The Quantum Thief (28 page)

‘My apologies,’ he says. ‘I’m not wearing my own body. This young man came back from Quiet earlier this morning, and I appropriated it for the purpose of having this meeting to avoid any … temptations to cause me harm.’ He takes out another cigar, wets its tip in his mouth and smells it. ‘Besides, it is nice to try on something new every once in a while. You can call me Robert. We have met before, although I understand you may not recall it. And we have both moved on in our careers since. I have become … one of the enlightened individuals your friends the tzaddikim call cryptarchs, whereas you, apparently, became a prisoner.’

Robert the cryptarch lights the cigar and puffs on it. The tip glows red. ‘Makes you wonder about karma, doesn’t it? I’m thinking that should be a feature in the next-generation resurrection system.’

‘What do you want?’ I ask.

He raises his eyebrows. ‘Well, now. Your associate here had a very interesting proposition. Perhaps the lady wants to repeat it for your benefit.’

Mieli looks at me. The light makeup she is wearing looks odd in the harsh light of the room: it makes her look like a corpse.

‘You stop interfering with our work,’ Mieli says, ‘and we give you the tzaddikim.’

‘It’s tempting, isn’t it?’ says Robert.

The rage wells up in my chest, hot bile and brimstone. The alcohol does not help. I take a deep breath and squeeze it in, making a mental fist to hold it, saving it for later. I smile at the cryptarch.

‘You know, Jean, we have been watching you since you came. For a professional, you were quite conspicuous. We still remember the last time. You did not make any friends here. Such a shame: we go back such a long way. But then loyalty was never one of your strong points. Just look at what happened with that Raymonde girl.’

I stop myself from rising to the bait. ‘So why all the pussyfooting around? Gogol pirates, the Unruh letter—’ Something flashes in his eyes: he tries to hide it with gevulot hastily, but it fails. He does not know about the letter. He waves his cigar dismissively.

‘Just a little game to spice things up. We are old and get bored easily. But now it is time to get down to business. The answer to your offer is no.’

Mieli frowns. ‘Why?’

I answer for him. ‘Because you already know who the tzaddikim are. One of them is yours, maybe more. They have all been Quiet. And they are convenient. They keep the streets clean.’

‘They are flashy and ineffectual and sometimes a little annoying, but yes, they help us to deal with the small problems. But that is not the point. Jean, I always loved the way you are so quick to see everybody else as monsters. We agree with the tzaddikim. We want this place to be free and special and safe, a good place to live free from the burden of past sins.’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s not the tzaddikim we have a problem with, it’s who’s behind them. And we want to feed them a little misinformation.’

‘The zoku colony,’ I say.

‘I’m glad you take an interest in our local politics.’ He takes a small object from his pocket: a round, egglike thing that looks like a zoku jewel. ‘There is a little co-memory that comes with it, prepared for your tzaddikim friends – something that you could have plausibly discovered in your little exercise with M. Unruh, but more useful to our purposes.’

‘That’s it?’ Mieli asks.

‘Of course not.’ The cryptarch grins again, teeth stained by cigar juices, an old man’s grimace in a young man’s face. ‘Of course it’s not enough. Jean, we want our share.’

‘What?’

‘We let you leave here all those years ago. You were going to come back. You were going to share all your offworld treasures with us. Remember that? Of course you don’t.’ Robert shakes his head. ‘You really should not have come back. We have had a long time to think about the bad old days.’

He gets up. ‘Here is our offer. One: you deliver this to the tzaddikim, with conviction. Two: whatever data crumbs you dug out from that poor boy’s mind, you share with us and destroy – we can make arrangements about that later. And three: when you find what you are looking for, we get our cut. With interest. Come on, Jean, don’t be greedy. Surely your fabled treasure has enough for all of us.’

‘You know what I think?’ I say. ‘I think you are bluffing. I don’t think you are nearly as powerful as you claim. I think you are scared of what we found. And you should be. The answer is—’

Mieli freezes my body. It feels like a cold hammer blow to the head.

‘Yes,’ Mieli says. I want to throw my hands up and scream and jump up and down, but I can’t shake her mental kung fu grip. I can only watch helplessly when the cryptarch bows to Mieli.

‘My employer recognises you as valuable allies,’ she says. ‘We will share some of our … findings with you, as a token of good faith. And she will consider what she can do to help with your zoku issue.’

