The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (11 page)

But perhaps the boy has gotten distracted.

‘Elder, is this really necessary?’ Chekhova says. ‘I have better things to do than to act as a tour guide—’

I start considering options to break the Circle for a second, but with the internal security systems of the Arsenal, I don’t dare risk it. To get here, we had to pass through a Realmgate that took us apart, scanned us at the atomic level for anything potentially dangerous. Of course, they would not do that to valuable antique items, risk damaging their precious quantum information contents: and that’s precisely what my plan relied upon.

I interrupt her. ‘It’s interesting to see so many ships here. I thought you were called the
Gun
Club?’

‘It’s not so different! Like your own Wang bullet! Ships are just guns pointed away from the enemy! The Robur and Nemo Societies find inspiration there.’ Barbicane strokes his whiskers. ‘We are often misunderstood! We don’t build things to destroy, but to test ourselves! Cannon shell against armour, vessel versus space – same thing!’

There is thunder in the distance.

Both Barbicane and Chekhova look up. I need to buy a few more seconds. I decide to go for the philosophical option.

‘So, you don’t have any problems with others using them for the purposes of war—’ I begin.

And then things start blowing up.

A rapid cascade of booming explosions makes the Arsenal feel like the inside of a drum. Missiles whoosh past us. Shells and bullets ricochet from the pseudomatter walls below. In the chamber behind us, rifles and cannons go off one after another like exploding domino pieces. The q-dot shell around us is like a night sky with blinking stars as it becomes adamantine under the constant fire from conventional weapons. The noise becomes so loud the bubble has to start filtering it out.

Then one of the holeships starts moving, slowly. Its linear accelerator stem swings around, back and forth, like the weapon of a drunkard.

The bubble zips us out of the way. Not that it will make much of a difference if the holeship’s weapon goes off. A single shot from one could take out the whole moon.

Barbicane and Chekhova break the Circle. She explodes into a bright constellation of foglets and jewels; he becomes a disembodied head with a stovepipe hat in the eye of a storm of diamond orbs.
To hell with it.
I speed up and hurl a qupt at Matjek.

What the hell are you doing?

There is an apologetic microsecond pause.

I got access to
all
of them
, comes a response.
I just wanted to play.

Well, stop that right now and come and get me!
The thought has more anger than I intended. The response is hot with tears.

Okay,
he says in a small voice.
I’m sorry.

Never mind. Just come and—

Invisible limbs seize me. I find myself suspended in the air between them by foglet tendrils, spread-eagled. Somewhere, far away, the Colonel Sparmiento identity pops like a soap bubble. White fire of the explosions in the distance makes the two trueformed zoku members look literally incandescent.

Wait,
I qupt at Matjek.
Don’t stop. Keep them popping. But stay away from the holeships!

Barbicane’s eyes are bulging with rage.

‘
You
,’ he says.

‘Hello, Barbicane,’ I gasp. ‘It’s been a long time.’ I try to incline my head towards Chekhova, but I can’t move. ‘Jean le Flambeur, at your service.’

‘You are causing irreparable damage,’ Barbicane thunders. ‘Get out of our gunscape now!’

Another cascade goes off in another chamber further down. I’m pretty sure there is a nuke or two this time. Debris bounces off the skin of the nearest holeship. I squeeze my eyes shut, but it doesn’t help much: a red sun shines through my eyelids, and a metal brush of second-degree burns caresses my skin.

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that. Not until I have what I came for. But open the Arsenal exit and I’ll see what I can do.’

‘It’s the
Leblanc
you want, isn’t it? Why didn’t you just
ask
?’

‘This is way more fun. Besides, I never trusted you. What’s it going to be?’ Something black and sleek is moving in the distance.
Come on, boy. I don’t have all day.

‘No deal.’

‘Suit yourself.’ The holeship turret is still moving, slowly but inexorably. It collides with a silvery seashell – a Protocol War metacloak generator, I now pick up from the Arsenal’s chaotic spimescape – and shatters it. ‘Oh my. That
did
look rather valuable.’

It’s not enough. They will detect Matjek any second. I need something else, something that will sting even outside the Circle.

