The Quantum Thief (23 page)

How are we doing on security? I whisper to Mieli. She is our backup in the hotel, coordinating things with Perhonen. Minimal, she says. Still, more than you expected. War Quiet concern me: they actually have pretty decent sensors.

‘Do me a favour,’ Raymonde says. ‘Don’t try to put me at ease. Come on, let’s mingle.’

Raymonde got us invitations with surprising ease. Apparently, Christian Unruh is a patron of the arts and a Kingdom enthusiast, so a friend of Raymonde’s at the Academy of Music thought it would be an excellent idea if she could discuss her opera concept with him. Of course, the party is full of would-be artists seeking patronage, but her contact promised to get us a personal introduction. And that’s all I need.

‘Raymonde!’ A short older woman waves at us. She is wearing a smartmatter dress that is like an hourglass without the glass: there is no fabric, just red Martian sand that runs down her generous figure. The effect is hypnotic. ‘How wonderful to see you here! And who is this handsome gentleman?’

I bow and open my gevulot a little as common courtesy dictates, but take care not to allow her any permanent memories of my appearance. ‘Raoul d’Andrezy, at your service.’ Raymonde introduces my cover identity, the emigré from Ceres. The hourglass lady’s gevulot reveals that she is Sofia dell’Angelo, a lecturer in the Academy of Music and Drama.

‘Oh, I’m sure we can think of something,’ Sofia says. ‘Now, what happened to poor Anthony? I loved his hair.’

Raymonde blushes a little, but does not reply. Sofia winks at me. ‘You should watch out, young man. She is going to steal your heart and keep it.’

‘Hush, I don’t want you to scare him away. It took a lot of effort to catch him,’ Raymonde says. ‘Any sign of our host yet?’

Sofia looks crestfallen, plump cheeks flushed. ‘No, I’m afraid not. I have spent almost an hour trying to find him. I absolutely think he should hear about your new piece. But apparently he is only going to show himself to a close circle of friends tonight. Do you know, I think he is actually afraid of that le Flambeur character? Terrible,’ she says in a hushed tone.

‘Le what?’ Raymonde asks.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ Sofia says. ‘The rumour has it that some sort of offworld criminal invited himself here – even sent a letter announcing himself. It is all terribly exciting. Christian actually hired a detective, you know, the young boy who was in all the papers.’

Raymonde’s eyes widen. Announced himself? hisses Mieli in my mind. Announced?

I have no idea what she is talking about, I protest. That would be terribly unprofessional. It’s true: the preparations over the past few days have kept me too busy to incorporate additional flourishes. I feel a sudden twinge of regret: sending a RSVP would have played exactly the right note. I’m innocent, I swear. It is the same thing as with the gogol pirates. Somebody knows too much.

We are going to abort, Mieli says. If they are expecting you, the risk is too great.

Don’t be ridiculous. We are not going to get an opportunity like this anytime soon. It’s just going to make this a little more exciting. Besides, I have an idea.

We are not going to argue about this, Mieli says.

Are you telling me that we are going to run away with our tails between our legs? What kind of warrior are you? I trust you to deal with the violence, all right? Let me make this call. This is what I do. Any sign of trouble, and we are gone.

Mieli hesitates. Fine. But I’ll be watching you, she says.

I know you will be.

Raymonde thanks Sofia for the attempt and we excuse ourselves, finding a little pavilion near the clearing where a group of acrobats perform with a pair of gracile elephants – trunks weaving intricate patterns with torches – and a flock of trained megaparrots, a riot of screeching colour.

‘I knew this was a bad idea,’ Raymonde says. ‘We are not going to get close to Unruh. And – why does he have to be here?’ She stares at a young man across the clearing, tall and lanky with tousled hair, dressed in an ill-fitting black and silver outfit. He is wandering through the crowd with a distracted, daydreaming look on his face.

‘Is that the detective?’

‘Isidore Beautrelet, yes.’

‘Interesting. Close to Unruh, apparently.’

Raymonde gives me a flinty look. ‘Don’t get him involved.’

‘Why not?’ I feel the gogol pirate tools in my mind. The identity theft engine is something I have not tried yet, but it is there, waiting to be used. ‘You know him, right? Any gevulot access you could share?’

She takes a deep breath.

‘Come on, don’t be such a goody-two-shoes,’ I say.

‘We are trying to commit a crime here. We have to use all the tools we have.’

‘Yes, I have a lot of his gevulot,’ she says. ‘So what?’

