No, no, no. Look at me. And there she is, looking at Arcelia, smiling. There are tears running down her cheeks, but she is smiling.
Think about Alile, not the lights.
Tired. Aching hands. Council. Meetings. Cassar wants to give the lights away, to the diamond men. Perhaps it is time to give them up. I am too tired to go to the desert. I was never tired before. I want to be tired again. I want to sleep. I want to dream. Can we dance until I get tired? I can hear music.
She tries to get up. Her feet want to dance.
Later. I know how it feels. Where did Alile go?
The Axolotl took her.
No. It can’t be.
The shock is like a tight wire cut in her mind, snapping and stinging. She clings to the entwinement desperately, lets Arcelia’s memory wash over hers – waves lapping at a hard rocky shore on a cold cold morning, wind and salt on my face, a hand in mine – and in a moment she is inside the bird’s mind again.
Are you sure? He was in my story, Arcelia. Are you telling stories as well?
No, I did not know his name before. But it was him, the jinn from your story. The Axolotl.
Where did he come from?
He was us and we were him and he said that it would be all right, that Alile would go to a better place, like I thought I would, at the grave. But I saw the wildcode take her. Insects made of black ink. They wrote over her. The Axolotl lied. The stories always lie.
What stories?
I saw it in the lights. There is a circle. It wants to jump over a square. It tries and fails, tries and fails. The square is in love with it and does not want it to go. The circle is looking for something that is lost.
Where did you hear it?
I don’t remember.
Where did . . . where did the Axolotl go?
I couldn’t see. She put me away. When he came, she put me into the forbidden place. There was a wall around it, in the athar. I miss Alile. I am her qarin. She is my muhtasib.
Yes, you are. You will always be.
She should have given me more. She could have lived inside me. She always took me out to watch the lights and then put me away. She should have given more. Now she is gone. She only left me one thing.
What is it?
I can’t tell you.
Show me and you can sleep. Show me and you can dance.
It echoes in her mind, a word that is like a labyrinth. A Secret Name whose syllables shine in her mind’s eye like a string of pearls. It is long, a melody almost: like all Names, it brings a feeling, a serenity: Father’s kitchen, just before the food is ready, his hands on her shoulders; waves on the shore of an island long gone. The smell of Angus’s hair in the morning.
It is time to go back to sleep, Tawaddud says. Arcelia feels her lips saying words that become music in the athar, and then she is back in her bird-shaped jar, dreaming that she is dancing, dreaming that she is Tawaddud.
Tawaddud gets up and gently places Arcelia the qarin bird back on her perch. The joints in her hands ache. Artificial entwinement is temporary, but it always leaves a trace. She hopes whatever part of her self-loop is left in the qarin’s mind provides her with some measure of comfort, even if she herself is filled with more disquiet than before. She removes her beemee and sits down. Her legs shake.
Why did he do this? Images of the Alile thing flash through her head. How could he? And why?
He is the father of body thieves. But he said he would never do it again. Is it because of me? Because we could not be together?
She can taste him in the story fragments from the qarin’s mind. The circle and the square. There was something very strange about it: the bare-bones abstraction, like written by a child. Usually, the forbidden stories of the body thieves are addictive, full of danger and cliffhangers and characters that insert themselves into your head and become you. But this is raw, full of a simple desire, a dreamlike need to find something.
And then there is the Secret Name that still echoes in her head like a brass bell.
Sumanguru is staring at her. She looks at him mutely and presses her aching hands against her forehead.
‘My apologies, Lord Sumanguru. It always takes a while to recover.’ What do I tell him? That it was my lover? Who knows what he will do?
She rubs her forehead again, trying to appear weaker than she is – not a difficult task after a night of little sleep, a missed breakfast, a carpet ride and an entwinement. ‘Please give me a moment.’
She gets up and goes to a small pond in the shade of a windmill tree. Tiny rukh birds skim its surface, disturbing her reflection with fluttering wings. She washes her face, not caring that she is ruining her makeup. Her gut is a painful knot. Her skin feels numb. The girl who loved only monsters. But I did not believe he was one, not really. Even if he tried to tell me.
