The Quantum Thief (24 page)

Unruh frowns. ‘I was saving the fireworks for my big moment tonight,’ he says.

I smile. ‘Shouldn’t every moment be a big moment?’

Unruh laughs again. ‘M. Beautrelet, I don’t know where you found your wit – at the bottom of a glass or on a pretty girl’s lips – but I’m glad you did!’

‘M. le Flambeur, I presume?’

The detective stands in front of me flanked by two of the Quiet guards, two sleek black creatures made of sheer power and ferocity. I raise my eyebrows. Faster than I expected, much faster. He deserves the bow I give him.

‘At your service.’ I let my features revert to my own. I grin at Unruh. ‘You have been a gracious host, but I’m afraid I must take my leave now.’

‘M. le Flambeur, I must ask you not to move.’

I throw my flower into the air and form the mental image of pressing a large red button.

The fireworks go off all at once. The sky is full of trails of fire, weaving double and triple spirals, stars bursting into flakes of silver and sudden thunderclaps. After a cascade of bright purple confetti, two blue rockets draw a sign of infinity. There is a smell of gunpowder.

Around me, the party stops. The Quiet guards are statues. The music dies. Unruh drops his glass, but remains upright, eyes glazed. There are a few slow collapses, but overall, almost everyone at the party remains standing, gazes fixed on something far, far away, but unseeing, as the fireworks fizzle and die above us.

Another trick from the gogol pirate handbook: an opto-genetic virus that makes brain cells hypersensitive to certain wavelengths of light. It was not hard to customise it not for the purposes of uploads, but for creating a period of inactivity. It looks like the infection from my flower spread even faster than I thought. And there are only so many fireworks manufacturers in the Moving City: bribing them with the pretence of a little innocent surprise for M. Unruh was the easy part.

I wrap myself in gevulot and make my way past the stunned, silent, thoughtless crowd. Raymonde is waiting for me at the garden gate, also wrapped in full privacy.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay for one more dance?’ I ask her. I close my eyes and wait for the slap. It doesn’t come. When I open my eyes, she is looking at me, face unreadable.

‘Give it back. His gevulot. Now.’

And I do, returning all the rights to the detective’s memories she gave me, purging all of him out of myself, becoming just Jean le Flambeur again.

She sighs. ‘That’s better. Thank you.’

‘I take it that your crowd will cover our tracks here?’

‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘Just go and do your part.’

‘In case it makes you feel any better,’ I say, ‘the next part involves me dying.’

We are in the public park. It is dark. Raymonde becomes the Gentleman and floats into the air. The dying fireworks reflect from her silver mask. ‘I never wanted you to die,’ she says. ‘It was always about something else.’

‘What? Revenge?’

‘Let me know when you figure it out,’ she says and is gone.

Amazingly, the party continues after the period of stolen time expires. Ten minutes have passed. The band picks up the tune, and the conversations begin again. And of course, there is only one topic.

Isidore’s temples throb. With the Quiet guards and Odette, he searches the grounds and the garden’s exomemory, over and over. But there is no sign of le Flambeur. The sense of failure and disappointment is a leaden weight in his belly. When the hour approaches midnight, he finally returns to the party.

Unruh has opened his gevulot to the public. He is the centre of attention and loving it, complimented on his bravery facing the thief. But eventually he waves his hand. ‘My friends, it is time for me to leave you,’ he says. ‘Thank you for your patience with our unplanned entertainment number.’ Laughter. ‘But at least – and thanks to the bravery of our very own M. Beautrelet – he went away empty-handed.

‘It was my intention to do this in bed between my lovely ladies here,’ he says, clutching two Serpent Street courtesans, ‘and possibly while being crushed by an elephant.’ He raises his glass to the gracile pachyderm looming behind the crowd. ‘But perhaps it is better to do it here, with friends. Time is what we make of it; relative, absolute, finite, infinite. I choose to let this moment last forever so that when I toil to clean your sewers and protect you from phoboi and carry your city on my back – I can remember what it is like to have such friends.’

‘And so, with a drink, and a kiss,’ Unruh kisses both girls – ‘or two’ – laughter – ‘I die. See you in the—’

He falls to the ground, dropping his glass. Blinking, staring at the still form of the millenniaire, Isidore looks at his Watch. It shows one minute to midnight. But how? He planned it so carefully, to the last word. But his thoughts are drowned by cheers and popping champagne bottles, all around.

