Read The Causal Angel (Jean le Flambeur) for Free Online Page A

desert. The city is passing through Hellas Planitia, and tendrils of orange dust worm along the rough surface behind it.
    Owl Boy makes hollow metallic sounds in his throat, like a fingernail tapping a tin can. His Noble body is still young, but he has the face of an old man, slack-jawed and worn. His eyes are blank. The gevulot around him feels foggy, broken.
    Marcel kisses his cheek. ‘I take it you know about his condition?’
    ‘I ’blinked it. His brain was altered by the Spike in ways that the Resurrection Men do not understand: there is a quantum condensate in his microtubules, something like the ancient theories of consciousness, but artificial. He can’t go to the Quiet, or the condensate might collapse, and they do not know what would happen then.’
    ‘Twenty years, he’s been like this.’ Marcel sighs. ‘I live in hope. Quantum states do not live forever. Perhaps he will come out of it. When he does, I will be waiting. So I live modestly, stretch out my days.’
    ‘Perhaps the zoku can help him. I could talk to—’
    Marcel smiles sadly.
    ‘I do not put my trust in gods anymore,’ he says. ‘Please. Do what you came to do. It will be his bedtime soon.’
    Isidore nods, holds the thief’s Watch in a tight grip and takes out the Key in his mind, the one that opens the doors of all memory.
    Owl Boy’s exomemory unfolds before him, but Isidore closes his eyes to most of it, ’blinking for a night in a glider, over Noctis Labyrinthus. The night of the Spike.
    And then he remembers being there, above Ius Chasma, laughing at Marcel’s fear at the aerial acrobatics.
    Owl Boy thinks Marcel can be such a girl sometimes. To pacify him he takes the glider higher, to see the stars. It has been a good night. Sometimes he does not understand Marcel, his obsession with his work, his need to be alone. But up in the night sky, it feels like they are meant to be together.
    And of course, that’s exactly when Marcel has to drop the bomb.
    ‘I’ve been thinking about going away,’ Marcel says.
    ‘Leaving?’ Owl Boy says. Somewhere, far away, Isidore tastes his disappointment, the bitter sting that pierces his chest. ‘Where would you go?’
    Marcel gestures. ‘You know. Up. Out there.’ He presses his palm against the smooth, transparent skin of the glider.
    ‘It’s a stupid cycle here, don’t you think? And it doesn’t feel real here anymore.’
    Owl Boy is angry now. Is that what I am, after all? A part of the stupid cycle. A diversion, something that you could play with before you go to do bigger and better things? He lets it come out in his words.
    ‘Isn’t that supposed to be your job? Feeling unreal?’
    ‘No,’ Marcel says. ‘It’s about making unreal things real, or real things more real. It would be easier, up there. The zokus have machines that turn thoughts into things. The Sobornost say that they are going to preserve every thought ever thought. But here—’
    Here it comes , thinks Isidore, clinging onto his self, trained by his Kingship to sustain the flow of his own consciousness in the river of memory, looking at Owl Boy’s frozen thoughts one by one. Is this why Marcel clings to him? Because the last thing he told him was about going away?
    The time in the memory slows down. Marcel’s fingers are pressed against the glass. A bright Jupiter winks between his fingers. And then there is another memory, a sudden discontinuity, a knife-cut through the thread of Owl Boy’s thoughts.
    Marcel can be such a girl sometimes. Jupiter is bright between his fingers. A sudden discontinuity—
    Isidore remembers remembering, is caught in a memory of the memory itself, an infinite mirror tunnel that draws him in. Marcel’s fingers move more and more slowly. Time flows sluggish and cold, as if he was swimming against an icy current.
    Of course. The thief would have left a trap for anyone who tried to follow. A memory pit that traps you in the infinite moment.
    But Isidore is not anyone. He is