‘I am many things.’ She touches his thick neck: there is a deep cut on the left side of his back that should do. ‘There is a needle fragment here I should remove, to avoid wildcode infection. This may sting a little.’
‘Pain is irrelevant. Go ahead.’
She picks up a scalpel from her doctor’s bag. A killer of Dragons. Is that who you really are, Sumanguru of the Turquoise Branch? She presses down on his firm flesh, ready to make the cut. He tenses at her touch.
Why were you afraid of flying?
She puts the scalpel down. No, Duny. I’m not going to play your game. Not like this.
‘If you are going to do it, do it,’ Sumanguru says. ‘If I have to die, I might as well be killed by a pretty girl.’
Tawaddud takes a step back. ‘Lord Sumanguru, I—’
Sumanguru turns around. He is holding up the little box Duny gave her, open. The tiny jewel glitters inside.
‘Nice,’ he says. ‘Zoku technology. Where did you get it?’ He turns it around, a curious look in his eyes.
Zokus are something Tawaddud only has the faintest idea about, a distant civilisation with ancient customs that once upon a time fought some sort of war with Sobornost. What could Duny possibly have to do with them?
She takes a step back, lifts the scalpel slowly, heart racing. Why can’t I do anything right?
Sumanguru gets up.
‘Calm down,’ he says. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I only tried to frighten you earlier. I get scared, too. I know you know who killed Alile.’
‘Who are you?’ Tawaddud hisses.
Sumanguru smiles. ‘The better question is who you really are, Tawaddud Gomelez. And I think you are not someone who would hurt a guest in your father’s house. Did he send you?’
‘No.’ Tawaddud’s face feels numb. She licks her lips but can’t feel them. The thoughts come at her fast like chimera serpents in the desert, striking. Dunyazad. Rumzan would have reported to her that we found the qarin. She would have known where to get a barakah gun.
The scalpel clatters to the floor. Sumanguru lets out a slow breath. ‘That’s more like it,’ he says.
They look at each other quietly for a while. Sumanguru sits down, leaning his elbows on his knees.
‘It was your sister, wasn’t it?’ he says slowly.
A sick feeling grows in Tawaddud’s stomach.
‘I wasn’t supposed to be your guide, she was. That’s why the Fast Ones did not touch me.’
‘Do you think your father knows?’
Tawaddud shakes her head. ‘He is Cassar Gomelez. After my mother died, all he has cared about is Sirr. He has been working on the Accords for half his life. And he would have never hurt Lady Alile.’
‘It does make sense,’ Sumanguru says. ‘Earth has been . . . a bone of contention between us and the zokus for some time. We pushed them back in the Protocol War and came here. It would definitely be in their interest to restrict our access to the gogols here as much as possible. So they may have used your sister to get rid of Alile.’
‘What about the attack in the aviary?’
‘My guess would be that she was worried about a Sobornost investigator getting too close to her. That’s also why she wanted you to put an insurance policy in place.’
He tosses the box back to Tawaddud. ‘No doubt it will have self-destructed already. Too bad: I could have tried to figure out which zoku it came from.’
Tawaddud squeezes her eyes shut. ‘I can’t go to Father without proof.’
‘Is there anyone else in the Council you trust?’
Abu. But it was Duny who wanted me to meet him. That is the last thing she will ever take away from me.
She shakes her head.
Sumanguru smiles. ‘Well, I suppose that leaves yours truly.’
‘With all due respect, I don’t trust you, Lord Sumanguru.’
‘And you shouldn’t. But that does not mean we can’t help each other. If we find the jinn who killed Alile, maybe we can link the murder to your sister.’
Zaybak tried to warn me. He would understand. Or at least the Zaybak who was Tawaddud would.
A cold certainty grips Tawaddud. She remembers old stories, about deals with devils, about dark figures who offered the innocent whatever they wanted, in exchange for their soul. She always thought they were just clever ways for body thieves to put their victims at ease.
But there are other stories too, ones where the sister no one likes saves the day in the end.
‘He is called the Axolotl,’ she says.
