The Quantum Thief

7. THE DETECTIVE AND HIS FATHER

Isidore blinks at the Phobos-light in the morning. His mouth tastes foul, and his head pounds. For a moment, he buries his face in Pixil’s hair, holding on to her warmth. Then he forces himself to open his eyes, slowly easing his hand out from underneath her.

The vault looks different in the morning. The walls and other surfaces let light filter through, and he can see the red line of Hellas Basin’s edge in the distance. It feels like waking up outside, in a strange geometric forest.

The previous night is a haphazard jumble of images, and he instinctively reaches out for the exomemory, to remind himself what happened: but of course, here, he only finds a blank wall.

He looks at Pixil’s sleeping face. Her lips are curled in a little smile, and her eyes are fluttering beneath the eyelids. The zoku jewel glitters in the morning light at the base of her throat, against her olive skin. What the hell am I doing? he thinks. She is right, it is just a game.

It takes a while to find his clothes in the pile, and he almost puts on a pair of pantaloons by mistake. Pixil breathes steadily all the way through the operation, and does not wake up even when he tiptoes away.

In daylight, the cubes in the vault resemble a labyrinth, and it is difficult to tell where they entered, even with a sense of direction honed by living in the Maze. As always, the lack of gevulot confuses Isidore, and thus finding the portal comes as a relief. That must be it. A silver arch, a perfect semicircle with intricate filigree work along its edge. He takes a deep breath and walks through. The discontinuity is even sharper this time-

‘More wine, my lord?’

– and he is in a vast ballroom that cannot be anything else but the Hall of the King in Olympus Palace. Glittering gogol slave dancers with jewelled bodies twist themselves into impossible configurations atop high pillars, performing slow, mechanical acrobatics. A machine servant in red livery is offering him a glass with a mandible-like limb. He realises he is wearing a Martian noble’s attire, a living cloak over a dark q-fabric doublet, wearing a sword. Everywhere around him there are people in even more elaborate finery, bathing in Phobos-light from a huge window with a view down the slope of Olympus Mons. The domed ceiling far, far above is like a golden sky.

It all feels completely real, and he accepts the offered glass, dumbfounded.

‘Would you care for a dance?’

A tall woman in a Venetian mask, lush body barely contained in a network of straps and jewels, her skin strikingly auburn red, offers him a hand. Still reeling, he allows himself to be led to a clear space in the crowd where a many-handed gogol plays achingly beautiful melodies with brass flutes. She moves lightly, tiptoed, following his lead like a writer’s pen; his hand rests on the smooth curve of her hip.

‘I want to make my husband jealous,’ she whispers, smelling of exotic wine.

‘And who is your husband?’

‘Up there, on the dais.’ Isidore looks up when they swirl around. And there, of course, stands the Martian King, a laughing figure in white and gold, surrounded by a coterie of admirers and courtiers. He turns to tell the red-skinned woman he really should be going, when everything freezes.

‘What are you doing?’ asks Pixil. She is looking at him, arms folded, looking completely awake now, in her plain zoku daysuit.

‘Dancing,’ he says, disentangling himself from the red woman who has become a statue.

‘Silly boy.’

‘What is this place?’

‘An old Realmspace. Something Drathdor whipped together once, I think. He’s a romantic.’ Pixil shrugs. ‘Not really my kind of thing.’ She gestures, and the semicircle is back behind her. ‘I was going to make you breakfast. The whole zoku is still asleep.’

‘I didn’t want to wake you.’

The discontinuity is a relief this time, restoring him and the world to a degree of normalcy.

‘All right. What is this about? Sneaking off after last night?’

He says nothing. Shame crawls down his back, leaving cold trails, and he does not entirely know why.

‘It’s just the tzaddik thing,’ he finally says. ‘I need to think about it. I’ll qupt you.’ He looks around. ‘How do I get out of here?’

‘You know,’ Pixil says. ‘You just have to want. Do qupt me.’ She blows him a kiss. But there is disappointment in her eyes.

Another discontinuity, and he is standing outside the colony, blinking at the bright sunlight.

He takes another spidercab and asks it to drop him off near the Maze, asking the driver to go slow this time. His stomach is churning; clearly, whatever ancient abusive chemicals the Elders were drinking are not something the Martian body designers were prepared for.

There is an immediate sense of relief when the cab leaves the Dust District. The gevulot hums in his mind, and things have texture again, not just ethereal geometry but stone and wood and metal.

He has breakfast in a small dragon-themed corner café, banishing fatigue with a coffee and a small portion of Chinese rice porridge, but it does not take the guilt away.