Barbicane has been subtly different from the man I remember, but zoku Elders do not change. Not unless their q-self changes, unless they join a new zoku.
Could it be?

It’s worth a try.

‘Something you may wish to consider, Miss Chekhova,’ I say. ‘Your Elder is working for the Great Game Zoku.’

Chekhova stares at Barbicane. A torrent of communication passes between them, blurring the spimescape. Her trueform features are a mask of shock and rage.

My low-rent metacortex picks up only a few fragments of the quptstorm between them, and fails to translate it. But I can imagine what they are saying.

‘I would never have believed it, but it makes perfect sense.’

‘He is bluffing! Can’t you see? He will say anything!’

‘
This
is why you blocked the ekpyrotic test, you bastard, it’s why—’

There is a blinding flash. My synthbio body is jarred to the core.
Matjek fired a Hawking shell, it’s all over now
, I have time to think. But my continuing consciousness implies that our lives have not been ended by a dying black hole.

My vision clears, and I see Barbicane coalesce back into his steampunk form, except that this time there is a silver egg-like q-gun floating next to his head. I fall onto the bubble bottom gently. The air is thick with inert utility foglets and scattered zoku jewels. Chekhova is gone.

‘Now look at what you made me do,’ Barbicane says. ‘Or rather, what I made
you do
! That’s the official version!’

‘Not getting softer in your old age, Barbicane? You used to have a spark of anarchy. Remember the sunlifter job? You were quite happy to break the rules then. That’s why I asked your zoku to make my ships.’

‘Just playing a different game now, Jean! As should you.’

‘Oh, I’m not
playing.
Not this time.’

‘Jean, don’t be a fool! Work with us! We know you were on Earth. We need intel. The Sobornost is going mad! This is the best offer you’re going to get!’

I shake my head.

‘I don’t work for cops, even ones that wear stovepipe hats,’ I say. ‘And by the way,
my
best offer is this: I leave now – with my ship – or we’ll get to see what Iapetus looks like with a black hole in the middle. Quite a lot like Mars, I would imagine. But then, you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’

Barbicane hesitates. I can feel the invisible scan beam of the q-gun probing my forehead. I grit my teeth and try not to blink. It’s hard when a light show of lasers, particle beams and kinetic warheads turns the chamber above into a red-and-white spiderweb.

‘Get the hell out of here!’ he growls, finally.

In the spimescape, I see the great gateway of the Arsenal irising open.

You can stop now,
I tell Matjek.

Do I have to?

Yes. We are going to talk about this later, young man.

The
Leblanc
rises beneath us. I can feel its cool non-mind touch my own through my quptlink with Matjek. It is a sleek, midnight blue thing, not large, barely ten metres long, a cross between a Rolls Royce Silver Phantom and a spaceship. The glare of its Hawking drive pierces the chaos of the Arsenal.

‘You are making a mistake, Jean,’ Barbicane says. ‘The Oortian
joined
us. She is a member of the Great Game now, in the embrace of our volition cone. She told us everything.’

Shit.

‘We know you are not what you used to be. A challenge for a small zoku, nothing more. We
will
catch you!’

‘You are welcome to try,’ I say. ‘As for the Oortian, you can keep her.’ I stare at him. ‘Next time we meet, I will take more than just toys.’

Then I jump through the q-dot bubble and drift slowly downwards, towards the ship.

We’ll be ready
, Barbicane mouths silently.

Another gun cascade goes off around us as a fiery goodbye, and then the blue cold skin of the
Leblanc
swallows me.

Interlude

THE GODDESS AND THE FLOWER

Joséphine Pellegrini takes a step, then another. Her legs ache. The sand is wet and clings to her feet.

The beach is dark. The spiderweb of the System map in the sky has faded into a ghostly glow. Even the sea is silent. The demiurges are busy, listening to her, making the partial. The gogol construct is taking shape next to her as she walks, a hollow ghost, a sand-woman, made of fine grains swirling in the air. It matches its steps to hers, waiting to be filled with thought and purpose.

Joséphine gives it memories. They do not belong to her: they are the Prime’s, perfect like diamonds, preserved across centuries. They were given to her by her copymother, to make her into what she is. She holds each one tight as they pass through her and into the partial’s eager brain.

