Alif the Unseen (44 page)

“You think these are disgusting? You should see their larger cousins. These might as well be a litter of kittens,” said the Hand. He reached out: the creature nearest him stretched
up its distended neck and caressed his fingers with its cheek.

Alif began to laugh silently.

“Something funny?” The Hand’s voice was sharp.

“No,” said Alif, “it’s not funny at all. It’s just that the Islamists have been saying for years that State is propped up by demonic powers. I never imagined they
might be right.”

The Hand made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat and stood, pacing.

“A pack of crazed, bearded homosexuals, the lot of them. What do they know of demonology? What you see in this room is not dangerous, Alif. I’ll tell you what is. The spirits that
lurk in your bloodstream, poisoning your mind day after day, eroding your will. They breed in the marketplace, sapping you with goods you don’t need and of money you don’t have. God was
right: those are the demons a wise man fears most. And they were well in evidence in this City long before I came along. This place is festering with
shayateen,
yet you despise me for
conjuring up a few helpers as one would call a dog.”

Alif noticed the Hand was perspiring.

“What about those people?” he said, pointing out the window at the turmoil in the square below. “They don’t look possessed to me.”

The Hand gave a short, barking laugh.

“They suffer from another malady, just as you do—the delusion of freedom.”

“Are you going to hurt them?” whispered Dina, speaking up for the first time. The Hand smiled restlessly.

“I don’t have to hurt them. I will set my little friends upon the crowd, and they will hurt themselves. Suspicions will grow, factions will arise, secularist and Islamist will
discover they cannot cooperate, men will decide women are not their comrades. Someone will get bold and pull a knife. And that will be the end.”

Alif swallowed hard, staring out the window at the square below. The crowd had swelled to an astonishing size. There seemed to be more people than street; the broad intersecting avenues of the
maidan
were invisible beneath a crush of human movement. He wondered how many of the demonstrators he knew—how many he had aided, unseen, disguising their digital origins from the
man who sat in front of him. He thought of Egypt and the anonymous friends he had allowed to suffer out of fear for his own skin.

“Never again,” he murmured.

“What’s that?” The Hand narrowed his depthless eyes.

Alif forced himself to look the man steadily in the face.

“Go to hell.”

Flushing red, the Hand took several steps toward Alif. Alif shook, but stood his ground. Fumbling in his pocket, he took out the whistle the goat-horned woman had given him and clenched it in
his fist.

“I beg your pardon?” The Hand’s voice was deadly.

“I said I ’d live to see you fed to the dogs,” said Alif, “and I’m still alive.” He raised the whistle to his lips and blew.

He waited. Nothing happened.

The Hand began to laugh. It was a terrible sound, a mad sound, rising out of his chest like the mindless howl of a jackal.

“Alif, Alif,” he choked out, “put that idiotic thing away. Your friends are not coming.”

Sweat slid between Alif’s arms and legs and down his back.

“What do you mean?” he asked, suddenly timid.

The Hand only laughed harder. He sat back down in NewQuarter’s desk chair, muscles straining in his reddened face.

“What did I tell you back in that filth hole of a cell? I’ve won.” He reached out. One of the twin voids beside him began to twist like a flame in a strong wind. It grew a
vaporous limb and, reaching inside itself, drew out a dusty manuscript bound in blue.

“You’ve lost your bargaining chip. My little friends lifted this today.” The Hand took the book and ran his fingers along its spine.

“Take a closer look,” said Alif, emboldened. “It’s not what you think it is. You’re holding an old but ordinary copy of the
Alf Layla
.”

The Hand tossed the book at Alif’s feet, saying nothing. Alif wiped his palms on his trousers and trembled as he bent to pick it up. The scent hit him before he touched the binding. He
closed his eyes.

It was the
Alf Yeom
.

“Is he dead?” Alif asked in a leaden voice. “The
marid
. Did you kill him for it?”

“Oh, no,” said the Hand, resuming his seat. “I simply bottled him up again. He could be useful at some future juncture. Magnificent creatures, the
marideen,
but stupid
as a bag of bricks. It wasn’t hard. He’s over there in the corner.”

