The Fractal Prince

20 THE STORY OF MIELI AND SYDÄN

Mieli presses her face against the invisible skin of the flying city and watches her lover dance in the sky.

The Venusian godlings are naked, chalk-skinned shapes against the sulphur acid clouds, Sydän a tiny thing next to them on her borrowed wings. Mieli watches as they swoop and chase her, force her into a spiralling dive and knows that she is laughing, wildly and loudly, having the time of her life.

‘Mieli, girl! Come on!’ she shouts in Mieli’s ear. ‘I bet you can’t catch me!’

It would only take a moment to be there with her, to let the city give her a second skin and enough strength for her wings to survive the Venerian wind, but Mieli lets Sydän have this thing to herself. Besides, she still feels heavy, earthbound, in spite of Amtor City’s utility foglets supporting her frame like a gentle ghost hand. She does not want to fly just yet. Or so she tells herself.

She feels vertigo looking at the rough basalt landscape below, with its strange fractures, furrows and tick-shaped volcanoes, thinking about the three-hundred-mile winds that roar outside, the searing heat under the angry cloud cover that makes the whole planet something akin to a vast pressure cooker. Mieli is no stranger to deadly environments, having spent most of her life in vacuum skinsuits, but the Dark Man of space is not angry at you, just empty. For Venus, it’s personal, and Mieli is not ready to meet her, not yet.

Stop moping, says Perhonen in her mind. Go out. Fly. Play. We came all this way. Let’s enjoy it. There is impatience in the ship’s voice.

‘Quiet,’ says Mieli. ‘I want to watch the dawn.’

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 Sydän 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 Sydän 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 Sydän, 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.

Sydän 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 Sydän 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 Sydän’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,’ Sydän 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 Sydän’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?’

Sydän 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?’

Sydän 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 Sydän. ‘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.’

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

‘I’ll stay with you. I promise,’ she says, after a while. ‘Damn. I still suck at this.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘So. Sightseeing instead. How about watching a transhuman mind have a Hawking orgasm? From afar.’

Mieli smiles. A warm rush of relief washes over her.

‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ she says.

I still think the best place to watch this thing would be in orbit, mutters Perhonen. Preferably around Mars.

‘Ssh. It’s about to start’, says Mieli, tingling with excitement. Snowflakes of data drift across her field of vision, superimposed on the forbidding landscape of Lakshmi Planum. There is movement everywhere on the basalt surface: the von Neumann beasts are fleeing in all directions, scuttling up the steep cliffs at the base of Maxwell Montes. They look like black ants in the blood-coloured haze of a Venerian morning, moving in panicky shifting swarms.

Have a look at this. The ship passes Mieli a feed from orbit: Amtor City is the eye of a maelstorm, a blue-white perfect golden-ratio spiral. Mieli, there are thinking mountains down there. Even up here, the data stream is a bit of a headfuck. If I go mad or spontaneously transcend in the next five minutes, I’m going to blame you.

‘Shut up. We’re having fun.’ Mieli squeezes Sydän’s hand: the responsive smartmatter of her suit melts away, and she grips her warm fingers hard.

They’re both wearing heavy quickstone suits, and a laser beam from orbit is feeding power to their q-dot bubble shield that is currently pretending to be a hyperdense element at the far, far end of the periodic table. Sobornost hospitality extends even to those who do not give their minds away just yet.

If anybody asks, I’ll be digging my head in the sand and praying that I still have a human captain four minutes from now, whispers Perhonen and disappears. Its absence is a small sharp shock to Mieli, but there is little time to worry about that when the world explodes.

A vast hand grabs a moon-sized fistful of rock and basalt from the centre of the Lakshmi plateau and squeezes. There is a flash of light, barely filtered by the q-bubble, and then there is a swirling crater, a growing whirlpool of rock and dust, pulled in by an incandescent pinpoint that is the newborn singularity.

Amtor City dives right into it, a falling star.

A funnel of dust rises into the sky, eclipsing what blood-hued sunlight there is. The Maxwell Mountains shake like dying animals. Mieli feels the vibrations in her bones, lets out a small gasp and Sydän squeezes her hand harder. The grey-haired boy was right. This is giant-land.

