The Causal Angel

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.

‘What in Verne’s name do you think you are doing?’ she says.

She is a honey blonde wearing a rather skimpy version of a pilot’s outfit: a short tan flying jacket that leaves her midriff bare, heavy boots, a cap, a scarf and a fighter pilot’s goggles. Her black eyebrows accentuate the cold beauty of her triangular face. Her ruby mouth is a tight line.

‘What am I doing? What am I doing? Acquiring an important historical artefact!’ Barbicane looks at her incredulously. ‘Chekhova dear, this is most irregular! You are offending our guest! Raoul here is a gentleman!’

‘I know who he is, Elder,’ Chekhova says. ‘The real question is, do you?’

I became Raoul d’Andrezy a subjective week earlier, in the Wardrobe’s vir, four days before the Bob Howard reached Saturn.

I sit at our usual table, a thought-mirror in front of me, a floating glass disc that is actually a vir construct, plugged into my dorsal stream. My face in it morphs from the slightly greying man with pencil eyebrows, hollow temples and Peter Lorre eyes into something darker, younger, more rough-hewn. The face alone is not enough, of course – my minions are also laying down a carefully designed data trail – but it’s a start.

‘What are you doing?’ Matjek asks.

I frown at him. It took a long time to clean up the vir. During my brief absence, Matjek recreated large swathes of Narnia faithfully, stretching the meagre computational capabilities of the Wardrobe to its limits. I have spent a lot of valuable time erasing islands inhabited by one-legged people and chasing down centaurs and talking mice with swords. I’m still not sure I got them all, nor do I fully understand how the boy did it. But given that his future self was the architect of Sobornost’s firmament, I should not be surprised that he cracked the Sobornost-style vir I built on top of the ship’s ancient hardware. And I suspect he had help from the Aun.

I have done my best to lock him in a sandbox, and since then he has been sulking quietly, watching the blue-tinted landscape outside our virtual window, the craggy, multicoloured shapes of the zero-g coral reefs that drift past us and the smooth-skinned, whale-tailed humanoids that dart between them, leaving trails of silvery bubbles. The Wang bullet and the Wardrobe are now safely in the watery belly of The Rorqual’s Revenge, a cetamorph ship, en route to Iapetos.

‘I’m getting ready to be someone else,’ I say. My voice is colder than I intended, but Matjek does not seem to care.

‘Why?’

I run my fingers along the surface of the mirror. My mind feels as smooth and blank. I had to use my metaself to calm down after Isidore’s qupt came. I haven’t been able to analyse the data he sent attached to his final message: it was a mess of quantum information, and the Wardrobe does not have the hardware to untangle it.

‘Everybody does it sometimes.’

Somewhere, deep underneath, I want to get drunk. I want to scream. I want to smash the thought-mirror into a million pieces. I want to tear the vir itself all the way down to firmament. My temples hurt.

‘I don’t,’ Matjek says. ‘I like being me.’

‘Even when you play war with the Green Soldier?’ I ask softly. ‘Or when you wanted to be the Silence?’

‘That’s just pretending.’

‘Well, this is the same. You just have to pretend hard enough.’

I adjust the shape of the nose a bit. I have met Barbicane before, and so I need to pitch my disguise carefully, close enough to my self-image to avoid cognitive dissonance

‘So, who are you going to be?’ Matjek asks.

I tell the vir to change my mindshell. Broader shoulders, a more military bearing, a swarthier complexion, a flashy suit and a vest with golden chains. I used to be rather pleased with Raoul. He is based on an identity I previously used on Mars.

Matjek’s eyes widen.

‘This is Raoul d’Andrezy,’ I say with a new voice. ‘An antiques dealer.’

A matchstick smell comes to me, unbidden. Thaddeus’s breath. The first glass of wine I drank with Raymonde. Damn these old dream virs. Not enough detail to have a real drink, just memories.

I shake my head. Pretend harder, Jean.

‘He looks boring,’ Matjek says. ‘Why would you want to be him?’

‘Being boring is the point. He has to look trustworthy. A bit weary. Experienced. Somebody competent. Somebody who has seen things. Somebody who is tired and just wants a comfortable life, who is ready to bend the rules a little bit to get it.’