Alif looked: an unassuming two-liter bottle of Mecca Cola sat on the floor next to one of the Hand’s formless sentries. Storm-colored mist curled upon itself inside, sluggish and
sullen.

“And the convert?”

“You mean the pregnant girl? Do you take me for an idiot? If she’d let me I would have delivered her to her embassy in a private car. No one wants unhappy Americans on their hands.
As it was, I left her in the Empty Quarter for the djinn to do with what they will. Though she was rather upset by this turn of events, I have to say. It was she who told me you were expecting
company. Once your little band of heroes saw what I ’d done to the
marid,
they wisely decided to stay home.”

“Cowards,” murmured Dina.

“I disagree. The djinn are rarely cowards—it’s just that they are, as a rule, practical rather than honorable.”

Alif thought of Vikram in his final hours, bleeding to death in the convert’s arms.

“That’s not true,” he said.

The Hand looked annoyed.

“Whether you agree or not is immaterial. What incentive does someone who is unseen have to keep his word? None. We are only honest because we must live in the light of day.”

Alif heard Dina say his given name in a soft voice. For reasons he did not immediately understand, he felt shaken by it, and by the motives she might have had for pronouncing it at that moment.
He glanced back at her, unseen as she herself was behind her black veil, and met her eyes and felt the threads of his life pull taut, revealing at last the modest image he had woven into the
tapestry of the world. He turned back to face the Hand.

“You’re full of shit,” he said calmly. Behind him, NewQuarter made a strangled noise. He ignored it.

“It’s because of people like you that we have to go unseen in order to be honest. You’ve made the truth impossible anywhere but in the dark, behind false names. The only thing
that ever sees the light of day in this City is bullshit. Your bullshit, the emir’s bullshit, State’s bullshit. But that’s over now. All the people you’ve chosen not to see
are out there calling for your blood. And I, and NewQuarter, and all our friends, all the ones you’ve been hunting and kidnapping and shutting up in prison all these years—we’re
going to give it to them.”

The sweat on the Hand’s brow grew more pronounced. He tore off his head cloth with a restless jerk and tossed in on the floor; bareheaded, he looked smaller, his hair an untidy thatch
threaded with gray.

“I thought we were talking about djinn,” he said in a cool voice.

“A djinn is not the only way to be invisible,” said Alif. “There are other ways, equally involuntary.”

“You’re a very cheap philosopher,” sneered the Hand. “Much good may it do you. I have the
Alf Yeom
. I’ve got your
marid
in an empty soda bottle. I
have a battalion of servants no earthly army can touch.”

Alif realized what was missing from the room.

“Where are your guards?” he asked. The Hand gave another barking laugh.

“Are you blind?” He motioned to the voids that stood beside him, the seething mass of dark bodies moving about the room.

“No, your
human
guards. Your State security people. The ones who bashed in my ribs at Al Basheera and starved me in prison.”

The Hand licked his lips.

“I have no need of human guards,” he said.

“The emir’s cut you loose, hasn’t he,” said NewQuarter incredulously. “You screwed up, and he’s decided it’s safer to feed you to the angry crowds than
to defend you.”

Rising again, the Hand pulled at the collar of his robe, which clung gray and damp to his neck. “The emir is an old fool, and his foolishness will cost him his throne. He’s under the
illusion that his people love him and that if he purges his government of a few corrupt officials, everyone will calm down. He doesn’t realize that the people in that square are not going
home.”

He leaned against the windowsill, heedless of the ragged fringe of glass that ringed the empty frame. A red spot blossomed on his shoulder. Alif stared at it in dismay. He had been unprepared
for this, for a Hand unshackled from the regime. Alif knew the bitter, boundless energy that came of having no dignity left to lose—it was what had made the difference between the idle boy
with a computer he had been at fifteen, and the threat he had become a few years later. It was what had made him, in his own way, dangerous. He recognized the rage in the Hand’s opaque eyes,
and was seized with fear.

“What are you going to do,” he asked.

The Hand’s lips parted in a smile.

