The Fractal Prince

‘Very well,’ Duny says. ‘Perhaps there are some things Father really should know about.’

Tawaddud squeezes her eyes shut. Her temples throb. It’s the Aun punishing me. Maybe I deserve it.

Maybe Father will look at me again.

‘Fine,’ she says slowly. She feels weak and cold. ‘I only hope I’m unusual enough.’

‘Wonderful!’ Duny gets up and claps her hands. Her jewellery and jinn rings tingle. ‘Don’t look so glum. It’s going to be fun!’

She looks at Tawaddud, up and down, and frowns. ‘But we are going to have to do something about your hair.’

3 THE THIEF AND THE ARREST

I enter the main cabin hesitantly. If the ship is worried, Mieli might really be in a bad mood, and I hate getting beaten up by an Oortian warrior when I’m tired.

I don’t have to look far. She floats in the middle of the cabin, eyes closed, dark, almond-shaped face illuminated by soft candlelight, wrapped in her usual dark toga-like garment like a caterpillar in her cocoon.

‘Mieli, we need to talk,’ I say. No response.

I pull myself along the cabin axis and orient myself to face her. Her eyes are closed, and she barely seems to be breathing. Great. She must be in some sort of Oortian trance. Figures: live on berries in a hollowed-out comet lit by artificial suns long enough, and you start to have delusions about achieving enlightenment

‘This is important. I need to have a word with your boss.’ Maybe she’s in a piloting trance. I once got her out of it by exploiting our biot link, but it took pushing a sapphire dagger through my hand. I have no desire to repeat the experience – and besides, the link is gone. I snap my fingers in front of her face. Then I touch her shoulder.

‘Perhonen, is she all right?’ I ask the ship. But there is no reply.

‘Mieli, this isn’t funny.’

She starts laughing, a soft, musical sound. She opens her eyes and smiles like a serpent.

‘Oh, but it is,’ she says. In my mind, a prison door opens and closes. Not the Dilemma Prison, but another one, a long time ago.

Maybe I should have stayed inside.

‘Hello, Josephine.’

‘You never called,’ she says. ‘I’m hurt.’

‘Well, on Mars, you seemed to be a little short on time,’ I say. Her eyes narrow dangerously. Perhaps it’s not a good strategy to remind her that I ended our last night together by having her thrown off the planet by Oubliette authorities.

Then again, perhaps it is.

‘Josephine Pellegrini,’ I repeat her name. There should be memories that come with it, but they, too, are behind the closed door. That is not surprising: she has probably done some careful editing of my memories herself. If you are a Sobornost Founder, you can do that sort of thing.

‘So you figured it out,’ she says.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Oh, that was for your own good, my sweet,’ she says. ‘You’ve spent a couple of centuries running away from me. I didn’t want you to be distracted.’ She touches the middle finger of her left hand, as if adjusting a ring. ‘And do you know what happens when you try to escape your fate?’

‘What would that be?’

She leans closer.

‘You lose yourself. You become a petty thief, a magpie, chasing after shiny things. You need me to be something more.’ She touches my face. Her hand is smooth and cold.

‘I gave you a chance to steal yourself back. You failed. You are still the little thing from the Dilemma Prison, good for nothing except guns and games. I thought you could be a seed for something greater. I was wrong.’ Her eyes are hard. ‘You are not Jean le Flambeur.’

That stings, but I swallow it. Her tone is soft, but there is a glint of genuine anger in her eyes. Good.

I brush her hand away.

‘Then we are two,’ I say, ‘because I don’t think you are Josephine Pellegrini. You are just a gogol. Maybe from one of the older branches, sure. But you are not a Prime. You would never send an important part of yourself to do a job like this. You are just a low-level Founder ghost, running a rogue operation. I want to talk to the Prime.’

‘And what makes you think you deserve that?’ she says.

‘Because you need me to steal a Spike fragment from Matjek Chen. I know how to do it. And I want a better deal.’

She laughs. ‘Oh, Jean. You failed, last time. All you were— Oh my, I can’t even tell you— Cognitive architectures stolen from the zoku and us alike. Machines made with a sunlifting factory. The perfect disguise. And still you were like a child compared to him, the father of Dragons. And you are telling me you know how to do it now? Oh, my sweetheart, my little prince, you are amusing.’

‘Not as amusing as watching the other Founders eat you. It’ll be the vasilevs and hsien-kus, right? They never liked you. You need a weapon against them. That’s why you got me out.’

Her eyes are two green pearls, cold and hard. I take a deep breath. Almost there. I must not forget that she can read at least my surface thoughts. There are ways to obfuscate them. Associative images. Pearls and planets and eyes and tigers. She frowns. Better distract her.

‘And I do wonder how they caught me in the first place, if I was that good,’ I say. ‘Could it be that you had something to do with it, lover?’

She stands up in front of me. Her mouth is a straight line. Her chest is heaving. She opens Mieli’s wings. They quiver in the candlelight like two giant flames.

‘Maybe I’ve been running away from you,’ I say. ‘But when you get desperate, you always find a way to catch me.’

‘Desperate?’ she hisses. ‘You little bastard.’

She grabs my head and squeezes so hard that it feels like a yosegi box about to pop open, pulls me up so our faces are close together. Her breath is warm. It smells of liquorice. ‘I’m going to show you desperate,’ she says.

‘No.’ Yes.

Her eyes are pale green at first, then impossibly bright, like looking right into the Sun. The world goes white. My face flows like wax beneath her fingers.

‘This is how they caught you,’ she says.

The Story of the Inspector and Jean le Flambeur

The inspector catches that bastard Jean le Flambeur in the photosphere of the Sun.

Before he begins, he takes his time to look at them, the Founders aboard the good ship Immortaliser. The bearded engineer-of-souls rocks slowly back and forth in his chair. The pellegrini in her white-and-gold naval uniform stares at him intently, waiting. The vasilev leans back in his chair, swirling the golden wine in his glass. The two hsien-kus, inscrutable. The chen, still and quiet, looking at the sea. The chitragupta pokes holes in the structure of the vir with its finger, making tiny, glowing singularities that vanish with a popping sound as soon as they appear.