‘That is boring. But I liked how you changed. Show me how.’

‘No. I think you have played with virs enough for a while.’ I restore my mindshell to normal and put the mirror on the table. ‘Why don’t you—’ Fatally, I pause, trying to think of something for the boy to do.

‘It’s boring here. You are boring. The fish-men are boring. I want to change, too.’

‘I told you, that’s not going to—’

‘I want to I want to I want to!’

The structure of the vir ripples. Matjek starts changing. His features flow into the first face in the mirror, a caricature me.

‘Look!’ he shouts with glee. ‘I did it all by myself!’

The pain in my temples turns into white noise. Something dark and scaly opens its claws in my chest. I raise my hand. There is a flash of fear in Matjek’s eyes. I bring my fist down onto the mirror, roaring the bloody Founder code of Sumanguru the warlord in my mind – rust and fire and blood and dead children.

The vir time stops. Matjek freezes, his normal mindshell restored. The mirror fragments float in the air, glittering and sharp and myriad, like the Highway ships.

The rage drains from me. The echoes of Sumanguru’s Code in my mind die. The look of terror on the boy’s face makes me turn away.

Almost immediately, the firmament software running the vir does something unexpected. It accesses a hidden cache and executes a complex command that I don’t entirely follow. I take a deep breath.

He has already been there.

Matjek starts moving again, faster and faster. In an instant, he is darting between the shelves and around the table faster than I can follow, a flickering grey blur.

‘Matjek, wait!’ I match our clockspeeds.

He stands in front of me, tears running down his face.

‘Don’t be angry, Prince,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry about Narnia. You went away, and I didn’t know what to do. You said I could help Mieli, too, but you are doing it all on your own.’

I conjure a silk handkerchief from my sleeve and wipe his face. ‘I know, Matjek. I should not have gotten angry. It’s not your fault. Something … something bad happened and I have been thinking about it too much.’

‘What was it?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ I smile. ‘But that was a nice trick you did, just now, with time. Can you tell me how it’s done?’

He shrugs. ‘I used to play time games a lot, on the beach, when I got bored. You always need to have a trigger like that that speeds you up if you get too slow by accident, so you don’t blink and miss the end of the world.’

Uh oh.

My plan was to sandbox the Wardrobe’s vir and slow Matjek’s clockspeed down while I was off doing the Iapetos job so that he would not even notice my absence. Clearly, that is not going to work. I could try to design a more secure vir, but I don’t have enough time, and I am starting to doubt that any construct I could come up with would even hold him.

I look at Matjek, at the thin dark hair that will go grey too early, at his snub of a nose and serious mouth, and there is an odd, warm tingle in my chest.

I need a babysitter. It would be so much easier if I could just leave a copy of myself here. Unfortunately, Joséphine made sure I’m a singleton white male now, unable to spawn off gogols of myself, and I can’t trust a partial to keep up with Matjek. The people of Sirr are compressed data, and until I complete my mission, I can’t bring them back. I don’t dare to bring in anybody from outside, either: Matjek is hot property, an early gogol of a Sobornost Founder.

That leaves—

I sigh. There are no two ways about it. I need to talk to the Aun.

Carefully, I gather the shards of the thought-mirror and put them onto the table. ‘I’ll tell you what. Here is a puzzle for you. If you manage to put the mirror back together, you get to keep it. I need to go and take care of something, but I won’t be gone long, and after I come back, I’m going to make some hot chocolate. How does that sound?’

Feigning obedience, Matjek sits back down and starts moving the glass fragments around with one forefinger.

‘Be careful, they are sharp,’ I tell him.

I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head as I walk towards the back of the shop and the many volumes of Sirr.

It is dark there, and the only light comes from the faint silver lettering on the spines of the night-blue books. Everything feels soft, dreamlike: around the edges, the vir forgoes a detailed physics simulation and exploits the brain’s ability to lie to itself. In the narrow passage between the looming shelves, I feel like an insect inside a book, pressed between porous, heavy pages.

