The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) (7 page)

‘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.’