The Quantum Thief

3. THE DETECTIVE AND THE CHOCOLATE DRESS

It surprises Isidore that the chocolate factory smells of leather. The conching machines fill the place with noise, echoing from the high red-brick walls. Cream-coloured tubes gurgle. Rollers move back and forth in stainless-steel vats, massaging aromas from the chocolate mass inside with each gloopy, steady heartbeat.

There is a dead man lying on the floor, in a pool of chocolate. A beam of pale Martian morning light from a high window illuminates him, turning him into a chocolate sculpture of suffering: a wiry pietá with hollow temples and a sparse moustache. His eyes are open, whites showing, but the rest of him is covered in a sticky layer of brown and black, spilled from the vat he is clutching, as if he tried to drown himself in it. His white apron and clothes are a Rorschach test of dark stains.

Isidore ’blinks, accessing the Oubliette exomemory. It lets him recognise the man’s face like it belonged to an old friend. Marc Deveraux. Third Noble incarnation. Chocolatier. Married. One daughter. It is the first fact, and it makes his spine tingle. As always in the beginning of a mystery, he feels like a child unwrapping a present. There is something that makes sense here, hiding beneath chocolate and death.

‘Ugly business,’ says a raspy, chorus-like voice, making him jump. It is the Gentleman, of course, standing on the other side of the body, leaning on his cane. The smooth metal ovoid of his face catches the sun in a bright wink, a stark contrast against the black of his long velvet coat and top hat.

‘When you called me,’ Isidore says, ‘I didn’t think it was just another gogol pirate case.’ He tries to sound casual: but it would be rude to completely mask his emotions with gevulot, so he can’t stop a note of enthusiasm escaping. This is only the third time he has met the tzaddik in person. Working with one of the Oubliette’s honoured vigilantes still feels like a boyhood dream come true. Still, he would not have expected the Gentleman to call him to work on mind theft. Copying of leading Oubliette minds by Sobornost agents and third parties is what the tzaddiks have sworn to prevent.

‘My apologies,’ the Gentleman says. ‘I will endeavour to arrange something more bizarre next time. Look closer.’

Isidore takes out his zoku-made magnifying glass – a gift from Pixil, a smooth disc of smartmatter atop a brass handle – and peers at the body through it. Veins and brain tissue and cellular scans flash into being around him, archeology of a dead metabolism floating past like exotic sea creatures. He ’blinks again, at the unfamiliar medical information this time, and winces at the mild headache as the facts entrench themselves in his short-term memory.

‘Some sort of… viral infection,’ he says, frowning. ‘A retro-virus. The glass says there is an anomalous genetic sequence in his brain cells, something from an archeon bacterium. How long before we can talk to him?’ Isidore never looks forward to interrogating resurrected crime victims: their memories are always fragmented, and some are unwilling to overcome the traditional Oubliette obsession with privacy, even to help solve their own murder or a gogol piracy case.

‘Perhaps never,’ the Gentleman says.

‘What?’

‘This was an optogenetic black box upload. Very crude: it must have been agony. It’s an old trick, pre-Collapse. They used to do it with rats. You infect the target with a virus that makes their neurons sensitive to yellow light. Then you stimulate the brain with lasers for hours, capture the firing patterns and train a black box function to emulate them. That’s where those little holes in his skull are from. Optic fibres. Upload tendrils.’ The tzaddik brushes the chocolatier’s thinning hair carefully with a gloved hand: there are tiny black dots in the scalp beneath, a few centimetres apart.

‘Produces enormous amounts of redundant data, but gets around gevulot. And of course completely scrambles his exomemory. Kills him, if you like. This body eventually died of tacyarrhythmia. The Resurrection Men are working on his next one, but there is not much hope. Unless we can find out where the data went.’

‘I see,’ Isidore says. ‘You are right, it is interesting, for a gogol pirate case.’ Isidore can’t suppress a note of distaste in his voice at the word gogol: a dead soul, the uploaded mind of a human being, enslaved to carry out tasks, anathema to anyone from the Oubliette.

Usually, gogol piracy – upload without the victim’s knowledge, stealing their mind – is based on social engineering. The pirates worm their way into the victim’s confidence, chipping away at their gevulot until they have enough to do a brute-force attack on their mind. But this – ‘A Gordian knot approach. Simple and elegant.’

‘Elegant is not the word I would use, my boy.’ There is a trace of anger in the tzaddik’s voice. ‘Would you like to see what happened to him?’

