The Quantum Thief

17. THE DETECTIVE AND THE GORDIAN KNOT

It takes Isidore the rest of the day to recover. The Quiet medics refuse to let him go before he is pumped full of synthbio nanodocs. His thoughts are a confused jumble, racing in all directions at once: but when he gets home, the exhaustion takes over and he collapses in his bed. He wakes up late after a long, dreamless sleep.

Frustratingly, rest does not offer any solutions, so he sits at the breakfast table for a long time, staring at the world through the kitchen window, trying to grasp where everything belongs, where the seams are, where everything fits together: the tzaddik, the thief, Time, the memory palaces. The wallpapers are a complex Escheresque jungle again, garish in the bright, mixed daylight. His thoughts are interrupted by a cheerful gevulot request.

‘Good morning,’ Lin says.

‘Hnnh,’ Isidore grunts. His roommate is wearing a more careful attire than usual, jewellery glinting in her ears. She smiles at Isidore and starts making breakfast with the fabber, a Spanish omelette.

‘Coffee and sustenance?’ she asks.

‘Yes, please.’ Isidore realises that he is starving. The hot food restores some of his fortitude. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t mention it. You look like you need it.’

‘You know, I gave your creature a name,’ Isidore says, between mouthfuls.

‘What did you call him?’

‘Sherlock.’

She laughs. ‘That’s a good name. Do I dare to ask how the detective business is going? You were in the Herald again. Parties, thieves and death. You have an exciting life, M. Beautrelet.’

‘Well.’ Isidore massages his temples. ‘It has its ups and downs. Right now, I don’t really know what I’m doing. It is all very confusing. I can’t figure out what this thief is doing, or if he is really a thief in the first place.’

Lin gives his arm a little squeeze. ‘You’ll figure it out, I’m sure.’

‘What about you? Did something happen? You look… different.’

‘Well,’ Lin says, running a finger along the wood grains of the table surface. ‘I met someone.’

‘Oh.’ There is an odd twinge of disappointment that should not be there. He ignores it. ‘That’s great.’

‘Who knows? We’ll see how it goes. It’s kind of been there for a while, you know, and we just… decided to stop stepping around it.’ She grins. ‘But I’m hoping it’ll last long enough that we can have some sort of party here. If you could bring your girlfriend over, we could all cook together. Or do zoku people eat? Just a thought.’

‘It’s a little bit complicated at the moment,’ Isidore says. ‘I’m not sure I can exactly call her my girlfriend anymore.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Lin says. ‘It’s funny, no matter how smart you are, these things always get so tangled. I think after a while you just have to treat it like a Gordian knot. One cut, that’s it, and it’s open. Not so complicated anymore.’

Isidore looks up and stops chewing. ‘You know what? You are a genius.’ He swallows, gulps down the rest of his coffee and runs to his room, grabbing his coat. He pats Sherlock on the head and rushes to the door.

‘Where are you going?’ Lin shouts.

‘To find somebody with a sword,’ Isidore says.

The zoku colony is strangely forbidding this time. The glass cathedral’s points, edges and protrusions look sharp. Isidore stands at the gates, trying to decide what to do.

‘Hello?’ he says. But nothing happens. How is this supposed to work again? Just think, Pixil said.

He touches the cold surface of the door and imagines Pixil’s face. His fingers tingle. The reply is sudden and violent, much harsher than ever with the entanglement ring.

Go away. It comes with a sensation that is like a physical blow, a stinging slap on the cheek.

‘Pixil.’

I don’t want to talk to you right now.

‘Pixil, can we meet? It’s important.’

Important things have an expiry date. Like me. I have things to do.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. Things have been a little insane. Can you let me in or come out and meet me? It won’t take long, I promise.’

I’m supposed to go on a raid in twenty minutes. I’ll give you ten. Now get out of the way.

‘What?’

Get out of the way!

Something big comes through the door. The surface shimmers and ripples. Pixil is astride a massive black creature, like a six-legged horse but larger, covered in gold and silver plates, with bloodshot eyes and white, sharp teeth. She is wearing elaborate armour with wide shoulderplates like a samurai’s, and a ferocious mask pushed up to her forehead. A sword hangs at her side.

The creature snorts and snaps at Isidore, sending him scrambling backwards. He backs up against a pillar. Pixil dismounts and pats the creature’s neck. ‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘You have met Cyndra already.’

The epic mount lets out a bellow that stinks of rotting meat and rings in Isidore’s eardrums.

