The bookshop vir looks the same – almost suspiciously so – but Matjek is different. He is older now – eleven or twelve, perhaps. He looks up from his book when I enter, frowns and continues to read. The Aun are nowhere to be seen.
I pull up a chair and sit down next to him.
‘Hello, Matjek.’
He ignores me.
‘How are you doing?’
Silence.
I look at him more closely. His hair is longer, and there is just a hint of grey in it. His eyes have acquired a piercing blue hue, like little shards of ice. I wonder if he has been playing with clockspeed again. I have done my best to make sure that the vir is sandboxed, isolated from the ship’s systems, but I’m not sure that provides enough protection from the future Father of Dragons if he gets bored. Still, it could just be mindshell customisation.
‘What are you reading?’ A lot of the books in the vir represent the fractally compressed city of Sirr and its inhabitants, and the minds of the Aun. Actually reading them is not a good idea, unless you want to be possessed by a jinn or a body thief. ‘Are your friends around?’
‘Why do you care?’ Matjek says finally.
I clear my throat. ‘Well, I thought it was time for us to have a little chat, man to man.’
He slams the book shut, holds it close to his chest with both hands and looks at me.
‘About what?’
‘About a lot of things. I wanted to thank you for your help and—’
‘You mean about about how you stole me? About how my mum and dad are dead?’
There is a cold rage in his eyes that is far too familiar from the older Matjek I know.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He throws the book at the shop window, hard: it doesn’t shatter, but rings in its hinges. ‘When are you going to let me out of here?’
I squeeze the bridge of my nose. Everything feels solid now, sharper. The Leblanc has enough computational power to run a full physics emulation: the dreamlike feel of the previous version is gone. I wonder if it’s entirely a good thing.
‘Look, Matjek,’ I say carefully. ‘You know why your parents put you in that vir? That place on the beach? They wanted to keep you safe. In case something bad happened to the world, in case they could not protect you themselves anymore. And I’m just trying to—’
I swallow. I’m pretty sure Bojan and Naomi Chen would not approve of me using their son as a viral weapon of mass destruction. But sometimes, I’m just as much of a slave to patterns as my almost-son Isidore was: when things click, when I can see a way out, it’s hard not to seize whatever tool there is at hand.
I can’t bear to look at him, so I stand up and walk to the nearest bookshelf. I lean on it. The blue and silver backs of the thousand books of Sirr stare at me accusingly.
‘I just want you to know that I never meant for you to get hurt. You helped a lot on Iapetus, and I’m sure Mieli will be grateful.’
‘I don’t care. I hate you both.’
‘You have to believe me. I would have told you, when you were ready. I did not want to find out like that, I swear. Who told you? Was it the Aun – your friends?’ I may need them, but if they caused this, I swear I’m going to—
‘No, it wasn’t them.’ He sniffs. ‘It was the gun.’
I turn around. He is hunched on the chair, looking at his hands. His eyes are rimmed with tears.
‘It was kind of fun, at first, having a body again, even if it was wispy, like a jinn, coming out of a bottle,’ he says. ‘I found the Leblanc. I thought at it, and it let us in, like you said. And then I found the gunscape. I got bored with waiting, so I played with it. My friends helped me to get in.’
I let out an inward groan.
‘There was a spime for every gun. Some even had Realms so you could try them out. There was one called a ghostgun, from the First Fedorovist War.’
Oh, hell.
‘I didn’t know what it was, so I asked. The gun said I started the war, in some place called Iridescent Gateway of Heaven. That it was my fault all those people died. I got angry. I thought it was lying. I wanted it to go away. So I started firing the guns. All of them.’
‘Matjek—’
‘Was the gun lying, Jean?’
I flinch. It is the first time he has used my name.
‘You know so much about lying. Was it lying?’
I kneel down next to him. I want to touch him, to take his arm, but he is looking at me with a fury so palpable that I can feel it in the air like a static charge.
‘No, it wasn’t. But it wasn’t telling the truth either. The person who did all those things was called Matjek Chen, that’s true. But he wasn’t you. Just somebody like you.’
‘He was me. The gun told me all about gogols, too.’
‘That’s not how it works. Not all gogols are the same. Trust me, I know. Something happened to that one, something bad, and he never got over it.’
‘What was it?’
I sigh. ‘I don’t know.’
‘So how do I know I won’t end up like him?’ His eyes are wide and desperate.
‘I don’t know, Matjek. I don’t know. But I believe we can decide who we are. If you don’t like that other Matjek, be someone else.’
‘Is that why you do it?’ he asks. ‘Put on faces because you don’t like who you are?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I saw you do it. You were just the same underneath.’
‘I’m sorry, Matjek,’ I say. ‘I’m not very good at looking after other people. I know you were happy, on the beach. I didn’t want to take you away. But I had no choice.’
‘You just said we always have a choice.’
‘Not always.’
‘How do you know which is which?’ He gets up. ‘You’re just trying to say something that’ll shut me up! You want to get rid of me so you can save your stupid friend! And you don’t even know why!’
He shoves me, as hard as the vir will allow, and I almost fall.
‘Matjek, that’s not true.’
‘Shut up! Everything you say is a lie! That’s what the other you said! Leave me alone!’
I blink.
‘What do you mean, the other—’
Father wants to be alone.
The Aun flash in my vision, jagged serpents of light. The vir snaps shut and throws me out. Then I am standing in the blue humming corridor of the Leblanc, and the stinging feeling in my eyes is just a vir-to-Realm translation error, not tears at all.
‘All right, you bastards, I screwed up!’ I shout at the empty corridor. ‘But so did you! Why didn’t you stop him?’
There is no reply.
I scour my mind for the presence of the Aun but find nothing.
‘Talk to me! Show yourselves!’
Still nothing. A righteous fury erupts in my chest. ‘Come out, or I’m going to take my brain apart to find you. What are you waiting for?’
For you to keep your promise, the Chimney Princess says.
She stands before me, a little girl in a wooden mask, wearing a sooty dress, barefoot. She looks completely alien in the Leblanc’s blue meta-Realm.
I look at her. Her eyes are faint embers behind the eye slits of the mask, and I can’t tell if their glow is anger or pity.
‘Why don’t you ever show your face?’ I ask her.
Because people give me theirs when they meet me.
‘I know the feeling.’
Have you found one you like yet?
‘Can’t say that I have. But I am trying. I need your help for that. I need to know what happened in the Collapse.’