She runs into the rain and opens her wings in an attempt to shield even a few of the delicate berries from the destruction. It is like standing beneath a shower of hot stones. Lightning flashes of entanglement requests bombard her mind to the rhythm of the blows. Time machine megaproject! Solve the Fermi Paradox! Resurrect Saint McGonigal to save us all!
‘Perkele!’ she screams and pushes a request to the Huizinga-zoku through the mad thunder of the mind spam. In a flash of silver, her Circle goes down. The ice sky disappears. The horizon lurches from the familiar bowl-shape of a koto into the endless gentle curve of Saturn, crisscrossed by the immense blue-and-green arcs of the Strips and the wispy mass stream pillars that hold them up. The vertigo-inducing stairway structure of the Farreach Plate reveals itself around her little hex, the immense set of stream-supported ascending steps, each with slightly lower gravity than the one below, reaching up nearly two thousand klicks from the one-G level near the ochre van Gogh brushstrokes of the giant planet below.
And, finally, with a pop and a faint ozone smell, a q-dot dome shimmers into being. A few thin streams of tiny jewels pour down to the ground from the hollows of the pumptrees and cupped leaves with a faint tinkle, and then the garden is silent.
Mieli stares at the devastation. Her wings and head hurt. The jewels crunch beneath her feet. Everything green is covered in a layer of multicoloured glitter. With a sigh, she summons a swarm of utility fog botlets from the Plate zoku to clean things up. This time, they materialise instantly: the air blurs in a heat haze, and the spam jewels start floating away in streams and spirals. She briefly considers telling them to hide the damage and make the garden look the way it was, but decides against it. Karhu always told her to keep reminders of her mistakes visible.
Mieli? comes a qupt. It’s Zinda: the message comes with a mixture of sensory impressions, smell of incense, a glimpse of the ring-bisected evening sky from the Great Game girl’s balcony, and a palpable sense of concern. Are you all right?
I’m fine, Mieli answers, restricting her reply to a curt verbal message and nothing else. What do you want?
Just checking up on you! I got a volition flash that you needed help with something. We are entangled now, you know. She pauses. Oh dear. What a terrible mess. I knew we should not have set you up on Farreach: the spam zoku must think that the newly joined and expats are easy targets, and the Plate zoku is a bit too loose to sort them out. Are you sure you don’t want a Realm?
Mieli swears silently. Clearly, she has to guard her thoughts even more carefully. Something of her volition must have slipped through to the Great Game jewel without her realising it – and she is still clumsy enough with the quptlink to allow Zinda to see what she is seeing.
Yes. I’m sure.
How tacky! But I understand. A lot of aegon-zokus feel that way, that matter is special. Just let me know if there is anything I can do. Oh, and if it’s more matter you are after, can I interest you in a dinner?
Mieli sighs. To all appearances, Zinda has been sincere in her attempts to help Mieli settle in. When Mieli accepted the Great Game jewel, she expected to be sent to some strange Realm where she would be rewarded or punished for answering questions about Sobornost. Instead, Zinda arranged her to join the Loom-zoku as a part of her cover identity – a zoku devoted to the intersection of music and matter, translating sound into physical shapes, who count several expatriate Oortians amongst their members. Conveniently, the Loomers devote a lot of time to individual projects, and the volition flashes tend to be requests for brief musings about what sort of Universe would arise from thread-theoretic particle states if you converted a symphony into the Fourier components of creation-annihilation operators. For the last two weeks, she has mostly been left to her own devices.
No thanks.
I’m not a bad cook, I swear!
Maybe another time.
Suit yourself. Remember to eat, though. You’ll need your strength soon.
Why is that? Mieli qupts.
Wait and see! A wink comes down the quptlink, the feeling of Zinda’s eyelid moving. It makes Mieli wince, and then the presence of the zoku girl is gone.
Mieli sighs. What is left of the garden has been cleared, revealing mounds of soil, battered pumptrees and a few angry anansi peeking out of the holes in the ground. At least it will keep me busy for a while.
She kicks at the loose dirt. She is wasting time. Perhaps she should have accepted Zinda’s dinner invitation, to get closer to her, to find out more about the Great Game and the Kaminari jewel. Pretending to be someone she is not, infiltration – that was always the thief’s domain, not hers.
She feels grimy and dirty from the rain, and finds herself desperately missing a sauna. Perhaps she should ask the Plate-zoku to make one, somewhere in the microgravity levels, higher up.
The volition flash comes suddenly. In an instant, she becomes aware of her Great Game jewel pulsing. Before Mieli can tell her metacortex to buffer the thought, it is as if a sudden insight has occurred to her after wrestling with a problem for a long time. Of course. She has to go to the Irem Plate, in twenty subjective minutes.
The Great Game needs her.
The compulsion to obey the call is like a toothache in her mind. Unlike the whispers of the Loom or the Plate-zoku, the demands of the Great Game are not gentle. Mieli fights it long enough to take a quick foglet shower. She immerses herself in a hazy cloud of nanobots that scrub her clean. It leaves her feeling tender and red, but more alert.
Then she fabs herself a new toga and summons her q-self to her. Her jewels alight from the nooks and crannies where she left them lying around like a flock of bright, startled birds, and form a modest diamond solar system around her head. Collectively, they are a quantum extension of her, containers for slow entangled light that encodes her relationships with other zoku members. From the zoku point of view, it is the jewels and their unique quantum states that constitute who she really is, not her replaceable flesh. Mieli finds the Sobornost notion of endless, identical self-copies almost preferable. I should have allowed the pellegrini to make a gogol of Perhonen.
But the Great Game does not allow her time for regrets. She shakes her head and tells the Plate to seal up her hex and take care of the anansi and the few remaining plants. Then she looks at her Tube-zoku jewel – a white disc surrounded by a red ring, with a blue bar across it – and wishes to be taken to Irem, with the caveat that she wants to avoid travel through Realmgates and stay in the physical world as much as possible.
In an instant, the air around her comes alive with a tingling feeling, and she floats up, as if carried by a gentle tide. A q-dot transport bubble flashes into being around her. There is a tickle in her stomach, and then she is flying, faster than even her wings could ever carry her.
First, the bubble accelerates at several dozen G, cushioning her every cell against the crushing force in a gentle but unbreakable nanobot grip. Yet she feels safe, her mind cocooned in the comforting presence of the Tube-zoku. For a few seconds, the varied hexes and Circles and Farseer stairway architecture that is like mathematics rendered into matter flash past her, until the paintbrush of speed smears them into a flickering tunnel around her.