Planesrunner (Everness Book One) Read Online Free Page B

screen. It drew three dimensions: left to right, down to up, front to back. A small palette of tools hovered at the edge of the window. Everett picked the magnifying glass and zoomed in on the horizontal axis. At each level of magnification, the images were the same: veils of light, like wings, or angels, or the glowing tendrils of vast space gods. In and in: the same. It looked no different. Big patterns were made of smaller patterns were made of tiny patterns. It was veils of light all the way down.
    He'd seen this before. It was when he was a kid. He'd been on the home computer when he'd opened a programme because he'd liked the look of a word: Mathyka . It sounded like a book of spells or a gateway to a magic world. It had opened up a gateway, not into a mystical realm but into forever. Everett now knew that the black beetle-like object at the centre of the screen surrounded by halos and streamers of brilliant colours like lightning bolts was called a Mandelbrot set. He could programme one—it was easy. He'd seen that the bolts of colour that cracked off from the points of the black beetle-thing contained little black specks in them. When he zoomed in on one of those specks, it was another little black beetle, complete with coloured halos and lightnings, complete with specks, which when he zoomed in, were black beetle shapes, with haloes and lightning bolts and specks that became beetles with…In and in and in and in. He had a scream-dream that night. He was falling through the dark eye at the centre of the Mandelbrot set, falling through a lightning storm of colours and black eyes that opened into whole new Mandelbrot sets, on and on and on.
    “How far does it go?” he'd asked his dad.
    “All the way. It never ends.”
    This wasn't a Mandelbrot set, though he could see now that it was built from that same Mathyka software that Tejendra used to model his theories of how the universe worked. This was…
    “Infundibular,” Everett whispered, in the screen-light, under his duvet, with a mid-December storm gusting and howling around the eaves. He remembered where he'd heard that word before.
    Tejendra had been a late convert to Dr. Who. He became a fan after he had a place of his own, where he could watch without Laura shaking her head at the geekiness of it all. It was all right for kids, but for grown men…After a Saturday game, or a wander up the Lea Valley, Everett and his dad would sit down and watch the show while their latest culinary creation evolved on the hob. “Infundibular,” Tejendra had said. “That thing, that police box. Bigger on the inside than the outside. It's easy in maths, having things that are much bigger on the inside than the outside. Now, if they were really clever, they'd make it properly infundibular, which is, the farther you go in, the bigger it gets. There'd be a smaller box inside that box, but that box would be bigger on the inside than the one containing it, and inside that one, a smaller box that was even bigger inside and so on, all the way down, so that by the time you got to the centre, it would be smaller than an electron but inside it would be bigger than the entire visible universe.”
    Infundibulum. The farther in you go, the bigger it gets. There was no doubt in Everett's mind about who had left the anonymous folder in his drop box. Neither was there any doubt that this was what Paul McCabe had been asking about with his parting question. He had tried to make it sound so offhand, but it was the only reason he had come to the house. Sudden fear knotted at the base of Everett's stomach. Paul McCabe knew about this Infundibulum, and it was important to him. Did he know what it was? To Everett it was eerie mathematical patterns, sent by his father to him and him alone. To Paul McCabe it was important enough to drive an hour and a half around the M25 to slide it in as a casual aside. Did he not have access to it? Had Tejendra not wanted him to have it? Had Tejendra not trusted