The Causal Angel

16 THE THIEF AND MIELI

Mieli appears in the pilot’s cabin of the Leblanc, just like she does in my fondest memories: wearing a furious expression.

‘You,’ she hisses. She is how I remember her from Perhonen, a compact woman in a black toga, her only ornament the jewelled chain around her ankle, a gift from an Oortian lover. The sudden rush of familiarity almost makes me embrace her. Still, I keep my distance: we may be in a Realm under my control, and I was prudent enough to delete her weapons when qupting her into the virtual space inside the ship, but Mieli is still one of the most dangerous individuals I know.

I grin. ‘Me. Welcome aboard the Leblanc. As you have probably figured out by now, I didn’t come here to steal Saturn’s ring. I came here to steal you. I have a small Great Game jewel, and managed to slip some ideas into the zoku volition, so I could make sure you were somewhere I could find you. In case you had any ideas from someone called Lenormand, that was me. I had a strangelet bomb set up on Pandora as a distraction. Turns out I didn’t have to use it, thanks to the exceedingly well-timed Sobornost invasion. Tell me, how does it feel to be free?’

Her hands clench and unclench. Then she moves faster than I can react. A silver filigreed blade shimmers into being in her hand, and then its point is inches away from my eyeball, her other hand firmly around my throat. Of course. Zoku enhancements. Adapt to Realms. How silly of me to overlook that.

‘Wait,’ I gasp.

‘What makes you think I want to hear what you have to say? Get me back out there. Right now. I have a war to fight.’

This is going better than I thought. At least I still have a tongue.

‘What did they tell you? That you would be free to leave any time? They lie about that, you know. I had to help you. The only way to do it was to break the whole system, to give you back your free will.’ My eyes widen. ‘Or … don’t tell me you are still working for the pellegrini? I didn’t see that one coming. What happened to the copy in your head, by the way?’

She throws me to the floor. I sit up slowly, massaging my throat.

‘She is gone,’ Mieli hisses. ‘Just like the entire Supra City will be soon. What in the Dark Man’s name did you do to the volition system?’

I smile sadly. ‘The Spooky-zoku and the Great Game have known about this for some time, but they have worked very hard to keep it a secret. It’s the reason why they destroyed Mars. I’ll give you the crib notes: the Collapse was caused by quantum mechanics breaking down. It turns out there is a bound for the size of entangled quantum states: create anything bigger than that, and things get even more crazy than usual. The whole zoku quantum jewel system has been teetering close to the boundary a while. So I just gave it a little push.

‘You may have noticed that there has been an increase in the number of spam zokus recently. I have been generating them algorithmically, with Sobornost-derived gogol minds. It’s amazing what you can do if you look past ideological differences and combine technologies in creative ways.’

I stagger upright. Mieli is standing with her back turned to me, still opening and closing the fingers of one hand, rotating the Realm-knife in the other.

‘As I said, I did not anticipate the invasion. But Mieli, it will be fine, the zoku have dealt with Sobornost before, this is some power move in the civil war, Joséphine getting desperate since her scheme with the jewel went wrong, surely. The zoku are always at their best when pushed into a corner. And what do you care, anyway? Have you gone native? Don’t tell me you have. I was going to take you home. They’ve done too good a job on you, Mieli. We are on our way to Oort, I thought that’s what you wanted, Perhonen said you missed it.’ My voice breaks.

‘Shut up, Jean. Don’t you dare to speak my ship’s name,’ she says in a thin voice, without turning around. ‘And it’s not some expeditionary force from a civil war, you idiot. It’s the entire Sobornost. It’s your All-Defector, controlling all of them. It has come for the Kaminari jewel. And you have just served the prize on a platter.’

I feel hollow and fragile, as if I was made of glass. Somewhere, I can hear my other self from the Gallery, laughing. We are not that different.

Mieli turns to look at me.

‘Why couldn’t you die with her, you bastard!’

My head spins. The All-Defector. I was wondering what Joséphine’s backup plan was. I remember facing it in the glass cell of the Dilemma Prison. The thing that never cooperates and gets away with it. An anomaly forged in the crucible of endless Dilemma iterations, something the Archons never expected, not so much a gogol as a viral algorithm. It pretended to me, and I trusted it. In a guberniya, it would go through Sobornost minds like a scythe through wheat. And it wants the Kaminari jewel?

My mistake is so deep I can’t even see the bottom.

