The Fractal Prince (21 page)

At first they shaped ice just to get a feel for it, wove some of the smaller ice clumps into toy castles and monstrous shapes. They even let the ancestors animate one of them, called it a minotaur and when little Varpu came to visit them they let her be chased by the jagged, slow-moving monster through a labyrinth they built; she shrieked with glee. But eventually, the Big Idea of what they
really
wanted to make started to emerge.

They called it the Chain. A hundred ice spheres laboriously crafted, decorated with bright designs that drew the eye and made you dizzy as you drifted through them. All strung together with unbreakable Jovian q-dot fibres and dancing slowly in the gravity well of the Moon-sized mass they called Pohja. The tertiary structure they modelled after that of a protein, found local minima for the Chain’s Lagrangian function so that it would fold itself into intricate shapes, creatures of myth and flowers and fractals.

It was slow work. The blackness was always there, just beyond the skin of their secondskins and the icy walls of the little garden Mieli built. She lit it up with a soletta and filled it with zero-g plants that reminded her of Grandmother’s garden. Sydän said it was a weakness and lived in her secondskin, a tiny little ecosystem, algae and respirator nanos flowing in tubes around her body, face glowing with fierce independence as she traversed the growing Chain. There was a lot of waiting, waiting for the Chain to fold, waiting for the väki in the ice to grow and complete the tasks they sang to it.

And as they waited, they talked.

‘I don’t want to be a ghost in the ice like the ancestors,’ Sydän said. ‘There are better places. When I was little, a Jovian ambassador came to our koto. He was just a seed that had to be planted. We brought it food, and it gave us dreams as presents. They showed places where you really are immortal, or live many lives at once. I don’t care about what the elders say. I don’t care about knowing the fifty names of ice. I want to live. I want to see the Inner System. I want to see the sky cities on Venus. I want to see Earth.’

In Mieli’s koto, the children told stories about Earth. The burning place, the place of pain, where
tuonetars
bind the damned dead with viper ropes and whip them with iron chains, where you drink dark waters and forget who you are. Where the Great Tree grew and was cut down. Where the people of her koto lived until Ilmatar carried them away.

Mieli preferred stories about Seppo the megabuilder who sang a starship out of ice and sailed to another galaxy to find his love, the Daughter of the Spider, or Lemmi the thief who stole one of Kuutar’s twelve lives, ate it, burst open and became the first of the Little Suns. The Earth stories always gave her nightmares, troubled dreams where she would crawl along the shores of a dark river, her body pressed down by the heavy hand of gravity, face scraping against the black rough gravel, certain that the
tuonetars
were just behind her but without strength to run or fly.

‘Why would you want to go
there
?’ she asked.

Sydän laughed. ‘I bet you believe all the stories, don’t you? The elders make that stuff up. I can see that
you
would have to take it seriously. After all, you have to be better than everybody else at everything. Because you are not from Oort. Because you are the tithe child, given to us to raise. The converts are always the most fervent believers.’

‘I’m not allowed to talk about that,’ Mieli said.

‘There was a book an ancestor gave me, one of the really old ones, from Earth,’ Sydän said. ‘There was this baby who was raised by presapient monkeys. He became their king. I always thought that’s the way you must feel, with all this. Smarter, better, stronger.’ She pauses. ‘More beautiful.’

‘I don’t want to be a queen.’

‘You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be,’ Sydän said. ‘And you don’t have to believe everything they tell you.’

‘But why Earth? What is there?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t you want to find out? What is so terrible that they have to hide it in nightmare stories?’

‘That’s heresy,’ Mieli said.

‘No,’ Sydän said. ‘What is heresy is you sitting here with me, a lightsecond from every other living soul, eating me with your eyes, and not doing anything about it.’

She kissed Mieli then, sudden warm softness beneath the slick cold secondskin, pulled away and laughed at her startled expression. ‘Come on, monkey queen,’ she said. ‘The Chain is not going to bind itself!’

In the end, Mieli followed Sydän. But they never made it to Earth.

She wonders what Sydän would think about her now, looking at Earth from the pilot’s crèche. The blue globe is covered in a spiderweb of shadows, sharp black knives in the white and azure. The dark lines are cast by the Gourd, a frame of silver arcs that stretch around the planet in an oval shape, in geostationary orbits, over a hundred thousand kilometres in diameter.