‘The one from the children’s story. I see. So, how do we catch him? I have something that will hold him, I think, but we need to find him first.’ He holds up a small device that looks like a bullet.
Tawaddud touches her temples. Entwinement always leaves a trace.
‘We already have,’ she says. ‘A part of him is in me. We just have to find a way to speak to it. There is a place called the Palace of Stories. Someone there will help us. But we have to go tonight.’
‘How do you plan to sneak away from this place?’
Tawaddud smiles a bitter smile.
‘That is the easy part, Lord Sumanguru. I am very good at running away from my father. But you may not like it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I understand that you are not too fond of heights.’
17
MIELI AND EARTH
Sydän wanted to go to Earth. At the time, Mieli could not understand why.
They had just met, while building a Great Work. Among the people of Hiljainen Koto, it was a coming-of-age thing to do, go out into the black and shape ice with väki, make new habitats or just Great Works for their own sake, just to show that there was something valuable to be made from the crude stuff that the diamond minds no longer cared about, big icy middle fingers held up to the prissy gods of the Inner System.
It was the Grandmother who sent Sydän to work with her, bright-eyed Sydän from the Kirkkaat Kutojat koto. Extreme programming, she said, ancient tradition (which meant that dirtpeople used to do it): two minds working as one, the other shaping, the other watching, monitoring, correcting. At first, Mieli saw it as an insult. But she discovered that the other girl was much better than her at chasing down errant ancestors that escaped down the icy pathways as phonons or configurations of ghostly electricity that messed up the growth patterns, leaving behind icicles shaped like fertility idols.
At first they shaped ice just to get a feel for it, wove some of the smaller ice clumps into toy castles and monstrous shapes. They even let the ancestors animate one of them, called it a minotaur and when little Varpu came to visit them they let her be chased by the jagged, slow-moving monster through a labyrinth they built; she shrieked with glee. But eventually, the Big Idea of what they really wanted to make started to emerge.
They called it the Chain. A hundred ice spheres laboriously crafted, decorated with bright designs that drew the eye and made you dizzy as you drifted through them. All strung together with unbreakable Jovian q-dot fibres and dancing slowly in the gravity well of the Moon-sized mass they called Pohja. The tertiary structure they modelled after that of a protein, found local minima for the Chain’s Lagrangian function so that it would fold itself into intricate shapes, creatures of myth and flowers and fractals.
It was slow work. The blackness was always there, just beyond the skin of their secondskins and the icy walls of the little garden Mieli built. She lit it up with a soletta and filled it with zero-g plants that reminded her of Grandmother’s garden. Sydän said it was a weakness and lived in her secondskin, a tiny little ecosystem, algae and respirator nanos flowing in tubes around her body, face glowing with fierce independence as she traversed the growing Chain. There was a lot of waiting, waiting for the Chain to fold, waiting for the väki in the ice to grow and complete the tasks they sang to it.
And as they waited, they talked.
‘I don’t want to be a ghost in the ice like the ancestors,’ Sydän said.
‘There are better places. When I was little, a Jovian ambassador came to our koto. He was just a seed that had to be planted. We brought it food, and it gave us dreams as presents. They showed places where you really are immortal, or live many lives at once. I don’t care about what the elders say. I don’t care about knowing the fifty names of ice. I want to live. I want to see the Inner System. I want to see the sky cities on Venus. I want to see Earth.’
In Mieli’s koto, the children told stories about Earth. The burning place, the place of pain, where tuonetars bind the damned dead with viper ropes and whip them with iron chains, where you drink dark waters and forget who you are. Where the Great Tree grew and was cut down. Where the people of her koto lived until Ilmatar carried them away.
Mieli preferred stories about Seppo the megabuilder who sang a starship out of ice and sailed to another galaxy to find his love, the Daughter of the Spider, or Lemmi the thief who stole one of Kuutar’s twelve lives, ate it, burst open and became the first of the Little Suns. The Earth stories always gave her nightmares, troubled dreams where she would crawl along the shores of a dark river, her body pressed down by the heavy hand of gravity, face scraping against the black rough gravel, certain that the tuonetars were just behind her but without strength to run or fly.