‘I know we are in a hurry,’ Pixil tells the creature, ‘but you don’t have to eat him. I can handle him all by myself.’ It turns around and vanishes through the doors.

‘Sorry about that,’ Pixil says. ‘Cyndra wanted to come along to tell you what she thought of you.’

‘I see,’ Isidore says. His knees feel weak, and he sits down on the steps. Pixil crouches down next to him, armour clinking.

‘So, what is this about?’ she asks.

‘I have been thinking,’ Isidore says.

‘Really?’

He gives her a reproachful look.

‘I’m allowed to tease you,’ she says. ‘That’s how these things work.’

‘All right.’ He swallows. It is difficult to say the words. They are jagged, awkwardly shaped things in his mouth. He remembers reading about Demosthenes, the great orator who practised speaking while chewing on small rocks. He bites down on them and speaks.

‘It’s not going to work. Us,’ he says, and pauses for a moment. She says nothing.

‘I’ve been with you because you are different,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t read you. I couldn’t understand you. It was fun for a while. But it was never going to be any different.

‘And I never put you first. You were always just… the other thing. The distracting voice in my head. And I don’t want to think of you like that. You deserve better.’

She looks at him, face grim, but then he realises it is just mock seriousness. ‘That’s what you came to tell me? That’s what it took you all this time to figure out? All by yourself?’

‘Actually,’ he says, ‘Sherlock helped.’ She gives him a curious look. ‘Never mind.’

Pixil sits down next to Isidore, rests her sword on one of the steps and leans on it.

‘I have been thinking too,’ she says. ‘I think the thing I like best about you is that you drive the elders up the wall. It’s fun to watch. And not having any entanglement between us, no strings. And being with someone who is a little slow, like you.’ She sticks her tongue out at him and brushes a lock of hair off his forehead. ‘Dim but pretty.’

Isidore takes a short, sharp breath.

‘I’m kidding about that last part,’ Pixil says. ‘Sort of.’

They sit still for a while, side by side.

‘See, this wasn’t hard,’ Pixil says. ‘We should have done this ages ago.’ She looks at Isidore. ‘Are you sad?’

Isidore nods. ‘A little bit.’

She hugs him, hard. The armour plates press into Isidore’s chest painfully, but he hugs her back anyway.

‘All right,’ she says and gets up in a clatter of metal. ‘There are monsters I need to go and kill. And you have a thief to catch, or so I hear.’

‘Yes, about that.’

‘Uh huh?’

‘Remember when you said that you could tell me who the Gentleman was? Were you kidding about that too?’

‘I never kid,’ Pixil says, brandishing her sword, ‘about matters of love and war.’

Isidore walks to the edge of the Dust District and sends a co-memory to the tzaddik. I know who you are, it says. Then he sits on a deck chair in a small square, just near the boundary where the colony begins, where stone becomes diamond.

He closes his eyes and listens to the water. He lets his mind drift with the sound. And suddenly, he feels like the water, flowing over a rock, feeling the shape that has been eluding him. It unfolds in his head like a giant snowflake. And it makes him angry.

There is a gust of wind. He opens his eyes. The Gentleman steps from a heat ripple. For a moment, her foglet aura is visible in the spray of water from the fountain. Her mask glitters in the sun.

‘This had better be important,’ she says. ‘I am very busy.’

Isidore smiles. ‘Mme Raymonde, I apologise. But there are things I need to talk to you about.’

The silver mask melts into the freckled face of a red-haired woman as she locks them within a tight gevulot contract. She looks tired. ‘All right,’ she says, folding her arms. Her real voice is like the ringing of a bell, deep and musical. ‘I’m listening. How did you-’

‘I cheated,’ Isidore says. ‘I called in a favour.’

‘Pixil, of course. That girl could never keep her mouth shut. I was counting on the fact that you would be too proud to ever ask.’

‘There are things more important than pride,’ Isidore says. ‘Perhaps you don’t know me as well as you think.’

‘I take it we are not here to admire your cleverness. Nor, apparently, to hear thanks for saving your mind. You are welcome, by the way.’ Her voice is cold, and she does not meet his gaze.

‘No,’ he says. ‘We are here to solve a mystery. But I need your help for that.’

‘Wait.’ She passes him a co-memory. He accepts it, and suddenly remembers a pungent smell that makes him think of the rotten food that his father once left in his studio.

‘What was that?’ he asks.

‘Something that the whole Oubliette will have soon,’ she says. ‘Continue.’