“Exactly what I planned to do,” he said. “Restore the natural order of things. I built the State’s digital infrastructure—they can’t keep me out. And the
people in that square must be made to know the poison that lies at the heart of all false hopes. They can oust the emir if they like, but they must learn to make do with me. And thanks to
that”—he pointed to the
Alf Yeom
—“this City will be under a metafirewall that will make China’s Golden Shield look like a leaky bucket. The Alifs of this
world will either crawl home or die in a prison cell, as you were intended to do. As you
will
do, in very short order.”

“You’re sick,” whispered NewQuarter. “You’re crazy.”

“And you are a dead man flapping his gums. The people out there want to see princes strung up by their feet. I may start with you.”

The eyeless things grew restive, boiling around the floor and walls on their swollen feet. Alif gnashed his teeth.

“You’re bluffing. You can’t build any firewall. The book will betray you like it betrays everybody. Look at the damage you managed to do to every ISP in the whole damn
City.”

A dark, blank face snapped at his ankle. He bit back a yelp, hoping the Hand had not seen him start.

“That was your sloppy coding,” the Hand said stiffly. “Now that I have the
Alf Yeom,
I will correct your mistakes.”

Alif’s eyes strayed to the manuscript lying on the floor between them. The eyeless creatures avoided it as if by instinct, leaving a circular perimeter around the book as they orbited
their master. The noise from the square had redoubled and seemed now to come from all directions at once, including the floors below. There was the sound of a window shattering, close by.

Alif was possessed by the same impulse that had overtaken him in the
marid’s
courtyard, when he had bolted for the door that led him to Dina: the certain knowledge that most
problems had very simple solutions, if one was willing to make sufficient sacrifice.

“Prove it,” he said. Behind him, Dina took a sharp breath. The Hand looked anxious, as though Alif had erred from the script he was meant to follow.

“What do you mean?” he asked cautiously.

“Pick up the book, open it, and tell me how you would outcode me,” said Alif. He was startled by the evenness of his own voice. NewQuarter grabbed his sleeve. He jerked away
irritably. The Hand raised one eyebrow, glanced down at the book, looked back up at Alif, and licked his lips.

“Very well,” he said, and picked up the
Alf Yeom
between careful fingers. Alif watched as he thumbed through the flaking pages, scanning the text. His face changed, growing
eager, almost manic.

“Yes,” he said. “The frame story, you see—Farukhuaz and the nurse, and this theme of marriage. You noticed, of course, that marriage plays a very small role in the
subsequent stories. Naturally, this is because it refers not to literal marriage but to the union between analog—that’s Farukhuaz—and digital—that’s the nurse. The
necessary blending of rational and irrational, of discrete and algebraic functions. The frame story is the platform, the subsequent stories are individual programs . . .” He dragged the heel
of one hand across his glistening forehead. Wiping it on his robe, he returned to his task, flipping pages three and four at a time, the greed in his eyes a terrible dead light.

“Have you read it through all the way to the end?” he asked.

“No,” Alif admitted. “I jumped around. I stopped after I came across a story that was—it was about someone I knew. I couldn’t go on after that.”

“Your own weakness,” said the Hand with contempt. The twin voids shimmered behind his shoulders like great dark wings. His fingers trembled. The room was silent but for the crisp
sound of paper and the thrum of dissent below. Alif looked nervously over his shoulder, hoping for some unspoken vote of confidence from Dina or NewQuarter. But NewQuarter had bitten his lips raw
and stared at Alif in wordless accusation; Dina was unknowable, her eyes cast down. Alif tasted bile.

He jumped when he heard the Hand cry out.

“Is this some kind of joke?” The book dangled from the Hand’s fingers, open to a chapter heading Alif couldn’t see.

“Joke?” Alif’s fraying nerves made him smile like an idiot. He fought for control of his face. The Hand was pale, jabbing with one finger at a page near the end of the
book.

“‘
The Fall of the Hand, or A Sad Case of Early Retirement,
’” he read. “The final story. Is this your work, you ass-coveting little shit? Is this elaborate
hoax your attempt to drive me mad?”

Alif looked from the book to the Hand and back again.

“My
what
?”

“Read it,” the Hand shrieked, hurling the book at Alif. He caught it awkwardly, crumpling the fragile pages against his chest. Looking down at the title page of the last story, he
read his own name.