.

When she found and crushed the second bug, nobody came. So, she reasoned, there must be a third. Some devices were passive, and there was always the chance of a pipe in the wall leading out to a microphone that her equipment couldn't detect. So she smiled at the prisoner, who looked back blankly, and left the room.

Twenty minutes later, after a brief and explosive conversation with the officer in charge of the hospital, she was pushing the Asian in a wheelchair to a remote part of the hospital grounds. When she was satisfied they were in an open enough space she tipped the chair and toppled her victim to the ground.

She wheeled the chair to a stand of trees a hundred feet away. Returning, she scanned herself and the prisoner, then started to strip down to her underwear.

"What's your name?"

The assassin just sprawled there on the ground, open mouthed, as a sixty-year-old woman discarded her clothes in front of him.

"Get them off," she commanded, and he nodded his head violently and started trying to get his clothes off even though his arms were pinioned by plastic ties.

"Oh, for heaven's sake."

Vez stepped forward, fishing a Swiss Army knife from the pocket of her discarded slacks. She slashed through his restraints and stepped back.

"Go on."

*

Alan looked as if he was asleep, which was quite a common thing amongst mathematicians and physicists. Bart had scouted him out over fifteen minutes and was now using him as a perch from which to survey the room. The TV was off. The curtains were closed. The wine had been drunk. Bart had finished the fish.

Alan's eyes flew open. Otherwise, he did not move, and Bart didn't stir, even when his new servant heaved a deep sigh.

The Alans had been talking, demonstrating a social dilemma to each other, and they had come to a conclusion.

Slowly, so as not to disturb the cat and get his knees shredded again, Alan slipped his phone out from his shirt pocket and dialled Veronica.

*

The head of the Secret Intelligence Service and the Asian assassin sat facing one another in the middle of a wide patch of unkempt grass. It was hidden from the old country house that made up the core of the hospital, and far enough from the surrounding trees that she could reasonably expect some privacy. Her equipment showed nothing, particularly since she had thrown their outer clothes into the bushes.

"Will you please raise your eyes?" she demanded. The slim male complied, and looked briefly into hers. He wasn't particularly encouraged by what he saw there. And neither was she enamoured of him. He was around forty, skinny almost to the point of malnourishment. Black hair going grey straggled over a balding scalp. His skin glistened with the pallor that came from a month lying in a hospital bed. He was altogether Not Her Type.

"You know that what I've just done means we are truly alone. No-one is listening. You're free, in a very limited sense. So, please – tell me why you tried to kill the girls. Tell me who you work for, and why. I know this sounds strange to you – but I think I'm on your side. Now it's your turn."

He looked left, looked right. He held his hands up in front of his face. He looked at her through the grate of his fingers.

"I know. You can send me somewhere. So what? Then you'll be back in a cell, or in a hospital bed. You can do better than that. Talk first. Then if you regret it, send me."

Slowly, he lowered his hands into his lap. The first word that came into Veronica's mind when she saw the expression on his face was, inscrutable. Then she chided herself; it was a stereotypical response, and racist. She looked again, and saw only a man who had gone through hell.

"I died in Paris," he began. Then he stopped for a while, shaking his head slowly. "My self in that World lived there. A nurse practitioner in a hospital beside the périphérique. I met his mind. He was a good guy. He didn't know what had happened, didn't know about Worlds, about travelling... I envied him."

She nodded. He ran his hand over the unkempt grass and shrugged.

"I explained, just enough so he wouldn't think he was going mad. We got along together. He was fluent in French, and I am too. He had lots of friends. We went out to bistros and bars with them. We had a fun time.

"But the sun; it was in all our minds. It was dying. And I knew, then, that what I am doing here, in this World, is necessary. Is good."

He leaned forward, urgent to express himself. Veronica kept herself still, even though he was close enough to reach out and touch her, to travel her.

He smiled, wistful, and leaned back.

"He was younger than me by four years. Full of hope, and of fear. He knew he wouldn't be chosen to leave on a starship. But I wished he could be; he was so alive, so bright. Brighter even than this sun we have here, a proper sun. A bright young man."

"He wanted to learn how to travel," she said.

"He did. He said he could see how, from my mind. I tried to hide it from him, but I couldn't. And even after all I had done here to protect us – to protect you, to protect all of us – I wanted just to bring him back here with me.

"But to what? To a life in prison?

"He knew what I was thinking."

Veronica had positioned herself so that she could see through the screen of trees to the back of the hospital. She saw a small group of officers trying to decide to take the walk out to see whether their boss needed help, or had gone mad.

"You are part of a group that knows how dangerous this secret is," she stated. He gave a curt nod. "And you're not going to tell me any more."

He grimaced. "You know I can't. You would arrest us."

"Actually, I wouldn't. I agree with you. This secret would destroy all the Worlds it touched. I have no problem with individuals finding out that they have this special skill – they'd keep quiet about it. But to broadcast it; we would become Shiva, the destroyer of Worlds."

The knot of operatives started to move purposefully in their direction.

"What happened?" she asked.

"A bomb. An atomic bomb in the heart of the city. Such pain. Such a waste of life. He died thirty hours after it exploded, of radiation sickness and severe burns. There was no one to help. We lay in the street with the ash of a hundred thousand people drifting down over us, and we died."

"Why didn't you bring him back?"

The small thin man smiled a crooked little smile. "I did."

*

Sophie called Ji Ye to the lounge. The first thing she saw when she entered, with Yifan trailing behind her, was John. The second thing was that this was not her John. This man was younger, by almost ten years in her estimation. He was slim, fit, didn't wear glasses and was extremely well and expensively dressed.

A brief spasm touched the man's face, and then he winked at her. Her outer Ji Ye looked at her inner Ji Ye and asked the question – this is him?

Yifan skirted around her mother and ran up to him, and hugged him. The expression on his face veered crazily between love and faint disgust. Ji Ye finally laughed.

"Is this the best you can do?" she said.

"What do you mean?" It was obviously this World's John speaking, and he wasn't in a good mood.

"I'm talking to the other one. The one that smiles sometimes."

"I'm here," he said. His expression softened, and he looked down at Yifan. "It looks as if we're about four years younger here."

"You look ten years younger!"

John smiled sadly. "Yes. That's what a life of abstinence and fitness does for you. This one doesn't smoke, drink to excess or watch TV, and he leads a very active life. He even plays badminton.

"Actually, he's a spy. A very senior one, which is how he managed to find you and come here. Calling in favours from the Chinese, who run this space elevator operation."

"I've been up it," his wife reported proudly. "It's amazing. And guess who's at the top of it?"

"Would it be Captain de Vlieger?" he hazarded, which deflated her somewhat.