‘Delightful,’ Robert says. ‘I’m glad we understand each other. A pleasure doing business with you.’ He leans on his knees and pats me on the cheek, sharply. ‘Looks like the lady has you under her heel, Jean. But then, that was always the way with you and women, wasn’t it?’

Mieli escorts him out while I sit still like a statue, pounding my temples with imaginary fists of rage.

‘I can’t believe we are doing this!’ I shout at Mieli. ‘You want to work with them? What happened to vows? Your koto’s honour? The tzaddikim are the good guys.’

‘He did have a point,’ Mieli says. ‘It’s not our place to judge.’

‘Hell it isn’t.’ I pace around, stop and press my forehead against the window to cool it. ‘And you forget something. They know me. That makes them bad guys by definition. We can’t trust them.’

‘It’s not about trust,’ Mieli says. ‘We will wait until we recover your memories before doing anything.’

‘And what if something goes wrong with that? What if the tzaddikim won’t buy it? What if Raymonde—’ I grit my teeth. ‘This is a huge mistake.’

‘It is not your call to make,’ Mieli says. ‘We have a job to do, and it’s my job to decide what the best way to do it is.’

‘You know,’ I say, ‘for a moment back there I thought you actually had some humanity.’ I try to stop the words but they come out like bullets from a machine gun. ‘But the Sobornost got into you. They have turned you into a robot. That singing – that was just the tune in a music box. A recording. A gogol.’ I clench my hands into fists. ‘I was in the Prison for an eternity. But they never broke me. What did whatever bastard it is you serve do to you?’

I take the half-empty glass that the cryptarch left, with the cigar stub floating in it. ‘Here. This is what it tastes like.’ I take a swig and spit it out to the floor. ‘Like ashes.’

Mieli’s expression does not change. She turns to leave. ‘I have work to do,’ she says. ‘I am going to study the Unruh data. We need insurance in case there is a problem.’

‘There is a problem,’ I say. ‘My glass is empty. I’m going to get drunk.’

‘Enjoy,’ Mieli says coolly. ‘If you try to contact your tzaddik friend, I will know. It will not go well for you.’

Bitch. Everything feels heavy. I am trapped. I curse my old self for the hundredth time, for making such a mess of things when there are perfectly straightforward ways to hide treasure, like burying it in a hole in the ground. Bastard.

Idiot, says a voice in my head. There is always a way out. No prison, except in your mind.

‘Wait,’ I tell Mieli. She looks at me like she looked at me on the ship on the first day after the Prison, full of disgust.

‘Let me talk to him. Her. It,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Let me talk to your employer. I know you are in touch. Let’s settle this. If we are going to do things your way, I want to hear it from the organ-grinder and not the monkey.’

Her eyes flash. ‘You dare to—’

‘Go ahead. Shut me down. Send me back to hell. I don’t care. I’ve been there already. I just want to say my piece. And then I’ll be a good boy.’ I swallow the rest of the foul, ashy liquid. ‘I promise.’

We stare at each other. Her pale green gaze does not flinch. But after a moment, she brushes her scar. ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘You asked for it.’

She sits down on the couch and closes her eyes. When she opens them, she is someone else.

It is like she is wearing a mask. She looks older, and composed, not the warrior-like ascetic stillness, but someone who is used to being looked at and in control. And there is a serpent in her smile.

‘Jean, Jean, Jean,’ she says, in a musical voice that is hauntingly familiar. ‘What are we going to do with you, my little flower prince?’

Then she gets up, wraps her arms around my neck and kisses me.

Mieli is a prisoner in her own body. She wants to close her eyes, but can’t; wants to pull away from the thief, but can’t. She can smell the foul liquor in his breath. She can see where this is going to go, and suddenly there is nothing funny about it.

‘Help me,’ she tells Perhonen soundlessly. ‘Get me out of here.’

Poor baby. Here. Suddenly, comforting, cool blackness surrounds her. Whatever subroutine her mind has been demoted to, at least the ship still has access to it.

‘What is she doing?’

Mysterious ways and all that, the ship says. Are you all right?

‘No.’ Bodiless, voiceless, Mieli wants to cry. ‘He was right, I was wrong. But there was no choice, was there?’

No, there wasn’t. What the goddess there says, goes, and that’s the way it is, for now. I’m so sorry.

‘And I broke vows. I need to beg Ilmatar’s forgiveness.’

