Zinda takes Mieli’s hand again.
‘So, let’s say the Kaminari-zoku did it. Let’s say they broke the Planck locks. Let’s say they left behind a zoku jewel. You take it, make a wish, and maybe it accepts you. But your wish can rewrite spacetime, make a new world where everything else except what you wish for is different, create a bubble of false vacuum that wipes out the rest of the Universe. Would you destroy what you have now? Is there anything in the world that you want so badly?’
Mieli says nothing.
‘Don’t worry about the Sobornost, Mieli. They are just another level boss. We can beat anything when we have a clear goal. When they come, all of Supra City will join the war zoku. They won’t know what hit them. You’ll see.’
You haven’t met the All-Defector, Mieli thinks.
‘Have you ever seen it? The jewel, I mean,’ she asks aloud.
‘Me? No. It’s in a safe place. Only the Elders know where.’
Mieli remembers the flash in Barbicane’s qupt. A twisting sheet of light, close but impossibly far.
‘What would you wish for?’ Mieli asks. ‘If it didn’t destroy the Universe, that is?’
‘For the same thing you already owe me,’ Zinda says.
‘What is it?’
‘Something small.’
‘Tell me.’
‘A kiss,’ Zinda says. ‘For starters.’
Her fingers caress Mieli’s neck. Her lips are soft and warm and slick and taste of champagne and peaches. Mieli touches the curve of Zinda’s hip, feels the hot flesh under the flimsy fabric of her dress.
The guilt feels like the q-suit’s spike, between her ribs.
She pushes Zinda away.
‘I can’t,’ she whispers.
‘Why not?’ Zinda says. She looks hurt. ‘I know there was someone, Mieli, the girl the witch had on the mountain. But she is not here now. I think she is just a doll the witch has made, in your head.’
‘No. It’s not that!’ Mieli stands up. ‘You don’t know – you are not even flesh. This is not who you are, it’s an alter. Something you created to handle me. A mask.’
You idiot. This is not how it’s supposed to go. She hugs herself, unable to face the zoku girl.
‘Is that it?’ Zinda says. ‘Mieli, I don’t think you understand us at all. That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier. We find ourselves here, together, because we are who we are.’
‘I—’
Zinda touches her face, cups her chin, turns her head gently. ‘Ssh. I want you to watch.’
She presses her hands against her chest. Something glows between them with warm light, emerging from beneath her smooth skin. Zinda cups it between her hands: a zoku jewel, like a pearly tear in a delicate golden frame. She places it on the ground gently, next to the eggs. ‘Great Game,’ she says. Another jewel follows, a round red eye in a silver disc, and then another, and another. ‘Manaya High. Supra. Huizinga. Strip. Liquorice. That’s my whole q-self.’
She smiles. ‘Remember, we always have the freedom to leave. You can always stop playing the game.’ She points at the jewels on the ground. ‘They are just pretty rocks to me now. What you see is all you get.’
She pulls her dress down and steps out of it with a rustle. Her body is slim and small, her breasts tiny buds, her bare sex a pink comma in the brackets of her hips. She steps forward lightly and stretches her arms like a dancer, wraps them around Mieli’s neck.
‘So, who is a big bad Great Game Zoku member now, hmm? Who is out to exploit a poor, innocent girl?’
Mieli answers with her hands and lips and tongue, and pulls Zinda down to the bed of grass, treasure eggs, and scattered quantum jewels.
*
Mieli sings to her, afterwards, a soft, quiet song that lovers sing. In Oort, it makes tinkling väki flowers grow in a koto’s walls. But here, it fits with the rhythm of Zinda’s breathing in her arms, with the warm breeze that the forest makes to dry the cooling sweat on their skin.
She feels free and light, unmoored, for the first time on a world bigger than a koto. Zinda is a small and precious and true thing against her.
I can’t do this. I can’t lie to her with my body. I have to tell her the truth.
The pellegrini may have sacrificed herself for her, but no doubt it was for selfish reasons. After years of service, Mieli owes her nothing.
And Sydän? She looked back. But she got what she wanted. An eternity. A life without end. Would she begrudge an end for Mieli, or a new beginning?
