The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (19 page)

‘He touched you, through the crystal stopper. But all your choices were your own.’

There are tears in my eyes.

‘But why? Why the Collapse?’ I whisper.

‘For the same reason you did everything,’ the Princess says. ‘To please the goddess.’

Joséphine.
I served her, on Earth, I know that much. She opened a door for me. I gathered the Founders for her. There was a time I would have done anything to make her smile.
No. I freed myself from her. That’s why I went to Mars. It was the best thing I ever did.

And this was the worst.

I lock the feeling away. I let the metaself calm the storm between my temples, make it smooth and cool and empty like the wildcode desert.

‘That’s not the answer I need,’ I say slowly. ‘I need to know
how
, not
what.
I need you to show me.’

‘We told you already,’ the Princess says. ‘You need to remember yourself.’

‘But I don’t. It is one of the secrets I burned when I was caught—’

The Princess smiles a wooden smile.

‘The other me,’ I breathe. ‘Matjek said something about the other me who spoke to him.
That’s
why the
Leblanc
felt haunted. There is a partial of the old me there, or a gogol even. It was watching me.’

The Princess hands my glasses back.

‘See?’ she says. ‘Which one is it who loves secrets so much? The boy from the desert, or the Flower Prince?’

She steps back, to stand with the others. They fade away into the light, become sand and wind.

Farewell, brother. We will be here when you return.

When le Flambeur comes back, he is uncharacteristically quiet. There is a strange fire in his eyes, and Tawaddud leaves him to his thoughts during the descent along the curve of the empty Shard, in one of his magic bubbles.

In the end, Dunyazad gives him the jewel, and he offers her the necklace. Tawaddud has to admit it suits Duny: the brightness of the jewels against her dark skin makes her look like a queen.

‘I trust you will not misuse them,’ le Flambeur says. ‘People of Sirr will need jewels of their own, too. And jinni may want bodies. This place has the power to give it to them. It may become a very different city from the Sirr on Earth.’

Tawaddud thinks of the Axolotl.
Perhaps there are other monsters I
can
heal.
She gives the thief a smile for that, a small one.

Dunyazad’s smile vanishes, suddenly. ‘Look.’ She points at the sky.

Fear opens a sharp-nailed hand inside Tawaddud’s chest.

‘No. Not here, too.’

The new pinpoints in the sky are deceptively beautiful. They are beyond counting and their numbers grow as she watches, like glittering sand poured onto a mosaic floor. They arrange themselves into patterns, polygons and wedges, with a clear purpose.

‘Don’t worry,’ le Flambeur says. ‘They are not here for you, but for me. And I shall not tarry long. Why is it that there is never enough time for proper goodbyes? Nothing ever changes.’

He kisses both of their hands and bows deep.

‘I am from a desert, too,’ he says. ‘Yours is harsher, and less forgiving. But as long as you two are in it, it will always be a garden.’

A glowing bubble takes him up to the sky. He blows them kisses as he goes. A moment later, there is a distant boom, and a white line is drawn across Sirr’s new sky. The dancing stars follow it, a flock of bright birds, and then they are gone.

During the hatching of Sirr, the sky has grown dark, and it is as if Tawaddud sees it for the first time. She looks up at the wide sky road of the rings, the discs of the moons, and the glowing threads in the distance that hold up other skies. She takes her sister’s hand, and for a while, they breathe it in. Finally, they turn back to the blue and gold mandala of Sirr.

‘Do you think it’s time yet?’ Dunyazad asks.

‘Yes,’ Tawaddud says. ‘Let’s go wake them up.’

Interlude

THE GODDESS AND THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT

There are two Joséphines, walking by the night-grey sea, one with bare feet on sand, the other stepping in the water, making small leaps every now and then. One of them is old, and the other is young, her auburn hair a dark curly banner in the wind.

Every now and then Joséphine loses herself in the partial, in its firm flesh and bright eyes. But the work is not finished. She still has memories to give, and so she has to look inward, to cut and keep and choose. As she walks, a constant stream of words for the demiurges pours from her lips, mingling with the deep, slow breath of the waves.

