Abu looks at her, human eye gleaming, his mouth a straight line. Then he starts laughing.
‘For a moment, I believed you. You did touch something, something I thought I no longer had.’ He shakes his head. ‘But you just used me to play your father. The body thief named you right. You are the Axolotl’s whore. Why do you think I was so interested in you in the first place? Because that’s what everybody calls you. When he gave me the slip, you were the obvious route to him. His weakness.
‘So don’t look so sad. We both got what we wanted. But enough of that. I do believe my other guest is here.’
A door opens, and a hsien-ku in a black Sobornost uniform walks in. She gives Sumanguru a curt nod.
‘Lord Sumanguru – or should I say Jean le Flambeur? Apologies for arriving slightly late. My branch prides itself on punctuality.’
I watch as Abu Nuwas hands the mind-trap over to the hsien-ku. Tawaddud is corpse-pale and shaking. Poor girl. I will make this up to you somehow. I promise.
Except that the worst is still to come.
‘We owe you thanks, le Flambeur, for alerting us to the existence of a primordial Chen gogol in the first place,’ the hsien-ku says. ‘It will be excellent currency to keep him off our backs while we move against our sister, who I believe is your current employer, am I correct? Perhaps there is an opportunity for you to offer your talents to us instead.’
I run through the options in my head. A voice is suggesting that perhaps misplaced loyalty to Joséphine at this juncture is not such a good idea. But then there is Mieli and my debt to her to think about – and I doubt the hsien-kus would be able to do anything to the locks inside my head.
‘I’ll consider it,’ I say. Tawaddud stares at me, wide-eyed.
‘It is only now that we dare to move openly: obtaining the gogol is far more important than our relationship with Sirr. Once we have dealt with our sister – with the help of our brothers the vasilevs – we will be back. And then there will be no need to dance to the whims of the gogol merchants. We will make Earth live again.’
‘By killing it all over again,’ I say.
‘Words spoken by the flesh. Perhaps that is what our sister finds attractive. What is your answer? Will you serve us? If your answer is no, you have outlived your usefulness.’
‘How do you think you are going to catch me?’ I smile, thinking of my escape route.
‘Oh, we are not going to catch you. We are scholars. But as it happens, our brother the Engineer created a gogol specifically for catching you. It should be on its way here as we speak. The Hunter, we believe it is called. Sasha always liked a bit of melodrama.’
Shit.
Abu Nuwas gestures with his gun. ‘Could we get on with it, please? My mercenaries are ready.’ The jinn, Rumzan, wavers restlessly next to him.
‘Of course,’ the hsien-ku says. She lifts up the mind-bullet between delicate fingers. No showmanship like what I did in the aviary: besides, I was just bluffing to get Tawaddud to entwine with the bird. This is the real thing.
‘What are you doing to him?’ Tawaddud whispers.
‘Mind surgery,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘They are going to torture him. Trying to get the Name out of his mind. Aren’t you?’
‘It is regrettable but unavoidable,’ the hsien-ku says, a sad look on her broad face. ‘Like most things are.’ I can only imagine the turmoil going on inside. Thousands of iterations of the Axolotl-fragment being created and tortured and destroyed, a feeling far too familiar to me.
Tawaddud starts screaming. She collapses to the floor, twitching, tearing at her hair. Of course. She must feel it through the entwinement. Abu Nuwas gives her one glance, then looks away.
‘For scholars, you can be real bastards,’ I tell the hsien-ku.
‘I will give it to you!’ Tawaddud shouts. ‘Stop it! I’ll give it to you!’
Her world is made of agony. The Axolotl part in her mind flickers and dies, flickers and dies, like a hot needle pushed into her brain again and again and again.
‘I will give it to you!’ she hears herself shouting.
It stops. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, whispers the Axolotl, far away.
She wipes snot and spittle away from her face and takes a deep breath. Then she cries out the Name of Al-Jabbar the Irresistible and becomes Rumzan the Repentant.
