The Fractal Prince

22 THE STORY OF THE PELLEGRINI AND THE CHEN

She finds the master of the Universe on the beach, throwing rocks into the sea. He is wearing a child’s face. This is an old memory. Did he choose it for her? This is not where they first met. And it is very different from his usual virs, abstract spaces of language and purity.

‘It’s very nice,’ she says. The boy looks up, eyes wide, fearless but without any sign of recognition.

What is Matjek playing at? It took her such a long time to get ready. Going through her Library, finding a memory of who she was when they first met, a hundred-year-old woman in white, but looking no older than forty, with just a hint of fragility in her step, a hat and sunglasses hiding scar tissue, golden rings in tanned fingers.

‘I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,’ the boy says.

She kneels on the sand next to him.

‘I would hope that I’m not a stranger to you, Matjek,’ she says.

The boy looks at her, brow furrowed in concentration. ‘How do you know my name?’ he asks.

‘I am very old,’ she says. ‘I know a lot of names.’ What kind of game is Matjek playing here? The wind tugs at her hat, and the sand is warm under her toes. Plankton lights up in her footsteps, like stars.

‘What are you doing, Matjek?’ she whispers. Suddenly, age returns to his eyes.

‘I’m trying to find something,’ he says. ‘Something I lost a long time ago.’

‘It’s a disease, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Trying to cling on to lost things.’

He looks at her, with a cruel humour in his eyes. ‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ He pokes at the sand with a stick. ‘I know why you are here. They are killing you, aren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Anton and Hsien never trusted me. But we can talk about that later. It’s such a beautiful vir.’ She thinks it best to pay him a compliment when he is in such a sullen mood.

The boy Matjek gets up and throws a stone into the sea. It skips a few times, then disappears into the waves. ‘It is not enough,’ he says, with fury in his voice, Matjek’s old rage at everything that is wrong with the world.

‘I can’t help you. I can’t intervene right now. We are too weak to risk a full-blown civil war. The zoku are watching and waiting. I know they look weak – but remember what the Kaminari did. We need to keep up the illusion that we are stronger than them. I will not risk a civil war to save a few of you.’

‘What exactly are you doing here, Matjek? Wrapping yourself in memories? This is not like you.’

He laughs. ‘The innocent inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Would you have believed that innocence is key to the Kaminari jewel? To think how I always found Christianity ridiculous. Trust me, if I find what I’m looking for here, everything will change. In the meantime, I ask you to survive. That is what you do best in any case, isn’t it?’

‘You would let me die? Is that how you pay me back for all these years? You would have me become a ghost, just because it’s convenient?’

The vir dissolves around them. Matjek assumes his Prime aspect, the voice of a billion gogols, the Metaself, the keeper of the Plan, the Father of Dragons.

‘I will sacrifice every Sobornost gogol, every conscious mind in the System, to make the Plan come true. But you never understood that, did you?’

His voice is strangely gentle. In other virs, other pellegrinis and chens are having the same conversation. How much easier it would be if she could truly share his mind, to see what goes on in his head. But that way lie Dragons.

Instead, she laughs. ‘It seems that you have become a slave to our own convenient fictions. How endearing. But then you were always a dreamer. Why don’t you dream us a new world, Matjek – a world without Dragons and entropy and zokus? Let me know when it arrives.’

In the virs below, from their god-view of the firmament, they watch the other outcomes. Violence. Love. But mostly, resentment.

‘Don’t come to me again. I know what you tried to do with the Experiment and the thief. You are on your own. I’m sure you will manage just fine.’

She withdraws, severing the links between her temple and his guberniya.

‘You never did want to grow up,’ she says.