The Causal Angel

12 THE THIEF AND THE CRYSTAL STOPPER

There are zoku ships everywhere above the Irem Plate. I glimpse them through my q-dot bubble’s magnifying skin as pinpoints as I rise towards my ship’s geostationary orbit. Then the entanglement beams between them become visible in the thin ammonium and water vapour, turning the sky into a silver net, woven to catch me.

Transitioning into the Leblanc‘s Realm through its gateskin is perfectly smooth now, like slipping beneath the surface of cool water. The pilot’s chamber flows into place around me. Carabas stands to attention and takes its hat off with a mechanical flourish.

The ship’s sensors show over two hundred ships in Plate space, ranging from the Notch-zoku’s Replicators – tiny, blocky insects – to green dense Dyson trees, sleek, spiky, purple pseudomatter vessels of the Evangelion-zoku, and even individual baseline quicksuits, silver humanoids with large, circular waste heat fins. In spite of the diversity, they are clearly members of one temporary zoku, moving in a seemingly random dance that nevertheless covers all possible escape vectors. What did Barbicane say? A challenge for a small zoku, nothing more. It looks like the Great Game has spun off an entirely new quantum collective to catch me.

I suppose I should feel flattered.

I fire up the ship’s Hawking drive and uncloak. The distributed information attack starts immediately. Qupt probes and attack software bore into the ship’s firewall from all directions. It seems they want me alive.

‘Two hundred baseline milliseconds until firewall collapse,’ Carabas says, ‘3.07 subjective minutes at maximum clockspeed.’

I wave the cat aside, sit down at the control keyboard and brush the brass keys gently. The ship’s non-sentient presence is a calm cool armour around my mind.

I can’t help but pause to think for a moment. What if I let them catch me? After what the Aun told me, I feel like I deserve it. It would be easy. I feel the possible vectors now, and there is nothing I can choose that will get me past the Plate and into either trans-Saturnian space to flee or into the planet’s dense depths to hide. Even tiny course corrections I make provoke an immediate response from the zoku all around. Is this how Mieli felt when she wanted to fight the Hunter swarm?

A quptlink request comes, through the tiny Great Game jewel Dunyazad gave me, safely in its own sandbox. I let Carabas and its agents examine it, and then let it through.

That was very sloppy, dear boy! It’s Barbicane, of course. The qupt comes with an aftershave smell and the echo of hollow brass. Did you think we wouldn’t notice? What have you done to a brand new Plate?

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.