The Fractal Prince

Tawaddud gets up and gently places Arcelia the qarin bird back on her perch. The joints in her hands ache. Artificial entwinement is temporary, but it always leaves a trace. She hopes whatever part of her self-loop is left in the qarin’s mind provides her with some measure of comfort, even if she herself is filled with more disquiet than before. She removes her beemee and sits down. Her legs shake.

Why did he do this? Images of the Alile thing flash through her head. How could he? And why?

He is the father of body thieves. But he said he would never do it again. Is it because of me? Because we could not be together?

She can taste him in the story fragments from the qarin’s mind. The circle and the square. There was something very strange about it: the bare-bones abstraction, like written by a child. Usually, the forbidden stories of the body thieves are addictive, full of danger and cliffhangers and characters that insert themselves into your head and become you. But this is raw, full of a simple desire, a dreamlike need to find something.

And then there is the Secret Name that still echoes in her head like a brass bell.

Sumanguru is staring at her. She looks at him mutely and presses her aching hands against her forehead.

‘My apologies, Lord Sumanguru. It always takes a while to recover.’ What do I tell him? That it was my lover? Who knows what he will do?

She rubs her forehead again, trying to appear weaker than she is – not a difficult task after a night of little sleep, a missed breakfast, a carpet ride and an entwinement. ‘Please give me a moment.’

She gets up and goes to a small pond in the shade of a windmill tree. Tiny rukh birds skim its surface, disturbing her reflection with fluttering wings. She washes her face, not caring that she is ruining her makeup. Her gut is a painful knot. Her skin feels numb. The girl who loved only monsters. But I did not believe he was one, not really. Even if he tried to tell me.

Sumanguru sits very still by the qarin, watching it. She walks back to the circle of sunlight beneath the dome and puts on her smile.

‘Well?’

‘It was noise, for the most part. But Alile was possessed. A body thief took over her body, but she was able to hide her qarin before the invader was in complete control.’

‘What did you learn about this . . . thief?’

‘Only echoes of the story it used as a vector.’

‘That was all?’

‘Yes. But at least we know it was not a suicide.’ She looks down, lets her voice waver, wipes her eyes. ‘I am sorry, Lord Sumanguru. Lady Alile was a family friend.’

‘And the story you told the creature – what was its purpose?’

‘Like I said, it was meant to provide the entwinement with an anchor, a seed of my self-loop in Arcelia’s mind. A children’s tale, nothing more.’

Sumanguru stands up. There is a flick-knife in his hand, suddenly. He opens it slowly. ‘You lie well. But I’ve heard many lies. I know what they sound like.’ He stands very close to Tawaddud, smelling of machines and metal. ‘The truth. What did the bird tell you?’

The knot in Tawaddud’s belly unravels, replaced by anger. She draws herself to her full height. Imagine he is an insolent jinn. ‘Lord Sumanguru, I am the daughter of Cassar Gomelez. In Sirr, being called a teller of tales is very serious. Do you want me to strike you again?’

‘Hrm.’ The gogol touches his lips with his blade. ‘Do you want me to do to you what I did to the bird?’

‘You would not dare.’

‘I serve the Great Common Task. All flesh is the same to me.’ There is that flicker in his eyes again, a softness. Tawaddud’s heart thunders.

‘You will not speak to me in such a tone,’ she hears herself saying. ‘How dare you? You come here and look upon us like we were playthings. Is this your city? Is your great-grandfather Zoto Gomelez, who spoke to the Aun so that the wildcode desert would not swallow us?

‘You may threaten, but you do not just threaten Tawaddud: behind me stand Sirr and the Aun and the desert. They rose up against you, once. They can do so again, if my father speaks the right Names. So show respect, Lord Sumanguru of the Sobornost, or I will strip you of your Seals with a word and you can find out for yourself if wildcode is more forgiving than Tawaddud of the House Gomelez.’

She breathes hard. Tawaddud the diplomat. She squeezes her hands into fists so hard that her jinn rings dig into her flesh.

After a moment, the Sobornost gogol laughs softly, lowers his knife and spreads his hands.

‘You should be a sumanguru,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we can—’

But before Sumanguru can finish, shadows flicker over him. Tawaddud looks up. Against the blue sky, sunlight glints off hundreds of transparent, whirring wings. Fast Ones.

A hundred guns chatter and roar. Glass shatters, and Sumanguru is covered in a shower of shards. Then the barrage of needles comes down like metal rain.

13 THE STORY OF THE WARMIND AND THE KAMINARI JEWEL

The Sobornost fleet falls upon the quantum filth from the shadow of the cosmic string.

The warmind coordinates the attack from the battle vir. The only indulgence to embodiment – and a show of respect for the Prime – he allows himself here is a faint smell of gun oil. Otherwise, he is immersed in the battlespace data, translated and filtered by his metaself. He sees through the eyes of all his copybrothers, from the lowest nanomissile warhead mind to his own elevated branch in the oblast ship.

He needs all of them to surf the deficit angle that the string cuts out of spacetime, a gravitational lensing effect that makes the zoku see double. A scar in the vacuum left by the Spike, the string is less than a femtometer thick, ten kilometres long, looped – and more massive than Earth, accreting clouds of hydrogen and dust like flesh around a bone.

The string swallows several of the warmind’s two hundred raion ships. They die in silent flashes along its length like diamonds in a pellegrini’s necklace. But their sacrifice buys them the element of surprise. The rest of the fleet comes at the zoku ships, two pincers made of fusion and fury.

The enemy ships are large and clumsy compared to the diamonoid wedges and polygons of the Sobornost. Some are elaborate structures like clockwork toys, housing wastefully embodied minds in matter bodies. Others are more ephemeral, soap bubbles full of quantum brains, green and blue and alive: another reason to be disgusted by the messy wet biology of old Earth, their propensity for exploiting long-lived quantum states.

Still, the zokus have tricks up their sleeve. Even outside each others’ lightcones, they perform wild, random manoeuvres that somehow translate into a perfect response to the two converging tentacles of Sobornost ships that vomit strangelet missiles into their midst. Geysers of exotic baryons and gamma rays erupt as the weapons hit, but do far less damage than the warmind intended.

Quantum filth, he thinks. That is what makes his war righteous, how the zoku embrace the unpredictability and uniqueness of quantum mechanics, the no-clone theorem that means that everything dies. Like his brothers, he was made to fight the war against death. And he is not fighting to lose.

At the warmind’s command, the fleet’s Archons compute Nash equilibria that weave the raion streams into flocking, self-organising formations that surround the zoku ships, tries to force the enemy to use strategies where the entanglement they share no longer provides them with an advantage. It is too easy: the zoku disperse, leaving a gap in the middle—

And suddenly the gap is no longer empty. The metacloaks of two large Gun Club zoku ships dissolve, just before they fire. They dwarf even the oblast ship: spheres with linear accelerator tails, several kilometres long. They fire Planck-scale black holes that evaporate in violent Hawking climaxes, converting mountains’ worth of matter into energy. What are they doing here?