‘See?’

‘I visited him earlier. The Resurrection Men are working on him. It’s not pretty.’

‘Oh.’ Isidore swallows. Death is much less gruesome than what happens after, and thinking about it makes his palms sweat. But if he ever wants to be a tzaddik, he can’t afford to be afraid of the underworld. ‘Of course, if you think it’s useful.’

‘Good.’ The Gentleman passes the co-memory to him, opening both hands. Isidore accepts it, momentarily tickled by the intimacy of the gesture. And suddenly he remembers being in a room with the dark-robed Resurrection Men, in the underground spaces where they restore minds from the exomemory into freshly printed bodies. The remade chocolatier lay in the synthbio vat as if taking a bath. Dr Ferreira touched the still form’s forehead with the ornate brass Decanter. The sudden flash of eye whites, the reverbrating scream, the flailing limbs, the pop of a dislocating jaw-

The leather smell makes Isidore nauseous. ‘That’s… monstrous.’

‘Unfortunately, it is very human,’ the Gentleman says. ‘But there is some hope. If we can find the data, Dr Ferreira thinks they can cut the noise from his exomemory and restore him properly.’

Isidore takes a deep breath. He lets the anger dissolve into the calm pool of mystery.

‘But can you guess why you are here?’

Isidore feels around with his gevulot sense – an Oubliette citizen’s acute awareness of privacy settings in the intelligent matter all around. The factory feels slippery. Trying to reach into exomemory for things that happened here is like trying to clutch air.

‘This was a very private place for him,’ Isidore says. ‘I don’t think he would have shared the gevulot even with his close family.’

Three little synthbio drones come in – large, dextrous spiders, bright green and purple – and adjust levers and dials of the conching machine. The heartbeat sound goes up a notch. One of them stops to examine the Gentleman, spindly limbs brushing its coat. The tzaddik gives it a sharp poke with his cane, and the creature scutters away.

‘Correct,’ the Gentleman says. He takes a step forward, standing so close to Isidore that he can see his own reflection in the tzaddik’s silver oval face, distorted. His curly hair is in disarray, and his cheeks are burning.

‘We have no way to reconstruct anything that happened here, except the old-fashioned way. And, as much as it pains me to admit it, you do seem to have the talent for it.’

Up close, the tzaddik has a strange, sweet smell, like spices, and it feels like the metal mask radiates heat. Isidore takes a step back and clears his throat. ‘I will do what I can, of course,’ he says, pretending to look at his Watch – a simple copper disc on his wrist, with a single hand, ticking down to his time as a Quiet. ‘I expect it to be quick,’ he says, nonchalance spoiled by the quiver in his voice. ‘I have a party to go to tonight.’

The Gentleman says nothing, but Isidore can imagine the cynical smile beneath the mask.

Another factory machine sputters into life. This one looks much more sophisticated than the stainless steel conching machines. The ornate brass lines hint at a Kingdom-era design: a fabber. An intricate clockwork arm dances above a metal tray, painting a neat row of macarone into being with a series of neat atom beam brushstrokes. The drones pack the sweets into small boxes and carry them away.

Isidore raises his eyebrows disapprovingly: a traditional Oubliette craftsman is not really expected to rely on technology. But something about the device does fit in the nascent shape that he can feel forming in his mind. He examines it more closely. The tray is covered in thin strips of chocolate residue.

‘I will need whatever else you have, of course, to begin with,’ he says.

‘His assistant says she found the body.’ With a flick of a white-gloved hand, the Gentleman passes Isidore a small co-memory: a face and a name. He recalls her like a passing acquaintance. Siv Lindström. Dusky skin and a pretty face, dark hair arranged in a swirl of dark cocoa. ‘And the family has agreed to speak to us – what are you doing?’

Isidore puts a piece of the chocolate from the fabber tray in his mouth, ’blinking as fast as he can, cringing at the headache of alien memories. They let him recognise the faint red berry taste and bitterness, and the strange terroir of the soil in Nanedi Valley. There is something wrong about it, about the fragility. He walks over to the chocolatier’s body and tries some of the chocolate from the vat he is holding. And that, of course, tastes exactly right.

Unbidden, the shape of the chocolatier’s story emerges in his mind, brushstroke by brushstroke, like the macarone a moment before.

‘Detecting,’ Isidore says. ‘I want to see the assistant first.’

