The Quantum Thief (34 page)

I struggle up to a sitting position and spit blood at le Roi’s feet. ‘Bastard,’ I say. ‘I was prepared for you. There are traps here you don’t know about. You’ll see.’

‘Now, that is a pathetic attempt, not worthy of either of us,’ says le Roi. ‘Be grateful that I find it amusing to keep you around. As a distant memory, perhaps.’

He gestures with the gun, and strong, unyielding hands lift me off the floor and start dragging me away. Wax figures: a man in an early twentieth-century suit, with a thick moustache, and a woman I don’t recognise, dressed as a maid. Both have glass eyes and yellow, clumsily sculpted wax faces. I try to struggle, but I am no match for their mechanical strength.

‘Let me go!’ I shout. ‘He is not your master, I am!’ But clearly, the gun grants le Roi more authority than I can muster here. ‘Bastard!’ I shout. ‘Come back and fight!’

The creatures drag me down a corridor with open doors. There seem to be hundreds of them: inside, silent wax figures enact scenes in slow motion. They strike a chord: a young man in a prison cell, reading a book. A dark tent, with a woman sitting in a corner, humming to herself, preparing food over a pitiful fire. I glimpse a wax-faced nude Raymonde, playing the piano with slow, clumsy fingers. They are all dead and mechanical, and suddenly I realise what a distant memory could mean.

But it is not until they take me to the workshop, with the moulds and the pool of hot wax and the sharp instrument that I start screaming.

There is a discontinuity. When it ends, Isidore is still holding Pixil’s hand. He blinks. The air smells of dust and wax. They are in what looks like a torturer’s workshop, but with high, ornate windows opening to a garden. The thief is strapped to a long table, with fairy tale creatures looming above him: a wolf in the clothes of a woman, a moustached man and a maid in costumes from ancient Earth history. They are holding sharp, curving knives in paws and waxy hands.

Pixil leaps forward. Her sword comes out of its scabbard with a zing and slices left and right, through wax and brass. A furry head flies into the air; cogs and metal spill out of the back of the man’s pierced cranium. The wax creatures fall to the floor in pieces. Then she places the tip of the blade gently on the thief’s throat.

‘Don’t move,’ she says. ‘This is a Realmspace sword. As you can see, it adapts to this place quite nicely.’

‘I was just going to say thank you,’ the thief wheezes. Then he grins at Isidore. ‘M. Beautrelet. Delighted to see you here. We have met before. Jean le Flambeur, at your service. But – obviously – your lady friend has the, uh, advantage of me.’

‘What is happening here?’ Isidore asks.

‘The cryptarch – le Roi – controls this place, I’m sorry to say.’ He blinks. ‘But how did you get here? Of course, your zoku ring,’ he says. ‘It is amazing how useful kleptomaniac habits can be, sometimes – watch out!’

Isidore turns. He catches a glimpse of a furry creature, darting across the floor. ‘Catch it!’ the thief shouts. ‘It has your ring!’

Here they come, Perhonen says. I can’t hold them anymore.

She can feel the impacts of the flying phoboi on the ship’s skin, draining its armour. ‘Get out of there.’ The ship rises up, and Mieli sees the phoboi tide hit the disorganised Quiet wall like a scythe, pouring over it. She blinks the ship’s view away and returns her attention to firing at the cryptarch-controlled assault Quiet.

A yellow constructor Quiet brought her down by filling the air with fabbed construction dust, temporarily blocking her wings’ microfans. The Quiet keep throwing themselves at her and Raymonde stubbornly, turning their advance towards the black needle into a crawl.

‘The phoboi are getting through,’ Mieli shouts at the tzaddik. Even through the dust and the silver mask, Mieli can see the despair on her face.

Mieli! Something is happening! She slows time and sees through the ship’s eyes again.

The bubble around the zoku colony disappears. Howling ghosts made from shimmer and diamond and jewels ride out, raining coherent light on the phoboi horde, cutting through it as if it wasn’t there, moving faster than human eye can see. Wildfires start in their wake – self-replicating nanotech weaponry – and circles of flame spread through the seething mass. What made them change their minds? Mieli wonders. But there is no time to reflect.

‘Come on!’ she tells Raymonde. ‘There is still time!’ Gritting her teeth, she extends a q-blade from the cannon and rushes the mass of Quiet ahead.