There are gaps in the silver structure, so that it looks like two skeletal hands, slowly closing around an eyeball. Where two or more arcs join there are hexagonal loops, bright with light and activity, streams of thoughtwisps, raions and oblasts, a few mercenary ships.

From one of the poles, the thin wire of the Silver Road stretches to the Moon, where Sobornost machines are eating the crust of the satellite, transporting the matter to be forged into a cage for Earth.

Dear Kuutar
, Mieli thinks.
Let me unsee this
.

Sobornost has been slowly building it for nearly twenty years. Why would they be doing it if not to guard against something evil inside? The ship’s databanks have no information on the purpose of the Gourd: common speculation in the Inner System is that it is created by the hsien-kus as a sensor array, to increase the fidelity of their ancestor virs.

You should not be here, the old goddesses of Oort tell her. This place is forbidden.

It is just a rock
, she tells herself, refusing to pray, refusing to ask the metacortex to turn off the regions in her brain that seethe with religious terror.
It’s just water and rock and ruins
.

She thinks about the journey, the sauna, the Oortian food, all her efforts to prepare herself for this. She is supposed to be Mieli, a heretic Oortian mercenary, come to seek her fortune in the wildcode desert in the pay of the muhtasib families of Sirr. Instead, she feels like a child who has woken up from a bad dream and found it real.

In the last hour, I have been offered immortality eight thousand times
, the ship says.
I hate negotiating with vasilevs. But I got us an orbit and a docking station in one of the mercenary hubs. They call themselves the Teddy Bear Roadside Picnic Company, if you can believe that
–
are you all right
?

‘I didn’t think it would be this hard,’ Mieli says. ‘I have not been in Oort for years. I fought in the Protocol War. I saw black holes eat moons. I saw a Singularity on Venus. I serve a goddess who rules a
guberniya
. And I still feel like I shouldn’t be here, like the
tuonetars
will get me if we go there.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Why is that?’

Because you are still Mieli
, the ship says,
the daughter of Karhu of Hiljainen Koto, the beloved of Sydän, who knows the songs of Oort. And if we do this right, you will always be
.

Mieli smiles. ‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘And at least I’ll get to tell Sydän I made it here first.’

Perhonen
drifts along one of the Gourd ribs. It is an endless band of Sobornost faces, surrounded by the glitter of constructor dust, like the largest rainbow in the world. The mercenary docking bay is the open of mouth of a vast hsien-ku face. Mieli reels in the ship’s wings and floats in.

The image of the recruiter of the Teddy Bear Roadside Picnic Company appears in the spimescape. He is a round, bearlike creature, an ursomorph with visible Sobornost enhancements. Diamond spikes protrude from his spine and thick head like icicles. But his eyes are very human and blue, with a suspicious look.

‘What do you want?’ he asks.

‘What do you think?’ Mieli says. ‘I want to go to the wildcode desert to hunt the dead.’

18

THE THIEF AND THE GOURD

I meet Hsien-Ku 432nd Generation, Early Renaissance Quintic Equations Branch, in a Viennese café in the 1990s. True to my nature and role, I don’t touch my Black Forest gâteau, even though it looks delicious. Instead, I maintain the stern businesslike visage of the sumanguru.

She, on the other hand, eats hers with relish: a short plain woman in a period dress, a faint smile on her round face, making appreciative noises as she spoons in the chocolate. I wait for her to finish. She wipes her mouth with a napkin.

‘Coffee?’ she asks.

‘I’d rather stay focused on the matter at hand,’ I say.

‘Very well. Lord Sumanguru, in all honesty, I took the time to speak to you since your visit is somewhat irregular. We have not received any updates to the Plan that would necessitate a review of our operation.’

I pick up a spoon in my large, black hands and bend it slightly. The hsien-ku winces.

‘The Plan can’t prepare for all the enemies of the Great Common Task.’ The soft metal twists, no doubt faithfully modelled by the ancestor sim’s physics engine.

I hold up the spoon. ‘It’s a good vir. Down to the quantum level, is that right?’

There is a sudden panic in the hsien-ku’s eyes.

