The Fractal Prince (6 page)

To the east, there are the hills and greenhouses, and beyond them the sea. In the north lies the City of the Dead, with its row upon row of grey featureless buildings. Tawaddud quickly turns her gaze away from it.

The city proper is dominated by the spire of the Sobornost Station: a massive diamond tower, bristling with heroic statues higher than the Shards. It looms above the morass of the gogol markets that slowly give way to the wide streets and low buildings in the shadow of the Ugarte and Uzeda Shards. The sunlight flashing off its upper segments makes it seem like it’s made of gold. It changes, sometimes slowly, sometimes even as you watch, new spires rising and falling, surfaces and statues rotating. Every few seconds, there are booms and flashes, streaks of light from thoughtwisps carrying Sobornost minds, fired towards the Gourd that the masters of the Inner System are building in the sky.

‘Makes you feel small, doesn’t it?’ Abu says.

Abu Nuwas has a reputation: grand gestures in the gogol markets, investment decisions that sometimes look like madness. Yet her more influential clients speak of Abu with reluctant respect.
Small men need to feel powerful
. Tawaddud keeps her eyes downcast.

‘I prefer the grandeur of the Shards to the undead creations of the Sobornost,’ she says. ‘And the wildcode desert taught them in the Cry of Wrath how small they can be.’

‘Yes, well,’ Abu says. ‘At least for a time.’

Another elevator passes them. A swarm of Fast Ones flashes past, trying to catch up with it, buzzing. They are tiny humanoids the size of Tawaddud’s forefinger, with black bodies and humming wings, who hitching rides to the top of the Shards on elevators, to soak up solar energy and potential energy on the way down, selling it to the cities of the little people like Qush and Misr and a hundred others in central Sirr whose names slow baseline humans will never know. The passengers are trying to shoo them away. They dodge flailing hands effortlessly, buzzing around the elevator like a cloud of flies.

‘I envy them, sometimes,’ Abu says, looking at the creatures. ‘To live in a world of giant statues, live fast lives, fight fast wars, fit centuries and dynasties in a day. Our lives are far too short, don’t you think?’

‘They also say,’ Tawaddud says, leaning closer to him, ‘that the Fast Ones and the jinni know pleasures that are lost to us, and once a human has tasted them, it is far too easy to lose interest in the flesh.’

‘I see,’ Abu says, turning his brass eye towards her, cocking his head like a bird. ‘And do you speak from experience, Lady Tawaddud?’ His expression is stiff.

After his initial shyness, Abu Nuwas is hard to read, like mutalibun often are. At the pretext of shielding her eyes against the sun, Tawaddud lifts up her athar glasses and looks at the gogol merchant’s aura in the Shadow. His entwined jinn is a fiery serpent, coiled protectively around him.
I need to be more subtle with this one
.

Tawaddud follows the receding elevator with her gaze. ‘I am just an innocent girl from the Gomelez family.’

‘That’s not what the stories say.’

‘The stories say many things, and that’s why the Repentants hunt them down before the body thieves steal our minds with them. I care for stories less than poetry, dear Abu: and you promised me more of it. I’m afraid the only thing I have to offer in return is an evening of hard work amongst the Banu Sasan.’ She touches Abu’s hand. ‘But then you are no stranger to hard work. My sister and I both appreciate the help you have offered my father.’

‘It is nothing. I would rather you appreciated my wit. Or my handsome features.’ He smiles ironically and touches his eye.

Foolish girl. Kafur’s first lesson. Make it like a dream, and never let them wake.

‘There is no greater honour in Sirr than the touch of the entwiner, and honour is greater than beauty,’ Tawadudd says. ‘What is it that you see with your eye?’ She smiles mischievously. ‘Anything you like?’

‘Would you like to see?’ He holds out his hand.

Wordlessly, she hands over her athar glasses, blinking at the bright sunlight. Abu turns them around in his hands. He whispers a Secret Name that Tawaddud does not know.

‘Try now.’

Tawaddud accepts the glasses uneasily and puts them on. She blinks, expecting to see the usual chaos of the local athar, the digital shadow of reality. The Seals of the palaces keep the worst of the wildcode away from the Shard, but even here the athar is always full of old spimes and noise.

She sees a different Sirr.