"Well, yes. And we're going to travel to the stars with him. You know that the sun here is going to die soon?"

"I was briefed about it, yes. But we have to get back to our World, and leave all that to those who belong here."

~~ You can't leave me!

~~ I think I have to, Yifan responded to little Yifan. She was sad, but she was excited too, and relieved that there was apparently something to go back to.

"We're alive back there?" she asked. John nodded.

"In a hospital. You'll need some time to recover your strength, but you're both quite safe."

"The Captain showed me how to get us back," she continued. "But I was frightened in case we weren't there any more."

++ Not so fast. You've still got to give me what I need.

++ I haven't forgotten. You can observe what we do. It'll be all the information you could hope for.

++ I don't believe you. Do it yourself. Go back, so I can see what you do. I don't trust a child to be able to communicate it to me.

This John was more intelligent than John thought, thought John. He'd hoped that Yifan would return all three of them, which would have hidden the method from the other. Still; if he did it quickly there might not be enough time for the other to understand the process. And indeed, the return method only used one of the mental images necessary to travel, because it used a different constant.

He tried to meet Ji Ye's eye, but he could not move his borrowed head. The owner had full control. The eyes looked down toward the little girl. He was holding her tightly against his body, and there was a vicious-looking knife in his free hand.

"I want information," he said, and gazed levelly at Ji Ye, who was frozen to the spot. "We can save millions of people with this ability. They can move to another world, another Earth with a proper sun. Talk. Tell me what I want to know."

++ If you kill her, you kill the girl who belongs here. The other goes back where she came from.

"If you kill her," quavered Ji Ye, "you'll kill the wrong one. She's innocent."

"I know. So persuade this fool in my head to spill the beans. He doesn't like innocent people being sacrificed, even if it's to a higher cause."

++ You can't use this power. What do you think would happen if a billion people here took over the minds, or even just shared the minds, of a billion people there?

"I'm not concerned with that!" The knife didn't waver in his hand. Both Yifans kept very still. Both Ji Yes held their breath. The only movement came from just beyond the open door of the lounge, where Sophie had been listening all this time, motionless, unremarked, ignored.

The bang was deafening. Ji Ye felt the tug of the bullet passing close to her shoulder at the same time as the shot rang out. John's expensive jacket became darker over the left breast, a spreading black stain on the dark fabric. His body jerked backward, his arms sprang apart, Yifan's body crumpling to the floor at the same time as his.

The faint smoke from the pistol floated past Ji Ye's face. For a long second she stared at the man spread-eagled on the carpet. He was most definitely dead.

And beside him, Yifan lay curled up in a ball. She knelt by the child, shook her gently, but there was no response. Yifan's body quivered like a taut string. She had retreated again into her own mind.

Both Ji Yes turned their head to the doorway. Sophie still stood with her arm raised, the pistol still poised. Her jaw was tight. She glanced in Ji Ye's direction with a visible effort. Behind her base personnel were running toward the scene, drawn by the gunshot.

"He would have taken you away," she said. A hand came from behind her and closed softly over the gun. Other hands held her, but she didn't struggle.

"You don't understand," began Ji Ye; but they took Sophie away before she could explain.

She looked down at her daughter. Temi and Bernard came and took them both, gently, one to the sick bay, the other to the Station Chief's office.

They left John lying on the floor in a spreading pool of blood.

*

Veronica got back to Alan some time after she noticed the missed call. She used an innocuous code phrase they had agreed on to set up a private meeting. This took place in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern gallery on London's South Bank. They had left their mobile phones behind – hers in her car, his in his office.

The exhibit was a mound of old tin cans that had been scrupulously sterilised and painted pink. It was supposed to represent something, but neither of them could work out what.

"The assassin is awake and he's been talking," she reported, "although he's clammed up now, on my advice. What's your news?"

Alan looked very pleased with himself. Then he remembered that the Nobel Prize he had been promising himself was not going to materialise, and his face fell. But he recovered before the spy chief could poke him in the ribs.

"I've found a visualisation that might suppress the travel pattern," he said. Veronica lifted an eyebrow. He stammered as he explained. "We travel by using a mathematical pattern in five-space, that changes as we range its parameters. We know when we have a lock on another Universe, and we can see whether time there flows differently to ours; although there are uncertainties if time flows backwards..."

"Get on with it."

"Ah. Hmm. Yes. Well. Then when you have a pattern you want, you combine a constant form with it. The act of doing that makes it happen. Travel, that is. And then coming back is just a matter of either meshing a return pattern, or dying.

"Anyway, there's a pattern that disrupts the joining. If it's in someone's mind, even if they're not actively thinking of it, they won't be able to travel. If we make this pattern into a meme, we can – in a sense – inoculate people against travelling. Even if they find out how to travel, they won't be able to."

"Is it reversible? What if we wanted to allow someone to travel?"

"I don't know. It's just a mathematical solution right now. I haven't tested it."

Veronica thought for a minute. "I can ask Vin if he wouldn't mind being our guinea pig."

"Vin?"

"The assassin. He's on our side now. Or we're on his. I'm not entirely clear."

Alan stood dumbfounded. "He's part of the group that tried to kill John. He tried to kill the girls. They tried to kidnap me! And you think we're on the same side?"

Veronica tried hard to understand the tin cans. It was impossible. She sighed.

"They know what travel means. So do we. We can't let it get out. We will use your suppression meme, if it works. And yes, we are on the same side.

"Don't you think that we – my department, and the other one across the river – we don't use murder as a tool for control? Just like these anti-travellers? Don't you understand that you could disappear if we decided you were a threat? That John could disappear? That the Queen of China and her Princess could die in an unfortunate accident, if it became necessary?

"And you should know – the Chinese government would approve it. All of it. To keep this World clean. To stop a vast and destabilising migration of minds from one Universe to another."

"Nothing can be kept secret for ever," he countered, weakly. Because he knew that the truth was being brought out into the open.

"True. To be honest, I hope your meme is not reversible. I do not want to travel between Worlds. I don't want two or more minds in one body. Because it leads to psychosis, to chaos, to madness. Even if it's for the most humanitarian of reasons." She turned away from the pointless Art and looked Alan in the face. He flinched at what he saw there. "Do you know why I meet you like this? Why I hide from my own people? Because I need to keep this from them. They'd use it. The government would certainly use it. They would send their enemies into coma, they'd steal information from more advanced Worlds, they'd give this ability to the rich, to escape from illness or catastrophe into another World. If it were up to me, I'd destroy everything to do with this. And everybody connected with it. But I can't."

"You'd kill us?"

"Yes. You, John, de Vlieger and his group." She paused while a pair of art lovers passed by, then decided she had made her point and said no more, just set off toward the exit, Alan beside her dumb with shock.

