The Fractal Prince (13 page)

‘Thank you, Rumzan,’ Tawaddud says. ‘Your loyalty to the cause of Sirr will not be forgotten.’

‘I am at your service,’ the jinn says. ‘And for myself, I have not forgotten a certain pleasant afternoon and the new perspectives of the world you showed me.’

‘It will continue to remain our secret,’ Tawaddud says, forcing herself to smile.

At first, the noise in the aviary is deafening, a cacophony of high-pitched screams and the flapping of wings. It is a high dome of glass nearly a hundred metres in diameter. Most of the bottom half is taken up by chimera plants from the wildcode desert, thick purple tangled networks of tubes that expand and contract, geoengineering synthbio of old Earth gone wild in the absence of its masters. A few windmill trees rotate slowly, spiky turbine foliage catching the light in hues of amber and angry dark red.

When Tawaddud and Sumanguru enter, the rukh swarm notices them. They are everywhere: flying things of different sizes, from tiny sapphire insects to two or three manta-ray like gliders who circle near the ceiling. Tawaddud shields her eyes against the storm of wings. Then she barks a Secret Name at them and the swarm disperses and quiets down, becomes a coiling cloud amongst the vegetation.

Down in the centre of the aviary is a clear space, with a delicately wrought white table, a few chairs and a perch. Tawaddud sets Arcelia on it. The bird does not open its eyes but clings to it, flapping its wings briefly for balance.

Sumanguru studies the bird closely, leaning forward, hands clasped behind his back. Then he reaches out, fingers spread like a magician’s, surprisingly graceful for a man of his size. Five crackling lines of light appear between his fingertips and the bird. Arcelia lets out a shrill, mechanical scream and starts flapping its wings furiously. A bubble shimmers into being around it, holding it in place, and the sound is gone, leaving the bird scratching and pecking at its invisible prison in silence.

Tawaddud clenches and unclenches her fingers in rhythm with the bird’s suffering. Finally, she can’t bear it.

‘What are you doing?’ she hisses at Sumanguru.

‘Interrogating, like I said.’

‘How?’

‘Copying its mind into a vir. A little reality, if you like. Running a genetic algorithm on it: asking the bird-brain questions and changing its brain structure until I get something sensible out.’ Sumanguru flexes his fingers. ‘It should only take a few thousand iterations. Half a minute, I’d say.’

‘Stop that. Immediately,’ Tawaddud says. ‘This is a Sirr citizen you are talking about. I will not have her tortured. I will alert the Council.’ She makes a fist, ready to summon a Repentant from her ring.

Sumanguru turns to look at her. His grin merges with his scars into a monstrous grimace.

‘It’s your city’s future. I can make it talk. Means getting your hands dirty.’

Tawaddud swallows. Is this what Dunyazad meant? That it’s not a game. The things you might have to do. She looks at the frantic qarin. Her heart thumps.
Not like this
.

‘There might be . . . another way. A better way.’
There has to be
.

She pulls her doctor’s bag over her shoulder, puts it on the table and opens it. She takes out her beemee and puts it on her head. ‘Please let her go. I can find out what we need.’

‘How?’

‘I could entwine with the jinn. It will want to anchor itself to a body, just like with Alile.’

Sumanguru frowns. ‘Explain.’

‘Self-loops. The stories in our heads. When you love someone, you become entwined. Your self spreads to others, like swarms of fireflies, mingling. There are ways to . . . invite someone in. The body thieves do it with stories. But you can be more direct. The athar responds to commands we call Secret Names. Many have been lost, but they can be used for many purposes, if you know how.’

The Sobornost gogol’s eyes narrow. ‘And you do.’

‘I was taught.’

‘In the
guberniyas
, the Founders forbid this. We know this leads to monsters and horrors. Hominid minds were made to be separate.’

‘Perhaps it is you who is afraid of getting your hands dirty,’ Tawaddud says.

Sumanguru looks first at her and then at Arcelia. He looks curious, like a child, almost.

‘Very well,’ he says, finally. ‘We are wasting time as it is. Just make sure it doesn’t fly away.’

The aviary does not have the kind of harmony as her assignation room, but she takes a few moments to meditate, breathing, letting her awareness spread out, into the noise of the rukh swarm and the plants and the hot humid air. Then she whispers to the metal bird in her arms.

