The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (3 page)

Besides, Mieli still has a chance. She has spent her entire life chasing after a lost love, and it has all been for nothing. That’s what happens to those whom Joséphine Pellegrini touches, I know that far too well.

Because it’s the kind of thing that Jean le Flambeur would do,
I whisper down the quptlink
. Stay out of trouble, Isidore.

Then I cut the link and lose myself in the data, and finally find Mieli in the memories of flowers.

The data is from a Quiet-built distributed telescope. Like much of Oubliette technology, it is more like an art project than engineering: synthbio flowers with photosensitive petals that collectively form a vast imaging device, seeded in the city’s footsteps across Mars. They spend their lives watching the Martian sky like a vast compound eye, until the phoboi eat them.

The data is from the Oubliette exomemory, and so accessing it is like remembering. Suddenly, I recall seeing a tiny dot in the sky. But unlike with a normal memory, the more I focus on it, the clearer the image becomes, until I see
Perhonen’s
winged spiderweb form. A thought brings me to the right moment. There is a flash, and then a smaller shape detaches from the ship, hurtling through the void.

There she is. I follow her with the flowers’ eyes.

Mieli floats in the nothingness, a woman in a dark robe, turning and tumbling, until a ship comes for her, a zoku ship, shaped like a glass clockwork orrery. Zoku trueforms – foglet clouds around human faces with jewel haloes – pour out and surround her. Then she is gone, and the ship accelerates at a solid G, towards the Highway.

I summon my minions. It only takes them moments to identify Mieli’s rescuer in the public Highway spimescapes.
Bob Howard
, a Rainbow Table Zoku vessel – one of the sysadmin ships that the zoku use to maintain their router network. Uncharacteristically, it is currently on its way to Saturn, riding one of the expensive kiloklick beams, and will reach Supra City in approximately seventeen days. Not very efficient use of resources for a sysadmin zoku, especially given the chaotic situation in the Inner System.

I steeple my fingers and think. The Great Game Zoku has Mieli, there is no doubt about it now. One of their sleepers in the Rainbow Table must have spotted an intel gathering opportunity and has been ordered to deliver Mieli to Saturn. Of course, they could have decided to shove her through a Realmgate instead, turned her into quantum information and used the router network to get her there nearly at the speed of light – but Mieli has military-grade Sobornost implants that could have self-destructed her when passing through a Realmgate. No, they are trying to get her there with all her atoms intact.

I empty my glass, lean back and let the mutter of the bar wash over me.
There is still time.
The seeds of a plan are already taking root in my head. Unfortunately, the
Wardrobe
will never get to Saturn that fast. My issues with the jannah ship are not merely aesthetic.

But Isidore had a point. I
do
have my freedom now: apart from annoyingly persistent copy protection, the cognitive locks that Joséphine caged me with are almost completely gone. Ever since we left Earth, I have been thinking about my
other
ship, my
real
ship, the
Leblanc
, and its hiding place in the Gun Club’s Arsenal on Iapetos. If I could just get to it in time—

Or if I could slow things down.

All the uncertainty is gone. I feel like myself again. I lose myself in the plan. I’m going to need tools.
A quantum pyramid scheme. A pair of physical bodies, a nugget of computronium, a bunch of entangled EPR pairs and a few very special hydrogen bombs …

I’m going to take her away from you, Joséphine. I’m going to steal her back.

To my surprise, the pyramid scheme turns out to be the easy part.

You are now a Level 4 Navigator!
I receive a satisfying jolt of entanglement from the Highway-zoku with the qupt, a reward for discovering a new coordination equilibrium that unravelled a conflict over trajectories through a Jovian Lagrange point. Of course, they don’t have to know that I used a botnet to create the conflict in the first place.

Bid for your mass stream herding contract: gathering fragments specified by and guiding them to Iapetos. Offer: a combinatorial auction for Iapetos corridor access or equivalent Highway entanglement.
A cetamorph ship – a huge bubble of water held together by a synthbio membrane and crewed by hominid-whale hybrids – wants to take up my job offer to collect the Wang bullet fragments and take them to Saturn. I set up a mental alert to review it later: I can’t afford it just yet.

