The Quantum Thief

6. THE THIEF AND PAUL SERNINE

‘Time, just a little Time, please, miss-’

‘I am going to be a Quiet for the third time, I have paid my debts, please help-’

‘I am a craftsman, a tailor, you can have my mind for a little Time, it will fetch a good price-’

Mieli is struggling in the crowd of Time beggars. Some are naked like the first one, others look just like everybody else on the Avenue, but they all share a look of hunger and desperation. Some wear masks and hoods. They are pushing at each other to get to her, a tangled ring of heaving bodies tightening around her, and some of her more autonomous defence gogols are waking up. I need to get out of here before I blow my cover.

She pushes one beggar aside, rams another with her shoulder: they go down, in a mess of limbs. She rushes past. One of the beggars on the ground grabs her leg. She falls. One of her elbows makes a painful impact with the pavement. An arm tightens around her throat. A voice hisses in her ear.

‘Give us Time or we’ll see if the Resurrection Men will bring you back, offworld bitch.’

‘Help!’ she shouts. Her vision goes black, and her temples start pounding. Her metacortex wakes up and muffles the pain, slows time down and starts waking the rest of her systems up. It would be so easy to sweep this rabble aside like so many rag dolls-

A wind rises. The pressure around her throat disappears. Someone screams, and running feet echo in the agora. She opens her eyes.

There is a man in black and silver floating in the air, perfectly polished shoes two metres above the ground, holding a cane. A living wind dances around him, a heat ripple, full of the telltale ozone smell of combat utility fog. They should not have that here, she thinks.

Hands made from heat haze hold the masked beggars on the ground – countless nanites, forming invisible structures that are the extensions of the black-clad man’s limbs. Other beggars make a run for it past the boundary of the agora and turn into gevulot blurs, disappearing into the crowd.

‘Are you all right?’ the man says, in a strange rasping voice. He comes down next to Mieli, shoes hitting the marble with a sharp tap. He is wearing a polished metal mask that covers his entire head: Mieli is fairly certain it is a q-dot bubble. He holds out a white-gloved hand. Mieli takes it and allows herself to be helped up.

A tzaddik. Great. The Sobornost database she studied during the journey had scant details on the Oubliette vigilantes. They have been active for two decades or so, and clearly have access to technology from outside Mars. Sobornost vasilevs – infiltrator agents – operating with the local gogol pirates, speculate they have something to do with the zoku colony established on the planet after the Protocol War.

‘I’m fine,’ Mieli says. ‘Just a little shaken.’

My, my, Perhonen says. Who is this? A handsome prince on a white horse?

Shut up and figure out how I avoid blowing my cover.

‘Let’s get you away from the agora before the journalists arrive,’ the tzaddik says, offering Mieli his arm. To her surprise, her legs are a little shaky, so she takes it and lets him lead her back to the shade of the cherry trees and the noise of the Persistent Avenue. There are people – mainly tourists – watching the scene, but the tzaddik gestures, and Mieli can tell that they are now private again.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Journalists?’

‘Yes, they tend to watch agoras very carefully. As do we. As do beggars looking for easy prey, as you found out.’ He motions towards the masked attackers on the ground with his cane.

‘What is going to happen to them?’

The tzaddik shrugs. ‘That will depend on what the Voice decides. An early or extended Quiet, probably: but that’s what was waiting for them anyway.’ There is a strange, angry note in its chorus voice. ‘That is the price we pay for the other good things here, I’m afraid.’ Then he takes off his hat and bows. ‘But my apologies. The Gentleman – which is the nom de guerre I have been given – at your service. I hope your day has not been completely ruined.’

He is flirting with you, Perhonen says. Oh my god. He so is.

Of course he isn’t. He has no face. Mieli feels a tickle that tells her the tzaddik is scanning her. Nothing that will penetrate the camouflage layers beneath her gevulot, but serves as another reminder that the natives have more than just bows and arrows.