I swallow. I don’t really understand the Aun. They were let loose in the Collapse – or long before that, by Matjek, if you believe what they say. They are pure self-loops, living memes that inhabit minds as parasites. They claim that I am one of them, their lost brother. I’m not sure I believe them. I never claimed to be a god. But the simple fact is they make my skin crawl. And the way you talk to them is by letting them become you.

I run my fingers along the books until I find the right one. I open it, and they rise from the pages, the never-human gods of Earth, serpents of light, coiling and uncoiling, illuminating the stacks around me with a fluttering will-o-the-wisp glow.

I close my eyes and let them in.

The one that comes to me is called the Chimney Princess. She speaks to me in a voice that sounds like my own inside my head.

Hello, brother.

I am not your brother.

Have you come to join us?

No.

Have you come to deliver our children to our new home?

No. Not yet. I massage my temples. Sirr. The last city on Earth, snatched from the jaws of Dragons. A child is one thing, an entire civilisation another. I promised Tawaddud that I would save them. Only promises left. I grit my teeth.

Spinning lies is what you do, brother. We hope you have not forgotten your promise.

I haven’t. You will have your new home, and so will the people of Sirr. But there is something I need to do first.

Something you need to steal.

Yes. I have to leave the vir. So I need you to look after the boy. Distract him. Tell him stories. Keep him occupied.

What are you stealing, this time? Memories? Stories? Souls? Dreams?

That’s none of your business.

How can we be sure you will come back? You left us before.

Because I keep my promises.

They rise in my mind, all of them, the Kraken and the Green Soldier and the Princess, thunderstorms made of thought that wrap tendrils of lightning around my brain.

PROMISES ARE GOOD, they roar. FEAR IS BETTER. WE ARE ALWAYS HERE. WE ARE ALWAYS LISTENING. DO NOT BETRAY US.

I fall to my knees. The Aun leave my mind, and the dusty darkness surrounds me. The sudden silence is deafening. Even in my dreamlike mindshell, I shake all over.

‘You know,’ I say aloud, ‘you are starting to convince me about the whole Flower Prince thing. Family really is the worst.’

The Princess speaks again, softly this time, like rain.

We will weave dreams for our father, as we did once before, long ago. But the time will come when he, too, has to wake up.

‘Yes. But not yet.’

‘His name is not Raoul d’Andrezy,’ Chekhova says, looking at me pointedly. ‘Isn’t that right … Colonel?’

I smile sheepishly.

‘Elder, this is Colonel Sparmiento. From the Teddy Bears’ Picnic Company. A Sirr-employed mercenary group. On Earth. When your volition push came, I was tasked to check his background. It turned out to be fabricated.’

Barbicane says nothing but his eyes widen.

‘So, Colonel,’ Chekhova continues. ‘How about you tell us your story.’ She crosses her arms and looks at me down her nose like a very cross, hot schoolteacher.

I spread my hands.

‘What can I say? You caught me. I was with the Teddy Bears. We were not all ursomorphs, although it helped if you liked honey. My apologies for the charade, but I would prefer if my former employers were kept in the dark regarding my whereabouts. The Bears are many things, but they are not forgiving. And we … parted ways rather suddenly.’

Conning the zoku is a fine art. But if there is one weakness they have, it’s that they always think everything is solvable, that problems are obvious and neat, like in games – and if you make them think they have succeeded, they tend to give up. My identity had another identity concealed within it, a rather more solid one, backed up with the data Mieli collected when she joined the ranks of the Teddy Bears. You can still break Colonel Sparmiento if you poke at him hard enough, but I’m betting that Chekhova won’t. Especially now that she is trying to make an impression on an Elder.

‘So, you are a deserter,’ she says. ‘And how exactly did you come by a Verne cannon bullet that is more than two hundred years old?’

‘As you are no doubt aware, things are a little bit … restless on Earth at the moment.’

‘If by restless, you mean eaten by recursively self-improving non-eudaimonistic agents, then, yes, I am aware. Professional interest.’ There is a hungry look in Chekhova’s eyes.