‘I’ve been thinking about the word cryptarch ever since you mentioned it,’ Isidore says. ‘They manipulate the exomemory, am I right?’

‘Yes. We know how it works now: they have a master key of some sort that lets them read anyone who has been a Quiet.’

‘And you fight them.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have been working with the thief. Jean le Flambeur. Whoever he really is.’

She looks surprised, but nods. ‘Yes. But-’

‘I’ll come to that. What he did to Unruh was obtaining evidence, wasn’t it? Comparing his mind before and after the resurrection system, to see if it had been changed. You got him to do your dirty work for you. An offworld criminal.’

Raymonde covers her mouth with a fist. ‘Yes, yes we did. But you don’t understand-’

‘Make me understand,’ Isidore says. ‘Because I know what he wants. And I can make sure he never gets it. I can let everyone know what you did. So much for trust in the tzaddikim then.’

‘Trust,’ she says. ‘It’s not about trust anymore. It’s about justice. We can beat them. We finally have a weapon to beat them. All those cases we worked on, gogol pirates, offworld tech – it was all them. And they have done worse things, things we don’t even know about. Every decision of the Voice. It’s not the Revolution dream. We are still slaves.’

She walks to the steps and stands over Isidore. ‘It is still a game to you. No wonder you got along with the zoku girl so well. Wake up. Yes, you won, you beat me; you worked it out. But the rest of us, we have bigger things to do. Not just another case, but justice, for everyone.’

Her eyes are hard. ‘You have never had to fight. You have always been protected. I started to work with you to show you that-’ She bites her lip.

‘To show me what?’ Isidore asks. ‘What did you want to show me, mother?’

She still looks like a complete stranger to him. The memories she denied him remain closed.

‘I wanted to show you that there were bad people in the world,’ she says. ‘And to make sure you did not turn out like-’ Her voice breaks. ‘But in the end, I couldn’t see you hurt. So I called it off.’

‘I think that people who keep the truth from other people,’ Isidore says, ‘are no better than the cryptarchs.’

He smiles bitterly. ‘You don’t know everything about them either. It’s not just the Voice they have been manipulating. It’s everything. It’s history. You talk about the Revolution? I think they made it up. Unruh saw it. If you look at it all in detail, it’s all fake. He gathered enough to see it. Anyone who remembers the Revolution – it’s all from exomemory. You can’t trust it, any of it.’

Isidore takes a deep breath. ‘I have seen the Kingdom. It took me a long time to realise it, but it’s inside a box in the zoku colony. It’s a simulation. That’s where all the Kingdom memories come from. The buildings, the artifacts – that’s all just dressing. So there you go. You work for the zoku; they work for the cryptarchs. So whatever it is you are planning, you are doing it for them.’

He looks at her and thinks about the row of faces on his father’s wall. ‘So I’m sorry if I take anything you say about the past – or the future, for that matter – with a grain of salt.’

‘I was-’

‘Protecting me?’ Isidore almost spits the word out. ‘That’s what father wants to believe. Protecting us from what?’

‘From your father,’ Raymonde says. ‘Your real father.’ She squeezes her eyes shut. ‘Isidore, you said that you know what the thief wants. What is it?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Tell me.’

‘There are nine buildings in the Maze. He designed them, when he was Paul Sernine. They link up to the Atlas Quiet somehow: there is a mechanism that brings them together. He had nine Watches made, they have something to do with it. Like what he did in the underworld, making the Quiet move. The buildings are parts of a machine. I don’t know what it does. I think it has something to do with the exomemory-’

‘Nine buildings. Oh God.’ She grabs Isidore by the shoulders. ‘When did you work this out?’

‘Just before the gogol pirates attacked-’

‘That means,’ she says, ‘that the cryptarchs know about it too. Something terrible is about to happen. I have to go. We will continue this conversation later. You have to go somewhere safe. The zoku colony is the safest place. Stay there, with Pixil. Things are going to get very ugly here.’

‘But-’

‘We are not going to argue about this. Go, right now, or I will take you there myself.’

She becomes the Gentleman again and takes to the air before Isidore can answer.

Isidore stares after her for a moment. Then he sits down again. He is used to the ground moving beneath his feet – the constant, gentle sway of the city – but this is like teetering on the brink of a vast chasm that has suddenly opened. He tries to hold on to the shape in his mind, but his heart beats so fast that it is hard to focus-

The earth shakes. There is a terrible grinding sound. The cobblestones in the small square buckle. He falls to the ground, shielding his face with his arms. Vast machines in the underworld are rumbling, and for a moment it feels like the city is a thin layer of life on the rough skin of some huge creature, stirred by a bee sting, shaking itself. Then it is over, as quickly as it began. The thief’s machine.

