The Fractal Prince

Prologue THE DREAMING PRINCE

That night, Matjek sneaks out of his dream to visit the thief again.

In the dream, he is in a bookshop. It is a dark, filthy place, with a low ceiling and a drooping staircase that leads up to a small attic. The shelves bend their backs under the weight of dusty volumes. A heady smell of incense from the back room mingles with a whiff of dust and mould in the air.

Matjek squints at the handwritten shelf labels in the dim light. They have changed since the last time, and list esoteric topics. Fire-eaters. Human Cannonballs. Poison Resisters. Wall of Death Riders. Multiple Mental Marvels. Escapologists.

His pulse quickens, and he reaches for a small volume whose back says The Secret History of the Zacchini Cannon, in curly, golden letters. He loves the stories in his dreams, although he can never quite remember them when he wakes up. He opens the book and starts reading.

The cannonball man never loved her, even though he told her so many times. His only true love was flying, that sensation of being blasted out of the mouth of the great iron thing that his grandfather cast out of metal that was said to come from a rock that fell from the sky. He wanted a wife like a thing he should have, another tool to keep the great mechanism he and the cannon formed together in working order, but love was the wrong word for it—

Matjek blinks. It’s not the right story. It does not lead to the thief.

He jumps when someone coughs behind him, and he slams the book shut. If he turns around, he will see the lanky shopkeeper sitting behind the counter, looking at him disapprovingly, eyes wild, grey chest hairs peeking out from the buttonhole of a stained shirt, unshaven face full of malice. Then he will wake up.

Matjek shakes his head. Tonight, he is not just a dreamer. He is on a mission. Carefully, he replaces the book in the shelf and starts walking up the stairs.

The wood groans under his weight with each step. He feels heavy. The handrail suddenly feels soft in his grip. If he is not careful, he will sink into another, deeper dream. But then he sees it: a flash of blue amongst the grey volumes, up in the corner shelf ahead, just where the stairway ends.

Below, the shopkeeper coughs again, a mucous, jagged sound.

Matjek reaches for the book, standing up on his toes and pulling at the blue binding with his fingertips. The book falls, and a cascade of others comes toppling down with it. Dust stings his eyes and throat. He starts coughing.

‘What are you doing up there, boy?’ says a creaking voice, followed by sudden, shuffling steps, and the groaning of floorboards.

Matjek gets down on his knees, tosses aside books on flea circuses and singing mice, and uncovers the blue volume. There are tears and dents on the cover, with brown paper peeking out, but the silver cover design with its minarets, stars and moon is still bright.

Something comes up the stairs, something that smells of incense and dust, not the shopkeeper anymore but something far worse, something papery and whispering and old—

Matjek fixes his eyes on the book and flings it open. The words leap out at him, black insects moving on the yellowed page.

Among the histories of past peoples a story is told that in the old days in the islands of India and China there was a Sasanian king, a master of armies, guards, servants and retainers, who had two sons, an elder and a younger—

The words swirl. The paper and the letters bulge out, form the shape of a hand, fingers of black and white, reaching out from the book.

The dust thing coughs and whispers, and something brushes Matjek’s shoulder, tickling sharply. He grabs the hand as hard as he can, and the razor edges of the word-fingers cut his palm. But he holds on, and the hand pulls him in, into the suddenly vast sea of language in front of him. The words roll over him like—

—waves, a gentle, teasing pull and push of cold foam around his bare feet. A warm evening sun above, a beach of white sand like a smile.

‘For a while there, I thought you weren’t going to make it,’ the thief says. He holds Matjek’s hand in a warm, tight grip, a slight man in shorts and a white shirt, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, blue like the book of nights.

The thief has laid a towel on the sand, close to a cluster of abandoned parasols and lounge chairs. They sit together and watch the slow descent of the sun into the sea.

‘I used to come here,’ Matjek says. ‘You know, before.’

‘I know. I took it from your memories,’ the thief says.

And suddenly, the empty beach is full of Saturday afternoons. Matjek and his father would go to the tech bazaars first, spread the loot on the sand, test little swimming drones in the waves, or just sit and watch the ferries and jetskis. But even with the soft sand between his toes, the smell of sun and sweat and salt on his skin, and the red curve of the rocks at the other end of the beach, it does not feel quite right, not entirely his.

‘You mean you stole it,’ Matjek says.

‘You didn’t seem to need it. Besides, I hoped you’d like it.’

‘It’s okay, I suppose,’ Matjek says. ‘Some details are wrong.’

‘Blame your memory, not me,’ the thief says.

That bothers Matjek. ‘You look different, too,’ he says, just to say something else.

‘It helps with not getting caught,’ the thief says. He takes off his sunglasses and puts them in his breast pocket. He does look a little different, somehow, although Matjek could swear the heavy eyelids and the eyebrows and the little twist in the corner of his mouth are the same as before.

‘You never told me how they caught you,’ Matjek says. ‘Just about the prison, and how Mieli got you out. And how she took you to Mars, to look for your memories. So you could steal something for her boss, and then she would let you go.’

‘And then?’ The thief smiles, like he sometimes does, as if at some joke only he knows.

‘You found the memories. But there was another you who tried to take them. So you trapped him in a prison, and only got out with a box with a god in it. And a memory that said that you needed to go to Earth.’

‘You do have a good memory.’

A sudden current of anger rushes through Matjek’s temples.

‘Don’t make fun of me. I don’t like it when people make fun of me. And you are not even people, just something I made up.’

‘I thought you went to school. Don’t they teach you about the importance of made-up things?’

Matjek snorts. ‘Only to chitraguptas. The Great Common Task is about reality. Death is real. The enemy is real.’

‘I see you are a quick learner, too. So what are you doing here?’

Matjek gets up and walks a few angry steps towards the sea. ‘I could tell them about you, you know. The other chens. They would cut you out.’

‘If they caught me,’ the thief says.

Matjek turns around. The thief is looking up at him, squinting his eyes at the sun, head cocked to one side, grinning.

‘Tell me about the last time,’ Matjek says.

‘Ask me nicely.’

Matjek is about to tell the thief what he thinks, that he is a figment of Matjek’s imagination and Matjek does not have to ask him anything. But the thief is so full of mirth, like a little Buddha that Matjek’s mother used to have in her garden, that the words die on his lips and he takes a deep breath instead. Slowly, he walks back to the towel and sits down, hugging his knees.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘Tell me about how they caught you the last time. Please.’

‘That’s better,’ the thief says. The sun is barely more than a golden wink in the horizon now, but he still puts his sunglasses on. The sunset spreads out in the sea, like flowing watercolours. ‘Well. It’s a story told against death, like I am, like you are, like we all are. Did anyone ever teach you that?’

Matjek gives him an impatient look. The thief leans back and grins at him.

‘Here’s how it goes,’ he says. ‘On the day the Hunter came for me, I was killing ghost cats from the Schrödinger Box.’

All around them, the dream vir begins to paint the thief’s words with the sunset, sand and sea.