‘Oh, I agree entirely. It is like washing wildcode off a mutalibun’s cock, and about as rewarding. Father feels differently, however.’
Tawaddud stops, a chill in her belly.
‘I spoke to him this morning. I told him that you had repented your actions, that you wanted nothing but to restore the good name of our family, to become an honourable woman again.’
Tawaddud turns around. Duny looks straight at her, with blue and earnest eyes.
‘Do you want to turn me into a liar, dear sister? Into a teller of tales, like you?’
Tawaddud pulls her robe tighter around her and grits her teeth. A teller of tales. A lover of monsters. Not my daughter anymore. That’s what her father said on the day the Repentants found her and brought her back from the Palace of Stories, three years ago.
‘Who is it, then?’
‘Abu Nuwas,’ Dunyazad says. ‘I think Father would be very pleased if you two became . . . friends.’
‘Duny, if you want to punish me, there are easier ways to it. What does Father want from him?’
Duny sighs. ‘What could he possibly want from the richest gogol merchant in the city?’
‘I am not stupid, sister.’ And Repentant jinni like Mr Sen like to tell me things, afterwards. ‘Father has all the support in the Council he needs: he does not have to buy it. Why him and why now?’
Dunyazad narrows her eyes and runs one of her rings along her lips, back and forth. ‘I suppose I should be glad that you follow at least the rudiments of city politics,’ she says slowly. ‘There have been recent developments that have made our position . . . unstable. A Council member died this morning, very suddenly. Councilwoman Alile, of House Soarez: I think you remember her.’
Alile: a dour-faced woman at her father’s table, with a wildcode-eaten bald patch in her dark hair, a brass hawk on her shoulder. You should rather shovel shit for a living than become a mutalibun, little girl. I guess this is why, Tawaddud thinks, brushing away the memory. Her chest feels hollow, but she keeps her face blank.
‘Let me guess,’ she says. ‘She was the biggest supporter of Father’s proposal to modify the Cry of Wrath Accords. How did she die?’
‘A far too convenient suicide. The Repentants think it was a possession. It could be the masrurs, but so far they haven’t claimed responsibility. We are looking into it. Father even contacted the Sobornost: the hsien-kus are sending somebody to investigate. The vote on the Accords is in three days. If we want to win it, we need to buy it. Abu Nuwas knows that, and that’s why you, dear sister, are going to try your best to make him very happy.’
‘I am surprised that Father would entrust such an important task to me.’ To a lover of monsters.
‘Lord Nuwas specifically requested Father’s permission to court you. Then again, rumour has it that his tastes are . . . unusual. In any case, I am going to be busy looking after the Sobornost envoy – a dull babysitting job, but somebody has to do it – so it is up to you, I’m afraid.’
‘How convenient.’ You are the one he trusts, and I am the one he sells to the merchant like a gogol from the desert.
It was not always like that. She remembers a sizzling pan, the rich heat on her face, her father’s soft hands on her shoulders. Go on, Tawa, taste it, you made it. Add some more marjoram if you feel like. Food should tell a story.
‘Dear sister, this is me trying to help you. Our father is merciful, but he has not forgotten what you did. I’m offering you a chance to show him who you really are.’
Duny takes Tawaddud’s hand. The jinn rings in her fingers are cold. ‘It’s not just about you, Tawaddud. You talk about your Banu Sasan. If we win the vote, we’ll have the power to change things, for all the people of Sirr. If you help me.’ Duny’s eyes are sincere, just like they always were when she tried to convince Tawaddud to run away to the sukh or hide from Chaeremon the jinn.
‘Promises? I thought you would try threats,’ Tawaddud says quietly.
‘Very well,’ Duny says. ‘Perhaps there are some things Father really should know about.’
Tawaddud squeezes her eyes shut. Her temples throb. It’s the Aun punishing me. Maybe I deserve it.
Maybe Father will look at me again.
‘Fine,’ she says slowly. She feels weak and cold. ‘I only hope I’m unusual enough.’