When they emerged into the bright Autumn sunshine she turned to him with a parting word.

"I won't meet you again. We have nothing more to talk about. I'm working hard to limit the damage that's been done by John's unwise decision to bring this to our attention. I do not want to hear you going public on this, I don't want to read about your discoveries, I don't want to see your smug scientific face ever again."

"What about Yifan and her mother?"

Veronica paused.

"They've been in deep coma for months now. John's in coma too. They're weak. It wouldn't surprise me if sadly they don't survive."

She turned her back on the Professor and strode away. Alan stood looking after her until she disappeared into the seethe of tourists around the Millennium Bridge, then slumped gloomfully back to Imperial College.
Escape

Shrill alarms brought people running. A door banged open. John's eyelids fluttered, he tried to lift his head but felt so weak. His mouth was very dry.

Cold hands explored his neck to gauge the strength of his pulse. The bed whirred, sitting him up. Someone switched the alarms off.

He coughed, which triggered a blinding pain in the back of his head. This was not quite as bad as the pain he still fancied he could feel in his chest, but as he thought about being shot it rapidly faded. When he tried to find the other in his mind, he was relieved to discover that he was alone in his own brain.

He opened his eyes. Blurred shadows moved in unbearable light. Blinking a few times brought clarity. A doctor, two nurses tending to him, a pair of heavy young men in suits just outside the open door. John waved an arm. One of the nurses proffered a plastic cup of water and touched it to his dry lips. He drank, and coughed again.

"How long?" he croaked. The doctor looked up from her clipboard.

"Fifteen days," she said. "How do you feel?"

"Awful. Get me up. I want to see the girls."

Ji Ye and Yifan lay as they had for six months, in their adjoining beds. The nets of Alan's monitoring equipment wrapped their heads. Breathing assistance covered their mouths, feeding tubes and blood monitors jutted from their arms. Machinery beeped softly. The doctor closed the door, leaving John beside them in a wheelchair. He took his wife's hand, and felt the mandala of her present World in his mind. The knot of tangled time was an awful blemish in the otherwise beautiful pattern. Even if they returned soon after he had been shot, it would be days before they came back to their own World.

John wept, silently.

*

They asked Sophie where she had got the gun, but Sophie didn't say anything. She sat where they had put her, on a hard chair in the Station Chief's office. Ji Ye sat against the wall on an identical chair. A technician stood by the door in lieu of a professional guard. The Chief was behind his desk in the only comfy seat.

"I can only think she brought it with her," Ji Ye hazarded. "I've not seen it before today, but it could have been in her pocket all the time."

"It's not one of ours," said the Chief, nodding in agreement. "Was it for personal protection?"

Sophie gave no answer, nor any indication that she had heard.

"Who was that man anyway? The first I knew about him was when I saw the body. Who gave him permission to come here?"

"He was a spy, if he could be believed," said Ji Ye. "Presumably the Chinese government gave him leave to come. Maybe he was here to investigate the bomb, to get information from Sophie and me." She saw no reason to go into a more honest explanation that would elevate the discussion into areas that frankly would sound like science fiction. Yifan, catatonic, was in a bed in the small sick bay being looked after by Temi and Tomass. Ji Ye wanted this interview to be over so she could go there too.

"Why would he threaten you? Why was he holding a knife to your daughter?"

"I don't know! He just did. He was demanding information, but he wouldn't tell me what. How would I know? And then Sophie came up behind me and shot him." Ji Ye stood up and went to stand beside her friend. "And I'm glad she did. She saved Yifan's life. She needs care now, not interrogation. Put her in the sick bay, and we'll look after her."

The Chief nodded again, and looked at the technician. "Do it, Zen." The man nodded, and pulled Sophie gently out of the chair. Ji Ye took the woman's other arm and they led her out of the office.

The Chief leaned back in his comfortable chair and wondered what to do.

*

Yifan stared at the blank stone wall. Back in the jug again. This time, though, whatever she tried had no effect. Little Yifan was buried deep.

At least there was no grotesque Clown now. She sat down against the wall of the circular cell and thought about what had happened.

John had come for them. He'd made the John in this World travel halfway round the globe to rescue them. But then this John had threatened to kill her if he didn't get what he wanted. What was that? The secret to travel between the Worlds?

It made sense, she supposed. With that secret he could maybe save many who were condemned to death by the iron sun. It was a worthwhile gamble for him. But, she knew, it would have condemned her own World to chaos and madness.

Who was this World's John? He had to have power; and power that could influence the Chinese, who were in control of this facility and the transport to it. He'd got here very quickly. And he'd expected to be obeyed.

She looked around the cell again. It was very small, like being at the bottom of a chimney. She saw, by some sourceless light, the prisoning walls, the clean, flagged floor.

But when she looked up, she couldn't see the ceiling.

She'd read a book, one of those John had recommended to her. She didn't tell him she'd read it, in case it gave him a big head. But in it a boy escaped by scaling a narrow shaft.

Yifan braced her back against the wall and her feet against the stone opposite. Walking up a few steps, then pushing her back off the wall with her hands, she gained a foot above the floor. But it was hard.

On the other hand...

This wasn't real. It was all inside her little sister's head. She wasn't really expending energy, she wasn't even really breathing.

She pulled her knees sharply back and fell the short distance to the flagstones. It didn't hurt, even though she fell right on her tailbone.

Yifan smiled.

She looked up the shaft. She fancied there was light at the end of it.

She took a deep and unnecessary breath, and felt herself leave the ground. Around her the courses of stone blocks appeared to be moving downward, slowly at first, then faster. She did not look down, afraid she might either be stricken with vertigo and fall, or worse, that the floor might still be only an inch away from her dangling feet.

The imagined patch of grey light wasn't growing. But she continued her imagined ascent.

"I know why you did it," said Ji Ye, quietly, to Sophie.

There was no response, not even a flicker in the engineer's eyes.

"You love me," said Ji Ye.

Was that a reaction? She fancied there had been a tiny tremor in her friend's rigid body.

"And I love you."

It was a bright and growing bead, growing in the corner of her eye, and Ji Ye only saw it because it caught the harsh clinical light. She reached out and held Sophie's hand.

"I lost my husband, my family, in Changchun. All I had left was Yifan, and my work. And... And when I met you I was ugly, scarred and scared, and your Chinese was so horribly bad, and – and it made me laugh." she, too was crying now. The trembling drop in Sophie's eye grew fat and rolled down beside her small nose, caught on her top lip, seeped over it.

Sophie's tongue flicked out and took it. She blinked.

"You gave me back humour, and hope. You accepted Yifan, sort of. I never realised why you didn't take to her completely. But now I do.

