The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (33 page)

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.

Acknowledgements

It has been a long journey, and it would not have even started without two people: Simon Spanton at Gollancz, and my agent John Jarrold. So many thanks to them for their trust, advice and companionship along the way. I am looking forward to travelling on to new lands with them, beyond those of the
Quantum Thief
books.

Deep heartfelt thanks also go to:

All you readers who decided to come along and stick with it – there are more of you than I ever dared to imagine!

All those who provided feedback on the early drafts of this book, in particular Sam Halliday, Mark Harding, Esa Hilli, Lauri Lovén, Kathryn Myronuk, Ramez Naam, Phil Raines, Brad Templeton, Stuart Wallace, as well as the usual Writers’ Bloc suspects: Halsted M. Bernard, Morag Edward, Andrew Ferguson, Bram Gieben, Gavin Inglis, Helen Jackson, Jane McKie, Andrew Wilson and Kirsti Wishart. Also thanks to Antti Autio for going above and beyond his translating duties and asking all the right questions.

Hugh Hancock, Martin Page and Charlie Stross for all those creativity-enhancing espressos.

My fellow GSP13 students at the Singularity University for injecting some exponential weirdness into the writing process – especially the amazing HelixNano team: Carina, Geoffrey and Kat.

The sadly absent Iain Banks, with a quiet toast, for showing me and an entire generation of writers the way.

My parents for continuing to show me what courage means.

And finally Zuzana, who appeared one Halloween night five years ago, just as the last words of
The Quantum Thief
were being written, and changed everything.

— Hannu Rajaniemi

In Edinburgh, 2008–2014.

Novels by Hannu Rajaniemi

The Quantum Thief

The Fractal Prince

The Causal Angel

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE CAUSAL ANGEL

Copyright © 2014 by Hannu Rajaniemi

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor
^®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rajaniemi, Hannu.

The causal angel / Hannu Rajaniemi.

    p. cm.—(Jean le Flambeur ; 3)

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN 978-0-7653-2951-6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4299-5610-9 (e-book)

I. Title.

PR9170.F563R33 2014

823’.92—dc23

2014014649

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to
[email protected]
.

Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, an Hachette UK Company

First U.S. Edition: July 2014