The Fractal Prince

In Amtor City, the dawn lasts for ever, the eye of the sun orange and red, painting the thick milky clouds in colours she has never seen in Oort, in the land of ice and dirty snow. The city rides the hot winds at the terminator, racing daylight: a bubble of q-stone and diamond with a city of fairy towers inside, all tall tensegrity spires and twined candyfloss. A civilisation dancing on the breath of Venus, fifty kilometres above the surface.

The viewing bubbles on the edge of the city provide a perfect view, and Mieli is content just to sit and enjoy it by herself. Being alone is a strange sensation after the journey, after all that time together under the thin skin of the spider-ship, light hours from the Kuiper belt, months surfing the Highway manifold.

But perhaps it is not enough to look at the dawn. Perhaps she should go —

‘Hey, Oort girl. Want a peach?’

The voice startles her. There is a boy on the next bench, perhaps sixteen years old, with dark skin that looks coppery in the Venerian dawn-light. He is wearing storybook clothes: jeans and a T-shirt, loose on his skinny frame. His hair is thin and grey, but his eyes are young and piercingly blue. He sits with his knees up, hands folded behind his head, leaning back. There is a backpack next to him.

‘How do you know I come from Oort?’ Mieli asks.

‘Oh, you know.’ The youth strokes his chin. ‘You have the look. Like planets are too big for you. Peach?’

He reaches into his backpack, pulls out a golden orb and throws it at her. She almost fails to catch it, unused to the quick parabolic arcs in the gravity. She blushes.

‘It is not too big,’ Mieli says. ‘Just too much gravity.’ She walks to the bench, self-conscious of her gait: she keeps feeling that she’ll fall through the floor any minute and walks carefully, as if the ground was made of thin glass. The boy moves his backpack and she sits down next to him, grateful.

‘So, why are you not out there, in the air, flying? That should make it easier.’

Mieli takes a bite of the peach. It is sweet and yielding, with a trace of bitterness, like Venerian air.

‘And you? Why are you not flying?’ she asks.

‘Well,’ says the boy. ‘You’re here, for one thing. Prettiest girl I’ve ever seen, all alone in the city of the gods.’ He bites his lip. ‘Or maybe I just don’t like flying.’

Mieli sits on the bench next to the boy and finishes eating the peach in silence. She keeps the peach stone in her mouth. Its surface is rough, and she imagines that that is what the venera firma below would feel like if she could reach out and touch it with her tongue. Uneven basalt, sticky almost-liquid air and bitter acid.

‘My . . . woman is out there,’ she says. Talking to someone who is not Sydan or Perhonen feels good. ‘We came here yesterday. It is very strange here. She likes it. I do not.’

‘I didn’t even think Oortians came this far to the Inner System. Not that I’m complaining, of course.’

For a moment, she wants to tell the story to someone. We met building big things and fell in love. We fought in a war, tribes against tribes. Everyone thought we were dead. So Sydan decided we might as well be. But the look in the boy’s eyes is too intense.

‘It’s a long story,’ she says aloud. ‘How did you know I wasn’t one of them?’ She gestures at the white winged figures in the clouds, now almost invisible in the distance.

‘The peach,’ says the boy. ‘They don’t eat. Not like you did, anyway.’ He grins. ‘It’s also symbolic. Paris gave it to the prettiest goddess.’

He flatters well, says Perhonen. Better than Sydan, almost.

‘You agreed that I am not a goddess,’ Mieli says.

‘You’ll do. Until I find the real one.’

‘That doesn’t sound like a compliment.’

‘Sorry,’ the boy says. ‘I meant that literally. I’m here for the quake. When the city falls. When the Sobornost gods come out.’

What is he talking about? Mieli whispers to Perhonen.

I have no idea, the ship says.

The boy sees her confusion. ‘Do you know what a Bekenstein quake is?’ he asks.

‘No. But perhaps I should.’

‘That’s what happens to all the Wind Cities. That’s why everybody comes here. Pilgrims and posthumans and monsters and godlings, from the Belt and the Oubliette and even zoku, from Jupiter and Saturn. They come here to be taken by the Sobornost, to give themselves to the Great Common Task.

‘The city falls. The Sobornost machines take it. They collapse it to Planck scale. There is a singularity. The information density goes beyond the Bekenstein bound. You get a little black hole: so small it’s not stable. So it blows up, beneath the crust. It’s a fantastic lightshow. And it’ll happen here soon.’ There is a wistful look in the boy’s eyes.

‘The goddess will come after the quake, to gather her children, to soak up the Hawking radiation. I’m here to meet her. And to give her a peach of immortality.’

Mieli stands up. Her body still feels so heavy it might be encased in lead, but she does not care.

‘She didn’t tell me,’ she says quietly. She didn’t tell me! she screams at Perhonen. You didn’t tell me!

I didn’t want to interfere, the ship protests. I thought she was going to tell you.

‘Thank you,’ she tells the boy quietly. ‘I hope you find your goddess.’

‘Oh, I will,’ he says, but Mieli is already running, towards the edge of the city and the clouds and the fifty- kilometre fall. She spreads her arms, opens her wings and leaps.

Sydan turns it into a chase, just like they used to do in the Chain in Oort. It always ends the same way, and by the time Sydan lets Mieli catch her, she is no longer angry.

They make love on Venus for the first time in a q-dot bubble above the Cleopatra Crater, on the slopes of Maxwell Montes, leaving them exhausted and bathing in the honey-coloured light of the clouds, wrapped around each other. Mieli traces the silvery lines of scars where Sydan’s wings used to be. The other woman shivers with pleasure, and then shifts in her embrace.

‘Look, you can see a guberniya from here,’ Sydan says, pointing up. And there it is, a bright evening star. A diamond eye in the sky, one of the homes of the deep Sobornost gods: an artificial sphere the size of old Earth, made from sunlifted carbon, thinking thoughts bigger than the sum of humanity. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel funny? How far we have come?’

Mieli feels cold. She touches Sydan’s cheek.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m afraid of this place,’ Mieli says. ‘We did not have to come here. The sunsmiths told us about Jovian polises, and the red planet where they drink wine and listen to old Earth music. Why are we here?’

Sydan turns away, hugging her knees. She takes her jewelled chain – fashioned after their first Great Work – and starts wrapping it around her left forearm.

‘You know why,’ she says.

‘Why do you want to be a goddess?’

Sydan looks at her, her lips a stern line in the dark, but says nothing.

‘You want to fall with the city,’ says Mieli. ‘A pilgrim told me. Be a thought in its mind when it dies.’

‘It’s a dream, all right? My dream,’ says Sydan. ‘Kirkkaat Kutojat think they are so good. Let’s all build ice bridges to the stars, let’s be free. Fine. Great. But we die. We die and become ghosts. The ancestors are not us, not really: just shades and memories and bones of ice. I don’t want that. Not ever.’ She touches Mieli just above the heart with her chained hand. ‘We could do it together.’

Mieli shakes her head slowly.

‘You were right. All my life they told me that I’m special,’ she says. ‘The tithe child, Grandmother’s pet. But none of that is as special as the me that is with you. I want to be that, just that, for a while. It’s the fear of losing it that makes it special. If it was for ever, it would not matter as much.’

Sydan says looks at Amtor City, a distant amber bubble in the sky, like a snowglobe.