The Fractal Prince

23 TAWADDUD AND THE THIEF

Abu and Rumzan take them to a viewing gallery near the top of the Ugarte Shard. The walls and floors of his palace are white and stark. Without athar glasses, Tawaddud sees only flickers of what is invisible: dense mandalas and geometric shapes decorating every surface. The wide window has a view of Sirr at night, dominated by the golden flame of the Station. She stares at it until it feels like it’s going to fall down, and the rest of her world with it.

‘My father knows we are here,’ she says. ‘You are finished.’

‘Dear Tawaddud,’ Abu Nuwas says. ‘You may be able to lie to your jinn clients, but I can see right through you.’ He taps his brass eye. ‘Literally.’ He shifts the gun in his hand, pointing at Sumanguru.

‘You might want to know that this is not Sumanguru of the Turquoise Branch. There is someone else lurking beneath his ugly face: a thief and a liar called Jean le Flambeur.’

Tawaddud looks at Sumanguru. The other face that she has glimpsed before is fully visible beneath the scars now, intense eyes, a sardonic smile. He raises his eyebrows and shrugs. ‘Guilty as charged.’

‘What shall we do with you? I suppose it doesn’t matter. Accidents do happen near the wildcode desert, after all. And we have time to discuss that. Please, make yourselves comfortable. We are still waiting for someone to join us.’

He gestures, and foglet chairs appear, transparent, curved shapes, floating in the air. He sinks into one, a leg over one knee. Gingerly, Tawaddud sits down facing the gogol merchant.

‘Why?’ she asks.

‘I told you. Revenge. Because I hate this place. Because of what Alile and her friends did to me. Yes, it was her; she bought me from the entwiner. She used me to find the Jannah of the Cannon and then left me in the desert to die. I told her the Name that opened it and she took it from me.’

He squeezes the mind-trap in his hand, making a fist.

‘Well, I survived. I came back. I went to an upload temple first, but the hsien-kus could not undo what was done to me, to wash the desert away, not until they made Earth theirs. I found other ways to serve them. They were kinder mistresses than Alile, and far more generous.

‘But it’s not just about me, Tawaddud. You have seen it, too. Sirr is rotten: it makes monsters to survive and feeds on souls. We live in dirt when others in the System build diamond castles and live for ever. Don’t your beloved Banu Sasan deserve better than that?’

It’s not like that, Tawaddud thinks, remembering the Axolotl’s words. But she says nothing.

‘The Accords mean nothing. They have been a convenience for the Sobornost, nothing more. They were burned by the Aun, but they are ready now: what do you think the Gourd is for? When your friend here,’ he tosses the mind-bullet into the air and catches it, ‘tells me what I want to know, there is no need for the hsien-kus to take things slow. Earth will be uploaded, and I will have my reward. I will be made whole.’ He smiles sadly. ‘I wish I could say I’m sorry.’

Tell them lies they want to hear.

‘You can never get it back,’ Tawaddud says. ‘What she took from you, you can never get it back. But you can find something else to replace it. Believe me, I know. Without the Axolotl, I was hollow, I was lost. But then, I met you.’

Abu looks at her, human eye gleaming, his mouth a straight line. Then he starts laughing.

‘For a moment, I believed you. You did touch something, something I thought I no longer had.’ He shakes his head. ‘But you just used me to play your father. The body thief named you right. You are the Axolotl’s whore. Why do you think I was so interested in you in the first place? Because that’s what everybody calls you. When he gave me the slip, you were the obvious route to him. His weakness.

‘So don’t look so sad. We both got what we wanted. But enough of that. I do believe my other guest is here.’

A door opens, and a hsien-ku in a black Sobornost uniform walks in. She gives Sumanguru a curt nod.

‘Lord Sumanguru – or should I say Jean le Flambeur? Apologies for arriving slightly late. My branch prides itself on punctuality.’

I watch as Abu Nuwas hands the mind-trap over to the hsien-ku. Tawaddud is corpse-pale and shaking. Poor girl. I will make this up to you somehow. I promise.

Except that the worst is still to come.

