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.’
18
THE THIEF AND THE KING
I stand in the robot garden with my old self, weighing the gun in my hand. He is holding it too, or a dream reflection of it. It’s strange how it always comes down to two men with guns, real or imaginary. Around us, the slow war of the ancient machines goes on.
‘I’m glad you made it,’ he says. ‘I don’t know where you have been. I don’t know where you are going. But I know you are here to make a choice. Pull the trigger, and you get to be who we were. Do nothing and – well, you will go on with your life, doing smaller things, dreaming smaller dreams. Or you can go back to listening to the music of the spheres, and the musical sound of breaking their laws. I know what I would do if I were you.’
I open the gun and look at the nine bullets. Each has a name on it, holding a quantum state, entangled with the Time in a person’s Watch. Isaac’s. Marcel’s. Gilbertine’s. The others. If I pull the trigger nine times, their Time will run out. The engine will start. Nine people will become Quiet, Atlas Quiet, beneath the city. They will make my memory palace. And I will never see them again.
I close it and spin the chamber, like in Russian roulette. The young me grins. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘What are you waiting for?’
I throw the gun away. It lands in a rosebush. I look at the empty space where my young self stood. ‘Bastard,’ I say. ‘You knew I’d never do it.’
‘That’s all right,’ says a voice. ‘I will.’
The gardener discards his gevulot, holding the gun in his hand. His hair is white, his features carefully aged, but there is something awfully familiar about them. I take a step forward, but a sleek, egg-shaped device – a zoku q-gun – is hovering above his right shoulder, looking at me with a bright quantum eye.
‘I wouldn’t move,’ he says. ‘This thing will make a mess of even that fancy Sobornost body of yours.’
I raise my hands slowly.
‘Le Roi, I presume?’ I say. He smiles, the same smile I saw on the cryptarch in the hotel. ‘So, you are the King here?’ I calculate my chances
of survival if I were to rush him. They are not very high. My body is still locked in its human state, and the five metres between us might as well be a lightyear.
‘I prefer to think of myself as just a gardener,’ he says. ‘Remember Sante Prison, on Earth? What you told your cellmate? That the thing you’d really like to steal was a Kingdom of your own. But ruling it would be too much trouble, much better have someone else be the figurehead, watch its people prosper and be happy, while you weed the garden and give flowers to young girls and give things a little nudge every now and then.’ He moves his free hand in a wide arc, encompassing the garden and the city around us. ‘Well, I’m living the dream.’ He sighs. ‘And like all dreams do, it’s getting a little old.’
‘Yes, it is,’ I say. ‘The tzaddikim are about to end it and wake the people up.’ I frown. ‘We were cellmates?’
He laughs. ‘After a fashion. If you want, you can call me le Roi. Jean le Roi, that’s what they called me here, although I don’t much care for the name anymore.’
I stare at him. Now that his gevulot is open, the resemblance is there.
‘What happened?’
‘We were careless before the Collapse,’ he says. ‘And why not? We worked with the Founders. We cracked our cognitive rights management software as soon as Chitragupta came up with it. There were lots of us. And some of us got caught. Like me.’
‘How did you end up here?’ I ask. Then it hits me. ‘This was never a Kingdom, was it?’ I say. ‘It was a prison.’
‘This was supposed to be a new Australia,’ he says. ‘A typical pre-Collapse idea: put criminals inside terraforming machines, get them to pay their debts to society. And we worked hard, believe me, processed regolith and lit up Phobos and melted the ice cap with nukes, all just to be human for a little while again.
‘Of course, they made sure we were safely locked up here. Even now, if I even think about leaving Mars, it hurts like hell. But then the Collapse happened, and the lunatics took over the asylum. We hacked the panopticon system. Turned it into the exomemory. Used it to give the power to us.’
He shakes his head.
‘And we decided to tell the others a nicer story. The Spike was a blessing, wiped out all the traces we left – not that there were many. It was only after the zoku came that we were really able to flesh it out, of course. In retrospect, we should never have let them in here. At the time, we needed something to keep the Sobornost off our backs. Much good that turned out to do. But at least they gave us tools to make pretty dreams.’
‘We? Who else is there?’ I ask.
‘No one,’ he says. ‘Well, not anymore. I took care of the others a long time ago. A garden only needs one gardener.’ He reaches out with his free hand and touches the stem of a flower.
‘I was content here, for a while,’ he says. Then his face twists in a grimace. ‘And then you had to come here. You had done so much better than I. All that power, all that freedom. All that, and you went native. You can’t believe how angry that made me.’
Le Roi laughs. ‘You know the feeling as well as I do, wanting something someone else has. So you can imagine how much I wanted what was yours. So after you left, I had what I could. Your woman, for example. She will never be yours again. She thinks you left her with the child you made together and disappeared. I never understood what you saw in her. At least you hid your traces well there, with that memory you split with her: I never knew what this was.’
He holds up the revolver with nine bullets. ‘You thought you were so clever. Hiding your treasure in your little friends’ exomemories. Great minds think alike, so much so I admit I could not find it. But I knew you would come back, and so I laid out a trail for you. The gevulot images came from me. Still, it was the detective who finally put the pieces together for me. Very appropriate.’ He points the gun at me. ‘I even gave you a chance to go through with it: fair is fair, after all. But you didn’t. So now it’s my turn.’
With a shout of red fury, I lunge towards him. The q-gun flashes. I fall to the ground, face hitting the marble hard. The Sobornost body screams for a moment, then applies some merciful anaesthesia, numbing the pain. I roll over and try to get up, only to realise my right leg is a blackened stump, gone from the knee down.
