The Fractal Prince (25 page)

Mieli is dimly aware of the fact that this is more of a cartoon than a faithful representation of what is really going on, but she doesn’t care, watching elaborate shapes form around the infant black hole, wishing for a second that she had the accelerated senses of the Sobornost gogols.

There is a shell that surrounds the little godhead completely now, multifaceted and intricate. The earth beneath their feet no longer so much shakes as hums, and Mieli’s teeth rattle even in spite of the q-bubble’s attempt to dampen the resonances.

‘Any second now’, whispers Sydän. Mieli kisses her hard, briefly joining their smartmatter suits into one.

‘Thanks’, she says.

‘Thanks for what?’

‘For showing me this.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Sydän says. ‘And I’m sorry. I need it to be for ever.’

She squeezes Mieli’s hand so hard it almost hurts. Then she lets go and takes a step forward, outside the q-dot bubble, and starts running. Mieli tries to grab her arm. She comes away with the jewelled chain in her fingers.

For a moment, Sydän turns to look back. She wavers in the information wind, face swirling into whiteness like cream poured into coffee.

Mieli screams, but it is too small a sound against the all-engulfing voice of the dying city.

The quake comes. The black hole has been teetering on the brink of instability for minutes, balanced precariously on the edge by the Higgs-churning machines around it, the superthread modes trapped in its event horizon computing furiously for an artificial eternity. It explodes, screaming out all the thoughts it has thought in its own private hell, the mass of a mountain converted into Hawking radiation in an instant.

The q-bubble groans, goes opaque and dissipates, but Mieli’s quicksuit holds under the impact of the blast wave. Basalt shatters under her feet. The white fire grinds Mieli between the hammer of pressure and the anvil of rock.

The last thing she sees before blackness is
Perhonen
’s feed from orbit, a fiery crack opening up in the face of Lakshmi like a mocking smile.

That was, by far, the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do
, says
Perhonen
.

Mieli floats in a sea of gentle euphoria, soothing blue shapes dancing in front of her eyes. But underneath the coolness hot pain is hiding, pulsing ever so slightly in her bones.

Don’t try to move. You are a mess. Compound fractures, a punctured lung, internal bleeding. I dumped the suit’s nanomeds, they’ve been mutated. Probably shaping some rock into a liver at the moment
.

‘Where’s Sydän?’ she says.

Not far
.

‘Show me.’

You really shouldn’t—

‘Show me!’

She is dragged back to the cold hard rock of reality. There is pain, and she feels groggy, but at least she can see. She lies on her back sprawled on a craggy basalt edifice. It is almost completely dark: dust swirls in the sky, blocking the cloud cover glow. The dark shapes of Von Neumann beasts creep across the landscape slowly, carefully. Lakshmi Planitia is no more – in its place is an impossibly smooth crater of some godstuff she cannot name.

She sits up slowly and sees the grey-haired boy, watching her.

He does not wear a quicksuit, or any other form of protection that Mieli can see, sitting on hot basalt, leaning back.

‘Did you find your goddess?’ she asks, almost laughing at the absurdity of the sight.

‘I did,’ the boy says. ‘But it seems that you lost yours.’

Mieli closes her eyes. ‘What is it to you?’

‘I was not entirely honest with you. I’m not a pilgrim. You could say that I’m . . . management. And I take an interest in whoever passes through here, whether they decide to join us or not.’

‘She let go of my hand,’ Mieli says. ‘She did not want me to come. I can’t follow her.’

‘I didn’t think you would. In spite of our reputation, we respect that. Or some of us do, in any case.’ He walks to Mieli and offers her a hand, helping her up. With the suit’s support, she manages to stand.

‘Look at you. That won’t do. See, this is what you get when you wear flesh and come here.’ Suddenly, the suit is flooded with a cool sensation, fresh nanomeds, Sobornost ones. The pain turns into a full-body tickle.

‘To be fair, your friend was not entirely honest with you either,’ the boy says. ‘She had been speaking to one of my sisters for a while now, about coming here.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Don’t give up,’ the boy says. ‘I learned that a long time ago. If reality is not what you want it to be, change it. You should not accept anything blindly, not death, not immortality. If you don’t want to join her, you can go to my sister and ask for her back. But let me warn you, there will be a price.’