It is a vast, shifting spiderweb of light. The Sobornost Station is still there, a glowing star in the centre, but everything else is replaced by an intricate, constantly shifting network: bright braids that flash into being and disappear, dense glowing currents that stretch from horizon to horizon, sudden blooms of activity that look like nests of fiery insects. After a moment, Tawaddud has to close her eyes. It is like watching the surface of the Sun.

‘
This
is what we see, muhtasib and mutalibun,’ Abu says. ‘This is what the Repentants gather for us, the blood of Sirr. Gogol trade. Sobortech trade. Jinni labour. Even,’ he lowers his voice, ‘embodiment trade.

‘It’s like a garden, and we are gardeners. We need to decide where to plant and where to cut and where to grow, to keep Sirr alive. That is why I help your father. That’s what makes me feel small.’

Tawaddud blinks, and the vision is gone, replaced by athar, the broken scrawls it writes on people and buildings, defaced by the white noise of wildcode. She removes her glasses.

‘Then I’m glad I’m taking you to see the Banu Sasan,’ she says slowly. ‘One often feels small when looking at things from too far above.’

‘Your sister did say that we would get along,’ Abu says, taking Tawaddud’s arm again, and try as she might, she cannot read his smile.
This is going to be harder than I thought
.

Clanking and rattling, the elevator takes them down to the base of the Shard, and, with even more noise, reconfigures itself into a tram. It carries them through the wide streets of the Shade quarters towards the city centre, along the narrow channels of water that lead towards the sea, the Station and the Banu Sasan.

5

THE THIEF AND THE HUNTER

Mieli floats in the spimescape, a ghost within the ghost of the ship. It is a representation of the worldlines all smartmatter leaves behind, from every nut and bolt of
Perhonen
to the System-wide machinery of the Highway. Reality overlaid with interpretation and explanation, cold physics caught in a cobweb of meaning.

Even when she is not piloting, she likes it here. The ship is made from her words, and here, she can see them. With a thought, she can look through walls, zoom in to the pseudo-living sapphire nanomachinery of the ship – or grow into a giant and hold the impossibly complex clockwork of the System in the palm of her hand. She can even turn back and look at her own body as if from some strange afterlife.

Except now: the central cabin of the ship is closed to her spime vision. She has been banished here like an ancestor spirit, while the pellegrini plays with the thief. At least the dreamy feel of the spimescape makes the disgust easier to bear.

‘Don’t worry,’
Perhonen
says. ‘As far as I can tell, they are just talking this time.’

‘I don’t want to know,’ Mieli says. ‘In any case, we have better things to do. She said something is coming.’

She interrogates the gogols in the ship’s sensor array who spend their bodiless existence watching the ship’s ghost imagers, neutrino detectors and other sensors. They are on one of the lesser Highway branches, engineered by Sobornost to provide pathways for their thoughtwisp traffic. Apart from old, scattered zoku routers – remnants of the Protocol War – and relativistic worldlines of the wisps, there is not much within millions of kilometres of the ship.

Still, just to be sure, she tells the ship to start activating the hidden Sobornost technology in its hull. Like Mieli, the ship is an uneasy amalgam of Oortian and Sobornost, remade on Venus, hidden weapons and quantum armour and virs and gogols and antimatter, embedded in
väki
smartcoral like diamond insects in amber.

‘I was wondering,’
Perhonen
says. Its voice is different here, not just coming from a butterfly avatar but from everywhere, even from within Mieli herself. ‘Are you going to tell him about the gogol you gave to the pellegrini?’

‘No,’ Mieli says.

‘I think it might help him. He doesn’t really understand you.’

‘That’s his problem,’ Mieli says. It feels safe to be here, among the stars and inside the ship, inside a song. She wants to forget about the thief and the pellegrini and wars and gods and quests. Maybe she could even forget about Sydän. Why does the ship has to spoil it?

‘I have been thinking,’ the ship says. ‘He could help us. He wants to be free, too. If you told him the truth—’

‘There is nothing to tell,’ Mieli says.

‘But don’t you see what the pellegrini is doing to you? Promises and vows and servitude, and where did that ever get us? Why should we—’

‘Enough,’ Mieli says. ‘You have no right to question her. I am her servant, and I am no traitor. Don’t make me regret making you.’ Here, without the steady breath of meditation or candlelight to anchor her, the words and anger come out easily. ‘I am not your child. I am your maker. You have no idea what—’

And then, neutrino rain, gentle as a breeze. Anomalous.

