The Fractal Prince (7 page)

Mieli ignores them and lets the thief loose from his chains.

Between one eyeblink and the next, just before the diamond thing hits, I become a god. A small god, but still: with an omniscient awareness of the contents of my smartmatter shell that pretends to be a human body, and the raion computer that is its brain.

It is only the second time that I have had root access to it. I wonder at the intricacies of its synthbio cells in a diamonoid frame, the fusion power source at the base of the spine and the nifty q-dot emitters. I get lost in the brain for a while. My mind is a tiny thing in its vast labyrinth, and for a time, it is good just to wander through the cool corridors of logic and to think. The plan that the pellegrini unwittingly gave me is there, too, a mosaic of interlocking pieces. I study it from every angle, humming to myself. Something is missing.

Then I hear the zoku jewel, an eager receptacle for thought and desire. I tell it what I need and it makes itself into something that completes the pattern, clicking into place. A part of me says that it is wrong, that I should feel guilty, but it fits too well. Surely there can be no harm in something so beautiful?

I feel like a little boy who has found pretty rocks on a beach. I hum to myself. I could happily stay inside my mind forever.

Except that there is a distant voice shouting that my flesh is boiling away and the bright, bright light weaving back and forth in front of me like a hypnotist’s watch has something to do with it.

I start moving. It feels like I’m wearing an oversized robot costume, huge and clumsy and slow. My mind is racing much faster than the body can react. My left hand disappears in white flame: fake skin, bones and flesh, consumed. The metaself informs me calmly how long it will take to grow it back. It puts together a picture of the tiny machine that is burning me alive: a hungry Sobornost creation, with a zigzag trajectory through the wreckage of
Perhonen’s
central cabin, now aimed straight at my brain.

Cops. No matter how much things change, they always stay the same
.

And then it happens. I’m not much of a chess player, but there is an aspect of the game that I find fascinating. After a while, you can almost see lines of force between the pieces. Areas of danger where it is physically impossible to move pieces into. Clouds of possibility, forbidden zones.

That’s what it’s like, watching the diamond cop. Suddenly, it is as if there is a mirror image of the thing inside me, full of single-mindedness and purpose—

Good hunter fast hunter nice hunter if you find it there will be a treat—

That’s it.
Mirrors
. Silently, I shout commands at my alien body. It obeys.

The q-dot layer beneath my burning skin turns into metamaterials. An improvised invisibility cloak. I become a quicksilver statue. The hungry white light is bent around me. It takes out a set of tribal statues in Mieli’s gallery of comet ice. The cop keeps blasting, confused, stationary just long enough for me to tell
Perhonen
what to do—

A q-dot bubble blinks into being around it, a shiny billiard ball that shows a distorted reflection of my face. Sudden electromagnetic fields make my skin tingle. And then
Perhonen
blasts the intruder into space along the cabin’s axis like a bullet from a gun, leaving a streak of ionized air behind.

The ship’s lasers flash. There is a blinding antimatter explosion in the distance. A torrent of gamma rays and pions gives me a headache.

The locks of my Sobornost body snap back to place. Mieli floats next to me, tendrils of black blood around her like Medusa’s hair. Then the pain of the hand comes, and I scream.

Mieli takes care of the thief’s hand as the fires die away and the ship seals the tears in the hull. The cabin is full of the sickly sweet smell of burnt synthbio flesh, mixed with ozone and smoke and ashes from the bonsai trees. A bubble of liquorice tea floats near Mieli like a grey, stinking ghost.

‘That hurt,’ says the thief, looking at his stump with distaste as the tissue seals itself. ‘What the hell was that? It was
not
made by gogols who deal with cuddly slowtime monkey people.’

He is a miserable sight. The left side of his face is a red ruin, and burn craters make his upper torso look like a planetary surface. Mieli does not feel much better. She is drenched in sweat and her stomach and head throb as the repair nanites of her body work overtime. Except for her brain, her biological parts are almost redundant, but they are a part of her, and she’s not going to let them rot.

‘Whatever it was,’
Perhonen
says, ‘I’m afraid there is more. It dumped a
lot
of bandwidth. I traced the vector. There is something else out there. Something that does not follow the Highway protocols. Something big. A whole swarm of the little bastard’s brothers, thousands of them, and by the looks of it they plan to intercept us.’