Expressing. Desire. Collective. Join.
A qupt that echoes with a thousand collective voices. A big punter, this one: a Venusian floating city jury-rigged into a spacecraft, the
Vepaja
, carrying Sobornost-grade computronium. I devote a few milliseconds of attention to reel it in and send it a quantum contract. The city does not read the fine print. It’s hard – NP-hard, to be precise – when verifying the contract structure is computationally intractable within the lifetime of the Universe.

Earth’s destruction convinced the Beltworlds that the Sobornost has finally started a campaign of active assimilation. The Highway is overloaded, with every refugee competing for rapid low-energy orbits out of the Inner System. I am one of many entrepreneurial minds to propose a collective computational effort to nearby ships to look for better corridors out of the Inner System, and to win Highway-zoku entanglement. The trick is to embed a simple quantum program in the contract that allows me to skim a small amount off the top of whatever the collective members receive – and to make algorithmic bids for certain trajectories, making them
very
desirable.

Ursomorph rockship Yogi-14 attacking Ceresian ships
Featherlight
and
Honesty.

I cringe. That was an unfortunate side effect of my scheme. An ursomorph rockship – shaped like a flint axe, kilometres long, sculpted by synthbio and fusion flame – refuses to admit that it lost a trajectory bid. The wispy medusa ships of the Ceresians descend upon it. The Highway-zoku struggles to contain the destruction, sends in their own q-ships, relocates lightmills to route traffic around the expanding bubble of the battlefield.

Mass stream disruption in the Saturn corridor. Streamship
Bubble Bobble
buying mass stream queue positions.

Lightmill in Martian orbit unavailable.

Requesting Poincaré invariant surface access for Saturn kilocklick beam.

Buying derivatives on future access rights to Saturn kiloklick beam.

I hold my breath. That’s the great thing about the zoku: their jewels force them to follow the zoku volition. I watch with satisfaction as the Highway-zoku routes the
Bob Howard
to a slower beam. It does not buy me much – perhaps an extra week – but that is just enough for me to get to Saturn right behind the Rainbow Table Zoku ship. Hopefully that won’t be enough time for the Great Game to break Mieli completely.

And of course, I now also have enough entanglement to trade for the tools I need for the Iapetos job.

Smiling to myself, I step back into the
Wardrobe
’s main vir.

It is snowing in the bookshop. Large white flakes drift down from the shadows in the ceiling. The bookshelves look like snow-covered trees, and the café table has been replaced by a tall lamppost, with a cast-iron gas lantern on top that casts yellow, fluttering light. My breath steams. It is cold. Matjek is nowhere to be seen.

Somewhere, far away, there is the sound of tiny bells. A set of small footprints leads into the shadows between the shelves. There is a discarded candy wrapper on the ground, silver and purple against the snow.
Turkish Delight.

‘Matjek!’ I shout, in a snow-muffled voice. There is no reply.
How the hell did he do this to the vir?

I stick my hands into my armpits for warmth and fumble at my Founder code to repair the damage done by the future god-emperor of the Solar System.

A snowball hits me in the back of the head.

I blink at the stinging wetness that slides down my neck. Matjek laughs somewhere in the darkness. I’m still rubbing my head when the qupt comes. It’s Isidore.

Jean! You can’t believe what I found!
I struggle to receive an exomemory fragment, flashes of flying in the Martian sky, a bright star between a man’s fingers.
It’s not just Earth, it’s the Spike, and the Collapse, you have to see this—

The detective’s voice is lost in a flood of images. Phobos falling from the sky. A pillar of light in the horizon. An earthquake, the whole planet ringing like a bell, the Oubliette losing its balance.

And then, silence.

2

MIELI AND THE MOUNTAIN

You have come to the mountain to find the witch.

The steep slopes and the white, bowl-shaped peak are shrouded in lacelike clouds. The mountain stands alone, perfect within itself, not caring for the narrow human path that zigzags up before you, like a stitch in a wound.

You think back at the journey, at the choices. Beads on a string, jewels in a necklace, one after another.

