The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (2 page)

He folds his arms across his chest imperiously. ‘No. I want to know if there is a different ending. I don’t like it.’

I roll my eyes.

‘Usually, there is only one ending, Matjek. Why don’t you find another book to read if you didn’t like that one?’

I really don’t want to have this conversation right now. My minions – a swarm of open-source cognitive agents distantly descended from rats and nematode worms – are scouring the System public spimescapes for public data on Earth’s destruction. There is a steady stream of qupts in my head, cold raindrops of information from the storm of ships beyond our ancient vessel’s walls.

And each of them is like the stroke of a clock, counting down time that Mieli has left.

*

A lifestream from a Ceresian vacuumhawk.
A grainy feed recorded by photosensitive bacterial film on the solar sail wings of a fragile non-sentient space organism that was following a female of its species past Earth. Not nearly detailed enough.
Next.

A from a Sagan-Zoku synthetic aperture array on Ganymede, public feed.

My heart jumps.
Not bad.
A hyperspectral dataset from a few days ago flashes past my eyes, like flying through aurora borealis, multicoloured sheets of light that show both Earth’s surface and the surrounding space in intricate detail. The Dragons are dark gashes in every layer, but I don’t care about them. With a thought, I zoom into the L2 Lagrange point and the cloud of technological debris where
Perhonen
should be.
Come on.

‘But I want to know,’ says a distant, insistent voice. ‘Who was the Emperor? What was beyond the sea? Why was Aslan no longer a lion?’

The spime view is detailed enough to show the space-time trail and history of every synthbio fragment and dead nanosat in that little Sargasso Sea of space – except that Mieli’s ship
Perhonen
is supposed to be there, too, and it isn’t. I swear under my breath.

‘You said a bad word!’ Somewhere far away, Matjek is tugging at my sleeve.

It is frustrating. All the public data I can find is subtly corrupt, even data with supposedly unforgeable quantum watermarks from zoku sensors. It makes no sense, unless there is a major spoofing operation going on. It makes me wonder if it’s already too late.

Where the hell is she?

I rub my eyes, send the minions to scour the ad hoc networks of the Highway to see if anyone else has noticed the phenomenon. Then I let their qupts fade into distant background noise. Suddenly, I miss
Perhonen’
s intel gogols very badly, although not as much as I miss the ship itself.

‘Why did they have to look at his face in the end?’

In a situation like this, it would know exactly what to say.

‘Look, Matjek. I am very, very busy now. I have to work.’

‘I can help you. I am good at working.’

‘It’s grown-up stuff,’ I say carefully. ‘I think you would find it boring.’

He does not look impressed.

‘That’s what Mum always says but once I went with her to her work, and it was fun. I crashed a quantum derivatives market.’

‘My work is not nearly as exciting as your mum’s.’ I know it’s a mistake the moment I say it.

‘I don’t believe you. I want to try!’ He reaches for my zoku jewel. I hold it up, spin it in my fingers and make it disappear.

‘Matjek, it is rude to take other people’s toys without asking permission. Do you remember what I told you? What are we doing here?’

He looks at the floor.

‘We are saving Mieli,’ he mutters.

‘That’s right. The nice lady with wings who came to visit you. That’s why I came back to you. I needed your help. That’s why we are in the
Wardrobe.
I let you name her, didn’t I?’

He nods.

‘And who are we saving Mieli from?’

‘Everybody,’ Matjek says.

Look after her. For me. Promise, Perhonen
said.

When a Sobornost Hunter attacked us, the ship tried to save Mieli by shooting her into space. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The problem is that Mieli served the Sobornost for two decades and carries a Founder gogol in her head. There are too many forces in the System that want access to that kind of information, especially now. For example, the Great Game Zoku, the zoku intelligence arm. They might be
nice
about it, but when they find her, they are going to peel her mind open like an orange. The pellegrinis, the vasilevs, the hsien-kus or the chens will be less polite. Let alone the mercenary company she infiltrated and betrayed on Earth.

