The Causal Angel

by Hannu Rajaniemi

  ‘You are making a mistake, Jean,’ Barbicane says. ‘The Oortian joined us. She is a member of the Great Game now, in the embrace of our volition cone. She told us everything.’

  Shit.

  ‘We know you are not what you used to be. A challenge for a small zoku, nothing more. We will catch you!’

  ‘You are welcome to try,’ I say. ‘As for the Oortian, you can keep her.’ I stare at him. ‘Next time we meet, I will take more than just toys.’

  Then I jump through the q-dot bubble and drift slowly downwards, towards the ship.

  We’ll be ready, Barbicane mouths silently.

  Another gun cascade goes off around us as a fiery goodbye, and then the blue cold skin of the Leblanc swallows me.

  Interlude

  THE GODDESS AND THE FLOWER

  Joséphine Pellegrini takes a step, then another. Her legs ache. The sand is wet and clings to her feet.

  The beach is dark. The spiderweb of the System map in the sky has faded into a ghostly glow. Even the sea is silent. The demiurges are busy, listening to her, making the partial. The gogol construct is taking shape next to her as she walks, a hollow ghost, a sand-woman, made of fine grains swirling in the air. It matches its steps to hers, waiting to be filled with thought and purpose.

  Joséphine gives it memories. They do not belong to her: they are the Prime’s, perfect like diamonds, preserved across centuries. They were given to her by her copymother, to make her into what she is. She holds each one tight as they pass through her and into the partial’s eager brain.

  The time of her branching, in her labyrinth temple in the shadow of Kunapipi Mons, when her Jean came to her, for the last time.

  She remembers being the Prime, but only in fragments. Walking through the gardens of the Engineer-of-Souls, helping him shepherd thought-swarms. Fighting a war against herself in the Deep Time, against a branch who wanted to take the entire guberniya into deep Dyson sleep, to leave behind these troubles and wake up to see Andromeda Galaxy fill the sky. Like her labyrinth, the thoughts are mere shadows of something greater and high-dimensional that she cannot understand with a mind confined to the dream-vir.

  On the other hand, she remembers very well how she felt when the thief made his entrance.

  One moment he is not there, and then he is, warming his hands in the blaze of her singularity, in the cylindrical room at the heart of the labyrinth. A cheap trick, as one of her gogols quickly determines: a carefully placed series of space-time cloaks, hiding his approach through the labyrinth even from her eyes.

  He wears flesh and heavy blue armour of the zoku, not quite matter, not quite light, and a halo of quantum jewels to go with it. She hopes that they are not for her. He has given her jewels aplenty already, all of them equally disappointing.

  He is so much smaller than she is. She is in the rock and the atmosphere and in the computronium beneath the crust of the planet and in the thread-modes of the event horizon of the black hole. He is a mess of carbon atoms and entanglements and q-dots and water, barely larger than the least of her gogols.

  And yet—

  She creates an image of herself out of modulated Hawking radiation and steps out of the glow of the black hole to meet him. Her gogols show her his point of view: a towering figure of blue fire, wearing a necklace of stars. He flinches, and she smiles. She keeps the intensity of her form just below what his q-stone suit can handle, but not by much.

  ‘Back already?’ she asks, in a voice made of gamma rays. Her words incinerate his armour’s surface layer. ‘It has only been a century or two. Did you grow tired of Mars so quickly?’

  He shields his face with a raised hand. ‘Mars was … educational,’ he says. ‘Could you stop glowing, please? It hurts my eyes.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  It only takes a thought to vaporise him and to pour him into a mindshell in her vir. Her gogols do not know what to do with the zoku jewels, so she just leaves them scattered on the floor of the singularity chamber like discarded toys.

  They stand together in her heart-vir, next to a murmuring fountain, beneath a starry sky. She, too, is embodied now, in her favourite dress, in the most regal mindshell from her Library she can find. He is simply a translation of the flesh he came in, a little older than she remembers, in form-fitting dark blue. He massages the bridge of his nose.

  ‘That’s better,’ he says.

