The Fractal Prince

I smile at Tawaddud.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I got you into trouble. I tend to do that.’

To her credit, she seems to take my sudden appearance in a stride. Tawaddud Gomelez, a lover of monsters. ‘If you want to make it up to me, you had better find a way to save my city,’ she says.

‘Chen is using things called Dragons,’ I say. ‘It’s going to take some drastic measures. I think there is a way to get everybody out. But you might not like it.’

Cassar Gomelez gives me a look I’ve had from many fathers. ‘My daughter now speaks for our people,’ he says, placing a hand on Tawaddud’s shoulder. ‘She decides.’

‘It may require a . . . transformation.’

‘Do it,’ Tawaddud says. ‘Zoto Gomelez said no. We say yes. All together.’

I shape my wish into a thought and give it to the strange beings who claim to be my brothers and sisters. They whisper together for a moment with voices like hissing sand. Then the one called Princess nods.

The world goes mad.

The storm of wildcode rises and washes over Sirr. When it reaches Tawaddud, she feels herself being lifted up, expanding, becoming a part of the hurricane of jinni. She watches with a godlike eye as the city turns into sand, as the heavens rain dragons upon the Earth.

The Aun come and take the minds of Sirr, turn them into stories, compress them into a form that is like a seed that can bloom in any mind, an eternal life in the space of a book, between blue covers like The Book of Nights. And as the book closes, she feels the Axolotl and Dunyazad and her father there next to her.

Chen’s Dragons are eating wildcode and jinni and everything that makes up the bodies of the Aun. But there is one place on Earth they are not going to touch.

It turns out there is a reason why they call it the Lost Jannah of the Cannon.

A 150-kiloton thermonuclear explosive device in the midst of reaction mass, under a giant shell, an impact shield of boron. A hardened vir running inside a Wang bullet of steel, a 3000-ton projectile with a full-blown spacecraft inside.

The vir inside is tiny, but stories do not take up much space. The only running minds are a boy called Matjek and me. It was him who came up with the design. It is a bookshop, bright and airy, with inviting shelves and nooks and crannies for reading.

Before we launch, he takes a book from one of the shelves, with a blue and silver cover. He looks at the first page and then closes it.

‘I want to read it,’ he says. ‘But I can never remember the stories in my dreams when I wake up.’

‘Something tells me that this one is different,’ I tell him. And then I press the red button in my head.

We sit together and drink tea as the jet of plasma underground takes us up, thousands of Gs and ten times the escape velocity. We are past the Moon before Chen realises we are gone. Then I deploy the solar sails and take us to the Highway.

Mieli is still out there. I made a promise to Perhonen, and I plan to keep it. I am small again, barely more than human. But that doesn’t matter. I just need help from a few friends, and without Josephine in my head, I know where to find them.

There is a smile on my lips as the prince and I steer the ship of stories towards Saturn.

Epilogue

Josephine Pellegrini watches the All-Defector sitting on the beach. The thief disguise is gone, like a discarded skin, and now the creature wears the childlike shape and the serene smile of Matjek Chen. But there is no trace of the Prime in his eyes: only infinite hunger remains. She shudders, turns away and looks at the sea.

‘I always thought you were going to take me, too,’ she says.

‘I’m going to take everything, in the end,’ the All-Defector says. ‘But I still need you.’

He is holding the Kaminari jewel in his lap, like it was a rock he picked up on the beach, space and time in the form of two hands in prayer. ‘Chen was wrong. There was a reason why it did not open for him. It was made to open for you.’

He holds the jewel out to Josephine. She looks at it: the ultimate zoku jewel, the secret of the Spike, the key to Planck locks. She accepts it hungrily. It opens like a flower in her hands.

Something white flutters to the sand. Josephine picks it up. A small rectangle, made from paper. A calling card.

She reads out the text written on it with a beautiful cursive hand.

Jean le Flambeur

Gentleman-Burglar

Will Return when your Zoku Jewels

are Genuine,

it says. And then it, too, is gone, dissolving like a dream.

Mieli is alone in the dark. She watches the guberniya arrive in orbit around Earth and the tidal forces it creates. Its presence alone tears the Gourd apart and makes the blue globe’s white clouds boil. It is raining black things down on humanity’s home, von Neumann machines or worse. Continents change shape and a dark shell spreads over the marble of the planet.

Chen is eating Earth, she thinks. So much for Sirr and all its stories, so much for the lost jannahs.

‘See what you did?’ The pellegrini seethes with rage inside her head. ‘I’m going to tear you apart for this. No Sydan for you, ever, no death, no alinen. I told you I’m not a gentle goddess. When my sisters come for me, I will—’

‘Do your worst,’ Mieli says. ‘I don’t work for you anymore.’ She steels herself for the pain. A part of her looks forward to it. She deserves it, for Sydan, for Perhonen. Perhaps even for the thief.

Something glints in her field of vision. A blue oval, smaller than her hand. Even in the vacuum, it smells faintly of flowers.

The zoku jewel. Perhonen shot me out with the zoku jewel.

It whispers to her, and the pellegrini’s voice becomes like distant rain.

Take me home, she thinks at it. Take me where I really belong.

The jewel glows brighter. Everything is still for a long time. And an eternity later, there is a ship, a zoku ship. Strange beings surround her. Glittering wheels, with faces in the middle, rings of jewels like miniature solar systems. They look like angels or figures from tarot cards. They remind Mieli of someone.

‘Mother,’ Mieli says and drifts to sleep, perfectly happy, in the moment just before it’s time to go home.

Acknowledgements

This was a tough one, for many reasons. So thanks first and foremost to Simon Spanton for his sharp editorial eye and enduring faith.