Neither do I, and that has never stopped me.

Never mind. What do I do? I can’t tap into the thief’s feed with him scanning me.

He’s a do-gooder. Ask him for help. Stick to your cover, silly girl. Just try being nice for a change.

Mieli tries to smile, trying to think what her cover identity – a tourist from a mixed asteroid belt habitat – would say. ‘You are a policeman, yes? A sysadmin?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I lost my friend when… they came. I don’t know where he is.’ Perhaps the ship is right: the thief is not the only one who can do a little social engineering.

‘Ah, I see. And you don’t know how to use co-memories to send him a message? You did not share gevulot to know where you are? Of course you didn’t. It is really terrible: the customs Quiet are very strict about leaving all your native tech behind, but never really tell you how to use ours.’

‘We just wanted to see the sights,’ Mieli says. ‘The Olympus Palace, maybe go on a phoboi hunt.’

‘Here is what we can do,’ the Gentleman says. ‘Let’s have a look at the agora memory – like this.’ The sensation is sudden, like finally finding the word that was at the tip of your tongue. Mieli remembers seeing the agora from high up, in incredible detail, knowing that she can recall every face in the crowd. She has a clear memory of the thief running across the agora.

‘Oh,’ the Gentleman says. There is a sudden gevulot request from him, asking her to forget his reaction. She accepts: the metacortex will store it anyway. She bookmarks it for later perusal. Curious.

‘What I can do is bend the rules a little to help you find him. We tzaddiks have some… special resources.’ The tzaddik unscrews the top of his cane. A tiny sphere of utility fog bops out, like a soap bubble. It hovers in the air next to Mieli, and starts glowing. ‘That should do it: just follow the firefly, and it will take you to him.’

‘Thank you.’

‘My pleasure. Just stay out of trouble.’ The tzaddik tips its hat again, is surrounded by heat haze, and rises up to the air.

See? That wasn’t so hard, was it? says Perhonen.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t know who you are talking about.’ I block the gardener’s gevulot request, or at least I think I do. The gevulot interface they give to visitors is not really meant to deal with all the subtleties of daily Oubliette interactions, but just to provide a few rough settings ranging from full sharing to perfect privacy. I have a vague recollection of an actual privacy sense: compared to it, this is like having a monochrome vision.

‘Your body designers must like the same movie star,’ the gardener says. ‘You look just like a guy who used to come here with his girlfriend. A pretty girl, too.’

I climb down the robot, slowly.

‘What were you doing up there, anyway?’ he asks, looking puzzled.

‘I just wanted to get a better view of the gameboard,’ I say. ‘You could say I’m something of a games enthusiast.’ I dust off dirt from my jacket. ‘Is it you who maintains all the flowers here? It’s beautiful.’

‘That’s me.’ He hooks his thumbs under the suspenders of his coveralls, grinning. ‘Years of work. It’s always been a place for lovers. I’m too old for that – a few rounds as a Quiet takes those kinds of thoughts out of you – but I enjoy keeping it nice for the young people. Are you visiting?

‘That’s right.’

‘Well spotted; this is the kind of place most tourists would not find. Your girlfriend seems to like it, too.’

‘What do you mean my girlfriend – oh.’

Mieli is standing in the shadow of one of the bigger robots, with a firefly guide hovering above her head. ‘Hello, darling,’ she says. I tense, expecting to be plunged into an inferno. But she just smiles like an icicle.

‘Did you get lost?’ I ask her. ‘I missed you.’ I wink at the gardener.

‘I’ll give you youngsters some privacy. Nice meeting you,’ the gardener says and blurs out, disappearing into the robot ruins.

‘You know,’ Mieli says, ‘a while back you said that we were going to be professionals.’

