She turns to the singularity of her temple. ‘Perhaps it is time for me to move more directly against those who would destroy me.’
Mieli bows her head.
‘You do understand that our technology will not survive in Earth’s atmosphere for long? That you are condemning those other selves of yours into a painful death?’
‘I am not afraid of death,’ Mieli says. ‘So none of us will be.’
‘Very well,’ the pellegrini says. ‘I am pleased. Perhaps you are growing up after all.’
She touches Mieli’s cheek. The goddess’ ring is cold against her scar. ‘It is only now that I’m taking your gogol,’ the pellegrini says. ‘No matter what Jean might tell you, I am not cruel. And you do remind me of someone I knew a long time ago.’
Then she is gone and Mieli is back on the bridge of Nakir, watching the Lost Jannah of the Cannon below.
Mieli steps forward and places a q-dot blade across Abu Nuwas’s throat.
‘I claim this jannah in the name of Joséphine Pellegrini of the Sobornost,’ she says.
Abu Nuwas stares at her with his one human eye.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he asks.
‘I am Mieli. The daughter of Karhu of Hiljainen Koto, the beloved of Sydän of Kirkkaat Kutojat.’ She points at the sky with her free hand. Up in the dark blue of evening, between the arcs of Gourd, there is a cloud that flashes golden in the sunset light. ‘And so are they.’
There are machines within the Gourd, built over decades by the hsien-ku, gogol factories and smartmatter moulds and picotech fabbers. The pellegrini tells them to make angels.
The metacortex in Mieli’s brain lights up, becomes more than just a layer on top of her frontal lobe, a metaself. She feels the echoes of her other selves, moving with a unified purpose, a goal, exchanging rapid bursts to synchronise differences between mind-states, spreading their wings and diving towards Earth.
They enter the atmosphere in their thousands, smartmatter armour flaming in the re-entry. Already, they feel the kiss of wildcode that brings death, but that is what they are here to embrace.
They sing songs of Oort as a choir as they fall.
Mieli’s viewpoint on the bridge of Nakir shatters into a kaleidoscope. The words of Oort arrive before her other selves do, by a fraction of a second, a thunderous roar from a thousand throats.
The fractal angel storm cuts through the mercenary fleet like a blade. Rukh swarms evaporate before synchronised cannon fire. Munkar veers to one side.
‘This is a place of the Aun,’ Abu Nuwas shouts as the ship sways. ‘Your machines will be eaten. Without the Secret Name, they will never let you in.’
‘I told you my name,’ Mieli says. ‘That had better be good enough for them.’
She pushes the muhtasib aside and dives towards the jannah, joining the battle song. The wildcode desert rises to meet them.
They fight their way through the desert city. They take out wild jinni with codeweapons, destroy chimera beings with plasma and fire. The jannah itself turns against them. A tower becomes a nightmare worm. A mieli takes it out by detonating her fusion reactor in its mouth. The combined force of their wings creates a pillar of dust that hides the mercenary fleet above.
The deaths of her other selves are hammer blows in Mieli’s mind. The hot twisting burn of the wildcode. The tearing claws of chimera beasts. The pure white of a fusion explosion. The quick sharp self-destruct that some choose, before the wildcode turns them against their sisters. Mieli is there through every last moment, every final darkness, and there is a strange joy in each one, a purity that makes her feel like a brass bell, ringing.
This is what I was made for. This is what I am.
In the end, the Lost Jannah of the Cannon is silent, full of fallen angels and shattered sapphire and dead towers like broken teeth. A domed building in the centre remains, a beautiful structure with an arced entranceway.
Remind me to never make you angry again, the thief says in Mieli’s head.
‘Get ready,’ she says. ‘You are going to have your prince soon.’
Flanked by her other selves, Mieli enters the building.
There is a metal disc on the floor beneath the dome, ten metres in diameter. There are three figures waiting for her in front of it. There is a man in green, a strange glowing creature that looks like an octopus made of light, constantly shifting shape – and a little girl in a sooty dress and a wooden mask.