As the Resurrection Men come to take the body away and the wake part of the celebrations begins, Isidore sits down with a glass of wine and begins to deduce.

TRUTH

On the night of the Spike, Marcel and Owl Boy go out over Noctis Labyrinthus in a glider.

It is Owl Boy’s idea, of course. Everybody knows the Labyrinthus canyons are full of phoboi and deceptive thermals. Marcel cannot exactly afford the Time for the glider either, but there is no arguing with his lover.

‘You have become an old man,’ he says. ‘You will never be an artist if you don’t court death every now and then.’ The barb about the concept he had been working on so long only to see it realised by someone else stings: and he can’t live that down. And so he ends up in the sky, looking down at the dark chasms and up at the stars, and, in spite of everything, enjoying himself.

Above Ius Chasma, Owl Boy suddenly steers the glider down until they almost scrape the dark pseudotrees that grow there, then pulls sharply up. They veer close to the canyon’s rim and the bottom of Marcel’s stomach goes down to his toes. Seeing his expression, Owl Boy whoops with laughter.

‘You are crazy,’ Marcel tells Owl Boy, and kisses him.

‘I thought you were never going to do that,’ Owl Boy says, smiling.

‘That was fun,’ Marcel says. ‘But could we go higher and just look at the sky, for a while?’

‘Anything for you, my love. Besides, we have all night for acrobatics.’

Marcel ignores his wink, swings his seat back and looks at the sky. He ’blinks the constellations and planets into being.

‘I’ve been thinking about going away,’ Marcel says.

‘Leaving?’ Owl Boy says. ‘Where would you go?’

Marcel gestures. ‘You know. Up. Out there.’ He presses his palm against the smooth, transparent skin of the glider. A bright Jupiter winks at him between his fingers. ‘It’s a stupid cycle here, don’t you think? And it doesn’t feel real here anymore.’

‘Isn’t that supposed to be your job? Feeling unreal?’ There is a hint of anger in his voice. Owl Boy is an engineering student, and he would never have gone for him if not for the physical attraction; but every now and then he says things that make Marcel’s heart jump. Many times during the course of their two-year partnership, Marcel has thought about leaving him. But moments like this always pull him back in.

‘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—’

Beneath his fingers, Jupiter explodes. For a moment, his hand is a red silhouette against bright whiteness. He blinks, feels the glider shudder around them, its wings curling into strange shapes like paper twisted by flame. He feels Owl Boy’s cold hand in his own. Then his lover is shouting, words that do not make sense, larynx-tearing glossolalia. All around, the sky is burning. And then they fall.

It is not until much later that Marcel hears the word Spike, after the Quiet have brought their bodies from the desert and the Resurrection Men have put them back together.

The cities have suffered. There is damage in the exomemory itself. Beyond the sky, things are worse: Jupiter is gone, eaten by a singularity, gravitational or technological or both, no one knows. The Sobornost claim to be containing a cosmic threat and offer an upload asylum to all citizens of the Oubliette. The remaining zokus out in Supra City are moving in response. There is talk of war.

Marcel cares little about any of it.

‘Well, this is an unexpected pleasure,’ says Paul Sernine, sitting in Marcel’s studio. Perhaps Marcel only imagines it, but his rival’s gevulot betrays a hint of silent envy as he looks at the claytronic models and sketches and found objects. ‘I really did not expect to be the first point of a social call after such a long absence. How are things?’

‘Well,’ Marcel says. ‘Come see for yourself.’

Owl Boy is in the nicest room in Marcel’s Edge house, looking away from the city. Most of the time he sits by the window quietly in his medfoam cocoon, eyes blank. But every now and then he speaks, long strings of rough throat-tearing clicks and metallic sounds.

‘The Resurrection Men don’t understand it,’ Marcel says. ‘There is a permanent coherent state in his brain, like one of the old quantum theories of consciousness: a condensate in the microtubules of his neurons, entangled with his exomemory. He may recover if it collapses, or he may not.’

‘I am very sorry to hear that,’ Sernine says. To Marcel’s surprise, the concern in his voice sounds genuine. ‘I wish there is something I could do.’

