Free The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi Page B

the neck, pulls it open all the way to her navel. She takes his hands and places them on her breasts. She whispers the Secret Name of al-Latif the Gentle, sees its shape before her eyes, focuses on its spirals and recursive twists like she was taught, and the tingle of a beemee connection comes in an instant.
    ‘You thought to court a woman who has lain with both jinni and men,’ she whispers. ‘You would find that Kafur’s Palace of Stories drives a cheaper bargain than Cassar Gomelez.’
    ‘I know I shouldn’t have,’ he says haltingly. His hand shakes slightly as he traces the shape of the aureola of her left breast with a finger, gently, uncertainly. The promise of the touch makes her tingle all over.
    ‘But when I heard the stories—’
    ‘Stories are things of the evening, not the night, and the night is here,’ she chides, kissing him again, drawing him close, opening his robes.
    ‘Is there anything I can give you to—’
    ‘You can tell my father that this is not all I am good for,’ she hisses in his ear. ‘Tell him that I want to serve him like my sister does.’
    The beemee hums around her temples. His hands wander down her belly, caress her back.
    Abu’s brass eye lights up like a star in the athar. Fire pours out of it and into her, incandescent tongues that tease and burn. She sees her own face, like in a mirror, her lips a circle, her eyes squeezed shut. And then she loses herself in the entwining of Shadow, flesh and flame.

7
    THE THIEF AND THE ROUTER
    ‘What are you going to do when this is over?’ I ask Perhonen through our neutrino link.
    From our orbit around 90 Antiope, the zoku router looked like a tree with mirror leaves, two kilometres in diameter, floating in space. But inside it is sheer Escherian madness. The processing nodes are blue glowing spheroids, ranging in size from hot-air ballons to dust motes, moving and tumbling in spirals around each other. Polygon-shaped silver mirrors that reflect each other, opening into infinite corridors. But like a vampire, I have no reflection.
    I’m going to find a job that does not involve breaking into giant machines full of lesbian dragon sex , the ship says. Its white-winged butterfly avatar flutters around my helmet. I blow at it to get it away from my field of vision: I’m in the middle of hacking into yet another processing node, a giant amoeba the size of my head. It is a rippling, transparent bubble, with an irregular crystalline structure within. Much of zoku q-tech is alive, and so is this thing – constantly hungry, eating quantum states from the photon stream through the router and encoding them into complex organic molecules. I’m about to feed it a treat.
    ‘That’s very narrow-minded of you – the zoku can do whatever they want in the Realms. But another job? Come on. Crime is the only way to make the world make sense. Besides, you are a natural.’
    I approach the node with gentle nudges from my quicksuit’s ion drives. I have to move slowly: there is enough bandwidth here to fry an unprotected human many times over. A constant photon storm of fantasy, bent around me by the metamaterials of the quicksuit. I’m invisible and undetectable, a ghost in the machine – as long as the suit keeps up.
    At my command, the quicksuit extends invisible tendrils that englobe the node. Far away, Perhonen ’s mathematics gogols work hard to inject a tiny piece of quantum software into the node’s memory, to allow us to monitor the traffic through it. We need to find the scale-free patterns in the traffic flow, to detect when a quiet period is coming, to allow us to use the router’s quantum brain for our own purposes—
    The traffic spike hits. Even through the faceplate of the helmet, the node becomes a bright, hot sun. The suit’s gogol processors – customised upload minds – literally scream. The sudden heat scalds my arms, face and chest. Not again . There are needles in my eyes, and suddenly I only see white noise. I