The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (6 page)

‘I apologise for any inconvenience caused,’ the shadow says. Its voice is vaguely male, but metallic and distorted. ‘Did I say that right?’

Isidore does a quick calculation in his head. He is not sure how much time has passed – only a few minutes, perhaps – and it should only take his bodyguard of the night, the Futurist, a few more to find him. He probes the exomemory to see if he could get a message out, but there is simply nothing there, the same empty feeling he has only experienced before while visiting the zoku colony in the Dust District.

‘You should have left things alone,’ the shadow says. ‘But it is not too late to make it right. Just give me the Cryptarch Key, and I’ll help you forget.’

‘Why?’

‘What you found is dangerous. It’s much better for all of us if I erase it for good, both from the exomemory and your mind.’

‘You are too late. I already sent it out.’

‘Ah. Well. That situation is already being dealt with, I’m told. Above my paygrade, in any case. It does not concern you. Please, I am asking nicely. Give me the exomemory key. I know you don’t want it anyway.’

‘It is not mine to give,’ Isidore says.
I need to buy time.
‘Not many people know about the Key. You are somebody from Pixil’s zoku, aren’t you?’

‘Yes and no. We have sleepers in every zoku.’

‘But why are you doing this?’

The shadow fidgets with its hands. ‘Because we have to protect you. We keep things stable. We keep things sane.’

Isidore stares at him. ‘It was
you
, whoever you are. You caused the Spike. You interfered with what the Kaminari were doing.
That’s
what destroyed Jupiter. That’s what broke this poor man’s mind. And you have been covering your tracks ever since. Why would you tamper with data from Chen’s attack on Earth? Who are you?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Look, Isidore, if you don’t cooperate, we will have to take more drastic measures. If we can’t edit the exomemory, we’ll have to … erase it. The situation in the System is too unstable to risk the information you have falling into the wrong hands. Please, it’s just a few edits for the greater good, you won’t even notice it.’

‘No.’ Suddenly, Isidore is full of a righteous fury. ‘The Cryptarch deceived us long enough, with the zoku’s help, no less. We are not doing that again.’

‘You don’t understand.’ The shadow’s metallic voice is almost desperate. The q-gun brightens. ‘I don’t want to do this, you understand, but I have to follow the zoku volition, I don’t have a choice. I’m going to take the Key from your mind, Isidore. I’ll try to make this painless.’

‘Pixil said you always have a choice, that you are always free to leave.’

The shadow sighs. ‘She is too young, not entangled enough. She’ll learn. It’s no use trying to distract me, Isidore. Your tzaddikim won’t make it here in time. We built their technology, remember? I can control what they see. And afterwards, their memories will change, too.’

Isidore blinks. One more piece falls into place. ‘You’re one of the Elders. You’re Sagewyn.’

The shadow explodes into a zoku trueform, a swirling mandala of foglets and jewels, with Sagewyn’s face in the middle, still wearing a lopsided, pointy-eared mask. ‘One more thing for you to forget,’ he says.

Isidore takes the thief’s Watch from his pocket. It is cold and heavy in his hand.

‘Wait.’

‘You can’t flee into the Quiet, Isidore,’ Sagewyn says. ‘I have blocked your access to the exomemory. Just close your eyes. It will be over soon.’

‘It’s not my Watch,’ Isidore says, ‘although it was Justin the Watchmaker who modified it for me. We of the Oubliette are not zoku or Sobornost, but we have our own crafts. I have known for a long time that someone would come for the Cryptarch Key, so I took precautions.’ There is a knot in his belly, and his hand shakes, but he holds the blazing trueform’s gaze. ‘It has a Mach-Zehnder trigger, coupled to my brain. And a microgram of antimatter. It should be enough to take out us both. Certainly enough to burn the Key.’

Sagewyn swirls back into the form in which Isidore first met him, a heavyset man in a blue cape with a ragged edge. His shoulders sag, and he looks tired. He smells faintly of stale sweat.

‘I was worried there would be something like that. I like you, Isidore. I like all of you. I wanted to give you a chance.’

‘We’ll stop you,’ Isidore says. ‘Whatever you are planning, it won’t work.’

Sagewyn sighs and clasps his hands behind his back, rocking back and forth on his heels.

‘We already did it, thirty-five minutes ago.’

The zoku Elder smiles wistfully. ‘I’ve always wanted to say that.’ He turns to look at the sky. ‘They’ll blame the Sobornost for it, of course. It’s all part of the game. Nothing is without purpose.’