I cover my ears when Tawaddud shouts the Name. By now I have a fairly good idea about how it works. Extreme fractal compression of some kind, a self-referential loop inside a story, forcing the target brain to iterate it all over again, bootstrapping a new mind inside it into existence. How it is possible, I do not know. Even encoding pictures in such dynamical maps takes a lot of computational power, and doing the same for a human mind seems like something that is firmly in the realm of the transhuman.
No matter how it works, it works quickly. Rumzan – or Tawaddud – rams sharp thought-form fingers through the throat of the hsien-ku in a shower of crimson. Abu Nuwas is just fast enough to fire the barakah gun before the creature turns on him. It explodes into inert white powder. Tawaddud screams one more time and lies still. The mind-bullet rolls across the floor. I dive down and grab it.
But hsien-kus are hard to kill, and the death of this one is like trimming a fingernail. As the gogol’s body dies, it sputters out the Name, torn from the Axolotl’s mind. It shimmers in the athar and rings in the air. Abu Nuwas’s eyes glaze over as he drinks it in.
As his gun hand wavers, I pick the still form of Tawaddud up and run. Sparks fly in my eyes as I push the Sobornost body to its limits. Tawaddud on my shoulder, I smash the diamond tool she gave me against the gallery window, as hard as I can. Pain shoots up my arm but the glass shatters like ice. Holding on to Tawaddud, I leap through the fragments, into the void beyond.
The Anti-Name echoes in my ears as we fall towards the blue and golden night of Sirr, far below. Its beauty takes my breath away.
But it’s nothing compared to the warm amber glow of the ancient angelnet, when it finally catches us in a soft embrace.
Tawaddud’s head feels like a shattered jinn jar. She lies on a cold, hard surface. Everything hurts.
She opens her eyes and sees the dark mouth of a barakah gun. Sumanguru – Jean le Flambeur – is pointing it at her face. He is smiling sadly.
‘There is nothing personal about this, you understand,’ he says. ‘I think you know about wanting to be good. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the luxury to follow through with that.’
‘What are you doing? Where are we?’
‘Please speak very, very carefully. If I hear the beginning of a Name, I will have to fire. That trick with the Name and Rumzan was very good. For future reference, it is a great idea to attack embodied Founders. It confuses them every time. We are in an old upload temple near the Station: I’ll be needing some Gourd bandwidth in a moment.’
Tawaddud swallows. Her mouth is dry.
‘Who are you? What do you want? Why are you doing this?’
‘I want you to know that I am very sorry. You didn’t deserve any of this.’
‘Why . . . why are you apologising? Just let me go.’
‘This was my fault, you see. I came to Earth to find two things. The Jannah of the Cannon was one of them. But it was going to be far too difficult to find it. I’m a thief, not an archeologist. So I made sure that the hsien-kus knew there was something in there they would desperately want: it was going to be much less trouble to steal it from them when they found it. They thought I let it slip, sent a careless message.’ A smile flickers on his lips. ‘I didn’t think they would use a local agent like Nuwas, but then I must admit I did not really understand Sirr.
‘It was a bonus that they actually sent me here to go after the Axolotl.’
Tawaddud feels empty and weak. She closes her eyes. There is the faintest echo of the Axolotl in her head, somewhere far away.
‘I trusted you,’ Tawaddud whispers.
‘I told you, you shouldn’t have,’ le Flam
beur says. ‘Hush now. No talking. I just have some business with your boyfriend, and then I’ll be on my way.’
He spins the mind-bullet between his fingers deftly, like a magician.
What the hell do you want? whispers the Axolotl.
‘I want the secret, the one you got from the Aun. That’s what I really came here for. The algorithm for turning minds into stories. The same thing you used to make all the other body thieves. But be careful. Any more tricks, and Lady Tawaddud here will become noise in the wildcode. Or I may decide to use the hsien-ku tactics: I can do mind surgery too. Your choice.’
Let him shoot, the Axolotl says in Tawaddud’s mind. Let him shoot. We can still be together.
‘It’s too late,’ Tawaddud says. ‘It was always too late.’
When it’s done, I give them both a bow. Then I plug into the Gourd communication systems in the upload temple. The scan beam comes down from the temple’s dome, a shower of white, cleansing fire. I leave Sirr in a burst of modulated neutrinos. An eyeblink later I’m in my old body in the main cabin. I stretch: it feels strange after days in Sumanguru’s massive frame.
