Alif the Unseen (26 page)

As night drew on he began to dream. He imagined the columns of code on his computer screen were instead a tower of white stone, growing up and up as he typed. He adorned the tower with the
climbing jasmine and dusty yellow hibiscus that grew in the garden of the little duplex in Baqara District. He imagined himself at the top of the tower, surveying his domain like a general. At
midnight a golden foot appeared on the edge of his field of vision.

You’ve come back,
said Alif.

I’m back,
said Princess Farukhuaz. The foot retreated beneath a gauzy black robe. He regretted its passing. Farukhuaz knelt next to the desk, or on the white stone of the
parapet—he had lost the ability to distinguish between them. She put one hand on his knee, her slim fingers laden with gold and tipped in red henna. His shivering increased.

You are building a tower,
she said.
Up and up and up, and at the very top I am waiting. All things are possible at the top. All things take whatever form they like. They will call
you a transgressor but I will call you free.

Yes,
said Alif,
that’s what I want
.

You’re very close,
said Farukhuaz.

He accessed the State mainframe almost without thinking. The firewalls that had been erected to protect their official intranet seemed trivial to him now, as decorative and breachable as the Old
Quarter wall that surrounded their literal fortress, a tourist attraction. Alif felt as though he was looking down at it from a great height. Grids of code spread out within the wall, representing
government e-mail accounts, municipal security, the City budget office. Largest of all, occupying an almost satirical amount of RAM in a well-cooled room full of blade servers somewhere, was the
intelligence bureau.

Alif was bewildered. For years he had written off his own bravado; he and Abdullah and NewQuarter01 and all the rest were, at the end of the day, hacks, not revolutionaries. As much as he hated
State, the idea of physical confrontation made him ill. All his efforts had been the product of fear, an anonymous finger in the face of men he would never have to confront face-to-face. He had
always assumed State crushed people like him because it could, not because it saw them as a real threat. The vast, energy-leeching intelligence grid told him otherwise. This was a government
terrified of its own people.

The Hand lurked there, a scavenging mathematical mass, unleashing worms in their millions upon the digital City. Alif recognized the payload they carried. Tin Sari was bundled in their guts,
ready to be injected into dissident hard drives like parasitical DNA.

Alif took a moment to marvel at the craftsmanship that had gone into creating the Hand. To call it a carnivore system was insufficient—one might as well call the pyramids a collection of
headstones. It functioned out of a single, central ISP. The usual packet-sniffing protocols had been replaced with something much more dynamic: software that could learn and adapt to the usage
patterns of each individual target, eliminating the false alarms that often occurred when search terms were used with a negative bias. The mark of a single personality was clear throughout its
design: the man who had programmed it was inventive, surgical, with a mind that melded orthodoxy and innovation. That he understood the metaphorical capacity of machines was obvious; he had
intuitively incorporated some of the basic elements Alif was using to build his tower.

That’s how he broke into my machine,
said Alif.
He was speaking a language none of my firewalls understood. He was speaking a language I myself did not understand, not
then
.

Yes,
said Farukhuaz,
but you have something he does not. Something he covets
.

I have the
Alf Yeom.

You have me.

Alif looked down into the digital plain below him. It was easier to strike here, from above; the binary world was still flat. He stood apart from it, ears ringing with the music of the spheres.
The tower churned beneath him.

Unleash it,
said Farukhuaz.
Destroy it all.

Alif typed in a series of execution commands. Immediately the plain began to glow with activity. Alarm after alarm was tripped as antimalware programs rushed in to contain the damage, attempting
to shut down noncritical functions to block Alif’s progress, creating a kind of burn perimeter between him and State’s most sensitive code blocks. He laughed; Farukhuaz laughed. It was
so easy now. He was above. The perimeter was a smudged circle beneath him, a child’s pencil drawing on a piece of paper, devoid of any depth. He sent himself into the heart of the State
intranet.