‘Wonderful!’ Duny gets up and claps her hands. Her jewellery and jinn rings tingle. ‘Don’t look so glum. It’s going to be fun!’
She looks at Tawaddud, up and down, and frowns. ‘But we are going to have to do something about your hair.’
3
THE THIEF AND THE ARREST
I enter the main cabin hesitantly. If the ship is worried, Mieli might really be in a bad mood, and I hate getting beaten up by an Oortian warrior when I’m tired.
I don’t have to look far. She floats in the middle of the cabin, eyes closed, dark, almond-shaped face illuminated by soft candlelight, wrapped in her usual dark toga-like garment like a caterpillar in her cocoon.
‘Mieli, we need to talk,’ I say. No response.
I pull myself along the cabin axis and orient myself to face her. Her eyes are closed, and she barely seems to be breathing. Great. She must be in some sort of Oortian trance. Figures: live on berries in a hollowed-out comet lit by artificial suns long enough, and you start to have delusions about achieving enlightenment
‘This is important. I need to have a word with your boss.’ Maybe she’s in a piloting trance. I once got her out of it by exploiting our biot link, but it took pushing a sapphire dagger through my hand. I have no desire to repeat the experience – and besides, the link is gone. I snap my fingers in front of her face. Then I touch her shoulder.
‘Perhonen, is she all right?’ I ask the ship. But there is no reply.
‘Mieli, this isn’t funny.’
She starts laughing, a soft, musical sound. She opens her eyes and smiles like a serpent.
‘Oh, but it is,’ she says. In my mind, a prison door opens and closes. Not the Dilemma Prison, but another one, a long time ago.
Maybe I should have stayed inside.
‘Hello, Joséphine.’
‘You never called,’ she says. ‘I’m hurt.’
‘Well, on Mars, you seemed to be a little short on time,’ I say. Her eyes narrow dangerously. Perhaps it’s not a good strategy to remind her that I ended our last night together by having her thrown off the planet by Oubliette authorities.
Then again, perhaps it is.
‘Joséphine Pellegrini,’ I repeat her name. There should be memories that come with it, but they, too, are behind the closed door. That is not surprising: she has probably done some careful editing of my memories herself. If you are a Sobornost Founder, you can do that sort of thing.
‘So you figured it out,’ she says.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Oh, that was for your own good, my sweet,’ she says. ‘You’ve spent a couple of centuries running away from me. I didn’t want you to be distracted.’ She touches the middle finger of her left hand, as if adjusting a ring. ‘And do you know what happens when you try to escape your fate?’
‘What would that be?’
She leans closer.
‘You lose yourself. You become a petty thief, a magpie, chasing after shiny things. You need me to be something more.’ She touches my face. Her hand is smooth and cold.
‘I gave you a chance to steal yourself back. You failed. You are still the little thing from the Dilemma Prison, good for nothing except guns and games. I thought you could be a seed for something greater. I was wrong.’ Her eyes are hard. ‘You are not Jean le Flambeur.’
That stings, but I swallow it. Her tone is soft, but there is a glint of genuine anger in her eyes. Good.
I brush her hand away.
‘Then we are two,’ I say, ‘because I don’t think you are Joséphine Pellegrini. You are just a gogol. Maybe from one of the older branches, sure. But you are not a Prime. You would never send an
important part of yourself to do a job like this. You are just a low-level Founder ghost, running a rogue operation. I want to talk to the Prime.’
‘And what makes you think you deserve that?’ she says.
‘Because you need me to steal a Spike fragment from Matjek Chen. I know how to do it. And I want a better deal.’
She laughs. ‘Oh, Jean. You failed, last time. All you were— Oh my, I can’t even tell you— Cognitive architectures stolen from the zoku and us alike. Machines made with a sunlifting factory. The perfect disguise. And still you were like a child compared to him, the father of Dragons. And you are telling me you know how to do it now? Oh, my sweetheart, my little prince, you are amusing.’
‘Not as amusing as watching the other Founders eat you. It’ll be the vasilevs and hsien-kus, right? They never liked you. You need a weapon against them. That’s why you got me out.’