Promises and vows, chains made of words and false hope. I am done with them. Perhonen was right. She would want this. She would want me to be happy.
I always loved you more than she did, the ship said.
Perhaps this is the best song I can give her.
‘Why did you stop?’ Zinda asks.
‘There is something I have to tell you.’ Mieli takes a deep breath. ‘I’m not one of you. I’m not sure I ever will be. I only joined because I was looking for the Kaminari jewel. And you were right. There was someone. And there was a witch, too. My friend Perhonen once told me the same thing you did. I have been a fool.’
‘Mieli, you don’t have to say anything.’
‘Yes, I do.’ Haltingly, she tells Zinda about Sydän, about Venus and the pellegrini; her long journey with the thief and Perhonen. And the All-Defector. It gets easier as she speaks, and it takes a long time. When she finally runs out of words, there is faint rosy soletta-light glinting in the infinitely distant horizon of the Strip.
‘I understand if you have to share all that with the Great Game,’ Mieli says, after a while.
Zinda hugs her bare knees and looks at Mieli. ‘I won’t, if you don’t want me to. I’ll leave the zoku, if I have to.’
‘I can’t ask you to do that.’
‘Of course you can.’
Zinda stares at the river water, weighing her pearly Great Game jewel in her hand. Then she squeezes her eyes shut. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she whispers.
‘What is it?’ Mieli touches her shoulder. ‘Tell me.’
‘I’m not sure you would understand.’
‘After you listened? Of course I will.’
Zinda smiles a sad smile. ‘I know you pretty well, Mieli. I knew you even before we met. And I know you won’t like it. But after everything you said, I can’t keep you in the dark. You don’t like lies, Mieli, you really don’t. And like you said, you will never be one of us.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I was made for you, Mieli.’
‘What?’
‘I told you about zoku children. We are never born without a purpose. You are mine.’ She bites her lip. ‘It’s not artificial. It’s not a mask. It’s not a jewel putting thoughts into my head. I want to make you happy and to love you. It’s who I am.’ Mieli looks at the jewels lying on the ground. They sparkle in the morning light, in many colours. It was a trap, all a trap. She stands up.
‘I’m sorry, Mieli. But you have to understand, it doesn’t make it any different.’
‘I thought the Sobornost were cruel,’ Mieli says in a cold voice. ‘But they have nothing to learn from you. They deserve to have this place, and everything in it.’
She turns her back to the zoku girl and starts walking into the woods.
Mieli walks for a long time. She is naked, except for Sydän’s chain, and her zoku jewels, which follow her like a flock of birds. She ignores them, ignores the qupts from Zinda, and keeps walking. Rage and guilt and confusion swirl inside her like the eyestorms of Saturn, until finally she can’t bear it and uses her metacortex to filter the emotions out. But that is even worse: there is no room for anything else in her mind, and she is left a blank sheet of paper, a mindless point in motion.
The landscape is changing around her. The party is over, the Circle erased. The building blocks of the world are showing through: the surfaces of rocks and trees are melting back into smooth notchcubes, and after a while, she is the only living thing in a roughly ske
tched, blocky forest of gunmetal.
What finally stops her is an insistent impulse from her Great Game jewel. Stay where you are. She regrets not throwing it into the river, but cannot summon the energy to do it.
Impassively, she stops and waits. A Realmgate pops into being, and Barbicane floats through it, a rotund splash of colour against the grey cubetrees.
‘I suppose you want your hat back,’ Mieli says, folding her arms.
Barbicane raises his eyebrows, and smiles a little awkwardly. ‘My dear, young ladies at parties do what young ladies at parties do! My headgear is hardly the issue here. I do apologise for intruding upon your privacy at a difficult time, but the zoku has an urgent need for your services, and your handler, the lovely Zinda, failed to contact you. I thought my presence would carry more … weight!’ He clangs on his brass belly with his heavy gun arm.
Mieli turns away. ‘Whatever it is, I’m not interested.’ She reaches for her Great Game jewel, ready to throw it away.
‘Oh, but I think you will be! I believe you are familiar with a rascal by the name of Jean le Flambeur?’