The Hand roused. It lumbered to its feet, reeking of ionized air and dry metallic bones, revealing a level of functionality Alif had not detected. He reeled backward, recalibrating. Breaching
the confines of the State intranet, the Hand began to attack the base of Alif’s tower, slicing away layers of code through a mirroring protocol of a kind Alif had never seen before.

Break him,
whispered Farukhuaz.

I don’t know how!
Alif felt a swell of panic as his creation began to shudder. Desperate, he began an elaborate code-switching operation, changing the state of the data the Hand
was attacking faster than it could attack. The shuddering lessened. Alif steadied his breathing. The panic in his chest, born of adrenaline with nowhere to go, turned swiftly to a sulfuric,
thwarted rage. The Hand had taken his love, his freedom, his name; yet those things mattered less to him now than destroying the man who had taken them. They were an acceptable sacrifice.

Alif turned on the electronic beast. It had weak points. There was no system that did not. His creation altered itself and its methods until it found them—errors that Alif now recognized
not as computational limits but as failures of imagination. His creation was better, higher, operating in a realm of near-consciousness, unbound by dualities. The tower rose. It spread its roots
into the guts of the Hand itself, injecting the beast’s most basic infrastructure with multivalent statements it could not process. The Hand fell back with a silicon scream, retreating behind
the burn line of the intranet.

Elated, Alif turned to pursue it, but found the entire edifice looked smaller now—alarmingly small. The height made him giddy. Farukhuaz’s arms were around his back, her veiled head
resting on his shoulder. She coaxed him in words he only half-heard, but he couldn’t breathe; the altitude, her arms, the lack of oxygen in this electrified stratosphere, everything pressed
down on him at once. He began to see spots of light. He shook his head to clear them, but instead they coalesced into something that spanned the horizon, arcing upward toward an improbable
nexus—not a face, not eyes and ears and a mouth, but a bright mass unnervingly akin to all those things.

Alif was pierced by a memory: he floated in a skin-bound pool, naked, curled upon himself. His mind was sluggish, as if unformed; he could not distinguish between his body and the saline world
around him. Suddenly the pool was lit from all sides by this very object, this nonface: time had begun then, and he had known himself to be alive.

The nexus grew brighter. Alif cowered before it, overcome by an emotion he could not identify.

Where are you going?
it asked.

Alif couldn’t find his voice. He had made a grievous error. The code was unstable. As he traveled dizzily upward, no longer certain of his control over what he had created, he realized
that in his zeal for innovation he had sacrificed the integrity of his knowledge. The base of the tower was blurring as data failed to cleanly replicate itself, leaving uncertainties, gaps in its
theoretical DNA. The tower could not hold long. He was approaching some kind of ceiling, a point at which the super-adaptable nature of his coding scheme would no longer compensate for its inherent
instability. If you told knowledge it could be anything it wanted, there was a risk it would degenerate into nothing at all.

You tricked me,
said Alif to Farukhuaz, trembling. Farukhuaz didn’t respond, but tilted her head to the sound of the tiny bells that shivered in her veil. She was a cipher. Alif
fought for something real, something to make him remember the earth that looked so tremulously small below him. He tried thinking of Intisar. But Intisar, too, had become an ashen idol. He saw his
own life polluted with her ambivalence, first about their uncertain marriage, then about this uncertain book, the purpose of both clouded by pointless secrecy.

He had mistaken that secrecy for something elite, evidence that he had been initiated into a greater truth than the unseeing people around him could understand. At this altitude his
self-importance seemed tawdry. He did not hide because he was better, he hid because he was afraid. It was not Intisar’s fault—it had begun with his name, the name behind which he had
concealed himself, a single line seemingly as straight and impregnable as the tower rushing skyward around him. The name without which he would never have had the courage to approach her. Yet he
blamed Intisar nonetheless.

It occurred to him that he might not love her.

The nexus was drawing nearer. The light it emitted penetrated Alif’s skull even when his eyes were closed, and he wailed, overtaken by fresh panic.

Where are you going?
the nexus repeated.

The tower began to crack.

