The chen turns to face them, a beatific smile on his face. ‘Let us draw forth our Founder Codes, and pray.’
The inspector takes a deep breath. He knew this was coming, but he has no desire to touch his Code, the thing that grants Founders root access to the meta-laws of the firmament that govern all virs. The Code derives from passwords in the same way that nuclear weapons descend from flint axes: not just a string of characters, but a state of mind, a defining moment, the innermost self. And his isn’t pretty.
Nevertheless, he grins at the vasilev as they all get up. The golden-haired gogol takes a drink from his glass, spilling a few drops as he puts it back on the table: his hands are shaking. I would really like it to be this one.
‘Come, now,’ the chen says. ‘Let’s all do this together, like brothers and sisters.’ He closes his eyes. An expression of bliss spreads across his face, as if he was watching something indescribably beautiful. The vir dissolves around them, absorbed by the firmament, disappearing into empty whiteness like the vasilev’s wine into the cotton tablecloth.
One by one, the other Founders follow. The chitragupta’s face is full of serenity. The pellegrini looks afraid. The engineer’s forehead is furrowed by furious concentration. The plain faces of the hsien-kus are made beautiful by expressions of wonder and awe. The vasilev is pale and sweating. He gives the inspector one more look full of hate and closes his eyes.
And then it is the inspector’s turn.
In the firmament, closing your eyes does not bring darkness, only white. The Founders are stark silhouettes against it. Hesitantly, the inspector touches his Code. It aches like his scars, only a hundred times worse, an unhealed gash inside him that reeks and oozes pus like a
bedsore. It opens when the gunfire wakes him up. His sister lies next to him. Flies walk on her open eyes. He tears out the wires in his scalp. There is a squelching sound and a lightning bolt of pain. Blood runs down his face. He touches her forehead. Under his fingers, the skin is clammy and soft.
He casts it at the firmament, eager to be rid of it. The hungry whiteness claims it and swallows. Suddenly, it is no longer white but a mirror that shows him six reflections.
He touches his face to feel the scars and sees the others do the same. The scars are not there: his cheeks are smooth. His mirror images are young men with coal-black hair and pencil-stroke eyebrows, dimpled temples and heavy eyelids. They wear slim velvet jackets and white shirts and look like they are on their way to a party. They brush invisible dust from their lapels, look at each other, blinking, as if they had just woken up from a dream.
As he watches them, there is a sharp crack inside him. Another self hatches like a bird from an egg. I smile at the confusion in my other selves’ eyes as we shake off the heavy shell of the inspector.
Next to me, the chen starts clapping.
‘Wonderful!’ he says, grinning like an excited child. ‘Wonderful!’
We all look at him. He alone is unchanged, a small grey figure against the firmament white. Something is wrong. I look for his Code in the vir trap we have created and find nothing.
The chen wipes his eyes and his expression becomes a serious mask again. Now that the xiao of my Sobornost disguise is gone, it is easier to look at him. A short, stocky Asian man with unevenly cut grey hair, barefoot, wearing a monkish robe. His face is younger than his eyes.
‘A vir that emulates the firmament,’ he says. ‘I did not think such a thing possible. And all this drama, just for me, just to steal my Codes. Better than going to the theatre. Very entertaining.’
The six of us take a bow, all together. ‘Surely you can figure out how I did it,’ we chorus. I can see it in my other selves’ eyes: trying to find a way out. But the vir is sealed around us, tight as a bottle.
‘Of course,’ he says, looking us up and down, hands behind his back. ‘I remember the first sunlifter factory you broke into, a century ago. So you did it again. The old compiler backdoor trick. Basic cleptography. The only part I can’t figure out is where you got my old friend’s Codes. From Joséphine? I will need to have a word with her.’
I am rather proud of it: hacking the ultimate trusted computing platform, by inserting a few choice things into the hardware of the Immortaliser when the sunlifter factory compiled it and its sister ships, four minutes or so ago in the Experiment reference frame.
So of course, I also made an escape route.
‘A gentleman never tells. And there is a reason why classics are called classics,’ we say, a slight disharmony in our chorus now as we diverge.
There. The vir is sealed tight like a bottle, but he missed one of my firmament back doors. Just have to keep him talking.
‘Indeed. And betrayal is one of them, isn’t it? The oldest of them all.’ He smiles a thin smile. ‘You should have known better than to trust her.’
I didn’t. But we only shrug.
‘It was always a gamble. That’s what I do.’ We gesture at the whiteness. ‘But you are gambling, too. This whole thing, the Experiment. It’s just to distract the others, isn’t it? You don’t need it. You already have the Kaminari jewel. The key to Planck locks.’
He raises his eyebrows. ‘And can you think of anyone else who deserves to have it?’
We laugh. ‘With all due respect, Matjek,’ we say, ‘you should really leave jewels and locks and keys to the professionals.’
‘Respect. I see.’ He crosses his arms. ‘You treat this as a game. Do you remember the first time we met? I told you it was not a game to me.’
That was not the first time we met. But it’s good you don’t remember that.
‘Then why is it,’ we ask, ‘that I always won?’
One of us – I’m no longer sure who – activates the escape protocol. The others self-destruct, flooding the white vir with noise. The software shell that contains my mind dumps its contents into thoughtwisps, launches them from the Immortaliser at other raion ships.
I jump from node to node in the Sobornost communications network, splitting, merging, sending out self-sacrificing partials. The chens come after me, tenacious, relentless. But it doesn’t matter. A few milliseconds and I will reach one of my getaway ships, beautiful Leblancs built by the Gun Club zoku, with their warm Hawking drives, ready to make my getaway at the speed of light—
Then the raions start self-destructing. The photosphere is full of antimatter blooms as they burn my bridges, sacrifice billions of gogols to contain me like a virus. The destruction spreads like a wildfire, until there is only one of me left.
I try to hide in the firmament processes, become a slow, reversible computation. But in vain: they hunt me down. The chens and the engineers come, swarm over me like lilliputs over Gulliver, trapping me.
Then the mind-blades come, invisible and hot.
They take me apart. The metacortex goes first: the ability to self-modify to sculpt my neural matter. Fixed, dead, no longer changing personalities at will, imprisoned. But they make sure to leave the knowledge that something is gone.
A voice asks questions.
I don’t answer and die.
A voice asks questions.
I don’t answer and die.
A voice asks questions.
I don’t answer and die.
Finally, the blades touch a trap I built inside myself a long time ago. My secrets catch fire and consume themselves in my head.
In the end, I am naked, in a cell made of glass. There are phantom pains in my mind where the god parts have been cut away. There is a gun in my hand. Behind each of the four walls, there is somebody else, waiting.
Cooperate or defect?
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 any
thing 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.