‘I can explain-’

I don’t even see the punch coming, just feel a sudden impact on my nose, calculated precisely to cause maximum amount of pain without breaking the bone, that tosses me back against the robot. Then, a series of kicks that hammer me against it and empty my lungs, setting my solar plexus on fire. And finally, light knuckle percussions on my cheekbones and one that rattles my jaw. Ever faithful to its cruel parameters, my body leaves me gasping for breath and feeling oddly disassociated, as if looking at Mieli’s impossibly fast movements from the outside.

‘That is me being professional,’ she hisses. ‘In my koto in Oort, we never cared that much for explanations.’

‘Thanks,’ I gasp. ‘For not pressing the hell button.’

‘That’s because you found something.’ She gets a distant look that tells me she is going through this body’s short-term memories. ‘Let’s see it.’ She holds out a hand.

I pass her the Watch. She tosses it up and down thoughtfully. ‘All right. Get up. We will talk about this later. Sightseeing is over.’

‘I know you are thinking about stealing it back,’ she says as we take a spidercab back to the hotel. She seems to be enjoying the ride as the diamond legs of the carriage-like vehicle telescope out, taking it up to the rooftops of the Maze.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. I can recognise the signals now. You caught me twice with that pickpocket trick, but not again.’

‘Sorry, it’s a reflex. Makes it more of a challenge, I suppose,’ I say, massaging my smarting face. ‘How long does it take for this body to heal?’

‘As long as I want it to.’ She leans back. ‘What is it about it, anyway? Stealing.’

‘It’s…’ It’s an instinct, I want to say. It’s like making love. It’s becoming more than I am. It’s art. But she would not understand, so I merely repeat the old joke. ‘It’s about respecting other people’s property. I make it my property so that I can properly respect it.’

She is silent after that, watching the scenery leap past.

The hotel is a massive building near the glider port where we arrived from the beanstalk station. We have a set of large, impressively Time-consuming rooms near the top floor, not decorated opulently enough for my taste (sleek lines and glass surfaces of Xanthean designers), but at least there is a fabber so I can replace my clothes.

Except that I don’t get a chance. She points at the small table and chair in front of the balcony. ‘Sit.’ She places the Watch in front of me. ‘Talk to me. What in Dark Man’s name happened at the agora?’ She clenches and unclenches her fingers. I swallow.

‘All right. I saw myself.’ She raises her eyebrows.

‘It was not another memory, not like on the ship. It must have been a gevulot construct of some kind: somebody else saw it too. It led me to the garden. So clearly, we are getting somewhere.’

‘Perhaps. It did not occur to you to fill me in on this? Are there any reasons for me to let you out of my sight again? Or not to recommend to my employer that we should take off the silk gloves and take a more… direct approach with your brain?’

‘It was… sudden.’ I look down at the Watch. The sunlight glints off it, and again, I notice the engravings on the side. ‘It felt… private.’

She grabs my face with impossibly strong fingers and turns it up. Her eyes look unblinking into mine, angry and green.

‘As long as we are in this together, there is no private. Do you understand? If I need to know, you will tell me your every childhood memory, every masturbation fantasy, every teenage embarrassment. Is that clear?’

‘I do wonder,’ I say slowly and carefully, ‘if there is something affecting your professionalism. And I would note that I’m not the one who screwed up the Prison exit. I’m just the one who got us out of it.’

She lets go and looks out of the window for a moment. I get up and get a drink from the fabber, Kingdom-era cognac, without offering her a glass. Then I study the Watch again. There are zodiac symbols, in a grid of seven by seven, Mars, Venus, and others I don’t recognise. And underneath, cursive script: To Paul, with love, from Raymonde. And that word again, Thibermesnil, in copperplate typeface.

Could you have a look at these? I whisper to Perhonen. You will still talk to me without hitting me, right?

I don’t need to hit you, the ship says. I have lasers. I’ll see what I can find. Its tone is unusually terse: I’m not surprised. I tell myself it’s the cognac alone that makes my face burn.

‘All right,’ Mieli says. ‘Let’s talk about this thing you stole.’

‘Found.’