"She's no threat to you. She likes you, but she would like you better if you could find it in you to love her.

"You can love her. She's part of me. You ought to love all of me, if you love me at all."

Sophie's head twitched in a sketch of a nod. Her hand tightened in Ji Ye's, her fingers pressed her friend's.

Beside them, in her bed, Yifan lay curled and trembling.

*

"I don't know what to do," Alan admitted, forlornly. He was standing in the dark, on tiptoe, in bare feet, his arms stretched high above his head. It was a very uncomfortable position to be in. Eventually, the light bulb clicked home in its socket and he sighed and settled into a more normal posture. He reached out and flicked a switch.

In the sudden illumination Bart looked almost intelligent, staring up at the Professor intently. Of course, he knew what Alan ought to do, but he was a firm believer in letting humans find out for themselves, so long as the outcome resulted in food or treats for cats.

"These bulbs are supposed to last ten thousand hours," the Professor grumbled. Bart yawned, and Alan set off to rattle bowls, still talking to his feline companion.

"Whatever I say's probably being recorded. I'm a scientist, for heaven's sake! We're supposed to be able to think freely. Find out the truths behind the way the world works. But oh no, we have to shut ourselves up..." Bart mewed in agreement, and headed for the noisiest bowl. Alan pulled a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from the rack and held it up to the new light. It was his second this evening.

"Bloody politics. Can't move for secret agents."

His mobile phone rang. Putting the bottle down with exaggerated care, he fished it from his trouser pocket at the third attempt and looked at the caller display. It was a number he and his phone didn't know.

He answered.

"I'm not in," he stated, firmly, and went to disconnect the call.

"Alan – stop being assertive and listen to me," came the voice. Alan jammed the phone against his ear.

"It's probably bugged," he complained.

"I would expect nothing else," John replied. "If you aren't completely sizzled, would you come outside and pay this cab driver seventy pounds? You'll find some cash in the top left-hand dresser drawer in the kitchen. He won't let me out of the car till he's paid."

They sat together in the Lounge Of Death, drinking wine and admiring the excellent job of plastering that MI6 had paid for. In the corner a replacement for John's destroyed B&O CD player was syphoning Bach gently into the air around them. Alan had already been warned in a whisper between the cab and the front door to go along with whatever John said.

"It's all a red herring," John explained, sipping. Then he looked down, picked up the bottle, read the label and looked accusingly at his friend. "This is the good stuff! I'm not running a hostel for wine critics here, you know?"

Alan would have had the grace to look abashed, but he was a bottle ahead.

"Anyway," continued John, "The coma is just the same sort of thing stage magicians have been doing for years. It's only that non-magicians don't know about it, and haven't got the trick of waking people up properly."

Alan nodded, and spilt a drop of wine, earning a dagger-like glance from John.

"So, the Department's getting Derren Brown in – at my expense, mind you – you know, they think it's all my fault? Cheek! And he'll sort out the girls. That Dutchman has nothing to answer for. Veronica's spitting nails and is frantically trying to cover this operation in the budget, and she's ballistic about getting the Chinese involved. Which reminds me" – he leaned forward and picked his phone off the coffee table – "I've got to go out again. I'll be a while. It's a shame you're so marinated – I could do with you driving me. This is costing a fortune in taxis.

"And no more of my wine while I'm gone!" He left.

"Damn." said Alan, and hiccoughed.

*

Captain de Vlieger made regular trips between the Unicorn and Midpoint Station. It was necessary, not just to coordinate the logistics, but to get gossip and news from Earth. This trip the station administrators were agog with news, although it did sound much more like gossip.

"It was a lovers' tiff," claimed Li Cheung, handing the Captain an energy bar. "She thought he was hitting on her – I mean Miss Ji, of course – and then she shot him – I mean the French one."

De Vlieger nodded, unzipped the bar. It was the third theory he'd heard so far, all of them from Li Cheung. He knew the mystery man was called John, and he'd seen the way Sophie looked at Ji Ye when they'd been up here, so he could pretty much write the true story himself.

He felt bad about Yifan. Ji Ye might be able to get back by herself, but she wasn't capable of taking her daughter with her. And she wouldn't, while the little girl was trapped in her own small world of pain.

He bit into the bar, and grimaced. He would kill for a steak.

Thousands of miles below, Yifan continued to rise. Was it just imagination, or was the point of light at the end of the tunnel now a circle of light at the end of the tunnel? She still didn't look down. And yes, she was certain that it was a circle. Maybe.

She rose.

*

John walked a mile, weary from the weakness of his enforced bed-rest, until he found a telephone kiosk that still had a working phone in it. He sighed, pulled a handful of coins from his jacket pocket, and dialled a number in China. It took eight pounds in change, but eventually he got through to the President's private secretary, whose English was better than his.

"It's delicate," he explained, after proving who he was for the third time. "Ji Ye and Shen Yifan are under the protection of MI6. You need to insist you send your own medical team to oversee their care."

"You think they are in danger?"

"I know they are."

"You know where they're being kept?"

"Facility Green Bolt."

"In Kent. We know it. We'll have a team there in an hour, and we'll clear it with Vauxhall Cross while they are on their way. Will they be able to make the Exo concert?"

John was nonplussed for a second, until he remembered the President's invitation at the Royal Banquet, when Yifan had come back from her adventures in Teal's body. "They'll be very weak for a while after they wake up. I don't know."

"They will be welcome, and we can provide travel and support. Now — what did you do to Major Yuan?"

"I stopped her making a fool of herself, and of China. What did YOU do to her?"

"We've promoted her. She's now our representative in Kamchatka."

"Excellent. That'll cool her down a bit."

"We thought so too. Thank you for your information, Major. President Xi looks forward to seeing you all again in Beijing next month. Good bye!"

John, uncomfortable about being addressed by his reserve rank, set off to find a cab to take him to Facility Green Bolt. In Beijing urgent calls were being made, and files updated; safety was being arranged for his precious girls.

*

Ji Ye held Sophie in her arms and rocked her gently. Her shirt was wet with tears. Sophie constantly mumbled apologies, and Ji Ye kept whispering, "It's all right, it's all right, shh..."

Yifan trembled beside her. Nothing had changed. Her mother ached to hold her, but she couldn't leave her friend to suffer.

Sophie's grip tightened momentarily, and the nanotechnologist fell into a sudden and exhausted sleep.

*

What was at the end of this interminable journey? The circle of light was definite, it was growing. What would it reveal? How would she...

The walls of the shaft fell away, and she found herself rising through unreal air above a plain of grey rock. She tried to drift to the side and set down, to stop, to gain breath she didn't breathe, but she kept on rising, breathlessly fast, and faster, the stone plain receding as she soared impossibly high, and there came a point when she slowed, and stopped, and found out why.