‘You have come for Father,’ the little girl says. ‘Our brother told us about you.’
Mieli blinks. The figures do not show up in spimescape, but they appear fully real. She can see the grains of the wood and the flaking paint in the girl’s mask.
‘Perhonen, are you getting this?’ Mieli whispers.
As far as I can tell, you are alone down there. Except for all the other Mielis, of course. The pellegrini has access to all the Gourd ghost imagers now. The jannah is directly below you, at the bottom of a long drop through a salt rock layer, almost a kilometre deep. There is a really big chamber down there, and lots of other stuff – geothermal power sources. Lots of chemicals, boron and hydrogen and radioactives. A layered representation of the underground facility flickers in Mieli’s field of vision as the ship speaks.
‘Are you going to try to stop me?’ Mieli tells the desert ghosts. ‘It’s not going to go well for you.’ She still has almost a hundred remaining selves – battered, wildcode-ridden, armed only with makeshift weapons and flickering, failing q-blades – but they are all battle-ready.
‘We should ask you for a true story,’ the girl says. ‘But we already know yours.’
Then the three are gone, leaving Mieli with a strange, yearning feeling. She shakes her head.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ she says.
With the help of her other selves, she cuts away the metal, revealing a cylindrical shaft. She descends slowly on her wings, lighting up her armour to illuminate the passage.
It is hot at the bottom. There is a round chamber with a ledge around its base, hardened terminals in the walls, ancient touchscreens and ports for jacks that haven’t existed for centuries. Mieli lets her software gogols loose on them, pushes q-dot tendrils into the guts of the ancient machines.
Then she is inside the jannah’s vir, and everything is bright.
Mieli is standing on a beach.
It is not exactly like the hard physics-based virs that the Sobornost use, but something softer, more dream-like. Mieli stops to look at the sea: she has never seen one like it. The blue expanse seems endless, and her gaze gets lost in it for a moment. Its soft crashing on the sand feels soothing after the madness of battle.
There is a boy playing near the water, building a sand-castle. He looks up when Mieli approaches. A smile lights up his tanned face.
‘Hi,’ Mieli says. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m building a castle for my friends,’ the boy says.
‘Why don’t you introduce us?’
‘This is the Green Soldier,’ the boy says, holding up an old plastic warrior, battered by salt water and the sun. ‘This is the lightkraken.’ He points at a blob of transparent putty in one of the towers, with a cartoon face. Then he picks up a little doll made from sticks. ‘And this is the Chimney Princess. The Flower Prince should be here, too, but I can’t find him. He likes to run away, sometimes.’
‘Nice to meet you all,’ Mieli says. ‘But what is your name?’
‘Mom told me not to speak to strangers.’
‘And do strangers ever come here?’ The boy reminds Mieli of Varpu and her leaps of logic.
‘No,’ the boy says uncertainly.
‘Then I can’t be a stranger, can I? My name is Mieli.’
The boy considers for a second. ‘I’m Matjek.’
‘How long have you been here, Matjek?’
‘I came in the morning, with Mom and Dad. They just left and said that I could play a little longer. It’s almost time to go home, but not quite.’
br /> Mieli swallows. Can I really take him out of here? Out of a childhood memory? The thief claims he will never know. We can leave him running after we are done, for ever if need be, it will be all right, he will never tell the difference.
That’s the kind of thing Sobornost always says, she thinks. But I just fought side by side with my other selves and won, and they all died willingly, just like I would have done. Perhaps Sobornost are not wrong about everything.
And even if they are, you are the only one who can take me to Sydän, little Matjek.
‘It’s time to go, Matjek,’ she says. ‘Your mother and father are worried.’
‘But I haven’t finished building the castle.’
‘Don’t worry. It will still be here tomorrow.’
‘Promise?’
‘I promise,’ Mieli says.
She holds out her hand to the boy. Together, they start walking away from the sea.
