Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

Order, that’s fine. But don’t interfere with my – our – work.’
    ‘Are you all right, Fro Villiers …’ Jen Heer began.
    ‘… Her Kerrim?’ Heer Fol finished.
    ‘Just catching up,’ Charlotte Villiers said. The party moved on through the labyrinth of the Praesidium palace.
    Jen Heer Fol stopped abruptly at a pair of vast, ornate doors.
    ‘I thought …’ Jen Heer began, swinging open one half of the doors.
    ‘… the Ambersaal,’ Heer Fol concluded, opening the other door.
    The room beyond took away even Charlotte Villiers’sbreath. Every centimetre of wall was covered in amber. Decorative panels showed the miracles of angels in inlaid amber, from palest yellow to darkest brown. January light poured through window panels of translucent amber and turned it to gold. Everything was golden. It was like drowning in honey.
    ‘Exquisite!’ Charlotte Villiers said. As the other Plenipotentiaries gazed up in amazement at the delicate tracery of the roof vaults, all carved from paper-thin sheets of amber, her alter slipped in alongside Charlotte Villiers. ‘He’s not with us,’ Charlotte Villiers whispered. ‘But he’s not against us.’

7
    ‘Flat?’ Captain Anastasia said.
    ‘We’re on the surface of a disc,’ Everett said. ‘It could be upper or lower – I’d need to see the stars. To be honest it doesn’t really matter.’
    Mchynlyth left off fastening the lifting cables to the impeller pod in its lowered position on the forest floor. He looked in stern disbelief at Everett and took a rotor disc from his pocket. He put his finger through the hole at the centre.
    ‘You’re telling me that my wee finger is the sun?’
    ‘Well, the hole would be a lot bigger, and the sun would be a lot smaller, but yes, that’s what I’m saying,’ Everett said. ‘We’re on an Alderson disk.’
    ‘Explain please, Mr Singh,’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘Slowly and clearly, if you please.’
    Everett read the faces around the impeller pod. Sen triedto look interested to please Everett. Mchynlyth was surly and disbelieving; everything Everett said was a challenge to him. Sharkey was still out hunting. But Captain Anastasia’s face asked the most from him: will this help or hurt my ship and my family?
    ‘An Alderson disk is a mega-structure,’ Everett said. ‘It’s a solid disc of material that surrounds the sun, I’d guess from inside the orbit of Venus to just beyond the orbit of Mars. Or it would if those planets existed in this universe. Say ninety million miles from inside to outside, and an outer circumference of half a billion miles. That’s a lot of surface area.’
    ‘And I’ll just bet you’ve worked it all out,’ Mchynlyth said.
    Snark if you like, but you’re paying attention to me now
, Everett thought.
    ‘I’ve done some mental arithmetic,’ Everett Singh. ‘It’s about a billion Earths. Both sides are habitable, you see. An Alderson disk could support a population of one thousand trillion people. With a thickness of two thousand miles, it would have about two-thirds Earth-normal gravity – you might have noticed that you don’t feel quite as firmly connected to the ground as usual.’
    ‘But the sun’s at the centre, right?’ Captain Anastasia said. ‘So how would you get night and day? The world turns – our world, I mean – to and away from the sun. But if the sun’s always at the centre …’
    ‘You move the sun,’ Everett said. This was the insight thathad come to him in the pool. This world must be this way, because it was the only way to make sense of what he had observed. The words – the ideas – sounded insane, but the numbers said there could be no other way. They had crash-landed on a massive artificial disc, like a giant DVD, that surrounded its sun. And the sun was moving. ‘It’s actually easier to move the star than it is to move the disc. In fact, the sun’s how I worked it out. I saw that the shadows were getting longer but the sun wasn’t