‘Oh? Is he a former lover? Another one whose heart you stole?’

‘None of your business.’

‘Help me out. Give me his gevulot, and we can do what we came here for.’

‘No.’

I fold my arms. ‘All right, then. Let’s go home, and let your hidden puppeteers continue pulling your strings. Their strings. His strings.’ I gesture at the detective and the crowd. ‘This is exactly what I was talking about. You have to compromise to win.’

She turns away from me. Her face is hard. I try to take her hand, but she does not open her fingers. ‘Look at me. Let me do this. So you won’t have to.’

‘Damn you.’ She grabs my wrist. ‘But whatever I give you, you’ll give back, after it’s over. Swear it.’

‘I swear.’

‘And I swear too,’ she says. ‘If you hurt him, you’ll wish you were still in your Prison.’

I look at the young man. He is leaning on a tree, eyes half-closed, almost as if asleep.

‘Raymonde, I’m not planning on hurting him. Well, perhaps his ego, a little bit. It’ll do him good.’

‘You were never much good at doing good,’ she says.

I spread my hands, give her a small bow and go to meet the detective.

*

Isidore is alert, walking around, observing, deducing; it is not hard to see social patterns below the flow of gevulot. Here is the composer responsible for the music the Quiet will play later tonight, fishing for compliments; here, a Quiet resurrection activist trying to get a donation from Unruh for their cause. He tries to feel more than look, brushing a mental fingertip over his surroundings, reading a Braille of reality that has always been there for him, looking for things that do not belong.

‘Good evening.’

Isidore looks up, his concentration interrupted. A dark-skinned man in a white tie stands in front of him. He is of indeterminate age, a little shorter than Isidore. The stranger’s waistcoat glitters with golden ornamental Watches – ostentatiously, in Isidore’s opinion – and in spite of the dim firefly lighting, he is wearing blue-tinted glasses. There is a strikingly red flower in his lapel. He brings with him the faintest whiff of a feminine perfume, a fine scent of pine.

The man removes his glasses and gives Isidore a smile made world-weary by his heavy eyelids. His eyebrows are very dark, almost as if sketched with a sharp pen. His gevulot is carefully closed.

‘Yes?’

‘I am sorry, I am looking for … how do you say, a private place?’

Isidore frowns. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘For … bodily functions, you understand?’

‘Oh. Are you an offworlder?’

‘Yes. Jim Barnett. I’m afraid I find it difficult to navigate here.’ The man taps his temple. ‘My brain, it hasn’t yet adjusted, yes? Can you help?’

‘Of course.’ Isidore passes the man a little co-memory, indicating the restrooms in the castle. He feels a quick twinge of a beginning headache as he does so. Perhaps I have been working too hard.

The man grins and pats him on the shoulder. ‘Ah! So convenient. Thank you very much. Have a nice time.’ Then he disappears into the crowd.

Isidore wonders if he should direct a guard Quiet to keep an eye on him. But an anomaly catches his eye from a nearby agora. There is something familiar about a short man dressed as Sol Mercurii, all blazing silver and heat and wearing a winged helmet, having a conversation with a young woman in a Gemini costume – a foglet image of herself shadowing her every move. The man’s eyes are fixed on something far away.

Isidore whispers to one of the Quiet, approaches the pair and touches the man on the shoulder.

‘Adrian Wu.’

The journalist jumps.

‘Let’s talk,’ Isidore says.

‘But I have an invitation,’ Wu protests. ‘Unruh has been handing them out right and left. I need to cover this. I’m surprised to see you here, though. Is there something my readers should know?’

‘No.’ Isidore frowns. ‘Have you been taking analog photographs?’

‘Well—’

One of the assault Quiet pads soundlessly next to Isidore. Its faceless head stares at the journalist. There is a silent, subsonic hum around it that echoes in Isidore’s lungs. Wu stares at it.

‘You know, I’m in charge of security around here,’ Isidore says.

‘But—’

‘Give them to me, and I’ll let you stay.’

Wu takes off his helmet, unscrews a cylinder-like object from it and hands it to Isidore. It is an analog camera, apparently triggered by his chin strap, a primitive device with light-sensitive film, far too simple to be affected by gevulot.

‘Thank you,’ Isidore says. He nods to the Gemini woman. ‘I would be very careful what you say around this man. Let me know if he causes any problems.’ He smiles at Wu. ‘You can thank me later.’

