The Quantum Thief (6 page)

The boy looks a little pale, turns and flees the shop.

‘Who was that?’ Isidore asks.

‘Élodie’s boyfriend. A little sleaze.’

‘You don’t like him?’

‘I don’t like anyone,’ Lindström says. ‘Except chocolate, of course. Now, what is this party you are going to?’

When Isidore leaves the shop, the Gentleman is nowhere to be seen. But as he walks along the Clockwise Avenue, he can hear its footsteps, stepping from one shade to another, away from the bright sunlight.

‘I must say,’ the tzaddik says, ‘I am interested to see where this is going. But have you considered that the theory you presented to her might actually be correct? That she could, in fact, be responsible for stealing her employer’s mind? I assume that it’s not her pretty smile that makes you think otherwise.’

‘No,’ says Isidore. ‘But I want to talk to the family next.’

‘Trust me, it will be the assistant.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘As you wish. I just received another lead from my brothers. There have been traces of a vasilev operation nearby. I’m going to investigate.’ Then the tzaddik is gone again.

The exomemory guides Isidore to the chocolatier’s home. It is in one of the high white buildings that overhang from the Edge, providing a glorious view of the Hellas Basin’s rolling desert, patched with green. Isidore descends one of the stairways that connect the outwards-facing facades to a green door, feeling a mild vertigo glimpsing the City’s legs through the dust cloud they raise far below.

He waits in front of the red door of the apartment for a moment. A small Chinese woman in a dressing gown opens it. She has a plain, ageless face and black silky hair.

‘Yes?’

Isidore offers his hand. ‘My name is Isidore Beautrelet,’ he says, opening his gevulot to let her know who he is. ‘I think you can guess why I am here. I would appreciate it if you had time for a few questions.’

She gives him a strange, hopeful look, but her gevulot remains closed: Isidore does not even get her name. ‘Please come in,’ she says.

The apartment is small but bright, a fabber and a few floating q-dot displays the only nods to modernity, with a stairway leading to a second floor. The woman leads him in to a cosy living room and sits down by one of the large windows on a child-sized wooden chair. She takes out a Xanthean cigarette and removes its cap: it lights, filling the room with a bitter smell. Isidore sits on a low green couch, hunched, and waits. There is someone else in the room, obscured by privacy fog: the daughter, Isidore guesses.

‘I should really get you – a coffee or something,’ she says finally, but makes no effort to get up.

‘I’ll do it,’ says a girl, startling Isidore with the sudden opening of her gevulot, appearing next to him as if out of nowhere. She is between six and seven Mars years old: a pale and willowy teen with curious brown eyes, wearing a new Xanthean dress, a tubelike affair that vaguely reminds Isidore of zoku fashion.

‘No, thank you,’ Isidore says. ‘I’m fine.’

‘I didn’t even have to ’blink you,’ the girl says. ‘I read Ares Herald. You help the tzaddiks. You found the missing city. Have you met the Silence?’ She seems unable to stay still, hopping up and down on the couch pillows.

‘Élodie,’ the woman says threateningly. ‘Don’t mind my daughter: she has no manners.’

‘I’m just asking.’

‘It’s the nice young man who is here to ask the questions, not you.’

‘Don’t believe everything you read, Élodie,’ Isidore says. He gives her a serious look. ‘I am very sorry about your father.’

The girl looks down. ‘They will fix him, right?’

‘I hope so,’ Isidore says. ‘I’m trying to help them.’

The chocolatier’s wife gives Isidore a weary smile, excluding her words from her daughter’s gevulot.

‘She cost us so much. Foolish child.’ She sighs. ‘Do you have children?’

‘No,’ says Isidore.

‘They are more trouble than they are worth. It is his fault. He spoiled Élodie.’ The chocolatier’s wife runs her hands through her hair, one hand clutching the cigarette, and for a moment Isidore is afraid that the silky hair is going to catch on fire. ‘I’m sorry, I’m saying terrible things when he is … somewhere. Not even a Quiet.’

Isidore looks at her, calmly. It is always fascinating to watch what people do when they feel they can talk to you: he briefly wonders if he would lose that as a tzaddik. But then there would be other ways to find things out.

‘Were you aware of any new friends that M. Deveraux might have made recently?’

‘No. Why?’

Élodie gives her mother a tired look. ‘That’s how they operate, Mom. The pirates. Social engineering. They gather bits of your gevulot so they can decrypt your mind.’

