The Causal Angel

Interlude THE GODDESS AND THE FLOWER

Joséphine Pellegrini takes a step, then another. Her legs ache. The sand is wet and clings to her feet.

The beach is dark. The spiderweb of the System map in the sky has faded into a ghostly glow. Even the sea is silent. The demiurges are busy, listening to her, making the partial. The gogol construct is taking shape next to her as she walks, a hollow ghost, a sand-woman, made of fine grains swirling in the air. It matches its steps to hers, waiting to be filled with thought and purpose.

Joséphine gives it memories. They do not belong to her: they are the Prime’s, perfect like diamonds, preserved across centuries. They were given to her by her copymother, to make her into what she is. She holds each one tight as they pass through her and into the partial’s eager brain.

The time of her branching, in her labyrinth temple in the shadow of Kunapipi Mons, when her Jean came to her, for the last time.

She remembers being the Prime, but only in fragments. Walking through the gardens of the Engineer-of-Souls, helping him shepherd thought-swarms. Fighting a war against herself in the Deep Time, against a branch who wanted to take the entire guberniya into deep Dyson sleep, to leave behind these troubles and wake up to see Andromeda Galaxy fill the sky. Like her labyrinth, the thoughts are mere shadows of something greater and high-dimensional that she cannot understand with a mind confined to the dream-vir.

On the other hand, she remembers very well how she felt when the thief made his entrance.

One moment he is not there, and then he is, warming his hands in the blaze of her singularity, in the cylindrical room at the heart of the labyrinth. A cheap trick, as one of her gogols quickly determines: a carefully placed series of space-time cloaks, hiding his approach through the labyrinth even from her eyes.

He wears flesh and heavy blue armour of the zoku, not quite matter, not quite light, and a halo of quantum jewels to go with it. She hopes that they are not for her. He has given her jewels aplenty already, all of them equally disappointing.

He is so much smaller than she is. She is in the rock and the atmosphere and in the computronium beneath the crust of the planet and in the thread-modes of the event horizon of the black hole. He is a mess of carbon atoms and entanglements and q-dots and water, barely larger than the least of her gogols.

And yet—

She creates an image of herself out of modulated Hawking radiation and steps out of the glow of the black hole to meet him. Her gogols show her his point of view: a towering figure of blue fire, wearing a necklace of stars. He flinches, and she smiles. She keeps the intensity of her form just below what his q-stone suit can handle, but not by much.

‘Back already?’ she asks, in a voice made of gamma rays. Her words incinerate his armour’s surface layer. ‘It has only been a century or two. Did you grow tired of Mars so quickly?’

He shields his face with a raised hand. ‘Mars was … educational,’ he says. ‘Could you stop glowing, please? It hurts my eyes.’

‘As you wish.’

It only takes a thought to vaporise him and to pour him into a mindshell in her vir. Her gogols do not know what to do with the zoku jewels, so she just leaves them scattered on the floor of the singularity chamber like discarded toys.

They stand together in her heart-vir, next to a murmuring fountain, beneath a starry sky. She, too, is embodied now, in her favourite dress, in the most regal mindshell from her Library she can find. He is simply a translation of the flesh he came in, a little older than she remembers, in form-fitting dark blue. He massages the bridge of his nose.

‘That’s better,’ he says.

‘Is it? Were you not happy with that particular self? Your Raymonde seemed to like it. Poor girl. She must miss you so.’ She adjusts her ring. ‘Perhaps I should bring her here, too, along with the rest of Mars.’

‘Joséphine—’

‘Do you think you can play with the little people, and then crawl back to me, with no consequences? Other yous have done the same. What do you think I did to them?’

‘Something involving poetic justice, I expect.’ He spreads his hands. ‘I was told that this is where you come to pray to the goddess. So I did.’

‘What do you want?’

‘As unlikely as it may seem to you, I am here on business.’

‘I see. And why should I not have my gogols consume you, here and now, and finally find out if there is anything of use in that mind of yours?’

‘Don’t offend me by thinking I haven’t taken precautions,’ he says, tapping one temple. ‘Touch me, and whatever I have to trade will all burn. Touch me wrong, that is.’ He grins.

‘Do not test my patience, Jean.’

‘I don’t have to test it.’

‘Then you know you should make it quick.’

‘Here, where we have all the time in the world? Where each minute takes less than a baseline picosecond? When we haven’t seen each other – well, I haven’t seen you – for nearly two hundred years? You have gotten even more impatient in your old age.’

She sighs and sits down on the fountain stairs.