The first dance has started. Isidore decides he deserves a drink and finds a glass of white wine. Then he checks the time: Unruh still has an hour left until his Timely demise.

That is when he realises his entanglement ring is gone from its chain. His heart pounds. He ’blinks at his encounter with the man with the blue-tinted glasses and sees the stranger steal it, with an almost imperceptible motion, separating his Watch from the chain and then putting it back, removing the ring, in a matter of seconds, talking to Isidore all the while, masking what can be masked with gevulot.

Isidore takes a deep breath. Then his mind is racing through the agoras of the party, sending the co-memory of the man to Odette and the Quiet guards. But he is nowhere to be seen, either gone or masked by gevulot. He walks around frantically, trying to locate all the gevulot blurs that could be hiding the uninvited guest that he has no doubt was no other than Jean le Flambeur. But the man seems to have vanished. Why did he come to talk to me? Just to taunt me? Or – He feels the odd headache again and a bizarre sense of déjà vu, flashes of faces, as if he was in two places at once.

He takes out his magnifying glass and Wu’s camera and looks at the film. Without effort, the zoku device translates the grains on the film into full-colour images. He flips through them, tapping the glass disc. Society women. Performers. And there – Unruh. A picture taken only minutes ago, according to the timestamp, showing the millenniaire laughing with a group of friends, among whom there is a familiar figure in black and silver, with tousled hair—

Isidore drops the camera and starts running.

Duplicating the detective’s physical appearance takes only a moment. I do it in one of the full privacy pavilions our host has considerately provided for his guests’ carnal and other clandestine activities: imprinting his three-dimensional image to my own flesh and reprogramming my clothes to resemble his. The match does not have to be absolute: a lot can be hidden with gevulot.

Absently, I look at the ring I stole from him: zoku tech, clearly. Deciding to investigate it later, I put it in my pocket.

The real problem is his identity signature, and that’s what I need the gevulot Raymonde provided for. And I need Perhonen’s quantum computation capability as well, to approximate the quantum state his Watch uses to identify itself.

I thought being a thief was easy, the ship says, as we bounce information back and forth. This is hard work.

‘Waiting and sheer terror, as I said.’ I try to ignore the memories that scroll through my mind as the ship and the identity theft engine work on them, to keep my promise to Raymonde. There are flashes of blank faces sculpted on a wall, and a girl with a zoku jewel at her throat. There is a strange innocence about the memories, and briefly I wonder what this boy is doing chasing gogol pirates and criminals like me.

I brush them aside: it is not the detective’s past I’m here to steal, but Time. The gogol engine chimes, announcing success, talking to my hacked Watch and making the world think I’m Isidore Beautrelet. Only a few moments before his Watch renews his identity signature with the ambient gevulot, so I have no time to waste. I check my remaining equipment – the q-spider and the trigger in my mind – and decide it is time for the main event of the night.

I approach Unruh’s group – the borrowed gevulot now allows me to see them – and imitate the detective’s distracted, meandering walk. My mark is talking to a tall woman in icy white, and looks cheerfully drunk.

‘M. Beautrelet!’ he shouts when he sees me. ‘How goes the villain hunt?’

‘There are too many to choose from,’ I say. Unruh bursts out laughing, but the woman in white looks at me curiously. Better make this quick.

‘You are in a festive mood, I see,’ Unruh says. ‘Good for you! Here’s to that.’ He drains his glass.

I hand Unruh another glass from a passing Quiet waiter. As he takes it, I give the q-spider a quick instruction. It runs up my arm, leaps to his palm and vanishes into his gas-giant-coloured sleeve. Then it goes looking for his Watch.

The spider took three days to grow and another protracted argument with Mieli to play with the Sobornost body. Perhonen and I came up with the design, and it grew in the crook of my arm, a little many-legged lump, storing inside it some of the EPR states that both Mieli and I use for our superdense communication link with the ship. I smile at Unruh and guide it with my mind.

‘It’s hard not to be,’ I say, ‘when the fireworks are about to start.’

There. The spider nestles on his Watch and crawls inside it, connecting little q-dot threads to the ion traps that store Unruh’s personalised, unforgeable units of Time, quantum states that his Watch sends to the resurrection system one by one, counting down his lifetime as a human. Then it shoots a little signal up at Perhonen. One, two, three, ten, sixty seconds of Time, quantum teleported away, transformed into quantum states up in the sky, stored in Perhonen’s wings. Yes.