The Fractal Prince

through either. You’ll have some surprise for me on the other side, no doubt. But you are right: you did give me a way out, this time.’ It moves aside, and I see what is lying on the ground.

In life, she had blue dreadlocks and pale skin that stands out even against the white snow. She looks younger than I expected, or perhaps it is the laughing eyes and the piercing in her lower lip. But when I see the black and red ruin that her body is from neck downwards I have to turn away and retch.

‘She came through first,’ the tiger says. ‘I made it quick. Not very satisfying, of course, not much meat. But there were EPR states inside her, for qupting, for connecting her to your ship. Perhonen, I believe she is called. Or was.’

I try to get up. ‘Bastard. I should have let you rot here.’

‘Thinking about you gave me the strength to keep going. You and Chen and death.’ The tiger’s grin is somewhere between human and animal. ‘But it’s your turn first. We’ll go somewhere else to have a little talk.’

The forest melts like snow. For a moment, we stand in the bone-white of the firmament, running in Perhonen’s synthbio core. Then the tiger roars its Founder code at the vir – dead children and rust and fire and blood – and rewrites the world.

Mieli does not need combat autism to blanket her rage. She rides it, blinks into the spimescape, fires her ghostgun at the ship’s walls, launches Godel bombs into Perhonen’s systems. The weapons. The self-replicating logic of her attack software burns through the infected systems like wildfire. The butterfly thing – Sumanguru – is too fast for her: it isolates the synthbio core from her attack. But that’s not what she is aiming for.

For a moment, the weapons systems are hers. She thinks a q-dot torpedo around the ship’s last remaining strangelet bomb, subatomic fury and chaos she can fire with a blink.

She opens her eyes.

‘I don’t care if you are the Dark Man himself,’ she says. ‘I’ll take out the router and both of us with it if you don’t let Perhonen go.’

Sumanguru’s butterfly face looks more human now, heavy jaw and forehead and nose and what look like scars, sketched by flickering wings. But the eyes are hollow.

‘Be my guest, little girl,’ it says. ‘Go ahead. I don’t have much to live for. Do you?’

The trigger burns in her mind like a candle. It would be so easy. One thought, and the strangelet will end it all, wash her away in gamma ray and baryon rain.

‘Here’s the deal,’ Sumanguru says. ‘You disarm whatever trap le Flambeur has on the Realmgate. I come out. You get your ship back. Everybody is happy. How does that sound?’

What happens if she dies here? The pellegrini will bring another Mieli back. Choices like precious gems. It could all be up to someone else, not her. Saving Sydan. Dealing with the thief. Another her could do it, and it would not make a difference to anyone.

Except to Perhonen.

She feels the ship’s pain, its systems seething with an alien presence, her song defiled. I can’t let her down.

‘Well?’

‘You win,’ Mieli says.

10 TAWADDUD AND ALILE

Councilwoman Alile is a labyrinth.

Tawaddud watches her move behind the haze of Seals. It makes her think of the nursery rhyme Chaeremon the jinn used to sing to her.

It is in our food, it is in the air, it’s even in our hearts and that’s just not fair. But if you keep a clean mind, whisper Secret Names to the Aun kind, if you do what you are told, you too can tame wildcode—

Alile fills the bright, tetrahedral workspace of her palace on the Soarez Shard almost completely.

She is a tangle of glowing sapphire pathways, transparent fleshy cables and blooms of tiny, waving tendrils. She stretches across the floor and up the walls and around tables and statues like some exotic sea creature, graceful in the ocean depths but limp and helpless washed up on the beach. Some of her has grown into the walls, merging with the clear diamonoid tiles of the palace, pushing through towards the outside world in spiky branches. In the middle of the web is a misshapen sac that looks like the belly of a mosquito, filled with blood, with knotted organs floating inside it, pulsing.

The haze of the Seals in the hallway – silver and golden graffiti in the air that the muhtasibs have woven around the infected part of the Alile’s palace – obscures some of it, but not enough. There is a stinging smell of burning dust and metal in the air.

Tawaddud tries to look at her like a doctor. She has seen wildcode do terrible things to her patients, but this—

After a few seconds, she has to turn away and cover her nose and mouth with a hand.

‘I did warn you,’ Rumzan the Repentant says.

Alile visited Tawaddud’s father once. She was a dour-looking woman, spare and lean, with a weather-beaten face, dressed in the stark, practical clothing of a mutalibun, with straps and hooks for Seal armour, athar glasses hanging around her neck. Alile’s hair was black and long, but she had a continent-shaped patch of rough, hairless sapphire in her skull, making her look like one of Duny’s old dolls, with some of its hair torn out in a tantrum.

Unlike normal muhtasibs who carried their jinn companions around in a jar, Alile’s qarin lived in a mechanical bird, with feathers of gold and scarlet and eyes of ebony, made from a metal so thin and delicate it could actually fly. Tawadudd always imagined it amongst the rukh swarm that carried Alile’s ship to the desert, giving its mistress eyes that saw the wildcode storms and mad jinni. Her name is Arcelia. She is the sensible half of me, Alile said.

Tawaddud wanted nothing more than to be like Alile.

But this is why you should not become a mutalibun.

Tawaddud becomes aware of Sumanguru standing next to her.

‘What can you tell me about what happened here?’ he asks Rumzan. The Sobornost gogol was silent throughout their brief carpet ride from the Station, indifferent to the vistas of Sirr below them. Matter: what kinds of heaps it’s piled up in makes no difference, he said, when she asked if Sirr pleased him. But now his eyes are alive, full of cold curiosity.

Rumzan spreads his skeletal fingers. He is a thin, elongated creature whose wispy feet barely touch the ground. His body is covered in intricate, interlocking tiles of white, red and black that make him look like a living mosaic: by Sirr law, jinni thought-forms cannot look human. He has a glowing golden symbol on his forehead, indicating Repentant rank, third circle. The jinni policemen rarely wear visible shapes – their primary task is to stay invisible, root out crime and body thieves. Rumzan smells faintly of ozone, and every now and then he becomes grainy and crackles. To Tawaddud, he seems familiar, from one of her father’s parties, perhaps.

‘We have a partial reconstruction of the lady’s movements yesterday from athar traces,’ Rumzan says. ‘She arrived back from an early Council meeting around nine in the morning. We can provide a record of the meeting and her schedule, although you will have to request access to the detailed minutes from the Council.’ Rumzan makes a high-pitched humming sound.

‘I understand that may be a somewhat . . . delicate matter. In any case, the Councilwoman took her lunch in the rooftop garden alone, went up to her private observatory and then went into her office.’ He points at the wildcode-filled space ahead.

‘Then – the infection hit. It was so violent and sudden that we can only assume she had a Sealed container with a wildcode-infested object in it, which she opened. From speaking to the housekeeper jinni, I understand she