The Causal Angel

  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.’

  I look at Barbicane. ‘Were you planning on offering us a drink? I’d like to toast to my comrades. Poor bastards: but I was proud to serve with them. And some of them left family behind, family who could do with a new start in Supra City.’ The last part is true as well: one of Mieli’s fallen squadmates had cubs in the Belt. ‘Especially now that the Sobornost has decided to eat everything inside the orbit of Mars. That’s why we came here. But I guess it’s all for nothing now.’

  Barbicane lets out a bellows-like sigh. ‘Well, Colonel! That’s quite a story! But you are being a good sport! Perhaps we can still work something out.’

  Barbicane hovers from his chair to a copper globe showing an engraved old-fashioned map of Earth, but with a strangely tilted axis – the Antarctic is near the equator. He opens it deftly with his manipulator hand, takes out a bottle of a dark amber liquor and three glasses, and pours. He looks at me seriously.

  ‘Names are not important! For us, only entanglement matters. The spime you gave us was impressive. I’m still interested!’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Chekhova says. ‘If the Colonel’s item is genuine and came from Earth recently, we should stay as far away from it as possible.’

  Barbicane raises his eyebrows.

  ‘You know how closely we are being watched by the Great Game Zoku these days,’ Chekhova says. ‘What do you think they will do if we acquire something that might be infested with Dragons?’

  Barbicane purses his lips.

  ‘True,’ he says. ‘Damn their eyes!’

  ‘The Great Game? What does she mean?’

  ‘A guardian zoku! Protects us from existential threats, or so they claim! Rose to power after the Spike.’ Barbicane’s face grows dark. ‘They converted some junior Club members, to report on more ambitious experiments! Said they endangered spacetime. Phsaw!’ He looks at his drink mournfully. ‘But I confess, Colonel, Chekhova has a point! It’s a delicate time.’

  I look at Chekhova. What game is she playing? Does she have something to do with the Great Game Zoku? I don’t want to risk a direct confrontation with them, not yet. Perhaps I should pull back and try again via a different route. But it has taken a lot of effort and time to set the current job up. Time that Mieli may not have.

  ‘I have comrades to think about, Elder,’ I say. ‘As it happens, I’ve also had interest from a Narrativist zoku in Supra City: I believe they would like to transport it into a Realm and use it for a setting in a confined-space drama of some sort – not that I really understand these things.’

  Barbicane sneers. ‘Give it to Narrativists! Ridiculous! A piece of matter shaped by nuclear fire, made for a purpose!’

  ‘But we must consider—’ Chekhova tries to speak, but Barbicane waves his gun-hand to stop her.

  ‘A great shame, to turn it into a – metaphor!’ he roars.

  I decide to throw more fuel into the fire.

  ‘I mean, really. I have heard a lot about the Gun Club. Wasn’t it your Hawking holeships that stopped the Protocol War from being an even bigger disaster? The only things that can take out a guberniya, from w
hat I hear. And you are telling me that you are afraid of another zoku who thinks you are playing with fire?’ I shake my head slowly. ‘I think I would be better off with the Narrativists. It sounds to me like your children out there have more courage than you.’

  I am not just talking to them. I’m talking to the whole zoku: they are acting as its avatars in the Circle of the train.

  ‘I bring you a historical object, a shell from the biggest gun ever built before the post-Collapse era, and you don’t want it because it might be dirty? Please.’ I get up. ‘I will take my business elsewhere.’

  Barbicane lifts into the air and spins around slowly, thruster legs burning holes in his chair’s upholstery. His eyes are squeezed shut, and he is thinking hard. Then he spins around and thrusts his gun arm straight at my face.

  ‘Ah ha! I have an idea, Colonel! A compromise! Will satisfy the zoku volition! Chekhova is a Dragon expert! She will inspect the item in the Arsenal, at molecular level! That way it will be safe. Everybody happy? Hmm?’

  Everybody except me, who has hidden a spare miniature body with qupt-ready EPR states inside it. And I was going to use it to steal back my ship from the Arsenal.

  But I just smile and nod, and start thinking about a plan B.