The time of her branching, in her labyrinth temple in the shadow of Kunapipi Mons, when her Jean came to her, for the last time.

She remembers being the Prime, but only in fragments.
Walking through the gardens of the Engineer-of-Souls, helping
him shepherd thought-swarms. Fighting a war against herself in the Deep Time, against a branch who wanted to take the entire guberniya into deep Dyson sleep, to leave behind these troubles and wake up to see Andromeda Galaxy fill the sky.
Like her labyrinth, the thoughts are mere shadows of something greater and high-dimensional that she cannot understand with a mind confined to the dream-vir.

On the other hand, she remembers very well how she felt when the thief made his entrance.

One moment he is not there, and then he is, warming his hands in the blaze of her singularity, in the cylindrical room at the heart of the labyrinth. A cheap trick, as one of her gogols quickly determines: a carefully placed series of space-time cloaks, hiding his approach through the labyrinth even from her eyes.

He wears flesh and heavy blue armour of the zoku, not quite matter, not quite light, and a halo of quantum jewels to go with it. She hopes that they are not for her. He has given her jewels aplenty already, all of them equally disappointing.

He is so much smaller than she is. She is in the rock and the atmosphere and in the computronium beneath the crust of the planet and in the thread-modes of the event horizon of the black hole. He is a mess of carbon atoms and entanglements and q-dots and water, barely larger than the least of her gogols.

And yet—

She creates an image of herself out of modulated Hawking radiation and steps out of the glow of the black hole to meet him. Her gogols show her his point of view: a towering figure of blue fire, wearing a necklace of stars. He flinches, and she smiles. She keeps the intensity of her form just below what his q-stone suit can handle, but not by much.

‘Back already?’ she asks, in a voice made of gamma rays. Her words incinerate his armour’s surface layer. ‘It has only been a century or two. Did you grow tired of Mars so quickly?’

He shields his face with a raised hand. ‘Mars was … educational,’ he says. ‘Could you stop glowing, please? It hurts my eyes.’

‘As you wish.’

It only takes a thought to vaporise him and to pour him into a mindshell in her vir. Her gogols do not know what to do with the zoku jewels, so she just leaves them scattered on the floor of the singularity chamber like discarded toys.

They stand together in her heart-vir, next to a murmuring fountain, beneath a starry sky. She, too, is embodied now, in her favourite dress, in the most regal mindshell from her Library she can find. He is simply a translation of the flesh he came in, a little older than she remembers, in form-fitting dark blue. He massages the bridge of his nose.

‘That’s better,’ he says.

‘Is it? Were you not happy with that particular self? Your Raymonde seemed to like it. Poor girl. She must miss you so.’ She adjusts her ring. ‘Perhaps I should bring her here, too, along with the rest of Mars.’

‘Joséphine—’

‘Do you think you can play with the little people, and then crawl back to me, with no consequences? Other yous have done the same. What do you think I did to
them
?’

‘Something involving poetic justice, I expect.’ He spreads his hands. ‘I was told that this is where you come to pray to the goddess. So I did.’

‘What do you want?’

‘As unlikely as it may seem to you, I am here on business.’

‘I see. And why should I not have my gogols consume you, here and now, and finally find out if there is anything of use in that mind of yours?’

‘Don’t offend me by thinking I haven’t taken precautions,’ he says, tapping one temple. ‘Touch me, and whatever I have to trade will all burn. Touch me
wrong
, that is.’ He grins.

‘Do not test my patience, Jean.’

‘I don’t have to test it.’

‘Then you know you should make it quick.’

‘Here, where we have all the time in the world? Where each minute takes less than a baseline picosecond? When we haven’t seen each other – well, I haven’t seen
you
– for nearly two hundred years? You have gotten even more impatient in your old age.’

She sighs and sits down on the fountain stairs.

‘Perhaps I have,’ she says. ‘It tends to happen when you walk a tightrope between Founder sisters and brothers who want to stab you in the back and a fanatic who wants to conquer death, all the while making sure that they don’t tear the System apart in another ridiculous war. It’s not like designing buildings and having affairs on Mars, Jean.’