We have to find her, before someone else does. And several baseline days have already passed.

Even if I knew where she was, getting to her would not be easy. Our good ship, the
Wardrobe
, is little more than a tangle of carbon nanotubes inside a cherry-sized blob of primitive smartmatter, tugged along a Belt branch of the Highway towards Saturn by kitelike solar sails. It hatched from a 3000-ton Wang bullet. I lit a 150-kiloton nuclear explosive under it to escape a dying Earth. Fragments of the shell that protected the ship still float around us, a three-dimensional puzzle of steel and boron, and a wispy mess of used anti-acceleration gel that trails the ship like a stream of toilet paper from a car window. It’s not the vessel I would choose for a high-speed System-wide chase.

And if I do find Mieli and she finds out what happened to
Perhonen
, there will be blood. Mostly mine.

I take Matjek by the shoulders gently. ‘That’s right. Everybody.’

‘I want to help Mieli, too.’

‘I know. But right now, you will help her best by being quiet and reading a little bit more. Can you do that?’

He pouts.

‘The Princess said we were going to have an adventure. She didn’t say anything about you having to work so much.’

‘Well, the Princess does not know everything.’

‘I
know.
That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I thought you were my friend.’

There is a sudden, hollow feeling in my chest.

I hate to admit it, but my motives for bringing Matjek along were selfish: his jannah was the only place that Chen’s Dragons were forbidden to touch.

And then there is a fact that not too long ago, I was ready to steal his soul.

‘Of course I am your friend, Matjek. What was it about the book that that upset you so much?’

He hops from one foot to another. Then he looks at me with those clear eyes.

‘Is this place like Narnia?’ he asks. ‘Are we both really dead?’

I stare at him.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It makes sense, when you think about it. I remember going to Mr Perenna’s white room. I was really ill. There was a bed, and then I was on the beach, and felt fine again.

‘I never thought about it when I was there. I just kept playing. Mum and Dad said I could play a little longer. They were going to come back, but they never did. It was like I was dreaming. But Mieli came and woke me up.

‘So maybe I was ill and died in the real world and the beach is Narnia and you’re Reepecheep the mouse.’

Matjek was four years old when his mind was copied into the jannah. The last real thing he remembers is going to the upload insurance company with his parents: the rest is a never-ending afternoon on the beach. As far as he knows, one of his imaginary friends, the one he calls the Flower Prince, came back and took him on an adventure. I can’t bring myself to tell him that his parents have been dead for centuries and that the world he knew was eaten by Dragons that his future self made.

‘Matjek—’

For a split second, I consider my options. I could roll his gogol back a few days, make him forget all about me and
The Last Battle.
I could recreate his beach. He could keep playing forever.

I take a deep breath. For once, Mieli was right. There are lines that have to be drawn. I’m not going to turn Matjek into an edited gogol like me. And there is no way I am building a prison for the boy.

I take Matjek’s small hand in my own. I squeeze his fingers gently, looking for words.

‘You are not dead, Matjek. Being dead is different. Believe me, I know. But things can be real in different ways. Your parents never believed in us, did they? In me, the Princess, the Soldier and the Kraken?’

It takes some effort to speak the names in a steady voice. Matjek’s imaginary friends – or their distant descendants, the Aun – make me uncomfortable. They claim I’m one of them, and saved me from being eaten by wildcode in Earth’s atmosphere. But they did not save
Perhonen.

Matjek shakes his head.

‘That’s because we live in a world they can’t see, the world of stories. Once we find Mieli, I promise I will take you back to the real world. But I need you to help me first. Okay?’

‘Okay.’ He sniffs. I suppress a sigh of relief.

Then he looks at me again.

‘Prince?’

‘Yes?’

‘I always forget the stories in my dreams. The children always forget Narnia. Will I remember you when I go back?’

‘Of course you’ll remember.’

The word echoes in my mind like thunder.
Remember. That’s it!
Grinning manically, I lift Matjek and hug him tight.

‘Matjek, you are a genius!’