She is back in the metal shaft. Above, there is fire and thunder. Her metaself flashes her a series of staccato updates. Nuwas’s mercenaries are attacking, and her other selves are defending the entrance against them. She checks her systems. A copy of the jannah is running in her metacortex. She starts the ascent, spreading her wings.
‘I’ve got the package,’ she tells Perhonen. ‘I need extraction.’
The pellegrini got us a Gourd orbital hook we can deploy. Just hold on.
She rises past the circle of her other selves and salutes them just as the tendril from the sky crashes through the dome and carries her up and away.
27
THE THIEF AND MIELI
Perhonen and I watch in awe from orbit as Mieli fights an army by herself. Around us, the Gourd boils with conflict: we barely made it out of the Teddy Bears’ station alive. The pellegrini copies I seeded the ancestor vir with have activated, and are taking on the hsien-kus everywhere. The surface of the vast Sobornost structure seethes like a disturbed anthill. So we go up, to a Lagrange point, hiding amongst the technological debris there, calculate a trajectory to pick Mieli up. Perhonen is in full stealth mode, getting ready for the Hunter – although there has been no sign of the bastard yet.
I taste the story in my mind. It feels like a loose tooth. It wants out, wants to be told. Almost there, I tell it.
I still don’t like this, Perhonen says.
‘Any other suggestions are welcome, but it is getting late in the game. Mieli’s stunt was impressive, but it’s going to bring the whole Sobornost down on our heads. I doubt even Chen can afford to ignore what’s going on.’
No kidding, the ship says and shows me the spimescape view. He’s only a couple of hours away. It just appeared. It had some sort of massive metamaterial cloak before that.
There is a new star in the sky. A guberniya is approaching Earth, one of the major Sobornost megastructures, moving. It is using a Hawking drive, lighting up half the Solar System behind it. A halo of countless raions and oblasts surrounds it. It has been coming for days. The pellegrini is gambling with high stakes, inviting him. Clearly, Chen wants something very, very badly, and he’s not going to be subtle about taking it.
For a moment, my gut goes cold. I fab myself two fingers of whiskey. Drinking it wakes up an older voice in my head, a wiser voice. The scale does not matter, it says. It has never mattered. A con is a con, a heist is a heist. Even gods fight stupidity in vain. Or, to put it another way, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Mieli has the gogol, the ship says. She is on her way up.
I swallow the rest of the whiskey and let it burn in my throat.
‘Let’s pick her up. The show is about to begin.’
The familiarity of Perhonen’s main cabin and the feeling of its systems enmeshing with her mind almost makes Mieli cry. The thief watches her breathe it all in for a moment, and grins.
‘Now you know what it feels like to die a thousand times,’ he says. ‘Not my favourite experience in the world. But you got the job done – and everything else is in place. Let’s see the goods.’
Mieli holds up the mind-bullet she has copied the Matjek gogol into. “Here he is. He is . . . on a beach. He is very happy. It was hard to leave.’
‘The afterlife designers of the old upload corporations were pretty damn good,’ the thief says. ‘We can admire it later. Just give it here. I’ll be in and out before he knows it.’
We are expecting company, Perhonen says. Chen and the Hunter, not necessarily in that order.
‘I’m afraid things are going to get a little difficult for the people of Earth,’ the thief says. ‘They don’t deserve this. But before you get pangs of conscience, this really was not our fault. It was an anomaly that they were able to survive this long, just that crazy wildcode thing. The way things are going in the System, it’s going to come down to the Sobornost and the zokus, and once we are done with this job, we are at least going to be free to choose sides. No offence, but I’m not including Oort on my list. A bit too chilly for me. Or too hot, with the saunas. Now, hand the kid over so we can make retirement plans.’
Mieli hesitates. Happiness. Just before going home. Surely, that cannot be the Founder Code of Matjek Chen.
‘There is something you are not telling me,’ Mieli says. ‘What exactly are you going to do to him? It’s not the Code, is it? It’s not even something he knows. He’s a child. Innocent. What are you going to do to him?’
‘You really don’t have to worry about it,’ the thief says. ‘It’s going to be fine.’