*

The zoku girl cuts me free. The detective is already running after the cat, and I race after him. The creature is no longer in sight, and I dash madly onwards in the direction I think it went, passing more memory automata.

And then I see it, in a small gallery, sitting on a one-legged table made of dark wood: a black, unadorned object that could hold a wedding ring. The Schrödinger Box. It is just as tempting as it was twenty years ago, when I found out that the zoku colony had it, and I can’t resist. Warily, I enter and grab it, expecting a trap. But nothing happens. I squeeze it in my fist and return to the corridor.

The detective and the zoku girl are running back.

‘I’m sorry,’ the detective says. ‘It got away.’

‘Are you looking for this?’ says Jean le Roi. He looks different now, younger, much more like me. His face is smooth, his hair black, and he has a pencil moustache. He is wearing a black tie, white gloves, and an opera cloak draped over his shoulders, as if before a night out on the town. He carries a cane. A cluster of zoku jewels floats around his head, flashing in hues of green and blue. But the sneer is still there.

He holds up the ring, a silver band with a blue stone. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t be needing it anymore.’ He waves his hand like a conjuror and the ring vanishes in a puff of flash powder. ‘You can all stay here, as my guests.’ He brushes invisible dust away from his lapels. ‘I have found a body I’m going to wear, I think. It’s time to leave all this strife behind.’

The zoku girl lets out a wild cry, and before I can stop her, she swings her sword in a wide arc at le Roi. With a movement too fast to follow, he twists the head of his cane, and a blade comes out in a bright flash. He parries her blow, then drops and lunges. The swordcane’s tip blooms out of her back, an evil, sharp flower. He pulls it out in one smooth movement. She falls to her knees. The detective rushes to her side, holding her up. But I can tell it is already too late.

Le Roi nudges her fallen sword with his own. ‘A nice toy,’ he says. ‘But mine are much nicer.’ He seems to notice the detective for the first time. His eyes widen.

‘You are not supposed to be here,’ he says quietly. ‘What are you doing here?’

The detective stares up at him. There are tears on his cheeks, but his eyes are brimming with anger. ‘M. le Roi,’ he says with a steady voice. ‘I am here to arrest you for crimes against the Oubliette, and in the name of the Revolution order you to turn your exomemory key over to me immediately—’

‘No, no.’ He kneels next to the boy. ‘You have it all wrong. I thought you were a memory he turned against me. I didn’t mean for this to happen.’ He looks at the girl. ‘We can bring her back if you want. And my key, here it is, if you want.’ He drops his cane and fumbles for something in his pocket. ‘Here. You have it.’ He presses something in the detective’s hand. ‘Take it. I’ll send you back. It is only right that the prince will inherit the kingdom—’

The detective strikes him across the face. He leaps up and picks up his swordcane, pointing at him. Then he shakes his head. ‘Enough.’ He gestures with the weapon, and the detective is gone, in a flash of light.

‘You are breaking all your toys,’ I say, holding up the Realmspace sword. ‘Want to try me as well?’

The sword is talking to me, showing the underlying structure of everything around us. This is a little Realm, a virtual world that serves as an interface for the picotech machine around us. I am a software entity, containing all the information of the matter of my body the palace disassembled. And there is something blue inside my belly, like a ghost—

Le Roi’s eyes narrow. ‘The boy is not broken,’ he says. ‘He turned out well. He outsmarted you. I will come and visit him in a hundred years.’

‘No thanks to you,’ I say. ‘And he is right. You have to pay for what you have done.’

He salutes me with the swordcane, sneering. ‘Then carry out the sentence, if you can. Let’s finish this.’ He assumes a fencer’s stance, his eyes a reflection of my own.

I raise the Realmspace sword with both hands and plunge the point into my stomach. The pain is blinding. The sword cuts through the software construct that is me.

And lets the Archon loose.

It comes out with my blood and guts, spilling out in a flood of data. It spreads into the walls and the floor of the palace. They start turning into glass. The walls of the cells come down between me and Jean le Roi, and as I give birth to a Dilemma Prison, I start laughing.

Mieli almost shoots the detective when the needle spits him out. A part of its jagged dark side turns into a naked body of a young man and falls forward. And then Raymonde is next to him, holding him up.

‘He got Pixil,’ the boy mutters.