‘We owe you thanks, le Flambeur, for alerting us to the existence of a primordial Chen gogol in the first place,’ the hsien-ku says. ‘It will be excellent currency to keep him off our backs while we move against our sister, who I believe is your current employer, am I correct? Perhaps there is an opportunity for you to offer your talents to us instead.’

I run through the options in my head. A voice is suggesting that perhaps misplaced loyalty to Joséphine at this juncture is not such a good idea. But then there is Mieli and my debt to her to think about – and I doubt the hsien-kus would be able to do anything to the locks inside my head.

‘I’ll consider it,’ I say. Tawaddud stares at me, wide-eyed.

‘It is only now that we dare to move openly: obtaining the gogol is far more important than our relationship with Sirr. Once we have dealt with our sister – with the help of our brothers the vasilevs – we will be back. And then there will be no need to dance to the whims of the gogol merchants. We will make Earth live again.’

‘By killing it all over again,’ I say.

‘Words spoken by the flesh. Perhaps that is what our sister finds attractive. What is your answer? Will you serve us? If your answer is no, you have outlived your usefulness.’

‘How do you think you are going to catch me?’ I smile, thinking of my escape route.

‘Oh, we are not going to catch you. We are scholars. But as it happens, our brother the Engineer created a gogol specifically for catching you. It should be on its way here as we speak. The Hunter, we believe it is called. Sasha always liked a bit of melodrama.’

Shit.

Abu Nuwas gestures with his gun. ‘Could we get on with it, please? My mercenaries are ready.’ The jinn, Rumzan, wavers restlessly next to him.

‘Of course,’ the hsien-ku says. She lifts up the mind-bullet between delicate fingers. No showmanship like what I did in the aviary: besides, I was just bluffing to get Tawaddud to entwine with the bird. This is the real thing.

‘What are you doing to him?’ Tawaddud whispers.

‘Mind surgery,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘They are going to torture him. Trying to get the Name out of his mind. Aren’t you?’

‘It is regrettable but unavoidable,’ the hsien-ku says, a sad look on her broad face. ‘Like most things are.’ I can only imagine the turmoil going on inside. Thousands of iterations of the Axolotl-fragment being created and tortured and destroyed, a feeling far too familiar to me.

Tawaddud starts screaming. She collapses to the floor, twitching, tearing at her hair. Of course. She must feel it through the entwinement. Abu Nuwas gives her one glance, then looks away.

‘For scholars, you can be real bastards,’ I tell the hsien-ku.

‘I will give it to you!’ Tawaddud shouts. ‘Stop it! I’ll give it to you!’

Her world is made of agony. The Axolotl part in her mind flickers and dies, flickers and dies, like a hot needle pushed into her brain again and again and again.

‘I will give it to you!’ she hears herself shouting.

It stops. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, whispers the Axolotl, far away.

She wipes snot and spittle away from her face and takes a deep breath. Then she cries out the Name of Al-Jabbar the Irresistible and becomes Rumzan the Repentant.

I cover my ears when Tawaddud shouts the Name. By now I have a fairly good idea about how it works. Extreme fractal compression of some kind, a self-referential loop inside a story, forcing the target brain to iterate it all over again, bootstrapping a new mind inside it into existence. How it is possible, I do not know. Even encoding pictures in such dynamical maps takes a lot of computational power, and doing the same for a human mind seems like something that is firmly in the realm of the transhuman.

No matter how it works, it works quickly. Rumzan – or Tawaddud – rams sharp thought-form fingers through the throat of the hsien-ku in a shower of crimson. Abu Nuwas is just fast enough to fire the barakah gun before the creature turns on him. It explodes into inert white powder. Tawaddud screams one more time and lies still. The mind-bullet rolls across the floor. I dive down and grab it.

But hsien-kus are hard to kill, and the death of this one is like trimming a fingernail. As the gogol’s body dies, it sputters out the Name, torn from the Axolotl’s mind. It shimmers in the athar and rings in the air. Abu Nuwas’s eyes glaze over as he drinks it in.

As his gun hand wavers, I pick the still form of Tawaddud up and run. Sparks fly in my eyes as I push the Sobornost body to its limits. Tawaddud on my shoulder, I smash the diamond tool she gave me against the gallery window, as hard as I can. Pain shoots up my arm but the glass shatters like ice. Holding on to Tawaddud, I leap through the fragments, into the void beyond.