The last day she truly loved him was her birthday.

It was after they lost the first war. Even centuries later, Matjek never wanted admit defeat, and so that early stain in the shining history of the Sobornost was wiped from gogol memories. But Joséphine remembers it.

After all, it was she who brought them together, from different parts of the world, sent her Jean to gather them and gave them a common cause. She made them into something more than just scattered fanatics.

She made sacrifices. She made mistakes. She always regretted the way she brought Anton Vasilev into the fold, for example. He was perfect for what they needed: a virtual pop star, a media cyborg, worshipped by millions, the demagogue, the ideologue, the stealer of souls and hearts. But she left him with a wound that never healed.

In the end, she made them into an army.

They fought to liberate uploads, those bound to insurance heavens, those slaving away in black box upload camps and in the cloud. Shenzen was a mistake. The liberated gogols went wild, took over the infrastructure of the city, a swarm of sentient computer viruses. It created a backlash against the Fedorovism movement. The struggling nation states, corporations and liquid democracies organised a response. They fought back, and won. The Founders – except for her, still bound to flesh – fled to space, minds distributed in swarms of nanosatellites, sent to orbit by loyal followers using microwave launchers, vowing to return.

Matjek, Sumanguru and the others swore that they would expand, build resources, unbound by a little planet, and return to conquer. They did not understand. She knew it would be much better if the gogols would come to them, out of their own free will.

And the problem was that the world that rose from the ashes of the war
worked.

A world of gogol labour markets, vast virtual economies based on the potential future labour of uploaded minds and their copies. An endless variety of complex financial instruments, traded across quantum markets – the first killer app for quantum computers. Entangled instruments, determining if dead souls had the right to live. The most efficient resource allocation system in history: superpositions of portfolios, entangled derivatives, applied to everything: gogol labour, the right to wear a fleshbody, energy, space and time.

Cancerous growths, standing in the way of true immortality. She wanted to cut them out, and she so made a hand to wield the knife.

Joséphine is dying, in her bedroom on the island. The sun is shining. Most of the time, the smartbed’s beemee feeds her lifestreams from the young, slim, trim employees she uses as proxy selves, but today, she watches the sunlight and the blue sky with her own eyes. The artificial retinas make everything clear and sharp. She wants to see the view better, and the bed shapes itself to her movements, supports her as she sits up. The window shows the white masts of the sailboats in the harbour. The ropes and the rigging make a distant, tinkling sound in the wind, like improvised music.

She has resisted a full brain transplant into a cloned body. After all, there are already other hers beyond the sky, young and beautiful, perfect like her pearls, and just as identical. The DNA nanomachines repairing her chromosomes can only do so much for someone who was already old when immortality arrived.

And there is always the black box upload, the sharp-edged crown waiting inside the softness of her bed.

For a long time, it made her angry to admit the hopelessness of the fight. It was Jean who told her to think of the last vestiges of her flesh as a cocoon, something that she would hatch from, even more beautiful than before.

It was the kind of thing he liked to say after making love.

She thinks about the last time and falls asleep for a moment. When the bed wakes her gently, he is there, sitting by her side, hands folded.

‘Happy birthday, Joséphine,’ he says, and makes a blue flower appear from thin air. He holds it out to her to smell. Again, the bed brings her up, and the scent takes her back, to her childhood, running up the vineyard hill in the morning, when the towers of the old village were purple in the distance and it didn’t matter that the sun shone right into her eyes and the dew got her trainers wet.

She must have fallen asleep again: the bed shakes her gently awake. Jean holds her hand in a firm, warm grip. She frowns at him.

‘Flowers,’ she says. Her voice is dry, and she does not want to ask the bed to make it stronger. If her Jean has earned anything, it is right to see and hear her as she is. ‘Why does it always have to be flowers?’

‘Well, I like flowers. But it’s not just flowers today,’ he says.

‘Jewels? Paintings? Poems? You really are a terrible poet, you know.’