I’m sure she is understanding, as goddesses go. I’m sure you’ll do better with her than with the other one. Don’t worry. She and the thief deserve each other.

The voice of the ship is soothing and calm. ‘That’s right,’ Mieli says. ‘Besides, don’t we have work to do?’

Indeed.

Suddenly, the blackness around Mieli is no longer empty. She is in a datascape, vast and complex. It whispers to her, explaining itself: two vast trees of nodes and lines, superimposed, representing the two versions of Christian Unruh’s encrypted mind and memory.

Kissing Mieli’s body is like finally kissing that old friend you have always had sexual tension with. Except the kiss is nothing like I imagined: there is a ferocity and strength to it that takes my breath away. And, of course, she is much stronger than I am: I have to turn my head away to come up for air.

‘Who are you?’ I manage, out of breath.

She lets herself fall back onto the couch pillows, laughing like a little girl. Then she spreads her arms along the back and crosses her legs.

‘Your benefactor. Your liberator. Your goddess. Your mother.’ She sees my horrified expression and laughs even louder. ‘I am joking, darling. Although you could call me your spiritual mother. I taught you a lot of things a long time ago.’ She pats the pillow next to her. ‘Now sit down.’

Somewhat gingerly, I obey.

She runs her fingers down my cheek and to my open shirt collar, sending cold waves through me. ‘In fact, we should find out if you still remember them.’ She kisses my neck, hard, nibbling at my skin, and I find it difficult to focus on my rage. I tense.

‘Relax. You like this body, I know you do. And I made sure yours is … receptive.’ She whispers the last words, and her hot breath on my skin turns the anger into something else. ‘When you live a very long time, you become a connoisseur in all things. Especially those you get to sample seldom. Sometime, when this is over, I will show you how to live. These things are so heavy and clumsy: we can do better in the guberniyas. But it’s fun, don’t you think?’ She bites my earlobe, hard, and flinches.

‘Oh, this silly biot feed. Poor Mieli, so paranoid. I am going to turn it off. You are not going to go anywhere, are you?’

‘No,’ I breathe. ‘But we need to talk.’

‘Talk can come after. Don’t you think so too?’

And, God help me, I do.

Bear in mind I don’t understand all of this, Perhonen says. But the mathematics gogols do. This is one of the root nodes of his gevulot tree. To Mieli, the complex data structures look like the incomprehensible visions one has in the alinen. Her viewpoint hovers over an intersection of innumerable lines, connecting in a sphere full of symbols and three-dimensional sections of a brain. The changes took place here, here and here. The objects inside the sphere change colour. Mieli touches the sphere to absorb the information and considers it for a moment.

‘It’s his procedural memory,’ she says. ‘So in a certain situation, it would trigger him to act in a certain way. For example, voting for the Voice.’

Yes. There are other changes too, here and there, but nothing major. Now, the interesting thing is that we can actually trace where the edit came from.

The ship highlights one of the lines connecting to the node they are viewing. There is additional information attached to it as well: complex mathematical formulae. The way gevulot works is by generating a tree of public and private key pairs: a new pair is generated whenever the user has a new memory, domain or experience they want to specify gevulot rights for. They are also encrypted with the pair above them in the hierarchy. The point is that only the individual is supposed to have access to the root.

‘Except that—’

Except that it looks like all the roots are also generated from another pair. A master key, if you like. Whoever holds those is able to access every exomemory in the Oubliette, and to rewrite them. For people who pass through Quiet, that means their entire mind. That’s where these new edits to Unruh’s mind came from. The cryptarchs must have some sort of automated system that modifies everybody who passes through the Quiet.

‘Mother Ilmatar,’ Mieli breathes. ‘So potentially—’

—if they want, they can view and change every memory and thought of anyone who has been a Quiet. Of course, that is too much information for any one person to keep track of, so I assume they have some mechanical ways of augmenting it. Given the minor edits they have made to Unruh’s mind, I would imagine that they only have limited resources to do this.

But the bottom line is, the Oubliette is not a place of forgetting. It’s not a privacy heaven. It’s a panopticon.

It has been a long time. So at first, everything is a hot fast blur of flesh and skin and mouths and touches and bites. She is much stronger than me, and not afraid to show it. She plays with Mieli’s enhancements too, teasing me with a hot q-dot at her fingertip, grinning like a cat.