‘Why would they want him? He was nothing special. He could make chocolate. I don’t even like chocolate.’

‘I think your husband was exactly the kind of person the gogol pirates would be interested in, a specialised mind,’ Isidore says. ‘The Sobornost have an endless appetite for deep learning models, and they are obsessed with human sensory modalities, especially taste and smell.’

He takes care to include Élodie in the conversation’s gevulot. ‘And his chocolate certainly is special. His assistant was kind enough to let me try some when I visited the shop: freshly made, a sliver of that dress that arrived from the factory this morning. Absolutely incredible.’

Disgust twists Élodie’s face into a mask, like an echo of the chocolatier’s death. Then she vanishes behind the blur of a full privacy screen, jumps up and runs up the stairs with three hasty, low-gravity leaps.

‘My apologies,’ says Isidore. ‘I didn’t mean to upset her.’

‘Don’t worry. She has been putting on a brave face, but this is very difficult for us.’ She puts out her cigarette and wipes her eyes. ‘I suspect she will run off and see her boyfriend and then she’ll come back and not talk to me. Children.’

‘I understand,’ Isidore says, getting up. ‘You have been very helpful.’

She looks disappointed. ‘I thought … that you would ask more questions. My daughter said you always do, that you always ask something the tzaddiks never think of.’ There is a strange eagerness on her face.

‘It is not always about the questions,’ Isidore says. ‘My condolences again.’ He tears a page from his notebook and scrawls a signature on it, attaching a small co-memory. Then he hands it to the woman. ‘Please give it to Élodie, as a form of apology. Although I’m not sure if she is a fan anymore.’

As he leaves, he can’t help whistling: he has the full shape of the mystery now. He runs a finger along it in his mind, and it makes a clear sound, like a half-full glass of wine.

Isidore eats octopus risotto for lunch in a small restaurant on the edge of the park. The ink leaves interesting patterns in the napkin when he dabs his lips. He sits and watches the people in the park for half an hour, scribbling in his notebook, making observations. Then he gets up and goes back to the chocolate factory to spring his trap.

The biodrones let him in. At some point the Resurrection Men have come and taken the body away. Its outline and the chocolate stain remain on the floor, but obscured by privacy fog now, like the discarded skin of a snake, made of light. Isidore sits on a rickety metal chair in a corner and waits. The sound of the machines is strangely soothing.

‘I know you are here, you know,’ he says after a while.

Élodie steps out from behind one of the machines, unblurred by gevulot. She looks older, showing more of her true self: her eyes are hard.

‘How did you know?’

‘Footprints,’ Isidore says, pointing at the chocolate stains on the floor. ‘Not as careful as last time. Also, you are late.’

‘The co-memory you left with your note was crap,’ she says. ‘It took me a while to figure out you wanted to meet here.’

‘I thought you were interested in detecting. But then, first impressions can be deceiving.’

‘If this is about my father again,’ Élodie says, ‘I’m just going to leave. I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend.’

‘I’m sure you are. But it’s not about your father, it’s about you.’ He wraps his words in gevulot so tight that only the two of them will hear them, or will ever remember them being spoken. ‘What I’m wondering about is if it really was that easy for you.’

‘What?’

‘Not thinking about consequences. Giving your father’s private gevulot keys to a stranger.’

She says nothing, but she is staring at him now, every muscle tense.

‘What did they promise you? Going to the stars? A paradise, all for you, like a Kingdom princess, only better? It doesn’t work that way, you know.’

Élodie takes a step towards him, spreading her hands slowly. Isidore rocks back and forth on his chair.

‘So the keys did not work. And Sebastian – vasilev boyfriend, one of them – was not happy. He does not really care about you, by the way: it is just someone else’s emotion they put in him, a mashup.

‘But it seemed real enough. He got angry. Maybe he threatened to leave you. You wanted to please him. And you knew that your father had a place with gevulot, where one could do things undisturbed. Maybe he came with you to do it.

‘I have to say you were very clever. The chocolate tasted subtly wrong. He is in the dress, isn’t he? His mind. You used the fabber to put it there. They had just finished the original: you melted it and made a copy. The drones delivered it to the shop.

‘All that data, encoded in chocolate crystals, ready to be bought and shipped away to the Sobornost, no questions asked, not like trying to set up a pirate radio to transmit it, a mind all wrapped up in a nice chocolate shell, like an Easter egg.’