The Sobornost is going to wipe out Supra City. I took away their only advantage. I remember Sirr, blue and golden, freshly reborn on the Irem Plate. I remember kissing the sisters’ hands, how they smelled of henna and perfume. I betrayed them, again. I broke my promise.

Am I going to destroy everything I touch?

‘No, this not my fault, it must have done something to me, planted an idea about the Wei bound.’ I know it’s nonsense, but the words come out, and I can’t stop. ‘It planned everything, ever since we met in the Prison, I could see it in its eyes, like a thinking mirror, it knew I would try to free you.’

The words bounce and shatter in my head, and for the first time in my life I know what it is like to want for the silence and the black that only truedeath brings.

She slaps me. Even in the Realm, it stings. I lean on the control organ of the ship to keep upright. The knife gleams in her other hand, like a promise.

‘That’s a Realm-knife, Mieli,’ I whisper. ‘It will work even here. It will hurt me. Why don’t you just do it? I deserve it. Come on. It was my fault Perhonen died.’

She drops the knife. It bounces off the crystal of the round observation window and makes a tinkling sound.

‘No,’ she says. ‘It was mine.’

Mieli stares at the thief. He is pale and shaking. There is grief in his eyes, and a death wish. She has seen that look before, in the mirror.

‘I could have stopped all this,’ she says slowly. ‘If I had let you and the pellegrini go ahead.’

‘I doubt it,’ the thief says. ‘And you were right. We need to draw lines somewhere. The jewel was a fake, and I think All-D would have gotten out anyway. You did the only thing you could.’ He sighs. ‘Matjek is here. The child chen gogol from the desert. If we survive this, maybe you’d like to meet him.’

She closes her eyes. ‘Maybe. I only wish I could have been there, with her, in the end.’

The thief takes a faltering step forward. ‘This was the last thing I saw,’ he says. ‘Please don’t kill me yet. She sent you this.’

He kisses her forehead. She sees butterflies, burning, swirling in the form of a face, the ship’s face she only saw in the alinen. Tell her that I love her. Look after her. For me. Promise.

There is a memory of a kiss on her lips. It tastes of fire and ashes. And then there is only black.

It is the first time I see Mieli cry. I don’t dare to touch her. I sit with my hands in my lap.

The abyss in me is still hungry, but at least for a moment, I manage to hang on to its edge.

I summon the cat avatar of the ship and tell it to start decelerating. It’s going to take a while: I’ve engaged the ship’s Hawking drive, and we are already well out of Saturnian space. Then I qupt a self-destruct order to my zoku botnet. It may be too late to form a new war zoku, but it won’t hurt. Finally, I order the cat to start gathering all the sensory data and chatter it can from the ongoing battle around Saturn.

When I’m done, I realise that Mieli is quiet again.

‘We are on our way back,’ I say. ‘And once my signal gets there, the volition system should be coming back online, too. It will take time: I just hope it’s not too late.’ I pause. ‘I guess we both know what she would say about this.’ That we are both fools. And we need to fix the mistakes we have made.

Mieli nods and gets up.

‘Come on,’ I say and offer her my hand. ‘We can’t do anything more right now. I have a fast-time Realm, so we are not in a hurry. And I think we could both use a drink.’

The thief takes Mieli through a silver gate to a Realm that is a ship – a real ship, an ancient, sea-going vessel, with people in elaborate, heavy clothing. It is the first time she has been in an ocean-going vessel. Usually, planetary surfaces disturb her, but the fresh sea air clears her head a little, and the sound of the sea is soothing. She looks at the foamy line the ship draws in the dark surface of the sea. It is night, and the ship’s lights make blurry reflections in the dark water, mirroring the round yellow moon in the velvety sky.

They sit in deck chairs by the railing in the bow of the ship. A man in a white uniform brings them two glasses.

‘The best single malt in the Universe, or so I’m told,’ the thief says. ‘To your health.’ His hand is still shaking. He downs half of his drink with one gulp and closes his eyes. Mieli tastes hers carefully. At first, it’s just liquor with a smoky overtone, but as she holds it in her mouth, it blooms into something warm, soft and gentle, with a final endnote of a spice she does not recognise.

It mingles with the lingering taste of Perhonen’s last kiss.

They drink in silence for a while.