  ‘Is it? Were you not happy with that particular self? Your Raymonde seemed to like it. Poor girl. She must miss you so.’ She adjusts her ring. ‘Perhaps I should bring her here, too, along with the rest of Mars.’

  ‘Joséphine—’

  ‘Do you think you can play with the little people, and then crawl back to me, with no consequences? Other yous have done the same. What do you think I did to them?’

  ‘Something involving poetic justice, I expect.’ He spreads his hands. ‘I was told that this is where you come to pray to the goddess. So I did.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘As unlikely as it may seem to you, I am here on business.’

  ‘I see. And why should I not have my gogols consume you, here and now, and finally find out if there is anything of use in that mind of yours?’

  ‘Don’t offend me by thinking I haven’t taken precautions,’ he says, tapping one temple. ‘Touch me, and whatever I have to trade will all burn. Touch me wrong, that is.’ He grins.

  ‘Do not test my patience, Jean.’

  ‘I don’t have to test it.’

  ‘Then you know you should make it quick.’

  ‘Here, where we have all the time in the world? Where each minute takes less than a baseline picosecond? When we haven’t seen each other – well, I haven’t seen you – for nearly two hundred years? You have gotten even more impatient in your old age.’

  She sighs and sits down on the fountain stairs.

  ‘Perhaps I have,’ she says. ‘It tends to happen when you walk a tightrope between Founder sisters and brothers who want to stab you in the back and a fanatic who wants to conquer death, all the while making sure that they don’t tear the System apart in another ridiculous war. It’s not like designing buildings and having affairs on Mars, Jean.’

  He sits down next to her, carefully choosing a step below her. He crosses his hands over one knee and leans back. ‘I know. That’s why I’m here. Things are about to get worse.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Matjek Chen has the Kaminari jewel.’

  She takes a deep breath.

  ‘And why are you telling me that?’

  ‘Why do you think? Because I’m going to steal it.’

  She laughs. ‘I would like to see that,’ she says. ‘And I suppose you are asking for my help?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ He takes her left hand in his own. His grip is tight and warm. ‘Joséphine, if I fail, you know where I’ll end up.’ He gestures with his free hand. There is a flower between his thumb and forefinger, suddenly, with colourful, tapering petals.

  ‘This will help you find me if that happens. If you ever want to, that is.’

  She holds it up. Clever little thief. It is information encoded in matter, translated by her gogols into vir form. At a molecular level the petals are spiky cathedrals, rows upon rows of them, containing data. It defines a set of modal logic constraints, provable properties for a neural network, like a gogol. The flower is an empty shape of a person, a shadow, waiting to be filled.

  ‘That’s very romantic, Jean,’ she says. ‘Asking me to be your get out of jail for free card. Are you sure you’d not rather receive a file in a cake?’

  ‘You were never much of a cook, even less so a baker. And I didn’t imagine for a moment getting out of jail would be free.’

  She freezes him in the vir’s slowtime for a moment and summons a warmind gogol family to scour the flower for traps. They find nothing. It is only then that she lets time resume and inhales the flower’s scent. It is delicate and sweet, the memory of a summer, with a hint o
f honey.

  ‘Jean,’ she says, a sudden tenderness in her chest. ‘This is Matjek. You are going to fail, and it sounds like you know it. Why are you doing this? You were happy on Mars, with the little people.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you cared.’

  ‘I don’t. I just thought I’d do the System a favour by keeping an eye on you.’

  He looks down.

  ‘I talked to a woman of the Kaminari once,’ he says, ‘before the Spike. Don’t give me such a look, it wasn’t like that, we were just friends. But one night on Ganymede, we got philosophical. The Universe is a game, she said. It makes us into players. We can’t see the moves that are not allowed. Like in chess. There is perfect freedom in the black and white, except that the rules make invisible walls. Two squares forward, one left. One left, whole row forward and backward, one right. That’s all you see.

  ‘There is a reason for it, she said. Algorithmic complexity. The Universe is a quantum computer, and over time, it is simply more likely that structure comes out of it than noise. That means rules, patterns. That means a game. But spend long enough poking at it, and you start to see the game engine, the labyrinth of the quantum circuit, wires looping around each other, forwards and backwards.’

