The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (22 page)

Hearing the zoku Elder’s voice brings a burst of welcome anger. I tell my metaself to use it to help me focus.

In the trade we call this breaking and redecorating
, I respond.
Stay out of Irem. You will find that it is under the control of a Notch-zoku member called Dunyazad. It’s all perfectly legitimate. Unless you want to take it up with Vipunen the Elder in the South Pole? I believe he ate the last expedition that tried to find his Realm.

Capital!
Barbicane says.
Perhaps he would like to join our brand new Ganimard-zoku! Detectives and manhunters extraordinaire. They get entanglement based on how close they get to you, of course.

He’s trying to distract me. Think, Jean. What would Mieli do?

Unless, of course, you want to surrender and we can settle this like gentlemen! They would be terribly disappointed! I am certain young Mieli would be pleased to see you and discuss the matter of her ship
Perhonen
with you as well – I believe that is the civilisation that destroyed it that you have helped to recreate down there, yes?

But of course, that is precisely the wrong question.

Incidentally, Mieli is such a bright young lady! I have a mission in mind just for her, and I expect her to succeed admirably – and be rewarded accordingly, of course. It is amazing how the volition system shapes you, how your zoku comes to mean everything to you. Why deny yourself that experience, Jean? You always lacked a purpose. We can offer you one.
Pipe tobacco and the clink of fine china with the qupt. He is enjoying this, the bastard. No matter. I know what to do.

This is the last time I ask you to join us. If the Ganimards catch you, they will give you to our information retrieval specialists, and the games they design are much less enjoyable than the Great Game.

‘Twenty subjective seconds until firewall collapse,’ Carabas says.

I plot a tight arc just along the skin of Irem and pass it to the cat. ‘Come on, boy,’ I tell it. ‘Time to earn your keep, for a change.’

Don’t get the wrong idea, Jean: reshaping Plates or not, you are nothing more than a nuisance. You are out of your depth. What do you think you have that you can fight an entire zoku with?

Carabas gives me an offended look. I hold my hand up.

Family,
I qupt at Barbicane, and cut the link. Then I bring my hand down. ‘Now.’

The
Leblanc’
s Hawking drive fires, a great white torch, and we dive straight at Irem and the wildcode desert.

We only see ourselves
, the Aun told me once.

The photon tail of the
Leblanc
cuts a scorched letter in the skin of Irem. My stomach tickles as the ship spins around, turns the mad dive into a parabolic arc following the Plate’s curve.

The Aun get the message. The wildcode desert rises behind us. Walls of dust and sand, jinni the size of mountains who grasp at zoku ships with sapphire fingers. Aerovore protuberances shoot up. For a moment, the wildcode data storm gets through the
Leblanc
’s firewalls, and I glimpse vast serpents of light, striking at the sky. They brush my mind like the hot fingers of the Chimney Princess, recognise me and release the ship.

The Ganimard-zoku ships are not so lucky. The wild-code enters their technology. A Dyson tree makes a green, fragmented impact on the shifting dunes. A Replicator fires signals at the notchcubes beneath the sand, but only twisted, dysfunctional copies of the von Neumann craft rise up, drawing short arcs before crashing and exploding. The Evangelion ships turn their weapons at the desert and white antimatter flowers blossom behind us like a string of blazing pearls. For a moment, I fear for the integrity of the Plate itself.

Then the body thieves come. They enter zoku minds through code fragments, through stories told as geometric patterns in the sand, and manipulate the Ganimard-zoku’s collective volition. The converging wedges of ships intercepting us turn away, scattering in all directions. It is a temporary reprieve – the zoku are not nearly as vulnerable to mind-hacking as sobortech, and will no doubt develop countermeasures rapidly – but it buys the
Leblanc
enough time to get past the edge of the Plate and follow the glowing flows of the dynamic support beams down to the depths of Saturn, away from pursuit.

As soon as we are in the relative safety of the sub-troposphere layers, I turn to Carabas again. The Ganimard-zoku won’t give up, so there is no time to waste.

‘Is there another Jean le Flambeur on board?’ I ask it. ‘Another copy?’

