Tonight, his mother will come home again, bone-weary, and he won’t have anything to show her. Last week, he tried to bum cigarettes from the soldiers in the village, spoke French to them and did magic tricks to make them laugh. But when Tafalkayt found out, she beat him, called him a clown, a no-man who would never be amenokal. The memory makes his cheeks burn hotter than the sun.
The soldiers are laughing, smoking next to their low vehicle, just visible beyond the wavering glare of the panel field. He calculates: fifteen steps to the robot, a few moments to open it with the multi-tool he took from Ijja’s shop at the souk. It is as if there is a clock ticking in his head, counting down seconds to the moment when he needs to move. Before he even realises, he is sliding down the slope of the dune. His bare feet barely whisper on the hot soft surface.
He pauses to grab a handful of sand, throws it into the robot’s sensors, follows with a spray of paint from a can, watches as it scutters around in a circle. He fumbles with his phone, squints at the screen, presses the app with his thumb. The robot jerks and is still. He starts working on the plastic carapace. It takes all his strength to break off a palm-sized piece with the tool’s plier head. The sun glints off the plastic tubes inside, the prize, the thinking bugs that are the crab machine’s brain. He only has to stretch out his hand and take it and his mother will smile and all will be well.
‘What are you doing, boy?’
He grabs the prize. The sharp plastic edge tears at his hand as he pulls it out. Then he runs. But it is harder to go up the dune than to come down: his feet sink into it like in a nightmare. A hand grabs him by the neck, and he rolls down, right into a circle of towering figures, their faces and rifles black shadows against the stinging sun.
One of the soldiers pulls him up, roughly, a thick man whose face is shaded by blue stubble. He smells of black tobacco and sweat. He backhands the boy, hard, harder than Tafalkayt ever hit him. Something metallic on the man’s wrist bangs against his teeth. The boy’s brain shakes in his head like an egg yolk.
He begs for him to stop, in French, screaming as loud as he can.
The big man laughs. He kneels next to the boy, grabs his face between his big fingers.
‘Goddamn. You are Theo’s boy, aren’t you?’
Shaking in the man’s grip, he nods. He is not supposed to know his father’s name, but he’ll say anything to stop them from hitting him again.
‘Well, boy, your daddy isn’t here, so I guess it’s up to us to teach you a lesson about stealing.’
The rifle butts come down, on his ribs and arms and back, to the rhythm of laughter and curses, each impact a new crater of pain. After a while, they blend together into white agony.
He is not sure when they stop. He comes to when another repair robot scutters past him. The men are gone, bored of their game. He feels like a ragged dolclass="underline" the sand beneath his face is black with his blood, and his face is numb and sticky, a puffed-up mask. Pain lances through a rib when he tries to move. It takes a while to sit up: his body wants to curl up and stay down.
He opens his right hand. He is holding the big one’s watch, a thick band of metal, silver and precious stones.
And that is the moment he remembers forever: not the prize, but becoming more than he is with a single act. It feels like being born.
He will look for it his whole life: on the other side of the sea, in cities and palaces and other worlds, and beyond. He won’t always find it. There will be times when he will die the death of getting caught. And one day, in a prison cell, he starts to read a book.
The boy becomes a young man with pencil eyebrows and dimpled temples, and weary Peter Lorre eyes. He is dressed in a dinner jacket and a red-lined cape, as if he was on his way to the opera. There is a white flower on his lapel that smells faintly of summer. He is me.
We are standing side by side in a crystal labyrinth, lit by some unseen sun far above. There is a bone-deep chill here, and our breaths steam in the air. There are glass cells on both sides of the narrow, twisting corridor. The light filters through their walls and makes dazzling rainbow patterns on the smooth mirrored floor. Inside each cell is a wax figure of me, as a young man, as an old man, with zoku jewels around my head. Each cell is framed in cast iron wrought in the shape of flowers and birds, and has a label written in old-fashioned cursive lettering: the design reminds me of the Paris metro entrances. The door to the cell behind me is open, and a rush of heat and desert wind blows out from it. The label above it reads THE BEGINNING.
It reminds me far too much of the Dilemma Prison.
The other me smiles, walks past me and closes the door behind me. Then he gestures at the glass labyrinth with a white-gloved hand.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Here we are. All of us.’
I follow the other me down the corridors of the crystal gallery of my selves. He hums to himself as he walks.
‘Here,’ he says, finally, pointing to another cell. The label above it says THE END. He takes out a small golden key, inserts it into the iron lock of the glass door and opens it. ‘This is mine. We will be a bit more comfortable here. The Gallery is far too cluttered. But that is really the point of you being here, isn’t it? Time for spring cleaning.’
Inside is a small table and two heavy mahogany chairs, facing each other. He points at one of them.
‘Please. Sit.’
I sit down carefully, watching him. The environment does not feel like a vir or a Realm, and as far as I can tell, everything is solid and real. I can’t feel the interface of the Leblanc. There is an uncomfortable pricking in my neck.
‘Any traps I should be worried about?’ I ask. ‘And if you want to play games, I didn’t bring my gun.’
‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘No games. No guns. Not anymore. Not here. Just the truth.’ He leans back in his chair, smiling. ‘First of all, Jean – I take it I may call you Jean – congratulations! You are the first of us to make it here. It’s quite an achievement.’
I raise an eyebrow.
‘Second, please note that I am not a full gogol like you – just a partial, a sketch, with limited autonomy. I may not be able to answer all your questions. I certainly cannot help you with any pressing problems you might have – which I believe include a rather strong-willed young man whom I spoke to briefly when he first entered this ship. He was very intent on exploiting every single vulnerability he could find in our systems, so I thought it best to have some words with him.’
‘Yes, thank you very much for that. Very helpful.’
‘Oh, but I had to give you a hint of some kind, didn’t I? Is he part of a plan to steal the Kaminari jewel from Matjek Chen? If so, I might as well tell you that you are wasting your time. Chen does not have it.’
‘Hm,’ I say. ‘I was wondering about that.’ I review the memories I got from the sumanguru on how Chen got his hands on the Kaminari jewel. With the wisdom of hindsight, there is something decidedly fishy about the whole thing.
‘The zoku gave up the jewel far too easily. Almost like the chens were meant to find it. It has the Great Game Zoku written all over it.’
‘Precisely.’
‘But how do we know he doesn’t have it?’ I ask myself.
He smiles a familiar smile. ‘Well, I tried to steal it from him, of course. It turned out to be a booby trap. A nasty viral thing that would have taken out the whole chen copyclan. The Great Game do not kid around. I was almost surprised it wasn’t an exploding cigar, or a poisoned diving suit.’ He sighs. ‘Nothing ever changes. I kept the fake as a memento, as a reminder of that. It should be lying around here, somewhere. Just to keep things civilised, I left a replacement in its place – with a calling card, of course.’