Sagewyn becomes a black ragged silhouette against a white light outside. The silence disappears, and the exomemory is back in Isidore’s head. Phobos arcs down towards Hellas Planitia, a sharp, sudden sunset. A chorus of panic and fear echoes through the exomemory, rushing into Isidore like a tsunami. A white pillar rises in the horizon. Everything shakes. The city stumbles.

The last thing Isidore sees is Marcel, a hand squeezing Owl Boy’s shoulder, looking at the light, a sad look in his eyes, as if he knew he was right all along.

Like a drowning man, Isidore reaches out to the exomemory. His mother, in the Gentleman’s guise, floating far above the city’s rooftops. Pixil, walking through an agora of the Permanent Avenue with her friend Cyndra. His Quiet foster father, toiling in the footsteps of the city, looking up from the wall he is building as the light grows brighter. There is no time for words. Their minds meet, and for a moment, they fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Pixil’s rage, her hand on her sword; Raymonde’s futile attempt to create a foglet shield around the city, his father’s Quiet calm as he places a final regolith brick on top of the unfinished wall and turns to face the light, and suddenly, he is not alone in the maelstrom of fear anymore.

As Isidore erases the last of the gevulot between himself and his loved ones and their courage and love fills him, he/they suddenly know what must be done.

The Cryptarch Key turns in all the mind-locks of the Oubliette. The boundaries of memory dissolve, as if they had never existed. All the privacy trees of gevulot collapse into a single point. All secrets are revealed. All memory is one. Centuries, millennia of life, shared in an instant.

As the Phobos singularity consumes the planet and becomes incandescent, the mind called the Oubliette opens its million eyes and looks straight into it, no longer afraid.

4

THE THIEF AND THE GUN CLUB

Just before the Iapetus job starts to go south, Barbicane the Gun Club Elder and I watch zoku children play global thermonuclear war.

We drink dark tea in the mahogany-panelled drawing room of the Gun Club Zoku’s copper-and-brass sky-train. It rides smoothly along the bright golden curve of the Club’s orbital ring around Iapetus, fast enough to create a cosy half a g of artificial gravity. Our view of the Saturnian moon’s surface through the large, circular viewports is spectacular. We are above the Cassini Regio, a reddish-brown birthmark that stains the white of the icy surface. It makes Iapetus look like a giant yin-yang symbol. And inside the Turgis Crater, five hundred kilometres in diameter, directly below us, is a miniature Earth. A disc of green and blue, its continents and seas circumscribed by a glowing silver line.

‘The Cold War Re-Enactment Society, they call it,’ Barbicane says in his bassoon voice. He gestures at the view flamboyantly with the gleaming fractal foliage of his manipulator arm. It makes a tinkling sound against the viewport glass.

The amber halo of zoku jewels orbiting his stovepipe hat like a miniature Solar System makes Barbicane look like a melancholy saint. In contrast to most members of his zoku, the Elder’s primary body actually has biological components left. His head belongs to a fifty-something man with impressive red sideburns, a prominent nose and a fierce blue-eyed gaze. But the rest of him is artificial: a rounded, cast-iron torso, a bushbot manipulator arm and a heavier, cylindrical gun limb. His legs are brass stumps – exhaust ports for small ion engines. He smells faintly of machine grease, metal polish and an old man’s aftershave.

‘Too modern for me, dear Raoul, far too modern! But I applaud their enthusiasm. They even made the warheads by hand, the old-fashioned way. Synchrotrons and plutonium! Aah!’ Barbicane makes a rumbling sound of pleasure.

In fact, they had a little help this time.
I smile, recalling my dealings with the zoku youths a few days ago, in a different guise from my current persona of Raoul d’Andrezy, an emigré and antique dealer from Ceres.
Give children matches and they will start fires. Nothing ever changes.

The silver ring running along the crater’s steep edge is a zoku Magic Circle that defines the boundary of the playground and the rules of reality within. The North American continent inside is dark, perforated by pinpoints of city lights. Every now and then, it is lit for a second by the dazzling wink of a hydrogen bomb.

‘Delightful,’ I say, as the East Coast goes up in a shower of nuclear sparks. The response is already on its way. White parabolic arcs of ballistic missiles reach for Moscow and Leningrad like skeletal, clawed fingers.

Suddenly, I wonder what they saw in the Oubliette, when the rain of fire started.

Maybe it was the Sobornost, as the System chatter would have us believe. Maybe it was Joséphine covering her tracks. Maybe the chens did not want an active zoku presence so close to the Inner System, without Earth as a buffer zone. Maybe the vasilevs and the hsien-kus just wanted to stop anyone else from getting the Oubliette minds they had been pirating for years.