On Mars, my past self left me a series of clues, partial ghosts of myself, to guide me to the memories hidden in the Oubliette. Could I have done the same here?

The cat’s metallic whiskers shiver. ‘Prime authorisation needed,’ it purrs.

I frown. After all the iterations I went through in the Dilemma Prison, the probability that I am sufficiently identical to the Jean the
Leblanc
would recognise as Prime is vanishingly small.

‘All right, never mind. Carry on.’

There is another possibility. The
Leblanc
’s technology is a hodgepodge mixture of Sobornost and zoku. The Sobornost have a concept called a Library: a repository of gogol snapshots, of people you once were and want to retain. Is it possible that the ship has one? I haven’t found it yet, but perhaps it is hidden. Could Matjek have accessed it somehow? Old virs like the bookshop are based on demiurge gogols, custom minds that maintain the illusion. Sometimes it’s possible to trick them into linking things that are not supposed to be linked, a kind of sympathetic magic.

I would have to ask Matjek, and at the moment the conversation would not go very well.

So where would I keep the Library of the ship? Where would I store self-fragments that I was too sentimental to throw away?

Of course.

I return to the Realm corridor and step through the gate leading to the white sunlit deck of the
Provence.

I find the book on the deck chair by the pool. No one looks at me twice here; it is a timeless Realm where I am a Monsieur d’Andrezy, a first-class passenger across an endless Atlantic, spending my days on the deck and nights in the gambling saloon and dining hall.

Golden flashes of sunlight reflected from the pool water dance on its cover when I pick it up.
Le Bouchon de cristal.
An old favourite, an anachronistic paperback edition with a colourful cover, a dark monocled silhouette of a thief and a crystal bottle. The pages are yellow and well-thumbed. I sit down comfortably, put on my blue-tinted sunglasses and open it.

The pages are blank.

I flip through them rapidly, looking for clues. The book is out of place in the Realm: even as I touch it, it feels unnatural, a kernel of another reality embedded in this one. It is as if the pages are waiting to be filled with something. A key. A memory.

I close my eyes.
Prime authorisation required.
It’s the same approach the Sobornost Founders use: an image that is the core of who you are, stable across copies, a neural configuration much more difficult to duplicate than any password, used to unlock secrets.

I search my memories. The Prison. Wearing the face of Sumanguru the Founder, getting caught.
It must be older than that.

Fragments from Mars, glimpses from the corridors of the memory palace. Getting drunk with Isaac. The first date with Raymonde. The affair with Gilbertine. The Corridor of Birth and Death. No, none of that. Something older.

I reach for the ship. There are tools on the
Leblanc
I can use, metacognition software to dig through my own mind, treat it like a memory lockpick, find the right shape that fits when you wiggle it.

I can’t move. My world is made of blank pages that swallow my gaze.

‘You have been identified either as a divergent copy of master-Prime or an intruder,’ says the voice of the cat, somewhere. ‘You have thirty subjective seconds to provide a Prime code. After that, I am authorised to use countermeasures.’

Bastard.
I waste a second cursing my past self.
I wish I had never been born.

That’s it. When
was
I born? Does the book want the moment when I first opened it in Santé Prison, when the Flower Prince first started growing in my mind? Too obvious, too easy.

‘Twenty seconds.’

Or when Joséphine opened the door to my cell? Her young-old face, a key turning in a lock.
No, not her. She does not define me.

‘Fifteen seconds.’

The pages are a desert, empty and bright with the glare of a harsh sun. I feel lost in them.

‘Ten seconds.’

There is a desert inside me, too, the blank paper on which I was first written, the first letter in the shape of a boy lying on a sand dune.

I whisper to him and he steps out of me. The book accepts him, and its pages are filled with the black ink of memory.

13

MIELI AND THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

In spite of herself, Mieli enjoys the egg hunt.

The search keeps getting harder as she goes. It is not a simple matter of finding peculiar hiding places, although, at first, she finds a few small eggs in streams, tree holes and under leaves, all easily spotted from air. But one particularly large egg, sitting in the crook of a tree branch, grows slender white legs when Mieli approaches it, and flees with amazing speed. She chases it on foot through a thicket, and a burning chasm suddenly appears in front of her. The egg leaps over it effortlessly, and Mieli almost falls in.