Only an echo of Mieli’s anger remains. She feels tired and helpless. She grits her teeth. The thief was right. Supra City may be fighting, but why should she care? She fought the zoku herself, in the past. Surely, it is just the tugging of the quantum chains of the zoku jewels, wrapped around her mind. She sips the strange liquor again.

Zinda didn’t have to tell me the truth. But she did. Everyone else has always lied to me.

‘So, is this who Jean le Flambeur is, now?’ she says aloud, just to brush away the thought. She pauses. ‘Did you really truekill someone to steal this ship?’

‘What? No! You have been listening to Barbicane, haven’t you? There may have been some property damage, but that’s all. It was he who did it, to protect his cover. He’s a callous bastard. I’ve never been very fond of killing, true or temporary. It’s not very elegant.’ He looks at Mieli curiously. ‘You have been busy.’

Mieli shrugs.

‘To be honest, I have been thinking of retiring,’ the thief says. ‘For real, this time. Getting you out was going to be my last job. But it sounds like we are going to have to think of something else now.’ He leans forward in his chair. ‘What about you? What have you been doing since you fed me to the Hunter?’

Between careful tastes of her drink, Mieli tells the thief her story. When she describes her encounter with the All-Defector and Joséphine’s sacrifice, the thief’s eyes widen.

‘Why would she do that? I know her pretty well, and I would have thought she considers you more expendable than even a low-level gogol of herself.’ He looks at Mieli. ‘But if she was more afraid of you being taken by All-D than of a copydeath—’ He squeezes the bridge of his nose.

‘Perhonen did tell me your story, you know. No offence, but to me, there was always something strange about the way Sydän led you to Venus, and how you found the pellegrini. As if it was meant to happen.

‘You see, Joséphine doesn’t just find people, she makes them. She did that to me, when I was young. She needed an agent she could trust, so she got me out of Santé Prison and moulded me into one.’ He looks at the sky and smiles at a distant memory. ‘Of course, it did not exactly work out like that, but that’s how it started, between us.

‘I recently … learned a little about the Kaminari jewel. To get it to accept you, you need to wish for something altruistic and something that is constant across your possible future selves. A singular drive, perhaps. Something all-consuming. Like saving someone from a black hole’s event horizon.’ The thief looks at Mieli. His eyes are bright.

‘I think Joséphine needed me to steal the jewel. But she needed you to use it. She needed someone who wanted, wanted in a way that the Kaminari jewel would accept. And she did not want her instrument to fall into All-D’s hands.’

Mieli stares at the thief.

‘That’s insane!’

‘Is it? But it does lead to conclusions that you might not like. Can I see that chain you wear, the one that your friend Sydän gave you?’ He smiles sheepishly. ‘I promise not to steal it, this time.’

Frowning, Mieli whispers to her ankle chain, opens it and hands it to the thief. It spirals into the air from his hand and rotates, like the DNA of some strange crystal animal.

‘Now, the nice thing about Realms is that they try to preserve the quantum information contained in anything that’s brought in here. It’s a good way to study things. I should have had a closer look at this before, but you always made it clear it would not be good for my health.’

A spime opens around the chain, a digital shadow flickering with annotations. The stones in it are simple Oortian smartcoral, made with whispers to resemble the Great Work Mieli and Sydän built, a long time ago. The thief frowns and zooms in. The jewels become first a crystal mountain range, then a grid of interlocking molecules. It looks familiar, and it takes a moment for Mieli to realise why. Prometheus. It’s like the surface of Prometheus. Too regular.

‘Hidden picotech,’ the thief says. ‘Probably something Joséphine stole from the zoku: she was never too concerned with remaining ideologically pure. Now, you would have to ask your zoku friends what this thing does, but my guess would be that it is some sort of volition analysis engine, like the zoku jewels. What makes Mieli, daughter of Karhu tick? What does she want?’ The thief sighs. ‘Mieli, I hate to say it, but I think your Sydän was working for Joséphine from the day you met her.’

Mieli stands up and grabs the chain. She stares down at the thief, who leans back in his chair, a sad smile on his face. A part of her wants to strike him again, but she has no rage, no strength left.

‘You are lying,’ she whispers. ‘This is a trick. You are trying to—’

‘Mieli,’ the thief says softly, ‘what do you think I am trying to do, exactly? I have nothing to gain from this.’ He pauses. ‘I’m trying to keep a promise. I’m trying to tell you things you need to hear.’

