The Fractal Prince

4 TAWADDUD AND ABU NUWAS

While Duny waits, Tawaddud puts on a new face in her bedroom.

She looks at her image in the mirror. The fantasy she created for Mr Sen is gone, replaced by a plain woman in a white body stocking that does not flatter her broad hips. Unusual? Not today. She runs her fingers through her unruly hair, refuses to do anything about it and chooses a short, hooded cloak to hide it. After a moment’s hesitation, she puts on her mother’s old athar glasses. Somehow, it is easier to look at the world from behind the round golden lenses.

She picks up her doctor’s bag and joins Dunyazad at the balcony of the palace’s apartment wing, to wait for the elevator. Her sister gives the glasses a disapproving look.

‘They do not really suit the shape of your face,’ she says. ‘Mother never had much taste, poor woman. I trust you will be extra charming to make up for the lack of style.’

You never knew Mother at all, Tawaddud thinks. And you do not know me.

She decides to ignore Duny’s barb. She has spent the whole day indoors, and it is good to feel the breeze and the heat of the afternoon sun.

Her father’s palace is like a hand sticking out of the Gomelez Shard, resembling a climbing plant on a giant wall: five tall buildings that were once vertical but are now horizontal, overgrown with walkways, joined together with extensions, balconies and hanging gardens. Somewhere above, there are faint echoes of moaning jinn music. Heavy smells of food drift up from Takht the gogol merchant’s palace, mingling with the warm wind. Below, overhanging minarets, snaking platforms and vertical streets cling to the Gomelez Shard like ivy. The city itself is lost in haze far below, glints of purple, gold and blue within a shroud of white mist.

The Shard is a cylinder segment almost two kilometres high, a piece of the orbital O’Neill colony where her ancestors lived, until it fell from the heavens. The impact broke its hull – millions of tons of diamond and metal and strange pre-Collapse materials – into pieces like an eggshell, into five Shards sticking out of the bedrock. They reach towards the sky that was lost, guarding Sirr the hidden, Sirr the blessed; the last human city on Earth.

There is a cough behind her.

‘Please excuse my sister,’ Dunyazad says. ‘She is a dreamer, and sometimes I have to be firm to get her to notice the real world.’

‘The Aun know Sirr needs more dreamers, in these hard times,’ says a male voice, low and soft.

Tawaddud turns around. A man stands on the balcony with them. He is small and slight, shorter than Tawaddud, and looks tired: his skin is pale and tallowy. He is dressed in rich black-and-silver robes that emulate a mutalibun’s traditional garb but are made from strange Sobornost fabrics that flutter in the breeze. He has long flowing hair, a narrow face – and a jinn jar for an eye. A leather strap across his face supports an ornate brass device where his left eye should be. His human eye is bright and green.

‘I am a dreamer myself,’ he says haltingly, as if reciting lines. ‘Sometimes I am a blind beggar dreaming that I am Abu Nuwas, and the morning wine I had and such beautiful ladies as you are just fantasies. But I’m quite sure that I would never dream of anything quite as hideous as my reflection in your eyes, so you must be real, thank the Aun.’

Abu Nuwas kisses Tawaddud’s hand, and sunlight glints in his brass eye. His lips are cool and dry and barely brush her skin, like the tickling touch of a jinn. His hand shakes a little and he lets go quickly.

‘Lord Nuwas, this is my sister Tawaddud. We are most grateful that you have agreed to escort her. She is so diligent with her charitable duties, you see: otherwise she would have arranged to meet you in a more dignified setting.’

Tawaddud studies Abu Nuwas, looking at him longer than is strictly proper. His smile wavers. She straightens her back. Suddenly, she is not Tawaddud, the black sheep of the Gomelez family. She is Tawaddud, the pride of the Palace of Stories, the lover of the Axolotl. No, sister, you do not know me at all.

‘My sister jests,’ Tawaddud says in a low voice. ‘I have no intention of being dignified.’ She removes her athar glasses and smiles, giving Abu Nuwas the same look she shared with Mr Sen and her mirror image. ‘But I would be delighted if you were to escort me, and say more such beautiful things. I did not know you were a poet.’

She offers Abu Nuwas her arm. He steps forward and takes it, puffing his chest. ‘Merely a dabbler, my lady, just words that come to a mutalibun’s mind while walking the desert, pale shadows of beauty like yours.’

Tawaddud laughs and rewards him with another smile, just a little warmer than the last one. ‘I would happily let a blind beggar accompany me for such words, Lord Nuwas,’ she says.

‘Please, call me Abu.’

Dunyazad gives Tawaddud an astonished look. Tawaddud purses her lips. ‘Dear sister, did you not have some Council duties to attend to? I’m sure they are terribly important. And we must both serve our Father and our city, in whatever way we can.’

The elevator is a clunky, analog thing with a flexible frame, a metal centipede that crawls along rails protruding from the Shard. The descent creates a pleasant breeze. For a time, Abu Nuwas seems content to hold on to her arm and watch the city unfolding before them. An idea is hatching in Tawaddud’s mind, and she welcomes the quiet to let it grow. You are going to regret this, Duny, you really are.

To the east, there are the hills and greenhouses, and beyond them the sea. In the north lies the City of the Dead, with its row upon row of grey featureless buildings. Tawaddud quickly turns her gaze away from it.