You are a real bastard, Jean, the ship says.
‘I know, but sometimes that’s what it takes.’ I pass it the algorithm – a bizarre image the Axolotl imprinted in my mind, encoded in what I can only assume is a recursive Penrose tiling.
‘Give this to the pellegrini and tell her to test it on a few gogols in the Gourd systems. I’ve seen it working firsthand, but just to be sure. And I think it’s going to require a lot of computational power.’
Sir, yes sir. Anything else?
‘I have some good news and bad news. The good news is that everything is ready, as long as Mieli gets into that jannah. Is she in Abu Nuwas’s fleet?’
Yes.
‘Good.’ I squeeze the bridge of my nose. ‘I need a drink.’
Why do I have the feeling that I’m not going to like the bad news?
‘Yes, well.’ I take a deep breath. ‘The Hunter is coming.’
Tawaddud sits alone in the upload temple with the mind-bullet for a long time. When the Repentants find her, she is holding the barakah gun against her forehead. They take it away. When she falls asleep in her cell, she can no longer remember if she was going to to pull the trigger.
24
MIELI AND THE SOUL TRAIN
Mieli watches the progress of the soul train from the sky. It is a silver worm glinting in the sun. The updraft carries her up lightly, and if it wasn’t for the constant chatter of Stanka the ursomorph, she would almost be enjoying herself.
‘—and then they came at us with some re-animated tanks, would you believe that, old drones they dug up from some military base, and Tara detonated them in a sequence that spelled FUCK YOU in the sky, poor bastards—’
While she can see why the Teddy Bears’ Roadside Picnic Company’s groupware matched them together as a combat team, sometimes she wishes the outcome had been different.
The train is sleek, all analog tech, made by Sirr craftsmen to give as little as possible for wildcode to infect. It always comes anyway, but it takes longer for the ancient nanotech to dig into simple machinery than smartmatter or more complex systems. Mieli herself is covered in Seal armour: words, flowing on her skin and face. It makes her wings look like pages of a book.
‘Are you listening, Oortian?’ Stanka says. ‘I said I hope we see some action today.’
The ursomorph mercenary is a fierce sight with her spiky enhancements visible, riding on the roof of the train. She has a point. They are approaching the Wrath region where a lot of Sobornost ships fell, twenty years ago. There have been several attacks here by anti-Sobornost jinni, and Mieli is not sure what to expect. She has been through a few skirmishes, and so far they have been quick and confusing. Unlike in Sirr, the wild jinni in the desert can be vast and powerful, like living storms.
The wildcode desert confuses her. Seen from above, on visible wavelengths, it does resemble a desert: mountains, valleys and here and there a cluster of abandoned buildings. But in the spimescape view, or in what the people of Sirr call athar, it is like looking at the surface of the Sun. Aerovore formations like protuberances, tiny nanites moving in complex patterns. Matter assembled into large unnatural configurations by invisible forces. She saw a patch of the desert full of tiny smiling faces, painstakingly assembled from individual grains of sand, propagating through the landscape like a flood.
‘It’s like inside my cubs’ dreams here, sometimes,’ Stanka said when they talked about it. ‘You get used to it eventually.’ Stanka’s people had been hit badly by the Protocol War: she left her offspring asleep back in the habitat inside their home asteroid. While they hibernated, she tried to win them a better life by working as a mercenary.
The desert makes many things difficult, including communication. Mieli can barely keep in touch with Perhonen through their neutrino link. The ship is moored in the Teddy Bears’ makeshift base in the Gourd, trying to get in touch with the thief and negotiating its way through the complex Sobornost systems with the help of the pellegrini – whom the thief has apparently managed to insert into the hsien-ku infrastructure in the sky.
Mieli does not know who they are working for – one of the muhtasib families of Sirr – but it does not matter as long as they are provided with Seals. The souls, stored in Sirr-made jars and transported in the trains, also belong to them. Mined from the hidden jannahs beneath the desert and the hardware in the Wild Cities, they are either sold to Sobornost or put to work as jinni slaves in the city to earn their freedom.
