The Fractal Prince

came to visit them they let her be chased by the jagged, slow-moving monster through a labyrinth they built; she shrieked with glee. But eventually, the Big Idea of what they really wanted to make started to emerge.

They called it the Chain. A hundred ice spheres laboriously crafted, decorated with bright designs that drew the eye and made you dizzy as you drifted through them. All strung together with unbreakable Jovian q-dot fibres and dancing slowly in the gravity well of the Moon-sized mass they called Pohja. The tertiary structure they modelled after that of a protein, found local minima for the Chain’s Lagrangian function so that it would fold itself into intricate shapes, creatures of myth and flowers and fractals.

It was slow work. The blackness was always there, just beyond the skin of their secondskins and the icy walls of the little garden Mieli built. She lit it up with a soletta and filled it with zero-g plants that reminded her of Grandmother’s garden. Sydan said it was a weakness and lived in her secondskin, a tiny little ecosystem, algae and respirator nanos flowing in tubes around her body, face glowing with fierce independence as she traversed the growing Chain. There was a lot of waiting, waiting for the Chain to fold, waiting for the vaki in the ice to grow and complete the tasks they sang to it.

And as they waited, they talked.

‘I don’t want to be a ghost in the ice like the ancestors,’ Sydan said. ‘There are better places. When I was little, a Jovian ambassador came to our koto. He was just a seed that had to be planted. We brought it food, and it gave us dreams as presents. They showed places where you really are immortal, or live many lives at once. I don’t care about what the elders say. I don’t care about knowing the fifty names of ice. I want to live. I want to see the Inner System. I want to see the sky cities on Venus. I want to see Earth.’

In Mieli’s koto, the children told stories about Earth. The burning place, the place of pain, where tuonetars bind the damned dead with viper ropes and whip them with iron chains, where you drink dark waters and forget who you are. Where the Great Tree grew and was cut down. Where the people of her koto lived until Ilmatar carried them away.

Mieli preferred stories about Seppo the megabuilder who sang a starship out of ice and sailed to another galaxy to find his love, the Daughter of the Spider, or Lemmi the thief who stole one of Kuutar’s twelve lives, ate it, burst open and became the first of the Little Suns. The Earth stories always gave her nightmares, troubled dreams where she would crawl along the shores of a dark river, her body pressed down by the heavy hand of gravity, face scraping against the black rough gravel, certain that the tuonetars were just behind her but without strength to run or fly.

‘Why would you want to go there?’ she asked.

Sydan laughed. ‘I bet you believe all the stories, don’t you? The elders make that stuff up. I can see that you would have to take it seriously. After all, you have to be better than everybody else at everything. Because you are not from Oort. Because you are the tithe child, given to us to raise. The converts are always the most fervent believers.’

‘I’m not allowed to talk about that,’ Mieli said.

‘There was a book an ancestor gave me, one of the really old ones, from Earth,’ Sydan said. ‘There was this baby who was raised by presapient monkeys. He became their king. I always thought that’s the way you must feel, with all this. Smarter, better, stronger.’ She pauses. ‘More beautiful.’

‘I don’t want to be a queen.’

‘You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be,’ Sydan said. ‘And you don’t have to believe everything they tell you.’

‘But why Earth? What is there?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t you want to find out? What is so terrible that they have to hide it in nightmare stories?’

‘That’s heresy,’ Mieli said.

‘No,’ Sydan said. ‘What is heresy is you sitting here with me, a lightsecond from every other living soul, eating me with your eyes, and not doing anything about it.’

She kissed Mieli then, sudden warm softness beneath the slick cold secondskin, pulled away and laughed at her startled expression. ‘Come on, monkey queen,’ she said. ‘The Chain is not going to bind itself!’

In the end, Mieli followed Sydan. But they never made it to Earth.

She wonders what Sydan would think about her now, looking at Earth from the pilot’s creche. The blue globe is covered in a spiderweb of shadows, sharp black knives in the white and azure. The dark lines are cast by the Gourd, a frame of silver arcs that stretch around the planet in an oval shape, in geostationary orbits, over a hundred thousand kilometres in diameter.

There are gaps in the silver structure, so that it looks like two skeletal hands, slowly closing around an eyeball. Where two or more arcs join there are hexagonal loops, bright with light and activity, streams of thoughtwisps, raions and oblasts, a few mercenary ships.

From one of the poles, the thin wire of the Silver Road stretches to the Moon, where Sobornost machines are eating the crust of the satellite, transporting the matter to be forged into a cage for Earth.

Dear Kuutar, Mieli thinks. Let me unsee this.

Sobornost has been slowly building it for nearly twenty years. Why would they be doing it if not to guard against something evil inside? The ship’s databanks have no information on the purpose of the Gourd: common speculation in the Inner System is that it is created by the hsien-kus as a sensor array, to increase the fidelity of their ancestor virs.

You should not be here, the old goddesses of Oort tell her. This place is forbidden.

It is just a rock, she tells herself, refusing to pray, refusing to ask the metacortex to turn off the regions in her brain that seethe with religious terror. It’s just water and rock and ruins.

She thinks about the journey, the sauna, the Oortian food, all her efforts to prepare herself for this. She is supposed to be Mieli, a heretic Oortian mercenary, come to seek her fortune in the wildcode desert in the pay of the muhtasib families of Sirr. Instead, she feels like a child who has woken up from a bad dream and found it real.

In the last hour, I have been offered immortality eight thousand times, the ship says. I hate negotiating with vasilevs. But I got us an orbit and a docking station in one of the mercenary hubs. They call themselves the Teddy Bear Roadside Picnic Company, if you can believe that – are you all right?

‘I didn’t think it would be this hard,’ Mieli says. ‘I have not been in Oort for years. I fought in the Protocol War. I saw black holes eat moons. I saw a Singularity on Venus. I serve a goddess who rules a guberniya. And I still feel like I shouldn’t be here, like the tuonetars will get me if we go there.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Why is that?’

Because you are still Mieli, the ship says, the daughter of Karhu of Hiljainen Koto, the beloved of Sydan, who knows the songs of Oort. And if we do this right, you will always be.

Mieli smiles. ‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘And at least I’ll get to tell Sydan I made it here first.’

Perhonen drifts along one of the Gourd ribs. It is an endless band of Sobornost faces, surrounded by the glitter of constructor dust, like the largest rainbow in the world. The mercenary docking bay is the open of mouth of a vast hsien-ku face. Mieli reels in the ship’s wings and floats in.

The image of the recruiter of the Teddy Bear Roadside Picnic Company appears in the spimescape. He is a round, bearlike creature, an ursomorph with visible Sobornost enhancements. Diamond spikes protrude from his spine and thick head like icicles. But his eyes are very human and blue, with a suspicious look.

‘What do you want?’ he asks.

‘What do you think?’ Mieli says. ‘I want to go to the wildcode desert to hunt the dead.’

18 THE THIEF AND THE GOURD