Mieli grits her teeth. ‘I just fought half the mercenaries of the System and the whole wildcode desert to get this. Don’t push me, Jean. I told you I can make you talk if I have to.’
Mieli, maybe he is right, Perhonen says. One of its butterfly avatars tickles Mieli’s cheek. Maybe you should let him do his job, that’s what he is here for. We need to move. I can’t keep us hidden when that guberniya gets here.
‘Not you too,’ Mieli whispers. ‘I told you. I don’t want you to protect me. If I make mistakes, they are mine to make. Now, thief, tell me what you are going to do with this gogol.’
‘Mieli, you do realise this is Matjek Chen we are talking about? Do you really care about what is going to happen to him?’
Her scar burns with rage on her cheek, like a fiery tear. She gives the thief one look with all her anger in it.
‘All right,’ the thief says, massaging the bridge of his nose. ‘I’m going to tell him a story. It’s not going to hurt. But it’s going to insert me and the pellegrini into his mind. That was another reason we needed to go to Earth. I had to find out how to do that.’
‘You are going to become him? You are going to wear his skin?’
‘I wouldn’t put it that way, the whole entwinement thing is far more complex than that, you should talk to this woman called Tawaddud—’
‘The woman you had arrested for murders she did not commit?’
‘Never mind, that was a bad example—’
‘You are going to steal his consciousness? His soul? His self?’
‘I would say it’s more like borrowing—’
‘No. Absolutely not. We are not going to do this. This is where I draw the line. You will find another way.’
‘I don’t see what the problem is,’ the thief says, exasperated. ‘We know what Chen wants – a childlike version of himself. So we are going to give it to him. Your job is done. It’s my show from now on.’
‘The answer is no. We do something else.’
‘Something else is what I tried last time, Mieli. It got me arrested and I died more deaths than you can imagine. Your doppelgänger experience down there was nothing compared to what I went through. I’m never going back. And this will work. I’m doing it not just for me, I’m doing it for you, for Sydän. Perhonen told me the story—’
You did what? Mieli screams at the ship in her mind.
I’m sorry, Mieli, he had to know so we could—
Mieli shakes her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. My peo
ple – we don’t do this. We have—’
‘Your people do not augment themselves with a metacortex, let themselves be uploaded into Dilemma Prisons, kill gogols with ghostguns built into their hands or with lasers from orbit, am I right? Do they turn themselves into entire armies and then just let their other selves die? Face it – you have crossed a line, we both have, and there is no coming back.’
‘That’s not what Jean le Flambeur would say,’ Mieli says.
‘Perhaps I am not Jean le Flambeur.’ The thief covers his eyes with both hands.
‘Look, the stakes are high. The pellegrini needs this. It’s the only way out for both of us. And that’s not all. If what I saw in the Box before you broke it is true, then the System itself is not going to be a happy place if the chen gets what he wants.’
‘Perhaps it would be better to die before that,’ Mieli says.
Then the pellegrini is there, a white figure standing by the thief’s side.
‘Stop this tantrum right now, Mieli. We are going to go ahead with Jean’s plan. Or have you forgotten what happens when you disobey me?’ She raises her hand. Her ring glints, sharp and bright.
Mieli closes her eyes.
This is why I had to die a thousand times. To be here and not be afraid anymore.
‘Now I see what you both are,’ she whispers. ‘You are just the same. You will never change. If you change, you will die. And you will always be afraid of the Dark Man.’
She can feel the pellegrini unfolding in her head, a dullness spreading into her limbs.
‘I’m sorry, Perhonen,’ she says.
Then she screams a fragment of the song that made the ship, the last note she sang, the song of ending. Perhonen’s systems respond and send a cry across the System.
Jean le Flambeur is here.
She watches the pellegrini letting the thief loose from his chains, trying to escape. The thief stares at her, blank-faced, tears in his eyes.
The Hunter comes. Beams of light cut through Perhonen. The knife-things are everywhere. One of them hovers in front of Mieli, its point sharp like the final note of her song.