Mieli takes a deep breath. Something rattles in her lungs. She finds that she is holding Sydän’s chain in her hand, like a little piece of Oort, made of jewels and songs.

‘I’ll do it,’ she says. ‘Just tell me where to go. But why are you doing this?’

‘For love,’ he says.

‘Love for whom?’

‘No one,’ he says. ‘I just want to know what it feels like.’

After three days, Mieli finds the temple on the metallic plain, in the shield volcano’s shadow.

Her limbs burn with fatigue. Her muscles and bones have almost completely healed now, and the q-stone armour helps, but hunger and thirst gnaw her insides, and she has to fight to take every step.

The temple is a labyrinth of stone, a seeming jumble of black rectangles and shards like building blocks discarded by a giant child. When she enters, it explodes into an intricate gallery where stone bridges and pathways lead in all directions.
Perhonen
whispers that the whole place is a projection of a larger, higher-dimensional object, a shadow solidified in stone. There, in the black rock, she sees silver flower markings, like the grey-haired boy said, and follows them.

After many twists and turns she finds the singularity in the centre.

It is a tiny thing, a star floating in a cylindrical room. Its Hawking radiation is so bright it floods her quicksuit. When she approaches it, the suit’s outer layers evaporate.

You should go back, Perhonen
shouts in her mind.

She takes another step, and is naked. The radiation that carries the thoughts of the goddess consumes her. Flesh turns into prayer. She holds up her hands. Her fingers burst into flame. The pain is so intense she has no words for it. And then there are no words or thoughts left at all, only burning red—

—that becomes the quiet murmur of a bubbling fountain. It is dark. The sky above is a velvet cloak, with tiny pinpricks. Apart from the sound of the fountain, there is a deep quiet, all around. The air tastes moist and fresh.

A woman sits on the steps that lead up to the fountain. She wears a white dress, diamonds around her neck. Her hair is an auburn mass of curls. Her face is neither young nor old. She is reading a book. As Mieli approaches, she looks up.

‘Would you care for some wine?’ she says.

Mieli hesitates and shakes her head. The goddess is not at all like what she imagined goddesses would be like: not a glowing, translucent being of light or a Titanic pillar of flame, but a woman. She can see the pores of her skin, smells her perfume.

Mieli reaches for
Perhonen’s
comforting presence, but there is nothing there, just a cold sensation down her back, an absence in her mind.

‘As you wish. By the way, my hospitality does not extend to small machine things like your ship,’ says the goddess. ‘But you, please come and sit.’

‘I prefer to stand,’ Mieli says.

‘Ah, spirit. I like that. What is it that you want, child? I embrace all souls who come to me, but not all of them go to such lengths to see me.’

‘I want her back.’

The goddess studies her quietly, a faint smile on her lips.

‘But of course you do,’ she says. ‘You haven’t had it easy: too many losses in a lifetime too short. Growing up a stranger in the land of silent ice and vacuum wings.’ She sighs.

‘What would you have me do? I am no zoku genie who could study your volition and do what is best for you. Otherwise, I would ease the pain of your loss, or perhaps take you to my gogol Library and let you say goodbye properly. Or make a raion and run a vir of the best possible future you two could have had together.

‘But I am none of these things. What you want from me is mine. I am Joséphine Pellegrini. I am an avatar of my
guberniya
, and I do not give things away for free. So the question is, what will you give me, little girl? What will you give to get your Sydän back?’

‘Everything,’ Mieli says. ‘Everything except death.’

21

TAWADDUD AND THE AXOLOTL

Sumanguru finishes. He looks at Kafur quietly. His eyes burn in the eyeslits of his mask.

‘Well?’ Tawaddud says. ‘Had you heard it before?’

‘I accept the payment,’ Kafur says. ‘Although I would very much like to hear the ending. Perhaps Lord Scarface has saved it for later?’

‘True stories do not always end,’ Sumanguru says.

‘Truly spoken.’ Kafur stands up. ‘Tawaddud, dear child, what you ask is not easy. Zaybak the Axolotl has gone to the desert, and is far from athar’s reach. To entwine you need athar, to carry thoughts, to bind minds together. But old Kafur is crafty, Kafur is wise, he knows how to ride the wildcode wind.’ He laughs softly.

‘What do you mean?’ Tawaddud asks.

