The Fractal Prince

and skin and soil her silk dress. The soggy fabric crumples around her waist. Little deities ruin her carefully prepared hairdo and trickle down her back.

Tawaddud the diplomat. What am I going to say to a god from beyond the sky when he arrives? The hastily absorbed facts about Sobornost and the envoy swim around in her head. ‘I’m sorry, your brothers rained on me.’

I thought I was so clever. Maybe Duny was right. Maybe I should have stuck to pleasuring jinni.

Her sister stormed into her bedroom at four in the morning, waking her from heavy, languid sleep. Dunyazad did not even look at Tawaddud, just walked to the keyhole-shaped window with a view of Father’s rooftop gardens, yanked the curtains open and stared out at the pre-dawn light. Her shoulders shook ever so slightly, but her voice was flat calm.

‘Get up. Father wants you to escort the Sobornost envoy to look into Alile’s death. We need to get you briefed and ready.’

Tawaddud rubbed her eyes. Abu had summoned a carpet to take them home – he did have jinni bodyguards, after all – and she had collapsed on her bed. She smelled of sweat and Banu Sasan, and a faint warm echo of his touch still clung to her skin. It made her smile even at Duny.

‘Good morning, to you too, sister.’

Duny did not turn around. Her hands were at her sides, squeezed into fists.

‘Tawaddud,’ she said slowly. ‘This is not a game. This is not sneaking away from Chaeremon to flirt with wirer boys. This is not some role you play for a lecherous jinn who cannot bear the phantom pains of his lost manhood. This is about the fate of Sirr. You don’t understand what you are dealing with, what you will have to do. Whatever deal you made with Lord Nuwas, I beg you to let it go. If you don’t want to marry him, so be it. We can find somebody else. If you want to play politics, we can find a way. But do not do this. I ask you in the name of our mother’s soul.’

Tawaddud got up, wrapping a sheet around her.

‘Don’t you think this is what Mother would have wanted?’ she said softly.

Dunyazad turned her head and looked straight at Tawaddud, her eyes two pinpoints of ice, and in the morning light, she did look like their mother. But she did not say a word.

‘Don’t you think I can do it, Duny? A boring babysitting job, is that not what you called it? I was taught everything you were, and more besides. But how would you know? You only ever come to me when you need something.’ She allows herself a half a smile. ‘Besides, it sounds like Father has made a decision.’

Dunyazad’s mouth was a straight line. She squeezed her qarin bottle in one hand, hard.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But there is no room for mistakes. And there is no running away from this one. That’s what you like to do when things get difficult, don’t you?’

‘I will have you to catch me if I fall, sister,’ Tawaddud said. She lowered her voice. ‘I think it’s going to be fun.’

Without another word, Dunyazad took her to one of the muhtasib admin buildings at the top of the Blue Shard. They climbed long, winding stairs to an austere chamber of white stone, with low couches and athar screens, where a dry-lipped, shaven-headed young man in orange robes – a political astronomer, Duny said – told her what she needed to know about the Sobornost.

‘We are confident that the Sobornost power structure is unstable and fragmented,’ he said, staring at her intently. ‘Grav-wave interferometry shows that the guberniyas go through periods of conflict and consolidation.’ He showed her images that looked like eyeballs, heat maps of the planet-sized diamond brains of the Inner System. ‘We know about the hsien-kus, of course. But it is the chens who seem to be the dominant power at the moment. It is them that the hsien-kus are trying to keep happy.’

‘So is it a chen they are sending?’ Tawaddud asked.

‘Probably not. It is more likely that they will send a sumanguru – or several, it could be a bodyship. They are warriors and enforcers of some sort. Policemen. Like Repentants.’

The young man’s voice was eager and breathless. ‘I must say that I envy you this opportunity. To interact with a Founder from the Deep Time. To find out more about all the big questions, even hints – the Cry of Wrath and why they are so vulnerable to wildcode, why they allow our city to exist, why they are building the Gourd, why they haven’t already uploaded Earth—’

The young man’s eyes gleamed with something akin to religious awe. It made Tawaddud’s skin crawl, and she was glad that her sister interrupted him.

‘There is no need for any of that,’ Duny said. ‘Whoever it is, you will start with Alile. You will give the envoy temporary Seals and take them to the Councilwoman’s palace: they know to expect you. All the Repentants there are with House Soarez: they are sympathetic to our cause, as is the Councilwoman’s heir, Salih. Let the envoy investigate as much as they want: I doubt they will do any better than the Repentants. But be careful: we don’t want to alert the rest of the Council to our guest’s presence just yet.’ She turned back to the young man. ‘What do we know about the sumangurus?’

‘Well, our hsien-ku sources are . . . afraid of them.’ The athar screens fill with ghosts of a black-skinned man with a shaved head and scarred face. ‘If what we know about the original is anything to go by, there is a good reason. He escaped a black box upload camp when he was eleven. Became a Fedorovist leader in Central Africa. Single-handedly wiped out gogol trade there.’ The young man licks his lips. ‘Of course, that was before he became a god.’

Dunyazad gave Tawaddud a dark look. ‘Sounds like you two should get along just fine.’

She feels foolish for mocking Duny now. She is not going to forget that. There was more, speculation about alliances between hsien-kus and vasilevs and instructions on how to operate the Repentant jinn ring the young man gave her for safety, Secret Names for emergencies, a Seal for the envoy. Inside the Station, all of it feels absurd, schemes of ants trying to understand the thoughts of gods. Her head aches with fatigue and anxiety.

A river of light flows to the upload platform she is standing on, carrying a group of twenty people or so: upload converts in black Sobornost unifs. Their shaved heads gleam in the rain, and they flinch at every thoughtwisp thunderclap, every scan beam lightning strike. A vasilev – an impossibly handsome blond young man she recognises from statues – shepherds them, moving quickly from one person to the next, touching their shoulders, whispering in their ears.

They all stare at the scan beam target markers – dull metallic circles on the floor in front of them – except for a skinny boy who steals a look at Tawaddud, a hungry, guilty glimpse. He cannot be more than sixteen, but his hollow temples and the grey hue of his skin make him seem older. His lips are blue, and his mouth is a thin line.

Why did you go to the temple where they told you of Fedorov and the Great Common Task and immortality? Tawaddud wonders. Perhaps because they said you were special, that you were clean of wildcode. They taught you exercises to prepare your mind. They told you they loved you. That you would never have to be alone again. But now you are not sure. It is cold in the rain. You don’t know where the thunder is going to take you. Tawaddud smiles at him. You are braver than I was, her smile says. It’s going to be all right.

The boy’s back straightens. He takes a deep breath and looks ahead with the others.

Tawaddud sighs. At least she can still tell lies that men need to hear. Perhaps the envoy won’t be any different.

The air booms like the skin of a drum. The ethereal machinery beneath the Station’s dome moves, coalesces into a whirlpool. A pencil beam comes from above, incandescent finger of a burning god. Tawaddud feels heat on her face as if from a furnace. The ray flickers back and forth, as if writing in the air. She squeezes her eyes shut against the unbearable brightness, but the light only becomes red, filtering through her eyelids. Then it is gone, and