She prays to Kuutar and Ilmatar every night, begging their forgiveness for being part of such dirty work. She asked Stanka how she could do it, one night.
‘It’s easy,’ the bear-woman said. ‘I think of the cubs.’
As they approach a valley between two gigantic Sobornost craft – oblasts that now look more like mountains, overgrown with strange, twisted trees and bushes – Mieli swoops down.
‘We should slow down,’ she tells Stanka. ‘Too many opportunities for ambush.’
‘Don’t be silly. I doubt we’ll even see a chimera after the beating we gave them last time—’
There is writing in the desert, in huge letters. There is a tickle in Mieli’s forehead when she looks at it. An alarm goes off in her head. Body thieves. She instructs her metacortex to blank out the message in the sand and prepares for combat.
‘What do you make of that?’ she transmits to Stanka. She calls for recon support, deploys two Fast Ones from her backpack. Tzzrk and Rabkh dart forward. The mercenary companies deploy the fast-living creatures as scouts and native guides. For her, using quicktime makes it easier to communicate with them.
‘. . . serpent queen. . .’ mutters Stanka in her ear. Her voice sounds strange. And then the ursomorph is standing on her back legs and firing her heavy cannon at the train tracks ahead.
The boom of the weapon mixes with the groan of twisting metal. A fountain of sand and rubble erupts in front of the train. The momentum of the huge silver vehicle carries it into the rain of rock and dust, and for a moment Mieli thinks it’s going to make it through. Then it twists, slowly, thrown up by the broken tracks like a snapped silver whip. The cars tumble over each other, ricochet from the walls of the valley, kick up dust. Finally, they come to rest in disarray, like a child’s toys tossed aside. The bear-woman screams incomprehensible words in Mieli’s ears.
Powering up her combat systems, Mieli dives down, just as a jinn storm of dust and glinting sapphire comes down the side of the old oblast ship. I’m getting paid to protect the cargo. Let’s just hope the backup gets here in time.
She fires attack software at the storm, with no effect. She powers up her multipurpose cannon reluctantly – with a wildcode infection, she’ll only get a few shots in – and puts quark-gluon plasma charges in the storm’s path. Dust and sand and nanites fuse into a sharp rain of glass.
A crowd of chimera animals inside the storm
swarms over the train, sleek, catlike creatures with a glinting sapphire carapace and sharp, sharp claws. Mieli dispatches the Fast Ones to call for backup from the Teddy Bears and lands, hard. She gets off one batch of q-dots that take out the first swarm of the sapphire cats like a scythe. Then her weapon goes hot. She tosses it aside and goes for hand-to-hand with a q-blade. She runs the microfans in her wings as hard as she can to disperse the foglet storm raging around her.
Then Stanka comes at her from the ruins of the train.
A swipe of a diamond-clawed paw throws Mieli aside like a rag doll and tears one of her wings into tatters. Then the ursomorph is upon her, pinning her down, enhanced teeth going for her throat. Her q-enhanced muscles scream as she gets her legs beneath the bear woman’s bulk and kicks as hard as she can. There is a surprised look in the ursomorph’s eyes as she flies into the air.
Mieli rolls, grabs the multipurpose cannon, squeezes the trigger, praying. The weapon gives her one more shot. An x-ray laser blast takes off half the bear’s torso, and the rest rains down on top of her.
And then the rukh ships and the Teddy Bears are there, driving away the storm.
The mercenary camp is a cluster of muhtasib-sealed temporary bubble buildings between the Wrath area and the Wall, a few kilometres from Sirr. On the evening of the battle of the train, Mieli is taken to see the commander. Odyne is a skeletally thin woman from the Belt, living in a medusa-like exoskeleton, made bulky by the thick layers of Sealed material around it. Her narrow face inside the globe-like helmet makes Mieli think of the fish in Grandmother’s spherical lake in Oort.
Odyne is sitting with a middle-aged portly man in lavish Sirr robes and rises to greet Mieli when she enters. A heavily armoured mercenary in mutalibun robes stands on guard behind them.
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