The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (32 page)

A Realmgate opens, and a boy of twelve steps out. He has just a hint of grey in his hair. He has grown since the last time Mieli saw him, on a beach, in the Lost Jannah of the Cannon, on Earth.

A tall woman with auburn hair follows him.

‘Hello, Mieli,’ the pellegrini says.

Mieli ignores her. She looks at the boy. ‘Matjek,’ she says. ‘Do you remember me? We met on a beach, once.’

Matjek nods. ‘I remember you.’ His mouth is a straight, serious line. ‘Jean says goodbye.’ His voice breaks, but he presses a fist against his mouth, refusing to cry.

Mieli offers him her hand, thinking of little Varpu, her
koto
sister. ‘Ssh,’ she says. ‘It will be all right.’

Then she turns to the pellegrini. The scar on her cheek burns.

‘I suppose you are here to tell me that Sydän still wants me back, and that you will give her to me in exchange for the Kaminari jewel,’ Mieli says.

A faint smile flickers across the pellegrini’s rouge lips. ‘No, Mieli,’ she says. ‘I am here to say goodbye, and to thank you for your service. I made a promise to Jean to leave you alone, and I plan to keep it.’ She sighs. ‘A pity. You were just beginning to show potential.

‘Now, I suppose I will have to watch as my brothers and sisters destroy you. Jean hurt the All-Defector, but it is still in many gogols across Sobornost, not as high-ranking as Matjek-Prime was, but it hasn’t given up. But by all means, give a quick truedeath to as many of them as you can. It will make things easier for me, afterwards.’

‘Perhaps I will surprise you,’ Mieli says.

‘Nothing would please me more, Mieli, daughter of Karhu. Good luck, and goodbye. I release you from your oath to me. Go free.’ She turns and takes a step towards the Realmgate.

‘Wait,’ Mieli says. The pellegrini looks at her over her shoulder.

‘Did you ever love him, truly?’ Mieli asks. ‘The thief. Or was he just a tool?’

The pellegrini closes her eyes. A veil of sadness passes across her face.

‘Of course I loved him, Mieli. There is no greater love than a maker’s for the things she makes. Especially when they grow to be something she never imagined.’

She blows Mieli a kiss and walks through the silver gate. Mieli feels something on her face, a touch of lips. She touches her cheek. It tingles under her fingers.

‘Mieli?’ Zinda says.

‘What is it?’

‘Your scar is gone.’

*

The
Zweihänder
takes the Liquorice-zoku and Matjek to the yin-yang moon of Iapetus, taking advantage of the disorder caused by the withdrawal of the pellegrini fleet. On the way, Mieli has to convince Sir Mik that engaging the four oblasts that are exchanging fire with Gun Club holeships is not a good idea.

‘ButMyladyMieli!’ the diminutive warrior protests. ‘NoGreaterHonourForKnightThanFightingGiants!’

Mieli sighs.
What would the thief tell him?

‘Except a sacred quest,’ Matjek says. ‘We seek the Holy Grail!’ Zinda has taken the boy under her wing, and one of the first things she did was to make the young chen a member of the Liquorice-zoku.

‘WhyDidn’tYouSayFirst?’

Wearing a heavy metacloak, the ship takes them down near the equatorial ridge. Mieli wears the body and the weaponry she created for her mission to Prometheus. In spite of her claims of having a combat alter, Zinda is unarmed, in a simple q-suit. Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere wears her incomprehensible four-dimensional form. Sir Mik, of course, is armed to the teeth. Matjek carries the tanglematter sphere, guarded by heavy botlets under Mieli’s control.

The lightning flashes of the battle above make their long, sharp shadows flicker as Matjek leads them to a sheer face of the colossal cylindrical mountain range. He touches the rock, and a disc-shaped area of it dissolves, revealing the eerie blue of the Arsenal’s pseudomatter wall. The boy qupts a large quantum state at the impossibly smooth surface and it, too, opens, revealing shifting folds that part before them.

Zinda creates a q-dot bubble to carry them through, and then they are in the giant blue-green tunnel of the Arsenal.

*

It does not take them long to find the ekpyrotic cannon. Mieli stares at it: it reminds her of some monster of the void of Oortian tales, a thing with a four-lobed eye made of black holes.

‘Algorithm termination: undecidable,’ Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere says.

