‘Look, Matjek,’ I say carefully. ‘You know why your parents put you in that vir? That place on the beach? They wanted to keep you safe. In case something bad happened to the world, in case they could not protect you themselves anymore. And I’m just trying to—’
I swallow. I’m pretty sure Bojan and Naomi Chen would not approve of me using their son as a viral weapon of mass destruction. But sometimes, I’m just as much of a slave to patterns as my almost-son Isidore was: when things click, when I can see a way out, it’s hard not to seize whatever tool there is at hand.
I can’t bear to look at him, so I stand up and walk to the nearest bookshelf. I lean on it. The blue and silver backs of the thousand books of Sirr stare at me accusingly.
‘I just want you to know that I never meant for you to get hurt. You helped a lot on Iapetus, and I’m sure Mieli will be grateful.’
‘I don’t care. I hate you both.’
‘You have to believe me. I would have told you, when you were ready. I did not want to find out like that, I swear. Who told you? Was it the Aun – your friends?’ I may need them, but if they caused this, I swear I’m going to—
‘No, it wasn’t them.’ He sniffs. ‘It was the gun.’
I turn around. He is hunched on the chair, looking at his hands. His eyes are rimmed with tears.
‘It was kind of fun, at first, having a body again, even if it was wispy, like a jinn, coming out of a bottle,’ he says. ‘I found the Leblanc. I thought at it, and it let us in, like you said. And then I found the gunscape. I got bored with waiting, so I played with it. My friends helped me to get in.’
I let out an inward groan.
‘There was a spime for every gun. Some even had Realms so you could try them out. There was one called a ghostgun, from the First Fedorovist War.’
Oh, hell.
‘I didn’t know what it was, so I asked. The gun said I started the war, in some place called Iridescent Gateway of Heaven. That it was my fault all those people died. I got angry. I thought it was lying. I wanted it to go away. So I started firing the guns. All of them.’
‘Matjek—’
‘Was the gun lying, Jean?’
I flinch. It is the first time he has used my name.
‘You know so much about lying. Was it lying?’
I kneel down next to him. I want to touch him, to take his arm, but he is looking at me with a fury so palpable that I can feel it in the air like a static charge.
‘No, it wasn’t. But it wasn’t telling the truth either. The person who did all those things was called Matjek Chen, that’s true. But he wasn’t you. Just somebody like you.’
‘He was me. The gun told me all about gogols, too.’
‘That’s not how it works. Not all gogols are the same. Trust me, I know. Something happened to that one, something bad, and he never got over it.’
‘What was it?’
I sigh. ‘I don’t know.’
‘So how do I know I won’t end up like him?’ His eyes are wide and desperate.
‘I don’t know, Matjek. I don’t know. But I believe we can decide who we are. If you don’t like that other Matjek, be someone else.’
‘Is that why you do it?’ he asks. ‘Put on faces because you don’t like who you are?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I saw you do it. You were just the same underneath.’
‘I’m sorry, Matjek,’ I say. ‘I’m not very good at looking after other people. I know you were happy, on the beach. I didn’t want to take you away. But I had no choice.’
‘You just said we always have a choice.’
‘Not always.’
‘How do you know which is which?’ He gets up. ‘You’re just trying to say something that’ll shut me up! You want to get rid of me so you can save your stupid friend! And you don’t even know why!’
He shoves me, as hard as the vir will allow, and I almost fall.
‘Matjek, that’s not true.’
‘Shut up! Everything you say is a lie! That’s what the other you said! Leave me alone!’
I blink.
‘What do you mean, the other—’
Father wants to be alone.
The Aun flash in my vision, jagged serpents of light. The vir snaps shut and throws me out. Then I am standing in the blue humming corridor of the Leblanc, and the stinging feeling in my eyes is just a vir-to-Realm translation error, not tears at all.
‘All right, you bastards, I screwed up!’ I shout at the empty corridor. ‘But so did you! Why didn’t you stop him?’
There is no reply.
I scour my mind for the presence of the Aun but find nothing.
‘Talk to me! Show yourselves!’