‘Whatever.’ She holds it up. ‘Tell me about this. The Oubliette data I have is clearly obsolete.’ Her tone is colourless. A part of me wants to break that icy veneer again, dangerous or not, to see how deep it goes.

‘It’s a Watch. A device that stores Time as quantum cash – unforgeable, uncopyable quantum states that have finite lifetimes, counterfeit-proof, measures the time an Oubliette citizen is allowed in a baseline human body. Also responsible for their encrypted channel to the exomemory. A very personal device.’

‘And you think it was yours? Does it have what we need?’ ‘Maybe. But we are missing something. The Watch is meaningless on its own, without the public keys – gevulot – inside the brain.’

She taps the Watch with a fingernail. ‘I see.’

‘This is how it works. The exomemory stores data – all data – that the Oubliette gathers, the environment, senses, thoughts, everything. The gevulot keeps track of who can access what, in real time. It’s not just one public/private key pair, it’s a crazy nested hierarchy, a tree of nodes where each branch can only by unlocked by the root node. You meet someone and agree what you can share, what they can know about you, what you can remember afterwards.’

‘Sounds complicated.’

‘It is. The Martians have a dedicated organ for it.’ I tap my head. ‘A privacy sense. They feel what they are sharing, what is private and what isn’t. They also do something called co-remembering, sharing memories with others just by sharing the appropriate key with them. We just have the baby version. They give the visitors a bit of exomemory and an interface to it, reasonably well-defined. But there is no way we can appreciate the subtleties.’

‘And why would they do this?’

I shrug. ‘Historical reasons, mainly: although not much is known about what exactly happened here after the Collapse. The commonly accepted version is that someone brought a billion gogols here for a private terraforming project and set themselves up as a King. Until the gogols rebelled. Anyway, the fact that the gevulot system is in place is pretty much why Sobornost has not just eaten this palace yet. It would be too much trouble to decrypt everything.’

All right, you two, says Perhonen. Sorry about the delay, I didn’t want to interrupt. The symbols are astrological. The exact sequence only appears in one source, Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theatre. It’s an occult system from the Renaissance. Thibermesnil is a castle in France. Here are the details. She sends a spime down our neutrino channel. Mieli looks at it and leaves it hanging in the air, between us.

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘So, what does all that mean?’

I frown. ‘I have no idea. But I think everything we need is in my old exomemory. What we need to do is to figure out how to get to it. I think I need to become Paul Sernine again, whoever he was.’ I pour myself some more cognac.

‘And where do you think your old body is? Did he – you – take it with you when he left? And what is the point of those markings?’

‘Could be. And as for the symbols, I don’t know – I always had a taste for theatrics. I’m certainly not getting any flashes from them.’ I feel slightly disgruntled at my past self. Why the hell did you have to make this so complicated? But the answer is obvious: so that secrets would be secrets. And hiding them among other secrets is a textbook way to do it.

‘So there is no way we could brute-force this, to get access to your memories through the Watch? We could use Perhonen to-’

‘No. There are three things they do better than anyone here: wine, chocolate and cryptography. But’ – I lift my index finger – ‘it is possible to steal gevulot. The system is so complex it’s not perfect, and sometimes you can trigger whole cascades of gevulot branches by getting a person to share the right thing with you at the right time. Social engineering, if you like.’

‘It always comes down to stealing for you, doesn’t it?’

‘What can I say? It’s an obsession.’ I frown. ‘We even know where to start: I had a significant other here. But we do need some proper gevulot-breaking tools. Maybe more: using this toy gevulot sense they gave us would be like trying to pick a lock with a brick in the dark. So I think it’s time you contacted your employer to put us in touch with some gogol pirates.’

‘What makes you think that-’

‘Oh, come on. Your employer is from Sobornost, clear as day, maybe some powerful copyclan, out to score points with the Founders. He/it/they – whatever pronoun they use these days – will have contacts with the pirates here, the Sobors are their main customers.’ I sigh. ‘I never cared much for them. But if you want to dig up treasure, you have to be prepared to get your hands dirty.’

