The Quantum Thief

4. THE THIEF AND THE BEGGAR

The Moving City of the Oubliette, the Persistent Avenue on a bright morning, hunting for memories.

The streets here shift and change as walking platforms join or leave the city’s flow, but the wide Avenue always comes back, no matter what. It is lined with cherry trees, with streets and alleyways leading off it to the Maze, where the secrets are. The shops that you find only once, selling Kingdom toys or old tin robots from old Earth, or dead zoku jewels that fell from the sky. Or doors that only show themselves if you speak the right word or have eaten the right food the day before, or are in love.

‘Thank you,’ says Mieli, ‘for bringing me to hell.’

I lift my blue-tinted shades and smile at her. She is suffering visibly in the gravity, moving like an old woman: she has to keep her enhancements down while we are temporary citizens.

I have been to few places that look less infernal. The deep indigo of the Hellas Basin sky above, and clouds of white gliders, huge wingspans clinging to thin Martian air. The tall, intricate buildings, like belle époque Paris without the burden of gravity, spires of red-tinted stone, wearing walkways and balconies. Spidercabs scampering up their sides, leaping across rooftops. The shining dome of the zoku colony near the Dust District where the red cloud raised by the city’s feet billows upwards like a cloak. The gentle swaying, if you stand very still: a reminder that this is a city that travels, carried on the backs of Titans.

‘Hell,’ I tell her, ‘is where all the interesting people are.’

She squints at me. Earlier, in the beanstalk, she had that bored déjà vu look that told me she was running virs, preparing. ‘We are not here to sightsee,’ she says.

‘Actually, we are. There is another associative memory here somewhere, and I need to find it.’ I wink at her. ‘It could take a while. So try to keep up.’

Muscle memory is back, at least, so I put distance between us, easing into the low, gliding John Carter lope of the tall Martians all around.

Fashions have changed while I’ve been away. Fewer people now wear the nondescript white shirts and trousers, based on the old Revolutionary uniform. Instead, there are Kingdom frills and hats and flowing dresses, alongside abstract zoku smartmatter creations, not so much clothing as geometry. Almost no one hides beneath a full gevulot privacy screen here. This is the Avenue: you are supposed to flaunt it.

The one constant, of course, are the Watches – in all shapes and forms, in wristbands and belt buckles and necklaces and rings. All measuring Time, Noble Time, time as a human being – time that you have to earn back through back-breaking labour as a Quiet. I have to suppress pickpocket instincts.

I stop at the Revolution Agora to wait for Mieli. It is a square where one of the Revolution monuments stands, a low slab of volcanic rock, sculpted by the Quiet. It is engraved with the billions of names of the gogols who were brought here from Earth, in microscopic script. Small fountains play against its sides. I remember being here, many times before.

But who was I? And what was I doing?

The Martian wine brought memories, but in no discernible patterns: just dashed them across my brain like spatters of paint. There was a girl called Raymonde; there was something called Thibermesnil. Perhaps Mieli is right: I should not rely on my old self to magically reveal where to go next, and to approach things in a more systematic fashion. I have a debt to pay to her and her mysterious employer, and the sooner I can get that sorted out, the better.

I sit down on a wrought-iron bench on the edge of the agora, just short of the boundary of the public sphere. The Oubliette is a society of perfect privacy, except in the agoras: here, you have to show yourself to the public. The people change their behaviour instinctively as they move from the avenue to the agora: backs straighten, and it is as if everyone walks with exaggerated care, greeting people with curt nods. What happens there is remembered by everybody, accessible to everyone. Places of public discussion and democracy, where you can try to influence the Voice, the Oubliette’s e-democracy system. Also good for the cryptoarchitects: publicly available data, to help shape the evolution of the city-

How do I know all that? I could have gotten all that from the little exomemory that came with the temporary citizenship and the Watch that Mieli bought for us. But I didn’t: I didn’t ’blink – consciously focus on retrieving information from the Oubliette’s collective data bank. That means I must have been an Oubliette citizen, before, at least for some time. That means I had a Watch: and here, having a Watch also means having an exomemory, a repository for your thoughts and dreams, where they keep you as you flip between being a Noble and a Quiet. Maybe that’s what I should be looking for: the Watch of whoever I was here.