I want to believe one of those things is true. At least that way, there would be a chance that the Oubliette citizens survived as gogols, somewhere. But deep down, I know the truth is worse.

I told him not to get involved. I told him.

Mars is gone, collapsed into a single point, eaten by the artificial singularity of Phobos, and with it, nearly everyone alive I could call friends and lovers and sparring partners. Raymonde. Isaac. Gilbertine. Xuexue. The foolish, brilliant Isidore. What was left of my other self, Jean le Roi, and his Prison. The Quiet and the phoboi. Gone. Locked behind an event horizon together.

They were never yours. They belonged to the other Jean, the one who betrayed them, the one who left them. You don’t need to miss them.

Perhonen
was right when she told me I’m a good liar. But the best lies I save for myself: they are perfectly crafted, indestructible and glittering, like zoku jewels.

My eyes sting. Without thinking, I pinch the bridge of my nose. Then I feel Barbicane’s eyes on me.

‘Raoul? Would you like more tea?’

I smile, giving myself a mental kick. I need to stay sharp. Barbicane is not really a steampunk cyborg gentleman, he’s a quantum-brained posthuman
playing
one. Of course, for the zoku, the two are close to the same thing. Everything is a game. The tobacco smell in the room, the mahogany tables and armchairs, the gas lamp candelabras made of revolvers, the lemony taste of the Labsang Souchong tea – all of it is defined by the train’s Circle, a game in which we bargain like civilised gentlemen in a nineteenth-century club room.

‘No, thank you. I was just thinking that you start them off in the trade early.’

Barbicane sighs.

‘It’s the zoku volition, dear boy, impossible to resist. We are all made for a purpose! Well, except us old clankers, of course. The young ones make me feel positively ancient, growing up so fast! Tomorrow, they will make Realms and Circles and guns that I can’t even imagine.’ He frowns. ‘Better than this one, I hope!’

‘But you are not a fan of the atompunk aesthetic?’

‘Ha! Indeed not! There is no beauty in an
uncontrolled
nuclear explosion!
Your
item, on the other hand—’ He winks.

Now we are in business.
I suppress a sigh of relief. Barbicane likes to talk, and during the last hour, I’ve heard more about guns than I ever wanted to know – especially after the intimate lessons my stay in the Dilemma Prison of the Sobornost taught me about their effects. But now it is clear that he wants to buy what I have to sell.

‘I take it you are interested?’

‘Raoul, you know very well that I cannot pass up on a genuine Wang bullet from a 150-kiloton Verne cannon.’

‘I can personally guarantee that it has.’

‘Capital!’

‘Of course, there is still the small matter of the price …’ I set my teacup down and fold my hands.

He raises his eyebrows. ‘Well, we’ll just have to see how the Club feels about that.’ There is a mischievous glint in his eyes. ‘If you will allow me to step outside for a moment?’

I incline my head politely. The boundary of the Circle appears, a silver line on the floor around us. Barbicane hovers up from his chair and crosses it: his appearance wavers slightly. Then he raises his bushbot arm. It fans out into a golden tree that touches a number of the gems in his halo gently, weaving his wish into the zoku’s volition.

I am certain it is mostly for show. Barbicane is an Elder, someone who has achieved the maximum level of advancement in his zoku, by performing actions in accordance with its goals and values – in this case, building bigger and better guns and blowing things up. He won’t have any problems using his entanglement with the rest of the zoku to acquire the paltry item I am asking for: a high-level jewel for a Supra City infrastructure zoku, enough to instantiate a personal Circle in one of the more fashionable zones of the zokus’ Saturnian capital.

What Barbicane doesn’t know is that the real stakes are much bigger than that.

After a second, he smiles and returns to his seat.

‘All good! The shell has been transferred to the Arsenal. And now for the celebratory drink! Stronger than tea! Would you care for a—’

A Realmgate pops into being on the other side of the room with a rush of displaced air and a whiff of ozone, a glowing blue circle two metres in diameter. A zoku trueform pours through it: a shimmering utility fog cloud with a haughty face in the middle, surrounded by a swirling mandala of zoku jewels. The newcomer enters the Circle and the Schroeder tech locks kick in. The foglets hiss and rasp with waste heat as they coalesce into a tall woman, first sketching her as a crystal statue, and then as flesh. Even before she is fully formed, she strides forward towards Barbicane, a pine-scented warm breeze behind her.