The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (14 page)

‘So we are going to find out. At the moment, our beloved zoku has several thousand intelligence-gathering operations at work, aimed at the chens. But
we
, dear friends, have a chance to win entanglement and glory for our zoku.’ She turns to Mieli. ‘Mieli, could you tell us what is the power structure on a Sobornost warship?’

Mieli frowns. ‘Most gogols will be branched for whatever mission the ship is fabbed for: warminds and turks. There will be a commanding gogol of an older generation, depending on the importance of a mission. And there will be a—’

‘A chen gogol, as an observer, to protect the interests of the Sobornost as a whole even during Founder conflicts, ever since the Dragon Wars.’ Zinda smiles. ‘If the ship is destroyed, the chen is usually evacuated in a thoughtwisp. So, there we have it: we will monitor a civil war battle – a skirmish between raions, that is all we need – and look for thoughtwisps we can intercept. Mik here will lay out a q-dot net and take care of navigation. Mieli will convince the wisp that we are a Sobornost ship. Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere will use Mieli’s protocols and Box the chen.’ She looks at their faces eagerly. ‘Any questions?’

Mik gets up slowly. ‘My lady Zinda, I deem this course of action most unwise,’ he says. At normal speed, his voice is a deep baritone, at odds with his boyish face. ‘You yourself are strong in entanglement, and known to us all. But our new companion? I like her not.’ He takes a step forward and looks up at Mieli. ‘She is a member of our zoku, aye; but in level, barely more than a lowly squire. Her will is not yet bound to the Great Game like ours is. I have fought the Sobornost: there is often another will within their will that can hide true intentions. And is it not true that she was the truedeath of many a friend of our lady Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere, in the War of Protocols?’

Mik shakes his head. ‘Were it not for the zoku’s volition, I would take my leave now, and I have a mind to pluck the Great Game jewel from the hilt of my blade rather than go forth on a dangerous quest with such a dark companion.’

*

Zinda looks at each of the trio in turn. ‘Mieli is a part of our zoku, like it or not, and the zoku has made up its mind. You are free to disagree. And you always have your freedom to leave. Now, we have heard from Mik. What do you think, Anti-de-Sitter?’

‘Filtered Markov chain state: doom,’ says Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere in a gentle, singsong voice.

‘Although the law of Hospitality binds me, as all those in my order,’ Mik says, ‘a Sobornost warrior with bloodstained hands will not enter my faithful ship, the
Zweihänder.
This I swear, by my blade.’

Zinda looks lost. ‘Maybe I made the Circle wrong,’ she says in a small voice. ‘Are you sure you are not just rules-lawyering here, trying to win some verbal points? I always do this with Circles, tend to come up with mechanisms that generate conflict, it’s better for the narrative.’

‘Implication via modus ponens: negative,’ sings Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere.

She is out of her depth
, Mieli thinks. And winning entanglement in the Great Game is her only chance to get closer to the Kaminari jewel.

She takes a step forward.

‘My name is Mieli, daughter of Karhu,’ she says. ‘And you are all right. I do not belong here.’

She looks at them in the eyes, each in turn. ‘But Sir Mik does me injustice as well. I may not truly belong to the Great Game yet, but I am not of Sobornost either. I may have served them for a time, but I have no reason to love them. In my heart, I am of Oort, of ice and darkness and song and void. I, too, was taught that strangers from outside my
koto
were evil. But I was also taught to put aside my grievances to work together for the Million Tribes, when we needed to, to drive the Dark Man back.’

She pauses. It is not that different from singing a song, watching
väki
respond to the notes and words.

‘When we met warriors and builders from other
kotos
, we would do something together, to forge a bond. We would go to the sauna and throw
löyly
until the Dark Man himself ran away from the heat. We would tattoo a common symbol to our skins, to forge bonds of pain and ink.’ She touches the butterfly tattoo on her chest beneath her toga and feels a flash of guilt on its raised contours. ‘Or we would drink liquorice vodka until we were ready to tell all our secrets to each other. We did all these things so we could stand as one, when the Tribes needed us.

‘We are supposed to be bound together by entanglement, by a compulsion to do what is best for our zoku. I say it is not enough. The thread that binds our destinies together is too weak, lost in the greater weave of the Great Game.’