‘How long?’ the thief asks.

‘A day or two, maybe three if we really push it,’
Perhonen
says. ‘They are
fast
.’

‘Damn,’ Mieli whispers. ‘The pellegrini warned me. I need to talk to her.’ She reaches for the goddess in her mind, but finds nothing.

The thief looks at her with his one good eye.

‘My guess is that she is going to be hiding until we get rid of our tail,’ he says. ‘This is big, bigger than either of us. Maybe even bigger than I used to be. To be completely honest, if I were you, I’d be looking for another line of work. It’s going to get ugly.’

Mieli raises an eyebrow. They both look like broken dolls. Her garment is in tatters and stained in blood. The thief’s face is still red and raw. Only clumps of white medfoam excreted by his body’s repair systems hide the terrible burns on his torso, legs and arms.

‘Well, uglier,’ the thief says. The undamaged side of his face grows serious. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. I know who your boss is, and what she wants. The stakes are high enough for the Founders and Primes to take notice. This whole affair – it’s part of some conflict between them. And we are right in the middle of it.’

‘Thanks to you,’ Mieli says.

‘Touché,’ the thief says. ‘So. Can we run?’

The damage from the battle with the knife-flower is superficial, and
Perhonen
is already fixing it. But she knows exactly what her ship can and cannot do. The fear needles of the battle are still in her belly. She finds herself clinging on to their sting.

‘No,’ she says. ‘But we can fight.’
Perhaps this will be a good way to end things. Fight an unbeatable enemy, hope for a honourable death
.

The thief looks at her incredulously. ‘As much as I have come to respect your ability to kill things,’ he says, ‘I’m starting to wonder if Oortian schools teach basic mathematics. Just one of these things nearly killed us. Are you
sure
fighting a few thousand is a good idea?’

‘This is my ship,’ Mieli says. The jewelled chain around her leg feels like it’s burning.
Sydän. Could it not be another me who gets her back
? She closes her eyes. ‘It’s my decision.’

Mieli
, whispers
Perhonen. That was really tough sobortech. I expended a lot of weaponry on Mars. We are good, but we are not that good. What are you doing
?

‘Mieli?’ the thief says. ‘Are you all right?’

Mieli takes a deep breath of the stinking air. She opens her eyes. The thief is staring at her with a look of concern. ‘Come on,’ he says with a soft voice. ‘Let’s think about this. There is always a way out.’

‘Fine,’ Mieli says finally. ‘What do you suggest?’

The thief is quiet for a moment. ‘It seemed to want me pretty badly,’ he says. ‘Maybe we can use that.’

‘Make a gogol of you and sacrifice it?’ Mieli says in disgust.

A cloud passes over the thief’s face. ‘No, that’s not possible. Looks like Joséphine does not want more than one of me running around. There must be something else—’ His good eye flashes. ‘Of course. I’m an idiot. That’s what it’s for. If the cop thing wants me, I need to become someone else. I need a new face.’ The thief tries to scratch the red ruin with his missing hand, then looks at the stump in dismay.

‘Not to mention some other bits and pieces. But I think I know where to find one. If
Perhonen
is right, we have less than two days to open the Box.’

‘And how are we going to do that?’ Mieli asks.

‘How is anything really important ever done? With smoke and mirrors.’

‘No games, Jean. Please.’

The thief gives her a broken smile and takes out a small amber egg from his pocket. A zoku jewel.

‘How quickly can you find us a zoku router?’

6

TAWADDUD AND THE GHUL

The district of the Banu Sasan lies around the Sobornost Station. It used to be the Sobornost model city: high, heavy buildings, squares, statues, upload temples. But ever since the Cry of Wrath, they have stood mostly empty, apart from the logistics hubs where the otherworldly goods Sobornost trades for gogols are distributed to those who can afford them. And it is here that the small and the weak of the city hide from wildcode.

Tawaddud watches Abu carefully. She would have expected the gogol merchant to turn his nose up at the dirt and the poverty but, instead, he wears a look of detached fascination, even when they pass the Takht al’Qala’a square, where the spider woman lives. She has spun a huge tent of spider silk from the glands the wildcode has grown in her breasts. Little statuettes and jinn bottles hang from the wispy strands, like strange fruit.