‘Well, my unit and I started to smell trouble a few weeks ago, before the chens came. We made it out with the bullet and some other goods from the wildcode desert. We may have taken some liberties with following the chain of command, if you take my meaning. But at least we got out. Most of the Teddy Bears were not so fortunate.’

I look at Barbicane. ‘Were you planning on offering us a drink? I’d like to toast to my comrades. Poor bastards: but I was proud to serve with them. And some of them left family behind, family who could do with a new start in Supra City.’ The last part is true as well: one of Mieli’s fallen squadmates had cubs in the Belt. ‘Especially now that the Sobornost has decided to eat everything inside the orbit of Mars. That’s why we came here. But I guess it’s all for nothing now.’

Barbicane lets out a bellows-like sigh. ‘Well, Colonel! That’s quite a story! But you are being a good sport! Perhaps we can still work something out.’

Barbicane hovers from his chair to a copper globe showing an engraved old-fashioned map of Earth, but with a strangely tilted axis – the Antarctic is near the equator. He opens it deftly with his manipulator hand, takes out a bottle of a dark amber liquor and three glasses, and pours. He looks at me seriously.

‘Names are not important! For us, only entanglement matters. The spime you gave us was impressive. I’m still interested!’

‘On the contrary,’ Chekhova says. ‘If the Colonel’s item is genuine and came from Earth recently, we should stay as far away from it as possible.’

Barbicane raises his eyebrows.

‘You know how closely we are being watched by the Great Game Zoku these days,’ Chekhova says. ‘What do you think they will do if we acquire something that might be infested with Dragons?’

Barbicane purses his lips.

‘True,’ he says. ‘Damn their eyes!’

‘The Great Game? What does she mean?’

‘A guardian zoku! Protects us from existential threats, or so they claim! Rose to power after the Spike.’ Barbicane’s face grows dark. ‘They converted some junior Club members, to report on more ambitious experiments! Said they endangered spacetime. Phsaw!’ He looks at his drink mournfully. ‘But I confess, Colonel, Chekhova has a point! It’s a delicate time.’

I look at Chekhova. What game is she playing? Does she have something to do with the Great Game Zoku? I don’t want to risk a direct confrontation with them, not yet. Perhaps I should pull back and try again via a different route. But it has taken a lot of effort and time to set the current job up. Time that Mieli may not have.

‘I have comrades to think about, Elder,’ I say. ‘As it happens, I’ve also had interest from a Narrativist zoku in Supra City: I believe they would like to transport it into a Realm and use it for a setting in a confined-space drama of some sort – not that I really understand these things.’

Barbicane sneers. ‘Give it to Narrativists! Ridiculous! A piece of matter shaped by nuclear fire, made for a purpose!’

‘But we must consider—’ Chekhova tries to speak, but Barbicane waves his gun-hand to stop her.

‘A great shame, to turn it into a – metaphor!’ he roars.

I decide to throw more fuel into the fire.

‘I mean, really. I have heard a lot about the Gun Club. Wasn’t it your Hawking holeships that stopped the Protocol War from being an even bigger disaster? The only things that can take out a guberniya, from what I hear. And you are telling me that you are afraid of another zoku who thinks you are playing with fire?’ I shake my head slowly. ‘I think I would be better off with the Narrativists. It sounds to me like your children out there have more courage than you.’

I am not just talking to them. I’m talking to the whole zoku: they are acting as its avatars in the Circle of the train.

‘I bring you a historical object, a shell from the biggest gun ever built before the post-Collapse era, and you don’t want it because it might be dirty? Please.’ I get up. ‘I will take my business elsewhere.’

Barbicane lifts into the air and spins around slowly, thruster legs burning holes in his chair’s upholstery. His eyes are squeezed shut, and he is thinking hard. Then he spins around and thrusts his gun arm straight at my face.

‘Ah ha! I have an idea, Colonel! A compromise! Will satisfy the zoku volition! Chekhova is a Dragon expert! She will inspect the item in the Arsenal, at molecular level! That way it will be safe. Everybody happy? Hmm?’

Everybody except me, who has hidden a spare miniature body with qupt-ready EPR states inside it. And I was going to use it to steal back my ship from the Arsenal.

But I just smile and nod, and start thinking about a plan B.