The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (12 page)

He sits down next to her, carefully choosing a step below her. He crosses his hands over one knee and leans back. ‘I know. That’s why I’m here. Things are about to get worse.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Matjek Chen has the Kaminari jewel.’

She takes a deep breath.

‘And why are you telling me that?’

‘Why do you think? Because I’m going to steal it.’

She laughs. ‘I would like to see
that
,’ she says. ‘And I suppose you are asking for my help?’

‘Not exactly.’ He takes her left hand in his own. His grip is tight and warm. ‘Joséphine, if I fail, you know where I’ll end up.’ He gestures with his free hand. There is a flower between his thumb and forefinger, suddenly, with colourful, tapering petals.

‘This will help you find me if that happens. If you ever want to, that is.’

She holds it up.
Clever little thief.
It is information encoded in matter, translated by her gogols into vir form. At a molecular level the petals are spiky cathedrals, rows upon rows of them, containing data. It defines a set of modal logic constraints, provable properties for a neural network, like a gogol. The flower is an empty shape of a person, a shadow, waiting to be filled.

‘That’s very romantic, Jean,’ she says. ‘Asking me to be your get out of jail for free card. Are you sure you’d not rather receive a file in a cake?’

‘You were never much of a cook, even less so a baker. And I didn’t imagine for a moment getting out of jail would be
free
.’

She freezes him in the vir’s slowtime for a moment and summons a warmind gogol family to scour the flower for traps. They find nothing. It is only then that she lets time resume and inhales the flower’s scent. It is delicate and sweet, the memory of a summer, with a hint of honey.

‘Jean,’ she says, a sudden tenderness in her chest. ‘This is
Matjek.
You are going to fail, and it sounds like you know it. Why are you doing this? You were happy on Mars, with the little people.’

‘I didn’t realise you cared.’

‘I don’t. I just thought I’d do the System a favour by keeping an eye on you.’

He looks down.

‘I talked to a woman of the Kaminari once,’ he says, ‘before the Spike. Don’t give me such a look, it wasn’t like that, we were just friends. But one night on Ganymede, we got philosophical. The Universe is a game, she said. It makes us into players. We can’t see the moves that are not allowed. Like in chess. There is perfect freedom in the black and white, except that the rules make invisible walls. Two squares forward, one left. One left, whole row forward and backward, one right. That’s all you see.

‘There is a reason for it, she said. Algorithmic complexity. The Universe is a quantum computer, and over time, it is simply more likely that structure comes out of it than noise. That means rules, patterns. That means a game. But spend long enough poking at it, and you start to see the game engine, the labyrinth of the quantum circuit, wires looping around each other, forwards and backwards.’

‘It sounds like the kind of thing the zoku like to say,’ Joséphine says disdainfully.

The thief sighs. ‘Perhaps. After that, she started talking about this ancient legend they have, about a creature called the Sleeper with a billion hit points, and after it was finally killed by a coalition of a thousand guilds, it dropped a small rusty dagger.

‘But there is something to it. I’m tired of games. Mars was not enough. And you were right, I made a mess of it. I need something new, something different.’

‘And you think the jewel will give you that?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m going to try.’

‘I know you, Jean, better than anyone. You will never stop. There will always be something else for you to steal.’

He gives her that fake-weary look. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I think one more thing would be enough. Maybe it always was.’ He stands up. ‘Goodbye, Joséphine. If we meet again, it will be your choice.’

‘Did I give you my permission to leave?’ she says, hardening her voice.

‘Oh, I’m not leaving. I would never have come here if I expected to
leave.
This is a new branch of me that I created just for you. That self-destruct loop of yours? I stole it a long time ago.’

‘Jean—’ She reaches for the firmanent, for his mindshell, but it is already too late.

‘You know, it’s good practice for what is to come. Even if you are branching before jumping into the nothing, you have to have the resolve to do it yourself. Take this as a compliment, Joséphine: if I had come here first, it would have been hard to find the courage. Take care of yourself. It’s been fun.’

He closes his eyes. He twitches once. The mindshell stands still, chest rising and falling, but Joséphine knows that the gogol inside is gone.

