There is no pain. She always thought there would be pain in a forced black box upload, living all possible lives in one white-hot moment.
‘No. You are not taking her,’ the pellegrini says. ‘She is mine.’
Like so many times before, the pellegrini becomes Mieli, wears her body like a glove. Mieli is looking down at herself, from above, a broken pale angel lying on dark rock, a silver monster looming over her, its fingers growing into her head. The jewels, she thinks. The jewels are caching my mind.
The other Mieli’s eyes below snap open. For an instant, she looks up at Mieli, smiles the pellegrini’s smile. Remember, she mouths. Then she squeezes her eyes shut.
I could self-destruct, the goddess said.
Mieli’s body twitches rhythmically. Her eyes flutter madly beneath her eyelids. All-D jerks to the same rhythm and pulls away: its tendrils come out of Mieli’s head, bloodlessly, easily.
A discontinuity.
Mieli is back in the blood-red madness of her body. Its systems are dying. Her brain is on fire. The fusion reactor is overheating. The only thing that does not burn is the awareness of her zoku, getting close.
But All-D is still moving, shaking off whatever recursive self-annihilation algorithm the pellegrini tried to use to destroy them both.
An itinerant fact from combat autism floats into her mind. Hektor. Escape velocity: 0.13 km/second.
She sends a command that shapes her power source’s tiny dense magnetic bottle into a funnel.
It does not take much strength to move in the low gravity, but it is almost more than Mieli has left. She slides forward so that her right leg is right beneath All-D.
Then she overloads her fusion reactor.
The damage reports become a white noise. Her eyes pop. Through the few sensors that still function, as if in a dream, she feels a pillar of plasma below her, taking her up from the surface of Hektor. Milliseconds later, the zoku suit’s antimatter containment collapses. She sees a god’s incandescent gaze for one quick eyeblink, and then there is nothing, nothing at all.
10
TAWADDUD AND THE BOTTLED CITY
Tawaddud, Dunyazad and the thief Jean le Flambeur stand on Saturn, on the newborn Plate of Irem, ready to plant the seed of Sirr.
It is Tawaddud who carries it: an intricate snowflake shape inside a transparent bubble. It is heavy, and she has to hold it with both hands against her chest. She wonders if this is how the women of the Banu Sasan feel, holding their infant children, shielding something unutterably precious from the world. Then she remembers that by carrying the seed, she is carrying all of the Banu Sasan as well. It is difficult to let go.
‘Come now, sister,’ Dunyazad says impatiently. ‘The hour grows late.’
Le Flambeur smiles, and the strange, diffuse sunlight of the vast gleaming plain glints in his blue sunglasses. It is still difficult to see the small, slim man in a white jacket and trousers as the Sumanguru she knew – a towering, dark-skinned giant, a warlord of Sobornost – but every now and then, he makes a small gesture that feels familiar.
‘You should take your time,’ he says, smiling a little sadly. ‘You want to do it properly. In the future, in the Palace of Stories, perhaps they will tell the tale of two sisters who saved the city of Sirr.’
‘And what about you, master thief?’ Dunyazad asks. ‘Will they tell stories about you?’
‘There are enough stories about me already,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I’ll be needing any new ones. Besides, I like the one about the sisters better.’
It was only hours ago that le Flambeur brought Tawaddud and Dunyazad back, from the pages of a book, he said. One moment Tawaddud stood in the razor whirlwind of a wildcode desert storm, drowning in the voices of the Aun, and then she opened her eyes in a dusty bookshop that felt real, but wasn’t. Then they stepped through a silver gate that Duny claimed made them real, turned quantum information into matter, wrote the Names of their atoms into reality, like the bright beams of the Sobornost Station in Sirr.
They are on Saturn, a thought that makes Tawaddud dizzy, on an artificial continent larger than the entire Earth. A part of her wonders if le Flambeur can be trusted as a guide in this place. But she is Tawaddud, daughter of Cassar Gomelez, trained in many arts in the House of Kafur, and if there is one thing she can do, it is reading men. Besides, Duny claims a connection to the zoku who rule here, and now wears a ring like a jinn ring, but with a bright purple jewel that glows with an inner light of its own. While Tawaddud has had her differences with her sister in the past, she knows that Duny will always think what is best for Sirr, and deal swift death to those she deems its enemies. Now, she is starting to look impatient, running the jewel of her ring back and forth along her lips.
Tawaddud kneels on the strange, hard ground that is made of interlocking geometric shapes, like the floor tiles of Sirr palaces or jinni skin. She puts the seed down carefully, reluctant to let go.
‘Wait,’ le Flambeur says. He removes his glasses, and looks at the sisters.
‘I have an apology to make,’ he says, ‘and this is as good a time as any. I came to Sirr to find the place you call the Lost Jannah of the Cannon, and to learn the secrets of the body thieves. I did not care what I had to do to get what I wanted. If not for me, Sirr might still be on Earth.’ He kneels next to Tawaddud. ‘I could spend forever apologising for the things I have done, but it is you, Lady Tawaddud, I have wronged the most. I threatened you, blackmailed the jinn Zaybak by holding a gun to your head. I want you to know I would never have pulled the trigger. Will you forgive me?’
Tawaddud looks at him. She remembers kneeling on the floor of the Sobornost upload temple, the black eye of the barakah gun, how helpless she felt, how the Sumanguru she had trusted betrayed her. The anger is still hot in her, and if le Flambeur did not look so different from Lord Sumanguru, she would recoil from his presence.
But she also remembers the moment in the desert, when all hope was lost, when black Dragons were falling from the sky, when the man in the blue glasses came to take Sirr away.
She sighs. Hate and gratitude are entwined in her like a muhtasib and a qarin, and she can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. So she remembers old, mad Kafur’s advice: tell them lies they want to hear.
‘You are forgiven, Lord le Flambeur,’ she says, ‘if my city is the way I remember it.’ In all honesty, she is not sure if the whole thing is a dream: a city in a bottle is a tale like the mutalibun tell, visions born from the madness that the wildcode desert brings.
He smiles a crooked smile. ‘I suppose I will have to take what I can get.’ He replaces his glasses and stands up. ‘Whenever you are ready, my lady.’
Tawaddud kisses the seed’s smooth smartmatter surface and mutters the Secret Name of Al-Mubdi the Initiator, for good fortune. She does not know if the Names have power here, but it is as if the seed senses her thoughts. The shell of the seed vanishes with a hiss and a whiff of ozone. The fractal snowflake crumbles into a dust that flows into the cracks of between the ground tiles with a swift purposefulness, quickly like water spilled in the desert.
Le Flambeur touches her arm. ‘We had better step back,’ he says. ‘This is something we will want to see from above.’ He gestures, and a bubble forms around them – this place’s version of magic carpets, as she has already learned – and takes them up with dizzying speed.