The Fractal Prince

‘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 vaki 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 Sydan. 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