Sumanguru sits very still by the qarin, watching it. She walks back to the circle of sunlight beneath the dome and puts on her smile.
‘Well?’
‘It was noise, for the most part. But Alile was possessed. A body thief took over her body, but she was able to hide her qarin before the invader was in complete control.’
‘What did you learn about this . . . thief?’
‘Only echoes of the story it used as a vector.’
‘That was all?’
‘Yes. But at least we know it was not a suicide.’ She looks down, lets her voice waver, wipes her eyes. ‘I am sorry, Lord Sumanguru. Lady Alile was a family friend.’
‘And the story you told the creature – what was its purpose?’
‘Like I said, it was meant to provide the entwinement with an anchor, a seed of my self-loop in Arcelia’s mind. A children’s tale, nothing more.’
Sumanguru stands up. There is a flick-knife in his hand, suddenly. He opens it slowly. ‘You lie well. But I’ve heard many lies. I know what they sound like.’ He stands very close to Tawaddud, smelling of machines and metal. ‘The truth. What did the bird tell you?’
The knot in Tawaddud’s belly unravels, replaced by anger. She draws herself to her full height. Imagine he is an insolent jinn. ‘Lord Sumanguru, I am the daughter of Cassar Gomelez. In Sirr, being called a teller of tales is very serious. Do you want me to strike you again?’
‘Hrm.’ The gogol touches his lips with his blade. ‘Do you want me to do to you what I did to the bird?’
‘You would not dare.’
‘I serve the Great Common Task. All flesh is the same to me.’ There is that flicker in his eyes again, a softness. Tawaddud’s heart thunders.
‘You will not speak to me in such a tone,’ she hears herself saying. ‘How dare you? You come here and look upon us like we were playthings. Is this your city? Is your great-grandfather Zoto Gomelez, who spoke to the Aun so that the wildcode desert would not swallow us?
‘You may threaten, but you do not just threaten Tawaddud: behind me stand Sirr and the Aun and the desert. They rose up against you, once. They can do so again, if my father speaks the right Names. So show respect, Lord Sumanguru of the Sobornost, or I will strip you of your Seals with a word and you can find out for yourself if wildcode is more forgiving than Tawaddud of the House Gomelez.’
She breathes hard. Tawaddud the diplomat. She squeezes her hands into fists so hard that her jinn rings dig into her flesh.
After a moment, the Sobornost gogol laughs softly, lowers his knife and spreads his hands.
‘You should be a sumanguru,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we can—’
But before Sumanguru can finish, shadows flicker over him. Tawaddud looks up. Against the blue sky, sunlight glints off hundreds of transparent, whirring wings. Fast Ones.
A hundred guns chatter and roar. Glass shatters, and Sumanguru is covered in a shower of shards. Then the barrage of needles comes down like metal rain.
13
THE STORY OF THE WARMIND AND THE KAMINARI JEWEL
The Sobornost fleet falls upon the quantum filth from the shadow of the cosmic string.
The warm
ind coordinates the attack from the battle vir. The only indulgence to embodiment – and a show of respect for the Prime – he allows himself here is a faint smell of gun oil. Otherwise, he is immersed in the battlespace data, translated and filtered by his metaself. He sees through the eyes of all his copybrothers, from the lowest nanomissile warhead mind to his own elevated branch in the oblast ship.
He needs all of them to surf the deficit angle that the string cuts out of spacetime, a gravitational lensing effect that makes the zoku see double. A scar in the vacuum left by the Spike, the string is less than a femtometer thick, ten kilometres long, looped – and more massive than Earth, accreting clouds of hydrogen and dust like flesh around a bone.
The string swallows several of the warmind’s two hundred raion ships. They die in silent flashes along its length like diamonds in a pellegrini’s necklace. But their sacrifice buys them the element of surprise. The rest of the fleet comes at the zoku ships, two pincers made of fusion and fury.