‘There is,’ Marcel says.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’m giving up,’ Marcel says. ‘You have obviously found my ideas worth emulating in the past. So I’m going to sell them to you.’ He gestures at the studio. ‘All of them. I know you can afford it.’

Sernine blinks. ‘Why?’

‘It’s not worth it,’ Marcel says. ‘There are giants out there. We do not matter. Someone can step on us without noticing. There is no point in making pretty pictures. It’s all been done, anyway. We are ants. The only thing that matters is looking after each other.’

Marcel touches Owl Boy’s hand. ‘I can do that for him,’ he says. ‘It is my responsibility. I can wait for him until he gets better. But I need Time to do that.’

Sernine looks at them for a long time. ‘You are wrong,’ he says. ‘We are just as big as they are. Somebody needs to show them that.’

‘By building toy houses? If you wish.’ Marcel waves a hand, thinks a gevulot contract at Sernine. ‘It’s all yours. You won.’

‘Thank you,’ Sernine says quietly. Then he stands still and listens to the Owl Boy’s sounds. Finally, he clears his throat. ‘If we do this,’ he says slowly, ‘could I visit, from time to time?’

‘If you wish,’ Marcel says. ‘It makes a little difference to me.’

They shake hands on the agreement. Out of courtesy, Marcel offers him cognac, but they drink quietly and after they are finished, Sernine leaves.

Owl Boy is quieter after Marcel feeds him. He sits with him for a long time, telling the house to play ares nova. But when the stars come out, Marcel closes the curtains.

THE THIEF IN THE UNDERWORLD

We stage my death the next morning, at the Place of Lost Time. This is where the Time beggars come to draw their last breath. It is an agora, with dark bronze statues of death and bones and suffering. And it is a show, meant to win the performers a few more precious seconds.

‘Time, Time, Time is running out,’ I shout at a passing couple, shaking a musical instrument made from fabber-printed bones. Behind me, two beggars make desperate love in the shadow of the statues. A group of nude morituri with painted faces dance a wild dance, pale bodies twisting and shaking.

My throat is hoarse from shouting at tourists from other worlds who form the majority of our audience. A puzzled-looking Ganymedean in a willowy exoskeleton keeps throwing us slivers of Time as if feeding pigeons, seemingly missing the point.

Don’t overdo it, Mieli says in my head. She is observing in the crowd, looking at the danse macabre of the square.

It has to be believable I tell her.

Of course you are. Anytime you are ready.

All right. Go.

‘Time is the great Destroyer,’ I yell. ‘I could be Thor the God of Thunder and the Old Age would still wrestle me to the ground.’ I take a bow. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, behold – Death!’

Mieli shuts me down remotely. My legs give away. My lungs stop working, and there is a terrible sense of drowning. Absurdly, the world remains as crisp and sharp as ever. My mind is still running inside the Sobornost body, but in stealth mode, while the rest of the body shuts down. My view lurches and I fall to the ground, as part of the Danse Macabre pattern I have been practising with my fellow soon-dead for the last couple of days. Our fallen bodies form words on the square: MEMENTO MORI.

A ragged cheer goes up from the watching crowd, a note that is a mixture of guilt and fascination. There is a moment’s silence. The square resonates to the sound of heavy footsteps, approaching in unison. The Resurrection Men are coming.

The crowd parts to let them pass. Over the years, the whole thing has been turned into a ritual, and even the Resurrection Men have accepted it. They walk to the square in rows of three, perhaps thirty of them, red-robed, with very tight gevulot hiding their faces and gait, Decanters hanging from their belts. A group of Resurrection Quiet follow them. They are vaguely humanoid but huge, three or four metres in height, with blank slabs of black shiny carapace for faces and a cluster of arms from their torso. I can feel their footsteps in the ground below me.

A red-hooded figure appears above me, and holds a Decanter above my hacked Watch. For a moment, I feel irrational fear: surely these grim reapers have seen every possible attempt to cheat Death. But the brass device makes whirring sounds and then chimes, once. Gently, the Resurrection Man bends over and closes my eyes with one flick of his fingertips, a quick, professional movement. A Quiet lifts me up, and the slow drumming of the footsteps begins again, carrying me to the underworld.

I can’t see anything, I tell Mieli. Any other senses you could turn on for me?