  ‘It sounds like the kind of thing the zoku like to say,’ Joséphine says disdainfully.

  The thief sighs. ‘Perhaps. After that, she started talking about this ancient legend they have, about a creature called the Sleeper with a billion hit points, and after it was finally killed by a coalition of a thousand guilds, it dropped a small rusty dagger.

  ‘But there is something to it. I’m tired of games. Mars was not enough. And you were right, I made a mess of it. I need something new, something different.’

  ‘And you think the jewel will give you that?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to try.’

  ‘I know you, Jean, better than anyone. You will never stop. There will always be something else for you to steal.’

  He gives her that fake-weary look. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I think one more thing would be enough. Maybe it always was.’ He stands up. ‘Goodbye, Joséphine. If we meet again, it will be your choice.’

  ‘Did I give you my permission to leave?’ she says, hardening her voice.

  ‘Oh, I’m not leaving. I would never have come here if I expected to leave. This is a new branch of me that I created just for you. That self-destruct loop of yours? I stole it a long time ago.’

  ‘Jean—’ She reaches for the firmanent, for his mindshell, but it is already too late.

  ‘You know, it’s good practice for what is to come. Even if you are branching before jumping into the nothing, you have to have the resolve to do it yourself. Take this as a compliment, Joséphine: if I had come here first, it would have been hard to find the courage. Take care of yourself. It’s been fun.’

  He closes his eyes. He twitches once. The mindshell stands still, chest rising and falling, but Joséphine knows that the gogol inside is gone.

  She sits on the stairs for a long time, watching the still form of the thief, standing there with a peaceful expression on his face. She turns the flower in her hands. Finally she stands up and touches her Jean’s face gently with her ring hand.

  Then she starts thinking about how to best betray him to Matjek Chen.

  7

  MIELI AND THE LIQUORICE-ZOKU

  Mieli is singing to her new garden when the quantum spam rain starts.

  She sits in the shade of a young pumptree and hums a wordless hum, softly varying in pitch and frequency. It tells the smartcoral in the garden’s soil to grow thin tendrils to hold the soft soil in place, packing it firmer than the gentle gravity of the Farreach Plate can. The humid air is warm and full of the wet rhubarb smell of pumptree breath. The shrill screams of young anansi spiders mingle with Mieli’s song. They dart amongst the tree branches, weaving diamond threads between them. The horizon curves up like the fingers of a cupped hand. Far above is the sky of ice, faintly transparent, and beyond it, the sisterspheres.

  Only some of it is real, for certain values of real. Like almost all inhabitants of Supra City, she is a member of the Huizinga-zoku now, the zoku of Circles. Inside her own Circle, she is free to define her own realities and their laws as she wishes. She cringes at the memory of fumbling with Circle-crafting, turning her hex first into a cartoon world without a third dimension, then into a grey fog where only sounds had physical form.

  Reluctantly, at Zinda’s suggestion, she turned her longing for Oort into a wish and wove it into the volition of the zoku through her Huizinga jewel. In an instant, several thousand Huizinga members qupted her complete Oortian Circle and Realm spimes, ranging from megaproject construction game Realms to a very detailed Narrativist Circle exploring gender dynamics in an Oortian koto. Mieli found the last one promising, until she realised it only allowed communication through song and wing movements, and completely excluded all sexual activity. But there was enough to help her create a patchwork reality that matched her memories.

  Now, she could believe she is in Oort. Almost.

  The song comes out of her easily, and she can feel the movement in the earth beneath her. She has already planted some cloudberries. Vecbushes and maybe even a small phoenixwood grove will follow. She breathes in the scent of the garden. It almost fills the hollow space in her chest.