Still nothing. A righteous fury erupts in my chest. ‘Come out, or I’m going to take my brain apart to find you. What are you waiting for?’
For you to keep your promise, the Chimney Princess says.
She stands before me, a little girl in a wooden mask, wearing a sooty dress, barefoot. She looks completely alien in the Leblanc’s blue meta-Realm.
I look at her. Her eyes are faint embers behind the eye slits of the mask, and I can’t tell if their glow is anger or pity.
‘Why don’t you ever show your face?’ I ask her.
Because people give me theirs when they meet me.
‘I know the feeling.’
Have you found one you like yet?
‘Can’t say that I have. But I am trying. I need your help for that. I need to know what happened in the Collapse.’
We cannot tell you.
‘There is no need for blackmail. I swore to Tawaddud I would—’
You don’t understand. Much of us is lost. We are shards and fragments, self-loops and voices. We are Sirr, we are the wildcode desert. That is where your answers are. Bring us and our children back and we will remember for you.
I can’t see her face, but it feels like she is smiling behind her mask. Or you can remember yourself.
Then she is gone. The corridor smells faintly of smoke.
I return to the pilot’s cabin and watch the coffee-and-cream flow of Saturn while Carabas steers the ship.
I start thinking about how to rebuild a city, how to get enough entanglement in the Notch-zoku to claim an Earth-sized plate. Slowly, in the calm of the ship’s crystalline heart, a smile returns to my face.
Barbicane was right. It is time to play a different game.
9
MIELI AND THE GREAT GAME
In the shadow of 624 Hektor, the Liquorice-zoku and the Zweihänder wait for the Sobornost civil war to come to them.
‘I wish it would start already!’ Zinda says. ‘Don’t you want to go to a Circle or a Realm, to pass the time?’
Mieli and her Great Game minder are in the central habitat module of the ship. It resembles a miniature fantasy forest wrapped into a cylinder, with gnarly bonsai-sized oaks, and tiny green-hued humanoid creatures lurking among them. Mieli is sitting in a forest clearing, inside a stone circle that barely reaches to her knees, basking under the glow of the ship’s tiny sun – which has its own convoluted orbit – and smelling the rich pine-and-dirt smell of the forest. It reminds her of her garden.
‘If there is one thing I have learned about war,’ says Mieli, ‘it’s that you spend most of it waiting. It feels … familiar. I prefer it to your Circles or Realms.’ She smiles. ‘Besides, I don’t want to forget about the physical world, especially not before going to battle. Someone … someone I knew once said that the reality is always there, like a razor blade inside an apple. The Sobornost always make that mistake. I don’t intend to.’
Zinda smiles wanly. ‘I understand. Still, I would have hoped that by now, you would have found something about the zoku lifestyle that you like. You turned down all my Realm and dinner invitations. I take that sort of thing personally, you know.’
Mieli feels the zoku girl’s eyes on her and looks up, squinting at the sunlight. Zinda is lying down on a riverbank, almost direc
tly above her on the cylinder surface. She is wearing colourful, oversized sunglasses that clash with her samurai outfit.
Mieli gestures at the green miniature landscape around them. ‘In Supra City, I feel like this, only … opposite. Everything is too big. I grew up in an ice sphere only a little bigger than this ship. If there is too much room, too much freedom, I get lost. I need … constraints. Boundaries.’
Maybe I’m saying too much, she thinks. But the zoku girl is easy to talk to. Perhaps it is their new zoku connection, or some remnant from the Realm of the witch. Or perhaps – although she does not want to admit it – the days in the confines of Zweihänder are starting to try even her Oortian composure, and it is good to talk to someone who is three dimensional and her own size.
‘But that’s exactly what Circles and Realms are!’ Zinda says. ‘They are all about the ludic attitude, making things harder for yourself, more interesting! On Earth, they had this game called golf, for example. You were supposed to get a ball into a hole by hitting it with a metal stick – I know, really tacky, don’t ask. If the goal was the point, you’d just walk it to the hole and drop it in. But it wouldn’t be as much fun.’
