‘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.
I’m sorry too, Mieli, Perhonen says. I always loved you more than she did.
The ship’s EM field grabs her. The acceleration is black light in her eyes. And then the Dark Man kisses her hard.
All my constraints are gone, but it’s too late. The Hunter comes fast and furious, this time. I watch Mieli disappear, and feel a strange sense of relief. Then I’m too busy being burnt alive.
Get us out of this and you will be free, Joséphine whispers.
Perhonen!
Burn, you bastard.
The atmosphere. The Hunter can’t handle the wildcode.
Neither can we.
Let’s take our chances. Please?
The ship fires its antimatter engines. We dive into the blue globe, enveloped by a swarm of Hunters. I watch the clouds and the seas and the continents as white light takes me apart, cell by cell, atom by atom—
28
THE PRINCE AND THE MIRROR
‘And that’s how I got caught the last time,’ the thief says, leaning back on the sand. The dream vir’s sky is full of images: Earth ablaze with white fire, the Gourd torn apart around it, the guberniya’s huge diamond eye.
‘The Hunter came, and here I am.’ He looks at Matjek. ‘That’s exactly what I would have told the other Matjek in the jannah, you know. You might as well drop this charade. Trying to be more innocent is not going to get the Kaminari jewel to accept you just like that.’
‘Being innocent suits me,’ Matjek says. ‘It was a good excuse to go through my Library. And your story was a wonderful attempt to hack into my mind. Unfortunately, I have a very good metaself that has been looking out for any signs of a le Flambeur self-loop.’
‘It must have been a blow to your ego to be rejected by the Kaminari jewel,’ the thief says. ‘The zokus have their eccentricities, but they did hit on something with the whole extrapolated volition thing. Calculating the effects of your wish on the maximum happiness of the whole zoku. I guess no gogol of yours so far has met the criteria the jewel has.’
‘We’ll see,’ Matjek says.
The old woman comes to them with tired steps. Her face is lined and wrinkled, ancient and withered, but there is a proud look in her eyes.
‘Gloating does not suit you, Matjek,’ she says and sits down on the sand wearily. ‘You are being very careful: a vir within a vir within a vir. Still, you might have some trouble with the creatures they call the Aun.’
‘When it comes to the Aun, I have certain advantages,’ Matjek says. He frowns. No matter what he told the thief, he hates being young-old: the kaleidoscopic awareness of all his other selves in the guberniya around them is always there, waiting to pull him back to give them commands, to tell them a story of themselves. He is the Prime, after all, the Self of the chens.
‘There is a reason why sobortech is so very vulnerable to the Aun,’ he says. ‘Stories. The hsien-kus never figured it out. The Aun insert themselves into gogol brains. Minds are their native environment.’
‘And how do you know that?’ the thief asks.
‘Because I made them. Or at least set them free. They were never very grateful. Just like I made the Dragons, who have no self-loop, no eudaimon. It’s convenient to deploy them to fight my older creations, don’t you think?’ Matjek laughs. His other selves show him images of Earth. He feels like he has just kicked an anthill, a nasty sort of pleasure that makes him feel a little bit guilty. But it is made all the better by that.
Joséphine looks at him in horror. ‘You sent Dragons to Earth. They will eat everything. There will be nothing left.’
‘They will deliver my past self to me. They can have the rest, for all they care.’
The thief runs his fingers through sand. ‘You know, Matjek, I am curious. What is it that made you into such a bastard? You never told me in Paris.’
‘Are you still trying to get my Founder Codes, Jean?’ Matjek says. ‘I assure you it won’t be that easy.’
‘Actually, I’m really just dying to know. I’ve told you a story. Perhaps you could entertain us with one. Mieli seemed to genuinely like the old you. I want to know what happened.’
‘Death,’ Matjek says. ‘Death made me angry.’ He tells the dream vir to make his words real. Why not? He has all the time in the world.
The Story of Little Matjek and Death
Matjek is fabbing a leg for his imaginary friend when his mother decides to take twenty minutes of holiday.
He likes playing in the rooftop garden. Beyond the glass walls, the tops of the high buildings remind him of being in a forest. Sometimes they let him go to a park, escorted by security drones, but it is never the same. And it’s the perfect place to play with his friends. When they are cooperative, that is.
The lightkraken does not like the way the transparent limb extruded by the handheld fabber’s beak looks, and expresses its displeasure by dancing angrily in the air. Its tentacles whirl around like a glowing carousel.