He looks at his empty glass and gets up. ‘Not exactly my strong suit, I know. I’ll leave you alone for a while. Come find me in the pilot’s cabin when you are done. I’m going to check on how things are going in Supra City.’

Mieli watches him walk away and disappear in a swirl of silver dust. She wraps her toga tighter around her and walks to the railing. The wind has picked up, and jagged glassy waves crash against the ship’s sides. She holds the jewelled chain in her hand. It can’t be true. But a part of her knows it is, a pattern that is as inevitable as the next note in a song. She tries to think of Sydän, but can’t hold on to her face. Mieli’s thoughts of her dissolve like Sydän’s face, erased by the data wind from the singularity on Venus.

Made for a purpose, Zinda said. She thinks of the glowing jewels the zoku girl laid down onto the grass, for Mieli, pieces of herself, one by one. What a fool I have been. A sudden longing blooms in her chest. And fear, a memory of the horror on Hektor, the non-face. She imagines it swallowing Saturn.

She squeezes Sydän’s chain in her hand so hard the edges of the stones dig into her flesh.

‘Kuutar and Ilmatar, not this one,’ she whispers, looking at the yellow moon. ‘Give me the strength to save her.’

Mieli replaces the chain around her ankle. It is cold from the sea air. It is good to keep reminders of your mistakes.

She stands in the bow of the ship for a moment, looking at the horizon. White waves rise and fall against the hull, like beating wings.

It is also good to finally know where she is going.

She whispers one last prayer to the moon and goes to find the thief.

I recognise a certain look on Mieli’s face when she returns. The last time I saw it was on Earth, when she fought a mercenary army and the wildcode desert by herself.

She says nothing, simply stands next to me and studies the spimescape, the hopeless tangle trying to represent millions of raions and zoku ships around Saturn. At least the guberniyas are obvious: all seven of them, positioned in Lagrange points, armed and dangerous, as only planet-sized zeusbrains can be.

‘It is difficult to tell what is going on. The particle storm is too dense, and I can’t access the Great Game intelligence network. But there is a lot of structural damage to Supra City.’ I swallow, thinking of Sirr on Irem. ‘A lot of strangelet events, a couple of Hawking blasts, nothing bigger than that yet. But it’s only a matter of time.’

Mieli narrows her eyes.

‘Here is what we are going to do,’ she says. ‘We are going to get to the Kaminari jewel before the All-Defector does. We are going to steal it from the Great Game Zoku. And then we are going to put things right.’

I smile. ‘Well, that’s a thought.’ Stealing the fire of the gods, that sort of thing. ‘Are you sure the Great Game won’t use it?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Do you know where it is?’

Mieli frowns. ‘I … heard something in the Great Game’s Realm. They talked about a Planck brane.’

I take a deep breath. ‘Oh my. They’ve hidden it in a parallel universe.’

I should have let my other self tell me his plan. Mental note: never interrupt a villain who is monologuing.

I grit my teeth. If he could come up with it, so can I. I massage my temples.

The Planck brane. Of course. The ekpyrotic cannon. The idea leads to others, like dominoes falling.

I turn to Mieli. ‘All right, I have a plan. Step one is to persuade the Father of Dragons to stop sulking.’

Mieli raises her eyebrows. ‘And step two?’

‘You’ll see. We may have to destroy Saturn in order to save it.’ I get up. ‘Come on. I’m going to introduce you to Matjek Chen. You’ve already met, of course, but he has grown up quite a bit since then.’

I take a deep breath in the main corridor. I have been putting of talking to Matjek for a while, but the time has come. And finally, I actually know what to say to him. This time, the bookshop vir opens easily as Mieli and I walk through the gate.

The boy is not sitting in his usual spot. The vir is silent, except for the quiet whisperings of the stories of Sirr.

‘Matjek! Where are you? I’ve brought an old friend to see you.’

There is no answer. I open the admin interface to the vir, make it transparent to my gaze. He is nowhere to be found.

I summon the cat avatar. It appears obediently.

‘Where is Matjek Chen?’ I ask. It cocks its head and looks at me with its glassy eyes.

‘Young Master ran away,’ it says in its whirring voice. ‘He said to tell you he’s gone to find himself.’

I can’t suppress a groan. So, it’s Young Master now, is it? I should have kept a closer eye on him. I access the ship’s records of our passage past the F-ring and in the vicinity of the Sobornost fleet. They confirm my suspicions: a thoughtwisp was launched without my knowledge when we were passing the orbit of Rhea.