Apart from the enchanted forest people, they are alone. Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere and Sir Mik made use of the Realmgate at the centre of the ship, the cryptographer to prepare her tools for Founder gogol capture, and the miniature knight to study the Great Game intel spime to determine likely locations for pellegrini, hsien-ku and vasilev skirmishes. His models predict a likely confluence of opposing forces in the local Jovian Trojan space – a Lagrange point hub of a number of minor Highway routes – within a day or two in baseline time.
‘It’s not the same,’ Mieli says. ‘It sounds like a … a song without a tune. Just making sounds that do not mean anything, that do not shape any väki, or tell a story. At least the Sobornost have a plan, a purpose.’
‘Be careful! I am from a Narrativist zoku, you know!’ Then Zinda’s expression grows serious. She sits up and removes her sunglasses.
‘I spent a lot of time studying you, Mieli, before we met. But there is so much I don’t know! Forgive me for asking, but if you miss your Oort so much, why did you ever leave? Why did you let the Sobornost change you? I can’t imagine what that was like. They do it so differently from us: we give you a way to change yourself, make a new self or an alter in a Realm, and then bring it back here. But they …’ She shakes her head. ‘Why did you feel you needed to?’
Mieli swallows. Something brushes her bare feet: a group of furred humanoids with golden eyes is chanting inside the circle, waving sticks and bones in the air. She is not sure if they are worshipping her or trying to banish her.
In spite of their diminutive size, the crew of the Zweihänder has physical specs that many Inner System mercenary companies would envy, and the positive aspects of being a giant are mostly negated by the nauseating Coriolis forces caused by the spin of the ship that creates the comfortable onboard 0.1g gravity. She has learned the hard way to take care not to step on any unwary denizens of the forest, or to swat at the dragon-riders that occasionally circle around them.
Some things are best left alone.
‘I’d rather not talk about that,’ she says, quietly.
Zinda smiles. ‘All right. We don’t have to talk. Would you like to sing to me?’
Mieli looks at Zinda. Her deep brown eyes are earnest, and their faint entanglement connection through the two zoku jewels they share betrays no malice, only warm curiosity.
‘We only sing,’ she says slowly, ‘to create, or to uncreate; in great sorrow or great joy.’ She pauses. ‘Or to a lover. But not to pass the time.’
‘Well,’ Zinda says lightly, ‘then we just have to find some other way to pass the time.’
‘Ladies!TheDarkheartedFiendApproaches!’ Sir Mik rides his winged steed into the module, fully garbed for battle. ‘TheBattleIsJoined! GloryAwaits!’
Mieli peers into the Zweihänder’s strange, runic spimescape. The passive sensors Sir Mik spent the last day seeding the Trojans with are detecting energy discharges: neutrino bursts from fusion reactors, and scattered pions from antimatter engines. Hundreds of tiny diamond shards move around the cold red masses of the asteroids like shoals of fish.
Raions.
‘I suppose that is your cue,’ Zinda says.
‘Yes.’ Mieli brings her systems up. Combat autism waits to embrace her like a vast cool sea where the world moves slowly and silently, with no room for emotions for mistakes. Yet, this time, she is reluctant to enter it.
Zinda reaches out across the treetops of the magical forest and squeezes her hand.
‘Good luck. Tell me, what comes after waiting?’
‘Terror,’ Mieli says.
‘Oh, I think we can do better than that!’
The battle does not look like a battle, at first.
Wrapped in zoku q-armour and the arms of the Dark Man, Mieli watches the raion pinpoints move in swarms and streams, dancing in the gravity well of 624 Hektor. They soak up delta-v and come at each other in battle formations like the lances of two knights, firing nanomissiles as they pass, tiny projectiles piloted by kamikaze gogols. Communication lasers flicker between them, invisible in the vacuum but sketched into the spimescape. During each microsecond pass, electronic warfare ghosts do battle in the ether, trying to break through the raions’ firewalls, flooding each other with viruses evolved by genetic algorithms. Both fleets are dumping so much bandwidth that their heat sink condensates are overloading and, in infrared, they glow like bright stars against the cool background of the Trojan rocks.