They are listening to her now. Sir Mik’s eyes gleam.
He is the key
, Mieli thinks.

‘I am ignorant of the ways of the zoku, but I understand this to be true: a zoku is not a difficult thing to make. I propose this: let us forge a zoku of our own for this mission, to join our thoughts and wills to a common cause. Entanglement among few is stronger than among many. It will show you that my purpose is true.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘Sir Mik, if we were in Oort, you would have to defend your words with your blade. But in this Circle, for my friend Zinda’s sake, I ask you to join me in a new zoku brotherhood. What do you say?’ She turns to the others. ‘What do you all say?’

Mik draws his sword and holds it high. ‘I say thee aye!’ he shouts. He grins. ‘My apologies, Lady Mieli,’ he says. ‘Bound by a jewel of our own, I will be glad to fight by your side.’

After a while, Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere speaks.

‘Set operation: inclusion,’ she says.

It takes only moments to create the zoku. Zinda takes out a small Notch-zoku jewel and, at her request, the plain extrudes a fabber that spits out four blank jewels, simple transparent pentagons. As she works, Mieli whispers to her metacortex, tells it to hide all thoughts of the Kaminari jewel until the mission is over, and hopes that the pellegrini is as good at hiding as she claims to be.

Betraying koto brotherhood
, she thinks darkly.
Another piece of me gone. Is that why the thief wore many faces? Because there was nothing left of him?

And then the thought is gone, erased.

The jewels are warm from the fabber, almost like living things. The four companions hold them up in the air, and Zinda summons an entangled light beam from one of the numerous routers in the sky. It comes down in a bright pillar, lights up their faces and bounces around the new jewels in dazzling patterns. Mieli feels a new presence through her jewel, a newborn zoku, a diamond-hard purpose of capturing a chen and winning entanglement from the Great Game.

‘What shall we call ourselves?’ Zinda asks. Thank you, she qupts at Mieli.

They all look at Mieli. ‘Well, let this be the first test of our zoku’s volition,’ she says. ‘Who shall name it?’

The answer is clear. It is Sir Mik who speaks.

‘Lady Mieli named us already, methinks – if our bond is meant to replace that of liquorice vodka, let us be known as the Liquorice-zoku!’

He brandishes his sword again. Above them, a dark long shape is distilled into being: a hundred-metre-long black cylinder emblazoned with red runes and bristling with jutting dark blades.

‘Gentle ladies, this is my
Zweihänder
,’ Mik says. ‘It is she who will bear us to our destiny.’

8

THE THIEF AND THE HAUNTED SHIP

My ship is haunted.

It’s a feeling I can’t shake as I steer the
Leblanc
through the lower cloud layers of Saturn, trying to hide us in the winter blue swirls of ammonia hydrosulfide pockets and egg-white water vapour clouds. It is a gnawing anxiety that mingles with the faint tickle of motion in my stomach that the interface Realm translates the ship’s slow dive into, a chilly sense of someone looking over my shoulder.

It could be some echo of my past self, preserved in the ship’s neural interface. The pilot’s Realm is a floating platform in a cavernous chamber with crystalline walls that provide a fish-eye view of the giant planet’s churning ochre depths. I sit on a velvet-cushioned chair at a control keyboard that looks like the bastard offspring of three pipe organs and a typewriter – it even has pedals. But it is all a shorthand for mental commands. As I brush the keys, the ship’s cool presence enfolds my mind, snug like a well-worn glove. Who knows what fossilised feedback loops were triggered by my touch and now resonate in my brain?

Or it could be the ship’s avatar Carabas, a glass-eyed mechanical cat in a flamboyant hat and boots. When I last encountered it on Mars, in my old memory palace, it tried to gut me and turn me into a wax figure. Now it never leaves my side, waiting for my commands with arrogant, feline resignation.

Or maybe it is the awareness that the Great Game Zoku is now after me. I shake my head at the notion: worrying about capture at this point is not rational. I am keeping us well away from Supra City’s support structures. The closest zoku presence is the Notch stormcrafter playground near the South Pole, with its fluid dynamics megastructures. There is a calculator made from Karman vortex trains – a region near the Sayanagi belt where chains of swirling vortices the size of continents collide and compute, logic gates larger than moons. Each arithmetic operation involves a mass of gas greater than old Earth’s atmosphere. To find us, the Great Game would have to throw enormous resources into a neutrino scan of the whole planet – and I don’t think they are ready to do that just yet. That will come later.