‘Perhaps I have,’ she says. ‘It tends to happen when you walk a tightrope between Founder sisters and brothers who want to stab you in the back and a fanatic who wants to conquer death, all the while making sure that they don’t tear the System apart in another ridiculous war. It’s not like designing buildings and having affairs on Mars, Jean.’

He sits down next to her, carefully choosing a step below her. He crosses his hands over one knee and leans back. ‘I know. That’s why I’m here. Things are about to get worse.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Matjek Chen has the Kaminari jewel.’

She takes a deep breath.

‘And why are you telling me that?’

‘Why do you think? Because I’m going to steal it.’

She laughs. ‘I would like to see that,’ she says. ‘And I suppose you are asking for my help?’

‘Not exactly.’ He takes her left hand in his own. His grip is tight and warm. ‘Joséphine, if I fail, you know where I’ll end up.’ He gestures with his free hand. There is a flower between his thumb and forefinger, suddenly, with colourful, tapering petals.

‘This will help you find me if that happens. If you ever want to, that is.’

She holds it up. Clever little thief. It is information encoded in matter, translated by her gogols into vir form. At a molecular level the petals are spiky cathedrals, rows upon rows of them, containing data. It defines a set of modal logic constraints, provable properties for a neural network, like a gogol. The flower is an empty shape of a person, a shadow, waiting to be filled.

‘That’s very romantic, Jean,’ she says. ‘Asking me to be your get out of jail for free card. Are you sure you’d not rather receive a file in a cake?’

‘You were never much of a cook, even less so a baker. And I didn’t imagine for a moment getting out of jail would be free.’

She freezes him in the vir’s slowtime for a moment and summons a warmind gogol family to scour the flower for traps. They find nothing. It is only then that she lets time resume and inhales the flower’s scent. It is delicate and sweet, the memory of a summer, with a hint of honey.

‘Jean,’ she says, a sudden tenderness in her chest. ‘This is Matjek. You are going to fail, and it sounds like you know it. Why are you doing this? You were happy on Mars, with the little people.’

‘I didn’t realise you cared.’

‘I don’t. I just thought I’d do the System a favour by keeping an eye on you.’

He looks down.

‘I talked to a woman of the Kaminari once,’ he says, ‘before the Spike. Don’t give me such a look, it wasn’t like that, we were just friends. But one night on Ganymede, we got philosophical. The Universe is a game, she said. It makes us into players. We can’t see the moves that are not allowed. Like in chess. There is perfect freedom in the black and white, except that the rules make invisible walls. Two squares forward, one left. One left, whole row forward and backward, one right. That’s all you see.

‘There is a reason for it, she said. Algorithmic complexity. The Universe is a quantum computer, and over time, it is simply more likely that structure comes out of it than noise. That means rules, patterns. That means a game. But spend long enough poking at it, and you start to see the game engine, the labyrinth of the quantum circuit, wires looping around each other, forwards and backwards.’

‘It sounds like the kind of thing the zoku like to say,’ Joséphine says disdainfully.

The thief sighs. ‘Perhaps. After that, she started talking about this ancient legend they have, about a creature called the Sleeper with a billion hit points, and after it was finally killed by a coalition of a thousand guilds, it dropped a small rusty dagger.

‘But there is something to it. I’m tired of games. Mars was not enough. And you were right, I made a mess of it. I need something new, something different.’

‘And you think the jewel will give you that?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m going to try.’

‘I know you, Jean, better than anyone. You will never stop. There will always be something else for you to steal.’

He gives her that fake-weary look. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I think one more thing would be enough. Maybe it always was.’ He stands up. ‘Goodbye, Joséphine. If we meet again, it will be your choice.’

‘Did I give you my permission to leave?’ she says, hardening her voice.

‘Oh, I’m not leaving. I would never have come here if I expected to leave. This is a new branch of me that I created just for you. That self-destruct loop of yours? I stole it a long time ago.’

‘Jean—’ She reaches for the firmanent, for his mindshell, but it is already too late.

‘You know, it’s good practice for what is to come. Even if you are branching before jumping into the nothing, you have to have the resolve to do it yourself. Take this as a compliment, Joséphine: if I had come here first, it would have been hard to find the courage. Take care of yourself. It’s been fun.’

He closes his eyes. He twitches once. The mindshell stands still, chest rising and falling, but Joséphine knows that the gogol inside is gone.

She sits on the stairs for a long time, watching the still form of the thief, standing there with a peaceful expression on his face. She turns the flower in her hands. Finally she stands up and touches her Jean’s face gently with her ring hand.

Then she starts thinking about how to best betray him to Matjek Chen.