The Quantum Thief (16 page)

She leaps forward. The air feels like greasy water. Even through combat autism, the freedom of movement is exhilarating. She weaves her way through the missiles, leaving frozen footprints in the water, punching through the art student’s abdomen as an afterthought.

Then they are upon her, Anne, the family, the woman in the garish dress, three others. Disassembler tendrils shoot out of their fingers, lines of vibrating destruction. One lashes across her back. Her armour reacts, burning away the infected layer, giving her wings of flame for an instant.

She programs a simple defence routine into her ghostgun and fires it at them, one, two, three: the thief will need more protection. She gets two. The ghost gogols take over the vasilevs’ brains and hurl their bodies at the paths of missiles aimed at the thief.

She tears off the caleidoscope’s disassembler arm, swinging it at Anne. The girl’s torso explodes into dust as the molecular fingers tear her cells apart. She fires her last q-dot into the red-haired man’s eye. Several vasilevs return fire. Ghostgun impacts make her armour scream. Gritting her teeth, she grabs one of the bullets in her fist. It will contain a copy of a vasilev mind – time to ask it questions later.

They rush her, all at once. There is a mass of bodies on top of her, a coordinated mountain of synthflesh, ignoring her punches and kicks that tear into it as if it were mist. Her skull presses against floor. She sends Perhonen a set of coordinates. Mark.

Fire from the sky cuts the balcony from the hip of the city like a surgeon’s knife. Metal groans. Somewhere above, Perhonen’s wings rain hard hot light.

The sudden freefall feels like home. She navigates through a bloody mist and tangled bodies, finds the thief and seizes him. Then she opens her wings. As always, the sensation – like flower buds opening in her shoulders – brings back her childhood, flying in her koto’s forests in the ice, racing paraspiders. But her wings are stronger now, remade, strong enough to carry both her and the thief, even in this heavy city.

Together they burst through the ceiling of the gallery. The twisted, burning remains of the balcony and the vasilevs plummet towards the city legs below.

Shame about the statues, she thinks.

The world is a chaos of bodies, explosions and the smell of burning flesh. I blink, and my body is hurled against stone. Staccato thunderclaps rock my skull. I am crashing through glass, Mieli is holding me and we are flying and there are flames below us and a whooshing sound of air as if in a wind tunnel that empties my lungs—

I scream. And then I fall. For about a metre. In Martian gravity. I land on my back, ears ringing, colours flashing in front of my eyes, mouth still open after the air in my lungs runs out.

‘Stop that,’ Mieli says. She is kneeling, a few metres away, and a pair of wings are slowly retracting into her back, two delicate trees of silver with gossamer-thin tracery, separated by a transparent, shimmering film, like Perhonen’s wing fabric. In a moment, they are gone.

‘Fuck,’ I say, when I catch my breath. We are on a gently sloping rooftop, somewhere near the edge of the city. The conflagration and a column of smoke in the horizon clearly shows where we were mere seconds ago. A flock of tzaddikim descend towards the battlefield, like crows. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

‘I told you to stop that,’ Mieli says, standing up. Her toga is in tatters, showing expanses of smooth brown skin. She notices my gaze and turns her back as her garment starts knitting itself back together.

‘F—’ I take a deep wheezing breath, cutting myself short. ‘The bastards. Somebody told them. Who we were. Somebody knew.’

Darling doves, says Perhonen. I’m glad you are okay, but don’t expect to hear from me for a few hours. I had to flee my holding position in stealth mode: the orbital Quiet might as well be blind and deaf, but even they have noticed me firing lasers down at their planet. I’ll let you know when I get back. Be safe.

‘What happened back there?’ I ask Mieli.

‘They attacked. I had to ask Perhonen to take them out, with extreme prejudice. Protocol.’

‘So, they are – all dead?’

‘Destroyed. No possibility of an exomemory sync; if they get resurrected, they won’t remember us. They were stealth vasilevs, they would not have had neutrino comms equipment.’

‘Jesus. Any collateral damage?’

‘Just art,’ Mieli says, and for the life of me I can’t figure out if she is making a joke. ‘But you got what we came for, yes?’

I touch the data the little pirate girl dumped on me. Parts are missing, but the important bits are intact.

