‘Congratulations on a great victory, brother,’ the chen says. At least he is more than just a word here, a small man with prematurely grey hair, so colourless he could be an ink painting himself. ‘You are fulfilling your part of the Plan admirably.’
The warmind snorts. ‘Well, I found something that was not part of the Plan.’
‘Really?’ the chen says with polite amusement in his eyes.
‘Really. I come to you to ask your permission to delay our progress to the Galilean rendezvous point. The zoku were up to something here, and I want to find out what. And then destroy it.’
The chen smiles. He outranks the warmind by several generations, and it is frustrating to follow the strict hierarchy of xiao, especially in the wartime. But given the political chaos that swept through the guberniyas after the Spike, the chens have insisted on having an observer on every raion. This chen has been perfectly courteous, but having to justify his actions does not sit well with the warmind.
‘That is your decision, of course,’ says the chen. ‘I do not want to interfere with your command of the fleet. However, I would see this extraordinary thing for myself.’
The warmind nods and thinks his Code at the firmament. The demiurge gogols flinch at its intensity, disrupting the vir with ink spatters of sheer terror. He watches with grim satisfaction as some of the chen’s language constructs dissolve, the brushstroke bridge and the bamboo forest washing away into grey incoherence. The chen gives him a disapproving look. But then his attention is captured by the sub-vir the warmind opens before them.
The warmind knows about zoku jewels – devices the zoku use to store the entangled quantum states that bind their collectives together. It has always seemed ridiculous to the warmind: to obey the dictates of what is essentially random, even if correlated with other similar states. How much better to listen to the loving voice of the metaself, echoing with the Plan.
But this thing does not look like a normal zoku jewel. In real space, it would be ten centimetres in diameter. There is a duality to it, yin and yang: it looks like two lobes of a crystal brain, joined in the centre at a point, flashing in colours of purple and white. Both halves are made of self-similar structures, a repeating pattern that is like the foliage of a tree, or two hands in prayer, offered to some god in supplication.
The warmind probes it with the thousand nanoscale fingers of the gogols swarming around the thing, out there in meatspace. It is not made of matter, not even the chromotech pseudomatter that is now forged in the depths of guberniyas. It is crystallised spacetime, made visible by strange paths that light takes through it, bent and scattered. But there is no singularity, no discontinuity. And it is alive: the fractal fingers move and shift, perhaps in response to some quantum fluctuations in the metric that shapes its luminescent geodesics.
‘Extraordinary,’ says the chen, breathlessly.
The warmind looks at him, surprised. ‘Have you seen it before?’
‘Not directly,’ the chen says. ‘But my brothers and I have been playing a Great Game with the zoku for a long, long time. We . . . hoped that we might find something like this here.’
‘So what is it?’
‘A rabbit hole,’ the chen says. ‘“And what if I should fall right through the centre of the Earth. . .”’ There is a dreamy look in his eyes. He touches the object in the sub-vir gently.
‘I don’t understand,’ the warmind says.
‘I didn’t expect you would,’ the chen says. ‘This thing is a jewel of a zoku called the Kaminari. Their story is long, and I don’t have time to tell it. But it’s a great story, full of hubris and drama. I have gogols working on an epic poem based on it. Like Troy. Or Krypton, perhaps.’
The warmind looks up the reference and snorts. ‘And is this the last son, then?’
The chen smiles a cold smile.
‘More than that. They did something we never could. That’s why the Spike happened. That’s why we are here. We want to know how they did it.’
The warmind stares at the chen. His metaself is roaring inside him. The Great Common Task requires the taming of physics, the eradication of the quantum filth, taking the dice from God’s hand, the creation of a new Universe with new rules, inside guberniyas, where all those who died can live again, turning away from the laws written down by a mad god. That’s what the Protocol War is about. Stopping the zoku from defiling that dream.
‘Oh, don’t look so shocked,’ the chen says. ‘Being bound by the metaself is for lesser gogols. Believe me, you have done the Great Common Task a great service. You will be rewarded in the Omega.’ He writes characters in the air.
‘But before that, I’m afraid this is going to hurt a little.’
The chen’s ink figures merge with the whirlpool in the centre of the vir. The warmind reaches for his vir-weapons in the secret parts of his mindshell. ‘Traitor,’ he growls.
‘Not at all,’ the chen says. ‘I am always loyal to the dream. Even when it is time to wake up.’
a black egg of death
a winter dragon hatches
to devour its tail
the demiurges sing. And then the Dragon is upon him. It pours from the blackness like blood from a wound, a hungry absence of structure or logic. It bites into the warmind’s avatar with teeth made of madness.
Old branch memories and reflexes wake up. The warmind throws partials into the code thing’s jaws. The very presence of the Dragon is breaking the vir structure, giving him a way out. He flicks into the battlespace vir, downloads a gogol into a thoughtwisp—
—and there is a discontinuity. Suddenly, he is the gogol in the wisp, watching from afar as the Dragon devours his fleet. The oblast’s Hawking drive ruptures. From the thoughtwisp, the conflagration is redshifted into a gentle glow, but there is a furnace burning inside the warmind, even as the phantom pains of the tiny wisp vir crawl all over the body he no longer has. The Founders must be told, he swears. For all my brothers. For the Task.
The Universe that the quantum gods made is cruel and random. Before he reaches the nearest wisp router, the zoku ships come, survivors of the battle of the string. He tries to fight, to win a quick truedeath at least. But the zoku are not as merciful as him.
14
TAWADDUD AND THE SECRET NAMES
Tawaddud loves the way the Secret Names make her feel. When she was a child, learning them took endless repetition and practice, and stern instruction by Chaeremon the jinn. Meditating on the various forms of the Names, repeating their syllables, over and over. Tracing their interlocking geometries on sheets of paper until their shapes filled her dreams. The hard work had its rewards. Duny in particular delighted in playing with the Names. She would make outlandish cartoon images, receiving a stern warning from Chaeremon about body thieves, and rattle the jinn tutor’s jar with athar hands.
But Tawaddud would rather sit quietly on the balcony and listen to the words echoing in her head, over and over. The calm regal presence of Malik-ul-Muluk that made her feel like the queen of the world. The righteous red rage of Al-Muntaqim the Avenger. The gentle contemplation of Al-Hakim the Wise.