The Quantum Thief (13 page)

Are you sure you’ll be all right?

I’ve done this before, remember? We went to Venus from the other side of the System to see this bitch. I think I can handle a little journey in my head.

You go, girl. And then Perhonen is gone.

Mieli lies down on the bed, closes her eyes and imagines the temple. It is in the shadow of Kunapipi Mons, a shield volcano rising from the basalt plain. The surface of the rock is covered in a thin layer of lead and tellurium, condensed from the metal fumes that rise from the canyons and furrows where the temperature exceeds seven hundred Kelvin.

The temple is a stone shadow, a projection of some higher-dimensional object, with strange geometry: the black corridors she walks along suddenly open into vast hollows crisscrossed by stone bridges at impossible angles. But she has been through this labyrinth before, and follows the metal flower markings unerringly.

In the centre, there is the axis, a little trapped singularity, floating in a cylindrical pit, a falling star, suspended. That is where the goddess lives. Even now, Mieli remembers how she felt at the end of her journey here in the physical world, in a thick q-suit, beaten down by the relentless gravity, limbs burning with fatigue.

‘Mieli,’ the goddess says. ‘How nice to see you here.’ Strangely, she looks more human here than when she chooses to manifest to her on her own. The lines on her face and neck and the corners of her eyes are visible. ‘Let me see where you are. Ah, Mars. Of course. I always loved Mars. I think we will preserve that place, somewhere, once the Great Common Task is done.’

She brushes a lock of hair away from Mieli’s forehead. ‘You know, I do wish you would come here sometime without having to ask for something. I have time to all those who serve me, and why wouldn’t I? I am many.’

‘I made a mistake,’ says Mieli. ‘I let the thief get away from me. I was inattentive. It will not happen again.’

The pellegrini raises her eyebrows. ‘Let me see your memories. Ah. But you found him again? And made progress? Child, you don’t have to come to me to unburden your soul after every little failure or a bump in the road. I trust you. You have served me well. Now, what is it that you need?’

‘The thief wants tools to steal what they call gevulot here. He thinks there are Sobornost agents on Mars who might be able to help, and wants to contact them.’

The pellegrini looks at the bright dot of the axis for a moment. ‘A simple enough request, under normal circumstances. They would obey my seal without question. But I cannot be associated with your mission, not directly. I can provide you with information and contacts, but you will have to do your own negotiation with them. It will be vasilevs, they can be troublesome. Such handsome boys, and they know it.’

‘I understand.’

‘No matter. I will send what you need to that cute little ship of yours. I am satisfied with your progress: do not worry about failures.’

Mieli swallows. The question comes out unbidden.

‘Am I being punished?’

‘What do you mean? Of course not.’

‘Then why am I treating the thief with velvet gloves? In the war, the warminds would take prisoners and find the tiniest things hidden in their minds. Why is the thief any different?’

‘He isn’t,’ the pellegrini says. ‘But he will be.’ ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t have to. Trust me, you were carefully chosen for this task. Carry it out as you have, and both I and your friend will see you here soon, in the flesh.’

Then Mieli is back in the rose-scented room. Slowly, she gets up and makes herself another drink.

While Mieli is away, Perhonen and I work on the Watch. Or she does; I mainly act as her hands. Apparently, Mieli has given the ship a degree of access to this body’s sensory systems. It is an odd feeling, holding the Watch in my hands while thin q-dot probes crawl from my fingers into it.

‘I always liked these,’ I say aloud. ‘The Watches. Coupling entangled states with oscillators and mechanics. Large and small. Beautiful.’

Hm. Lift it closer to your eye.

While Perhonen carries out the analysis, I’m flicking through exomemories of memory palaces, fighting the resulting headache with drink.

‘You know, I think I was off my head. Memory palaces?’ An elaborate memory system, based on a technique of impressing places and images on the mind. Imaginary loci where symbols representing memories could be stored. Used by Greek orators, medieval scholars and Renaissance occultists. Made obsolete by the advent of printing.

I wave the Watch in frustration. ‘You know, I would have thought that the whole point of hiding things here would have been for me to find them easily again. It’s almost as if I don’t want myself to discover anything.’

Hold still.