  5

  MIELI AND THE ABYSS

  Mieli is standing on a balcony. The sky above is impossibly vast, faded blue, with a white cut across it. The sunlight is bright and warm on her face, but it is diffuse, soletta-light, collected by some giant mirror in space and distilled into this gentle radiance. Strangely, it reminds her of Oort, of home.

  Nothing else does.

  The building she is in is high and white, made of organic rounded shapes like seashells, bristling with terraces and balconies. Tanned people sit or lie in the sun, surrounded by haloes of jewels.

  Below her, there is a canal. It goes on forever, a thread that vanishes into a haze somewhere impossibly far. A golden gondola suspended from two purple balloons floats leisurely above it. On both shores of the waterway, the landscape is a quilt of mismatched buildings and vistas, separated from each other by silver lines. There is a temple of onion-shaped pagodas and spires, rising from a stark field of dark circuitry; a row of coral castles; a mist-shrouded grey city in the distance. Further away lies a white-peaked mountain range, surrounded by red-winged flying specks too large to be birds. At the very edge of her vision, there is a structure almost as big as the sky, a looming broad arc with a metallic glint, held up by thin white pillars. To right and left, the world is abruptly bound by two cloud-walls, amber-hued.

  Mieli feels a touch of vertigo. She has never liked planets: they are too big for her, and the horizons and the skies here dwarf anything she has ever seen. She focuses her eyes on the blue thread of the canal. Hundreds of zoku trueforms dart along it, whirlpools and parachutes of jewels and fog, moving in flocks like birds. They suddenly remind her of the dream that brought her here.

  To Supra City.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  Mieli turns around. Her systems wake up, but detect no threat. It is the usagi-ronin. She is barefoot, dressed in torn blue trousers and a simple green shirt. Here, she is shorter than Mieli. Her skin is the colour of milk chocolate. Her mouth is a bit too wide to fit in the shape of her face, but her eyes are bright. She is carrying a tray with small bowls and a jade green teapot. She motions Mieli to follow her inside.

  Warily, Mieli obeys. They are in a small apartment. Its white walls are covered in brightly coloured sheets showing ancient-looking two-dimensional pictures of young people, prominently featuring the words Manaya High. There is no smartmatter: the sparse furniture is made of wood and handwoven, colourful fabrics. The simplicity of it is a pleasant contrast to the madness outside. Deliberate, of course.

  The usagi-ronin gracefully sets the tray down onto a small table. Then she sits down on the pillows, cross-legged. ‘Have some. It’s sencha. Unless you would like something to eat?’

  Mieli sits down carefully in a kneeling position: the gravity here is heavy for her, nearly the same as on Earth. In spite of that, she feels light and strong, and her limbs no longer ache from days of climbing. She is dressed as she was on Perhonen, a black toga, and Sydän’s jewelled chain around her ankle. She notices that she is holding the zoku jewel that saved her: a blue oval, smaller than her hand, pulsating with faint light, surrounded by a very faint smell of flowers. She puts it on the table in front of her.

  The usagi-ronin girl looks at the jewel and smiles. She places a cup in front of Mieli and fills it with steaming, fresh-smelling liquid.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about the Realm,’ she says. ‘The mountain and all that. I can see now that it would have been disorienting for you. We usually try to bring orphans in through Realms, to let them work through their issues: they get the narrative rights to shape their surroundings in the framework we give them. You did very well, by the way. I did not see that ending coming at all. Chilling.’ She cradles her own cup in her small hands, and sips it carefully. ‘But, I didn’t realise just how many enhancements your trueform there has. One of its subsystems started fighting back, so I thought it would be best if we started again here. What do you think?’

  Mieli looks at the girl sharply. Her Sobornost-made enhancements are functioning normally, and she tasks a few intel gogols to scan the environment. In an instant, they confirm what she already knew: she is on a strip of dense smartmatter, tens of thousands of kilometres long and a few hundred wide, somewhere near the equator of Saturn. However, they can’t access the local spimescape – either because she is inside a firewall, or because she lacks the right protocols.

  ‘What am I doing here?’ Mieli asks.

  ‘Whatever you want. Maybe start by drinking tea? You haven’t touched it. My name in this Circle is Zinda, by the way.’