Or perhaps the ghost is Matjek. I know I need to speak to him, sooner or later, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not yet. Besides, I need to make sure we are well hidden, and the Aun are supposed to be looking after him.

In the end, what chills my spine the most are Barbicane’s last words.
She is a member of the Great Game now. She told us everything.
I cannot imagine Mieli as a zoku member. The Gun Club Elder must have been lying, trying to get back at me for breaking his toys.

And yet—

After Earth, Mieli must be lost, looking for a direction, looking for guidance. She has served Joséphine nearly her entire adult life. Perhaps the Great Game has exploited that, offered her a new purpose when she needed it the most. And with
Perhonen
gone, there is no one around to tell her what a bad idea that is.

I thought the job would be straightforward. Get to Mieli before they break her, use the
Leblanc
’s tools to break into whatever Realm they have her in, and steal her. Simple, what I do best. Instead, I now have the Great Game after me – and Mieli is already one of them.

Nothing has changed. I still need to get her out.

It all depends on how entangled she is with the zoku already, how much freedom the Great Game volition leaves her. That is the paradox of the zoku: the more you achieve, the more entanglement you have, and thus more power to impose your will upon the zoku’s collective reality. But at the same time, as you advance, you are sculpted by the zoku jewel into a perfect member of the collective. If I know Mieli she will rise through the ranks quickly. Soon, she will be like Barbicane, a shell of herself, trapped inside her role in the zoku Circles.

I need a better plan. The problem is, Barbicane was right.
You are not what you used to be.
I almost screwed up the Iapetos job. I didn’t anticipate the Great Game’s paranoia about Dragons following Earth’s destruction. If it hadn’t been for Matjek—

I shake my head. I can’t think about the boy, not yet.

Infiltrating the Great Game is not an option. They are too well hidden, and screen their members very carefully. I have to draw them out, break Mieli’s link to them. And they only deal with epic, existential threats.

I need to become one. To manipulate them, I need to find something that makes them afraid. I need leverage. And I already know what that is: the ghost that has been haunting me since the Highway.

I find us a slow-flowing layer not too far from the eyestorms of the South Pole.

‘Keep us in the hot stratosphere beacons,’ I tell Carabas. ‘If you see any mermaids, let me know.’

‘Yes, Master,’ it says in a whirring, high-pitched voice, and takes my place at the pilot’s seat, short booted feet hanging in the air.

I sigh. Evidently, my former self thought his own witty banter was company enough.

I leave the cat to its work and head for the ship’s treasure room, to open the qupt that Mars died for.

The
Leblanc
is bigger from the inside than from the outside. Physically, it is a marvel, a picotech creation: zoku subatomic engineering, dense pseudomatter and bizarre metastable quark configurations and nucleon soup, impossibly dense but programmable, all whirling around a tiny black hole like those of the Gun Club ships, only smaller. The passenger space is virtual, a network of interconnected Realms. The main meta-Realm is a blue-lit corridor with a moving walkway, lined with humming Buck Rogers machines and Realmgates.

I’ve barely had time to explore them, but this time, I’m only interested in the treasure room. It is a vault in an ancient fantasy castle, full of loot converted into iconic Realm form, potions and weapons and treasure, representing stolen zoku jewels and quantum software. Sobornost tech stored as firmament code on scrolls, exotic gogols as frozen homunculi inside bottles. There is even a green planet, a stolen biosphere, some design from the world-builders of the Belt, with an entire biological history unfolding on its surface. It makes me realise why Joséphine did not allow me to remember the ship: with these resources, I would have been too difficult to control.

But I’m not here to admire the spoils of past crimes. I take out the qupt and look at it. The treasure room – a small Realm to itself – translates it into a scroll, sealed with hard candle wax. I break the seal carefully, and Isidore’s message echoes in my mind again.

Jean! You can’t believe what I found! It’s not just Earth, it’s the Spike, and the Collapse, you have to look at this.