Mieli is perched on Hektor’s surface, watching the battle. It unfolds before her, dream-like, through the viscous lenses of quicktime and combat autism. The Liquorice-zoku’s passive sensors – barely more than flakes of condensed matter with topological quantum logic – intercept fragments of the pellegrini fleet’s signals and tightbeam them to her. She feels strangely vulnerable: even though the Sobornost ships are thousands of kilometres away, through the sensor network, her presence and self-image extend right into the heart of the battle itself.
The combatants are the smallest class of common Sobornost vessel, diamonoid wedges barely a metre long, housing computronium cores and millions of gogols. Yet their surfaces are carved with intricate detail. Tetrahedral prows decorated by vasilev and hsien-ku images, a smiling handsome man and a studious, serious woman. The chilling beautiful visage of the pellegrini multiplied thousandfold, both as a proud figurehead and repeated all over the ships’ pearly skin across all length scales, down to the atomic level.
The fleets pass through each other again, and this time, antimatter novae bloom at the point of contact, staccato notes of searing light. Her armour complains at the sudden gamma ray bombardment. She tells the spimescape to filter out as much noise as it can. Her gogols fill in missing data and plot likely trajectories. They seek matches to the mission constraints and direct her attention to an optimal target.
There: a pellegrini raion, severely damaged, hurtling away from the main spear of the fleet. Diamonoid fragments float around it in a halo, extruding filaments in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the main hull whose perfect symmetry has been ruined by a deep crater on the port side. But the damage is not only physical: the smartmatter surface boils with the waste heat of a software conflict. Ghostgun bullets have embedded themselves in the ship’s white flesh, flooding its virs with invader gogols. In seconds, the raion will be enveloped by the next thrust of the joint fleet of hsien-kus and vasilevs.
Mieli takes a deep breath, and sends the raion the message she has checked and re-checked against her Sobornost protocol gogols during the last few days, a coded burst of wartime code.
To Elixir-4711. This is Balsamo-334. Your sacrifice for the Great Common Task will be complete in four point three seconds in your frame. You are requested to transmit us a gogol of your observer chen.
The tenth of a second that sluggish light take
s to travel to the raion gives her a moment to reflect while waiting for the response, truly alone for the first time since the beginning of the journey, with the radio silence between her and the Zweihänder isolating her from her zoku companions. She casts a quick glance at the elongated shape of Hektor. The zoku ship is hidden behind the bulk of the asteroid, along with its own metacloak, and even at this distance she can’t detect any signs of it – except the faint pulsing of her Liquorice jewel.
There is something she has been wondering about the mission ever since Zinda described it. Given the intensity of the Great Game intelligence operations elsewhere, is she really that important?
Or is this a test, designed to probe her loyalty? And if that is the case, does she dare to fail? She has to remain useful to the Great Game, has to win entanglement, to get closer to the Kaminari jewel.
The response from Elixir comes, preceded by a rapid burst of protocol. Mieli sighs with relief. At least her Protocol War codes are still approximately up to date. But the message itself makes her grit her teeth.
Founder code authorisation required.
Mieli whispers a fervent prayer, first to Kuutar and Ilmatar, and then to the pellegrini.
‘What a waste of gogols this is.’
Mieli blinks. The Sobornost goddess is standing next to her on some invisible surface. She checks her metacortex, to make sure none of her perceptions will filter through to the rest of the zoku.
‘Oh, stop fretting, dear,’ the pellegrini says. ‘Please give me more credit than that. Once we are done, I will edit your memories to make sure it looks like your old Protocol War codes still worked. But first, let me send a confirmation to my sisters.’
With disturbing ease, the pellegrini takes over Mieli’s systems and answers the Elixir’s message with a quick, coded burst.
‘There. All done. Now we just have to enjoy the show. I would dearly like to exchange a few words with my sisters, to get an update on the situation in the Inner System, but you are right, the zoku is testing you. In all honesty, I am surprised that things have not escalated faster. I would have expected the All-Defector to move against my brothers and sisters by now, and that should have made Anton and Hsien give up on petty squabbles such as this. But then they were always too blind to see what was right in front of them.’