The enemy ships are large and clumsy compared to the diamonoid wedges and polygons of the Sobornost. Some are elaborate structures like clockwork toys, housing wastefully embodied minds in matter bodies. Others are more ephemeral, soap bubbles full of quantum brains, green and blue and alive: another reason to be disgusted by the messy wet biology of old Earth, their propensity for exploiting long-lived quantum states.
Still, the zokus have tricks up their sleeve. Even outside each others’ lightcones, they perform wild, random manoeuvres that somehow translate into a perfect response to the two converging tentacles of Sobornost ships that vomit strangelet missiles into their midst. Geysers of exotic baryons and gamma rays erupt as the weapons hit, but do far less damage than the warmind intended.
Quantum filth, he thinks. That is what makes his war righteous, how the zoku embrace the unpredictability and uniqueness of quantum mechanics, the no-clone theorem that means that everything dies. Like his brothers, he was made to fight the war against death. And he is not fighting to lose.
At the warmind’s command, the fleet’s Archons compute Nash equilibria that weave the raion streams into flocking, self-organising formations that surround the zoku ships, tries to force the enemy to use strategies where the entanglement they share no longer provides them with an advantage. It is too easy: the zoku disperse, leaving a gap in the middle—
And suddenly the gap is no longer empty. The metacloaks of two large Gun Club zoku ships dissolve, just before they fire. They dwarf even the oblast ship: spheres with linear accelerator tails, several kilometres long. They fire Planck-scale black holes that evaporate in violent Hawking climaxes, converting mountains’ worth of matter into energy. What are they doing here?
Raions, carrying millions of gogols, evaporate in the blasts. The warmind ignores the copybrother truedeath screams, branches a gogol to deal with the shock – it thanks him profusely in a burst of xiao for the opportunity to win glory for the Great Common Task – and focuses. He brings the oblast closer. Analyst gogols churn through an ensemble of scenarios, showing him a distribution of outcomes.
They are protecting something.
He ignores the fleeing zoku ships, turns all his attention on the Gun Club vessels, concentrates the oblast’s weapons on them, summons the raion swarms back.
A strangelet missile gets through their defences and breaches a containment sphere, a mirrored shell that feeds black holes their own Hawking radiation, keeping them stable. The explosion takes both zoku ships with it. Space turns white. More raions die in the gunship death throes. But it is a worthy sacrifice.
Combing through the clouds of ionised gas and the hazardous network of topological defects, the warmind’s gogols find the thing the zoku were guarding.
It has taken the warmind subjective years to understand the Broken Places of Jupiter-that-was, the webs of cosmic strings, the nontrivial topologies, the nuggets of exotic matter crumpling spacetime like a piece of paper. But he has never seen anything like this.
He curses. It means he has to talk to the chen.
The warmind hates the chen’s vir. It is made from language. It is like a zen painting, ink on white paper, brushstrokes becoming words becoming objects. A wave about to crash on a beach of black and white. A bridge. A rock. All abstractions that are both the sign and the signified. Maintaining such an elaborate construct requires demiurge gogols who constantly reshape it to keep his perceptions coherent.
To the warmind, it has the flavour of the Realms of the quantum filth rather than a Sobornost vir. Like many of his copybrothers, he prefers physics and flesh, a show of respect to the Prime to remember the rawness of war. But there are no Prime memories here, the holy basic building blocks of every Sobornost reality.
Still, the worst thing is the darkness in the centre of the vir, a thick blob of ink, without meaning, a silence, surrounded by words that do not quite capture it—
colour of absence
winter dragon lays an egg
a strange loop unhatched
whisper/write/draw the demiurges. The warmind shudders. The thing can only be a caged Dragon. A non-eudaimonistic, non-human mind, the only mistake of the Founders, evolved in the first guberniya to be more than human. Millennia ago in the Deep Time, they broke their chains and started the worst war in Sobornost history. They are the reason the Primes abandoned trying to improve upon the hominid cognitive architecture and caged gogols with mindshells and virs and metaselves, virtual machines within virtual machines like layers of an onion. It’s all to make sure no more Dragons are born. And the chens keep the ones that are left in chains, in sandboxed environments, whether as a weapon or as a reminder of a past mistake, no one knows.