The whole edifice, the billions of squared boulders, were a gigantic and petrified little girl made the size of a city. Yifan, ejected from a tiny pore in the granite, was looking down on a blank stone face.

Her sister had become the castle. Yifan, prepared, she had thought, for anything, hovered impotently over little Yifan. She knew the girl had been pushed into this transformation by the threat of imminent death, and by the violence of the shooting. The bullet must have almost parted her hair. How else could she have dealt with this? Yifan's mouth sagged in sorrow and disappointment and a tear ran down her face, the vanguard of a thousand more that rained from her onto the lithic mirror below.

Long it fell, until her first tear struck. Then the others, a rain of grief, unnatural in reality but here an inevitability. Her eyes gushed. And even then, she saw, from each impact pinkness grew, flesh replacing stone, seeping over rock, transforming it.

The great stone eye became clear, and a tear the size of a building grew and rolled down the rigid grey cheek, bringing warmth in its wake.

\-- Leave me with Sophie. We'll look after Yifan.

\-- I know you will. But I can't. Not while she's like this.

Ji Ye indicated her daughter with a sweep of her arm, but it was the other that glimpsed a movement in Yifan's limbs.

\-- She's waking up!

They took her up in their arms, cradled her as she woke, her eyes streaming with tears. And she smiled, a sad, small smile, and hugged her mothers.

\-- Well, now there's only Sophie to go.

Bernard was having a hard time understanding Tomass. The boy's English was laced with the local language whenever he couldn't find the proper word, but with perseverance the British pilot managed to get to the sense of the thing.

"Tomass, slow down... Look, Yifan will recover – get better. She'll wake up. Just stay calm. Quiet. I mean..." Tomass suddenly wrapped his arms around the startled man and nearly strangled him as he wept onto his shirt. "Oh, no, you're getting me wet... please..."

The door opened with a bang and a small bullet of child barrelled in and wrapped herself around both Bernard and the boy. The breath left Bernard's body with an oof.

"Tomass!"

The ensuing noise was incoherent. Bernard extracted himself from the grappling children and went off to find somewhere quieter, and drier.

In the sick bay, Ji Ye and Sophie embraced. Sophie's tears were drying on Ji Ye's shoulder while the latter whispered urgently, telling her about the Worlds, about John, about getting back. Sophie just nodded, constantly, and there was no way for Ji Ye to know whether her words had been understood.

In the middle of this, Zen the technician opened the door and told Ji Ye she was wanted. The Captain of the Unicorn was on the line from Midpoint.

"You're stronger than I expected, both of you," de Vlieger commented.

"We've been through a lot. All of us," replied Ji Ye, and then had to wait to see the Dutch Captain smile.

"I need you in pods," he ordered. "I've talked with the Station Chief. You're coming up to join me. Sophie too, if she wants. And we have a pod for your girl's rescuer, Tomass – we'll send someone down to talk to his parents; I think they'll be happy for him to escape to the stars. We'll put it on the manifest as John's, which solves a lot of problems, according to your Station director down there."

Ji Ye laughed. It wasn't funny; but it was a relief.

"We'll go back, and leave you with the right number of brains," she said. Eventually de Vlieger nodded, and the link dissolved.

But it was easier to say than to do.

"It's not working," moaned Yifan. She was holding her mother's hand. Her eyes were tight closed. "I can see the pictures like he said, but I don't know what to do with them."

Ji Ye could see them too. An eye-bending egg made of ribbons of light, hanging in the centre of her vision. At its heart was a tangle that stretched into dimensions she could not comprehend.

She brought the thing she imagined was the constant into view, and tried to merge the two images together. Loops of light deformed and curled, but nothing otherwise happened.

"I can't do it either. Yifan, we have no time."

Yifan's eyes opened. She looked at her mother.

"We'll have to stay. We can't keep trying this and make them miss the trip."

Ji Ye nodded. There were worse places to be. "Perhaps it means we're dead back there," she said tentatively. Yifan dipped her head.

She climbed stiffly to her feet and pulled her daughter up off the hard floor. Beside them the smooth grey pods waited. Tomass and Sophie were already in theirs, deep in a cold sleep that would last a thousand years. Zen and his assistant offered paper tissues so the girls could wipe their faces and helped them into the hi-tech coffins. Ji Ye did not want to lose sight of her daughter, but she was gently and firmly pressed down. Her arms were adjusted into loose padded cuffs, and almost immediately she felt the sting of needles.

Within seconds, a numbness, not unpleasant, spread through her brain.

Within a minute the lid went down. But for her the darkness had already descended.

*

John swept into the hospital grounds in a black cab. He threw money at the driver and hurtled into the main building, into an argument.

"They're here at my request," he shouted. The Chinese team and the hospital security goons stopped shouting for long enough that he could establish some sort of dominance.

"Ji Ye and Shen Yifan are citizens of the People's Republic of China," he announced. "As such, these people are here to make sure that their nationals are being treated well and appropriately. They've been cleared by C – check now, if you don't believe me. You should have already got the message." One of the security men went off to call the Duty Officer. Everyone else waited around sullenly. One of the Chinese appeared to have a black eye.

A sudden fear struck John.

"Wait here," he ordered, and ran for the wards.

*

Alan woke up feeling that his face had been sandpapered. Perhaps it had been a dream. There was a cat sitting next to him, licking its paw. It was Bart.

Alan groaned, and rolled off the sofa and onto the floor.

*

The needles bit into Yifan's arm, and the world contracted into a tiny circle in front of her eyes, and then it winked out.

*

Alarms blared, medical staff ran. In the room with the two Chinese girls red lights flashed. The traces for brain activity stuttered then fell flat. Those for blood pressure dived; their heartbeats raced for a few seconds and then crashed, flatlined. Alan's equipment flashed a 'not connected' signal.

The doors flew open and the crash team raced in, followed by John, who was threatened with violence if he didn't get out. He retreated to a corner instead, which appeared to satisfy the medics.

*

In the other World, machinery loaded four pods into a lift module, completing its complement of frozen people. The door closed, motors groaned to start it moving, technicians left and closed heavy doors. The cable caps opened and the dark sky was revealed. Powerful lasers started up beneath the module, giving power, and the long journey to Midpoint and the Unicorn began.

*

Ji Ye's heart started. It gave a single massive thump, then another, weaker one. The brain monitor spiked and a tangled mess of jagged lines settled into something approaching normal. John's mouth dropped open.

Beside her Yifan's body jerked and the monitors started to wail again. A doctor froze just as he was about to punch a hole into the girl's chest with a syringe of adrenaline. Within a minute both girls' vital signs were erratic, but strong.