The walk back to town leads Isidore and the Gentleman across the Tortoise Park.

That, in itself, is a testament to the chocolatier’s success. The red-brick building with a huge mural depicting cocoa beans sits in one of the most desirable locations of the city. A green space with low, rolling hills perhaps three hundred metres across, like all the interlocking parts of the City, the park is carried by a walking robotic platform. The green fields are dotted with tall, graceful, Kingdom-era villas that the young Time-rich of the Oubliette restore and incorporate into the city. Isidore has never understood the need of some of his generation to burn their Time fast on material goods and services, spending their Noble lives in brief opulence before the long, back-breaking labour as a Quiet. Especially when there are mysteries to solve.

Even though the park is an open space, it is not an agora, and walking down the sandy pathways, they pass several gevulot-obscured people, their privacy fog shimmering like the morning dew of the grassy fields around them.

Wanting to be alone with his thoughts for a moment, Isidore walks fast, holding his hands inside his overcoat sleeves against the chill: with his long legs, he usually manages to keep a distance between himself and others. But the Gentleman stays with him, seemingly without effort.

You are bored, aren’t you? Pixil’s qupt is abrupt. Along with her voice, it brings a tangle of sensations: a taste of espresso, the odd too-clean smell of the zoku colony.

Isidore massages the entanglement ring he wears on the index finger of his right hand: a silver band with a tiny blue stone, speaking directly to his brain. He has yet to get used to the zoku method of qupting. Sending brain-to-brain messages directly through a quantum teleportation channel seems like a dirty, invasive way to communicate compared to Oubliette co-remembering. The latter is much more subtle: embedding messages in the recipient’s exomemory so that information is recalled rather than received. But as with everything else with Pixil and her people, it is all about compromises.

I can’t believe it. Your tzaddik friend snaps its fingers and you leave me behind, to get ready for the party, all by myself. And now you are bored.

I’m not bored, he protests, too quickly, and realises that it is the wrong answer.

I’m glad. Because you will never hear from me again if you don’t make it here in time. The qupt comes with an unmistakably erotic sensation of smooth fabric on skin, like a caress. I’m deciding what to wear. Putting clothes on, taking them off again. I’m thinking of turning it into a game. I could use some help. But, your loss.

Last night was one of their better nights, in Isidore’s small Maze apartment; no distractions, just the two of them. He cooked; afterwards, she showed him a new bedroom game she had designed, which was both intellectually and physically stimulating. Still, he lay awake while she slept, the wheels of his mind turning without traction, looking for patterns in her hair, falling across her pale back.

He tries to think of the right thing to say, but he is still caught in the shape of the dead chocolatier. It’s just gogol pirates, he qupts back, attaching a careless shrug. It won’t take long. I’ll be back in no time.

The response comes with a sigh. This. Is. Important. My whole zoku is going to be there. The whole zoku. Coming to see me, the rebel. And to see my stupid primitive Oubliette boyfried. You have two hours.

I’m making real progress here-

Two. Hours.

Pixil-

I could spoil your game, you know. I could tell you exactly who your tzaddik is. How would you like that?

He is almost certain that the threat is a bluff. Her zoku’s q-tech does give her abilities far beyond the Oubliette’s old calmtech, but the tzaddikim guard their identities well. But even the thought of not finding out if he could, not putting the final piece in place on his own, makes him afraid. Before he can stop it, his terror goes down the qupt as a heartbeat, quick and thick.

See? That’s what really matters, isn’t it? Have fun. Bastard. And then she is gone.

‘And how is young Pixil?’ asks the Gentleman.

Isidore does not reply and tries to walk faster.

The chocolate shop is in one of the wide shopping streets of the Edge, a gently curving avenue that follows the southern rim of the city. The platforms here are relatively large, and the layout stable, so maps exist. Hence, it is where many offworlders come to catch a glimpse of the Oubliette. The restaurants and cafés are just opening, lighting heaters to make the chilly Martian air palatable to early customers. Purple and green biodrones cluster around them, holding their spindly limbs out for warmth.

The Gentleman stops in front of a narrow shop window. Remarkable objects are on display: a football-sized sphere that looks like a scale model of Kingdom-era Deimos, dotted with multicoloured candy, and an intricate chandelier hanging from the ceiling, both made from chocolate. But a large object next to them is the one that draws Isidore’s attention. It is a dress: a sober, high-collared affair with a sash at the waist and a flowing skirt, frozen in a swirly chocolate snapshot.

