The Quantum Thief (18 page)

Pixil holds up the entanglement ring. There is a blurry granularity in her features, and he realises she is a utility fog image. ‘It’s not just a communication device, you know,’ she says. ‘I got tired of playing the guess what your boyfriend is thinking game. I suppose you showed initiative in coming up with that one.’

‘Are you—’

‘Serious? No. Most people in the zoku would be, no question about it. I like this guy. Does he have a name?’

‘No.’

‘Shame. He could use one. Something from Lovecraft perhaps. Although there are bigger slimy and tentacled beings around here.’

Isidore says nothing.

‘I suppose you are too busy to talk?’ Pixil says. ‘Maybe I’m just tired of the let’s talk about our feelings game.’

Pixil looks at him for a while. ‘I see. And here I was coming up with a new scoring system for that. One point every time you say a true thing, with achievements unlocked by actual emotional revelations. But I see I wasted my time.’ She crosses her arms. ‘You know, if I asked Drathdor, he could set up a little emotional response model that would tell me exactly what makes you tick.’

A horrible thought strikes Isidore. ‘You don’t have anything to do with this le Flambeur thing, do you?’ He hits the boundaries of what the gevulot allows him to share about Unruh’s assignment, and his tongue freezes. But it does feel exactly the kind of thing Pixil would do. Setting up an elaborate puzzle to restore his confidence. With some horror, he realises it is not a hypothesis he can discard outright.

‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ she says. ‘Clearly, you are busy focusing on important things. I came to say that no matter what game you want to play with me – and believe me, I play better than you – it’s your move.’

She disappears. The entanglement ring and the green thing fall to the bed with a thump. The creature lands on its back and waves its tentacles in the air helplessly.

‘I know exactly how you feel,’ Isidore says.

He picks the creature up and turns it upright. It gives him a large-eyed thankful look. He lies down next to it and stares at the ceiling. He should be thinking about Pixil, and ways to make it up to her, he knows. But his thoughts keep returning to the letter. The letter is a physical object. It has an origin. Somebody wrote it. It is impossible for exomemory not to have recorded where it came from. Therefore, one must be able to find its origin in the exomemory. Unless—

Unless exomemory itself is flawed.

The thought makes him blink. It is like saying that gravity might not be a constant 0.6g, or that the sun might not come up tomorrow. But the thought, wrong as it is, fits. And not only that, it feels like it is only a part of some larger shape, looming in the darkness, just beyond his grasp. When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Something chilly touches his toes, and he lets out a small yelp. It is the creature, exploring the world under his blanket. He picks it up again and gives it an angry look. It flutters its tentacles innocently.

‘You know,’ Isidore says, ‘I think I’m going to call you Sherlock.’

As promised, she assists him in choosing an outfit for the carpe diem party. They spend half a day on Persistent Avenue. The celebration is going to be Time-themed, and a deft-fingered outfitter measures him up for a costume based around Sol Lunae, the second day of the Darian week: black and silver.

‘Isn’t the Moon supposed to be feminine?’ he protests when Odette informs him of the theme.

‘Christian has thought about this very carefully,’ Odette says, frowning as the shop projects various designs on Isidore’s lean frame. ‘I wouldn’t argue with him: I’ve never managed to change his mind. I think we are going to try another fabric, possibly velvet.’ She smiles. ‘The Moon also symbolises mystery, and intuition. Perhaps that is what you represent to him. Or perhaps not.’

Isidore stays quiet after that and submits to the gentle torture of the tailor without complaint.

After the shopping trip, he returns to the chateau and starts to eliminate the impossible, coming up with a series of hypotheses to explain the appearance of the letter, each more elaborate than the last. They range from self-assembling paper to an invisibility fog sophisticated enough to fool the ubiquitous exomemory sensors. But everything brings him back to the improbable conclusion: something is wrong with exomemory itself.

One of the Quiet servants brings him a light lunch, which he eats alone. Apparently, the millenniaire is too occupied with his last week in a Noble body to spend much Time on something already set in motion.