‘Do you really have to do this, Mieli? How can you go inside that thing, and ask us to fire it into Saturn?’ Zinda’s eyes plead until Mieli has to look away.

Mieli smiles. ‘I’m afraid that the waiting will be your job, this time,’ she says. She turns to Matjek: the boy is already busy feeding the tanglematter sphere’s contents to the monstrous weapon. ‘Matjek, can you—’

A lightning bolt strikes at her through her Great Game jewel, like the All-Defector’s blow on Hektor, only inside her mind. Around her, she sees the other Liquorice-zoku members shimmer into their trueforms, frozen in place like huge snowflakes.

‘This is not how the Great Game is played,’ Barbicane says, shaking his head.

The Great Game Elder is alone, wearing his brass cyborg form. His Game jewel shimmers in his hand: the others orbit his stovepipe hat in a dimly glowing halo.

‘We don’t take the easy way out! We don’t use cheat codes! Would you risk all of reality for one insignificant war?’ Barbicane gestures at Zinda with her gun hand, exasperated. ‘And you, little girl! I made you to keep her sane! What were you thinking?’

Barbicane winks. ‘My apologies. I am being facetious! You are all doing exactly what I wanted you to do. Sobornost infiltrators who broke into our most secure fortress during a time of crisis, and destroyed the Kaminari jewel! That’s the official version! Why do you think I let you know where it was, pretended to overlook Zinda’s twinking?

‘I always wanted to do it myself, but the volition of the Great Game would not let me. It was too tempting for too many. I kept a balance of indecision for a long time, managed at least to hide it on another brane.

‘But now, our mutual friend Jean has set us all free! It has been forever since I did not feel the volition of the zoku in my head. It is like playing a new game! I am finally free to do what the zoku
needs
, not what it
wants
!’

He gestures at an iridescent cube floating behind him. ‘A strangelet device. It will go with you all into the cannon. It should cause a Big Crunch on the Planck brane. Ah! A grand truedeath for all of you! I almost wish I could share it!’

Mieli
, comes a quiet qupt from Mieli’s Liquorice jewel. It’s Matjek.
I can move. And I still have access to the gunscape. I don’t think he knows I’m not Great Game. Can you keep him talking?

‘There won’t be anyone to remember our deaths,’ Mieli says. ‘The Sobornost is about to wipe out Supra City if we don’t use the jewel.’

‘Oh, there will be survivors, my dear! Like I said, it is time to start a new game, and I look forward to the challenge! We had grown too powerful. But being the underdog again, a rebel, one of the few ragged survivors of a great empire, fighting a vastly superior force. What a jolly Great Game that will be!’

I’m almost ready, Mieli
, Matjek says. He pauses.
Are you?

Mieli casts a quick glance at Barbicane, hovering in front of the ekpyrotic cannon.

You can’t be serious
, she qupts.

The entire Arsenal is a linear accelerator. I will fire you at Saturn. The rest of us will be fine. Just promise that you will come back.

‘We could end that game, here and now, if you just let me,’ Mieli shouts.

Ten seconds.

‘And are you so arrogant that you think the jewel will accept you, Oortian?’ Barbicane growls. ‘You are nothing special, no matter what le Flambeur thinks. I had to dangle you in front of him to goad him into desperation, into breaking the volition system. I even filled his ship with tools! I suppose I should thank him. After all, it was his Collapse that created the Great Game Zoku in the first place, to make sure it would never happen again!’

His face darkens. ‘Then again, there are parts of me that remember what I lost on the day it rained fire. So I must admit it gives me some pleasure to think that his attempt to rescue you was in vain.

‘Perhaps I will allow myself the indulgence of taking care of you personally. It will not make a difference in the end, after all, and may teach a lesson to incompetent little Zinda here. Discipline amongst the newbies is far too lax these days, that’s what I always say!’

He presses the cold mouth of his gun arm against Mieli’s head.

Do it!
Mieli qupts at Matjek. She casts one more look at Zinda. The zoku girl’s eyes flash with understanding. The metal against Mieli’s flesh grows hot.

Done.
Mieli is qupted into the gunscape, her mind encoded into the quantum states of the tanglematter sphere. She is inside a tiny Realm, bodiless, only dimly aware of the Arsenal around her, of the minuscule shape of Barbicane right in front of the ekpyrotic weapon.