She sits on the stairs for a long time, watching the still form of the thief, standing there with a peaceful expression on his face. She turns the flower in her hands. Finally she stands up and touches her Jean’s face gently with her ring hand.

Then she starts thinking about how to best betray him to Matjek Chen.

7

MIELI AND THE LIQUORICE-ZOKU

Mieli is singing to her new garden when the quantum spam rain starts.

She sits in the shade of a young pumptree and hums a wordless hum, softly varying in pitch and frequency. It tells the smartcoral in the garden’s soil to grow thin tendrils to hold the soft soil in place, packing it firmer than the gentle gravity of the Farreach Plate can. The humid air is warm and full of the wet rhubarb smell of pumptree breath. The shrill screams of young anansi spiders mingle with Mieli’s song. They dart amongst the tree branches, weaving diamond threads between them. The horizon curves up like the fingers of a cupped hand. Far above is the sky of ice, faintly transparent, and beyond it, the sisterspheres.

Only some of it is real, for certain values of
real.
Like almost all inhabitants of Supra City, she is a member of the Huizinga-zoku now, the zoku of Circles. Inside her own Circle, she is free to define her own realities and their laws as she wishes. She cringes at the memory of fumbling with Circle-crafting, turning her hex first into a cartoon world without a third dimension, then into a grey fog where only sounds had physical form.

Reluctantly, at Zinda’s suggestion, she turned her longing for Oort into a wish and wove it into the volition of the zoku through her Huizinga jewel. In an instant, several thousand Huizinga members qupted her complete Oortian Circle and Realm spimes, ranging from megaproject construction game Realms to a very detailed Narrativist Circle exploring gender dynamics in an Oortian
koto.
Mieli found the last one promising, until she realised it only allowed communication through song and wing movements, and completely excluded all sexual activity. But there was enough to help her create a patchwork reality that matched her memories.

Now, she could believe she is in Oort. Almost.

The song comes out of her easily, and she can feel the movement in the earth beneath her. She has already planted some cloudberries. Vecbushes and maybe even a small phoenixwood grove will follow. She breathes in the scent of the garden. It almost fills the hollow space in her chest.

A part of her dreads finishing the song. After singing to living things, it will be time to sing to the dead. She has been working on a song for
Perhonen
for weeks. But she can only do it in bits and pieces, when the grief is hiding beneath a blanket of sunlight and comfort. In her dealings with her zokus, she uses her metacortex heavily, to filter her thoughts and emotions. It always leaves her feeling like a butterfly pressed between two glass plates, thin and lifeless. But she refuses to touch her sorrow, and so it remains a wild thorny plant in the ordered garden of her mind.

She mistakes the first falling jewel for a waterdrop from the anansi webs. But more follow: slowly at first, little more than flashes of sunlight that vanish into the grass, then as a relentless glass hail downpour that beats down on the pumptree leaves with a sound like a whispering machine gun. A tiny jewel stings her cheek. An offer to join a zoku dedicated to constructing a perfect life-sized replica of an ancient imaginary starship from notchcubes on the surface of Rhea flashes through her brain, full of shrill enthusiasm. She brushes it aside and presses herself against the pulsating trunk of the pumptree.

Bigger jewels follow, bouncing off the anansi webs and tearing the creatures down from their perches. They make small craters in her soil and completely decimate the cloudberry patch. Mieli fumbles for her link to the Plate zoku that takes care of all the infrastructure needs, and qupts a frantic request for a q-dot umbrella over her garden.
Conflict with your Circle’s Schroeder locks,
comes back the reply. Mieli groans. Clearly, some subtle setting in her Circle excludes non-Oortian technology.

She runs into the rain and opens her wings in an attempt to shield even a few of the delicate berries from the destruction. It is like standing beneath a shower of hot stones. Lightning flashes of entanglement requests bombard her mind to the rhythm of the blows.
Time machine megaproject! Solve the Fermi Paradox! Resurrect Saint McGonigal to save us all!

