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 o
f 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.
There is an aching weight in my chest when I hear his voice, but I grit my teeth and focus on the task at hand.
The quantum state that came with it floats up from the scroll, countless tiny soap bubbles connected by glowing tendrils. I examine it carefully: it is a delicate thing, a tangle of qubits that does not follow any encoding scheme I have come across. Aboard the Wardrobe, I would have no hope of deciphering it. But here in the Leblanc, I do not lack tools.
The work takes a long time, and I have to uncork some of the mathematics gogols. Eventually, they inform me that it is a small virtual quantum computer, meant to bootstrap itself in a biological brain, perhaps originally transmitted via complex photon states – a node in a vast distributed machine, computing … something.
I imagine what it could have been like for poor Owl Boy: a flash of light in the sky that you look at, and suddenly this thing enters your brain via the optic nerve, infects you, repurposes the microtubules in your neurons to do coherent quantum computations. But what is it for? For making a viral, System-wide zoku?
There is only one way to find out. I sandbox myself and increase the fidelity of my neural network emulation to the maximum. A full molecular-level simulation of even a single human brain swallows a respectable chunk of the ship’s computational capacity. The feeling is strange. At the level of my consciousness, there should be no perceptible difference, but I could swear that my thoughts feel messier, softer, more eager to copulate with each other and form new ideas.
I tell the sandbox to instantiate the contents of Isidore’s qupt in my virtual brain. There is a flash of light in my optic nerve, and then I hear a voice.
You live on an island called causality, it says.
Like Isidore before me, I listen to the Kaminari speak. When it is over, I seal the scroll again. I feel dizzy. By accident, I lean on the green planet, and almost fall down as my hand slides along its slick, cold atmosphere.
The System history speaks of the Spike as a Singularity-class event created by the Kaminari-zoku’s transcendence gone wrong, a destructive echo of a god-birth that the Sobornost tried to contain by starting the Protocol War. Instead, it seems that the event that took out Jupiter was engineered by the Great Game Zoku, an attempt stop the Kaminari’s attempt to break the Planck locks. Spacetime weapons. I bet Barbicane and his cronies had something to do with it.
Cold anger comes with the thought. I’m going to keep my promise. I’m going to take more than just your toys for this. For Mars and the Kaminari both.
I could try to blackmail the Great Game by threatening to expose them. But that can’t be what they are afraid of. The Sobornost would not care, especially not now, and with their sleeper agents in nearly every zoku, in all likelihood the Great Game would be able to strangle any Deep Throat attempts easily.
What the Kaminari did is not enough for the Great Game to destroy Mars. It must be how they did it that they fear. Creating a system-wide viral zoku? How was that supposed to break the locks?
We found the answer in the Collapse, the Kaminari said. We need your help.
The Collapse is another white spot both in my memory and history itself. If the exomemory was still there, I’m sure I could find further evidence for Great Game interference. The consensus version is a sudden, catastrophic collapse of the global quantum markets used to value upload labour and embodied life on old Earth, a world with a population so large that most people could not afford human bodies. A time of chaos and madness, when the ancestors of the zokus and the Oortians and other System civilisations fled a dying world, leaving it to the wildcode and the—
It is as if a white-hot pen wrote the word in my brain. The Aun. They were there. They were the ones who took over after the Collapse. They must know what happened. They will know what the Great Game fears so much they destroyed two worlds to hide it.
I close the treasure room behind me and head for the bookshop vir.
I pass the gate to the main leisure Realm of the ship: the transatlantic liner Provence on a never-ending journey across a sunlit sea, offering the charms of a swimming pool, tennis on the deck, and the delightful company of a Miss Nellie Underdown. I pause in front of it, and listen to the faint echoes of sea birds and the rushing waves. Suddenly, I feel tired after my efforts. Perhaps that is what I need: a few quiet subjective hours in a deck chair with a good book laid over my eyes. The smell of sun and old paper and sweat, a dip in the pool, an evening with a charming young lady, even an imaginary one.
A sudden sharp thought stops me.
What would Perhonen say?
I can hear the Oortian ship’s voice in my head, fluttering like a butterfly’s wing.
I know what you are doing, Jean. You are avoiding the boy. And time is ticking away. I’m not getting any deader, and Mieli is still not free. Stop whining and do what you have to do.
That’s what is missing in the Leblanc, with all its treasures. A voice that only speaks things that are true.
The bookshop vir looks the same – almost suspiciously so – but Matjek is different. He is older now – eleven or twelve, perhaps. He looks up from his book when I enter, frowns and continues to read. The Aun are nowhere to be seen.
I pull up a chair and sit down next to him.
‘Hello, Matjek.’
He ignores me.
‘How are you doing?’
Silence.
I look at him more closely. His hair is longer, and there is just a hint of grey in it. His eyes have acquired a piercing blue hue, like little shards of ice. I wonder if he has been playing with clockspeed again. I have done my best to make sure that the vir is sandboxed, isolated from the ship’s systems, but I’m not sure that provides enough protection from the future Father of Dragons if he gets bored. Still, it could just be mindshell customisation.
‘What are you reading?’ A lot of the books in the vir represent the fractally compressed city of Sirr and its inhabitants, and the minds of the Aun. Actually reading them is not a good idea, unless you want to be possessed by a jinn or a body thief. ‘Are your friends around?’
‘Why do you care?’ Matjek says finally.
I clear my throat. ‘Well, I thought it was time for us to have a little chat, man to man.’
He slams the book shut, holds it close to his chest with both hands and looks at me.
‘About what?’
‘About a lot of things. I wanted to thank you for your help and—’
‘You mean about about how you stole me? About how my mum and dad are dead?’
There is a cold rage in his eyes that is far too familiar from the older Matjek I know.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He throws the book at the shop window, hard: it doesn’t shatter, but rings in its hinges. ‘When are you going to let me out of here?’
I squeeze the bridge of my nose. Everything feels solid now, sharper. The Leblanc has enough computational power to run a full physics emulation: the dreamlike feel of the previous version is gone. I wonder if it’s entirely a good thing.