I roll the thought around in my head. It seems too simple, somehow, too inelegant, too fragile. Would the old me have done that? Stored secrets in the exomemory of an Oubliette identity? It chills me to realise that I have no idea.

Feeling the need to do something that makes me feel like myself again, I get up and walk the edge of the agora until I find a beautiful girl. She is sitting on another bench next to a public fabber, putting on parkrouller skates with huge round smartwheels she has just printed. She is wearing a white top and shorts. Her bare legs are like sculpted gold, long and perfect.

‘Hi,’ I say, giving her my best smile. ‘I’m looking for the Revolution Library, but they tell me there aren’t any maps. Any chance you could point me in the right direction?’

She wrinkles her tanned nub of a nose at me and disappears, a grey gevulot placeholder popping into being in her place. And then she is gone, the blur in the air, moving down the Avenue.

‘I see you are sightseeing,’ Mieli says.

‘Twenty years ago, she would have smiled back.’

‘This close to an agora? I don’t think so. And you botched the gevulot exchange: you should have made that ridiculous line private. Are you sure you used to live here?’

‘Somebody has been doing their homework.’

‘Yes,’ she says. I’m sure she has: going through virs and sims, sending out little slave-minds to dig up whatever our temporary gevulot allows us to get from public exomemories. ‘It is surprisingly little. If you did live here during the past two decades, you either looked very different, or never visited agoras or public events.’ She holds my gaze. There is a sheen of sweat on her forehead. ‘If you somehow forged that memory – if this is an escape attempt, you will find me ready. And you will not like the outcome.’

I sit down on the bench again, looking across the agora. Mieli sits next to me in an uncomfortable-looking position, her back arrow-straight. The gravity must be hurting her, but she’ll be damned before she shows it.

‘It’s not an escape attempt,’ I say. ‘I owe you a debt. And everything is so familiar – this is where we are supposed to be. But I don’t know what the next step is. There is nothing on this Thibermesnil thing, and that’s not surprising; it’s layers and layers of secrets here.’ I grin. ‘I’m sure, somewhere, the old me is enjoying this. Honestly, he might have been too clever for us by half.’

‘The old you,’ she says, ‘got caught.’

‘Touché.’ I squirt some Time from my temporary Watch (a little silver circle on a transparent strap around my wrist; the hair-thin dial moves a millimetre) into the fabber next to the bench. It spits out a pair of dark sunglasses. I hand them to Mieli. ‘Here. Try these.’

‘Why?’

‘To hide that Gulliver look of yours. You don’t do planets well.’

She frowns, but puts them on, slowly. They accentuate her scar.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘my original idea was to keep you in suspension on Perhonen, come here to gather sensory data and feed it into your brain until your memories came out. You are right. I don’t like this place. There is too much noise, too much space, too much everything.’ She leans back on the bench, spreading her arms, lifting her legs up into a lotus position.

‘But their sun is warm.’

That is when I see the barefoot boy, maybe five years old, waving at me from across the agora. And his face is familiar.

You know, when this is over, I’m going to kill him, Mieli tells Perhonen, smiling at the thief.

Without torturing him first? the ship says. You are getting soft.

The ship is in high orbit, and their neutrino link – strictly hidden from the Oubliette’s paranoid technology sniffers – allows barely more than a normal conversation.

Another little frustration of this place, but not nearly as bad as the constant heaviness, and the stubborn refusal of objects to stay in mid-air when she lets go. As ashamed as she is of her Sobornost enhancements, she has come to rely on them.

But secrecy is one of the mission parameters. So she wears the temporary gevulot shell the black-carapaced customs official Quiet in the beanstalk station gave them (no imported nanotech, q-tech, sobortech; no data storage devices capable of storing a baseline mind; no-), keeps her metacortex and q-stone bones and the ghostguns and everything else in camouflage mode, and suffers.

Anything on the public exomemory data yet? she asks. Or our mysterious contact who never showed up?

No, says Perhonen. The gogols are going through it, but there is a lot: no Thibermesnil, no Flambeur lookalikes yet. So I would make our boy work harder for his freedom, if I were you.

