‘By killing it all over again,’ I say.
‘Words spoken by the flesh. Perhaps that is what our sister finds attractive. What is your answer? Will you serve us? If your answer is no, you have outlived your usefulness.’
‘How do you think you are going to catch me?’ I smile, thinking of my escape route.
‘Oh, we are not going to catch you. We are scholars. But as it happens, our brother the Engineer created a gogol specifically for catching you. It should be on its way here as we speak. The Hunter, we believe it is called. Sasha always liked a bit of melodrama.’
Shit.
Abu Nuwas gestures with his gun. ‘Could we get on with it, please? My mercenaries are ready.’ The jinn, Rumzan, wavers restlessly next to him.
‘Of course,’ the hsien-ku says. She lifts up the mind-bullet between delicate fingers. No showmanship like what I did in the aviary: besides, I was just bluffing to get Tawaddud to entwine with the bird. This is the real thing.
‘What are you doing to him?’ Tawaddud whispers.
‘Mind surgery,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘They are going to torture him. Trying to get the Name out of his mind. Aren’t you?’
‘It is regrettable but unavoidable,’ the hsien-ku says, a sad look on her broad face. ‘Like most things are.’ I can only imagine the turmoil going on inside. Thousands of iterations of the Axolotl-fragment being created and tortured and destroyed, a feeling far too familiar to me.
Tawaddud starts screaming. She collapses to the floor, twitching, tearing at her hair. Of course. She must feel it through the entwinement. Abu Nuwas gives her one glance, then looks away.
‘For scholars, you can be real bastards,’ I tell the hsien-ku.
‘I will give it to you!’ Tawaddud shouts. ‘Stop it! I’ll give it to you!’
Her world is made of agony. The Axolotl part in her mind flickers and dies, flickers and dies, like a hot needle pushed into her brain again and again and again.
‘I will give it to you!’ she hears herself shouting.
It stops. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, whispers the Axolotl, far away.
She wipes snot and spittle away from her face and takes a deep breath. Then she cries out the Name of Al-Jabbar the Irresistible and becomes Rumzan the Repentant.
I cover my ears when Tawaddud shouts the Name. By now I have a fairly good idea about how it works. Extreme fractal compression of some kind, a self-referential loop inside a story, forcing the target brain to iterate it all over again, bootstrapping a new mind inside it into existence. How it is possible, I do not know. Even encoding pictures in such dynamical maps takes a lot of computational power, and doing the same for a human mind seems like something that is firmly in the realm of the transhuman.
No matter how it works, it works quickly. Rumzan – or Tawaddud – rams sharp thought-form fingers through the throat of the hsien-ku in a shower of crimson. Abu Nuwas is just fast enough to fire the barakah gun before the creature turns on him. It explodes into inert white powder. Tawaddud screams one more time and lies still. The mind-bullet rolls across the floor. I dive down and grab it.
But hsien-kus are hard to kill, and the death of this one is like trimming a fingernail. As the gogol’s body dies, it sputters out the Name, torn from the Axolotl’s mind. It shimmers in the athar and rings in the air. Abu Nuwas’s eyes glaze over as he drinks it in.
As his gun hand wavers, I pick the still form of Tawaddud up and run. Sparks fly in my eyes as I push the Sobornost body to its limits. Tawaddud on my shoulder, I smash the diamond tool she gave me against the gallery window, as hard as I can. Pain shoots up my arm but the glass shatters like ice. Holding on to Tawaddud, I leap through the fragments, into the void beyond.
The Anti-Name echoes in my ears as we fall towards the blue and golden night of Sirr, far below. Its beauty takes my breath away.
But it’s nothing compared to the warm amber glow of the ancient angelnet, when it finally catches us in a soft embrace.
Tawaddud’s head feels like a shattered jinn jar. She lies on a cold, hard surface. Everything hurts.
She opens her eyes and sees the dark mouth of a barakah gun. Sumanguru – Jean le Flambeur – is pointing it at her face. He is smiling sadly.
‘There is nothing personal about this, you understand,’ he says. ‘I think you know about wanting to be good. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the luxury to follow through with that.’
‘What are you doing? Where are we?’
‘Please speak very, very carefully. If I hear the beginning of a Name, I will have to fire. That trick with the Name and Rumzan was very good. For future reference, it is a great idea to attack embodied Founders. It confuses them every time. We are in an old upload temple near the Station: I’ll be needing some Gourd bandwidth in a moment.’
Tawaddud swallows. Her mouth is dry.
‘Who are you? What do you want? Why are you doing this?’
‘I want you to know that I am very sorry. You didn’t deserve any of this.’
‘Why . . . why are you apologising? Just let me go.’
‘This was my fault, you see. I came to Earth to find two things. The Jannah of the Cannon was one of them. But it was going to be far too difficult to find it. I’m a thief, not an archeologist. So I made sure that the hsien-kus knew there was something in there they would desperately want: it was going to be much less trouble to steal it from them when they found it. They thought I let it slip, sent a careless message.’ A smile flickers on his lips. ‘I didn’t think they would use a local agent like Nuwas, but then I must admit I did not really understand Sirr.
‘It was a bonus that they actually sent me here to go after the Axolotl.’
Tawaddud feels empty and weak. She closes her eyes. There is the faintest echo of the Axolotl in her head, somewhere far away.
‘I trusted you,’ Tawaddud whispers.
‘I told you, you shouldn’t have,’ le Flambeur says. ‘Hush now. No talking. I just have some business with your boyfriend, and then I’ll be on my way.’
He spins the mind-bullet between his fingers deftly, like a magician.
What the hell do you want? whispers the Axolotl.
‘I want the secret, the one you got from the Aun. That’s what I really came here for. The algorithm for turning minds into stories. The same thing you used to make all the other body thieves. But be careful. Any more tricks, and Lady Tawaddud here will become noise in the wildcode. Or I may decide to use the hsien-ku tactics: I can do mind surgery too. Your choice.’
Let him shoot, the Axolotl says in Tawaddud’s mind. Let him shoot. We can still be together.
‘It’s too late,’ Tawaddud says. ‘It was always too late.’
When it’s done, I give them both a bow. Then I plug into the Gourd communication systems in the upload temple. The scan beam comes down from the temple’s dome, a shower of white, cleansing fire. I leave Sirr in a burst of modulated neutrinos. An eyeblink later I’m in my old body in the main cabin. I stretch: it feels strange after days in Sumanguru’s massive frame.
You are a real bastard, Jean, the ship says.
‘I know, but sometimes that’s what it takes.’ I pass it the algorithm – a bizarre image the Axolotl imprinted in my mind, encoded in what I can only assume is a recursive Penrose tiling.
‘Give this to the pellegrini and tell her to test it on a few gogols in the Gourd systems. I’ve seen it working firsthand, but just to be sure. And I think it’s going to require a lot of computational power.’
Sir, yes sir. Anything else?
‘I have some good news and bad news. The good news is that everything is ready, as long as Mieli gets into that jannah. Is she in Abu Nuwas’s fleet?’