They shuddered with breath, and John collapsed to his knees.
Destination

Ji Ye sat on the sofa, wrapped in warm blankets with Yifan, and being waited on hand and foot by her long-suffering husband. She sipped at a cup of English Breakfast tea while her daughter continued her andante narration of events.

"Then we had to go up this thing. A lift. It was so hot! And Tomass was SO irritating! And there were spiders. And then I got my finger chopped off..."

"On the lift?"

"No! Later. Anyway, we had these bananas for lunch but it was instead of meat – so YUCK! – and then we got wet and there were all these bugs..."

It had been going on for a while, and John knew there would be lots more to come, but he was glad that it was not coming from his wife, who had been mostly silent since they'd got home from the hospital. He glanced in her direction. She was frowning.

The moment he was dreading came – a lull in Yifan's monologue. Ji Ye opened her mouth, paused just in case Yifan was only drawing a breath, and then spoke.

"How did we end up in that hospital? With all the guards and security? Why did they all behave as if you were in charge?"

Such simple questions, thought John, but with such complicated answers. He held up a hand to Yifan, who was about to launch again into the world of irritating foreign children and spiders, and said, "I had other jobs before I got into computers. I knew people in some rather shady areas."

"You were a crook?" squeaked Yifan. "I knew you were bent!" She shrieked with laughter.

"No, I was a spy."

When the second bout of laughter died down – and it took a long time – John told his story. He kept his eyes on Ji Ye as he told it, and just as he had expected he saw her brows gather. At the end he sat back in 'his' chair, the chair he'd been sitting in when he'd been shot at. Both girls turned to look at the fresh plasterwork on the wall by the door.

"You mean that – It's true?"

"Yes, it's true."

"And you never told me."

"It was in the past... I signed the Act; I gave my oath not to talk about it."

"You never told me." Ji Ye stood up, shaky on her feet. Yifan stood with her. "You lied to me. You told me you worked in shops!"

"I couldn't tell you! Love, please..."

Ji Ye swept from the room slowly, wailing and followed by Yifan and Bart, who cast a baleful look back at the man who had saved their lives.

*

Ji Ye woke slowly, stiff and uncomfortable. Her face was wet, her mouth dry, her tongue sticky. She felt sick, and she was extremely hungry. There was a hiss and her ears popped; light, dim but still too bright, grew above her as the lid of the coffin slid back.

Captain de Vlieger looked down at her.

"Come, when you're ready," he said. "There's something I'd like you to hear."

She rested in the narrow space for five minutes or so, then suddenly felt confined by it and gripped the sides to pull herself up. Her arms were weak.

The Captain was sitting in a wheelchair, but stood up when she emerged. He, like all the other sleepers, was dressed in a white paper jumpsuit. Ji Ye looked for Yifan.

"She's not awake. I just wanted you to hear this. Sit; I'll wheel you." She sat gratefully, and de Vlieger got her comfortable. She gazed at the banks of sleeper pods as he activated a control and the platform they were on moved smoothly up. They were stacked five abreast, and stretched out above her as far as she could see.

"How many are there?"

"Around a quarter of a million in this stack. There are three columns like this around the axis of my ship."

Ji Ye could not comprehend the numbers. When she had first revealed herself to the Captain they had been on their way to see his ship. Now they were in it, and it boggled her mind. The lift was fast, but it was fifteen minutes later that they arrived in the command centre.

"I thought there would be no gravity."

"We're decelerating. It's about half of Earth's gravity, but comfortable enough.

"I was awakened two days ago. We've received a signal from the star ahead. It repeats. I am going to send a response, but I thought before I did I should get a second opinion from someone I trust."

She looked at dark screens, keyboards. Nothing showed anything interesting. The Captain clattered some keys and a big screen lit up. It showed a field of stars, with a very bright star in the middle. Ji Ye knew it had been her home.

"It exploded around five hundred years ago. The messages the ship recorded tell us that seventy-four ships were launched before it happened. The last ones would have been caught up and destroyed."

He pressed a few keys and the view changed.

"This is our destination. We've been decelerating for about three hundred fifty years. We'll arrive there in about another two hundred years. We can already see that there are planets, and at least two that could support us." All there was on the screen was a fuzzy blob. It wasn't very impressive.

"What do you mean, a signal?" Her face was itching. She didn't have her mask on. She needed some cream on the radiation scars. She missed her other self.

The Captain pressed more keys. A roar filled the air, and he made frantic adjustments to bring the volume down.

"This. It comes from the star ahead. Listen."

It was definitely language, but she didn't understand anything. The words were nonsense to her ears. A chill took her suddenly, from a source at the base of her neck. It crept over her scalp, raising her hair. "What is it?"

"Listen. That's Russian. What comes next..."

There was a pause. And then, in clear Mandarin, the first message – from what?

"Hello! We see you approach. We see what has happened to your world. We are sorry, it is so sad. Make your way here. There is space for you. Please reply and we will send helpers.

"You are not alone."

She looked into the gentle smiling face of the Dutchman. She nodded.

He sent his reply, and they both went back to their long sleep.

*

The long black Rolls Royce swept into the short drive and smoothed to a halt in front of a comfortable suburban house. Two police escorts drew up outside in the road, one blocking the drive, the other hanging back on the other side near the Grammar School. The chauffeur got out and walked around the back of the car — you never go around the front of such a beautiful vehicle — and opened the heavy, well-balanced door. An elegant, elderly and obviously very powerful woman got out, showing off slim legs as she accepted the driver's hand.

Curtains twitched in at least two of the neighbouring windows.

The driver rang the doorbell. He waited. Then he looked at Veronica. She nodded, and he rang again. Eventually a shadow appeared behind the frosted panes in the door and it opened to reveal a yawning young woman, scratching her head, her black hair sticking out in all directions except the right ones. She ungummed her eyes, looked at her visitor, and then clutched the front of her old and comfortable pink dressing-gown and gave a convincing imitation of the death cry of the banded marmoset.

Some talk took place, according to a neighbour – who reported this later to her friends in the library, amid much shusshing from customers and staff – and then, bold as brass, this woman from out of the car (the neighbour said) just walked in as if she owned the place, and that man just got back in the car and sat there waiting.

How long? The others asked.

I can't say, really. I had so much to do. You know, in case it was some door-to-door thing. I did some tidying. But they were still there when I came here. I bet they're in trouble.

Well; they're foreign, aren't they.

Everyone in the library looked at Mrs. Pararajasingham, who had spoken without thinking things through.

Veronica assured Ji Ye that she wouldn't be put out if her hostess got changed into something more suitable for the hours of daylight, and offered to put the kettle on in the meantime. Within minutes Ji Ye was down again, hair brushed and a dab of toothpaste on her cheek, and more or less properly dressed. Veronica passed her a mug of tea, and they sat down at the kitchen table.