‘
Perkele!
’ she screams and pushes a request to the Huizinga-zoku through the mad thunder of the mind spam. In a flash of silver, her Circle goes down. The ice sky disappears. The horizon lurches from the familiar bowl-shape of a
koto
into the endless gentle curve of Saturn, crisscrossed by the immense blue-and-green arcs of the Strips and the wispy mass stream pillars that hold them up. The vertigo-inducing stairway structure of the Farreach Plate reveals itself around her little hex, the immense set of stream-supported ascending steps, each with slightly lower gravity than the one below, reaching up nearly two thousand klicks from the one-G level near the ochre van Gogh brushstrokes of the giant planet below.

And, finally, with a pop and a faint ozone smell, a q-dot dome shimmers into being. A few thin streams of tiny jewels pour down to the ground from the hollows of the pumptrees and cupped leaves with a faint tinkle, and then the garden is silent.

Mieli stares at the devastation. Her wings and head hurt. The jewels crunch beneath her feet. Everything green is covered in a layer of multicoloured glitter. With a sigh, she summons a swarm of utility fog botlets from the Plate zoku to clean things up. This time, they materialise instantly: the air blurs in a heat haze, and the spam jewels start floating away in streams and spirals. She briefly considers telling them to hide the damage and make the garden look the way it was, but decides against it. Karhu always told her to keep reminders of her mistakes visible.

Mieli?
comes a qupt. It’s Zinda: the message comes with a mixture of sensory impressions, smell of incense, a glimpse of the ring-bisected evening sky from the Great Game girl’s balcony, and a palpable sense of concern.
Are you all right?

I’m fine,
Mieli answers, restricting her reply to a curt verbal message and nothing else.
What do you want?

Just checking up on you! I got a volition flash that you needed help with something. We are entangled now, you know.
She pauses.
Oh dear. What a terrible mess. I knew we should not have set you up on Farreach: the spam zoku must think that the newly joined and expats are easy targets, and the Plate zoku is a bit too loose to sort them out. Are you sure you don’t want a Realm?

Mieli swears silently. Clearly, she has to guard her thoughts even more carefully. Something of her volition must have slipped through to the Great Game jewel without her realising it – and she is still clumsy enough with the quptlink to allow Zinda to see what she is seeing.

Yes. I’m sure.

How tacky! But I understand. A lot of aegon-zokus feel that way, that matter is special. Just let me know if there is anything I can do. Oh, and if it’s more matter you are after, can I interest you in a dinner?

Mieli sighs. To all appearances, Zinda has been sincere in her attempts to help Mieli settle in. When Mieli accepted the Great Game jewel, she expected to be sent to some strange Realm where she would be rewarded or punished for answering questions about Sobornost. Instead, Zinda arranged her to join the Loom-zoku as a part of her cover identity – a zoku devoted to the intersection of music and matter, translating sound into physical shapes, who count several expatriate Oortians amongst their members. Conveniently, the Loomers devote a lot of time to individual projects, and the volition flashes tend to be requests for brief musings about what sort of Universe would arise from thread-theoretic particle states if you converted a symphony into the Fourier components of creation-annihilation operators. For the last two weeks, she has mostly been left to her own devices.

No thanks.

I’m not a bad cook, I swear!

Maybe another time.

Suit yourself. Remember to eat, though. You’ll need your strength soon.

Why is that?
Mieli qupts.

Wait and see!
A wink comes down the quptlink, the feeling of Zinda’s eyelid moving. It makes Mieli wince, and then the presence of the zoku girl is gone.

Mieli sighs. What is left of the garden has been cleared, revealing mounds of soil, battered pumptrees and a few angry anansi peeking out of the holes in the ground.
At least it will keep me busy for a while.

She kicks at the loose dirt. She is wasting time. Perhaps she
should
have accepted Zinda’s dinner invitation, to get closer to her, to find out more about the Great Game and the Kaminari jewel. Pretending to be someone she is not, infiltration – that was always the thief’s domain, not hers.

She feels grimy and dirty from the rain, and finds herself desperately missing a sauna. Perhaps she should ask the Plate-zoku to make one, somewhere in the microgravity levels, higher up.