The Fractal Prince

30 THE THIEF AND THE STORIES

We fall and burn in the guberniya dawn.

The white incandescence of the Hunter is gone, and yet I remain. I feel strangely light, like an old man of the sea was gone from my back. I almost start laughing, until I see wildcode twist my hands sapphire claws. The Hunter components are dead, too, taken by Earth’s powers-that-be, drifting around like dead insects.

Perhonen tries to brake with her wings. They catch fire and are torn away.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper. ‘I was wrong.’

So was I, the ship says.

The wildcode is everywhere now. The ship’s systems are full of white noise. Its hull twists and curls like burning paper as we fall. Earth reaches for us like a giant’s hand.

The butterflies are all around me. It is hot in the cabin, and they catch fire, tiny candles, flame and dust. I reach for one and close my jagged hand around it.

As the avatars burn, they form a face, the face I saw in the tiger’s vir, a pretty girl, skin like snow.

You get out of everything, Jean, she says. Tell her that I love her. Look after her. For me. Promise.

‘I promise.’

She kisses me, lightly, a butterfly kiss. Then she is gone. Ashes fall on my face. I close my eyes.

In the end, there is a sound that fills the world, and then only black.

They are like serpents of light, all around me, woven into each other so it is hard to say where one ends and another begins. They are old. They wear many faces. And I know them, or a part of me does. The Flower Prince.

The girl from the ancestor vir is there. She takes off her mask and kisses me on the forehead.

Welcome back, brother.

‘Bastards,’ I tell them. ‘Why did you not save Perhonen as well? She deserved it more than I did.’

We could not see her. We can only see ourselves. There is a grief of ages in her voice.

‘Damn it. It’s not fair.’

When was it ever fair? It doesn’t matter. We will go back to Father and be with him for ever.

The old thing inside me wants to say yes. To be with the Prince of Stories again. But something pulls me back. Perhonen. A promise.

I keep my promises.

Whatever the serpent things are, I am something else. I remember reading a book in a cell. I remember a door opening. That’s when I was born, out of the crystal stopper. A creature made from La Bouchon de cristal, a boy from the desert and an old god.

Come with us. Come with us, brother.

‘My name is Jean le Flambeur,’ I say. ‘And we have work to do.’

I smile at Tawaddud.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I got you into trouble. I tend to do that.’

To her credit, she seems to take my sudden appearance in a stride. Tawaddud Gomelez, a lover of monsters. ‘If you want to make it up to me, you had better find a way to save my city,’ she says.

‘Chen is using things called Dragons,’ I say. ‘It’s going to take some drastic measures. I think there is a way to get everybody out. But you might not like it.’

Cassar Gomelez gives me a look I’ve had from many fathers. ‘My daughter now speaks for our people,’ he says, placing a hand on Tawaddud’s shoulder. ‘She decides.’

‘It may require a . . . transformation.’

‘Do it,’ Tawaddud says. ‘Zoto Gomelez said no. We say yes. All together.’

I shape my wish into a thought and give it to the strange beings who claim to be my brothers and sisters. They whisper together for a moment with voices like hissing sand. Then the one called Princess nods.

The world goes mad.

The storm of wildcode rises and washes over Sirr. When it reaches Tawaddud, she feels herself being lifted up, expanding, becoming a part of the hurricane of jinni. She watches with a godlike eye as the city turns into sand, as the heavens rain dragons upon the Earth.

The Aun come and take the minds of Sirr, turn them into stories, compress them into a form that is like a seed that can bloom in any mind, an eternal life in the space of a book, between blue covers like The Book of Nights. And as the book closes, she feels the Axolotl and Dunyazad and her father there next to her.

Chen’s Dragons are eating wildcode and jinni and everything that makes up the bodies of the Aun. But there is one place on Earth they are not going to touch.

It turns out there is a reason why they call it the Lost Jannah of the Cannon.

A 150-kiloton thermonuclear explosive device in the midst of reaction mass, under a giant shell, an impact shield of boron. A hardened vir running inside a Wang bullet of steel, a 3000-ton projectile with a full-blown spacecraft inside.

The vir inside is tiny, but stories do not take up much space. The only running minds are a boy called Matjek and me. It was him who came up with the design. It is a bookshop, bright and airy, with inviting shelves and nooks and crannies for reading.

Before we launch, he takes a book from one of the shelves, with a blue and silver cover. He looks at the first page and then closes it.

‘I want to read it,’ he says. ‘But I can never remember the stories in my dreams when I wake up.’

‘Something tells me that this one is different,’ I tell him. And then I press the red button in my head.

We sit together and drink tea as the jet of plasma underground takes us up, thousands of Gs and ten times the escape velocity. We are past the Moon before Chen realises we are gone. Then I deploy the solar sails and take us to the Highway.

Mieli is still out there. I made a promise to Perhonen, and I plan to keep it. I am small again, barely more than human. But that doesn’t matter. I just need help from a few friends, and without Joséphine in my head, I know where to find them.

There is a smile on my lips as the prince and I steer the ship of stories towards Saturn.