She folds her arms. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘I will point out – to deaf ears, I’m sure – that it is not particularly wise or healthy for you to ask questions or make inferences about our mutual… benefactor.’ There is a trace of irony in her voice when she says the last word. ‘In any case, it seems there are three things we can do. One: figure out why you would leave the Watch to yourself. Two: try to find your old corpse. Three: get in touch with the only people on this planet with less morals than you.’

She gets up. ‘I will see what I can do about option three. In the meantime, you and Perhonen will work on number one: we will leave option two until we know more. And get yourself cleaned up.’ She turns to leave.

‘Wait.’

‘Look. I’m sorry I escaped. It was a reflex. I haven’t forgotten my debt. You have to understand that this is a little strange.’

Mieli looks at me, and smiles cynically, but does not say anything.

‘In my profession, the idea is not to get too caught up in the past. If we are going to work together, I hope you can try to do that as well.’ I smile. ‘I don’t apologise to many people. Or get caught by many people. So consider yourself lucky.’

‘Do you know,’ Mieli says, ‘what they do to thieves where I come from?’ She smiles. ‘We fill their lungs with life-support synthbio. Then we throw them out. Their eyes pop, their blood boils. But they can live for hours.’ She takes my glass from the table and walks away with it. ‘So consider yourself lucky.’

The anger makes Mieli feel strangely awake. Being angry at the thief is a pure, clean feeling. For a long time, her anger has been wrapped up and locked away, but this is good and straightforward. She takes deep breaths and paces around her room, even enjoying the sense of fighting gravity for a while. Then she swallows the rest of the thief’s alcohol. It is a perfect counterpoint to the emotion, a sharpness that turns into warmth. The guilt comes immediately after that. I’m letting him get to me again. Bastard.

She leaves the glass hanging in the air and curses when it falls to the floor. The room makes her uncomfortable: it is too two-dimensional, and the gravity reminds her of the Prison. But at least there is a faint scent of roses.

He is going to think about that vacuum line for a long time, Perhonen says. Good one.

I don’t mind him thinking that I’m some savage barbarian. He certainly makes me feel like one. Mieli sets the glass aside. Some peace and quiet now, please. I need to talk to the pellegrini.

Are you sure you’ll be all right?

I’ve done this before, remember? We went to Venus from the other side of the System to see this bitch. I think I can handle a little journey in my head.

You go, girl. And then Perhonen is gone.

Mieli lies down on the bed, closes her eyes and imagines the temple. It is in the shadow of Kunapipi Mons, a shield volcano rising from the basalt plain. The surface of the rock is covered in a thin layer of lead and tellurium, condensed from the metal fumes that rise from the canyons and furrows where the temperature exceeds seven hundred Kelvin.

The temple is a stone shadow, a projection of some higher-dimensional object, with strange geometry: the black corridors she walks along suddenly open into vast hollows crisscrossed by stone bridges at impossible angles. But she has been through this labyrinth before, and follows the metal flower markings unerringly.

In the centre, there is the axis, a little trapped singularity, floating in a cylindrical pit, a falling star, suspended. That is where the goddess lives. Even now, Mieli remembers how she felt at the end of her journey here in the physical world, in a thick q-suit, beaten down by the relentless gravity, limbs burning with fatigue.

‘Mieli,’ the goddess says. ‘How nice to see you here.’ Strangely, she looks more human here than when she chooses to manifest to her on her own. The lines on her face and neck and the corners of her eyes are visible. ‘Let me see where you are. Ah, Mars. Of course. I always loved Mars. I think we will preserve that place, somewhere, once the Great Common Task is done.’

She brushes a lock of hair away from Mieli’s forehead. ‘You know, I do wish you would come here sometime without having to ask for something. I have time to all those who serve me, and why wouldn’t I? I am many.’

