The Causal Angel

Epilogue

Joséphine Pellegrini the Prime watches the war from her guberniya, drinking wine. She misses her temple on Venus. That seems like a more appropriate distance from these messy proceedings, in any case.

And she has many rediscovered emotions to file away in her Library. Like grief. She raises a lonely glass to Jean le Flambeur. Still, there are many more where that one came from. Perhaps it is time to ask Sasha for a favour and visit the Dilemma Prison again.

Joséphine sighs. It is almost time to get ready for another war. Her brothers and sisters are about to wipe out Supra City with their shiny sunbeam. Shame, really. They will have to come up with a new and better common enemy. Something less risky than the All-Defector.

Something outside the Solar System, perhaps? She will have to branch gogols to think about it.

There are still things to settle with the hsien-kus and the vasilevs: the cooperation the All-Defector forced upon them did not help them to put aside their grievances with her. But they have expended far more of their forces against the zokus than she did, and even without Chen support, she has a much better chance against them, this time. The others will be distracted. Chitragupta will spend millennia combing through the remains of the zoku Realms. Sasha will play with his new toys. And sumangurus are little more than weapons, just asking for targets to be pointed at.

She sips her perfect chardonnay, the product of millions of iterated worlds and taster gogols. Perfection. So hard to come by, so hard to make.

Oh, yes, the future looks bright.

Saturn flashes white, a tear in the skin of reality, the lightning wingbeat of an angel. The sunbeam, she begins to think, before the frantic cries from her gogols come in.

Saturn is gone. A strange gravitational shadow remains, holding the Sobornost fleet in orbit around empty space. But the planet itself and Supra City are nowhere to be seen.

Joséphine stands up in her Prime aspect, steps into the minds of a billion gogols, replays the event from every possible angle. Gravitational anomalies. Dense radiation, scattered all over the System. Quantum disturbances in brains and hardware.

The Spike. It was just like the Spike.

All the gogols in her guberniya sense her rising emotion, and cower in fear, gripped by the iron fingers of xiao.

Then Joséphine Pellegrini starts laughing, laughing in a chorus of billions: a thundering sound, full of joy and pride.

The sky of the new world is endless, as is everything else, but Mieli does not mind. The suns are warm, and she is eating a peach. Or a half of it: Zinda is nibbling at the other.

‘To be completely honest,’ the zoku girl says, ‘I don’t see the attraction.’ She looks at the stone in her hand with puzzled distaste.

‘Paris the man gave it to the prettiest goddess, I was once told,’ Mieli says. ‘It’s a compliment.’

‘Oh!’ Zinda says, and kisses her. ‘A story is always better than a piece of fruit!’

Mieli smiles to herself.

For a while, they lie side by side. Supra City is in the sky, healing, but they are in a small world of their own. Here, reality is like väki, more malleable, and you don’t need machines to make Realms. Yet, it holds surprises, just enough so you don’t forget the razor blade within.

‘Do you think they will follow us?’ Zinda asks.

‘Why would they? They have a Universe of their own now,’ Mieli says. Another smile rises to her lips, unbidden. ‘Besides, I have a feeling they are going to be busy.’

She gets up and takes Zinda’s hand.

‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I want to fly.’

The Archon is happy.

It has been guarding the Dilemma Prison for a long time, but there are always new patterns in the infinite grid of cooperation and defection, always new flavours to discover. Its most recent hobby is looking for a Prison-complete pattern that would allow it to build the Prison itself out of flashes of the prisoners’ guns. Finding the right Eden state should only take a few subjective millennia.

Thus, the Archon does not care much for the distant wars of the Founders, and when the radiation burst comes from Saturn, it merely changes the error correction schemes of the Prison’s computronium to compensate. To pay attention to the inner workings of subatomic particles would be to follow the teachings of the quantum filth.

Inside one of the Prison’s many, many cells of glass, a man sits, reading a book, or trying to. His body dreads the next game with guns. His mind drifts to memories of a boy in a desert, to a choice he made, to the paths he did not take. They are the kinds of thoughts that come to you in a prison where nothing ever changes.

Harsh, sudden sunlight falls on a blank page of the book. The glare hurts his eyes. He takes blue sunglasses from his pocket, puts them on and looks up.

There is a door, open, white and bright.

He puts down the book, gets up and walks through it, whistling as he goes. He is surprised, but only a little. For in the end, there is always a way out.