The air is dry, with the faint smell of ozone everywhere, mixing with the pungent odour of unwashed bodies. There is music, shadow-players who create images on the sides of high pillars, cafés with old men with faces marked by wildcode playing chess. Chimera acrobats in silk robes, sapphire-enhanced muscles gleaming.

Abu stops to give a few sobors to a man who has a chimera beast in a cage, a fetus-like pink thing the size of a dog, with a blue transparent shell and sharp spider legs. The man bows to him many times, loudly proclaiming to his audience that the creature is a prince of Fast New York, transformed into this shape by the Aun, and that it understands holy texts. It spells out answers to questions with a sharp tap-tap-tap of its legs on concrete. In the athar, Tawaddud sees the chains that make the creature an extension of the handler’s mind.

‘You should be careful, Abu dear,’ she says. ‘I don’t want you to become one of my patients.’
And no doubt you have jinni bodyguards following us that would stop you if you tried to do anything stupid
.

‘What a terrible fate that would be. I’m sure there are those who go to the desert just so they can be treated by you.’

‘I warn you: my medicines can be bitter.’ She pats her doctor’s bag.

Abu looks at her curiously. ‘Why do you do it? Come here, I mean.’

‘Perhaps you will see, before the day is over. What do you make of the Banu Sasan?’

Abu smiles. ‘I grew up here.’

Tawaddud blinks. ‘That is a story I would like to hear.’

‘Too long to be told on an afternoon walk, I’m afraid. I do not speak of it often: it is difficult enough for me to deal with the muhtasib families without being a Soarez, Ugarte, Gomelez or Uzeda.’ Abu spreads his hands. ‘No matter how many gogols my mutalibun bring back from the desert.’

‘So, in your position, a wise man would be looking for the hand of a younger daughter of a muhtasib House? Even one with a . . . less than perfect reputation?’

Abu looks down. ‘I had hoped to spend a pleasant afternoon with a beautiful woman without discussing such things.’

There is such sadness in his human eye that Tawaddud almost tells him the truth: that he should never marry a girl who loves only monsters. Then the wound left by Duny’s smile stings again.
I am going to show Father who I really am. But not like she thinks
.

Tawaddud touches Abu’s shoulder lightly.

‘You are right. Let us leave marriages and Houses up on the Shards, where they belong. Here, no one cares who we are. And that is one reason why I come here.’

As always, Tawaddud sets up her practice next to a defaced Sobornost statue – a bearded man with a machinist’s tools, now covered in athar scrawls and patches of wildcode.

As Abu watches, Tawaddud unfolds her stall from her bag: components that open up into spindly structures like giant insect legs. She turns them into a tent with a small table and a bed. She spreads out her gear and the jinni bottles. Almost as soon as she is finished, the patients start coming.

They line up outside the tent and, one by one, Tawaddud does the best she can. Most are simple hauntings, easily dispelled. Actual wildcode infections are more difficult but, fortunately, the ones today are not too bad. Merely a boy who has glowing v-shaped dashes all over his skin, chasing each other, moving in flocks like birds. He claims they are ancient symbols of victory and would like to keep them, but Tawaddud points out that they will grow and take over his skin entirely.

She studies the boy with athar vision, gently cupping his face.

‘You have been in the desert again,’ Tawaddud chides. The boy twitches, but Tawaddud grips his face firmly. ‘Let me see.’

She takes one of the little jinn bottles from her belt, opens it and lets the software creature out, a cloud of sharp triangles in the athar.

‘I thought I told you not to go there,’ she says.

‘A man needs to have a dream, my lady, and the dreams are in the desert,’ the boy says.

‘I see you are going to be a poet next. Hold still.’ The little jinn eats the wildcode in the boy’s frontal lobe. ‘This might hurt a little. But if you don’t stay out of the way of the mutalibun, you are not going to be much use to anyone.’

‘I’m too fast for them to catch me,’ the boy says, wincing. ‘Like Mercury Ali.’

‘He wasn’t fast enough in the end: no one runs away from the Destroyer of Delights for ever.’

‘Except the flower prince,’ the boy says. ‘The thief who never dies.’

In the afternoon they bring her the ghul.

It is the wife of one of the sapphire acrobats, a lean, muscled woman with dark curls in a tight sobor-fabbed dress. The acrobat leads her by the hand. She follows him like a child, an empty look in her eyes.