The Fractal Prince

‘I have children myself,’ he says. ‘A boy and a girl. They are already in the program. I can’t tell you what comfort it gives me, every night. The old nightmare of a parent. They say that after you have a child, every night is full of fear. We want to help you to carry that fear, to take away the fangs of death.’

‘I’m still not sure about this,’ says the man, Bojan Chen, Matjek Chen’s father. ‘There are just so many philosophical issues—’

‘Of course, I understand,’ says Perenna. ‘There is philosophy – loving wisdom – and then there is love. We at Jannah are more interested in the latter.’

‘We talked about this already,’ the woman says, firmly. Her grip on Bojan’s forearm tightens. The sensors in the office are good enough that I can watch the decision-making processes unfold in their brains. Perenna has them hooked.

‘All right,’ the young man says. ‘Let’s see it.’

The screens show structures that look like underground bunkers. ‘Powered by geothermal energy and fusion. With a unique backup feature. Secret location.’ Damn it. I’m going to go through Jannah’s records in more detail.

‘We can guarantee absolute security. It will survive even an asteroid impact. The clockspeed within will be slow by default, with periodic synchronisation—’

I was right. There is a secret gogol of Matjek Chen, buried somewhere on Earth. That’s going to be the key to the operation. That, and the body thieves. I craft a coded message to Mieli and send it out, into the Sobornost thoughtwisp network.

The vir freezes.

‘What an interesting discovery,’ Hsien-ku Quintic Equations says. ‘Extraordinary! Quite a scholarly achievement for somebody from your copyclan.’

‘What do you want?’ I say in Sumanguru’s growl.

‘I was merely making sure that you found whatever it was that you were looking for. I couldn’t imagine anything like this. How did you come across it? A new fragment of the lives of the Chens.’

‘I would not advise you to interfere,’ I say. The bitch set me up.

She nods politely.

‘Of course not. However, I would ask you for a favour.’

I get it: it’s going to be a blat game. The problem with central planning is that you always end up getting out of sync with it, and there are alternative ways to get things done. I should have known. The hsien-kus are sufficiently far from the deep guberniya time that they play fast and loose with the Plan.

‘There is a small matter requiring attention in the flesh-realm of Sirr, and your assistance would be much appreciated . . .’

19 TAWADDUD IN THE PALACE OF STORIES

I’m climbing down the Gomelez Shard of Sirr like a spider, with the wildcode desert behind my back. The desert looks like a city at night, full of faintly glowing lines and patterns that the eye gets lost in. So I keep focused on Tawaddud Gomelez who climbs a few metres above me, sleek body clad in black Sealed fabric, deftly finding one handhold after another. You learn a few things growing up in a vertical city, I suppose.

I appreciate the view. That is about the only good thing about this part of the job. As heights go, it doesn’t get much worse than this. The Shard on the desert side is a sheer, smooth surface: only the occasional crack in the old dead smartmatter provides any purchase whatsoever. I cling to it tenuously with the tiny spikes from my palms and the soles of my bare feet, hugging it like a lover, trying to ignore the hundreds of metres of empty space below us.

On paper, as plans go, it’s not bad: avoiding Cassar Gomelez’s Repentant guards by climbing down the outside of the Wall, where the jinni don’t like to go, wearing mutalibun gear to shield us from the wildcode wind. In reality, it’s harder. In spite of the heavy fabric, there are already little sparks in my field of vision that indicate wildcode working its way into my brain.

‘We should have stolen a bloody magic carpet,’ I mutter for the fourth time. But Tawaddud would not hear of it: that would have given us away immediately.

Instead, she dug up a concoction from the spiderwoman of Banu Sasan that she made me drink, a bitter and sticky greenish fluid: still, whatever nanites it introduced into my Sobornost-compiled body worked. I don’t really get Sirr technology, if you can call it that: creating geometric shapes and words that create mind-states that activate ancient hidden commands in the athar – their name for spimescape – reverse- engineering the brain-computer interface of old nanotech. And then there are the Secret Names that seem to go even deeper, and have something to do with the wildcode.

What the hell are you doing, Jean?

Perhonen’s voice in my head almost makes me lose my grip. For a moment, I swing one-handed over the abyss. The rope that attaches me to Tawaddud goes taut. She looks down, but I gesture to assure her it’s okay.

‘Keep it down, damn it,’ I tell the ship. ‘Where have you been?’

It took a while for the pellegrini to get me access to the Gourd comms systems.

‘So she has been busy. What about Mieli?’

She has her mercenary identity firmly in place.

‘Good. We are not the only ones after the jannah, but the plan has worked so far. I have a feeling that somebody is going to be hiring a lot of mercenaries soon. If she can join up with the right crowd, we’ll be in a position to move.’

And the . . . other thing?

‘That’s why I’m pretending to be a spider at the moment.’

You know I don’t like this, Jean. And now you are making the poor girl promises you can’t keep.

‘I always keep my promises, you know that—’

Don’t go there.

‘Now is not the time to start getting cold feet. We had a deal, remember?’

As long as you keep your end of the bargain. By the way, the pellegrini says that there is quite a lot of unusual activity in the Gourd, too. The hsien-kus are up to something. And it’s hard to do this kind of thing discreetly. I may have to—

Suddenly, the voice of the ship is gone. I swear under my breath. But we have come too far to turn back now. I gesture again at Tawaddud. Another two hundred metres down. My body feels battered and aching. It’s like having a cold. When I instantiated it from the Gourd systems, I was not able to include any of the serious enhancements from the Sobornost body the pellegrini gave me – it’s still in stasis aboard Perhonen. And wildcode is making a serious mess of my innards. I’m hoping I can survive as long as it takes to get the job done.

And then I need my escape route to work, too.

Tawaddud yanks on the rope. Below us is what looks like a viewing gallery, unlit.

Just as I cut through its Sealed glass, my q-tool sputters and dies, changing shape. I swear and eject it with a yelp. It vanishes into the darkness below, twisting and sputtering like a firecracker as it goes.

‘Try this,’ Tawaddud says and hands me an old-fashioned tool: a diamond attached to a metal compass.

Diamonds are worthless in Sirr: children go and gather them from where the Sobornost ships fell during the Cry of Wrath. There is some pleasure in using what must have run a thousand Sobornost gogols as a sharp instrument for breaking and entering. After a few moments of work, I remove a circular disc of glass carefully, and we slip in.