‘Yes. I’m going to have to study this.’ I massage my temples. ‘Look, something is going on. Clearly, somebody tipped them off. Is there some twisted Sobornost power game going on with your employer? Is there something I should know about?’

‘No.’ Her answer does not leave any room for argument.

‘All right, then we have to assume it’s local. We are going to have to look into it.’

‘I am going to look into it. You are going to get on with the mission.’

I get up, slowly. My body is undamaged – no broken bones – but it pretends that it is. Everything tingles as if covered by one massive bruise. ‘Yes, about that.’

‘What?’

‘You do realise that you are going to have to give me more than just hurt privileges for this body? If I’m going to create a new identity, I’m going to need some flexibility. Even hunting this Raymonde girl down is going to involve more than just eyes and ears. Not to mention emulating the gevulot sense or surviving if we ever happen to encounter our many-voiced friend there again.’

She studies me carefully, massaging her hands together. A thin layer of dried gore is peeling off them, falling down in flakes as her skin cleans itself.

‘Oh, and thank you for saving my ass, by the way,’ I tell her. I know the effort is wasted, but I summon some warmth – most of it genuine – into my eyes and give her my best smile. ‘You have to let me repay the favour.’

Mieli frowns. ‘All right. Once we get back, I’ll see what I can do. Now, let’s get out of here. I don’t think we left any public trails outside gevulot, but the same rules don’t seem to apply to the tzaddikim. I don’t want to fight them on top of that.’

‘Are we flying?’

She grabs my shoulder firmly and drags me to the edge. The street is almost a hundred metres down. ‘You can try if you want,’ she says. ‘But that body does not have wings.’

That night, at the hotel, I make myself a new face.

We sneaked back a roundabout route, under full gevulot cover, covering half the sights of the city – somewhat excessively paranoid as under full gevulot we should not be recognisable by anyone – but Mieli insists. She also sets up a defence grid of some kind; little dots of light come out from her hands and start patrolling the doors and windows.

‘Don’t touch them,’ she says, unnecessarily. And then she does something magical, something that almost makes me kiss her. And I would, too, if I didn’t have flashing images of her tearing a young girl’s arm off and beating three people to death with it. In any case, she closes her eyes for a moment and there is a click inside my head. Nothing excessive, nothing like the complete freedom I briefly felt when we fought the Archons, but it is something. An increased awareness of myself, a sense of control. I now know there is a network of q-dots – artificial atoms capable of assuming any range of physical properties – under the skin of this body, able to simulate an epidermis of any colour, shape or appearance.

Mieli claims that her systems need to recharge and that she has some damage to regenerate, so she goes to bed early. Perhonen is quiet as well, dodging the orbital sentinels, no doubt; or hacking into their systems and manufacturing convincing excuses about why they lost her for a moment. So I am as alone as I have been since the escape from the Prison.

It feels good: I spend some time simply watching the night view of the city, on my balcony and drinking, single malt this time. Whisky has always tasted like introspection to me, a quiet moment after taking a sip, the lingering aftertaste, inviting you to ponder upon the flavours on your tongue.

I lay out the tools in my mind, one by one.

Gevulot is not perfect. There are loops in it, places where a node – representing a memory, an event, a person – has more than one parent. That means that sometimes, sharing gevulot about an innocuous memory, a taste or an intimate moment, can unlock whole swathes of a person’s exomemory. The gogol pirates have software that tries to map out a person’s gevulot tree, tries to scan for the key nodes in conversation.

There is a man-in-the-middle attack software that attempts to intercept the quantum communications between a Watch and the exomemory. That will require a lot more brute force, and quantum computation capability besides: I will have to talk to Perhonen about that. A perfect emulation of the privacy sense organ which I want to start running immediately. And finally, a set of /files/05/05/49/f050549/public/private keys and blank exomemories to choose from. I don’t want to think about how those have been obtained, but at least the dirty work has been done for us. Some of them are fragmented from the interruption of the transfer, but what is there will do, for now.

Being about to become someone else is a thrilling feeling, a tickle of possibility in my gut. There must have been times when I flicked from one identity to another, posthuman, zoku, baseline, Sobornost. And that makes me want to be the god of thieves again, more than anything.