* * *

Alif heard the door to the sheikh’s office crash open. There was a smell in the air like burning flesh. He gasped, wrenching away from the keyboard: it glowed hot and
blisters were already forming on his fingertips. The computer monitor was a molten heap, revealing mechanical guts that crackled with a bluish static charge. Pain overcame the protective veneer of
adrenaline. Alif moaned, balling himself around his injured hands. There were voices in the doorway. The smell of burned skin was replaced by that of sweat, fur, and blood; a dark-pelted shape, now
jackal-like, now human, limped toward the desk chair and regarded Alif at eye level.

“You’ve made quite a mess, younger brother,” it rasped. Fluid trickled from one side of its mouth.

Alif turned sideways in the chair and buried his face in the furred shoulder closest to him.

“I’ve screwed up so badly,” he whispered. “Dina was right—the sheikh was right—you were right—”

“I usually am.” A cough vibrated through the chest beneath Alif’s cheek.

Alif looked up. “You’re hurt!”

Vikram was favoring one limb, which ended in a paw, or hand, that bent inward at a sickly angle. Blood streaked his coat.

“There are a lot of them now,” he said, “and they’re on their way inside.”

Sheikh Bilal appeared behind Vikram’s looming shoulder, with the convert and Dina close behind. Alif instinctively reached for Dina; she stopped short of touching his hand, but let her
fingertips linger in the air above it.

“God save us! What on earth has happened in here?” Sheikh Bilal surveyed the simmering wreckage on his desk. “Did you light my computer on
fire
?”

“Hellfire,” said Vikram, with a hissing laugh that ended in another cough. “The boy has been dabbling in some very naughty things. That’s sulfur you’re
smelling.” He cackled at his own joke.

“There’s no time for idle talk. We’ve got to get the women out. God knows what might happen to them if they’re arrested.”

“I’m an American citizen,” said the convert in a voice that shook. “I’ll show them my passport—they can’t interrogate me without someone from the
embassy present—”

Alif did not take his eyes from Dina. The sight of her, concealed though she was behind yards of black, drained some of the fear from his chest. She looked at him steadily, the green solar flares
around her pupils bright and tearless.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he told her.

“You most certainly will not, because you are going to turn yourself in,” said the sheikh. “You will explain to the authorities that these girls were coerced into aiding you
and have had no part in whatever schemes you are involved with.”

Alif uncurled his hands, wincing. “Where are they now?” he asked.

“They’ve gotten through the outer doors,” said Sheikh Bilal. “I barred the back entrance of the
musala
to buy us a little more time. I think, perhaps, if the
girls were hidden in the cellar—”

“What a stupid idea,” said Vikram. “They’ll be discovered within an hour. No, I’ll take them with me.”

“Take us where?” The convert’s question ended in a shriek. Her face was very white.

Vikram sighed. “Into the Empty Quarter,” he said. “Into the country of my people.”

“What are you talking about?
What is he talking about?
”

“Is that safe?” asked Dina quietly. Vikram shook his head.

“It’s said that only holy folk can walk there without going mad,” he said. “And it’s very difficult to get your muddy little bodies through intact. Very
difficult.” He winced. More fluid dripped from the side of his mouth and splashed on Alif’s knee. “But it’s better than what will happen if you stay.”

Alif searched for the origin of the blood on Vikram’s pelt. He thought he saw a red wound between two ribs, opening and closing with each breath like a hideous mouth.

“Are you—well enough to do that?” he asked.

Vikram’s head drooped a little.

“On a good day it would cost me my life. Today it may cost me significantly more.”

“No!” said Dina. “No—”

“Don’t squeak at me, little sister,” said Vikram irritably. “Let me choose my own final deed, so the angels have something impressive to write down on the last page of my
book.”

The voices of men, angry and low, echoed down the corridor from the direction of the
musala
.

“I want five minutes,” said Alif. “Do I get five minutes? With Dina. Alone.”

Vikram hauled himself to his feet.

“You’ll be lucky to get three,” he said, and padded toward the door. Sheikh Bilal ushered the convert out in front of him.