I have been looking for Mieli’s trail in public data sources that have been compromised by unknown forces. But there is one place in the Solar System where they remember
everything.
And keep secrets better than anyone else.

Setting up an anonymous quptlink to speak to the King of Mars is not easy, but I work feverishly now that I finally have a plan. I’ve encouraged Matjek to tackle an algorithmically generated, neuroadaptive fantasy book from the late twenty-first century next: I’m hoping it will keep him busy for a while.

We are several light-minutes away from Mars, and so I slow down my subjective clockspeed to simulate a real-time conversation. I create a slowtime sub-vir and step inside: nothing fancy, just a fragment from my visit to the hsien-kus’ ancestor simulation of old Earth, a basement bar in Paris, full of calm, friendly expatriate bustle.

I pause for a moment, savouring a screwdriver cocktail. Technically, the detective and I were adversaries, and I would hate to ask for his help even if he wasn’t my ex-lover Raymonde’s son. I make a last-minute effort to think of other options, conclude there are none, and send the first qupt, making sure to attach a grin.

How are you, my King?

Don’t call me that,
the answer comes.
You have no idea what it’s like
. The qupt carries the gritted teeth feel of frustration, and I smile.

It’s a title you earned, Isidore. You should embrace it.

What do you want, Jean? I did not expect to hear from you again. Don’t tell me you want your Watch back.

Clearly, the boy is growing teeth.

You can keep the Watch. I seem to recall you had trouble with keeping appointments, or so Pixil said.
I would like to let him ponder that for a while, but time is short.
I need something else, though. Your help. It’s urgent.

What happened on Earth?
There is a hunger in his query.
Did you have something to do with it?

It’s better that you don’t know the details. As for what happened – that’s what I’m trying to find out.

I send him a quick summary of my efforts to find Mieli, adapted to the Martian co-memory protocols.

Isidore, someone has been tampering with all the public data I can find. The Oubliette exomemory may have slipped past them: if your encryption schemes are too much trouble for the Sobornost, they will give anyone pause. I need all the Earth and Highway observation data you have from this period.

I
sidore’s reply is full of feverish enthusiasm.
This is almost like the Kingdom, forging the past, but on a much larger scale! I’ll have to use the Cryptarch Key to get all this. Why would anyone go to so much trouble?

Perhaps someone is really afraid of a Dragon infection. That is the best idea my minions found amongst Highway chatter.
Or to keep anyone else from finding Mieli
, I think to myself. Although why anyone would deploy such resources to hide one Oortian, even a servant of Joséphine Pellegrini, I have no idea.

Please hurry, Isidore. And stay out of this. You have a planet to rule. There is a Sobornost civil war going on: the usual courtesies do not apply anymore. If they find out you have the Key, they will come after you. You don’t need distractions.

Like I said. You have no idea
, Isidore qupts.
There you go.
A dense, compressed collection of co-memories floods the quptlink. I file it away for detailed analysis, thankful that I kept the vasilev-made exomemory emulation and hacking tools I used during my brief but eventful visit to the Oubliette.

Thank you, Isidore. I am in your debt. I pause. Please say hello to Raymonde for me.
I try to hide the bittersweet emotion with vodka and lemon, sending the tart taste of my drink with the qupt.

I will. But Jean, why are you trying to find Mieli? She fought side by side with Raymonde, her ship saved us from the phoboi, we are all grateful for that, but what do
you
owe her? It sounds like you are free now.
You can go anywhere you want.
This time the hint of bitterness is his.
From what I know about her, Mieli can look after herself. Why are you trying so hard to save her?

The question takes me by surprise. I let time flow at its usual pace so I have time to think. Isidore is right. I could go anywhere. I could be anyone. I could go to Saturn or beyond, find someone to take care of Matjek, and then be Jean le Flambeur again.

Perhonen
once asked me what I was going to do when our mission was over. When I think about it now, it is like peeking over a sheer cliff. It makes my gut wrench with fear. So little of me came out of the Prison intact. What do I have left, except promises?