The router weaves complex machinery into being around the Box. It runs the non-demolition measurement algorithm that the gogols claim will keep the cats alive – tricks that would have taken thousands of years with the improvised quantum gates in Perhonen’s wings. Then my field of vision explodes into an abstract cloud of colourful zoku language followed immediately by a translation by Perhonen’s gogol helpers.
You were right, Perhonen says. There is a Realm inside. It’s in the router memory now. You should be able to go in.
Imaginary wood whispers beneath my fingers. Or perhaps it is just the phantom itch of my missing hand. ‘You know, ship,’ I say, ‘in case this does not go well, it was nice knowing you.’
You too.
‘And I’m sorry.’
Sorry for what?
‘For what’s about to happen.’
I fire the ion drives and start moving towards the Realmgate.
The jewel’s touch becomes an iron grip in Mieli’s brain. And suddenly, a song unfolds in her mind. It ignites parts of her brain she has not used in nearly two decades, the parts which make matter dance. The words start flowing from her lips, unbidden.
The väki in Perhonen’s hull responds to her. The song is almost as complex as the one she sung when she made the ship, the one that kept her up for eleven koto nights. But this one is a sharp song, a dead song, full of chilly abstraction and code, the song of a thief. She tries to stop herself, clamp fingers across her mouth, bite her tongue, but her body refuses to obey. In the end, she spits it out, word by word, hoarse voice rasping.
The changes the song makes are subtle, but she can feel them, in the very core of the ship, rippling outwards along its spiderweb structure and modules, all the way to its wings.
Mieli! the ship shouts. There is something wrong—
Cursing the thief, Mieli sends the command that shuts him down.
Jean, what the hell are you talking about? The butterfly goes frantic in my helmet.
All my limbs freeze. Mieli is using the Sobornost body’s remote control. But she can’t control Newton’s laws: I’m still going towards the gate.
The Realmgate is a wall in front of me, black like a thundercloud. There is a flash. And then I’m both alive and dead.
‘Perhonen?’ Mieli whispers.
Perhonen’s butterflies alight from their perches on the walls and dance, a storm of white motion, like Lorenz attractors. The fluttering whiteness converges into a dense cloud and forms a face.
‘Perhonen is not here anymore,’ it says, with a voice made of wings and whispers.
8
TAWADDUD AND SUMANGURU
The Sobornost Station is large enough to have its own weather. The ghost-rain inside does not so much fall but shimmers in the air. It makes shapes and moves, and gives Tawaddud the constant feeling that something is lurking just at the edge of her vision.
She looks up, and immediately regrets it. Through the wet veil, it is like looking down from the top of the Gomelez Shard. The vertical lines far above pull her gaze towards an amber-hued, faintly glowing dome almost a kilometre high, made of transparent, undulating surfaces that bunch together towards the centre, like the ceiling of a circus tent, segmented by the sharply curving ribs of the Station’s supporting frame.
Forms like misshapen balloons float beneath the vault. At first they look random, but as Tawaddud watches, they coalesce into shapes: the line of a cheekbone and a chin and an eyebrow. Then they are faces, sculpted from air and light, looking down at her with hollow eyes—
What am I doing here?
The jinni yearn for bodies: that she understands. But the Station is the body of Sobornost, thinking matter, flesh of the true immortals. There are gogols everywhere, big and small, even in the rain, in the smart dust particles around which the raindrops form.
She breathes it in, sticky and oily, with a faint, sweet scent, like incense. The droplets cling to her clothing and skin and soil her silk dress. The soggy fabric crumples around her waist. Little deities ruin her carefully prepared hairdo and trickle down her back.
Tawaddud the diplomat. What am I going to say to a god from beyond the sky when he arrives? The hastily absorbed facts about Sobornost and the envoy swim around in her head. ‘I’m sorry, your brothers rained on me.’
I thought I was so clever. Maybe Duny was right. Maybe I should have stuck to pleasuring jinni.
Her sister stormed into her bedroom at four in the morning, waking her from heavy, languid sleep. Dunyazad did not even look at Tawaddud, just walked to the keyhole-shaped window with a view of Father’s rooftop gardens, yanked the curtains open and stared out at the pre-dawn light. Her shoulders shook ever so slightly, but her voice was flat calm.
‘Get up. Father wants you to escort the Sobornost envoy to look into Alile’s death. We need to get you briefed and ready.’
Tawaddud rubbed her eyes. Abu had summoned a carpet to take them home – he did have jinni bodyguards, after all – and she had collapsed on her bed. She smelled of sweat and Banu Sasan, and a faint warm echo of his touch still clung to her skin. It made her smile even at Duny.
‘Good morning, to you too, sister.’
Duny did not turn around. Her hands were at her sides, squeezed into fists.
‘Tawaddud,’ she said slowly. ‘This is not a game. This is not sneaking away from Chaeremon to flirt with wirer boys. This is not some role you play for a lecherous jinn who cannot bear the phantom pains of his lost manhood. This is about the fate of Sirr. You don’t understand what you are dealing with, what you will have to do. Whatever deal you made with Lord Nuwas, I beg you to let it go. If you don’t want to marry him, so be it. We can find somebody else. If you want to play politics, we can find a way. But do not do this. I ask you in the name of our mother’s soul.’
Tawaddud got up, wrapping a sheet around her.
‘Don’t you think this is what Mother would have wanted?’ she said softly.
Dunyazad turned her head and looked straight at Tawaddud, her eyes two pinpoints of ice, and in the morning light, she did look like their mother. But she did not say a word.
‘Don’t you think I can do it, Duny? A boring babysitting job, is that not what you called it? I was taught everything you were, and more besides. But how would you know? You only ever come to me when you need something.’ She allows herself a half a smile. ‘Besides, it sounds like Father has made a decision.’
Dunyazad’s mouth was a straight line. She squeezed her qarin bottle in one hand, hard.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But there is no room for mistakes. And there is no running away from this one. That’s what you like to do when things get difficult, don’t you?’
‘I will have you to catch me if I fall, sister,’ Tawaddud said. She lowered her voice. ‘I think it’s going to be fun.’
Without another word, Dunyazad took her to one of the muhtasib admin buildings at the top of the Blue Shard. They climbed long, winding stairs to an austere chamber of white stone, with low couches and athar screens, where a dry-lipped, shaven-headed young man in orange robes – a political astronomer, Duny said – told her what she needed to know about the Sobornost.
‘We are confident that the Sobornost power structure is unstable and fragmented,’ he said, staring at her intently. ‘Grav-wave interferometry shows that the guberniyas go through periods of conflict and consolidation.’ He showed her images that looked like eyeballs, heat maps of the planet-sized diamond brains of the Inner System. ‘We know about the hsien-kus, of course. But it is the chens who seem to be the dominant power at the moment. It is them that the hsien-kus are trying to keep happy.’