The Causal Angel

19 THE THIEF AND THE ALL-DEFECTOR

I look at the flaming sky and the All-Defector, squeeze the jewel of judgment in my hand and try to think. There is always a way out.

Or is there?

The vir shows us a painfully detailed view of the battle of Saturn. The supramundane world-shell is unravelling. There is a swirling boil on the side of the giant planet that can only be a black hole, shooting up a fountain of X-rays.

Plates have shattered, Strips broken. On the ground, botlets and combat alters pour from Realmgates to resist von Neumann beasts, slow-moving but tenacious creatures that turn any matter into copies of themselves.

The zoku are redirecting mass streams from the undone structures towards the sky as improvised defensive weapons, weaving a dense sheet of iron pellets, each tiny metal flake carrying the kinetic energy of a train. Raions shatter against them like bugs on a windscreen.

Above the Plate of Irem, something strange is happening. There is a raion formation above it – but they seem to be defending the Plate from other Sobornost craft. The Aun are still fighting. But it won’t be enough. All-D is not using Dragons yet, but he will, if he has to.

I look at the Saturnian space beyond the torn fragments of the planet’s rings. The zoku ships have been decimated. The battle for the sunbeam mirrors is almost over, and the perfectly reflective quantum dot structures are aligning to burn away the rest of zoku resistance.

Finally, I can’t take it anymore.

I take a step forward. ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ I hold up the trap jewel. ‘You let me and Matjek go, or I open this, and we find out if you can outplay a Dragon.’

He smiles contemptuously, a cruel expression on a little boy’s face.

‘I know you too well, Jean,’ he says. ‘I can predict your every move. The moment you decide to do it, I will know. Why do you think I let you keep it? I can’t touch it, but I can touch you. The moment you decide to open it, I will erase you. And you would not risk the boy, not now. You have to lie to me much better than that.’ He sits down on the sand and looks up at the battle in the sky again. ‘Not much longer,’ he says.

I look at Joséphine. A prison door, opening. We have danced a long dance, she and I.

‘He is me, isn’t he?’ I say. ‘A Dilemma Prison anomaly, but from a le Flambeur seed. Do you want to lose to me?’

‘I’m not losing, Jean,’ she says. ‘I am winning. You were never the enemy, death was.’ Help me, her eyes say.

‘Matjek,’ I whisper. ‘Do you remember that game we played, back in the Leblanc? The game with time?’

He nods, eyes wide.

It’s worth a try. All-D may control our surroundings, but this vir does come from Matjek’s memories, very close to something he spent centuries in on Earth. And I only need a moment.

‘Let’s play it now.’

Matjek closes his eyes. The air around us becomes viscous and thick. It is difficult to talk.

‘It won’t help,’ Joséphine whispers. ‘It knows you were going to do this. It knows what you are going to do next. It knows everything.’ She smiles, sadly. ‘I’m sorry, Jean. If I had won, I would have wanted you by my side. But it is too late now.’

‘We both know that would never have worked out. But you opened a door for me once, and that buys you a lot of forgiveness.’ I lean closer to her. ‘But if you really want me to forgive you, get the boy out of here. If you get him to Mieli, we may still have a chance.’ I pass her the escape protocol I planted in the guberniya’s firmament. ‘If we could get him to lose control of the vir for just one moment—’

She shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry, Jean. I can’t. I can’t fight him. It’s not even like fighting myself, I’ve done that many times, it’s like fighting a god who sees what you are going to do and is never wrong, who makes moves that force you to do things you don’t want—’

He must have a weakness. Traces, he said. I remember far too well how the Dilemma Prison shaped my mind, made me see the world in a grid of cooperations and defections.

‘What is he? How do I beat him? Give me something I can use!’

Joséphine swallows.

‘He sees what I’m doing,’ Matjek says, his voice strained. ‘He’s breaking through.’

Joséphine runs a shaking hand across the diamonds in her necklace, frantically touching each one. ‘Simulations,’ she says. ‘The All-Defector said it runs simulations to predict what we do, that we can’t even know if we are those simulations.’

I remember the gun, pointed at my head, my double image in the All-Defector’s mirrorshades, just before he pulled the trigger. Always mirrors. And in the small and naked reflection of my memory, there is the faintest glimmer of an idea.

I grab Joséphine’s hand, hard. ‘Remember,’ I tell her. ‘If you have a chance, get out. Promise me you will get him to Mieli.’

‘I promise,’ she whispers.

Time lurches into its normal course. Suddenly, All-D is facing us, looking at Matjek curiously.

‘That was interesting,’ he says. ‘I would like to know how you did that.’

‘Ask your mum,’ Matjek says tartly.

All-D takes a step forward and stretches out a small hand towards Matjek.

‘I think I will take you now,’ he says. ‘It will be interesting to see if you and the Prime are any different.’

I shove Matjek behind me and raise the fake jewel.

‘No,’ I say. ‘If you want to play, play with me.’

The All-Defector looks at me curiously.

‘You know,’ I say, ‘something I often thought about while in the Prison. What would it truly be like to play Prisoner’s Dilemma with myself? Not just a copy, but me. A perfect predictor of what I am going to do. What should I do? Obviously, I should cooperate, since we are going to think of the same things, and make the same decisions. Obviously, I should defect, since no matter what I do, it’s not going to affect what you do. But you will have thought of that as well.