  A part of her dreads finishing the song. After singing to living things, it will be time to sing to the dead. She has been working on a song for Perhonen for weeks. But she can only do it in bits and pieces, when the grief is hiding beneath a blanket of sunlight and comfort. In her dealings with her zokus, she uses her metacortex heavily, to filter her thoughts and emotions. It always leaves her feeling like a butterfly pressed between two glass plates, thin and lifeless. But she refuses to touch her sorrow, and so it remains a wild thorny plant in the ordered garden of her mind.

  She mistakes the first falling jewel for a waterdrop from the anansi webs. But more follow: slowly at first, little more than flashes of sunlight that vanish into the grass, then as a relentless glass hail downpour that beats down on the pumptree leaves with a sound like a whispering machine gun. A tiny jewel stings her cheek. An offer to join a zoku dedicated to constructing a perfect life-sized replica of an ancient imaginary starship from notchcubes on the surface of Rhea flashes through her brain, full of shrill enthusiasm. She brushes it aside and presses herself against the pulsating trunk of the pumptree.

  Bigger jewels follow, bouncing off the anansi webs and tearing the creatures down from their perches. They make small craters in her soil and completely decimate the cloudberry patch. Mieli fumbles for her link to the Plate zoku that takes care of all the infrastructure needs, and qupts a frantic request for a q-dot umbrella over her garden. Conflict with your Circle’s Schroeder locks, comes back the reply. Mieli groans. Clearly, some subtle setting in her Circle excludes non-Oortian technology.

  She runs into the rain and opens her wings in an attempt to shield even a few of the delicate berries from the destruction. It is like standing beneath a shower of hot stones. Lightning flashes of entanglement requests bombard her mind to the rhythm of the blows. Time machine megaproject! Solve the Fermi Paradox! Resurrect Saint McGonigal to save us all!

  ‘Perkele!’ she screams and pushes a request to the Huizinga-zoku through the mad thunder of the mind spam. In a flash of silver, her Circle goes down. The ice sky disappears. The horizon lurches from the familiar bowl-shape of a koto into the endless gentle curve of Saturn, crisscrossed by the immense blue-and-green arcs of the Strips and the wispy mass stream pillars that hold them up. The vertigo-inducing stairway structure of the Farreach Plate reveals itself around her little hex, the immense set of stream-supported ascending steps, each with slightly lower gravity than the one below, reaching up nearly two thousand klicks from the one-G level near the ochre van Gogh brushstrokes of the giant planet below.

  And, finally, with a pop and a faint ozone
smell, a q-dot dome shimmers into being. A few thin streams of tiny jewels pour down to the ground from the hollows of the pumptrees and cupped leaves with a faint tinkle, and then the garden is silent.

  Mieli stares at the devastation. Her wings and head hurt. The jewels crunch beneath her feet. Everything green is covered in a layer of multicoloured glitter. With a sigh, she summons a swarm of utility fog botlets from the Plate zoku to clean things up. This time, they materialise instantly: the air blurs in a heat haze, and the spam jewels start floating away in streams and spirals. She briefly considers telling them to hide the damage and make the garden look the way it was, but decides against it. Karhu always told her to keep reminders of her mistakes visible.

  Mieli? comes a qupt. It’s Zinda: the message comes with a mixture of sensory impressions, smell of incense, a glimpse of the ring-bisected evening sky from the Great Game girl’s balcony, and a palpable sense of concern. Are you all right?

  I’m fine, Mieli answers, restricting her reply to a curt verbal message and nothing else. What do you want?

  Just checking up on you! I got a volition flash that you needed help with something. We are entangled now, you know. She pauses. Oh dear. What a terrible mess. I knew we should not have set you up on Farreach: the spam zoku must think that the newly joined and expats are easy targets, and the Plate zoku is a bit too loose to sort them out. Are you sure you don’t want a Realm?

  Mieli swears silently. Clearly, she has to guard her thoughts even more carefully. Something of her volition must have slipped through to the Great Game jewel without her realising it – and she is still clumsy enough with the quptlink to allow Zinda to see what she is seeing.

  Yes. I’m sure.

  How tacky! But I understand. A lot of aegon-zokus feel that way, that matter is special. Just let me know if there is anything I can do. Oh, and if it’s more matter you are after, can I interest you in a dinner?