The Fractal Prince

this woman called Tawaddud—’

‘The woman you had arrested for murders she did not commit?’

‘Never mind, that was a bad example—’

‘You are going to steal his consciousness? His soul? His self?’

‘I would say it’s more like borrowing—’

‘No. Absolutely not. We are not going to do this. This is where I draw the line. You will find another way.’

‘I don’t see what the problem is,’ the thief says, exasperated. ‘We know what Chen wants – a childlike version of himself. So we are going to give it to him. Your job is done. It’s my show from now on.’

‘The answer is no. We do something else.’

‘Something else is what I tried last time, Mieli. It got me arrested and I died more deaths than you can imagine. Your doppelganger experience down there was nothing compared to what I went through. I’m never going back. And this will work. I’m doing it not just for me, I’m doing it for you, for Sydan. Perhonen told me the story—’

You did what? Mieli screams at the ship in her mind.

I’m sorry, Mieli, he had to know so we could—

Mieli shakes her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. My people – we don’t do this. We have—’

‘Your people do not augment themselves with a metacortex, let themselves be uploaded into Dilemma Prisons, kill gogols with ghostguns built into their hands or with lasers from orbit, am I right? Do they turn themselves into entire armies and then just let their other selves die? Face it – you have crossed a line, we both have, and there is no coming back.’

‘That’s not what Jean le Flambeur would say,’ Mieli says.

‘Perhaps I am not Jean le Flambeur.’ The thief covers his eyes with both hands.

‘Look, the stakes are high. The pellegrini needs this. It’s the only way out for both of us. And that’s not all. If what I saw in the Box before you broke it is true, then the System itself is not going to be a happy place if the chen gets what he wants.’

‘Perhaps it would be better to die before that,’ Mieli says.

Then the pellegrini is there, a white figure standing by the thief’s side.

‘Stop this tantrum right now, Mieli. We are going to go ahead with Jean’s plan. Or have you forgotten what happens when you disobey me?’ She raises her hand. Her ring glints, sharp and bright.

Mieli closes her eyes.

This is why I had to die a thousand times. To be here and not be afraid anymore.

‘Now I see what you both are,’ she whispers. ‘You are just the same. You will never change. If you change, you will die. And you will always be afraid of the Dark Man.’

She can feel the pellegrini unfolding in her head, a dullness spreading into her limbs.

‘I’m sorry, Perhonen,’ she says.

Then she screams a fragment of the song that made the ship, the last note she sang, the song of ending. Perhonen’s systems respond and send a cry across the System.

Jean le Flambeur is here.

She watches the pellegrini letting the thief loose from his chains, trying to escape. The thief stares at her, blank-faced, tears in his eyes.

The Hunter comes. Beams of light cut through Perhonen. The knife-things are everywhere. One of them hovers in front of Mieli, its point sharp like the final note of her song.

I’m sorry too, Mieli, Perhonen says. I always loved you more than she did.

The ship’s EM field grabs her. The acceleration is black light in her eyes. And then the Dark Man kisses her hard.

All my constraints are gone, but it’s too late. The Hunter comes fast and furious, this time. I watch Mieli disappear, and feel a strange sense of relief. Then I’m too busy being burnt alive.

Get us out of this and you will be free, Josephine whispers.

Perhonen!

Burn, you bastard.

The atmosphere. The Hunter can’t handle the wildcode.

Neither can we.

Let’s take our chances. Please?

The ship fires its antimatter engines. We dive into the blue globe, enveloped by a swarm of Hunters. I watch the clouds and the seas and the continents as white light takes me apart, cell by cell, atom by atom—

28 THE PRINCE AND THE MIRROR

‘And that’s how I got caught the last time,’ the thief says, leaning back on the sand. The dream vir’s sky is full of images: Earth ablaze with white fire, the Gourd torn apart around it, the guberniya’s huge diamond eye.

‘The Hunter came, and here I am.’ He looks at Matjek. ‘That’s exactly what I would have told the other Matjek in the jannah, you know. You might as well drop this charade. Trying to be more innocent is not going to get the Kaminari jewel to accept you just like that.’

‘Being innocent suits me,’ Matjek says. ‘It was a good excuse to go through my Library. And your story was a wonderful attempt to hack into my mind. Unfortunately, I have a very good metaself that has been looking out for any signs of a le Flambeur self-loop.’

‘It must have been a blow to your ego to be rejected by the Kaminari jewel,’ the thief says. ‘The zokus have their eccentricities, but they did hit on something with the whole extrapolated volition thing. Calculating the effects of your wish on the maximum happiness of the whole zoku. I guess no gogol of yours so far has met the criteria the jewel has.’

‘We’ll see,’ Matjek says.

The old woman comes to them with tired steps. Her face is lined and wrinkled, ancient and withered, but there is a proud look in her eyes.

‘Gloating does not suit you, Matjek,’ she says and sits down on the sand wearily. ‘You are being very careful: a vir within a vir within a vir. Still, you might have some trouble with the creatures they call the Aun.’

‘When it comes to the Aun, I have certain advantages,’ Matjek says. He frowns. No matter what he told the thief, he hates being young-old: the kaleidoscopic awareness of all his other selves in the guberniya around them is always there, waiting to pull him back to give them commands, to tell them a story of themselves. He is the Prime, after all, the Self of the chens.

‘There is a reason why sobortech is so very vulnerable to the Aun,’ he says. ‘Stories. The hsien-kus never figured it out. The Aun insert themselves into gogol brains. Minds are their native environment.’

‘And how do you know that?’ the thief asks.

‘Because I made them. Or at least set them free. They were never very grateful. Just like I made the Dragons, who have no self-loop, no eudaimon. It’s convenient to deploy them to fight my older creations, don’t you think?’ Matjek laughs. His other selves show him images of Earth. He feels like he has just kicked an anthill, a nasty sort of pleasure that makes him feel a little bit guilty. But it is made all the better by that.

Josephine looks at him in horror. ‘You sent Dragons to Earth. They will eat everything. There will be nothing left.’