Mieli sighs. That’s not what I wanted to hear, she says.

The only good thing so far is the artificial sunlight, from the bright pinpoint in the sky that used to be Phobos. At least I’ll have my Venusian tan back in no time.

‘To hide that Gulliver look of yours,’ the thief says again.

Suddenly, Mieli feels disoriented: an overwhelming sense of déjà vu pulses in her temples. Damn the biot feed, trust the pellegrini to know exactly what would drive me insane. In her koto, back in Oort, she lived in an ice cave with two dozen other people, a hollowed-out comet with living space not much bigger than Perhonen. But it was nothing like this, a constant awareness of another’s thoughts and actions through a quantum umbilical. She filters most of it out, but every now and then, thoughts and sensations tunnel through.

She shakes her head. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Perhonen tells me we are going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. We are going to keep walking until-’

She is talking to empty air. The thief is nowhere to be seen. She takes off the sunglasses and stares at them, looking for some trick, for some augmented reality function that allowed the thief to slip away. But they are just plastic. Perhonen! Where the hell is he?

I don’t know. You are the one with the biot link. She can almost hear the amusement in the ship’s voice.

‘Vittu. Perkele. Saatana. The Dark Man’s balls,’ Mieli swears aloud. ‘He’s going to pay for this.’ A passing couple in Revolutionary white, with a child in tow gives her a strange look. Clumsily, she tries to think at her visitor’s gevulot interface. Private. An odd, stifled sensation tells her that she is now a placeholder to those around her.

Gevulot. Of course. I am an idiot. There is a boundary in her memories, between those which are local and exo. The thief passed her a co-memory of them talking, from seconds before, and her primitive gevulot accepted it. I was talking to a memory.

Mieli’s self-loathing is sudden and sharp. It reminds her of the smartcoral infection she had as a child, sharp spikes growing from her teeth and pressing painfully into the gums. Karhu cured her with a song, but it was impossible not to poke the protrusions with her tongue. She swallows the feeling, and focuses on the biot feed.

It is difficult to work without resorting to the metacortex and revealing it to the sniffers. So she just tries to focus on the part of her mind that is connected to the thief’s. It feels like trying to reconnect with a phantom limb. She closes her eyes and focuses-

‘Lady, have pity,’ says a voice, coarse and ragged. There is a naked man standing in front of her, intimate areas tastefully censored by a grey gevulot blur. His skin is pale, and he has no hair. His eyes are red-rimmed, and he looks like he has been crying. The only object on his body is a Watch, a thick metallic band with a clear crystal disc, dangling from one scrawny arm.

‘Have pity,’ he says. ‘You come from the stars; you will spend a few luxurious moments here and then go back to plenty, to immortality. Have pity on someone who only has a few moments of this life left, before being forced to atone for my sins, before they come and take my soul and cast it into the maw of a tongueless machine so I cannot even cry out in pain-’

Are you okay? Perhonen asks. What is happening?

Mieli tries the same basic gevulot trick as before – complete privacy – to exclude the madman from her horizon and vice versa – but the gevulot layer simply informs her that she has entered into a gevulot contract with another individual guaranteeing mutual superficial observation for the next fifteen minutes.

There is a naked madman in front of me, she tells the ship, helpless.

I thought he escaped.

‘If I could only beg you to share a few worthless seconds, insignificant slivers of your time, I would reveal all my secrets to you. I was a Count in the King’s Court, no less, a Noble, not as you see me now, but with a robotic castle of my own and a million gogols to do my bidding. And in the Revolution, I fought in the troops of the Duke of Tharsis. You should see the true Mars, the old Mars, I will give you all that for only a few seconds-’ Tears are streaming down the long, pale face now. ‘I have only dekaseconds, have pity-’ Cursing, Mieli gets up and starts walking, just to get away from the man, and notices a sudden hush. She is standing right in the middle of the agora.

Here, the Martians walk with exaggerated care. No one acknowledges anyone else. Tourists – a few Quick Ones, like fireflies, a delicate-limbed polymorph from Ganymede-zoku, and a few others, turn from inspecting the engraved names on the Revolution monument through floating smartmatter lenses to look at her.