  Mieli frowns. Her experience of the zoku is limited to fighting them. During the Protocol War, she went through a few virs set on Supra City, in case of capture, but they were nothing like this. As far as her sensors can tell, the apartment is what it looks like, down to the molecular level. Zinda, however, is a zoku alter – a mixture of foglets and zoku jewels – although she is running a passable emulation of a human body, down to sketches of internal organs and a digestive system.

  ‘I would like to find out what happened to my ship.’

  ‘Hmm. We’ll get to that in a moment,’ Zinda says. ‘But to answer your first question: you are here because the Rainbow Table Zoku – which you belong to, by the way – found you. They didn’t know what to do with your volition. They mostly deal with routers, Realmgates, that sort of thing: they are really more into picotech than people, if you see what I mean. So the volition got passed to our zoku, the Manaya High. We take care of … lost lambs, you could say. Those who want to return.’ Zinda smiles gently. ‘Like you.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you are talking about.’ Gingerly, Mieli tries the tea. It, too, is exactly what it appears to be, slightly bitter and not completely warm anymore, but in spite of herself, she likes the taste. ‘I can’t stay. I need to get back to my ship.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Zinda looks serious. ‘You are free to leave at any time, of course. But that’s not what your volition said to the jewel. You wanted to come home, and here you are.’

  Mieli gets up slowly.

  ‘My name is Mieli, the daughter of Karhu, of Hiljainen Koto, of Oort. I have nothing to do with you.’ But deep in her gut, there is a sudden chill. A tithe child. A child of the sun-smiths, given together with a Little Sun, for the koto to protect and cherish.

  ‘Volition is a funny thing,’ Zinda says. ‘The jewels don’t just respond to what we want, but what we would want if we were wiser or smarter or knew more. The zoku as a whole tries to extrapolate what you really need, rather than just what you are asking for, and in line with everybody’s volition. I’ll give you an example. Tell me something you really like. A food, or something.’

  Mieli hesitates. ‘This is point
less.’

  ‘Come on. Don’t take it so seriously!’

  Mieli sighs. ‘Liquorice. I like liquorice.’

  ‘Great! So, let’s say I have two boxes, A and B’ – she places two empty cups on the table, upside down – ‘and A has liquorice in it. I know that you really like liquorice and are looking for some. You ask me to open box B. Which box should I open?’

  Mieli blinks.

  ‘See?’ Zinda says.

  ‘But it’s not the same thing.’

  ‘Well, it’s harder to compute, for sure. The real extrapolated volition thing is absurdly difficult, PSPACE-hard or something, so usually we take shortcuts, make approximations. Maybe you don’t want to be here, but a future self of yours does.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Mieli says.

  Zinda smiles reassuringly. ‘Look, I’ve been through this many times. It’s completely normal to feel confused at this point. Why don’t you try it out for a while? We are not Sobornost – who you obviously have spent some time with. We don’t take away your freedom. We just give you a quantum self, to make you larger than you are now. I think you will find it very easy.’ She pours herself and Mieli some more tea. ‘I mean, we did study you at some length while you were in the Realm. Your body and mind both have pretty clear signatures of zoku design. A Jovian aegon-family zoku if I had to guess. They used to trade with Oortians – you know, before the Spike. I don’t mean to pry, but is it really such a surprise for you?’

  Mieli sits back down, slowly.

  ‘Why would they do that?’ she whispers.

  ‘Many reasons. We do weave everybody into the zoku’s volition. Children always have a purpose. Making them is kind of a game, too. Perhaps your parents wanted to give you a different life, outside their zoku’s volition cone. We could try to find them, if you want. Although if they were based on Jupiter, that could be … difficult.’

  Sydän used to joke about it, how Mieli was like the character from a book some ancestor gave her, a queen of presapient monkeys. Mieli only ever knew that she was a tithe child, given to Oortians to raise, a part of a bargain that gave her koto their Little Sun. That’s why she had spent her early years in Grandmother Brihane’s house, until she was big enough to live with the rest of the koto. No one except Sydän ever talked about it, and Karhu could not care less. But it was why she had always tried harder than anybody else. It was why she had practised the väki songs until her voice was hoarse, why she did a Great Work younger than anyone else, why she brought an ancestor spirit back from alinen.