‘Is the copy of the Kaminari jewel the previous Prime acquired still on board?’

‘Negative,’ the cat says. ‘The Young Master took it with him.’

I close my eyes and press both fists against my forehead, hard. ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’

‘What is it?’ Mieli asks.

‘Matjek has gone to kill the Chen-Prime.’

For the past weeks, Matjek has been moving through the Leblanc’s systems like a ghost. I review spimescape snapshots, watch him work his way up in the privilege hierarchy, until he has access to the small space where the few physical objects onboard the ship are stored, wrapped in q-dot gel. I watch a smartmatter shell form around the fake Kaminari jewel. He fuses it with a thoughtwisp and launches it – and himself – at just the right moment, when the Leblanc is carrying out the high-G manoeuvre of grabbing Mieli.

‘Why in the Dark Man’s name would he do that?’ Mieli asks.

‘He found out about what he became when he grew up,’ I say. ‘Doesn’t matter how.’ I tell her about the weapon the Great Game planned to use on the chens. ‘He has gone to detonate it under Matjek Chen-Prime’s ass.’

Mieli shrugs. ‘I’m sorry for the boy,’ she says. ‘But this is war, and if it works, he could save us all a lot of trouble.’

‘Except that as you found out, all the higher chens are now infected with All-D. Matjek doesn’t know that. And he is just a boy. He is not ready for this.’ I close my eyes. ‘I’m going after him.’

‘What?’

‘You are the one who almost got us both killed to protect this boy’s innocence, remember?’ I try to keep my voice cold. ‘Besides, we need him.’

As we speak, I track the trajectory of the thoughtwisp. It went straight at the main body of the Sobornost fleet. Right at the chen guberniya. I can launch a faster wisp: I don’t have to worry about extra payloads like the fake jewel. Still, he will get there a few seconds before I do. That might as well be an eternity. Even the microseconds in the Leblanc’s fast-time vir might make a difference.

‘Need him for what?’ Mieli asks.

I take a deep breath. ‘We need two things to qupt to the Planck brane. One: matter that is entangled with something over there. That will have to be your department. By the sound of it, the Spooky-zoku have something like it. Two: we need a modulated gravitational wave source. We are made of stuff that is stuck on this brane, but gravity sees the higher bulk dimensions. Make a big enough bang and its gravitational echo will carry there.

‘The Gun Club Zoku have a device called an ekpyrotic cannon, Matjek and I saw it when we stole the Leblanc. Assuming Iapetus is still intact, we will need it. Matjek got into their gunscape virs last time, and I’m certain he left back doors. I don’t think we can get in without him, not this time. I managed to piss Barbicane off pretty royally.’

Mieli raises an eyebrow. ‘I can relate,’ she says, dryly. Then she grows serious. ‘Jean, this is the worst plan I have ever heard. You can’t go up against the chens and the All-Defector alone. The last time you tried, they caught you. I’ll come with you.’

‘No,’ I say firmly. ‘If we don’t make it, you will at least have a chance with the zoku. And I have more tricks up my sleeve than last time. You take the Leblanc to Saturn, and try to get us some Planck brane entanglement. Matjek and I will meet you there.’

‘Very well.’ Mieli looks down. ‘But how in Dark Man’s name am I supposed to get the stuff? I can’t just go knocking on the Spooky-Zoku’s door.’

I think for a moment. ‘I trust you, Mieli. You will find a way. But maybe this will help.’ I pass her Isidore’s last qupt that contains the Kaminari’s message. ‘This is the last mystery that Isidore Beautrelet solved. It shows you how to make a viral zoku. Maybe it will help.’

Mieli accepts it, her mouth a line of grim resolve.

‘Kuutar and Ilmatar go with you,’ she says quietly. ‘And Jean? Try to come back. I’m tired of losing friends. And I can’t find the words for death-songs anymore.’

I stare at her, astonished. Then I give her a grin. ‘I know what you mean. Don’t worry. I have a feeling it will be a high roll, this time.’

I take her strong, small hand and squeeze it hard. Her fingers are cold. ‘I have been many things, but I have never been an Oortian’s friend before. It makes me proud. Take care of yourself, Mieli. It’s been fun.’

With that, I pass the admin rights of the Leblanc over to her, think a thoughtwisp into being in the ship’s mass driver, and launch myself at the Sobornost fleet.