‘Touché,’ he says, smiling. ‘It is a very expensive gift, Joséphine. I have made you very poor. I hope it’s worth it.’ He holds out his hands to her, cupped, as if cradling a tiny bird. Then he spreads his fingers wide. Between them is the blue globe of Earth. He gestures, and it expands to fill the space between them. Around it is a cloud of data, a visualisation of quantum markets, pillars and curves and geometries, like aurora borealis.

‘I made a machine out of money,’ he says. ‘Mostly yours. Although a few of the other wealthy ancients made … involuntary donations. They were very generous.’

‘What is this? It hurts my eyes.’

‘Look closely.’

The bed forms a cool helmet around her head, and then she does not just see the data, but
understands
, senses the tension in the flow of it like a drawn bowstring, feels the uncountable trading bots across the world connected by neutrino links, ready to be fired by a thought.

‘It’s very pretty, Jean,’ she says, ‘but what is it
for
?’

He leans back and looks up, the way he does when is feeling guilty.

‘I had a hunch about something. I always thought there was a flaw in what the exchanges have been doing. I talked to the zoku. They gave me some hints. I … found the insurance gogol of a physicist they quoted. I’m afraid I have made him work very hard. He provided the details.’

‘Jean dear, I am sure you know I have little time or patience for
details
.’

‘I remembered that meeting with the others, where you said it would be better if people would follow us of their own free will. That the world worked too well.’

‘You are delightfully cryptic today, Jean. What is my birthday present? It’s the last one, so it had better be good.’

‘Well, I thought the world would make a pretty musical sound if we broke it,’ Jean says.

She takes a deep, rattling breath.

‘What do I have to do?’

‘Just think of something beautiful. Think of a secret. Something no one else knows.’

She sees on his face that he wants her to choose a shared, beautiful moment, the first night on the seastead, or the first time they met, in that awful stinky cell. He refused to come with her, saying that he liked her pearls and would come for them three days later. When the guard closed the door behind her, she could see in his eyes that he was free. And for the first time in a long, long time, so was she.

But she can’t help it: it is a different secret that rises up to swallow her and the world. It is the worst night of her life, long ago, that comes to her. Lying in bed, on rough, sticky sheets, holding the dead little red thing, being eaten by the emptiness that comes after enduring the world-filling pain. Looking into its tiny closed eyes, vowing to survive its death. Vowing never to die.

He sees it, sees the pain on her face, and flinches. But then it is too late: his machine is set in motion, and the world starts to unravel. He squeezes her hand gently, and they watch it together.

She cannot be sure what comes afterwards, how much of what she sees through the beemee and Jean’s little spime is a real memory. More likely it is a combination of fragments of Prime thought and data absorbed throughout the centuries, re-interpreted to fit the context of that birthday.

The markets that control life and death collapse.

Swarms of repo bots, come to reclaim bodies, descend upon a seastead off the shore of California.

Upload cities in China shut down, unable to purchase energy.

The great exodus begins. The infant zoku escape on desperately crowdfunded ships. Improvised transmitters beam gogols to the loving arms of the Sobornost in the sky.

She watches it all, exhilarated. The slate of the world is wiped clean, and it will be her writing that appears on it next.

She turns to Jean to thank him for a beautiful gift, to kiss him like she once did, to tell him how much she loves him.

*

That is the last moment she gives the partial. The rest, she keeps to herself: seeing the horror on his face, the sad eyes wide, all innocence and joy and freedom gone. She does not understand why, it is all like clockwork.

Something else is loose, engulfing gogol minds, burning, consuming.

The weather ghosts who control the climate of a warmed Earth go mad and make winds dance like whips.

There is a fiery arrow in the sky outside. She looks at it, and the faithful bed provides annotations in her field of vision. Sirr, the great city in the sky, is falling.

There are rains of miniature bodies above London, suddenly vacated and deactivated.

Wildcode, they would later call it, serpents that sting minds, madness that consumes a hsien-ku fleet in a great Cry of Wrath, beings born from the machine that Jean made.