In the afternoon, Isidore considers the possibility of exomemory manipulation. He ’blinks until his head pounds with technical information about distributed ubiquitous communication and quantum public key cryptography, Byzantine general problems and shared secret protocols. The exomemory is everywhere. Its tiny distributed sensors – in every piece of smart- and dumbmatter – record everything, from events to temperature fluctuations to object movements to thoughts, with access to it controlled only by gevulot. But it has been designed to be write-only, with massive redundancy. Hacking into it and editing it would mean nanotechnological and computational resources far beyond the reach of any Oubliette citizen.

The realisation sends a chill down Isidore’s spine. Perhaps some otherworldly force has indeed chosen Unruh as its target.

After a walk in the garden – where a white-haired man in blue coveralls is working on Unruh’s flowers with the help of a Quiet servant – he goes through all of the castle exomemory he has access to, looking for other gaps. He sits in one of the library chairs, remembering. Unruh has had a regular life for the past year, almost hermit-like, apart from the occasional small party. There are times when exotic courtesans from Serpent Street pass through the memories, making Isidore wonder what Adrian Wu would make of his new patron. But mostly Unruh spends his time in solitude, receiving antique dealers, eating alone, and spending endless hours immersed in study in the library.

He is almost ready to give up – the amount of detail is too much to absorb on one sitting – when he decides to cross-reference the memory with the book Unruh was reading, the lifecast of Count Isidis. The last time Unruh read it was four weeks ago. And in the memory—

It takes a few moments to take in. Then he leaps to his feet and goes to find Odette. She is overseeing preparations for the party in a small office in the eastern wing of the chateau, surrounded by floating spime invitations, like a flock of birds frozen in time.

‘I want to see M. Unruh.’

‘I’m afraid that is not possible,’ she says. ‘Christian has only a few days left, and unless he tells me otherwise, he is going to spend them how he pleases.’

‘I have some questions for him.’

‘If I were you, M. Beautrelet,’ Odette says, ‘I would be content to play your part in this little drama of his.’ She touches a virtual sheet in the air. It becomes a young woman’s face: she studies it, touching her lips lightly with the tip of her pen. ‘A lifecast artist,’ she says. ‘I don’t think she would fit. Sometimes I think I should have been a musician. Organising a party is much like composition: considering how different instruments complement each other. For me, you are another instrument, M. Beautrelet. Christian trusts me to be the conductor of his final day. So please, save your dramatic revelations for the party. Comedy is all about timing, I’ve always been told.’

Isidore folds his arms. ‘I heard a quote once,’ he says. ‘Tragedy is when I slip on a banana peel. Comedy is when you fall into a hole and die. I do wonder what I would find if I spent more time investigating you.’

She holds Isidore’s gaze for a long time. ‘I have nothing to hide,’ she finally says.

Isidore smiles, saying nothing. She is the first to look away.

‘All right,’ Odette says. ‘I suppose he could use some light entertainment.’

Unruh greets him at one of the galleries of the chateau, wearing a dressing gown and a chilly expression. Isidore sees someone walk past along a corridor, blurred by gevulot, wondering what activity the millenniaire interrupted to see him.

‘M. Beautrelet. I am told that you have discovered something.’

‘Yes. I am convinced that your concern is real, and there is an offworld force of some sort at work here. I will help you to make appropriate preparations for the party.’

‘I suppose I should thank you for not agreeing with Odette and claiming I wrote the letter myself,’ Unruh says. ‘And?’

‘Nothing. The local exomemory has been manipulated in some fashion, but I cannot determine how or by who. But that is not what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Oh?’ Unruh raises his eyebrows.

‘When going through the exomemory and looking for gaps, I noticed you had frequently studied the Isidis lifecast, and went back to its first appearance. I realise that I was, perhaps, abusing the powers that you had given me, but I felt it was important to study all the elements of the case from all possible angles.’

‘Indeed.’

‘I could not help noticing your … reaction to the text.’ Unruh had screamed, thrown the book across the room, flung other books from their shelves, toppled the orrery with violence that seemed to overflow his thin frame, before collapsing into a heap in his reading chair. ‘If I’m correct, soon after that you made up your mind to enter Quiet early. What was it that you saw?’