And then he sees the newspaper. An aging gentleman with a Watch in a brass chain and a waistcoat is reading the Ares Herald at a nearby table. TZADDIK BOY PARTIES HARD, screams the headline. Shaking, he asks his table for a copy, and the waiter drone brings it. It is him, a moving picture on paper, talking about everything, the chocolate case, Pixil.

For a long time now, we have enjoyed the protection of those masked men and women of might, the tzaddikim; and those who follow our publication know that with difficult cases, they, too, need help. We trust the reader does not need to be reminded of the incident of the disappearance of Schiaparelli City, or the disappearing lover of Mlle Lindgren, where an individual, so far unknown, played a key role. Described as a ’pleasant young man’, this person worked with the Gentleman on several occasions, unravelling mysteries that perplexed the tzaddik.

The Herald can now reveal that this unsung hero is no other than Isidore Beautrelet, an architecture student, aged ten. M. Beautrelet gave your humble correspondent an unusually candid interview last night at a sophisticated celebration in the Dust District. The young detective had been invited by a young lady to whom he has been romantically linked to for some time-

There are pictures; a black-and-white shot of him, mouth open, at the zoku party. He looks pale and wild-eyed, with dishevelled hair. The awareness that people he has not shared gevulot with now know who he is and what he has done makes him feel dirty. The gentleman in the next table is looking at him sharply now. He pays quickly, wraps himself in privacy and makes his way home.

Isidore shares a flat with another student, Lin, in one of the old towers at the edge of the Maze. The place consists of five rooms in two floors, mostly decorated with haphazard tempmatter furniture, with peeling wallpapers that change patterns according to their moods. When he enters, a ripple goes through them, and they adopt an Escheresque pattern of interwoven black-and-white birds.

Isidore showers and makes more coffee. The kitchen – a high-ceilinged room with a fabber and a wobbly table – has a large window with a view of the Maze rooftops and sunlit shafts between buildings. He sits by it for a while, trying to gather his thoughts. Lin is around too. Her animatronic figures all over the kitchen table again. But at least she herself has the decency to stay hidden behind gevulot.

There are already a lot of co-memories tugging his subconscious about the Herald article, like a headache. He wants to forget about it all. At least he has no exomemories of the conversation with the reporter, to be prodded and touched like a loose tooth; a small mercy. And then there is the tzaddik. Not thinking about that is harder.

Then there is a gevulot request from Lin. Grudgingly, he accepts it, allowing his flatmate to see him.

‘Iz?’ she asks. She studies traditional animation and comes from a smalltown in Nanedi Valley. There is a look of concern on her round face, and paint stains in her hair.

‘Yes?’

‘I saw the paper. I had no idea that it was you who did all that stuff. My cousin was in Schiaparelli.’

Isidore says nothing. He looks at her expression and wonders if he should try to figure out what it means, but there does not seem to be any point.

‘Really, I had no idea. I’m sorry you ended up in the paper, though.’ She sits down at the table and leans across towards him. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I have to study.’

‘Oh. Well, let me know if you want to go for a drink later.’

‘Probably not.’

‘Okay.’ She picks up something from the table, wrapped in cloth. ‘You know, I was thinking about you yesterday, and I made this.’ She hands the bundle to him. ‘You spend so much time alone, I thought you could use some company.’

Slowly, he unwraps the thing. It is an odd, cartoonish green creature, all head with large eyes and tentacles, the size of his fist. It starts moving in his grip, inquisitive. It smells faintly of wax. It has large white eyes, with two black dots for pupils.

‘I found this old chemical bot design and put a syntbio brain in it. You can give him a name. And let me know about that drink.’

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I appreciate it. Really.’ Is this what I have to look forward to? Pity? Misguided gratitude?

‘Don’t work too hard.’ And then she is gone again, behind her own gevulot wall.

In his room, Isidore sets the creature on the floor and starts thinking about Heian Kyo influences in Kingdom architecture. It is easier to focus surrounded by his own things, a couple of his father’s old sculptures, books and the large tempmatter printer. His floor and desk are covered in three-dimensional building sketches, both imaginary and real, dominated by a scale model of the Ares Cathedral. The green creature hides behind it. Smart move, little fellow. It’s a big, bad world out there.

Many of his fellow students find studying frustrating. As perfect as exomemory is, it only gives you short-term memories. Deep learning still comes from approximately ten thousand hours of work on any given subject. Isidore does not mind: on a good day, he can get lost in the purity of form for hours, exploring tempmatter models of buildings, feeling each detail under his fingertips.

He summons up a text on the Tendai sect and the Daidairi Palace and starts reading, waiting for the contemporary world to fade.