I flick the Watch open and look at the picture again. Who should I become for you, Raymonde? Who was I for you before? Her smile has no answers, so I close the lid, finish my drink and look at myself in the bathroom mirror.

The face – heavy-lidded eyes, a tinge of grey in the hair – makes me wonder about Mieli’s employer again. She must have known me, a long time ago. But whoever she is, she belongs to the things that the Prison took away from me. I relish the image for a moment. I’m not narcissistic, but I like mirrors, the way they let your define yourself through something external. And at last, I test how this body responds. Become a little younger, I tell it. A little taller, higher cheekbones, longer hair. The image in the mirror starts flowing like water, and my belly thrill becomes glee.

‘You are enjoying this, aren’t you?’ says a voice. I look away from the mirror and around the room, but there is no one there. And the voice feels awfully familiar.

‘Over here,’ says my mirror image. It is the young me from the picture, dashing and dark-haired, grinning. He tilts his head slightly, studying me across the glass. I stretch my hand and touch it, but the image does not move. The same sense of unreality as with the boy at the agora is there.

‘You are thinking about her,’ he says. ‘Which means you are about to go to talk to her again.’ He sighs a little wistfully. ‘There are a few things you should know.’

‘Yes!’ I shout at him. ‘Where are my memories? Why are we playing games? What are those symbols—’

He ignores me. ‘We really thought she was the one. The redemption. And for a while, she was.’ He touches the glass surface from the other side, a reflection of my earlier gesture. ‘I really envy you, you know. You get to try again. But remember that we treated her very badly last time. We don’t deserve a second chance. So don’t break her heart, or if you do, make sure there is someone to put it back together.’

Then the grin is back. ‘I’m sure you hate me now, a little. This is not meant to be easy. I made finding things difficult, not for you, but for myself. Like an alcoholic who locks the booze in the basement and throws away the key.’

‘But you are here, so it wasn’t enough. There we are. Give her my best.’

He takes out a Watch, the one I’m holding as well, and looks at it. ‘Well, got to go. Have fun. And remember, she likes balloon rides.’

Then he is gone, replaced my own new reflection.

I sit back and start making a new one, for a first date.

THE DETECTIVE AND THE LETTER

Later that evening, Isidore lets the co-memory take him to the Tortoise Park. It leads him down a narrow sandy path, through a grove of pine and elm. Beyond the trees, he finds the chateau.

It is the largest restored Kingdom building Isidore has ever seen apart from the Olympus Palace; it is astonishing that it is hidden from public view by gevulot. The last sunbeams of the day glance off two towers that weave left and right as they rise towards the sky, like Oriental daggers. The chateau casts long blue shadows on a field of flowers, laid out with geometrical precision. The flowers form triangles and polygons of many colours, as if the gardener was proving Euclidean theorems. It takes Isidore a moment to realise that they are laid out in the shape of a Darian solar clock, with the shadow of the taller tower as the dial.

There is a tall iron fence with a gate. A Quiet is standing behind it, waiting. It is an unusual creature: a sculpted humanoid, no larger than a man, a golden mask and gloves hiding the angles and edges beneath, wearing blue silver-embroidered livery. It reminds him of the jewelled mannikins in the Kingdom simulation. Naturally, it gives him no greeting, but he feels it is polite to say something.

‘I’m Isidore Beautrelet,’ he says. ‘I’m expected.’

Silently, it opens the gate for him and leads him towards the chateau. They walk through fields of roses, lilies and more exotic flowers he needs to ’blink to recognise. The smell is intoxicating.

The evening sun casts a golden pool in a clearing where a small pagoda-like pavilion stands. A pale-haired young man – barely more than a boy, perhaps six or eight Martian years old – sits inside, reading a book, an empty teacup next to him. He is wearing a plain Revolution uniform that hangs loose on his frame. His thin eyebrows are squeezed together in concentration in a delicate face, rounded by baby fat. The Quiet servant stops and rings a small silver bell. The man looks up slowly and gets up with exaggerated care.

‘Dear boy,’ he says, offering a hand. His fingerbones feel like porcelain in Isidore’s grip. He is taller than Isidore, but almost painfully thin, the elongated Martian bodymorph taken to the extreme. ‘How delightful that you could come. Would you like some refreshments?’