The man is clinging to the hem of her toga. ‘One minute, even, a few seconds, for all the secrets of old Mars-’ He is completely naked now, unprotected by gevulot in the agora. She brushes his arm aside, with mere human strength instead of tearing it from its socket. But he lets out a high-pitched yelp, and collapses to the ground at her feet, still clinging to her garment and moaning. Suddenly, she is certain that everybody is looking at them, although it seems that no one is.

‘All right,’ she says, lifting her Watch, a crystalline model she chose because it looked like Oortian jewellery. ‘Ten minutes. It will take me longer than that to get rid of you.’ She thinks at the device, and the golden dial moves a fraction. The beggar leaps up, licking his lips.

‘The ghost of the King bless you, lady,’ he says. ‘The stranger said you were generous.’

‘The stranger?’ asks Mieli, even though she already knows the answer.

‘The stranger in the blue-tinted glasses, bless him, and bless you.’ A wide grin spreads across his face. ‘A word of warning,’ he says in a businesslike tone. ‘I would get out of this agora right now.’ Around Mieli, everybody, except the tourists are leaving. ‘Blood, water. I’m sure you understand.’ Then he springs into a naked run, scrawny legs carrying him away from the agora.

I am going to torture the thief, Mieli says. Blood and water? What did he mean by that?

On Earth, says Perhonen, there was this type of fish called sharks. I think the time beggars watch the public exomemory feeds, like from the agoras, no privacy there, so they would have seen you giving Time to a-

Suddenly, the agora is full of the sound of running bare feet, and Mieli finds herself face to face with an army of beggars.

I chase the boy through the Avenue crowd. He stays ahead of me, navigating the forest of legs with ease, his bare feet a blur, like the needle of a fabber. I elbow people aside, shouting apologies, leaving a trail of angry grey gevulot blurs in my wake.

I almost catch him at a spidercab stop, where the Avenue breaks into a hundred different alleys into the Maze. He stands in front of the long-legged machines, ornate horseless carriages with brass legs, curled up beneath them as they wait for passengers, looking at them in fascination.

I approach him slowly, in the crowd. He has different texture from everything else around me, sharper. Maybe it is the dirt on his face or the ragged brown garment he is wearing, or the dark brown eyes so different from those of the Martians. Only metres away-

But he is just taunting me. He lets out a faint peal of laughter as I lunge forward and slips under the long-legged cab carriages. I’m too big to follow and am left negotiating the crowd to get around the vehicles and their waiting passengers.

The boy is me. I remember being him, in my dream. The memories are pressed flat like a butterfly beneath the centuries, fragile, and fall apart when I touch them. There was a desert, and a soldier. And a woman in a tent. Maybe the boy is in my head. Maybe he is some construct that my old self left behind. Either way, I need to know. I shout his name, not Jean le Flambeur, but the older one.

A part of me is counting seconds to when Mieli manages to deal with her little distraction and shuts me down, or sends me to some new hell. I may only have minutes to find out what he has to tell me, without my minder looking over my shoulder. I catch a glimpse of him vanishing down an alley, into the Maze. I curse and keep running.

The Maze is where the larger platforms and components of the city collide, leaving spaces in between for hundreds of smaller jigsaw pieces that constantly move, forming occasional hills and winding alleyways that can slowly shift direction as you walk down them, so smoothly that the only way to tell is to see the horizon moving. There are no maps of the place, just firefly guides that brave tourists follow around.

I run a rough-cobbled steep slope downwards, lengthening my steps. Running on Mars is an art that I’ve never properly mastered, and as the street beneath lurches, I land badly after a particularly high leap, skidding down several metres.

‘Are you all right?’ There is a woman on a balcony above, leaning over the railing, clutching a newspaper.

‘I’m fine,’ I groan, fairly certain that the Sobornost body Mieli gave me is not going to break easily. But the simulated pain from the bruised tailbone is still pain. ‘Did you see a little boy go past?’

‘Do you mean that little boy?’

The rascal is less than a hundred metres away, doubled over with laughter. I scramble up and keep running.