The city proper is dominated by the spire of the Sobornost Station: a massive diamond tower, bristling with heroic statues higher than the Shards. It looms above the morass of the gogol markets that slowly give way to the wide streets and low buildings in the shadow of the Ugarte and Uzeda Shards. The sunlight flashing off its upper segments makes it seem like it’s made of gold. It changes, sometimes slowly, sometimes even as you watch, new spires rising and falling, surfaces and statues rotating. Every few seconds, there are booms and flashes, streaks of light from thoughtwisps carrying Sobornost minds, fired towards the Gourd that the masters of the Inner System are building in the sky.

‘Makes you feel small, doesn’t it?’ Abu says.

Abu Nuwas has a reputation: grand gestures in the gogol markets, investment decisions that sometimes look like madness. Yet her more influential clients speak of Abu with reluctant respect. Small men need to feel powerful. Tawaddud keeps her eyes downcast.

‘I prefer the grandeur of the Shards to the undead creations of the Sobornost,’ she says. ‘And the wildcode desert taught them in the Cry of Wrath how small they can be.’

‘Yes, well,’ Abu says. ‘At least for a time.’

Another elevator passes them. A swarm of Fast Ones flashes past, trying to catch up with it, buzzing. They are tiny humanoids the size of Tawaddud’s forefinger, with black bodies and humming wings, who hitching rides to the top of the Shards on elevators, to soak up solar energy and potential energy on the way down, selling it to the cities of the little people like Qush and Misr and a hundred others in central Sirr whose names slow baseline humans will never know. The passengers are trying to shoo them away. They dodge flailing hands effortlessly, buzzing around the elevator like a cloud of flies.

‘I envy them, sometimes,’ Abu says, looking at the creatures. ‘To live in a world of giant statues, live fast lives, fight fast wars, fit centuries and dynasties in a day. Our lives are far too short, don’t you think?’

‘They also say,’ Tawaddud says, leaning closer to him, ‘that the Fast Ones and the jinni know pleasures that are lost to us, and once a human has tasted them, it is far too easy to lose interest in the flesh.’

‘I see,’ Abu says, turning his brass eye towards her, cocking his head like a bird. ‘And do you speak from experience, Lady Tawaddud?’ His expression is stiff.

After his initial shyness, Abu Nuwas is hard to read, like mutalibun often are. At the pretext of shielding her eyes against the sun, Tawaddud lifts up her athar glasses and looks at the gogol merchant’s aura in the Shadow. His entwined jinn is a fiery serpent, coiled protectively around him. I need to be more subtle with this one.

Tawaddud follows the receding elevator with her gaze. ‘I am just an innocent girl from the Gomelez family.’

‘That’s not what the stories say.’

‘The stories say many things, and that’s why the Repentants hunt them down before the body thieves steal our minds with them. I care for stories less than poetry, dear Abu: and you promised me more of it. I’m afraid the only thing I have to offer in return is an evening of hard work amongst the Banu Sasan.’ She touches Abu’s hand. ‘But then you are no stranger to hard work. My sister and I both appreciate the help you have offered my father.’

‘It is nothing. I would rather you appreciated my wit. Or my handsome features.’ He smiles ironically and touches his eye.

Foolish girl. Kafur’s first lesson. Make it like a dream, and never let them wake.

‘There is no greater honour in Sirr than the touch of the entwiner, and honour is greater than beauty,’ Tawadudd says. ‘What is it that you see with your eye?’ She smiles mischievously. ‘Anything you like?’

‘Would you like to see?’ He holds out his hand.

Wordlessly, she hands over her athar glasses, blinking at the bright sunlight. Abu turns them around in his hands. He whispers a Secret Name that Tawaddud does not know.

‘Try now.’

Tawaddud accepts the glasses uneasily and puts them on. She blinks, expecting to see the usual chaos of the local athar, the digital shadow of reality. The Seals of the palaces keep the worst of the wildcode away from the Shard, but even here the athar is always full of old spimes and noise.

She sees a different Sirr.

It is a vast, shifting spiderweb of light. The Sobornost Station is still there, a glowing star in the centre, but everything else is replaced by an intricate, constantly shifting network: bright braids that flash into being and disappear, dense glowing currents that stretch from horizon to horizon, sudden blooms of activity that look like nests of fiery insects. After a moment, Tawaddud has to close her eyes. It is like watching the surface of the Sun.

‘This is what we see, muhtasib and mutalibun,’ Abu says. ‘This is what the Repentants gather for us, the blood of Sirr. Gogol trade. Sobortech trade. Jinni labour. Even,’ he lowers his voice, ‘embodiment trade.

‘It’s like a garden, and we are gardeners. We need to decide where to plant and where to cut and where to grow, to keep Sirr alive. That is why I help your father. That’s what makes me feel small.’

Tawaddud blinks, and the vision is gone, replaced by athar, the broken scrawls it writes on people and buildings, defaced by the white noise of wildcode. She removes her glasses.

‘Then I’m glad I’m taking you to see the Banu Sasan,’ she says slowly. ‘One often feels small when looking at things from too far above.’

‘Your sister did say that we would get along,’ Abu says, taking Tawaddud’s arm again, and try as she might, she cannot read his smile. This is going to be harder than I thought.

Clanking and rattling, the elevator takes them down to the base of the Shard, and, with even more noise, reconfigures itself into a tram. It carries them through the wide streets of the Shade quarters towards the city centre, along the narrow channels of water that lead towards the sea, the Station and the Banu Sasan.