‘Stop it!’ Matjek tells it angrily. ‘Or you are not going to have a body after all.’ The kraken gives him a disapproving look with its sharp ink-dot eyes. It is the eldest of all of Matjek’s friends so of course it has to be the first one to come through. But there are more on the other side, waiting for their turn: the Chimney Princess and the Green Soldier and the Flower Prince. It might not be a bad idea to teach the kraken a lesson, Matjek thinks.
‘Hello, Matjek,’ his mother says.
He looks up. When she is off work, she always looks like a stranger. Her face moves, her fingers are not twitching as if playing invisible keyboards, and even her eyes are still as if there is no data coming into them except what she sees. And she always looks so tired. Matjek’s mother is a small woman, and she does not have to bend down far to give him a hug. In spite of the warmth in the rooftop garden, her skin feels cold.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks. He looks at the fabber. There is something wrong with it: it is sputtering out gobs that look like large boogers. Probably he should not have fed the tree branch into it. But the Chimney Princess wanted a face made from painted wood.
‘Nothing,’ he mutters.
‘Tell me,’ she begs.
‘You are not going to have the time to listen,’ he chides her.
‘Lit
tle kvetinka, I have almost half an hour,’ she says, eyes dull with fatigue. She tousles his hair, like she always does. He does not want her to notice he is wearing the beemee again, so he brushes her hand away.
‘It’s just you are early,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t finished. It’s important.’
‘Shall I go away?’ she asks, a hurt look on her face. ‘You can continue if you want.’
‘I guess it’s all right,’ he says. Her face lights up. ‘It looks very exciting,’ she says. ‘Can we do it together? Is there anything I can do to help?’
‘I’m making bodies for my friends,’ he says.
‘Baby, we talked about this,’ her mother says. ‘They can’t have bodies. They are not real.’
Of course he knows that the lightkraken and the others are not real in the same way he is: he asked the watson to explain to him about imaginary friends and paracosms. The idea that they would all fade away as he got older just seemed unfair. So he has been tuning the beemee to the parts of his brain the watson says they live in, to help them to get out. But he decides it’s not a good idea to tell that to his mother.
‘Yes, they are,’ he says firmly. He pushes out his lower lip in a way that tells his mother that the conversation is over. She is smart enough to pick up on it and sighs. ‘Whatever you say, dear. Can we play with them, then?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘They don’t like you. They went away.’
She looks around. ‘I’m sorry, sweetie. What can I do to make it up to them?’
She has the haunted look in her eyes that means that she is already thinking about work. Matjek asked the watson what his mother does but did not really understand the answer: quantum hedge funds and corporate avatars and doing what the shareholders vote for you to do. It sounded a bit like having imaginary friends except letting them control you, instead of the other way around.
‘They want to see Daddy,’ Matjek says.
‘Your father has promised to spend time with you tomorrow,’ his mother says.
‘I want him now,’ Matjek says. His friends join him in an angry chorus inside his head.
‘He is only going to be able to make it tomorrow, sweetheart. He is very busy with his show.’
It’s like there is a bell ringing in Matjek’s head, suddenly. The bell that wakes up the Flower Prince.
‘Now. Now. Now.’ He purses his lips and looks away from his mother.
‘Mommy’s holiday is almost over, sweetie. Are you sure we can’t do something together?’
‘I want Daddy,’ Matjek says. His mother sighs. ‘All right. I’ll call him.’ She looks pale. ‘I’m going to have to get ready for work now, sweetie. Be good.’ She almost touches his hair again, sees his expression and pulls her hand back. Then her ghosts take over and she walks away, giving him one more look before her eyes fill with flickering numbers.
You were mean to her, the Chimney Princess chides him, brown eyes sad in her wooden face beneath her lopsided crown. She sits on the grass and smooths her sooty dress.
‘That’s the only way she listens to me,’ Matjek says. He looks first at his waiting friends, then at the sputtering fabber. He kicks at it. It spits out one more misshapen clump of plastic and circuitry and dies.
‘Son,’ says the Green Soldier. ‘There is no point in being upset if you are not prepared to do something about it.’
Matjek looks at the Soldier’s craggy face. He is crouched on the ground, leaning on a tree, a rifle across his knees.
‘What should I do?’ Matjek asks.
‘Let’s go find your dad,’ the Chimney Princess says.
Matjek is not allowed to look at his father’s beemee feeds. But he has already figured out how to pretend to be his mother. The watson shows him a timeline of his father’s activities. Like all big beemee stars, there are whole fan communities around tracking him, distributed computing engines running Bojan Chen recognition software. The watson condenses discussions for him:
But is it not just a glorified form of pornography? No, it’s poetry of experience. He could be anywhere, he could be anyone. That’s what you pay him for, making the mundane extraordinary.