How are you, lover? Pixil’s qupt startles him. It comes with an euphoric burst of joy. Great news. Everybody thought you were adorable. They want you back. I spoke to my mother, and I really think you are just paranoid-

He yanks the entanglement ring off and throws it away. It ricochets among the Martian model buildings. The green monster scutters away and hides beneath his bed. He kicks at the cathedral. A part of it dissolves into inert tempmatter, and white dust rises into the air. He continues to break the models, until the floor is full of dust and fragments.

He sits among the ruins for a while and tries to figure out how to reassemble them in his head. But his grip keeps slipping, and it feels like no two pieces fit together anymore.

The next day it is Sol Martius, and as always, Isidore goes to see his father in the land of the dead.

He walks down the long, winding steps of the Inverted Tower with the other mourners, in silence, eyes aching from a sleepless night. The Tower hangs from the belly of the city like a crystal teat. They can see the city’s shadow for the whole journey, the slow rhythmic rise and fall of the city’s legs. Above, the platforms of the city shift and interlock as the city optimises its weight distribution with each step. Everything is tinted with orange dust. The light of Phobos – a former moon, now turned into a star by the tiny singularity inside it – gives the world an odd, timeless, twilight feel.

There are few mourners this morning. Isidore walks behind a black man whose back is bent by the weight of his quicksuit.

Every now and then, they pass a platform manned by a silent, masked Resurrection Man. The movements of the Quiet below are obscured by the dust cloud, but the phoboi walls are visible. The ramparts stretch towards the horizon and define the city’s planned route. They contain the trail of new life behind the city, a paintbrush streak of synthbio fields and terraforming machinery. Like its brothers and sisters, the city tries to paint Mars green again. But in the end, the phoboi always come.

At the bottom of the Tower, there are elevators waiting. Resurrection Men give them fireflies to follow, accompanied by stern instructions to make it back by noon. One of them helps Isidore don his quicksuit, Oubliette make, with modern programmable materials but with far too much design effort spent on it, brass and leather, so that it looks like an ancient diving suit. The gloves are clumsy and it is difficult to hold on to the bouquet of flowers he has brought. They crowd into the elevator through an airlock – a simple platform suspended from nanofilament – and descend through the orange mist, swinging back and forth with the city’s motion. And then they are on the surface, slow-moving figures in bell-like helmets, each following a firefly.

The vast mass of the city looms above like a second, heavier sky, with fractures and seams where the different platforms meet, moving and shifting slowly like clockwork. From this vantage point, the legs – a forest of multi-jointed shafts – seem too frail to hold it up. The thought of a falling sky makes Isidore uncomfortable, and after a while, he decides to focus his gaze on the firefly.

The sand beneath his feet is beaten hard by legs and tracks and other locomotion methods of the Quiet. They are everywhere here, tiny ones that scatter to make way for his feet, as if he were a giant City striding across their landscape. There are terraforming Quiet, bigger than a man, moving in herds, toiling on the algae and regolith. An Atlas Quiet strides past, making the ground shake, a six-limbed caterpillar larger than a skyscraper, on its way to correct the balance of a city leg or to make sure the ground is safe when it completes its arc. He sees an air factory Quiet in the distance, a plant on tracks that is like a small city in itself, with swarms of flying Quiet around it. But the firefly does not let him linger. It leads him across the shadow of the city at a rapid pace, up and ahead where his father is helping to build phoboi ramparts.

His father is ten metres tall, with an elongated insect body. He burrows into the Martian regolith with a grinding noise, pulling up powdered rock through a chemical processing system, mixing it with synthbio bacteria, turning it into a construction material for the wall. His dozen limbs – spindly and fast-moving – shape the material flow from his beaklike mouth, laying down the wall, layer by layer. His carapace has a metallic hue that looks rusty in the orange light. There is a dent on his side, with another limb bud growing from it; a memory of a recent phoboi battle.

He labours side by side with a hundred others; some of them climb on top of each other, making the wall taller and taller. But his father’s section of the wall looks different. It is full of faces, reliefs and shapes. A lot of them are almost immediately shattered by the smaller mechanic Quiet who come and install the wall’s weaponry. But Isidore’s father does not seem to care.

‘Father,’ Isidore says.

The Quiet interrupts his work and turns to Isidore slowly. His metal carapace snaps and groans as it cools. The usual fear chills Isidore, the awareness that he is going to be inside a body like that one day. His father looms above him in the orange dust like a bladed tree, the mechanisms of his hands slowly spinning down.

‘I brought you some flowers,’ Isidore says. The bouquet is full of his father’s favourites, tall Argyre lilies, and he places it on the ground carefully. His father picks it up gently, with exaggerated care. His blades spin again for an instant, and the spidery shaper limbs dance. The Quiet places a tiny statue in front of Isidore, made from the dark wall material, a man making a bow and smiling.