Le Roi looks down at me and smiles. Then he lifts the revolver into the air and starts firing. I try to claw at his legs but he kicks me in the face. I try to count the shots, but lose track.
The ground shudders. Deep beneath the city, the Atlas Quiet who once were my friends awaken with new minds and a new purpose. The memory palaces are parts of them, and with the force of a natural disaster, they want to be together again. A storm of stone rages around us. The buildings around the robot gardens collapse. The palaces loom above them like black sails, ploughing through everything in their way, bearing down on us.
They come together on top of us like the templed fingers of two hands made of black geometry. Then all is dark, and the pins and needles come, taking me and the King apart.
19
THE DETECTIVE AND THE RING
Mieli’s skin tingles from the gevulot locks. But she feels light and weightless again, and Perhonen’s cockpit is the closest thing to a home she has left. The sense of safety and comfort is almost enough to drown out the raging voice of the pellegrini inside her head.
It’s good to have you back, Perhonen says. The ship’s butterfly avatars dancing around Mieli’s head. I felt like a piece of me was missing.
‘Me too,’ Mieli says, delighting in the familiar tickle of wings fluttering against her skin. ‘A big piece.’
‘How soon can you get back down there?’ demands the pellegrini. The goddess has been Mieli’s constant companion ever since the immigration Quiet delivered her back to the ship and woke her up. Her mouth is a cold red line. ‘This is intolerable. He will have to be punished. Punished.’ She seems to taste the word. ‘Yes, punished.’
‘There is a problem with his biot feed,’ Mieli says. She feels an odd sensation of absence. Can I actually be missing his feed? The poisons you get addicted to.
Just go ahead and admit that you are actually worried, Perhonen says. Don’t tell anyone, but so am I.
‘The last thing that registered is severe damage. And we can’t go down for thirty days, not legally at least.’
‘What is that boy doing?’ the pellegrini mutters.
The Oubliette orbital control is telling us to get a Highway approach vector, Perhonen says. And they are turning all visitors away from the beanstalk station. There is something happening down in the city.
‘Can we see anything?’ Mieli asks.
The ship’s butterfly avatars open a fan of moving images across various wavelengths in front of her. They show the city, a dark lenticular shape in the orange bowl of the Hellas Basin, blurred by its gevulot cloud.
Something is seriously wrong down there, Perhonen says. It has stopped moving.
There is something else in the images as well. A black fuzzy mass, pouring down from the rims of the impact crater towards the city.
Perhonen ramps up the magnification, and Mieli finds herself looking at a vision from hell.
Those? the ship says. Those are phoboi.
‘What should we do?’ Mieli asks the pellegrini.
‘Nothing,’ the goddess says. ‘We wait. Jean wanted to play games down there: let him play. We wait until he is done.’
‘With all due respect,’ Mieli says, ‘that means the mission is a failure. Are there any remaining agents on the ground who could be used? Gogol pirates?’
‘Do you presume to tell me what to do?’
Mieli flinches.
‘The answer is no. I cannot leave any signs of my presence here. It is time to cut our losses.’
‘We are going to abandon him?’
‘It is a pity, of course. I was a little sentimental about him: it has been a pleasant experience, for the most part. His little betrayal even added some spice. But nothing is irreplaceable. If
the cryptarch emerges victorious, perhaps he will be easier to bargain with.’ The pellegrini smiles wistfully. ‘Perhaps not as entertaining, though.’
Whatever problems the city is having, I think they are spreading, Perhonen says. The Quiet fleet is in disorder. In case you are interested, the phoboi will hit the city’s ramparts in approximately thirty minutes.
‘Mistress,’ Mieli says. ‘I have given up everything to serve you. My mind, my body; much of my honour. But the thief has been my koto brother these last few weeks, however reluctantly. I cannot leave him behind and face my ancestors. Let me have that much.’
The pellegrini raises her eyebrows. ‘So, he got through to you in the end, did he? But no, you are far too valuable to risk. We will wait.’
Mieli pauses, looking at the unmoving city in the images. He is not worth it, she thinks. He is a thief, a liar.
But he made me sing again. Even if it was a trick.
‘Mistress,’ Mieli says. ‘Grant me this, and I’m willing to renegotiate our bargain. You can have a gogol of me. If I don’t return, you can resurrect me as you wish.’
Mieli, don’t do this, the ship whispers. You can never go back on that.
That’s the only thing I have left, apart from honour, Mieli says. And it is worth less.
The pellegrini narrows her eyes. ‘Well, that is interesting. All that for him?’
Mieli nods.
‘Very well,’ the goddess says. ‘I accept your offer. With the condition that if anything goes wrong, Perhonen will use the strangelet device on the city: you still carry me inside you, and I cannot be found.’ She smiles. ‘Now, close your eyes and pray to me.’
It only takes minutes to get past the disorganised Quiet sentry fleet. Mieli does not feel like being subtle and burns the ship’s antimatter engines hard. The ship is a sleek diamond dart, slicing through the troposphere, down towards the Hellas Basin.
Show me the phoboi.
Nightmare things race across the Basin. There are millions of them, in endless variations, all packed closely together in a mass that moves like a coherent organism. Swarms of transparent insects that form hulking, walking shapes. Clumps of bulbuous sacks full of chemicals that move by pulsing and flowing. Humanoids with glasslike bodies and disturbingly realistic faces – apparently some of their ancestors have found that human countenances slow the reflexes of the warrior Quiet a small fraction.
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