The whirlpool grows and starts to glow as rock and dust become white-hot plasma. From their vantage point it looks like a glowing drill is being pushed through Venus’s skin, revealing the shifting, intricate layers of computronium beneath the crust. The q-bubble struggles to keep up with the barrage it is taking across the electromagnetic spectrum and switches to neutrino tomography. Basalt and lava become transparent like glass, leaving the spiraling madness visible around the Bekenstein epicentre where god-thoughts have pierced the fabric of spacetime.

Mieli is dimly aware of the fact that this is more of a cartoon than a faithful representation of what is really going on, but she doesn’t care, watching elaborate shapes form around the infant black hole, wishing for a second that she had the accelerated senses of the Sobornost gogols.

There is a shell that surrounds the little godhead completely now, multifaceted and intricate. The earth beneath their feet no longer so much shakes as hums, and Mieli’s teeth rattle even in spite of the q-bubble’s attempt to dampen the resonances.

‘Any second now’, whispers Sydän. Mieli kisses her hard, briefly joining their smartmatter suits into one.

‘Thanks’, she says.

‘Thanks for what?’

‘For showing me this.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Sydän says. ‘And I’m sorry. I need it to be for ever.’

She squeezes Mieli’s hand so hard it almost hurts. Then she lets go and takes a step forward, outside the q-dot bubble, and starts running. Mieli tries to grab her arm. She comes away with the jewelled chain in her fingers.

For a moment, Sydän turns to look back. She wavers in the information wind, face swirling into whiteness like cream poured into coffee.

Mieli screams, but it is too small a sound against the all-engulfing voice of the dying city.

The quake comes. The black hole has been teetering on the brink of instability for minutes, balanced precariously on the edge by the Higgs-churning machines around it, the superthread modes trapped in its event horizon computing furiously for an artificial eternity. It explodes, screaming out all the thoughts it has thought in its own private hell, the mass of a mountain converted into Hawking radiation in an instant.

The q-bubble groans, goes opaque and dissipates, but Mieli’s quicksuit holds under the impact of the blast wave. Basalt shatters under her feet. The white fire grinds Mieli between the hammer of pressure and the anvil of rock.

The last thing she sees before blackness is Perhonen’s feed from orbit, a fiery crack opening up in the face of Lakshmi like a mocking smile.

That was, by far, the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do, says Perhonen.

Mieli floats in a sea of gentle euphoria, soothing blue shapes dancing in front of her eyes. But underneath the coolness hot pain is hiding, pulsing ever so slightly in her bones.

Don’t try to move. You are a mess. Compound fractures, a punctured lung, internal bleeding. I dumped the suit’s nanomeds, they’ve been mutated. Probably shaping some rock into a liver at the moment.

‘Where’s Sydän?’ she says.

Not far.

‘Show me.’

You really shouldn’t—

‘Show me!’

She is dragged back to the cold hard rock of reality. There is pain, and she feels groggy, but at least she can see. She lies on her back sprawled on a craggy basalt edifice. It is almost completely dark: dust swirls in the sky, blocking the cloud cover glow. The dark shapes of Von Neumann beasts creep across the landscape slowly, carefully. Lakshmi Planitia is no more – in its place is an impossibly smooth crater of some godstuff she cannot name.

She sits up slowly and sees the grey-haired boy, watching her.

He does not wear a quicksuit, or any other form of protection that Mieli can see, sitting on hot basalt, leaning back.

‘Did you find your goddess?’ she asks, almost laughing at the absurdity of the sight.

‘I did,’ the boy says. ‘But it seems that you lost yours.’

Mieli closes her eyes. ‘What is it to you?’

‘I was not entirely honest with you. I’m not a pilgrim. You could say that I’m . . . management. And I take an interest in whoever passes through here, whether they decide to join us or not.’

‘She let go of my hand,’ Mieli says. ‘She did not want me to come. I can’t follow her.’

‘I didn’t think you would. In spite of our reputation, we respect that. Or some of us do, in any case.’ He walks to Mieli and offers her a hand, helping her up. With the suit’s support, she manages to stand.