The tzaddik opens the door, and a brass bell rings. ‘Here we are. As your lady friend might put it – the game is afoot. I’ll be nearby: but I’ll let you do the talking.’ He fades out of sight, suddenly, a ghost in the pale morning sun.

The shop is a narrow space with a long glass counter on the left and display shelves on the right, brightly lit. There is a pleasant, sweet smell of chocolate and caramel, not at all like the raw leather of the factory. Beneath the counter, moulded pralines glitter, like bright-carapaced insects. The showpieces are on the right, ornate chocolate sculptures. There is an arching butterfly wing as tall as a man, with an etching of a woman’s face, and what looks like a death mask, impossibly thin, made out of chocolate the colour of terra-cotta.

For a moment, Isidore is captivated by a pair of red shoes with flowing chocolate ribbons. He files them away for future reference: Pixil’s current mood may require some offerings on his part.

‘Looking for something special?’ asks a voice, familiar from exomemory. Siv Lindström. She looks more tired than the memory, lines in her pretty face. But her blue shop uniform is smooth, and her hair carefully arranged. Their Watches exchange a brief burst of standard shop gevulot, enough for her to know that he does not really know much about chocolate but has Time enough to afford it – and for him to glimpse public exomemories about her and the shop. Her gevulot must be hiding an emotional reaction of some kind, but to Isidore she presents a perfect facade of good service.

‘We have a very nice range of macarone, fresh from the factory.’ She motions towards a counter, busily restocked by a synthbio drone Isidore saw earlier, placing the colourful chocolate discs in neat rows.

‘I was thinking,’ says Isidore, ‘about something… more substantial.’ He points at the chocolate dress in the window. ‘Like this one. Could I have a closer look at this?’

The assistant walks around the counter and opens the glass panel that separates the window from the shop. She walks in with that abrupt, shuffling step of old Martians, flinching in the absence of Earth’s gravity: like a dog that has been beaten too many times, expecting a blow when receiving a caress. Up close, Isidore can see the intricate details of the dress, how the fabric seemingly flows, how vivid the colours are. Maybe I’m wrong about this. But then he can feel her gevulot shifting, just a little. Or not.

‘Well,’ she says, tone unchanged. ‘This is certainly something very special. It is modelled after a Noblewoman dress from the Olympian Court, made from Trudelle-style chocolate: we had to try the mixture four times. Six hundred aromatic constituents, and you have to get them just right. Chocolate is fickle, it keeps you on your toes.’

‘How interesting,’ says Isidore, trying to affect the world-weary tone of a Time-rich young man. He takes out his magnifying glass and studies the hem of the dress. The swirly shape becomes a crystalline grid of sugars and molecules. He probes deeper into his fresh chocolate memories. But then the shop gevulot interferes, detecting an unwanted invasion of privacy, and turns the image into a blur.

‘What are you doing?’ asks Lindström, staring at him as if seeing him for the first time.

Isidore frowns, looking at the white noise.

‘Damn. I almost had it,’ he says. He gives Lindström his best smile, the one Pixil says turns older women’s bones to water. ‘Could you please taste it? The dress?’

The assistant looks at him incredulously.

‘What?’

‘My apologies,’ he says. ‘I should have told you. I am investigating what happened to your employer.’ He opens his gevulot just enough for her to know his name. Her clear green eyes glaze over for a moment as she ’blinks him. Then she takes a deep breath.

‘So, you are the wonderboy they keep talking about. Who sees things the tzaddikim don’t.’ She walks back to the counter. ‘Unless you are going to buy something, I’d appreciate it if you left. I’m trying to keep the shop open. It’s what he would have wanted. Why should I talk to you? I already told them everything I know.’

‘Because,’ says Isidore, ‘they are going to think you had something to do with it.’

‘Why? Because I found him? I barely had enough of his gevulot to know his last name.’

‘Because it fits. You are of the First Generation, I can see it in the way you walk. That means you spent almost a century as a Quiet. That can do strange things to a person’s mind. Sometimes enough to make them want to be a machine again. The gogol pirates could make that happen, for a price. If you did them a favour. Like helped them to steal the mind of a world-famous chocolatier-’

Her gevulot closes completely, and she becomes a blurry placeholder for a person, wrapped in privacy: at the same time, Isidore knows he is a non-entity for her. But it only lasts for a moment. Then she is back, eyes closed, fists pressed against her chest as if she’s holding something in, knuckles hard and white against her dark skin.

