Abu’s brass eye lights up like a star in the athar. Fire pours out of it and into her, incandescent tongues that tease and burn. She sees her own face, like in a mirror, her lips a circle, her eyes squeezed shut. And then she loses herself in the entwining of Shadow, flesh and flame.
7
THE THIEF AND THE ROUTER
‘What are you going to do when this is over?’ I ask Perhonen through our neutrino link.
From our orbit around 90 Antiope, the zoku router looked like a tree with mirror leaves, two kilometres in diameter, floating in space. But inside it is sheer Escherian madness. The processing nodes are blue glowing spheroids, ranging in size from hot-air ballons to dust motes, moving and tumbling in spirals around each other. Polygon-shaped silver mirrors that reflect each other, opening into infinite corridors. But like a vampire, I have no reflection.
I’m going to find a job that does not involve breaking into giant machines full of lesbian dragon sex, the ship says. Its white-winged butterfly avatar flutters around my helmet. I blow at it to get it away from my field of vision: I’m in the middle of hacking into yet another processing node, a giant amoeba the size of my head. It is a rippling, transparent bubble, with an irregular crystalline structure within. Much of zoku q-tech is alive, and so is this thing – constantly hungry, eating quantum states from the photon stream through the router and encoding them into complex organic molecules. I’m about to feed it a treat.
‘That’s very narrow-minded of you – the zoku can do whatever they want in the Realms. But another job? Come on. Crime is the only way to make the world make sense. Besides, you are a natural.’
I approach the node with gentle nudges from my quicksuit’s ion drives. I have to move slowly: there is enough bandwidth here to fry an unprotected human many times over. A constant photon storm of fantasy, bent around me by the metamaterials of the quicksuit. I’m invisible and undetectable, a ghost in the machine – as long as the suit keeps up.
At my command, the quicksuit extends invisible tendrils that englobe the node. Far away, Perhonen’s mathematics gogols work hard to inject a tiny piece of quantum software into the node’s memory, to allow us to monitor the traffic through it. We need to find the scale-free patterns in the traffic flow, to detect when a quiet period is coming, to allow us to use the router’s quantum brain for our own purposes—
The traffic spike hits. Even through the faceplate of the helmet, the node becomes a bright, hot sun. The suit’s gogol processors – customised upload minds – literally scream. The sudden heat scalds my arms, face and chest. Not again. There are needles in my eyes, and suddenly I only see white noise. I fight the urge to curl up into a ball, reach for the suit’s tiny ion drives through the neural interface and fire them.
The thrust pushes me out of the boiling current of data, and the world goes blissfully dark: we are back within the suit’s operating regime. I fire the drives again to stabilise, and they die as well, leaving me in a disorienting spin.
—going too fast, shouts Perhonen in my ear through the neutrino link. The butterfly avatar of the ship beats its wings frantically inside my helmet, a delayed reflection of the ship’s distress.
‘I would be going faster if somebody had updated their traffic models!’ I yell at it. I straighten my arms to slow the spin, praying that I’m not going to collide with a processing node. Too much disturbance inside the router and it’s going to call the zoku sysadmins. Although if I don’t get the Box open in a few hours, angry zoku computer nerds are going to be the least of our worries.
Hold on. Just stay put. It’s settling down.
I start healing again. It feels like needle-legged ants crawling all over me, accompanied by a sudden light-headedness. I’m still in a bad shape: my hand has not grown back properly, and the body’s synthbio cells are riddled with mutations and cancer analogues from being exposed to hard radiation. At least Mieli now allows me enough control to turn the pain off at will. The only problem is the detachment that comes with the numbness, and I can’t really afford it in a job like this.
The suit vents heat and hisses. The gogols’ complaints in my head settle down into a soft murmur as the suit systems recover. I lick sweat from my lips and take deep breaths, squeezing the Box in my hand, hard. There should be easier ways to break into something that small.
‘And by the way, I’m all right here, thank you for asking,’ I mutter.