‘You’re welcome,’ Isidore says.

They stand in silence for a moment. Isidore looks at the crumbling relief on the wall, all the faces and landscapes his father has carved into it. There is a tree lovingly rendered in stone, its branches full of large-eyed owls. Maybe Élodie was right, he thinks. It is all unfair.

‘I have something to tell you,’ he says. The guilt clings to his back and shoulders and belly, wet and heavy, like the old man of the sea. It is difficult to speak while in its grip.

‘I did something stupid. I talked to a journalist. I was drunk.’

He feels weak and sits down on the sand, taking his father’s statuette in his hand. ‘It was inexcusable. I’m sorry. I’ve already had some trouble, and you may have some too.’

Two statuettes this time, the larger holding his hand across the smaller one’s back.

‘I know you trust me,’ Isidore says. ‘I just wanted to tell you.’ He gets up and looks at the relief: running horses, abstract shapes, faces, Noble, Quiet. The quicksuit lets some of the gunpowder smell of the freshly worked stone through.

‘The reporter asked me why I try to solve things. I told him something stupid.’ He pauses.

‘Do you remember what she looked like? Did she leave you that?’

The Quiet stands up, all angles and metal. It runs its shaper limbs along a row of blank female faces, each subtly different, each an attempt to capture something he has lost.

Isidore remembers the day he stopped remembering his mother, when her gevulot closed. There was sudden awareness of an absence. Before, there was always a sense of safety, that someone always knew where he was, always knew what he was thinking.

The Quiet makes another statue in the sand, a female one, faceless, holding an umbrella above the other two.

‘I know you think she was trying to protect us. I don’t believe that.’ He kicks at the statue. It crumbles back to dust. The regret comes immediately.

‘I didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry.’ He looks back at the wall, at his father’s endless labour. They break it, and he makes it again. Only the phoboi here to see it. Suddenly, he feels foolish. ‘Let’s not talk about her.’

The Quiet sways, like a tree in the wind. Then it makes another pair of statues, with familiar features, holding hands. ‘Pixil’s fine,’ Isidore says. ‘I… I don’t know where we are going. But once we figure it out, I’ll bring her to see you again.’

He sits down again, leaning against the wall. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you have been up to?’

Back in the city, in the bright daylight, Isidore feels lighter again, and it is not just the lack of the quicksuit’s weight. He is carrying the first statue in his pocket: its weight is comforting.

He treats himself to lunch in a fancy Italo-Chinese place along Persistent Avenue. The Ares Herald is still running the story, but this time he is able to focus on his food instead.

‘Don’t worry, M. Beautrelet,’ a voice says. ‘All publicity is good publicity.’

Startled, Isidore looks up. There is a woman sitting on the other side of the table. He didn’t sense even a ripple in the gevulot. She has a tall, young designer body, a face that is beautiful in a carefully unconventional fashion: short-cropped hair, a strong, sweeping nose, full lips and arching eyebrows. She is dressed in white, a Xanthean jacket over an expensive variant of the Revolution uniform. Two tiny jewels wink at him from her earlobes.

She lays two slender hands on top of the newspaper, long fingers arcing like the back of a cat.

‘What does fame feel like, M. Beautrelet?’

‘I’m sorry, I haven’t had the pleasure-’ Again, he makes a gevulot offer, at least to learn her name; he’s not even sure she should be able to know his, or to see his face. But it is as if there was a solid wall of privacy around her, a one-way mirror.

She waves a hand. ‘This is not a social call, M. Beautrelet. Just answer my question.’

Isidore looks at her hands, resting on the black-and-white picture. He can see his own drowsy eyes from the reporter’s picture between her fingers.

‘Why do you care?’

‘How would you like to solve a case that would give you real fame?’ There is something childlike about her smile. ‘My employer has been watching you for some time. He never fails to notice talent.’

Isidore is awake enough now to deduce, to access exomemory. She is comfortable in her body, which means she has spent a lot of time as a Noble, too long perhaps to look so young. She has the slightest hint of a slowtown accent, but carefully hidden. Or perhaps hidden just enough for him to notice.

‘Who are you?’

She folds the newspaper in two. ‘You will find out if you accept our offer.’ She gives it to him, and with it, a tiny comemory. ‘Have a pleasant day, M. Beautrelet.’ Then she gets up slowly, flashes that smile at him again and walks away, becoming a gevulot blur in the crowd.

Isidore opens the memory, something just at the tip of his tongue flashing into his consciousness. A place, a time. And a name.

Jean le Flambeur.