‘Why don’t we find out? Put your money where your mouth is. Let’s make it a formal game.’ I make the jewel dance between my fingers. ‘It should be more or less equivalent to the Dilemma. I decide when and if to open the jewel, and you try to predict it. If you can really be me, the moment I decide to open it, you erase me. Perfect correlation. And if I don’t – well, we are back to where we started.’

‘And what if I just erase you anyway?’

I raise my eyebrows. ‘Well, then you will have been wrong. Surely, that’s a smaller payoff. What do you say?’

‘All right,’ he says. ‘One more Dilemma, for old times’ sake.’

He stretches and blurs and becomes me, in a white tennis shirt, shorts and mirrorshades. ‘All right, loser.’ There is a gun in his hand, a sleek silver automatic pistol. ‘Would you like a gun, too? Or are you happy with your toy?’

Carefully, I summon the chen-gogol whose mind I stole earlier closer to the surface, close enough that I can become it with a simple mental trigger, open the fake jewel with a mental command and unleash the Dragon-thing within.

‘I’m good, thanks.’

‘It would have given you some extra points for style.’

‘Look who’s talking. You lose style points for threatening little boys.’

He raises the gun. ‘I think you and I are playing different games, Jean.’

‘Oh yes. So we are. Boom boom.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Déjà vu.’

I stare at my reflection in his mirrorshades, and think about opening the jewel.

I look for a trigger in my memories.

A boy in the desert, getting caught.

When the first blow lands, I will open it.

The man with the silver watch raises his hand. All-D’s gun hand twitches.

I smile. No. Sitting in a cell, reading a book. When the door opens, I will open the jewel.

No, not that.

Another Prison. Another me. The mirror image of a mirror image. When he pulls the trigger, I will open the jewel.

I can tell he doesn’t like that. His finger tightens on the trigger.

Well. Plenty of memories left. He is caught in the game now, back in the frame of the Prison. Good. Need to keep moving.

I’ll do it

when Mieli breaks the wall of my cell.

when I push the sapphire shard through my hand.

when Raymonde, sitting naked at the piano, plays the first note.

when Isaac shatters the third bottle.

when I reach the end of the Corridor of Birth and Death.

On and on it goes, a thief’s life, random memories and associations. The All-Defector is very still. I can tell it’s working. Theory of mind. Modelling the behaviour of others. I’m trying to create a problem that is Jean le Flambeur-complete, that will require him to run a full simulation of me, not just one, but many and many and many.

The jewel opens

when Xuexue stops smiling.

when I hatch from Sumanguru’s mind.

when the story Tawaddud is telling ends.

when the Collapse begins.

I can’t defeat him alone, but those simulations have to run somewhere in the guberniya, and there is a way out of every box, an escape from every prison. If I do this right, I’ll have a billion chances, and I only need one.

when the first star falls above Noctis Labyrinthus.

when Matjek closes his book.

when the Cannon of the Jannah booms.

when the warmind pulls the trigger—

The All-Defector fires.

Time slows down. The muzzle flash is a flaming flower. The bullet is a slow train, first stop my head, travelling on invisible rails. Is it Matjek? Is he trying to buy me time? But it is too late. The bullet does not matter, it is just the vir’s shorthand for All-D reaching out to end me.

Cracks appear in the All-Defector’s mirrorshades. They spread down to his face. His mindshell shatters, turns into a hole in the vir. He is swallowed by the blind-spot blankness of the firmament beneath.

And replaced by another me, young, dark-haired, grinning.

He reaches out and catches the bullet in mid-air.

The other me holds the bullet up, like a magician.

‘That was quite a gamble,’ he says.

‘Hey. If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?’

‘We still needed a high roll.’

There are other firmament flashes along the beach. More Jean le Flambeurs are arriving. Their faces are all mine, but different, a gallery of past lives and moments. I smile. It is good to see them, for one last time.

I turn to Joséphine and Matjek. ‘Go,’ I tell her. ‘That trick will only work once.’

The other Jeans are doing something to the vir, creating encrypted firmament layers to keep the vir under our control. It’s not going to help us for long: All-D has the entire guberniya under its control.

Time is running out.

‘Jean, you don’t have to—’ Joséphine begins. I cut her off.

‘Yes, I do.’

I kneel and hug Matjek, hard. His hair smells of the sea.

‘Be good, okay? Tell Mieli I said goodbye.’ I squeeze his shoulders, and run out of words again.

I turn to Joséphine. ‘And you. You stay away from Mieli. Leave her alone? Do you understand?’

She nods. I kiss her. Her lips are papery and dry, but there are other kisses beneath them, serpent lips of a goddess that taste of roses and open doors and beginnings. It is hard to let go.

‘He’s coming,’ one Jean says. ‘He is in us,’ the other whispers.

‘Now,’ I tell Joséphine. She and Matjek raise their hands in a silent goodbye, and then they are gone, in a firmament blink.

I turn to the assembled ranks of Jean le Flambeur.

‘How much time do we have?’

The dark-haired young Jean looks at his pocket watch. ‘Twenty seconds,’ he says.

I nod. I don’t have to say anything to them. They already know.

I walk down to the waterline and dig my toes in the warm sand. I cradle the dragon jewel in my hands. I never realised how beautiful it is, shaped like a butterfly, made of liquid light.

The sea sighs and the water pulls back, leaving behind a dark grin of wet sand.

I close my eyes.

When the wave reaches my feet, I will open the jewel.