Her eyes are two green pearls, cold and hard. I take a deep breath. Almost there. I must not forget that she can read at least my surface thoughts. There are ways to obfuscate them. Associative images. Pearls and planets and eyes and tigers. She frowns. Better distract her.
‘And I do wonder how they caught me in the first place, if I was that good,’ I say. ‘Could it be that you had something to do with it, lover?’
She stands up in front of me. Her mouth is a straight line. Her chest is heaving. She opens Mieli’s wings. They quiver in the candlelight like two giant flames.
‘Maybe I’ve been running away from you,’ I say. ‘But when you get desperate, you always find a way to catch me.’
‘Desperate?’ she hisses. ‘You little bastard.’
She grabs my head and squeezes so hard that it feels like a yosegi box about to pop open, pulls me up so our faces are close together. Her breath is warm. It smells of liquorice. ‘I’m going to show you desperate,’ she says.
‘No.’ Yes.
Her eyes are pale green at first, then impossibly bright, like looking right into the Sun. The world goes white. My face flows like wax beneath her fingers.
‘This is how they caught you,’ she says.
The Story of the Inspector and Jean le Flambeur
The inspector catches that bastard Jean le Flambeur in the photosphere of the Sun.
Before he begins, he takes his time to look at them, the Founders aboard the good ship Immortaliser. The bearded engineer-of-souls rocks slowly back and forth in his chair. The pellegrini in her white-and-gold naval uniform stares at him intently, waiting. The vasilev leans back in his chair, swirling the golden wine in his glass. The two hsien-kus, inscrutable. The chen, still and quiet, looking at the sea. The chitragupta pokes holes in the structure of the vir with its finger, making tiny, glowing singularities that vanish with a popping sound as soon as they appear.
The inspector frowns at the chitragupta. The Immortaliser is a knotted configuration of electromagnetic fields around a nugget of smartmatter the size of a pinhead. It floats five hundred kilometres above the solar north pole, in the temperature minimum region of the photosphere. He went into a lot of trouble to get the vir to run on that kind of hardware.
The vir is a little restaurant in the crook of a rocky harbour’s arm. They sit around tables set out on the uneven sunlit rock in a cool breeze, glasses of white wine and plates of seafood in front of them, full of rich, subtle smells. The rigging of the sailboats in the water makes a tinkling sound in the wind, like improvised music. To remind them where they are, the jewelled orrery of the Experiment looms in the sky, larger than clouds or worlds, against the blazing white curve of the Sun. It’s a patchwork reality, put together from the memories of the Founders, as these things should be. To show respect, to have consensus. Or so the theory goes.
The vasilev is the first to speak.
‘What are we doing here?’ he says. ‘We have already answered all your questions.’
The inspector’s fingers find the ridges and valleys of scar tissue on his cheeks. The touch awakens the dull ache that is always there, not because the wounds have not healed but because it is part of him, a show of respect to the Prime.
Good, he thinks. It is good to meet the others in a vir where they can feel pain. These are gogols from branches deep within the guberniyas, used to abstraction, with a tendency to forget that the physical reality is still there, raw and painful and devious and messy, like a razor blade hidden inside an apple.
‘One of you is Jean le Flambeur,’ he tells them. ‘One of you is here to steal.’
The Founders look at him in stunned silence. The chitragupta giggles. The engineer stares at the coils of purple octopi on his plate. The pellegrini flashes the inspector a smile. He feels a strange warmth in his chest. That was something he did not expect. High-fidelity virs and embodiment have their advantages and disadvantages. He stops himself from smiling back.
‘I don’t understand any of this,’ he says, gesturing upwards.
The sky is full of neutrino winks of other raion ships like the Immortaliser, millions of them, moving in tight, orderly orbits, interwoven like threads in a tapestry. Somewhere, far away, echoes the thrumming song of a guberniya, an artificial brain the size of a planet, watching over its children from the shadow of Mercury, coordinating, guiding, planning.
The Sun wears a belt made from tiny points of light: sunlifting machinery that pumps heavy elements from the fusion depths and feeds it to smartmatter factories in stationary orbits. An entire ecology of constructor gogols in plasma bodies churns the solar corona, creating pockets of order that will be used as the lasing medium for solar lasers.
