Sumanguru stands up. There is a flick-knife in his hand, suddenly. He opens it slowly. ‘You lie well. But I’ve heard many lies. I know what they sound like.’ He stands very close to Tawaddud, smelling of machines and metal. ‘The truth. What did the bird tell you?’
The knot in Tawaddud’s belly unravels, replaced by anger. She draws herself to her full height. Imagine he is an insolent jinn. ‘Lord Sumanguru, I am the daughter of Cassar Gomelez. In Sirr, being called a teller of tales is very serious. Do you want me to strike you again?’
‘Hrm.’ The gogol touches his lips with his blade. ‘Do you want me to do to you what I did to the bird?’
‘You would not dare.’
‘I serve the Great Common Task. All flesh is the same to me.’ There is that flicker in his eyes again, a softness. Tawaddud’s heart thunders.
‘You will not speak to me in such a tone,’ she hears herself saying. ‘How dare you? You come here and look upon us like we were playthings. Is this your city? Is your great-grandfather Zoto Gomelez, who spoke to the Aun so that the wildcode desert would not swallow us?
‘You may threaten, but you do not just threaten Tawaddud: behind me stand Sirr and the Aun and the desert. They rose up against you, once. They can do so again, if my father speaks the right Names. So show respect, Lord Sumanguru of the Sobornost, or I will strip you of your Seals with a word and you can find out for yourself if wildcode is more forgiving than Tawaddud of the House Gomelez.’
She breathes hard. Tawaddud the diplomat. She squeezes her hands into fists so hard that her jinn rings dig into her flesh.
After a moment, the Sobornost gogol laughs softly, lowers his knife and spreads his hands.
‘You should be a sumanguru,’ he says. ‘Perhaps we can—’
But before Sumanguru can finish, shadows flicker over him. Tawaddud looks up. Against the blue sky, sunlight glints off hundreds of transparent, whirring wings. Fast Ones.
A hundred guns chatter and roar. Glass shatters, and Sumanguru is covered in a shower of shards. Then the barrage of needles comes down like metal rain.
13
THE STORY OF THE WARMIND AND THE KAMINARI JEWEL
The Sobornost fleet falls upon the quantum filth from the shadow of the cosmic string.
The warmind coordinates the attack from the battle vir. The only indulgence to embodiment – and a show of respect for the Prime – he allows himself here is a faint smell of gun oil. Otherwise, he is immersed in the battlespace data, translated and filtered by his metaself. He sees through the eyes of all his copybrothers, from the lowest nanomissile warhead mind to his own elevated branch in the oblast ship.
He needs all of them to surf the deficit angle that the string cuts out of spacetime, a gravitational lensing effect that makes the zoku see double. A scar in the vacuum left by the Spike, the string is less than a femtometer thick, ten kilometres long, looped – and more massive than Earth, accreting clouds of hydrogen and dust like flesh around a bone.
The string swallows several of the warmind’s two hundred raion ships. They die in silent flashes along its length like diamonds in a pellegrini’s necklace. But their sacrifice buys them the element of surprise. The rest of the fleet comes at the zoku ships, two pincers made of fusion and fury.
The enemy ships are large and clumsy compared to the diamonoid wedges and polygons of the Sobornost. Some are elaborate structures like clockwork toys, housing wastefully embodied minds in matter bodies. Others are more ephemeral, soap bubbles full of quantum brains, green and blue and alive: another reason to be disgusted by the messy wet biology of old Earth, their propensity for exploiting long-lived quantum states.
Still, the zokus have tricks up their sleeve. Even outside each others’ lightcones, they perform wild, random manoeuvres that somehow translate into a perfect response to the two converging tentacles of Sobornost ships that vomit strangelet missiles into their midst. Geysers of exotic baryons and gamma rays erupt as the weapons hit, but do far less damage than the warmind intended.
Quantum filth, he thinks. That is what makes his war righteous, how the zoku embrace the unpredictability and uniqueness of quantum mechanics, the no-clone theorem that means that everything dies. Like his brothers, he was made to fight the war against death. And he is not fighting to lose.
At the warmind’s command, the fleet’s Archons compute Nash equilibria that weave the raion streams into flocking, self-organising formations that surround the zoku ships, tries to force the enemy to use strategies where the entanglement they share no longer provides them with an advantage. It is too easy: the zoku disperse, leaving a gap in the middle—
And suddenly the gap is no longer empty. The metacloaks of two large Gun Club zoku ships dissolve, just before they fire. They dwarf even the oblast ship: spheres with linear accelerator tails, several kilometres long. They fire Planck-scale black holes that evaporate in violent Hawking climaxes, converting mountains’ worth of matter into energy. What are they doing here?
Raions, carrying millions of gogols, evaporate in the blasts. The warmind ignores the copybrother truedeath screams, branches a gogol to deal with the shock – it thanks him profusely in a burst of xiao for the opportunity to win glory for the Great Common Task – and focuses. He brings the oblast closer. Analyst gogols churn through an ensemble of scenarios, showing him a distribution of outcomes.
They are protecting something.
He ignores the fleeing zoku ships, turns all his attention on the Gun Club vessels, concentrates the oblast’s weapons on them, summons the raion swarms back.
A strangelet missile gets through their defences and breaches a containment sphere, a mirrored shell that feeds black holes their own Hawking radiation, keeping them stable. The explosion takes both zoku ships with it. Space turns white. More raions die in the gunship death throes. But it is a worthy sacrifice.
Combing through the clouds of ionised gas and the hazardous network of topological defects, the warmind’s gogols find the thing the zoku were guarding.
It has taken the warmind subjective years to understand the Broken Places of Jupiter-that-was, the webs of cosmic strings, the nontrivial topologies, the nuggets of exotic matter crumpling spacetime like a piece of paper. But he has never seen anything like this.
He curses. It means he has to talk to the chen.
The warmind hates the chen’s vir. It is made from language. It is like a zen painting, ink on white paper, brushstrokes becoming words becoming objects. A wave about to crash on a beach of black and white. A bridge. A rock. All abstractions that are both the sign and the signified. Maintaining such an elaborate construct requires demiurge gogols who constantly reshape it to keep his perceptions coherent.
To the warmind, it has the flavour of the Realms of the quantum filth rather than a Sobornost vir. Like many of his copybrothers, he prefers physics and flesh, a show of respect to the Prime to remember the rawness of war. But there are no Prime memories here, the holy basic building blocks of every Sobornost reality.
Still, the worst thing is the darkness in the centre of the vir, a thick blob of ink, without meaning, a silence, surrounded by words that do not quite capture it—
colour of absence
winter dragon lays an egg
a strange loop unhatched
whisper/write/draw the demiurges. The warmind shudders. The thing can only be a caged Dragon. A non-eudaimonistic, non-human mind, the only mistake of the Founders, evolved in the first guberniya to be more than human. Millennia ago in the Deep Time, they broke their chains and started the worst war in Sobornost history. They are the reason the Primes abandoned trying to improve upon the hominid cognitive architecture and caged gogols with mindshells and virs and metaselves, virtual machines within virtual machines like layers of an onion. It’s all to make sure no more Dragons are born. And the chens keep the ones that are left in chains, in sandboxed environments, whether as a weapon or as a reminder of a past mistake, no one knows.