Élodie stares at him, blank-faced.

‘What I don’t understand is how you could bring yourself to do it,’ he says.

‘It didn’t matter,’ she hisses. ‘He didn’t make a sound. There was no pain. He wasn’t even dead when I left. No one lost anything. They will bring him back. They bring us all back. And then they make us Quiet.

‘It’s unfair. We didn’t fuck up their fucking Kingdom. We didn’t make the phoboi. It’s not our fault. We should live forever properly, like they do. We should have the right.’

Élodie opens her fingers, slowly. Hair-thin rainbows of nanofilament shoot out from underneath her fingernails, stretching out like a fan of cobras.

‘Ah,’ says Isidore. ‘Upload tendrils. I was wondering where those were.’

Élodie walks towards him in odd, jerky steps. The tips of the tendrils glow. For the first time, it occurs to Isidore that he might indeed be very late for the party.

‘You should not have done this in a private place,’ she says. ‘You should have brought your tzaddik. Seb’s friends will pay for you as well. Maybe even more than for him.’

The upload filaments snap forward, whips of light, towards his face. There are ten pinpricks in his skull, and then an odd dullness. He loses control of his limbs, finds himself getting up from the chair, muscles responding involuntarily. Élodie stands in front of him, arms outspread, like a puppeteer.

‘Is that what he said? That it wouldn’t matter? That they would fix your father no matter what?’ His words come out in a stutter. ‘Have a look.’

Isidore opens his gevulot to her, giving her the co-memory from the underworld, the chocolatier screaming and fighting and dying again and again in the room below the ground.

She stares at him, open-eyed. The tendrils drop. Isidore’s knees give way. The concrete floor is hard.

‘I didn’t know,’ she says. ‘He never—’ She stares at her hands. ‘What did I—’ Her fingers clench into claws, and the tendrils follow, flashing towards her head, vanishing into her hair. She falls to the ground, limbs spasming. He does not want to watch, but he has no strength to move, not even to close his eyes.

‘That was one of the most spectacular displays of stupidity I have ever seen,’ says the Gentleman.

Isidore smiles weakly. The medfoam working on his head feels like wearing a helmet made of ice. He is lying on a stretcher, outside the factory. Dark-robed Resurrection Men and sleek underworld biodrones move past them. ‘I’ve never aimed for mediocrity,’ he says. ‘Did you get the vasilev?’

‘Of course. The boy, Sebastian. He came and tried to buy the dress, claimed it was going to be a surprise for Élodie, to cheer her up. Self-destructed upon capture, like they all do, spewing Fedorovist propaganda. Almost got me with a weaponised meme. His gevulot network will take some rooting out: I don’t think Élodie was the only one.’

‘How is she doing?’

‘The Resurrection Men are good. They will fix her, if they can. And then it will be early Quiet for her, I suspect, depending on what the Voice says. But giving her that memory – it was not a good thing to do. It hurt her.’

‘I did what I had to do. She deserved it,’ Isidore says. ‘She is a criminal.’ The memory of the chocolatier’s death is still in his belly, cold and hard.

The Gentleman has removed his hat. Beneath, whatever material the mask is made from follows the contours of his head: it makes him look younger, somehow.

‘And you are criminally stupid. You should have shared gevulot with me, or met with her somewhere else. And as for deserving—’ The Gentleman pauses.

‘You knew it was her,’ Isidore says.

The Gentleman is silent.

‘I think you knew from the beginning. It was not about her, it was about me. What were you trying to test?’

‘It must have occurred to you that there is a reason that I haven’t made you one of us.’

‘Why?’

‘For one thing,’ the Gentleman says, ‘In the old days, on Earth, what they used to call tzaddikim were often healers.’

‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything,’ Isidore says.

‘I know you don’t.’

‘What? Was I supposed to let her go? Show mercy?’ Isidore bites her lip. ‘That’s not how mysteries get solved.’

‘No,’ says the Gentleman.

There is a shape in the one word, Isidore can feel it: not solid, not certain, but unmistakably there. Anger makes him reach out and grasp it.

‘I think you are lying,’ says Isidore. ‘I’m not a tzaddik because I’m not a healer. The Silence is not a healer. It’s because you don’t trust someone. You want a detective who has not Resurrected. You want a detective who can keep secrets.