The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) by Hannu Rajaniemi Read Free Book Online Page B

horizon. Everything shakes. The city stumbles.
    The last thing Isidore sees is Marcel, a hand squeezing Owl Boy’s shoulder, looking at the light, a sad look in his eyes, as if he knew he was right all along.
    Like a drowning man, Isidore reaches out to the exomemory. His mother, in the Gentleman’s guise, floating far above the city’s rooftops. Pixil, walking through an agora of the Permanent Avenue with her friend Cyndra. His Quiet foster father, toiling in the footsteps of the city, looking up from the wall he is building as the light grows brighter. There is no time for words. Their minds meet, and for a moment, they fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Pixil’s rage, her hand on her sword; Raymonde’s futile attempt to create a foglet shield around the city, his father’s Quiet calm as he places a final regolith brick on top of the unfinished wall and turns to face the light, and suddenly, he is not alone in the maelstrom of fear anymore.
    As Isidore erases the last of the gevulot between himself and his loved ones and their courage and love fills him, he/they suddenly know what must be done.
    The Cryptarch Key turns in all the mind-locks of the Oubliette. The boundaries of memory dissolve, as if they had never existed. All the privacy trees of gevulot collapse into a single point. All secrets are revealed. All memory is one. Centuries, millennia of life, shared in an instant.
    As the Phobos singularity consumes the planet and becomes incandescent, the mind called the Oubliette opens its million eyes and looks straight into it, no longer afraid.

4
    THE THIEF AND THE GUN CLUB
    Just before the Iapetus job starts to go south, Barbicane the Gun Club Elder and I watch zoku children play global thermonuclear war.
    We drink dark tea in the mahogany-panelled drawing room of the Gun Club Zoku’s copper-and-brass sky-train. It rides smoothly along the bright golden curve of the Club’s orbital ring around Iapetus, fast enough to create a cosy half a g of artificial gravity. Our view of the Saturnian moon’s surface through the large, circular viewports is spectacular. We are above the Cassini Regio, a reddish-brown birthmark that stains the white of the icy surface. It makes Iapetus look like a giant yin-yang symbol. And inside the Turgis Crater, five hundred kilometres in diameter, directly below us, is a miniature Earth. A disc of green and blue, its continents and seas circumscribed by a glowing silver line.
    ‘The Cold War Re-Enactment Society, they call it,’ Barbicane says in his bassoon voice. He gestures at the view flamboyantly with the gleaming fractal foliage of his manipulator arm. It makes a tinkling sound against the viewport glass.
    The amber halo of zoku jewels orbiting his stovepipe hat like a miniature Solar System makes Barbicane look like a melancholy saint. In contrast to most members of his zoku, the Elder’s primary body actually has biological components left. His head belongs to a fifty-something man with impressive red sideburns, a prominent nose and a fierce blue-eyed gaze. But the rest of him is artificial: a rounded, cast-iron torso, a bushbot manipulator arm and a heavier, cylindrical gun limb. His legs are brass stumps – exhaust ports for small ion engines. He smells faintly of machine grease, metal polish and an old man’s aftershave.
    ‘Too modern for me, dear Raoul, far too modern! But I applaud their enthusiasm. They even made the warheads by hand, the old-fashioned way. Synchrotrons and plutonium! Aah!’ Barbicane makes a rumbling sound of pleasure.
    In fact, they had a little help this time. I smile, recalling my dealings with the zoku youths a few days ago, in a different guise from my current persona of Raoul d’Andrezy, an emigré and antique dealer from Ceres. Give children matches and they will start fires. Nothing ever changes.
    The silver ring running along the crater’s steep edge is a zoku Magic Circle that defines the boundary of the playground and the rules