Do you want to update a simulation model of a quantum system with about three million unknown parameters? No? Then shut up and let me and the gogols do our job.
I can’t blame the ship for being slightly cranky. We turned her wings – her pride and joy – from something resembling trapped aurora borealis into rigid grids of quantum logic, the closest thing we have to proper quantum processors. Which also means that if something does go wrong, it’s going to be difficult to run.
And then there is Mieli, who seems awfully keen to die a heroic death.
‘I would like to point out that I’m still the one going in,’ I say testily.
I would like to point out that it would be nice to be appreciated, Perhonen says. So you think your box god is just going to welcome you with open arms and help us?
‘Don’t worry, I’ve dealt with him before. And I know what it feels like to be in a box. You’ll do anything to get out. You’ll even throw in your lot with smartass ships and Oortian warriors.’
I’ll take your word for it. In any case, the traffic seems to be settling down.
‘How long?’ The suit’s spimescape is back up at last. It shows me a reconstructed view of the router’s innards. The price of being invisible is being blind – which makes it somewhat tricky to break into a vast machine constantly creating and dissolving new components. At least for the moment I’m in the stable outer layers, away from the heavy processing centres.
Oh, should not be more than an hour or so. Try not to get bored.
‘Great.’ I squirm inside the suit. My makeshift outfit is not exactly comfortable: it’s essentially a chunk of smartmatter, loaded with custom gogols and fitted with a few extra pieces of kit like the drives. It feels like wearing a full-body suit of wet clay, and I’ve been inside it for nearly two days. The neural interface is improvised and crude, with a constant spillover of the gogols’ muttering into my brain. The thought of another hour in it, floating in the router’s outer layers, possibly hit by another traffic spike at any moment, does not exactly fill me with joy. Especially when the siblings of the cop thing could show up at any moment.
What about you? the ship asks, suddenly.
‘What?’
What are you going to do when this is over?
I have only faint memories of what freedom truly means, what I used to be. Of a manifold, chameleon existence among the guberniyas, the zero-g coral reefs of the beltworlds, the endless party of Supra City, dancing above Saturn’s rings. Finding treasures and stealing them. Being Jean le Flambeur. All of a sudden, I want it very, very badly.
‘I’m going to take a vacation,’ I say. ‘What do you think Mieli wants to do?’
The ship is quiet. I’ve never asked it about Mieli, not directly, and her recent death wish is not exactly something I want to bring up in a conversation. Even if I’m sure the ship knows where it came from.
For her, Perhonen says finally, I’m not sure it will ever be over.
‘And why is that?’
Another long pause.
Because she is looking for something that never existed in the first place.
And so, while we wait for the data storm in the router to die, the ship tells me what Mieli lost on Venus.
Mieli is glad of the quiet in the main cabin. The space is completely empty and bare after the ship cleared out the mess, just sapphire walls with white cracks where the hull is still healing. There was no time to salvage her Oortian things. She does not care: the songs remain.
Perhonen’s freshly fabbed butterfly avatars rest on the curving surfaces, like wh
ite flowers. The ship’s attention is elsewhere, in the target – a huge wedding bouquet of glass a few kilometres away, against the irregular potato shape of 90 Antiope. The thief’s minor crisis with the processing node appears to be over. The next step is up to Mieli. She reaches into her robes and takes out the thief’s jewel.
Mieli saw her first zoku jewel in Hiljainen Koto, when she was six. A Jovian sunsmith gave a dead one to her koto sister Varpu as a plaything. All the children huddled around Varpu to look at it while she spread her wings with pride. It did not look like much: a bauble barely larger than a fingertip, with a dim amber colour and a corrugated surface. There was something sad about it. But when they touched it, they could imagine touching the outside, touching the sun.
When it was Mieli’s turn, it clung to her palm like hungry smartcoral. And suddenly, there was a murmuring voice in her mind, not like any song she had ever heard, full of yearning and desire, so strong that she was afraid. It said that she was special, that she belonged together with the jewel, that she only had to let it in and that they would be one for ever—
Mieli spread her wings, flew to the nearest darkhole and, ignoring Varpu’s shocked protests, threw it out into the black. Varpu did not speak to her for days afterwards.