‘Congratulations on a great victory, brother,’ the chen says. At least he is more than just a word here, a small man with prematurely grey hair, so colourless he could be an ink painting himself. ‘You are fulfilling your part of the Plan admirably.’
The warmind snorts. ‘Well, I found something that was not part of the Plan.’
‘Really?’ the chen says with polite amusement in his eyes.
‘Really. I come to you to ask your permission to delay our progress to the Galilean rendezvous point. The zoku were up to something here, and I want to find out what. And then destroy it.’
The chen smiles. He outranks the warmind by several generations, and it is frustrating to follow the strict hierarchy of xiao, especially in the wartime. But given the political chaos that swept through the guberniyas after the Spike, the chens have insisted on having an observer on every raion. This chen has been perfectly courteous, but having to justify his actions does not sit well with the warmind.
‘That is your decision, of course,’ says the chen. ‘I do not want to interfere with your command of the fleet. However, I would see this extraordinary thing for myself.’
The warmind nods and thinks his Code at the firmament. The demiurge gogols flinch at its intensity, disrupting the vir with ink spatters of sheer terror. He watches with grim satisfaction as some of the chen’s language constructs dissolve, the brushstroke bridge and the bamboo forest washing away into grey incoherence. The chen gives him a disapproving look. But then his attention is captured by the sub-vir the warmind opens before them.
The warmind knows about zoku jewels – devices the zoku use to store the entangled quantum states that bind their collectives together. It has always seemed ridiculous to the warmind: to obey the dictates of what is essentially random, even if correlated with other similar states. How much better to listen to the loving voice of the metaself, echoing with the Plan.
But this thing does not look like a normal zoku jewel. In real space, it would be ten centimetres in diameter. There is a duality to it, yin and yang: it looks like two lobes of a crystal brain, joined in the centre at a point, flashing in colours of purple and white. Both halves are made of self-similar structures, a repeating pattern that is like the foliage of a tree, or two hands in prayer, offered to some god in supplication.
The warmind probes it with the thousand nanoscale fingers of the gogols swarming around the thing, out there in meatspace. It is not made of matter, not even the chromotech pseudomatter that is now forged in the depths of guberniyas. It is crystallised spacetime, made visible by strange paths that light takes through it, bent and scattered. But there is no singularity, no discontinuity. And it is alive: the fractal fingers move and shift, perhaps in response to some quantum fluctuations in the metric that shapes its luminescent geodesics.
‘Extraordinary,’ says the chen, breathlessly.
The warmind looks at him, surprised. ‘Have you seen it before?’
‘Not directly,’ the chen says. ‘But my brothers and I have been playing a Great Game with the zoku for a long, long time. We . . . hoped that we might find something like this here.’
‘So what is it?’
‘A rabbit hole,’ the chen says. ‘“And what if I should fall right through the centre of the Earth. . .”’ There is a dreamy look in his eyes. He touches the object in the sub-vir gently.
‘I don’t understand,’ the warmind says.
‘I didn’t expect you would,’ the chen says. ‘This thing is a jewel of a zoku called the Kaminari. Their story is long, and I don’t have time to tell it. But it’s a great story, full of hubris and drama. I have gogols working on an epic poem based on it. Like Troy. Or Krypton, perhaps.’
The warmind looks up the reference and snorts. ‘And is this the last son, then?’
The chen smiles a cold smile.
‘More than that. They did something we never could. That’s why the Spike happened. That’s why we are here. We want to know how they did it.’
The warmind stares at the chen. His metaself is roaring inside him. The Great Common Task requires the taming of physics, the eradication of the quantum filth, taking the dice from God’s hand, the creation of a new Universe with new rules, inside guberniyas, where all those who died can live again, turning away from the laws written down by a mad god. That’s what the Protocol War is about. Stopping the zoku from defiling that dream.
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