Tell me your name. I am Tawaddud. Tell me your name
.

At first, nothing, just a tickle in the back of her head. It occurs to her it is dangerous to do this in a place so full of wildcode, even if it is behind Seals. But it is better than letting an innocent creature suffer.

What is your name
?

Something moves inside the bird, in her head, suddenly, like a startled serpent. A shape in the athar, like smoke, coiling in the bird’s heart. She is an ouroboros of software, in the tiny confines of her metal shell, in a little world that feels like a dream – except that, suddenly, there is a corridor of light, and a voice calling out to her.

I am Arcelia.

Arcelia
, she says.
Arcelia, listen to me. I’m going to tell you a story
.

Stories always lie.

This one is a true story, I promise
.

What is it about?

It’s a love story
.

I like love stories.

Good
, Tawaddud says and begins.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved only monsters
.

11

THE THIEF AND THE SCARS

The vir smells of gunpowder and oil. There is a distant sound of gunfire. I’m bound to a metal chair under a bright light, naked. The plastic straps cut into my wrists and ankles, and the thin chair frame presses painfully into my back. The tiger is no longer a tiger but a man, standing in shadow with his arms folded, a distant expression on his scarred face.

He steps forward into the light, still moving like a tiger.

‘This is a good ship,’ he says. ‘Too many concessions to the flesh, of course. But we can change that. Starting with your whore.’

‘What have you done to Mieli?’

‘The Oortian? Nothing. She’s going to do me a favour, get me out properly.’ He pulls his own chair forward, swings it around, sits down and leans on the backrest, his face close to mine like the tiger’s muzzle. ‘So we have time to talk.’

I flinch. Our minds are still running inside the Box. This vir is inside
Perhonen
. A separation between worlds and minds, that is the Sobornost way. But it’s not going to make this hurt any less.

The tiger-man opens a flick-knife slowly.

‘This vir comes from my memories,’ he says. ‘I put a lot of detail into it. Good avatars. Nerves, muscles, veins.’ He tests the edge against his thumb, draws a red line of blood like a tiny smile. ‘The others always forget about the flesh. But you should never forget about the enemy. It’s always there, even when you are not looking. The quantum filth know that.’

The laugh bubbles up before I can stop it, comes out from my lips with droplets of spittle and blood.

‘You always had a sense of humour, le Flambeur,’ he says. ‘Maybe we can make this short, if you tell me what that bitch Pellegrini wants from me this time.’

‘It’s not that,’ I say.

‘Well, if laughing makes it easier for you—’ He reaches out with the knife, presses it against the corner of my eye, starts making the first cut—

‘You know, I wanted to give you a chance,’ I say, blood running down my face. ‘That’s why I left the Realmgate open. I thought you had good reasons to do what you did. But now I really think you just like hurting people.’

His eyes widen and he takes a step back. My features start flowing. My body changes. His Code echoes in my mind –
soft cold dead skin under my fingers
. I smile a tiger smile. I dissolve the chair with a thought and get up.

‘What did you do?’ he growls.

‘I may be smaller and weaker and younger, but that does not mean I’m not smarter. Like you said: you should not forget about the enemy. I made a firmament vir. Yes, it should be impossible. Unless you have Oortian hardware running Sobornost software. She is a good ship.’

He slashes with the knife, but I am already a ghost, outside the laws of the vir. ‘You should have gone through the gate,’ I say. ‘The monkey does not always lie.’

I freeze the vir and cut my link to it. A discontinuity takes me back to the dark forest. The tiger is frozen in mid-leap. I pick up my sword and walk past it, through the Realmgate.

The gate slams me back into a physical body, inside the swirling madness of the router. I grab the Box and tear it away from the router’s delicate machinery, just when the rain of Hunters starts.

Mieli watches as the butterfly avatars become still. The sneering face of the box god slowly dissolves as they drift apart.

‘
Perhonen
?’ she whispers.

Here
, the ship’s voice says.

‘Are you all right?’

I think so. I feel strange. I think I fell asleep
.

‘If that bastard did something to you, I’m going to—’

Mieli. The hunter thing. It’s coming
.