‘We simplify things wherever possible,’ she says hastily. ‘There are no unnecessary quantum elements. All the minds are strictly classical. Whenever we have to make quantum corrections, it is only in the experiments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and then we ensure we carefully run all quantum aspects classically, in sandboxed virtual machines. I assure you, Lord Sumanguru, there is no contamination here.’

‘You misunderstand me.’ I place the twisted spoon on the table. ‘My brothers and I commend you. We find embodiment . . . useful for questioning the enemies of the Task.’

A faint look of fear flickers across her eyes. It is easy to see why I chose this disguise last time. My greatest concern was that the chen would have notified the others that this particular Founder code was compromised – but that would have harmed the carefully maintained illusion of Founder infallibility.

‘And surely you do not expect to find any such here?’ she asks.

‘There is a concern that your operation has gotten too close to the flesh; that much of it has to do with matter.’

‘That is not by choice,’ the hsien-ku says. ‘Our interpretation of the Task is as valid as that of the other Founders – and it demands us to recover the lost souls of Earth.’

‘Then why have you not already done so?’

‘There
was
an attempt to scan and upload Earth’s biosphere and matter more forcefully some years ago, but it was a failure.’

‘Absurd. Why should a planetary environment like that pose any problems? Especially given the kinds of resources the Plan has deployed here.’

‘Wildcode,’ the hsien-ku says, embarrassed. ‘Something happened there after the Collapse. A mini-Singularity of sorts. Not on the scale of the Spike, but a merging of the noosphere with the native biosphere. It resulted in something the natives call wildcode, complex self-modifying code. It permeates Earth’s matter and it’s a pain to get rid of. While our imagers are capable of partial reconstructions, most of the key minds are in the upload heavens.’

‘Which you have access to through
trade
, is that correct?’

‘Broadly speaking, yes. We trade with the natives. It’s a slow process, but we are archaeologists. It has proven more effective than our previous attempts.’

‘Soft. Your copyclan lives up to its reputation,’ I say.

‘We will find a way to counteract the wildcode effects. If the Plan was to grant us more resources—’

‘—you would find another way to waste them. Already, our conversation has given me enough to raise this matter with the Prime. However, perhaps there is something you can do to help us both. I understand you have . . . detailed records of our glorious past.’

‘As our interpretation of the Task dictates, our aim is to give life to all those who lived on Earth before the rise of Fedorovism. It requires a detailed study of matter and historical records, as well as mind archeology.’

‘I don’t care about your interpretation of the Task. I require access to the ancestor virs. Full access.’

‘Surely, you understand that I need to follow the Plan to get you anything of the sort. Otherwise, where would we be?’

‘Your . . . rigour is admirable. But not wise.’ I give her a sumanguru smile, a tiger grin.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Scholarship can distract you from important events. Pellegrinis and vasilevs. There are serious tensions. Serious enough for us to take notice.’

She places her own spoon on her plate with a nervous clink. She is probably searching her Library for moments of greater self-confidence.

‘There were also some . . . irregularities with the Experiment I am looking into.’

‘That was centuries ago in our frame,’ she protests.

‘Crimes against the Task do not get old.’

‘I understand,’ she says. ‘Perhaps a limited period of access could be arranged.’

‘Good.’ I try the gâteau. It is excellent, but I force myself to make a face. ‘It would be a shame to feed such a wonderful creation to the Dragons.’

The ancestor vir of the Gourd, where the hsien-kus of Sobornost make history. It is a giant puzzle, fragments of the past glued together with simulation. The hsien-kus observe and measure, search the memories of gogols bought from the soul merchants of Sirr, or stolen from the Oubliette – and run ensembles of simulations to find histories that match the observations. Averages over possible event sequences instantiated, culled and tweaked until they conform with what the hsien-kus think history should be.

The interface is overwhelming at first. I am a bodiless ghost in a four-dimensional world. A god-view and a new sense that allows me to step backwards and forwards in time. I hate the incorporeal aspect of it – I need to
touch
things – but there is no embodiment here, just the chill of watching processes unfold in gogol brains. The hsien-kus cheat as much as they can: in spite of my accusations, not everything is simulated down to the molecular or even cellular level to allow true physics-equivalence.