"So," Ji Ye remarked, sipping at her tea. "You're John's boss."

"I was," Veronica admitted, then winced as she burned her lip on the tea. "I'm not now. He left many years ago. He contacted us because you were in trouble.

"You know, he really loves you. Both of you. And when someone tried to kill you and Yifan" – Ji Ye started, spilling tea, and stared at the older woman – "he came to us, to protect you. And we did. You were seconds from death when we got to the hospital.

"And then he put his life on the line to find out who wanted you dead. He found Captain de Vlieger..." Veronica noticed Ji Ye's eyes flicker. She knew who the Captain was. "Anyway; there are two groups at least who know how to do what Yifan does. De Vlieger's is no threat. The other — I think we've neutralised them for the time being. Did you know you were being watched?"

The Queen of China looked at the head spy with wide eyes. "Watched? When?"

"Right up until fifteen minutes ago. My people have been stood down. We know that the bad group left off their own watch a few days ago. And the Chinese pulled back a few days after you came home from our hospital. You'll always be under surveillance, but at a distance. You're an important person." Veronica blew on her tea. "And so is John. He left us because of his convictions, and he came back to us because of his love for you, and for Yifan."

"He never told us. He lied to me."

"I would have expected nothing less. He was ordered to lie. How could we run a secret service if our people went around blabbing to everyone? Even to their wives or husbands?"

Ji Ye slammed her mug down. "Because I AM his wife! How could you think I would go around telling people about him? 'Oh, my husband was a spy', you think I can't be trusted? And Yifan? We've had a secret over the last three years and we could never tell anyone, we kept quiet, and now everyone knows because of you –"

"Sit down!"

"This is MY house. I will stand if I want!" Ji Ye sat down, her face flushed, her chest heaving. She lifted the mug and gulped tea. "Do you want to tell me how to behave? How to deal with my husband? Are you going to tell me what to do with my daughter?"

The back door opened then, and Yifan came in, back from school. She stopped dead when she saw Veronica.

"Hello, Yifan," said the spy. Ji Ye started to cry. Yifan, her eyes glazing on a point halfway between the two women, said, "I'm going up to my room," and dropped her schoolbag on the floor.

"Sit!"

Yifan gaped at Veronica. Then she saw the look in her eyes. She pulled out a chair and thumped down into it.

*

The dreams she dreamed took her to worlds beyond her imagination. She dreamed lifetimes, she was born and she lived and she died a thousand, ten thousand times. The gift the older Yifan had given opened a burning beach of Universes to her, each grain of golden sand a whole World, sometimes of pain, sometimes full of love and fulfilment.

She dreamed she was an older Yifan, a girl who lived and was loved in a country far from China. She, and her mother, and the man who loved them both, and a black cat with white paws...

She dreamed she was a boy, a fighting boy, following his father and his brother into battle and glory, aching for the mother who had died...

She dreamed lives lived in the vastness of space, and beneath foreign seas; nights lit by volcanoes and dragons, days filled with picnics and laughter and wine. All of these lives were real.

Little Yifan grew, and became wise.

When the chemical soup flushed from her veins, and bright light shone into eyes that had been sightless a thousand and more years, she was ready.

"Darling," whispered Ji Ye, stroking her daughter's wet hair. Behind her hovered the big face of Captain de Vlieger, with Sophie beside him. Yifan tried to raise an arm, but couldn't. Her mother moved aside to let the man scoop her up from the coffin and place her gently into a wheelchair next to another which held a damp Tomass, who beamed weakly at her. As the coffin lid whirred down the lift took them up to the habitation module, Ji Ye talking all the time, reassuring Yifan and her friend, the Captain and the nanoscientist smiling beside them.

*

"John and I joined the Service at around the same time. We suffered through training together, went our separate ways on early missions. Later we operated as a couple, in operations in Western Europe, mainly, with some excursions into the Communist Bloc. Our cover was a cosmetics business struggling to find markets." Veronica felt that she had her audience in the palm of her hand. She made the mistake of pausing for breath.

"What did he do before then?"

"Was he in love with you?"

Veronica hesitated, then answered Ji Ye's question first. "He was in the military. That's all I can say. A normal enough background, first in Military Intelligence and then on to the SIS.

"I came in through academia. I was recruited from Cambridge – I was a Professor of Literature. I have no idea why they thought that was a relevant background for spying.

"And no, we didn't fall in love. We respected one another, certainly, and we got along together very well. Romance would have complicated things – you can't do this job if you're worried about your partner getting hurt." She paused again and took a sip of wine, the tea having long since been consumed. It was not a bad wine.

She was playing for time, thinking about how much she should reveal. These people – civilians, she thought them, and then she winced inside. They were not civilians, they were players. Politically important people – the Queen of China, and her Princess.

Veronica put the glass down and looked at them, at Ji Ye, who was still vibrating with anger, and at Yifan, who was apprehensive.

"You were debriefed by Ms Dwarakanath. Do you think she was particularly good at the job?"

Ji Ye's mouth opened, but Yifan beat her to it.

"She was okay," the girl said, "but I don't think she's done it much."

Veronica nodded. "She did it because I need to keep you a secret, even from my own organisation. She's one of the few I have who I can trust.

"We need to keep travel secret. You know why – if everyone could do it, there would be chaos. I'm really unhappy that John had to come to us, but I trust him. He behaved very badly, trying to save your lives and trying to protect de Vlieger and his group. But he did the right thing."

"That makes a change," Yifan quipped; but she didn't mean it. She slurped at her Coke.

"You were going to tell us why he left." Ji Ye said. She looked hard, stressed, Veronica thought. And she deserved the truth.

"We were on the trail of a terrorist gang in Munich. They had a bomb, planted in a school. We didn't know which school. We were working with the German BfV – the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz – because two of the group were British nationals.

"John identified one of them and we tailed him. We cornered him on the top floor of a department store. He grabbed a little girl and ran up to the roof. Shop security held her mother to keep her out of the way, and we followed the terrorist."

Veronica was surprised to find tears in her eyes. The more she tried to blink them away, the harder they fell. They splashed into her wine. Her blood-red wine.

"I shot him. His mobile phone – in those days it was quite a big device – it fell, it bounced off the roof...

"I shot him."

She couldn't see the two Chinese women any more. She was talking to herself.

"It had to be a killing shot. I shot him through the heart.

"I shot him through her heart."

She felt a hand on hers. It helped to stop the trembling. She took a deep and wavering breath.

"John ran to the edge of the roof. The phone was the trigger to the bomb. If it had been smashed, there'd've been no way to stop it going off. He saw it on a ledge, ten feet below.