‘There are many things I did not teach little Tawaddud. If you want your voice to carry to the desert, you have to let the desert come to you.’

Images of Alile flash in Tawaddud’s eyes. ‘Is that what you have done?’

‘Kafur has drunk the potent wine of stories too deep, it’s true. But it is the desert where stories come from, and that is where you will have to go to find an end to yours.’

‘What is he talking about?’ Sumanguru whispers.

‘If I want to reach the Axolotl, I need to expose myself to wildcode,’ Tawaddud says.

The Sobornost gogol touches her shoulder. ‘He’s mad. Let’s get out of here. We will find another way.’

‘I have bottled desert jinni who eat wildcode,’ Tawaddud says slowly, touching her doctor’s bag. ‘I have used them to treat Banu Sasan. It could work if we do it quickly. And the Seals in my body are strong, my father made them. It could work.’

Sumanguru’s eyes widen. ‘But—’

‘It’s my decision.’ She steps forward. ‘I’ll do it,’ she tells Kafur.

The Master of the Palace of Stories bows to her. ‘Old Kafur is glad,’ he says, ‘that somewhere, under the mask of the daughter of the Gomelez, you are still his Tawaddud.’

Deep down in the guts of the Palace, there is a room full of coffins. They are Sealed, emblazoned with the golden spirals and twists that shine brightly against the dark stone.

Laboriously, Kafur opens the lid of one of them. An athar interface flashes into being above it. Inside is a tank shaped like a human body, filled with water, and a breathing apparatus with a black tube like an umbilical.

‘You need silence to listen,’ he says.

She puts down her bag and takes out three bottles. ‘First this one, then this, then this,’ she tells Sumanguru. She makes him repeat the Names he must speak.

‘This is crazy,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to do this. It’s black magic. Five minutes, and I’ll get you out. I can take you to the Station, we can clean you up—’

Tawaddud holds up the Sobornost mind-trap. ‘You have your magic, Lord Sumanguru, and I have mine.’ She removes her robe and her mutalibun bodystocking and lets them fall to the ground. The chill radiating from the coffins makes her bare skin crawl, and she shivers.

Kafur takes out a clear glass bottle, filled with sand.

‘Do it,’ Tawaddud says.

Kafur opens the bottle and pours the contents over Tawaddud. The sand runs over her skin like a caress. As it touches her, it starts to glow. It feels like the fog-hands in her garden, long ago.

She lies down in the coffin and presses the breathing mask against her face. In an instant, the water becomes the same temperature as her body. Then the lid slams shut, and Tawaddud is alone with the desert.

At first, she feels heavy and weightless at the same time, floating in silence. After a while, the voices start: a thousand whispers, in languages she does not understand, dry and soft like rustling leaves.
Is this what Abu talked about? The voices of the desert
.

Then the lights come. It is like looking at the other Sirr Abu showed her, except she sees the whole world. She is floating in the heart of a galaxy, a vast spiderweb of light, bright pinpoints joined with threads that loop and spiral and intertwine.

Zaybak
, she whispers.
Come to me
.

Her voice joins the muttering chorus around her, and her words are repeated, an echo of an echo of an echo in the bright net.

Something responds, and her heart jumps. Tendrils of light snake out and curl around her. She looks up and there is a glowing being floating above her, as if in an ocean, a kraken of light, regarding her with curious childlike eyes. One of its tentacles brushes her, briefly, and she feels an echo of terrible longing. Then it is gone, speeding into the gaps of the network like a wisp of smoke.

Zaybak, where are you
? she calls again.

Something else answers, this time. A shoal of elongated things, snake-like, moving like whips, without eyes but with sharp, sharp teeth. They twine around her limbs, cold and slippery and tight.
Wild jinni who smell a body
. She shouts a Secret Name, but it has no power here; they scatter from her but keep circling, waiting.

Zaybak!

There are more jinni, things that look like chains and tori and strange loops that swallow themselves, thick around her, hungry for embodiment, coming closer with each circuit. She tries to feel her body, tries to find the lid of the coffin so she can call to Kafur and Sumanguru and get out. But she has no voice, no flesh.

A wind comes, scattering the desert things, blowing through her and into her and around her, a touch and a kiss and a voice at the same time, and suddenly she remembers steam rising from the tombs in the City of the Dead, after the rain.