‘I made a mistake,’ says Mieli. ‘I let the thief get away from me. I was inattentive. It will not happen again.’

The pellegrini raises her eyebrows. ‘Let me see your memories. Ah. But you found him again? And made progress? Child, you don’t have to come to me to unburden your soul after every little failure or a bump in the road. I trust you. You have served me well. Now, what is it that you need?’

‘The thief wants tools to steal what they call gevulot here. He thinks there are Sobornost agents on Mars who might be able to help, and wants to contact them.’

The pellegrini looks at the bright dot of the axis for a moment. ‘A simple enough request, under normal circumstances. They would obey my seal without question. But I cannot be associated with your mission, not directly. I can provide you with information and contacts, but you will have to do your own negotiation with them. It will be vasilevs, they can be troublesome. Such handsome boys, and they know it.’

‘I understand.’

‘No matter. I will send what you need to that cute little ship of yours. I am satisfied with your progress: do not worry about failures.’

Mieli swallows. The question comes out unbidden.

‘Am I being punished?’

‘What do you mean? Of course not.’

‘Then why am I treating the thief with velvet gloves? In the war, the warminds would take prisoners and find the tiniest things hidden in their minds. Why is the thief any different?’

‘He isn’t,’ the pellegrini says. ‘But he will be.’ ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t have to. Trust me, you were carefully chosen for this task. Carry it out as you have, and both I and your friend will see you here soon, in the flesh.’

Then Mieli is back in the rose-scented room. Slowly, she gets up and makes herself another drink.

While Mieli is away, Perhonen and I work on the Watch. Or she does; I mainly act as her hands. Apparently, Mieli has given the ship a degree of access to this body’s sensory systems. It is an odd feeling, holding the Watch in my hands while thin q-dot probes crawl from my fingers into it.

‘I always liked these,’ I say aloud. ‘The Watches. Coupling entangled states with oscillators and mechanics. Large and small. Beautiful.’

Hm. Lift it closer to your eye.

While Perhonen carries out the analysis, I’m flicking through exomemories of memory palaces, fighting the resulting headache with drink.

‘You know, I think I was off my head. Memory palaces?’ An elaborate memory system, based on a technique of impressing places and images on the mind. Imaginary loci where symbols representing memories could be stored. Used by Greek orators, medieval scholars and Renaissance occultists. Made obsolete by the advent of printing.

I wave the Watch in frustration. ‘You know, I would have thought that the whole point of hiding things here would have been for me to find them easily again. It’s almost as if I don’t want myself to discover anything.’

Hold still.

‘I can’t find anything on Paul Sernine, no public exomemories, not that it’s surprising. I do wonder what I was doing on Mars, apart from this Raymonde girl.’

Stealing something, probably.

‘I love this place, but looking at my previous career, there isn’t that much here to steal. And I would not have gone into the gogol piracy business.’

Are you sure? Now put it back on the table.

‘Yes, of course I’m sure. What is your problem, anyway?’

The ship sighs, an odd, imaginary sound. You are. You may think you are charming, but you are causing distress to my friend. She does not do riddles or prison breaks. She is not even a warrior, not really.

‘So why is she doing all this? Serving the Sobornost?’

Why does anyone ever do anything? For someone. Don’t ask so many questions, I’m trying to concentrate. The ion traps in these things are delicate.

‘All right. Well, the sooner we crack this, the sooner we can all get on with bigger and better things.’

I feel the thing in my hands. The letters on the word Thibermesnil are raised slightly. ‘Ah ha.’ I suddenly make the connection. When I came back, there was a dream, and there was a book, a book about the flower thief. And a story. Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late. A secret passage, unlocked by-

I press the letter H with a fingernail. After some pressure, it turns. So do R and L. The cover of the Watch opens. Inside, is a picture of a man and a woman. The man is me, younger, black-haired, smiling. The woman has reddish brown hair and a dash of freckles across her nose.

‘Well, hello, Raymonde,’ I say.