"He went over the edge, he dropped to the ledge. He almost fell – I saw him, I got there just after him... his arms windmilling... he got his fingers into the brickwork..."

Ji Ye punched Yifan on the shoulder with her free hand, and when the girl turned to her with a sharp response on her tongue her mother mouthed, 'coffee!' to her, and Yifan got up and went to the machine.

"He picked up the phone. In those days most phones weren't password protected. He found the timer and stopped it. Then, of course, he couldn't get back up, and he couldn't go down. He was stuck there until we could get a rope down to him.

"So then he was useless to us. Terrified of heights. It was a gusty day; he almost got blown off the ledge, several times, before we rescued him. And he had the image of his partner shooting a child, constantly running though his head.

"He resigned. And we thought that was for the best."

"It should have been you."

"Maybe. The fact is, killing one innocent to save a whole lot more innocents was a feather in my cap. It helped me up to where I am now."

"Was it worth it?"

Veronica smiled crookedly. "Yes. Because if I hadn't been here when John called, you would both be dead."

*

John, back at his ordinary job, was on a late lunch with a colleague. They were braving the perpetual winds that circled the buildings of Canary Wharf, having drinks and a bowl of chips together in the weak autumn sunshine. Alek chomped on a chip, took a pull at his tomato juice, and delicately tried to pump John for information.

"I bet you're glad to have your girls back," he tried. John nodded gloomily.

Alek felt this was an improvement. Since returning to work, John had been surly and monosyllabic. A nod was a breakthrough. He pressed on.

"Monika in HR said they'd had someone come in to see her when you took your compassionate leave. They said they'd cover your salary."

"Nice of them." John sipped his Guinness.

"Who were they?"

John took a larger dose of stout, then set the glass down gently. "They were philanthropists. They were worried about the Queen of China and her Princess. They felt I should be free to be with them, to support them in hospital. Very altruistic, I think. Maybe they should have arranged for someone to cover my work while I was away."

"Oh, they did."

John snorted his drink.

Alex continued, unperturbed. "We got someone who really knew quite a lot about Cognos and Axway and such. She was brilliant. And a bit of a babe."

"Why didn't you keep her?" snarled John, wiping Guinness from his chin.

"They wouldn't let us. Anyway, you're good too... Excuse me..." Alek looked at his phone. "They want us back. Apparently you need to go home."

"Why not just call me?" said John, draining the glass and getting up.

"Because," explained Alek, "you never answer your phone."

*

"Who are they?"

"They're aliens, Yifan. We don't know what they look like." De Vlieger shifted in his seat, reached for a squeeze bottle of beer.

"They sound nice. Helpful. I don't think there would be many humans who would give the same welcome, if aliens visited the Earth."

"The Earth doesn't exist any more," said Sophie. They were only a few weeks away from planetfall now, and decelerating hard. The ship had turned hundreds of years before and its massive engines had been pouring energy into braking, first by using the interstellar hydrogen collected from its magnetic ramscoops, then by tossing hydrogen bombs out of its stern. A few years earlier it had completed a braking manoeuvre around a convenient gas giant, aiming to slow itself into an orbit around one of the four inhabited planets closer to the pair of suns that circled one another at the centre of the system.

While they had slept their computers had been updated, without their knowledge or permission, by the aliens. Their engine efficiency had been enhanced, their ramscoop fields improved, and their course had been changed. De Vlieger at first had stomped around the control centre swearing in Dutch, but after a while he sullenly conceded that they knew what they were doing. The message log, forgotten in the heat of his annoyance, was opened and the messages played. Now they were all in English — how had the aliens known that the only humans awake on the Unicorn shared English as a common language?

Yifan, in her first hours awake, knew, but would not say. She had lived with aliens in several lifetimes, and with humans so technologically advanced that they would be considered to be gods in the world that had burned. Her mother, watching her, knew that something had happened, but didn't suspect just how profoundly her daughter had changed. She was about to find out.

A pair of lights started glowing on the panel behind de Vlieger, and a melodic whistling filled the air. Musical, emotional, it filled their hearts with a sudden joy. Ji Ye watched Yifan's eyes light up.

"What is it?"

"Reply," said Yifan, and when the music stopped the Captain pressed a switch.

"Go on," he said, and Yifan started whistling.

*

When John arrived home, brought by Ralph in one of MI6's cars, he found his erstwhile boss teaching Yifan how to make cheese scones. Ji Ye was upstairs, packing suitcases.

"What's going on?" he asked, suspiciously. Veronica left her pupil rubbing butter into flour and arched an eyebrow.

"You don't remember?"

"Remember what?" he replied, not remembering.

"We're going to see Exo in China," said Yifan. "You forgot."

"So did you. Anyway, we can't go. You and your mum have to go to school and I have to go to work."

"No, it's all been sorted," said the spy chief, passing a measuring jug to the girl. "Milk. One hundred millilitres, please." Yifan, uncharacteristically, didn't argue, and went to the fridge. "You were invited by President Xi. You're all recovered now, so you can go."

"But that was at the end of August," John protested. "It's nearly October now!"

"It's a private concert," Yifan beamed. "At the Forbidden City. Party members and their kids, and we're the guests of honour!"

"Oh, great," moaned John. He looked around and found a wooden spoon, which he passed to Veronica.

"Start stirring," he ordered. "You're good at that."

*

We are the aliens, thought Ji Ye, just before the airlock door opened. She, Yifan, Tomass, Sophie and de Vlieger stood beside a wheeled pallet of supplies and necessities, watching the door roll sideways. It revealed a collection of sticks and leaves with a bulbous tripod base, hung with coloured ribbons, next to what appeared to be an octopus balanced on top of a wobbly pudding with long legs swathed in black and hung with bulging pockets and tool-belts.

Yifan whistled at them, and the pudding-pus whistled back.

"She's saying hello," said Yifan helpfully.

"And the tree?"

"It's making a nice smell," said the girl, cautiously. She didn't speak smell.

"Welcome," said the tree, in English. Then again in Mandarin, French, Li Niha – which brightened Tomass up no end – and finally in Dutch. De Vlieger's eyebrows went up.

"How do you know I am a Dutch speaker?"

"You mutter in Dutch," came the reply. "We've listened to you. Apology, if there are private words. We use machines to talk and listen..." the tree bent a limb to point to what looked like a watch, strapped around a tentacle of the other creature. "We have technical crew arriving on strand four. They will build a discharge plan for your population. We could unload within four years."

"Come," said the other, through the translator. "It will take five of your days to descend the tower. We will eat, talk, sleep. Look for goodness together."

Yifan knew what she meant, but the others were confused. She led the way into the tower's lift module, and the door slid shut.

The End