Still shaking, Isidore gets up, blinking away the head rush. Then he starts running towards the Maze.

The aftershock echoes through the city. Most of the damage has been cosmetic – the buildings in the city have smart-matter skeletons – but the city has stopped moving. Persistent Avenue is filling with a noisy crowd: the air is full of the restless murmur of thousands of human voices. Something has happened in the Maze: a cloud of dust swirls to the sky above the rooftops. And behind it looms a new structure, a black needle, hundreds of metres high.

Isidore tries to make his way through the throng of the crowd. Gevulot shields are open in the confusion. Everywhere, there are wide-eyed faces, nervous laughter and quiet fear.

‘Another damn art project,’ says a rough-faced man in a cobweb mask, leaning on his grounded spidercab. ‘If you ask me, it’s another damn art project.’

‘Could you take me up there?’ Isidore asks him.

‘Not a chance,’ the man says. ‘The tzaddikim are blocking it off. Look.’

Isidore follows his gaze, and sees a cloud of tzaddikim hovering over the Maze, surrounded by heat haze, creating a shield of some kind.

‘They’ve all gone mad,’ the cab driver says. ‘Did you see what they did earlier? I got that co-memory of theirs. Tasted foul. And there’s another one.’

One of the tzaddikim – the Cockatrice – is hovering above a nearby agora. Her voice seems to come from everywhere, from the air itself.

‘Don’t trust the Voice!’ she says. ‘We have been lied to!’

She talks about the cryptarchs, and how the Voice has been manipulated, about the secret rulers. She offers a co-memory that will protect against them. She talks about gogol pirates, evidence of mind manipulation, about the data from Unruh’s mind. She says that the tzaddikim will make sure the exomemory remains intact, that the cryptarchs will be found and brought to justice. There are angry mutters in the crowd.

As she talks, Isidore ’blinks at the public exomemory feeds from the Avenue. She is not there in them, just a crowd, listening to empty space.

‘Shit,’ he says. They are trying to block it.

The sudden Voice memory comes with a crushing force and emotion and almost makes him fall to his knees. He remembers that the tzaddikim are spreading lies and that they are agents of the zoku, and that the zoku wants to destroy the Oubliette way of life. The Voice has always been just a suggestion, just a nagging little voice of remembering a to-do list, but this – it’s direct, violent, a memory branded into his mind, impossible to ignore. He remembers that he should go home and use full gevulot privacy until things are back to normal, and that any disruption in the city machinery has to do with a mild phoboi infection that is being dealt with.

He shakes his head. The memories are full of guilt: he wrenches himself away from them as if from quicksand.

‘This isn’t right,’ the cab driver says, massaging his temples. ‘This isn’t right. I heard what she just said.’

There are shouts. A fight has started on the edge of the agora, a young man in zoku-style clothing being pushed around by a group of men and women in Revolution uniforms. ‘Dust-kisser,’ they shout. ‘Quantum whore.’ Ripples of anger and violence are spreading through the crowd. And there is another movement, too, a slow flow of people moving in unison, in silence. A couple with middle-aged bodies passes Isidore. They have a strange, glassy look in their eyes. She was right, Isidore thinks. It is not just a game.

He shakes the cab driver. ‘A megasecond if you get us to the Dust District right now,’ he says.

The man blinks. ‘Are you crazy? These people are going to go there and tear it apart.’

‘Then you better get us there first,’ Isidore says.

Then he looks at Isidore, squinting. ‘Hey, you are that tzaddik’s sidekick boy, aren’t you? Do you know what the hell is going on?’

Isidore takes a deep breath. ‘An interplanetary thief is building a picotech machine out of the city itself while the cryptarchs take over people’s minds to try to destroy the zoku colony in order to stop the tzaddikim from breaking their power,’ he says. ‘I want to stop them both.’ He pauses. ‘Also, I think the thief is my real father.’

The driver stares at him blankly for a second.

‘Right on,’ he says. ‘Get in!’

The spidercab moves like a possessed insect, scampering away from the Avenue and cutting through a part of the Maze, crossing the streets with crazy leaps. The black needle looms over the Maze, and a few tzaddikim still hover around it. The Maze itself has been seized by vast hands and moved around like a child’s puzzle: there are collapsed buildings and broken streets. Yellow rescue and medic Quiet are everywhere, but their movements are uncoordinated and confused. There are strange ripples going through the whole exomemory, flashes of déjà vu.