‘But I know it is to serve the Great Common Task. Our brother the engineer tried to explain thread theory to me, about quantum gravity scattering, about the Planck locks and how God is not a gambler but a cryptographer. I don’t care. My branch deals with simpler things. You all know what I do.’
It is a little dishonest. Of course he knows what is about to happen. But it is better if they think of him as a barbarian.
Solar lasers will focus on a constellation of points until the concentration of energy tears the fabric of spacetime itself and gives birth to singularities, fed with the particle stream that the sunlifting system kicks up from the pole. Countless gogols will be cast into them, their minds encoded in thread states in the event horizons. Seventeen black holes will pull together long tails of plasma from the Sun like orange peels, coming together. A many-fingered hand of God will close into a fist. A violent Hawking decay will convert several Earth masses into energy.
And, perhaps, within that inferno, there will be an answer. An answer someone wants to steal.
‘So, where is this fabled creature, then?’ asks the vasilev. ‘This is madness. Nine seconds in the Experiment frame, and we are wasting cycles in this fancy vir. Out there, our brothers and sisters are getting ready for the most glorious of tasks. And what are we doing? Jumping at shadows.’ He looks at the pellegrini. ‘Sister pellegrini here has decided that we should dance for the monkey.’
The inspector lays his large hands on the table and gets up. His sudden movement and his bulk make the glasses shudder and sing.
‘Brother vasilev should reconsider his words,’ he says, quietly. He will have to deal with this one soon. And possibly the hsien-kus: there are two of them, an older and a younger, one in an elaborate avatar from the Deep Time – a hsien-ku face embedded in a blue, many-angled body and a forest of limbs – the other an unassuming young woman a plain grey uniform. He is almost certain they sent the core vampire that tried to kill him in the ship’s Library.
‘Sister pellegrini here detected an anomaly in the mathematics gogols,’ the inspector says. ‘She brought me from the Library to investigate, and cut off communications from the rest of the fleet. It was the right thing to do. I found traces. In virs, in gogol memories. Le Flambeur is here.’
He looks at the chen from the corner of his eye, trying to see a reaction. The grey-haired Founder is the only one who is not looking at the inspector.
His eyes are fixed on the sky, and a smile plays on his lips.
The older hsien-ku rises.
‘This creature you are talking about is a myth,’ she says. ‘In our ancestor sims, he is little more than a story. A bogeyman.’
She is impressively ancient. The instinctive xiao – the inbuilt respect for a gogol closer to a Prime than he is – makes the inspector feel like a child for a moment. The inspector was the sword of Sobornost, his metaself rewrites his thoughts. He stayed strong. He knew his cause was true and pure.
‘Is sister saying that the Prime memories are flawed?’ he says, clinging to the metaself’s reassuring voice, gritting his teeth.
‘Not flawed,’ she says. ‘Merely . . . distant.’
‘We are wasting time,’ the vasilev says. ‘If there is an anomaly here, if the ship has been infected, then sister pellegrini should self-destruct and so our deaths will serve the Task. But then, she has always been a little too fond of her continuity to do what is necessary.’
The inspector smiles. ‘My investigation was thorough. It seems that our brother vasilev and sister hsien-ku tried to manipulate the balance of test gogols used in the Experiment. But I’m not here to accuse them. I’m here to find Jean le Flambeur.’
The vasilev stares at him. ‘Of all the outrageous accusations—’
‘Enough,’ says the chen. There is a sudden silence. The chen is the only gogol on the ship not branched for the Experiment: fourth generation, Battle-with-the-Conway-Angel branch. Even the metaself cannot silence the heavy rush of xiao that the inspector feels when he speaks.
‘Our brother has performed his task well. If anyone questions his recommendations, it is surely not out of guilt, but merely out of desire to see the Great Common Task performed well, am I not right? If it is a question of identity, then the answer is simple. The Primes, in their wisdom, have provided us with the means to tell the world who we are.’