The spimescape goes crazy. Vectors rain upon
Perhonen
like the scrawls of an angry child. Mieli starts to summon combat autism, but the ship’s systems are sluggish after the Box god infection. And it is already too late.

The hunters surround the ship like a shoal of fish, thousands and thousands of them, a river of tiny stars flowing through and past the ship. Their upload beams crisscross the central cabin in a deadly spiderweb, but just brushing lightly, not burning this time. They ignore
Perhonen
and converge towards the router like a giant arrowhead.

The router vanishes in a blaze of antimatter, piranhas tearing a wedding bouquet apart. Space is full of pions and gamma rays. In an eyeblink, the zoku machine is gone, replaced by a slowly expanding cloud of debris and fragments. The hunter swarm passes through it and is gone, heading back towards the main vein of the Highway at a considerable fraction of lightspeed.

And then everything is still and dark, and the space around
Perhonen
is empty. The awakened Oortian
väki
in its walls starts glowing with a familiar blue-green light.

Mieli
, it says.
I’m still getting Jean’s signal. He’s still out there
.

Feeling numb, Mieli reels in the ship’s wings and modules into a more compact shape and steers them into the debris cloud, burning a way through with anti-meteorite lasers. They bring the thief in with a q-dot bubble, a helmeted, quicksuited figure, clutching a small black box against his chest, unmoving.

Mieli tells the helmet to open. The opaque metamaterial bubble vanishes, revealing the face the butterflies made.

Bastard
. Mieli extrudes a q-dot blade from her hand and pushes it against the creature’s throat—

‘Wait!’

The voice is the thief’s. But that doesn’t mean anything.

‘Mieli, wait, it’s me!’

It
does
sound like the thief. She pulls back but does not let go. ‘What happened?’

The scarred face blurs and becomes the thief again, charcoal-dark eyebrows and hollow temples, covered in sweat. ‘I got Sumanguru’s Founder codes. The song I embedded in the zoku jewel – it was the same trick I tried before with Chen, except that this time it worked. A vir that pretends to be firmament, a trap. The hunters thought I was him. I told them to leave me alone. It worked.’ He talks fast, breathlessly.

‘You are not making any sense, you bastard,’ Mieli says.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ the thief says. ‘We won. And I have a plan.’

Mieli stares at him. She takes the Box from the thief. He does not resist. She crushes it slowly in her hand. Black shards spread in all directions like the negative of a slow, tiny nova.

‘You used
Perhonen
as bait,’ she says.

‘I did.’

‘You nearly got us all killed. Or worse.’

‘I did.’

She pushes him away. He floats across the cabin, a guilty look on his face.

‘Get the hell away from me,’ she says.

Mieli hides herself in the pilot’s crèche, exhausted, nursing her anger and mapping out
Perhonen
’s systems to ensure every last trace of the box god is gone.

‘How do you feel?’ she asks the ship.

Strange. Parts of me rebelled. I could not feel them anymore. All the gogols did what Sumanguru said. And there was a part that went into the Box and did not come back
.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Mieli says.

But that was not the worst thing. That was when I saw you almost giving up, twice. You came very close to pulling the strangelet trigger, Mieli. And it was not a bluff
.

Mieli says nothing.

You have been stretching yourself too thin. Keeping your promises and protecting me and letting the pellegrini change you. This time, you almost fell. And I was not there to catch you
.

For a moment, Mieli is unable to speak. She is used to the ship always being there, always offering warmth, ever since the day she made her. But now there is a cold edge in
Perhonen
’s voice.

‘The thief did this to you,’ Mieli says. ‘He went too far this time. I’m going to—’

I will deal with the thief, Perhonen
says.
You don’t have to fight my battles for me. Just because you made me does not mean I did not exist before. You brought me back from the alinen, and I will always love you for that. You made me into a new being and you will always have my loyalty for that. But I am not only what you sang into me. Some things you can’t fix with words or a song like Karhu did with your tooth when you were little. Or by taking it out on the thief
.

The ship’s voice resonates through its sapphire hull, all around Mieli.

So what if the pellegrini can make gogols of you
? it says.
Nothing has changed. They will be just as strong as you. And you will still be Mieli
.