‘I can’t find anything on Paul Sernine, no public exomemories, not that it’s surprising. I do wonder what I was doing on Mars, apart from this Raymonde girl.’

Stealing something, probably.

‘I love this place, but looking at my previous career, there isn’t that much here to steal. And I would not have gone into the gogol piracy business.’

Are you sure? Now put it back on the table.

‘Yes, of course I’m sure. What is your problem, anyway?’

The ship sighs, an odd, imaginary sound. You are. You may think you are charming, but you are causing distress to my friend. She does not do riddles or prison breaks. She is not even a warrior, not really.

‘So why is she doing all this? Serving the Sobornost?’

Why does anyone ever do anything? For someone. Don’t ask so many questions, I’m trying to concentrate. The ion traps in these things are delicate.

‘All right. Well, the sooner we crack this, the sooner we can all get on with bigger and better things.’

I feel the thing in my hands. The letters on the word Thibermesnil are raised slightly. ‘Ah ha.’ I suddenly make the connection. When I came back, there was a dream, and there was a book, a book about the flower thief. And a story. Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late. A secret passage, unlocked by—

I press the letter H with a fingernail. After some pressure, it turns. So do R and L. The cover of the Watch opens. Inside, is a picture of a man and a woman. The man is me, younger, black-haired, smiling. The woman has reddish brown hair and a dash of freckles across her nose.

‘Well, hello, Raymonde,’ I say.

THE DETECTIVE AND HIS FATHER

Isidore blinks at the Phobos-light in the morning. His mouth tastes foul, and his head pounds. For a moment, he buries his face in Pixil’s hair, holding on to her warmth. Then he forces himself to open his eyes, slowly easing his hand out from underneath her.

The vault looks different in the morning. The walls and other surfaces let light filter through, and he can see the red line of Hellas Basin’s edge in the distance. It feels like waking up outside, in a strange geometric forest.

The previous night is a haphazard jumble of images, and he instinctively reaches out for the exomemory, to remind himself what happened: but of course, here, he only finds a blank wall.

He looks at Pixil’s sleeping face. Her lips are curled in a little smile, and her eyes are fluttering beneath the eyelids. The zoku jewel glitters in the morning light at the base of her throat, against her olive skin. What the hell am I doing? he thinks. She is right, it is just a game.

It takes a while to find his clothes in the pile, and he almost puts on a pair of pantaloons by mistake. Pixil breathes steadily all the way through the operation, and does not wake up even when he tiptoes away.

In daylight, the cubes in the vault resemble a labyrinth, and it is difficult to tell where they entered, even with a sense of direction honed by living in the Maze. As always, the lack of gevulot confuses Isidore, and thus finding the portal comes as a relief. That must be it. A silver arch, a perfect semicircle with intricate filigree work along its edge. He takes a deep breath and walks through. The discontinuity is even sharper this time—

‘More wine, my lord?’

—and he is in a vast ballroom that cannot be anything else but the Hall of the King in Olympus Palace. Glittering gogol slave dancers with jewelled bodies twist themselves into impossible configurations atop high pillars, performing slow, mechanical acrobatics. A machine servant in red livery is offering him a glass with a mandible-like limb. He realises he is wearing a Martian noble’s attire, a living cloak over a dark q-fabric doublet, wearing a sword. Everywhere around him there are people in even more elaborate finery, bathing in Phobos-light from a huge window with a view down the slope of Olympus Mons. The domed ceiling far, far above is like a golden sky.

It all feels completely real, and he accepts the offered glass, dumbfounded.

‘Would you care for a dance?’

A tall woman in a Venetian mask, lush body barely contained in a network of straps and jewels, her skin strikingly auburn red, offers him a hand. Still reeling, he allows himself to be led to a clear space in the crowd where a many-handed gogol plays achingly beautiful melodies with brass flutes. She moves lightly, tiptoed, following his lead like a writer’s pen; his hand rests on the smooth curve of her hip.

‘I want to make my husband jealous,’ she whispers, smelling of exotic wine.

‘And who is your husband?’

‘Up there, on the dais.’ Isidore looks up when they swirl around. And there, of course, stands the Martian King, a laughing figure in white and gold, surrounded by a coterie of admirers and courtiers. He turns to tell the red-skinned woman he really should be going, when everything freezes.

