‘Perhaps I will allow myself the indulgence of taking care of you personally. It will not make a difference in the end, after all, and may teach a lesson to incompetent little Zinda here. Discipline amongst the newbies is far too lax these days, that’s what I always say!’
He presses the cold mouth of his gun arm against Mieli’s head.
Do it! Mieli qupts at Matjek. She casts one more look at Zinda. The zoku girl’s eyes flash with understanding. The metal against Mieli’s flesh grows hot.
Done. Mieli is qupted into the gunscape, her mind encoded into the quantum states of the tanglematter sphere. She is inside a tiny Realm, bodiless, only dimly aware of the Arsenal around her, of the minuscule shape of Barbicane right in front of the ekpyrotic weapon.
Matjek fires. The Arsenal walls come alive with energy. An EM field pushes the ekpyrotic shell to an enormous velocity in seconds. It flashes through chamber after chamber, spinning faster and faster, erasing every gun in the Gun Club’s collection in its path.
Even inside her cocooned Realm, Mieli feels the impact on Saturn’s south pole, of the shell pushing deep into the metallic hydrogen core. Then the four black holes of the ekpyrotic shell come together.
The entire giant planet pulses like a heart, pumps gravitational waves across the space between universes. They carry Mieli with them, a message in a bottle, washing onto an alien shore.
Everything is soft. Everything is liquid.
Mieli does not see or feel as much as perceives, does not move as much as flows. There is only a bubble-thin boundary between her and Other, inside and outside. It is like a dream where you dive and start breathing underwater.
She has a vague sense of up and down, and of infinite depths below her. Something huge passes beneath, moving with slow strokes, and her fragile bubble-self wavers in its wake. For a moment, she stays very still, fear spilling out of her in ripples.
How did the zoku build this place? Solitonic states, governed by alien physics, just about complex enough to compute, to provide a platform for thought, here on the Planck brane. Did they build it or find it?
Slowly, carefully, she lets herself expand, reaches out with her awareness, feeling for things that are not her. After a while, she starts to sense a knotted flow, something warm in the liquid other, something shaped like hands, folded together, or a sleeping butterfly.
The Kaminari jewel.
Here, touching is a metaphor, and when Mieli reaches for it, its flow lines pull her essence in, make her a part of it, create a knot in what she thinks of as her chest.
Then the jewel opens.
At first, there is only a cool presence, filling her, spreading to her every cell. Then the jewel is her, and she is it, and they are all possible Mielis at once.
An old winged woman dying of a smartcoral growth in Oort, telling a story to her great-grandchildren.
A Sobornost goddess whose wings spread over the Solar System.
A zoku trueform with a halo of jewels, like a tarot card.
A story told by a jinn in the wildcode desert.
A caleidoscope of images, a superposition, many things all at once. And yet they have one thing in common.
Softly, note by note, Mieli starts singing, as if she was filled with väki of Oort, ready to shape itself to her/their will. The chorus of angels rises together, and sings a last song for the ship Perhonen.
She sings of alinen and the dark, and of another song that made a ship like a butterfly of the void. She sings of advice and love. Of fear of goodbyes, of closing doors. Of a thief in a prison. Of an ending, of wings burning against a sphere of blue and white. Of a last butterfly kiss.
Of all the lives around her, entangled in not a jewelled chain, but a spiderweb.
She sings of a new beginning.
In between the notes of the song, there is a Universe.
The jewel listens. The wish is granted.
A pattern emerges in the weave of quantum threads, in the emptiness of the Planck brane. The perfect symmetry of nothing shatters into the imperfect order of gauge fields, quarks and gluons.
Many things are born from one. A path is chosen through a forest of possible orderings. Chaos crystallises into a diamond of causality.
Mieli’s song begins to sing, and there is a flash of light.
Epilogue
Joséphine Pellegrini the Prime watches the war from her guberniya, drinking wine. She misses her temple on Venus. That seems like a more appropriate distance from these messy proceedings, in any case.
And she has many rediscovered emotions to file away in her Library. Like grief. She raises a lonely glass to Jean le Flambeur. Still, there are many more where that one came from. Perhaps it is time to ask Sasha for a favour and visit the Dilemma Prison again.
Joséphine sighs. It is almost time to get ready for another war. Her brothers and sisters are about to wipe out Supra City with their shiny sunbeam. Shame, really. They will have to come up with a new and better common enemy. Something less risky than the All-Defector.
Something outside the Solar System, perhaps? She will have to branch gogols to think about it.
There are still things to settle with the hsien-kus and the vasilevs: the cooperation the All-Defector forced upon them did not help them to put aside their grievances with her. But they have expended far more of their forces against the zokus than she did, and even without Chen support, she has a much better chance against them, this time. The others will be distracted. Chitragupta will spend millennia combing through the remains of the zoku Realms. Sasha will play with his new toys. And sumangurus are little more than weapons, just asking for targets to be pointed at.
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 Pris
on 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
The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) Page 25