You adjust your katana and start climbing. The wind brings a whiff of smoke. Somewhere, behind you, a white pillar rises to the sky.

Your village is still burning.

The gaki attack when you make it up to the mountain’s shoulder ridge in the early evening.

You are above the clouds now, and the last rays of the sun turn the cloudtops into a mixture of blue and pink. A chilly wind comes down the white slope of the mountain, bringing tiny snowflakes. The breath of Yuki-Onna, the white witch. She knows you are coming.

There are pits in the mountainside above. The gaki emerge from them slowly, like pale tongues from dark mouths.

They are emaciated, withered creatures, except for their swollen bellies, filled with dark blood. They sniff the air, and come down the mountain path, hesitantly at first, then in a loping run.

Your katana comes out of its scabbard of its own volition, a sliver of bright silver.

The first gaki hisses and swings a scythelike arm at you. Its smell makes you gag: excrement, wet earth and decay. Your katana draws a lightning arc in the air. Ash-coloured liquid spurts out from the stump of the gaki’s outstretched paw. It backs off, clacking its teeth together angrily, yellow eyes burning.

Then you see two of its comrades going up the slope to the right. They scamper back down towards your flank.

There is an outcropping not that far below, with a large standing boulder that would protect your back. But getting there requires risking the steep, snowy slope.

A gaki makes the decision for you. It hurls itself straight at you, looking to impale itself on your blade. You dance lightly to one side, slice at its legs; it rolls down the slope, and you follow it, making crazy leaps as rocks rattle and roll beneath your feet, praying that your ankle won’t catch and twist.

You nearly fall close to the bottom, but catch yourself in a half-roll, come back up, and turn around, breathing hard. Your back is now protected, but a half-circle of gaki is coming at you, clawing and hissing and clacking and spitting. You wait. The wind picks up. It feels like a good place to die. Your only regret is that the Yuki-Onna will escape your vengeance and keep your lover’s soul. You grip the katana lightly, like a calligrapher’s brush, and prepare to write a haiku of death.

A feathered arrow sprouts from the neck of the gaki in the middle. More come arcing down at the others, in rapid succession. You advance with rapid, shuffling steps, and strike left and right. A gaki head rolls down the mountainside.

Then another ronin appears behind the gaki. He – or
she
, judging by her light frame – wields a naginata and wears an usagi mask, the cross-marked white face of a demon rabbit. She spins her weapon in an arc and clears a space around her, then lunges forward to pierce a gaki’s chest. She stops to look at you. Her eyes flash behind the mask.

The battle goes quickly after that. You coordinate your movements, swift sword and reaching naginata. It feels like you were back in the dojo, and even on the uneven ground of the mountain, difficult strokes become easy, and the gaki fall before you like wheat. Soon they flee, leaving dismembered bodies behind. The rocks are slick with their gore.

Afterwards, you are the first to bow.

‘Honoured ronin,’ you say. ‘You have saved my life.’

She bows back and removes her mask. Her face is dark-skinned, and her long jet-black hair is tangled with sweat.

‘The honour is mine,’ she says, with a soft voice that is like the whisper of silk wiping blood off a blade. ‘Without you, I would have fallen prey to the gaki myself.’

You bow again.

‘What is it that you seek, usagi-sama?’

‘The witch Yuki-Onna, who has done me a wrong,’ she says.

The wind picks up.

‘An ill-spoken name. I seek her also,’ you answer.

‘Shall we join in a common purpose, to seek our vengeance together?’

You hesitate.

‘My path is my own,’ you say. ‘And so are the dangers of the mountain.’

‘I understand. But we have both travelled far. Let us guard each other’s sleep tonight, and then go our separate ways.’

You nod. You return to the path together and continue the climb, with the usagi-ronin leading the way. You try to ignore a whispering voice in your head, a voice that tastes like fire and sulphur, of a bite of metal against your cheek.

Mieli, you fool
, it says.
Mieli, wake up.

You make camp in a cluster of pitiful, low pine trees. For a long time, you sit quietly and eat your meagre fare of rice cakes.