She stops. The ship says nothing. The spimescape is silent.

Mieli scans the sky again. Synthbio seeds, thoughtwisp shells, and much further away, a lonely Sobornost raion in the main vein of this Highway branch. Still, her neck bristles.

Maybe I should apologise
, she thinks.
Perhonen
is trying its best to watch over her. That’s what it has been doing ever since she brought its spirit up from the alinen—

A bright line splits the spimescape in two like lightning. The ship and her words vanish in white noise. The scape goes down.

Mieli comes back to her body with a force like a thunderclap. Around her,
Perhonen
rings like a bell. A ragged tear in the hull shows blackness and stars. Air rushes out.

In the middle of the cabin, there is a bright, dancing dot. White beams flash from it in all directions, like from a lighthouse gone mad. The bonsai trees next to Mieli burst into flame.

Never pray to the Dark Man
, Mieli thinks.

It takes me a long, long time to come back from the memory of the arrest.

There is blood in my mouth. I have been biting my tongue, and it hurts. The taste of failure is worse. I spit. Droplets of spittle and blood float in front of me like a string of glistening pearls, white and dark red.

It was dangerous to play the pellegrini like that. A high roller’s luck. She had to be in Mieli’s body, like last time. Sobornost gogols get confused in the flesh, easy to read, easy to manipulate, no matter how godlike they are in the virs. She gave me exactly what I needed. The door in the memory castle is open. I remember Earth. I remember the prince in the jannah. And in spite of the pain, the plan is now whole in my head.

And that’s when the diamond policeman from space hits me in the face.

Mieli is still holding the coral drinking bulb in her hand when the beam sweeps over her. The liquid inside boils, and the bulb shatters with a mournful note, swallowed by the roar of the vacuum. For a moment, the heat is almost gentle, welcome after the chill of the spimescape. Then it comes down on her like the fiercest
löyly
steam in an Oortian sauna.

Her metacortex reacts. Her subdermal smartmatter armour kicks in. Third-degree burns become damage statistics. Quicktime freezes the world into a slideshow of still frames.

In the combat autism, the world always makes sense.

Zoom in
.

In the heart of whiteness, there is a machine, a fraction of a millimetre long: a sleek thing like a dagger, with delicate petals protruding from its hilt. Faces, carved around the needlelike tip. A Sobornost device—

The knife-flower moves. Even in quicktime, it is like a wasp, dancing a deadly dance amongst
Perhonen
’s butterfly avatars. Its strobing beam sweeps along the cabin’s wall, dancing in a random pattern, leaving behind a fiery scrawl. It turns towards Mieli.

Perhonen
slams a q-dot bubble around it and pumps the binding energies of the artificial atoms up. The mirrored sphere bounces around the cabin and starts to glow.

Lasers
, Mieli thinks at the ship, arming her own weapons.
Get ready to throw it out and burn it
. She positions herself between the knife-thing and the thief, who is floating motionless, eyes closed, puts up another q-dot wall to keep him safe.

Tactical gogols feed analysis results into her metacortex. The thing’s beam is
scanning
, like an aggressive version of a zoku Realmgate, capturing information but destroying the source, sending the results to someone. The heat is
bandwidth
.

Killing it all, letting the gods sort it out
.

‘Mieli,’ the ship says. ‘It’s not going to—’

The bubble shatters. The thing comes straight at Mieli like a bullet. She fires her ghostgun at it, a thick cloud of nanomissiles, but already knows she is too slow. The thing is a bright serpent, dodging the tiny projectiles.

Its scanning beam rakes across Mieli’s torso like a claw. Her armour goes mad and deploys active countermeasures. Her skin erupts in tiny fireworks. It doesn’t do much good. Her intestines boil and burst –
pressures and temperatures and recovery times
– and the beam comes up, towards her head, swinging from side to side to a staccato rhythm of damage reports.

She expected a kind of detachment from the battle, with the knowledge that another Mieli will survive her death. Instead, a keen edge of fear presses down on her mind even through the blanket of combat autism.

She welcomes it.

The knife from the void changes direction, brushes her cheekbone, swings around her, towards the helpless thief. The metacortex Nash engine gives her three options, all of them bad.