‘Why would you want to go there?’ she asked.
Sydän laughed. ‘I bet you believe all the stories, don’t you? The elders make that stuff up. I can see that you would have to take it seriously. After all, you have to be better than everybody else at everything. Because you are not from Oort. Because you are the tithe child, given to us to raise. The converts are always the most fervent believers.’
‘I’m not allowed to talk about that,’ Mieli said.
‘There was a book an ancestor gave me, one of the really old ones, from Earth,’ Sydän said. ‘There was this baby who was raised by presapient monkeys. He became their king. I always thought that’s the way you must feel, with all this. Smarter, better, stronger.’ She pauses. ‘More beautiful.’
‘I don’t want to be a queen.’
‘You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be,’ Sydän said. ‘And you don’t have to believe everything they tell you.’
‘But why Earth? What is there?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t you want to find out? What is so terrible that they have to hide it in nightmare stories?’
‘That’s heresy,’ Mieli said.
‘No,’ Sydän said. ‘What is heresy is you sitting here with me, a lightsecond from every other living soul, eating me with your eyes, and not doing anything about it.’
She kissed Mieli then, sudden warm softness beneath the slick cold secondskin, pulled away and laughed at her startled expression. ‘Come on, monkey queen,’ she said. ‘The Chain is not going to bind itself!’
In the end, Mieli followed Sydän. But they never made it to Earth.
She wonders what Sydän would think about her now, looking at Earth from the pilot’s crèche. The blue globe is covered in a spiderweb of shadows, sharp black knives in the white and azure. The dark lines are cast by the Gourd, a frame of silver arcs that stretch around the planet in an oval shape, in geostationary orbits, over a hundred thousand kilometres in diameter.
There are gaps in the silver structure, so that it looks like two skeletal hands, slowly closing around an eyeball. Where two or more arcs join there are hexagonal loops, bright with light and activity, streams of thoughtwisps, raions and oblasts, a few mercenary ships.
From one of the poles, the thin wire of the Silver Road stretches to the Moon, where Sobornost machines are eating the crust of the satellite, transporting the matter to be forged into a cage for Earth.
Dear Kuutar, Mieli thinks. Let me unsee this.
Sobornost has been slowly building it for nearly twenty years. Why would they be doing it if not to guard against something evil inside? The ship’s databanks have no information on the purpose of the Gourd: common speculation in the Inner System is that it is created by the hsien-kus as a sensor array, to increase the fidelity of their ancestor virs.
You should not be here, the old goddesses of Oort tell her. This place is forbidden.
It is just a rock, she tells herself, refusing to pray, refusing to ask the metacortex to turn off the regions in her brain that seethe with religious terror. It’s just water and rock and ruins.
She thinks about the journey, the sauna, the Oortian food, all her efforts to prepare herself for this. She is supposed to be Mieli, a heretic Oortian mercenary, come to seek her fortune in the wildcode desert in the pay of the muhtasib families of Sirr. Instead, she feels like a child who has woken up from a bad dream and found it real.
In the last hour, I have been offered immortality eight thousand times, the ship says. I hate negotiating with vasilevs. But I got us an orbit and a docking station in one of the mercenary hubs. They call themselves the Teddy Bear Roadside Picnic Company, if you can believe that – are you all right?
‘I didn’t think it would be this hard,’ Mieli says. ‘I have not been in Oort for years. I fought in the Protocol War. I saw black holes eat moons. I saw a Singularity on Venus. I serve a goddess who rules a guberniya. And I still feel like I shouldn’t be here, like the tuonetars will get me if we go there.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Why is that?’
Because you are still Mieli, the ship says, the daughter of Karhu of Hiljainen Koto, the beloved of Sydän, who knows the songs of Oort. And if we do this right, you will always be.
Mieli smiles. ‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘And at least I’ll get to tell Sydän I made it here first.’