But the jewel that now floats in front of her is alive, full of slow, entangled light. It is a simple blue oval, smaller than her hand, smooth and cool – and it smells faintly of flowers.
When she touches it, there is a tickle that goes all the way to her belly, an offer of joining. Like many of the low-level infrastructure jewels, it is not imprinted on a specific owner. That’s why the thief stole it from the Martian zoku, of course. But the quantum states inside are unique: unforgeable, protected by the no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics.
Unlike me. She quickly pushes the thought away and accepts the jewel’s touch. There is a sudden cool weight like a gentle hand resting on her brain.
She is a member of a zoku now, technically, part of a collective mind, bound together by quantum entanglement. This particular zoku is large but loose, devoted to maintaining and improving the common communication infrastructure through the System. She only needs to wish and the zoku’s serendipity engines will weave her desire into the zoku’s fabric – to be satisfied if the resources are available, in a way that is optimal to all the collective’s members.
Still, there is a price: the zoku may ask something of her in return – without her knowing. An idea may flash by, possessing her for a moment, consuming all her attention. Or she may feel a compulsion to be in a particular place, seemingly random, to meet a stranger who has a problem she can help them with.
Within the router, the thief is opening the Box. She takes a deep breath and lets the plan take over.
The metacortex passes her wish to the jewel: a complex, canned thought she crafted with the thief and Perhonen, a request for the router to run a very specialised quantum algorithm. The jewel seizes her volition eagerly. Perhonen’s modified wings, emulating a zoku communication protocol, pass it to the router. Slowly, the wedding bouquet starts to change shape, like origami, unfolded by invisible hands.
Mieli carries out her part perfectly, as I knew she would. I wish I could high-five her as the mirror headache around me comes to life. But time is of the essence: there could be a new traffic spike any second, and we are going to need everything the router can give us. Through Mieli’s connection to the router zoku, Perhonen is feeding it instructions.
You had better move, the ship says. Here is the latest traffic heatmap. The suit spimescape flashes into a three-dimensional contour image, like a brain scan. Intricate multicoloured shapes change and pulse in front of my eyes. I stare at the butterfly avatar inside the helmet. It looks comfortably normal against the madness in the background.
I grit my teeth, feed the map to the suit’s pilot gogols and fire the ion drives.
It is like swimming through invisible currents of fire. At the back of my mind, the clock is ticking. After tense seconds of sweat-drenched manoeuvring, I reach the Realmgates.
They are where we figured they would be, a large chamber-like space near the centre of the router, close to the power source, in a blissfully bandwidth-free zone, eye of the storm. A cluster of cubes, glowing with a faint tinge of purple in my spimescape vision, each two metres to the third power. Realmgates: the universal zoku interface between physical and virtual. They translate you into the language of the Realms going in, and back into physics and matter coming out. Picotech disassemblers that take the quantum information of any substance, convert it into qubits and teleport it into simulated gameworlds full of magic and dragons.
Or in this case, dark war gods with a grudge.
‘That’s more like it,’ I whisper to Perhonen. The plan clicks back into place in my head, and suddenly everything is sharp. ‘How is Mieli doing?’
All ready to go.
I merge my quicksuit gloves together to allow freedom of movement and lift up the Box with my right hand – the left is still a tingling clump of regenerating flesh. I detach a part of the suit’s q-dot field and let go of it, keeping a sensory link so it feels like I’m still holding it, guiding it into position next to the Realmgates.
Forty seconds to the predicted traffic minimum, Perhonen says.
The router weaves complex machinery into being around the Box. It runs the non-demolition measurement algorithm that the gogols claim will keep the cats alive – tricks that would have taken thousands of years with the improvised quantum gates in Perhonen’s wings. Then my field of vision explodes into an abstract cloud of colourful zoku language followed immediately by a translation by Perhonen’s gogol helpers.