Matjek fires. The Arsenal walls come alive with energy. An EM field pushes the ekpyrotic shell to an enormous velocity in seconds. It flashes through chamber after chamber, spinning faster and faster, erasing every gun in the Gun Club’s collection in its path.

Even inside her cocooned Realm, Mieli feels the impact on Saturn’s south pole, of the shell pushing deep into the metallic hydrogen core. Then the four black holes of the ekpyrotic shell come together.

The entire giant planet pulses like a heart, pumps gravitational waves across the space between universes. They carry Mieli with them, a message in a bottle, washing onto an alien shore.

Everything is soft. Everything is liquid.

Mieli does not see or feel as much as
perceives
, does not move as much as
flows.
There is only a bubble-thin boundary between her and Other, inside and outside. It is like a dream where you dive and start breathing underwater.

She has a vague sense of up and down, and of infinite depths below her. Something huge passes beneath, moving with slow strokes, and her fragile bubble-self wavers in its wake. For a moment, she stays very still, fear spilling out of her in ripples.

How did the zoku build this place
? Solitonic states, governed by alien physics, just about complex enough to compute, to provide a platform for thought, here on the Planck brane.
Did they build it or find it?

Slowly, carefully, she lets herself expand, reaches out with her awareness, feeling for things that are not her. After a while, she starts to sense a knotted flow, something warm in the liquid other, something shaped like hands, folded together, or a sleeping butterfly.

The Kaminari jewel.

Here, touching is a metaphor, and when Mieli reaches for it, its flow lines pull her essence in, make her a part of it, create a knot in what she thinks of as her chest.

Then the jewel opens.

At first, there is only a cool presence, filling her, spreading to her every cell. Then the jewel
is
her, and she is
it
, and they are all possible Mielis at once.

An old winged woman dying of a smartcoral growth in Oort, telling a story to her great-grandchildren.

A Sobornost goddess whose wings spread over the Solar System.

A zoku trueform with a halo of jewels, like a tarot card.

A story told by a jinn in the wildcode desert.

A caleidoscope of images, a superposition, many things all at once. And yet they have one thing in common.

Softly, note by note, Mieli starts singing, as if she was filled with
väki
of Oort, ready to shape itself to her/their will. The chorus of angels rises together, and sings a last song for the ship
Perhonen.

She sings of
alinen
and the dark, and of another song that made a ship like a butterfly of the void. She sings of advice and love. Of fear of goodbyes, of closing doors. Of a thief in a prison. Of an ending, of wings burning against a sphere of blue and white. Of a last butterfly kiss.

Of all the lives around her, entangled in not a jewelled chain, but a spiderweb.

She sings of a new beginning.

In between the notes of the song, there is a Universe.

The jewel listens. The wish is granted.

A pattern emerges in the weave of quantum threads, in the emptiness of the Planck brane. The perfect symmetry of nothing shatters into the imperfect order of gauge fields, quarks and gluons.

Many things are born from one. A path is chosen through a forest of possible orderings. Chaos crystallises into a diamond of causality.

Mieli’s song begins to sing, and there is a flash of light.

Epilogue

Joséphine Pellegrini the Prime watches the war from her
guberniya
, drinking wine. She misses her temple on Venus. That seems like a more appropriate distance from these messy proceedings, in any case.

And she has many rediscovered emotions to file away in her Library. Like grief. She raises a lonely glass to Jean le Flambeur.
Still, there are many more where that one came from. Perhaps it is time to ask Sasha for a favour and visit the Dilemma Prison again.

Joséphine sighs. It is almost time to get ready for another war. Her brothers and sisters are about to wipe out Supra City with their shiny sunbeam. Shame, really. They will have to come up with a new and better common enemy. Something less risky than the All-Defector.

Something outside the Solar System, perhaps? She will have to branch gogols to think about it.

There are still things to settle with the hsien-kus and the vasilevs: the cooperation the All-Defector forced upon them did not help them to put aside their grievances with her. But they have expended far more of their forces against the zokus than she did, and even without Chen support, she has a much better chance against them, this time. The others will be distracted. Chitragupta will spend millennia combing through the remains of the zoku Realms. Sasha will play with his new toys. And sumangurus are little more than weapons, just asking for targets to be pointed at.