The Anti-Name echoes in my ears as we fall towards the blue and golden night of Sirr, far below. Its beauty takes my breath away.

But it’s nothing compared to the warm amber glow of the ancient angelnet, when it finally catches us in a soft embrace.

Tawaddud’s head feels like a shattered jinn jar. She lies on a cold, hard surface. Everything hurts.

She opens her eyes and sees the dark mouth of a barakah gun. Sumanguru – Jean le Flambeur – is pointing it at her face. He is smiling sadly.

‘There is nothing personal about this, you understand,’ he says. ‘I think you know about wanting to be good. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the luxury to follow through with that.’

‘What are you doing? Where are we?’

‘Please speak very, very carefully. If I hear the beginning of a Name, I will have to fire. That trick with the Name and Rumzan was very good. For future reference, it is a great idea to attack embodied Founders. It confuses them every time. We are in an old upload temple near the Station: I’ll be needing some Gourd bandwidth in a moment.’

Tawaddud swallows. Her mouth is dry.

‘Who are you? What do you want? Why are you doing this?’

‘I want you to know that I am very sorry. You didn’t deserve any of this.’

‘Why . . . why are you apologising? Just let me go.’

‘This was my fault, you see. I came to Earth to find two things. The Jannah of the Cannon was one of them. But it was going to be far too difficult to find it. I’m a thief, not an archeologist. So I made sure that the hsien-kus knew there was something in there they would desperately want: it was going to be much less trouble to steal it from them when they found it. They thought I let it slip, sent a careless message.’ A smile flickers on his lips. ‘I didn’t think they would use a local agent like Nuwas, but then I must admit I did not really understand Sirr.

‘It was a bonus that they actually sent me here to go after the Axolotl.’

Tawaddud feels empty and weak. She closes her eyes. There is the faintest echo of the Axolotl in her head, somewhere far away.

‘I trusted you,’ Tawaddud whispers.

‘I told you, you shouldn’t have,’ le Flambeur says. ‘Hush now. No talking. I just have some business with your boyfriend, and then I’ll be on my way.’

He spins the mind-bullet between his fingers deftly, like a magician.

What the hell do you want? whispers the Axolotl.

‘I want the secret, the one you got from the Aun. That’s what I really came here for. The algorithm for turning minds into stories. The same thing you used to make all the other body thieves. But be careful. Any more tricks, and Lady Tawaddud here will become noise in the wildcode. Or I may decide to use the hsien-ku tactics: I can do mind surgery too. Your choice.’

Let him shoot, the Axolotl says in Tawaddud’s mind. Let him shoot. We can still be together.

‘It’s too late,’ Tawaddud says. ‘It was always too late.’

When it’s done, I give them both a bow. Then I plug into the Gourd communication systems in the upload temple. The scan beam comes down from the temple’s dome, a shower of white, cleansing fire. I leave Sirr in a burst of modulated neutrinos. An eyeblink later I’m in my old body in the main cabin. I stretch: it feels strange after days in Sumanguru’s massive frame.

You are a real bastard, Jean, the ship says.

‘I know, but sometimes that’s what it takes.’ I pass it the algorithm – a bizarre image the Axolotl imprinted in my mind, encoded in what I can only assume is a recursive Penrose tiling.

‘Give this to the pellegrini and tell her to test it on a few gogols in the Gourd systems. I’ve seen it working firsthand, but just to be sure. And I think it’s going to require a lot of computational power.’

Sir, yes sir. Anything else?

‘I have some good news and bad news. The good news is that everything is ready, as long as Mieli gets into that jannah. Is she in Abu Nuwas’s fleet?’

Yes.

‘Good.’ I squeeze the bridge of my nose. ‘I need a drink.’

Why do I have the feeling that I’m not going to like the bad news?

‘Yes, well.’ I take a deep breath. ‘The Hunter is coming.’

Tawaddud sits alone in the upload temple with the mind-bullet for a long time. When the Repentants find her, she is holding the barakah gun against her forehead. They take it away. When she falls asleep in her cell, she can no longer remember if she was going to to pull the trigger.