The Quantum Thief

Interlude. VIRTUE

Gilbertine dreams about the puss-in-boots again. It is a streaky tom on two legs, wearing a flamboyant hat and heavy boots. It leads her through marble-and-gold corridors of a palace, with rows of doors on both sides. One door is open.

‘What is in there?’ she asks the cat. It looks up at her with strange, glittering eyes. ‘You will know,’ it says, in a high-pitched quivering voice, ‘when the master comes back.’

She wakes up in her Montgolfiersville apartment, next to the warm, snoring body of her latest lover, whose name is already fading from her memory. Her gevulot contracts are always well-crafted, a minimum of disruption for everybody, leaving only pleasing memories of flesh here and there, hot flushes of emotion associated with tastes and places.

The dreams have been more frequent lately. And her own memories feel loose, uncomfortable. She wonders if she is getting old, not in the old-fashioned way but developing the malady of immortals that Bathilde talks about, being erased and rewritten too many times.

The co-memory message comes when she is in the shower with her lover, his nameless fingers lathering her back. It is full of sudden anxiety and urgency. Raymonde.

She disappears from beneath his touch into a gevulot blur. That was always the plan anyway. She stops only to pick up her Watch from her night table: she hates wearing it when making love. The word Virtus engraved on it has always felt too much like a bad joke.

Raymonde waits for her in her Belly apartment. Her face is pale and drawn, and her freckles stand out against her skin.

‘What’s wrong?’ Gilbertine asks.

‘Paul. He is gone.’

‘What?’

‘He is gone. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know what to do.’

Gilbertine embraces her friend, anger rising inside her. ‘Sssh. Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.’

‘Is it?’ Raymonde’s shoulders shake. ‘How is it going to be fine?’

Because I’m going to find him and make him pay, Gilbertine thinks.

Her gevulot contracts are always well-crafted, even the old ones. And they always have emergency clauses.

To her satisfaction, she actually surprises him. He is in the strange robot garden of the Maze, sitting on a small luggage pod, smiling at empty space. He wears a sleek dark blue full-body garment, zoku style, not quite matter, not quite light. He holds a small box that he keeps turning in his hands, round and round.

When she lets him see her, for a fleeting moment he looks like a frightened little boy. Then he smiles.

‘Ah, there you are.’ Paul says. But he does not look like the Paul that Gilbertine remembers, the sometimes foolish, self-centred architect hopelessly in love with her friend. His eyes are clear and emotionless, and the smile playing on his lips is cold. ‘Can you remind me what your name is?’

‘Don’t you remember?’

He spreads his hands. ‘I made myself forget,’ he says.

Gilbertine takes a deep breath. ‘I am Gilbertine Shalbatana. You are Paul Sernine. You loved my friend Raymonde. She is hurting. You need to go back. Or at least have the guts to say goodbye. She already forgave you once.’

She hurls the memory at him, opening her gevulot.

Raymonde introduced them. Raymonde, Gilbertine’s comrade-in-arms ever since she came from Nanedi; a slow-town girl in the big city, wanting to make music. Secretly, Gilbertine hated her easy grace, the way things fell into place for her, seemingly without effort. He was one of those things. So of course she wanted him. And making him want things he did not have was not difficult.

But it did not last. He went back to her, content not to even remember who Gilbertine was, chased after Raymonde to Nanedi and back. She accepted it as the way of things. But this, this she won’t accept.

Paul looks at her with a detached look on his face. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have enough from you before.’ To her horror, she can feel something eating through her gevulot.

‘But you are quite right,’ Paul says quietly. ‘Paul Sernine could never leave. But he is staying here, you see, inside you and the others. Whereas me – there is somewhere else I need to be. Stealing the fire of the gods. Being Prometheus. That sort of thing.’

‘I don’t care,’ Gilbertine says. ‘You have a child with that girl.’

He flinches. ‘I would have remembered that,’ he says. ‘No, that does not seem right.’

‘Damn right it doesn’t,’ Gilbertine says, filling her voice with as much venom as she can draw from the old hurt.

‘You don’t understand. I would have not forgotten that.’ He shakes his head. ‘In any case, it doesn’t matter. We are not here to talk about me. This is all about you.’

Gilbertine pulls her shoulders back, reaching for the exomemory. ‘You are insane.’ A tingling sensation crawls across her scalp, and suddenly there is just a wall where the part of her that is connected to everything else should be. It is like having a phantom limb, trying to convince you that it is not gone, only inside her mind.

Paul stands up. ‘I’m afraid I’ve cut off your exomemory link. Don’t worry, you’ll get it back in a moment.’

Gilbertine takes a step back. ‘What are you?’ she hisses. ‘A vampire?’

‘Not at all,’ Paul says. ‘Now stay still. This will hurt a little.’

Gilbertine runs. It is hard to think, with the hole inside her head. The Watch. Whatever he is doing, it must be through the Watch. She claws at her wrist, to get it off-

– but she is not really running, it’s just a memory of running, and she is still standing in front of Paul whose eyes look a lot like those of the puss-in-boots-

He holds up the box. ‘See? I found out about this from the dreams of a poor boy hurt in the Spike. I took it from the zoku: they will never miss it.’

‘What is it?’ Gilbertine whispers.

‘A trapped god,’ Paul says. ‘I need to put it somewhere. That’s why you are here.’

The box starts to glow. It disappears from Paul’s hand. And then it is inside her head.

She remembers abstract shapes, a data structure like a vast metallic snowflake, sharp edges pressing against the soft parts of her mind. A flood of alien sensations passes through her exomemory. For a moment it is like a hot metal rod being pushed through her temples. Then the pain is gone, but a sense of weight remains.

‘What did you do to me?’

‘The same thing I did to all of you. Put things in a place where no one will look for them. In your exomemories, protected by the best cryptography in the System. In a place that will claim a price if I want them back. That was the last thing I had to dispose of. I am sorry about the discomfort. I hope you can forgive me.’ The not-Paul sighs. ‘For what it’s worth, your Paul had nothing to do with this.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Gilbertine says. ‘It’s not all about memory. A part of you is Paul, no matter who you think you are, no matter what you have done to your brain, no matter if he was just a mask you wore. And I hope he burns in hell.’ She wants to claw at his face. But the faint foglet halo around whatever the creature wearing Paul’s shape tells her that violence would be useless.

‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ he says. ‘I can’t let you remember any of this, of course. I hope you can comfort Raymonde in some way.’

‘Do what you want to my memory,’ she says. ‘I’m going to make sure she hates you forever.’

‘Perhaps I deserve that,’ he says. ‘Goodbye.’

He touches her forehead, and a wind blows through her mind-

Gilbertine blinks at the bright Phobos light. She is standing alone in the robot garden. She feels disoriented, and it takes a few moments to remember meeting Raymonde. What did she do after that? She ’blinks at the last few minutes, but finds them empty. Damn. Must be another Spike legacy glitch.

For some reason, she remembers the dream she had last night: a puss-in-boots, a closed door. Did she have a dream?

For a moment, she considers ’blinking the dream, too, but decides against it. There is too much to do in the waking world.