Perhonen drifts along one of the Gourd ribs. It is an endless band of Sobornost faces, surrounded by the glitter of constructor dust, like the largest rainbow in the world. The mercenary docking bay is the open of mouth of a vast hsien-ku face. Mieli reels in the ship’s wings and floats in.
The image of the recruiter of the Teddy Bear Roadside Picnic Company appears in the spimescape. He is a round, bearlike creature, an ursomorph with visible Sobornost enhancements. Diamond spikes protrude from his spine and thick head like icicles. But his eyes are very human and blue, with a suspicious look.
‘What do you want?’ he asks.
‘What do you think?’ Mieli says. ‘I want to go to the wildcode desert to hunt the dead.’
18
THE THIEF AND THE GOURD
I meet Hsien-Ku 432nd Generation, Early Renaissance Quintic Equations Branch, in a Viennese café in the 1990s. True to my nature and role, I don’t touch my Black Forest gâteau, even though it looks delicious. Instead, I maintain the stern businesslike visage of the sumanguru.
She, on the other hand, eats hers with relish: a short plain woman in a period dress, a faint smile on her round face, making appreciative noises as she spoons in the chocolate. I wait for her to finish. She wipes her mouth with a napkin.
‘Coffee?’ she asks.
‘I’d rather stay focused on the matter at hand,’ I say.
‘Very well. Lord Sumanguru, in all honesty, I took the time to speak to you since your visit is somewhat irregular. We have not received any updates to the Plan that would necessitate a review of our operation.’
I pick up a spoon in my large, black hands and bend it slightly. The hsien-ku winces.
‘The Plan can’t prepare for all the enemies of the Great Common Task.’ The soft metal twists, no doubt faithfully modelled by the ancestor sim’s physics engine.
I hold up the spoon. ‘It’s a good vir. Down to the quantum level, is that right?’
There is a sudden panic in the hsien-ku’s eyes.
‘We simplify things wherever possible,’ she says hastily. ‘There are no unnecessary quantum elements. All the minds are strictly classical. Whenever we have to make quantum corrections, it is only in the experiments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and then we ensure we carefully run all quantum aspects classically, in sandboxed virtual machines. I assure you, Lord Sumanguru, ther
e is no contamination here.’
‘You misunderstand me.’ I place the twisted spoon on the table. ‘My brothers and I commend you. We find embodiment . . . useful for questioning the enemies of the Task.’
A faint look of fear flickers across her eyes. It is easy to see why I chose this disguise last time. My greatest concern was that the chen would have notified the others that this particular Founder code was compromised – but that would have harmed the carefully maintained illusion of Founder infallibility.
‘And surely you do not expect to find any such here?’ she asks.
‘There is a concern that your operation has gotten too close to the flesh; that much of it has to do with matter.’
‘That is not by choice,’ the hsien-ku says. ‘Our interpretation of the Task is as valid as that of the other Founders – and it demands us to recover the lost souls of Earth.’
‘Then why have you not already done so?’
‘There was an attempt to scan and upload Earth’s biosphere and matter more forcefully some years ago, but it was a failure.’
‘Absurd. Why should a planetary environment like that pose any problems? Especially given the kinds of resources the Plan has deployed here.’
‘Wildcode,’ the hsien-ku says, embarrassed. ‘Something happened there after the Collapse. A mini-Singularity of sorts. Not on the scale of the Spike, but a merging of the noosphere with the native biosphere. It resulted in something the natives call wildcode, complex self-modifying code. It permeates Earth’s matter and it’s a pain to get rid of. While our imagers are capable of partial reconstructions, most of the key minds are in the upload heavens.’
‘Which you have access to through trade, is that correct?’
‘Broadly speaking, yes. We trade with the natives. It’s a slow process, but we are archaeologists. It has proven more effective than our previous attempts.’
‘Soft. Your copyclan lives up to its reputation,’ I say.
‘We will find a way to counteract the wildcode effects. If the Plan was to grant us more resources—’
‘—you would find another way to waste them. Already, our conversation has given me enough to raise this matter with the Prime. However, perhaps there is something you can do to help us both. I understand you have . . . detailed records of our glorious past.’