‘What are you doing?’ asks Pixil. She is looking at him, arms folded, looking completely awake now, in her plain zoku daysuit.

‘Dancing,’ he says, disentangling himself from the red woman who has become a statue.

‘Silly boy.’

‘What is this place?’

‘An old Realmspace. Something Drathdor whipped together once, I think. He’s a romantic.’ Pixil shrugs. ‘Not really my kind of thing.’ She gestures, and the semicircle is back behind her. ‘I was going to make you breakfast. The whole zoku is still asleep.’

‘I didn’t want to wake you.’

The discontinuity is a relief this time, restoring him and the world to a degree of normalcy.

‘All right. What is this about? Sneaking off after last night?’

He says nothing. Shame crawls down his back, leaving cold trails, and he does not entirely know why.

‘It’s just the tzaddik thing,’ he finally says. ‘I need to think about it. I’ll qupt you.’ He looks around. ‘How do I get out of here?’

‘You know,’ Pixil says. ‘You just have to want. Do qupt me.’ She blows him a kiss. But there is disappointment in her eyes.

Another discontinuity, and he is standing outside the colony, blinking at the bright sunlight.

He takes another spidercab and asks it to drop him off near the Maze, asking the driver to go slow this time. His stomach is churning; clearly, whatever ancient abusive chemicals the Elders were drinking are not something the Martian body designers were prepared for.

There is an immediate sense of relief when the cab leaves the Dust District. The gevulot hums in his mind, and things have texture again, not just ethereal geometry but stone and wood and metal.

He has breakfast in a small dragon-themed corner café, banishing fatigue with a coffee and a small portion of Chinese rice porridge, but it does not take the guilt away.

And then he sees the newspaper. An aging gentleman with a Watch in a brass chain and a waistcoat is reading the Ares Herald at a nearby table. TZADDIK BOY PARTIES HARD, screams the headline. Shaking, he asks his table for a copy, and the waiter drone brings it. It is him, a moving picture on paper, talking about everything, the chocolate case, Pixil.

For a long time now, we have enjoyed the protection of those masked men and women of might, the tzaddikim; and those who follow our publication know that with difficult cases, they, too, need help. We trust the reader does not need to be reminded of the incident of the disappearance of Schiaparelli City, or the disappearing lover of Mlle Lindgren, where an individual, so far unknown, played a key role. Described as a ’pleasant young man’, this person worked with the Gentleman on several occasions, unravelling mysteries that perplexed the tzaddik.

The Herald can now reveal that this unsung hero is no other than Isidore Beautrelet, an architecture student, aged ten. M. Beautrelet gave your humble correspondent an unusually candid interview last night at a sophisticated celebration in the Dust District. The young detective had been invited by a young lady to whom he has been romantically linked to for some time—

There are pictures; a black-and-white shot of him, mouth open, at the zoku party. He looks pale and wild-eyed, with dishevelled hair. The awareness that people he has not shared gevulot with now know who he is and what he has done makes him feel dirty. The gentleman in the next table is looking at him sharply now. He pays quickly, wraps himself in privacy and makes his way home.

Isidore shares a flat with another student, Lin, in one of the old towers at the edge of the Maze. The place consists of five rooms in two floors, mostly decorated with haphazard tempmatter furniture, with peeling wallpapers that change patterns according to their moods. When he enters, a ripple goes through them, and they adopt an Escheresque pattern of interwoven black-and-white birds.

Isidore showers and makes more coffee. The kitchen – a high-ceilinged room with a fabber and a wobbly table – has a large window with a view of the Maze rooftops and sunlit shafts between buildings. He sits by it for a while, trying to gather his thoughts. Lin is around too. Her animatronic figures all over the kitchen table again. But at least she herself has the decency to stay hidden behind gevulot.

There are already a lot of co-memories tugging his subconscious about the Herald article, like a headache. He wants to forget about it all. At least he has no exomemories of the conversation with the reporter, to be prodded and touched like a loose tooth; a small mercy. And then there is the tzaddik. Not thinking about that is harder.

Then there is a gevulot request from Lin. Grudgingly, he accepts it, allowing his flatmate to see him.