‘Look at you. That won’t do. See, this is what you get when you wear flesh and come here.’ Suddenly, the suit is flooded with a cool sensation, fresh nanomeds, Sobornost ones. The pain turns into a full-body tickle.

‘To be fair, your friend was not entirely honest with you either,’ the boy says. ‘She had been speaking to one of my sisters for a while now, about coming here.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Don’t give up,’ the boy says. ‘I learned that a long time ago. If reality is not what you want it to be, change it. You should not accept anything blindly, not death, not immortality. If you don’t want to join her, you can go to my sister and ask for her back. But let me warn you, there will be a price.’

Mieli takes a deep breath. Something rattles in her lungs. She finds that she is holding Sydän’s chain in her hand, like a little piece of Oort, made of jewels and songs.

‘I’ll do it,’ she says. ‘Just tell me where to go. But why are you doing this?’

‘For love,’ he says.

‘Love for whom?’

‘No one,’ he says. ‘I just want to know what it feels like.’

After three days, Mieli finds the temple on the metallic plain, in the shield volcano’s shadow.

Her limbs burn with fatigue. Her muscles and bones have almost completely healed now, and the q-stone armour helps, but hunger and thirst gnaw her insides, and she has to fight to take every step.

The temple is a labyrinth of stone, a seeming jumble of black rectangles and shards like building blocks discarded by a giant child. When she enters, it explodes into an intricate gallery where stone bridges and pathways lead in all directions. Perhonen whispers that the whole place is a projection of a larger, higher-dimensional object, a shadow solidified in stone. There, in the black rock, she sees silver flower markings, like the grey-haired boy said, and follows them.

After many twists and turns she finds the singularity in the centre.

It is a tiny thing, a star floating in a cylindrical room. Its Hawking radiation is so bright it floods her quicksuit. When she approaches it, the suit’s outer layers evaporate.

You should go back, Perhonen shouts in her mind.

She takes another step, and is naked. The radiation that carries the thoughts of the goddess consumes her. Flesh turns into prayer. She holds up her hands. Her fingers burst into flame. The pain is so intense she has no words for it. And then there are no words or thoughts left at all, only burning red—

—that becomes the quiet murmur of a bubbling fountain. It is dark. The sky above is a velvet cloak, with tiny pinpricks. Apart from the sound of the fountain, there is a deep quiet, all around. The air tastes moist and fresh.

A woman sits on the steps that lead up to the fountain. She wears a white dress, diamonds around her neck. Her hair is an auburn mass of curls. Her face is neither young nor old. She is reading a book. As Mieli approaches, she looks up.

‘Would you care for some wine?’ she says.

Mieli hesitates and shakes her head. The goddess is not at all like what she imagined goddesses would be like: not a glowing, translucent being of light or a Titanic pillar of flame, but a woman. She can see the pores of her skin, smells her perfume.

Mieli reaches for Perhonen’s comforting presence, but there is nothing there, just a cold sensation down her back, an absence in her mind.

‘As you wish. By the way, my hospitality does not extend to small machine things like your ship,’ says the goddess. ‘But you, please come and sit.’

‘I prefer to stand,’ Mieli says.

‘Ah, spirit. I like that. What is it that you want, child? I embrace all souls who come to me, but not all of them go to such lengths to see me.’

‘I want her back.’

The goddess studies her quietly, a faint smile on her lips.

‘But of course you do,’ she says. ‘You haven’t had it easy: too many losses in a lifetime too short. Growing up a stranger in the land of silent ice and vacuum wings.’ She sighs.

‘What would you have me do? I am no zoku genie who could study your volition and do what is best for you. Otherwise, I would ease the pain of your loss, or perhaps take you to my gogol Library and let you say goodbye properly. Or make a raion and run a vir of the best possible future you two could have had together.

‘But I am none of these things. What you want from me is mine. I am Joséphine Pellegrini. I am an avatar of my guberniya, and I do not give things away for free. So the question is, what will you give me, little girl? What will you give to get your Sydän back?’

‘Everything,’ Mieli says. ‘Everything except death.’