Deep, deep into the Maze we go, the boy always ahead, always rounding a corner, never getting too far ahead, running across cobblestones and marble and smartgrass and wood.

We run through little Chinese squares with their elongated Buddhist temples, red and gold dragons flashing in their facades; through temporary marketplaces full of a synthfish smell, past a group of black-robed Resurrection Men with newly born Quiet in tow.

We race down whole streets – red lights districts, perhaps – blurred with gevulot, and empty streets where slow-moving builder Quiet – larger than elephants, with yellow carapaces – are printing new houses in pastel colours. I almost lose the boy there, lost in the loud hum and the odd seaweed smell of the huge creatures, only to see him wave at me from the back of one of them and then leap down.

For a time, a group of parkroullers follows us, mistaking our race for some urban game, young Martian girls and boys in faux-Kingdom wear of corsets and umbrella skirts and powdered wigs, smartmatter-laced so they know to stay out of the way and flex as the kids bounce off walls and make somersaults across gaps between rooftops, the oversized wheels sticking to every surface. They encourage me with shouts, and for a moment I consider spending some Time and buying a pair of skates from one of them: but the fading imaginary pain in my backside keeps me on foot.

Every second, I wait for my body to shut down, to wait for Mieli to come and give me whatever punishment she has thought up. Still, I wish I could have seen her face.

I finally run out of breath when we reach the old robot garden. I curse the fact that I can’t override the strictly baseline human parameters of the body as I lean on my knees, wheezing, the sweat stinging my eyes.

‘Look,’ I say. ‘Let’s be reasonable. If you are a part of my brain, I’d expect you to be reasonable.’ Then again, I probably was anything but reasonable at that age. Or at any other age.

The garden looks strangely familiar. It is some piece of the old Kingdom that the city picked up and swallowed somewhere during its passage through the Martian desert, and its strange urban metabolism has brought it here. It is an open space within the Maze, protected by a cluster of tall synagogues around it, made from black and white tiles of marble perhaps five metres square, forming a ten-by-ten grid. Someone has planted trees here, and flowers: green and red and white and violet spill over the neat monochrome borders on the ground. The boy is nowhere in sight.

‘I don’t have a lot of time. The scar-faced lady is going to come for us both soon, and she’s not going to be happy.’

In each square stands a giant machine: medieval knights and samurai and legionnaires, with intricately carved armour, yawning helmets and fearsome, spiked weapons. The plates are rusty and weather-beaten, and the empty helmets of some have been turned into flower-pots, with clusters of begonias and pale-hued Martian roses peeking out of them. Some of them are to be frozen in mid-combat – except that, as I catch my breath, they appear to be slowly moving. Something tells me that if I stayed and watched, they would play out a slow game set in motion by players long dead.

The laughter again. I turn around. The boy dangles from the arm of a red robot apart from the others, frozen with its scythelike weapon raised up. I jump forward, trying to catch him in a bear grip, but he is no longer there. I fall down a second time during the chase, right into a bed of roses.

Still out of breath, I roll over slowly. The thorns tear at my clothes and skin.

‘Little bastard,’ I say. ‘You win.’

A ray from bright Phobos – on its eight-hour passage through the sky – hits the robot’s open helmet. Something glints inside, something silver. I get back to my feet, reach up and climb up the robot’s armour; that, at least, is easier in Martian gravity. I dig in the dirt in the helmet and uncover a metal object. It is a Watch, with a heavy silver wristband and a brass face. The dial rests solidly at zero. I quickly put it in my pocket for a later, thorough inspection.

There are footsteps, along with a sharp gevulot request. I don’t bother trying to hide. ‘All right, Mieli,’ I say. ‘I can’t run anymore. Please don’t send me to hell, I’ll come nicely.’

‘Hell?’ says a gruff voice. ‘Hell is other people.’ I look down. A man with a carelessy aged face and a shock of white hair, in blue coveralls, is staring at me, leaning on a rake. ‘It’s not an apple tree, you know,’ he says.

Then he frowns.

‘I’ll be damned. Is that you?’

‘Uh, have we met?’

‘Aren’t you Paul Sernine?’