Mieli stops and looks at Barbicane, eyes wide.
‘He is here?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Barbicane licks his lips. ‘We received a communication from him. He claims that in precisely fifty-seven minutes, he is going to steal a ring of Saturn.’
14
THE THIEF AND THE CLUTTERED SELF
The boy is lying in the hot sand with the sun beating down on his back, thinking about stealing.
The robot moves along the edge of the solar panel fields. It looks like a plastic toy, a camouflage-coloured crab. But there is a bioprocessor inside the cheap shell, and One-Eyed Ijja will pay well for it.
His mouth is dry. The sun is hot enough to peel even his parched neck, and bright lights are starting to flash in his eyes.
Tonight, his mother will come home again, bone-weary, and he won’t have anything to show her. Last week, he tried to bum cigarettes from the soldiers in the village, spoke French to them and did magic tricks to make them laugh. But when Tafalkayt found out, she beat him, called him a clown, a no-man who would never be amenokal. The memory makes his cheeks burn hotter than the sun.
The soldiers are laughing, smoking next to their low vehicle, just visible beyond the wavering glare of the panel field. He calculates: fifteen steps to the robot, a few moments to open it with the multi-tool he took from Ijja’s shop at the souk. It is as if there is a clock ticking in his head, counting down seconds to the moment when he needs to move. Before he even realises, he is sliding down the slope of the dune. His bare feet barely whisper on the hot soft surface.
He pauses to grab a handful of sand, throws it into the robot’s sensors, follows with a spray of paint from a can, watches as it scutters around in a circle. He fumbles with his phone, squints at the screen, presses the app with his thumb. The robot jerks and is still. He starts working on the plastic carapace. It takes all his strength to break off a palm-sized piece with the tool’s plier head. The sun glints off the plastic tubes inside, the prize, the thinking bugs that are the crab machine’s brain. He only has to stretch out his hand and take it and his mother will smile and all will be well.
‘What are you doing, boy?’
He grabs the prize. The sharp plastic edge tears at his hand as he pulls it out. Then he runs. But it is harder to go up the dune than to come down: his feet sink into it like in a nightmare. A hand grabs him by the neck, and he rolls down, right into a circle of towering figures, their faces and rifles black shadows against the stinging sun.
One of the soldiers pulls him up, roughly, a thick man whose face is shaded by blue stubble. He smells of black tobacco and sweat. He backhands the boy, hard, harder than Tafalkayt ever hit him. Something metallic on the man’s wrist bangs against his teeth. The boy’s brain shakes in his head like an egg yolk.
He begs for him to stop, in French, screaming as loud as he can.
The big man laughs. He kneels next to the boy, grabs his face between his big fingers.
‘Goddamn. You are Theo’s boy, aren’t you?’
Shaking in the man’s grip, he nods. He is not supposed to know his father’s name, but he’ll say anything to stop them from hitting him again.
‘Well, boy, your daddy isn’t here, so I guess it’s up to us to teach you a lesson about stealing.’
The rifle butts come down, on his ribs and arms and back, to the rhythm of laughter and curses, each impact a new crater of pain. After a while, they blend together into white agony.
He is not sure when they stop. He comes to when another repair robot scutters past him. The men are gone, bored of their game. He feels like a ragged doll: the sand beneath his face is black with his blood, and his face is numb and sticky, a puffed-up mask. Pain lances through a rib when he tries to move. It takes a while to sit up: his body wants to curl up and stay down.
He opens his right hand. He is holding the big one’s watch, a thick band of metal, silver and precious stones.
And that is the moment he remembers forever: not the prize, but becoming more than he is with a single act. It feels like being born.
He will look for it his whole life: on the other side of the sea, in cities and palaces and other worlds, and beyond. He won’t always find it. There will be times when he will die the death of getting caught. And one day, in a prison cell, he starts to read a book.
The boy becomes a young man with pencil eyebrows and dimpled temples, and weary Peter Lorre eyes. He is dressed in a dinner jacket and a red-lined cape, as if he was on his way to the opera. There is a white flower on his lapel that smells faintly of summer. He is me.