‘It was not like that,’ she says quietly.

‘No,’ Isidore says. ‘Because you had an affair with him.’

His Watch tickles at his mind. She offers him a gevulot contract, like a cautious handshake. He accepts: the conversation over the next five minutes will not go into his exomemory.

‘You really are not like them, are you? The tzaddikim.’

‘No,’ Isidore says. ‘I am not.’

She holds up a praline. ‘Do you know how hard it is to make chocolate? How long it takes? He showed me that it wasn’t just candy, that you could put yourself into it, make something with your hands. Something real.’ She cradles the candy, as if it were a talisman.

‘I was in the Quiet for a long time. You are too young, you don’t know what it’s like. You are yourself, but not yourself: the part of you that speaks is doing other things, machine things. And after a while, that is the way things should be. Even after. You feel wrong. Unless someone helps you find yourself again.’

She puts the half-melted praline away. ‘The Resurrection Men say they can’t bring him back.’

‘Miss Lindström, they might be able to, if you help me.’

She looks at the dress. ‘We made it together, you know. I wore one like it once, in the Kingdom.’ Her eyes are far away.

‘Why not?’ she says. ‘Let’s have a taste. In his memory, if nothing else.’

Lindström takes a small metal instrument from behind the counter and opens the glass door hesitantly. With infinite care, she carves a small chip from the hem and puts it in her mouth. She stands still for almost a minute, expression unreadable.

‘It’s not right,’ she says, eyes widening. ‘It’s not right at all. The crystal structure is not right. And the taste… This is not the chocolate we made. Almost, but not quite.’ She hands another small piece to Isidore: it dissolves on his tongue almost instantly, leaving a bitter, faintly nutty taste.

Isidore smiles. The feeling of triumph is almost enough to wipe the lingering tension of Pixil’s qupts from his mind.

‘Can I ask what the difference is, from a technical point of view?’

Her eyes brighten. She licks her lips. ‘It’s the crystals. In the last stage, you reheat and cool the chocolate, many times; you get something that does not melt in the room temperature. There are crystals in chocolate: there is a symmetry there, that’s what keeps it together, made from hot and cold. We always try to make type V, but there is too much type IV here, you can tell from the texture.’ Suddenly, all the hesitation and fragility seems to be gone from her. ‘How did you know? What happened to my dress?’

‘That’s not important. What matters is that you must not sell this one. Keep it safe. Also, please give me a small piece of that? Yes, that’s good – a wrapping will do. Don’t lose hope: you may still have him back.’

Her laugh is bitter and dark. ‘I never had him in the first place. I tried hard. I was nice to his wife. His daughter and I were friends. But it was never real. You know, for a moment, it was almost easier, like this. Just the memories and the chocolate.’ She opens and closes her hands, slowly, many times. Her fingernails are painted white. ‘Please find him,’ she says quietly.

‘I’ll do my best.’ Isidore says. He swallows, somehow relieved that the conversation is not etched in the diamond of exomemory, just in the mortal neurons of his mind.

‘By the way, I was not lying. I really do need something special.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. I am going to be late for a party.’

The door opens, suddenly. It is a teenage boy, blond and remarkably handsome, with regular Slavic features, maybe eight Martian years old.

‘Hi,’ he says.

‘Sebastian,’ Lindström says. ‘I’m with a customer.’

‘It’s all right; I don’t mind,’ Isidore says, making a polite offer of gevulot to unhear the conversation.

‘I was just wondering if you had seen Élodie?’ The boy gives the assistant a radiant smile. ‘I can’t seem to reach her.’

‘She is at home, with her mother,’ she says. ‘You should give her some space now. Be respectful.’

The boy nods eagerly. ‘Of course, I will. It’s just that I thought I could help-’

‘No, you can’t. Now, would you please let me finish here? It is what Élodie’s dad would have wanted.’

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.

‘You want a detective who can go after the cryptarchs.’

‘That word,’ the Gentleman says, ‘does not exist.’ He puts on his hat and gets up. ‘Thank you for your help.’ The tzaddik touches Isidore’s face. The touch of the velvet is strangely light and gentle.

‘And by the way,’ the Gentleman says, ‘she will not like the chocolate shoes. I got you something with truffles instead.’

Then he is gone. There is a box of chocolates in the grass, neatly tied with a red ribbon.