Lots of the beemee stars do extreme things: benji jumps, hot air balloon rides. The big stars go for having sex in a drop capsule during an orbital dive from a space station. But Matjek’s father is credited with turning the beemee-experience transfer via transcranial magnetic stimulation – into an art form. To be seen through Bojan Chen’s eyes is something special.
Still using his mom’s password, Matjek queries the watson for his father’s calendar. He is not far. He is going to be in a park in the city, looking at wet leaves. So that’s the location. The problem is getting there.
‘How can I sneak past the watson?’ he asks his friends. ‘I’m not going to get very far. Mom will find out. And then there is no point.’
‘Don’t worry, son,’ the Green Soldier says. ‘You just leave it to us.’
The doors open for him. The security system does not see him. He takes the elevator down, the one that usually opens for Mom or the guards, through the three hundred floors. The Chimney Princess whispers to him all the way.
Now, right. Now, left.
Thousands of people, in a shopping centre. Ribbons of light and images in the air around them. Shop windows sending avatars to materialise in front of them, telling them about toys and games. A camera drone whizzes past him, then swings around. Soon, there are several of them. He whispers to the Flower Prince and they fall down to the floor. Then he runs, the Green Soldier guiding his steps.
It takes a long time to find the park, but if the calendar was right, there is still time. And there, on the bench, looking down, is his father. Shouting, Matjek runs to him.
Matjek’s father pushes up his goggles, swirls his red cape aside and grins at Matjek. There is glitter around his eyes. His thick blond hair covers his beemee. He swoops Matjek up in his arms.
‘Matjek! What are you doing here?’ He uses the formal tone that means he is on the beemee feed but Matjek does not care, he is having too much fun.
‘I came to find you,’ he says.
‘That’s great. Sit with me.’ He pats Matjek on the back.
‘Have you been reading?’
‘No,’ he says.
‘You should, it’s different from beemee. Harder work, but more rewarding.’ He grins at Matjek.
Then his eyes widen. ‘Is that ours?’ he whispers, not to Matjek, but to someone else.
There is a tiny dragonfly hovering in the air, all gleaming black plastic and metal, a couple of metres away. Its eye lenses are bright.
‘They saw me in the shopping centre,’ Matjek says. ‘It’s kind of pretty—’
There is a clap of thunder and a burst of white heat. Matjek’s father throws them down to the ground. Matjek hits his head and feels his father’s weight falling over him, crushing all the air from his lungs and the light from his eyes—
He wakes up in the garden. Everything feels distant and strange, like a dream. His mother is there, and she seems bigger, somehow. She is not wearing her work face.
‘Can you hear me, little one?’ she says. He nods.
‘What happened?’ he asks.
‘Somebody tried to hurt your dad.’
‘Why would anyone want to do that?’
‘Lots of people want to be your dad, sweetheart. That’s what he does. And somebody wanted to know what it would feel like if he died.’
‘What does it feel like?’
‘I don’t know, Matjek. And you shouldn’t worry about that either. Sleep now.’
The lightkraken is there in his room, keeping the room bright and safe from monsters, but it is a long time before Matjek can sleep.
It’s not difficult to get the watson to show him the beemee feeds.
He is
on a beach with his body straining thin fabric in strange places, a cocktail in hand, looking at black shining bodies, smell of chlorine, long fingernails tinkling against
glass as he takes out the little umbrella to drink, the sun a hot blanket on his back—
looking at a burning candle with a scalpel in his hand, cutting and the pain is like the skin on his back but magnified, as if focused into one point by a magnifying glass—
a dog running in grass panting panting panting through the spray of the lawn watering system, wanting to bark—
But none of these things are what he is looking for. There are darker corners of the beemee web, and if the watson does not let him in there, there are other ways. He tells the lightkraken to find it for him. It knows exactly what he wants – it used to be a part of him, after all – but it is faster, much faster, and he barely has time to blink and it is already there.
Death
is a hospital ceiling with flaking paint and a Virgin Mary statue clasped between his hands that are like tree roots—
a sip of cognac, right before he loses everything he used to be, and as the alcohol and poison blaze in his belly, he is suddenly so afraid—
a thundering chaos and shards of rock hitting his face and a heavy helmet on his head and then a roaring sound and warmth and then the cold and dark—
He cries, at first. But after a while, the tears leave him and what remains is anger. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that it should be like this.
His mother does not understand. How could she? In the land of the Princess, no one has to die. She has not been there.
And that’s when he knows what he has to do.
It’s not that he needs to bring the lightkraken and the Princess and the others to this world. It’s the other way around.
He sits in the garden for a long time, thinking about it. It feels like there is something inside him, bigger than he is.
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