Unruh sighs. ‘M. Beautrelet, I should perhaps clarify that it is not a generic investigation you are carrying out here. I did not empower you to pry into my private life, or the reasons to my actions: merely to protect my property and my person from what I felt was a threat.’

‘You hired me because you wanted to solve a mystery,’ Isidore says. ‘And I think it was not just the mystery of the letter. I also ’blinked Count Isidis.’

‘And what did you discover?’

‘Nothing. I can’t find any references to a Count Isidis in the public exomemories. As far as the general public is aware, he never existed.’

Unruh walks to one of the gallery’s large windows and looks out. ‘M. Beautrelet, I admit I have not been entirely honest with you. A part of me was hoping you would spot certain things on your own as you have done.’ He presses a pale hand against the glass. ‘A strange thing happens when you are very rich, even when one’s wealth is as artificial as in our society. You develop a solipsism of sorts. The world yields itself to your will. Everything becomes your reflection, and after a while looking into your own eyes is dull.’

He sighs. ‘So I sought to find more solid ground in the past, in our origins, our history. I doubt there are many of our generation who have put as much effort into the study of the Kingdom and the Revolution as I have.

‘At first it was the perfect escape. So much richer than our bland existence, with real struggle, real evil, ideas triumphing over oppression, despair and hope. Count Isidis, plotting against a tyrant. Drama. Intrigue. And the Revolution! I bought memories from Time beggars. I remember being there, in Harmakis Valley, tearing Noble bodies with diamond claws.

‘But after a while I realised that something was wrong. The deeper I delved, the more inconsistencies there were. People who appeared in lifecasts I bought from black market dealers, memories that contradicted each other. The Isidis lifecast was when I had the first revelation, and you … saw how I reacted.’

Unruh clenches his hands into fists.

‘I lost my faith in the past. Something is wrong with it. Something is wrong with what we know. That is why I didn’t want you to study the texts in the library. I would not wish this feeling on anyone. Perhaps the old philosophers were right, and we are living in a simulation, playthings of some transhuman gods; perhaps the Sobornost has already won, Fedorov’s dreams are true and we are merely memories.

‘And if you can’t trust history, what should you care of the present? I don’t want any of it anymore. Merely Quiet.’

‘Surely, there is a rational explanation,’ Isidore says. ‘Perhaps you have been a victim of forgery; perhaps we should investigate the sources of your library texts—’

Unruh waves a hand in dismissal. ‘It does not matter anymore. You may do what you want with this knowledge, once I am gone. One perfect moment for me, and then I’m done.’ He smiles. ‘I’m glad I was right about le Flambeur, though. That encounter should be entertaining.’ He touches Isidore’s shoulder.

‘I am grateful, M. Beautrelet. I wanted to discuss this with someone. Odette is many things to me, but she would not understand. She is a creature of the moment, as I should try to be.’

‘I appreciate your confidence,’ Isidore says, ‘but I still think—’

‘We will say no more about it,’ Unruh says firmly. ‘The only thing you need to worry about now is the party, and our thief. Speaking of which – any security arrangements I should ask Odette to make?’

‘We could demand full gevulot disclosure at the entrance, or set up a series of agoras in the garden—’

‘How gauche! Absolutely not!’ Unruh frowns. ‘Being robbed is one thing, lack of manners another.’

THE THIEF AND THE SECOND FIRST DATE

Raymonde is having her lunch near the playground when we meet again for the first time. She has sheets of music in her lap and spread across the bench and studies them while eating an apple with a kind of ferocity.

‘Excuse me,’ I say.

She comes here every day and eats from a small tempmatter bag, in a hurry, as if she feels guilty about allowing herself a moment of peace. She watches the children in the high elaborate climbing racks where they move like monkeys, the toddlers playing with the round and colourful synthbio toys in the sandpits. She sits on the edge of the bench, graceful long limbs folded uncomfortably, ready to spring away.

She looks at me, frowning. Her gevulot is open just a little, showing the forbidding expression on her proud, angular face. Somehow that makes her even more beautiful.

‘Yes?’ We exchange a gevulot greeting, brief and sparse. The gogol pirate engine is scanning for gaps, but there aren’t any, not yet.