I close my eyes. Prime authorisation required. It’s the same approach the Sobornost Founders use: an image that is the core of who you are, stable across copies, a neural configuration much more difficult to duplicate than any password, used to unlock secrets.
I search my memories. The Prison. Wearing the face of Sumanguru the Founder, getting caught. It must be older than that.
Fragments from Mars, glimpses from the corridors of the memory palace. Getting drunk with Isaac. The first date with Raymonde. The affair with Gilbertine. The Corridor of Birth and Death. No, none of that. Something older.
I reach for the ship. There are tools on the Leblanc I can use, metacognition software to dig through my own mind, treat it like a memory lockpick, find the right shape that fits when you wiggle it.
I can’t move. My world is made of blank pages that swallow my gaze.
‘You have been identified either as a divergent copy of master-Prime or an intruder,’ says the voice of the cat, somewhere. ‘You have thirty subjective seconds to provide a Prime code. After that, I am authorised to use countermeasures.’
Bastard. I waste a second cursing my past self. I wish I had never been born.
That’s it. When was I born? Does the book want the moment when I first opened it in Santé Prison, when the Flower Prince first started growing in my mind? Too obvious, too easy.
‘Twenty seconds.’
Or when Joséphine opened the door to my cell? Her young-old face, a key turning in a lock. No, not her. She does not define me.
‘Fifteen seconds.’
The pages are a desert, empty and bright with the glare of a harsh sun. I feel lost in them.
‘Ten seconds.’
There is a desert inside me, too, the blank paper on which I was first written, the first letter in the shape of a boy lying on a sand dune.
I whisper to him and he steps out of me. The book accepts him, and its pages are filled with the black ink of memory.
13
MIELI AND THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE
In spite of herself, Mieli enjoys the egg hunt.
The search keeps getting harder as she goes. It is not a simple matter of finding peculiar hiding places, although, at first, she finds a few small eggs in streams, tree holes and under leaves, all easily spotted from air. But one particularly large egg, sitting in the crook of a tree branch, grows slender white legs when Mieli approaches it, and flees with amazing speed. She chases it on foot through a thicket, and a burning chasm suddenly appears in front of her. The egg leaps over it effortlessly, and Mieli almost falls in.
She stops and stares at the hot lava at the bottom of the deep fissure, hissing and spitting sparks. The fleeing egg is lost among the shadows of the trees.
‘How do you find flying now, Oortian?’ rings Zinda’s taunting voice from the other side. ‘You have to be smarter than that!’
Gritting her teeth, Mieli sits down on a rock and starts listing the craziest possible hiding places she can think of. Barbicane’s hat. Clouds. Inside flowers. Then she starts going through them, one by one.
Most of them turn out to be dead ends, although she does find swooping down from above to snatch the zoku Elder’s hat away quite satisfying. He shouts something at her she can’t hear. Fortunately, the Circle prevents his gun arm from working. The hat turns out to be empty, but she wears it for the rest of the night anyway. Eventually, she does notice a suspiciously low cloud over the party – far too white and fluffy to be natural – and inside it she discovers a large floating egg with the number 890 written on one side.
When the time is up, Mieli returns to the riverbank with her loot and gathers them in the stovepipe hat, five eggs in total. Surely, that must be a respectable result, especially the cloud egg. She leans back on the grass and watches the wavering golden and silver reflections of the lanterns on the dark water. She imagines herself drifting along the river with the small zoku boats, sailing somewhere far away.
After a while, a sound wakes Mieli up abruptly. She sits bolt upright and sees Zinda kneeling next to her, angular face lit from below by blue light.
‘I’m sorry,’ the zoku girl says. ‘I didn’t want to wake you up. You looked so calm. But I’m afraid I have to tell you that you lost.’ At Zinda’s feet, there is a glowing pyramid of at least a dozen eggs of different sizes. ‘I even found the one that I think is the main prize.’ She holds up a tiny egg with the number 999.
‘Where was it?’ Mieli wipes her eyes. She feels more awake now, but the night and the river still hold her in their grip. Or perhaps she is not ready to let go of them.
‘In my purse! The last place I could think of. But I don’t think it was actually there before I looked – Great Timbo! Is that Barbicane’s hat?’
‘It was the last place I could think of,’ Mieli says.
Zinda laughs a long, pearly laugh. ‘Well, I’m glad you have been having a good time, Mieli,’ she says.
‘Me, too. And thank you. It has been a good party.’
‘It’s not over yet! Do you want to go back to collect our winnings?’
‘No, not really.’ Mieli looks at the glowing contents of her hat. ‘Maybe I prefer to imagine what I would have won.’ She holds up an egg with the number 27. ‘An unsung song, perhaps. Or a new beginning.’
Zinda takes her hand. ‘That’s a nice thought,’ she says. ‘Maybe we need one, too.’
A warm wave of desire leaps up within Mieli. No, not like this. She is just wearing a mask. None of this is real. I am doing this for Sydän, maintaining my cover, getting close to her for information.
Mieli pulls her hand away.
‘Speaking of winnings,’ she says, ‘what is your wish going to be?’
Zinda looks down. ‘I’ll tell you later.’ She puts Barbicane’s hat on. It is far too big for her, and she has to tilt it back at a ridiculous angle to wear it.
‘I don’t know about you, but I feel like doing something forbidden,’ she says. ‘I think it would do us both a lot of good. What do you think?’
Mieli sits up. ‘Listening to people say that is the story of my life,’ she says.
‘So, what happens next?’
‘Usually, we find out why the forbidden things are forbidden.’
‘Come on! On nights like this, we need to climb over fences and break into graveyards. Suggest something forbidden.’
‘Well,’ Mieli says carefully, ‘your friend Barbicane said that talking about the Kaminari jewel was forbidden.’
Zinda looks at her, eyes wide. ‘I didn’t realise you even knew about that,’ she says in a hushed voice.
Mieli shrugs. ‘So you don’t know everything about me,’ she says.
Zinda smiles. ‘Are you trying to play me, Mieli? Are you flirting with me to try to get me to talk about things I’m not supposed to?’
Mieli takes Zinda’s hand. It is small and warm in her own. Kuutar help me, she thinks.
‘Don’t you want to be played?’ she says aloud.
‘Mieli, daughter of Karhu,’ Zinda says, ‘are you suggesting that we twink? That I help you to level up, tell you zoku secrets you are not supposed to know? That’s bad. That’s very bad. How do you think we are going to get away with that?’ She grins wickedly. ‘I like it. Give me your Great Game jewel!’
Mieli opens her purse and passes the trinket to Zinda. The zoku girl holds it up.
‘This really is forbidden, you know. We could get bumped back to level one! But you just leave it to Auntie Zinda.’ She touches Mieli’s jewel with her own, like clinking glasses. Mieli feels a surge of entanglement, like in meditation, a sudden, sharp awareness of everything around her: the Great Game Zoku members, everywhere in Supra City, minds close to her like her own heartbeat. Then the feeling settles down like the surface of a glass of water.