The Dust District looks like a snowglobe. It is surrounded by a q-dot bubble that distorts everything inside, making the zoku buildings look elongated and surreal. And everything inside is moving, folding, changing shape.

The mob is marching towards it in the streets below, but it seems likely that their efforts are going to be frustrated. This can’t be what the cryptarchs are planning, Isidore thinks. They are not going to get rid of them with just a mob-

‘Well, that’s it,’ says the driver. ‘Do you want me to turn back? We are not going to go through that.’

‘Just get me somewhere close.’

The driver sets him down in a side alley, just outside the q-dot field. It looks like a soap bubble, thin but impossibly huge, curving towards the sky like a vertical, iridescent horizon.

‘Good luck,’ says the driver. ‘I hope you know what you are doing.’ The cab takes off again, legs striking sparks from the pavement as it leaps up.

Isidore touches the bubble. It feels insubstantial and slick, but the harder he pushes against it, the harder it pushes back. Every push he makes just ends up sliding along its surface. He thinks about Pixil. Let me in. But there is no response. ‘I want to talk to the Eldest,’ he says aloud. ‘I know about the Kingdom.’

For a moment, nothing happens. Then the bubble yields under his hand and he almost falls down. He walks through it: it passes over his skin exactly like a soap bubble, wet and tickling.

In the zoku colony, everything is in motion. The diamond buildings are folding, becoming smaller, changing shape, as if they were papercraft castles being disassembled and put away. There are zoku creatures everywhere, in a variety of shapes from faces in foglet clouds to green monsters, manipulating matter with gestures.

A man-sized q-dot sphere appears in front of him, like the inverse of a soap bubble popping. Pixil steps out, still wearing her armour and sword. Her face is grim.

‘What is happening out there?’ she asks. ‘Our raid got cancelled. And the whole zoku is getting ready to leave. I would have told you, but-’ She touches her zoku jewel helplessly.

‘I know, I know. Resource optimisation. I think we are about to have a revolution,’ Isidore says. ‘I need to talk to the Eldest.’

‘Oh, good,’ Pixil says. ‘Perhaps this time you can really make her mad.’

The q-dot bubble takes Isidore and Pixil into the treasure cave. It, too, is full of activity: the black cubes rise off the ground and vanish into the portals of silver. The Eldest is in the middle of it, a giant, shimmering female form, serene face surrounded by a circle of floating jewels.

‘Young man,’ she says. ‘You are always welcome to visit us, but I must say you have chosen a particularly bad time.’ Her voice is the same as that of the blonde woman Isidore met, deep and warm.

Isidore looks up at the Eldest, summoning all the anger and defiance he can before the posthuman. ‘Why did you do it? Why did you help the cryptarchs?’

Pixil stares at him incredulously. ‘Isidore, what are you talking about?’

‘You know the cryptarchs that the tzaddikim out there have been talking about today? Do you remember that Realm that you said Drathdor whipped up? Well, that is the Kingdom. That’s where all the memories anyone in the Oubliette has about the Revolution and before come from. Your zoku made that possible.’

‘That’s not true!’ She stares at Isidore, eyes blazing. ‘That does not even make sense!’ She turns to the Eldest. ‘Tell him!’

But the Eldest says nothing.

‘You have got to be kidding,’ Pixil says.

‘We had no choice,’ the Eldest says. ‘After the Protocol War, we were broken. We needed a place where we could hide from the Sobornost while we healed. We made a deal. It seemed like a small thing: we rewrite our pasts and memories all the time. So we gave them what they wanted.’

Pixil takes Isidore’s hand. ‘Isidore, I swear I didn’t know about this.’

‘We made you to be like them, to go among them,’ the Eldest says. ‘So we couldn’t let you know any more than they did.’

‘And you just let them do what they wanted?’ Isidore asks.

‘No,’ the Eldest says. ‘We had some… regrets after we saw what happened. So we created the tzaddikim – gave technology and assistance to young Oubliette idealists. We hoped that they would act as a counterweight. Clearly, we were wrong, and this thief of yours has disrupted things.’

‘Tell me one thing,’ Isidore says. ‘What was this place before?’

The Eldest pauses. An expression of sadness flickers across her serene face.

‘Isn’t that obvious?’ she says. ‘The Oubliette was a prison.’