She stops and stares at the hot lava at the bottom of the deep fissure, hissing and spitting sparks. The fleeing egg is lost among the shadows of the trees.

‘How do you find flying now, Oortian?’ rings Zinda’s taunting voice from the other side. ‘You have to be smarter than that!’

Gritting her teeth, Mieli sits down on a rock and starts listing the craziest possible hiding places she can think of.
Barbicane’s hat. Clouds. Inside flowers.
Then she starts going through them, one by one.

Most of them turn out to be dead ends, although she does find swooping down from above to snatch the zoku Elder’s hat away quite satisfying. He shouts something at her she can’t hear. Fortunately, the Circle prevents his gun arm from working. The hat turns out to be empty, but she wears it for the rest of the night anyway. Eventually, she does notice a suspiciously low cloud over the party – far too white and fluffy to be natural – and inside it she discovers a large floating egg with the number 890 written on one side.

When the time is up, Mieli returns to the riverbank with her loot and gathers them in the stovepipe hat, five eggs in total. Surely, that must be a respectable result, especially the cloud egg. She leans back on the grass and watches the wavering golden and silver reflections of the lanterns on the dark water. She imagines herself drifting along the river with the small zoku boats, sailing somewhere far away.

After a while, a sound wakes Mieli up abruptly. She sits bolt upright and sees Zinda kneeling next to her, angular face lit from below by blue light.

‘I’m sorry,’ the zoku girl says. ‘I didn’t want to wake you up. You looked so calm. But I’m afraid I have to tell you that you lost.’ At Zinda’s feet, there is a glowing pyramid of at least a dozen eggs of different sizes. ‘I even found the one that I think is the main prize.’ She holds up a tiny egg with the number 999.

‘Where was it?’ Mieli wipes her eyes. She feels more awake now, but the night and the river still hold her in their grip. Or perhaps she is not ready to let go of them.

‘In my purse! The last place I could think of. But I don’t think it was actually there before I looked – Great Timbo! Is that Barbicane’s hat?’

‘It was the last place
I
could think of,’ Mieli says.

Zinda laughs a long, pearly laugh. ‘Well, I’m glad you have been having a good time, Mieli,’ she says.

‘Me, too. And thank you. It has been a good party.’

‘It’s not over yet! Do you want to go back to collect our winnings?’

‘No, not really.’ Mieli looks at the glowing contents of her hat. ‘Maybe I prefer to imagine what I would have won.’ She holds up an egg with the number 27. ‘An unsung song, perhaps. Or a new beginning.’

Zinda takes her hand. ‘That’s a nice thought,’ she says. ‘Maybe we need one, too.’

A warm wave of desire leaps up within Mieli.
No, not like this. She is just wearing a mask. None of this is real. I am doing this for Sydän, maintaining my cover, getting close to her for information.

Mieli pulls her hand away.

‘Speaking of winnings,’ she says, ‘what is your wish going to be?’

Zinda looks down. ‘I’ll tell you later.’ She puts Barbicane’s hat on. It is far too big for her, and she has to tilt it back at a ridiculous angle to wear it.

‘I don’t know about you, but I feel like doing something forbidden,’ she says. ‘I think it would do us both a lot of good. What do you think?’

Mieli sits up. ‘Listening to people say that is the story of my life,’ she says.

‘So, what happens next?’

‘Usually, we find out why the forbidden things are forbidden.’

‘Come on! On nights like this, we need to climb over fences and break into graveyards. Suggest something forbidden.’

‘Well,’ Mieli says carefully, ‘your friend Barbicane said that talking about the Kaminari jewel was forbidden.’

Zinda looks at her, eyes wide. ‘I didn’t realise you even knew about
that
,’ she says in a hushed voice.

Mieli shrugs. ‘So you don’t know
everything
about me,’ she says.

Zinda smiles. ‘Are you trying to play me, Mieli? Are you flirting with me to try to get me to talk about things I’m not supposed to?’

Mieli takes Zinda’s hand. It is small and warm in her own.
Kuutar help me
, she thinks.

‘Don’t you
want
to be played?’ she says aloud.