We are standing side by side in a crystal labyrinth, lit by some unseen sun far above. There is a bone-deep chill here, and our breaths steam in the air. There are glass cells on both sides of the narrow, twisting corridor. The light filters through their walls and makes dazzling rainbow patterns on the smooth mirrored floor. Inside each cell is a wax figure of me, as a young man, as an old man, with zoku jewels around my head. Each cell is framed in cast iron wrought in the shape of flowers and birds, and has a label written in old-fashioned cursive lettering: the design reminds me of the Paris metro entrances. The door to the cell behind me is open, and a rush of heat and desert wind blows out from it. The label above it reads THE BEGINNING.
It reminds me far too much of the Dilemma Prison.
The other me smiles, walks past me and closes the door behind me. Then he gestures at the glass labyrinth with a white-gloved hand.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Here we are. All of us.’
I follow the other me down the corridors of the crystal gallery of my selves. He hums to himself as he walks.
‘Here,’ he says, finally, pointing to another cell. The label above it says THE END. He takes out a small golden key, inserts it into the iron lock of the glass door and opens it. ‘This is mine. We will be a bit more comfortable here. The Gallery is far too cluttered. But that is really the point of you being here, isn’t it? Time for spring cleaning.’
Inside is a small table and two heavy mahogany chairs, facing each other. He points at one of them.
‘Please. Sit.’
I sit down carefully, watching him. The environment does not feel like a vir or a Realm, and as far as I can tell, everything is solid and real. I can’t feel the interface of the Leblanc. There is an uncomfortable pricking in my neck.
‘Any traps I should be worried about?’ I ask. ‘And if you want to play games, I didn’t bring my gun.’
‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘No games. No guns. Not anymore. Not here. Just the truth.’ He leans back in his chair, smiling. ‘First of all, Jean – I take it I may call you Jean – congratulations! You are the first of us to make it here. It’s quite an achievement.’
I raise an eyebrow.
‘Second, please note that I am not a full gogol like you – just a partial, a sketch, with limited autonomy. I may not be able to ans
wer all your questions. I certainly cannot help you with any pressing problems you might have – which I believe include a rather strong-willed young man whom I spoke to briefly when he first entered this ship. He was very intent on exploiting every single vulnerability he could find in our systems, so I thought it best to have some words with him.’
‘Yes, thank you very much for that. Very helpful.’
‘Oh, but I had to give you a hint of some kind, didn’t I? Is he part of a plan to steal the Kaminari jewel from Matjek Chen? If so, I might as well tell you that you are wasting your time. Chen does not have it.’
‘Hm,’ I say. ‘I was wondering about that.’ I review the memories I got from the sumanguru on how Chen got his hands on the Kaminari jewel. With the wisdom of hindsight, there is something decidedly fishy about the whole thing.
‘The zoku gave up the jewel far too easily. Almost like the chens were meant to find it. It has the Great Game Zoku written all over it.’
‘Precisely.’
‘But how do we know he doesn’t have it?’ I ask myself.
He smiles a familiar smile. ‘Well, I tried to steal it from him, of course. It turned out to be a booby trap. A nasty viral thing that would have taken out the whole chen copyclan. The Great Game do not kid around. I was almost surprised it wasn’t an exploding cigar, or a poisoned diving suit.’ He sighs. ‘Nothing ever changes. I kept the fake as a memento, as a reminder of that. It should be lying around here, somewhere. Just to keep things civilised, I left a replacement in its place – with a calling card, of course.’
‘Well, that would have been useful to know. You know, before I spent several months and lost friends trying to steal your calling card.’
He waves a hand at me. ‘Calm down, calm down. I could not tell you anything before you got rid of Joséphine. You are here now, that’s all that matters.’
‘So, what about the real jewel? I take it that the Great Game has it?’
‘Now we are getting somewhere,’ he says.
‘After trying my luck with Chen, I went after the real thing. And yes, the Great Game have it, unless they have done something spectacularly stupid recently. I’ll spare you the details. I found it. I just had to stretch out my hand and take it. Except—’ His eyes are far away.
The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) Page 18