The Quantum Thief

‘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