You were right, Perhonen says. There is a Realm inside. It’s in the router memory now. You should be able to go in.
Imaginary wood whispers beneath my fingers. Or perhaps it is just the phantom itch of my missing hand. ‘You know, ship,’ I say, ‘in case this does not go well, it was nice knowing you.’
You too.
‘And I’m sorry.’
Sorry for what?
‘For what’s about to happen.’
I fire the ion drives and start moving towards the Realmgate.
The jewel’s touch becomes an iron grip in Mieli’s brain. And suddenly, a song unfolds in her mind. It ignites parts of her brain she has not used in nearly two decades, the parts which make matter dance. The words start flowing from her lips, unbidden.
The väki in Perhonen’s hull responds to her. The song is almost as complex as the one she sung when she made the ship, the one that kept her up for eleven koto nights. But this one is a sharp song, a dead song, full of chilly abstraction and code, the song of a thief. She tries to stop herself, clamp fingers across her mouth, bite her tongue, but her body refuses to obey. In the end, she spits it out, word by word, hoarse voice rasping.
The changes the song makes are subtle, but she can feel them, in the very core of the ship, rippling outwards along its spiderweb structure and modules, all the way to its wings.
Mieli! the ship shouts. There is something wrong—
Cursing the thief, Mieli sends the command that shuts him down.
Jean, what the hell are you talking about? The butterfly goes frantic in my helmet.
All my limbs freeze. Mieli is using the Sobornost body’s remote control. But she can’t control Newton’s laws: I’m still going towards the gate.
The Realmgate is a wall in front of me, black like a thundercloud. There is a flash. And then I’m both alive and dead.
‘Perhonen?’ Mieli whispers.
Perhonen’s butterflies alight from their perches on the walls and dance, a storm of white motion, like Lorenz attractors. The fluttering whiteness converges into a dense cloud and forms a face.
‘Perhonen is not here anymore,’ it says, with a voice made of wings and whispers.
8
TAWADDUD AND SUMANGURU
The Sobornost Station is large enough to have its own w
eather. The ghost-rain inside does not so much fall but shimmers in the air. It makes shapes and moves, and gives Tawaddud the constant feeling that something is lurking just at the edge of her vision.
She looks up, and immediately regrets it. Through the wet veil, it is like looking down from the top of the Gomelez Shard. The vertical lines far above pull her gaze towards an amber-hued, faintly glowing dome almost a kilometre high, made of transparent, undulating surfaces that bunch together towards the centre, like the ceiling of a circus tent, segmented by the sharply curving ribs of the Station’s supporting frame.
Forms like misshapen balloons float beneath the vault. At first they look random, but as Tawaddud watches, they coalesce into shapes: the line of a cheekbone and a chin and an eyebrow. Then they are faces, sculpted from air and light, looking down at her with hollow eyes—
What am I doing here?
The jinni yearn for bodies: that she understands. But the Station is the body of Sobornost, thinking matter, flesh of the true immortals. There are gogols everywhere, big and small, even in the rain, in the smart dust particles around which the raindrops form.
She breathes it in, sticky and oily, with a faint, sweet scent, like incense. The droplets cling to her clothing and skin and soil her silk dress. The soggy fabric crumples around her waist. Little deities ruin her carefully prepared hairdo and trickle down her back.
Tawaddud the diplomat. What am I going to say to a god from beyond the sky when he arrives? The hastily absorbed facts about Sobornost and the envoy swim around in her head. ‘I’m sorry, your brothers rained on me.’
I thought I was so clever. Maybe Duny was right. Maybe I should have stuck to pleasuring jinni.
Her sister stormed into her bedroom at four in the morning, waking her from heavy, languid sleep. Dunyazad did not even look at Tawaddud, just walked to the keyhole-shaped window with a view of Father’s rooftop gardens, yanked the curtains open and stared out at the pre-dawn light. Her shoulders shook ever so slightly, but her voice was flat calm.
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