They made it to the base of the needle minutes ago. It looks like the pseudomatter Mieli has only seen near Spike remnants, not made from atoms and molecules but something more subtle, quark matter or spacetime foam.

Mieli, says Perhonen, I’m not sure it’s safe to be there. There is something happening inside that thing. Gamma rays, exotic WIMPs, it’s like a fountain—

A ripple goes through the structure. And suddenly it is like smoked glass, dark, cold and dense. Like the Prison. He released the Archon.

Mieli lowers her weapon and touches the wall of the needle. It opens and accepts her like a lover.

The Archon is happy. New thieves, new things to make, new games to grow, in dense soil that makes its mind expand a thousandfold. Someone touches it: the Oort woman, the fugitive, returning to its embrace. It lets her in. She tastes of cinnamon.

Isidore aches. His body is new and raw, and inside, Pixil’s death is a fire. But there is no time to think about that, because suddenly he knows everything.

The exomemory is a sea around him, clear like a tropical ocean. Quiet, Nobles, tzaddikim: every thought ever thought, every memory. They are all his. It is the most beautiful and the most terrible shape he has ever seen or felt. The history. The present: rage, blood and fire. Atlas Quiet, going mad, labouring to keep the city standing. People fighting like puppets, the triggers and knobs and dials in their heads that his father put there turned to madness.

He speaks to them with the Voice and reminds them of who they are. The Quiet return to man the phoboi walls. The fighting stops.

And slowly, step by step, the city starts to move again.

So, here we are again. Doing time.

I am naked. I keep my eyes closed. On the floor in front of me is a gun. And soon, I am going to pick it up and decide to shoot or not to shoot.

The sound of shattering glass sounds like music, or like breaking the law. A wind blows through the cell, carrying tiny shards. I open my eyes and see Mieli, wings outspread, a scarred angel in black.

‘I was hoping you would come,’ I say.

‘Is this the part,’ she says, ‘where you tell me that you are Jean le Flambeur and that you only leave this place when you choose?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s not that part.’

I take her hand. She embraces me. She beats her wings and we rise up, through the glass sky, away from guns, memories and kings.

THE THIEF AND THE STOLEN GOODBYE

I say goodbye to the detective – Isidore – in his kitchen, the day after the zoku brings Pixil back.

‘She is different now,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why, but she is different.’

We sit around his kitchen table, and I try to avoid looking at the sombre, dirty brown wallpaper.

‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘it only takes a few moments to make you a different person. Sometimes it takes centuries.’ I try to shake off the green creature that has been wandering around the table. It seems to regard me as a natural enemy, and keeps chewing on my sleeve. ‘But of course, you should not really listen to anything I say. Especially about women.’

I look at him: a bony nose, high cheekbones. The resemblance is there, around the mouth and the jaw and the eyes. I wonder what Raymonde and le Roi would have left to chance. I hope there is more of her in him than me.

‘You have changed a lot too,’ I continue. ‘Isidore Beautrelet, Cryptarch of the Oubliette. Or perhaps king would be a better word. What are you going to do next?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I can’t make every decision. I have to give the Voice back to the people. There has to be a better way to make this work. I’m going to give it up as soon as I can. And I have to figure out if … if I’m going to let everyone remember where the Oubliette really came from.’

‘Well, a revolution is always a beautiful dream,’ I say. ‘And you have just had a real one. Whatever you do, be careful. The Sobornost is going to come after you, hard and fast. The zoku will help now, I think: but it won’t be easy.’ I smile. ‘It’ll be exciting, too. Big and confusing. Like an opera, someone told me once.’

He looks out through the window. The city is still healing: it must be a different view than before. And the Prison is visible from here, a diamond needle above the Maze rooftops.

‘What about you?’ he asks. ‘Are you going to go off and do something … criminal?’

‘Almost certainly. I still have a debt to pay, I’m afraid.’ I grin. ‘You are welcome to catch me if you can. But I think you are going to be too busy.’ I give the green creature a dark look. It is now trying to get into my lap. ‘Of course, others here don’t seem to have that problem.’

I get up. ‘I’d better get going. Mieli hasn’t killed anything for a few days now, and that always puts her in a bad mood.’

I shake his hand. ‘I’m not your father,’ I say, ‘but you are a better man than I am. Keep it that way. But if you are ever tempted by the other path, let me know.’

To my surprise, he hugs me, hard.