‘It’s not about trust,’ Mieli says. ‘We will wait until we recover your memories before doing anything.’
‘And what if something goes wrong with that? What if the tzaddikim won’t buy it? What if Raymonde—’ I grit my teeth. ‘This is a huge mistake.’
‘It is not your call to make,’ Mieli says. ‘We have a job to do, and it’s my job to decide what the best way to do it is.’
‘You know,’ I say, ‘for a moment back there I thought you actually had some humanity.’ I try to stop the words but they come out like bullets from a machine gun. ‘But the Sobornost got into you. They have turned you into a robot. That singing – that was just the tune in a music box. A recording. A gogol.’ I clench my hands into fists. ‘I was in the Prison for an eternity. But they never broke me. What did whatever bastard it is you serve do to you?’
I take the half-empty glass that the cryptarch left, with the cigar stub floating in it. ‘Here. This is what it tastes like.’ I take a swig and spit it out to the floor. ‘Like ashes.’
Mieli’s expression does not change. She turns to leave. ‘I have work to do,’ she says. ‘I am going to study the Unruh data. We need insurance in case there is a problem.’
‘There is a problem,’ I say. ‘My glass is empty. I’m going to get drunk.’
‘Enjoy,’ Mieli says coolly. ‘If you try to contact your tzaddik friend, I will know. It will not go well for you.’
Bitch. Everything feels heavy. I am trapped. I curse my old self for the hundredth time, for making such a mess of things when there are perfectly straightforward ways to hide treasure, like burying it in a hole in the ground. Bastard.
Idiot, says a voice in my head. There is always a way out. No prison, except in your mind.
‘Wait,’ I tell Mieli. She looks at me like she looked at me on the ship on the first day after the Prison, full of disgust.
‘Let me talk to him. Her. It,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘Let me talk to your employer. I know you are in touch. Let’s settle this. If we are going to do things your way, I want to hear it from the organ-grinder and not the monkey.’
Her eyes flash. ‘You dare to—’
‘Go ahead. Shut me down. Send me back to hell. I don’t care. I’ve been there already. I just want to say my piece. And then I’ll be a good boy.’ I swallow the rest of the foul, ashy liquid. ‘I promise.’
We stare at each other. Her pale green gaze does not flinch. But after a moment, she brushes her scar. ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘You asked for it.’
She sits down on the couch and closes her eyes. When she opens them, she is someone else.
It is like she is wearing a mask. She looks older, and composed, not the warrior-like ascetic stillness, but someone who is used to being looked at and in control. And there is a serpent in her smile.
‘Jean, Jean, Jean,’ she says, in a musical voice that is hauntingly familiar. ‘What are we going to do with you, my little flower prince?’
Then she gets up, wraps her arms around my neck and kisses me.
Mieli is a prisoner in her own body. She wants to close her eyes, but can’t; wants to pull away from the thief, but can’t. She can smell the foul liquor in his breath. She can see where this is going to go, and suddenly there is nothing funny about it.
‘Help me,’ she tells Perhonen soundlessly. ‘Get me out of here.’
Poor baby. Here. Suddenly, comforting, cool blackness surrounds her. Whatever subroutine her mind has been demoted to, at least the ship still has access to it.
‘What is she doing?’
Mysterious ways and all that, the ship says. Are you all right?
‘No.’ Bodiless, voiceless, Mieli wants to cry. ‘He was right, I was wrong. But there was no choice, was there?’
No, there wasn’t. What the goddess there says, goes, and that’s the way it is, for now. I’m so sorry.
‘And I broke vows. I need to beg Ilmatar’s forgiveness.’
I’m sure she is understanding, as goddesses go. I’m sure you’ll do better with her than with the other one. Don’t worry. She and the thief deserve each other.
The voice of the ship is soothing and calm. ‘That’s right,’ Mieli says. ‘Besides, don’t we have work to do?’
Indeed.
Suddenly, the blackness around Mieli is no longer empty. She is in a datascape, vast and complex. It whispers to her, explaining itself: two vast trees of nodes and lines, superimposed, representing the two versions of Christian Unruh’s encrypted mind and memory.
Kissing Mieli’s body is like finally kissing that old friend you have always had sexual tension with. Except the kiss is nothing like I imagined: there is a ferocity and strength to it that takes my breath away. And, of course, she is much stronger than I am: I have to turn my head away to come up for air.
‘Who are you?’ I manage, out of breath.
She lets herself fall back onto the couch pillows, laughing like a little girl. Then she spreads her arms along the back and crosses her legs.
‘Your benefactor. Your liberator. Your goddess. Your mother.’ She sees my horrified expression and laughs even louder. ‘I am joking, darling. Although you could call me your spiritual mother. I taught you a lot of things a long time ago.’ She pats the pillow next to her. ‘Now sit down.’
Somewhat gingerly, I obey.
She runs her fingers down my cheek and to my open shirt collar, sending cold waves through me. ‘In fact, we should find out if you still remember them.’ She kisses my neck, hard, nibbling at my skin, and I find it difficult to focus on my rage. I tense.
‘Relax. You like this body, I know you do. And I made sure yours is … receptive.’ She whispers the last words, and her hot breath on my skin turns the anger into something else. ‘When you live a very long time, you become a connoisseur in all things. Especially those you get to sample seldom. Sometime, when this is over, I will show you how to live. These things are so heavy and clumsy: we can do better in the guberniyas. But it’s fun, don’t you think?’ She bites my earlobe, hard, and flinches.
‘Oh, this silly biot feed. Poor Mieli, so paranoid. I am going to turn it off. You are not going to go anywhere, are you?’
‘No,’ I breathe. ‘But we need to talk.’
‘Talk can come after. Don’t you think so too?’
And, God help me, I do.
Bear in mind I don’t understand all of this, Perhonen says. But the mathematics gogols do. This is one of the root nodes of his gevulot tree. To Mieli, the complex data structures look like the incomprehensible visions one has in the alinen. Her viewpoint hovers over an intersection of innumerable lines, connecting in a sphere full of symbols and three-dimensional sections of a brain. The changes took place here, here and here. The objects inside the sphere change colour. Mieli touches the sphere to absorb the information and considers it for a moment.
‘It’s his procedural memory,’ she says. ‘So in a certain situation, it would trigger him to act in a certain way. For example, voting for the Voice.’
Yes. There are other changes too, here and there, but nothing major. Now, the interesting thing is that we can actually trace where the edit came from.
The ship highlights one of the lines connecting to the node they are viewing. There is additional information attached to it as well: complex mathematical formulae. The way gevulot works is by generating a tree of public and private key pairs: a new pair is generated whenever the user has a new memory, domain or experience they want to specify gevulot rights for. They are also encrypted with the pair above them in the hierarchy. The point is that only the individual is supposed to have access to the root.
‘Except that—’
Except that it looks like all the roots are also generated from another pair. A master key, if you like. Whoever holds those is able to access every exomemory in the Oubliette, and to rewrite them. For people who pass through Quiet, that means their entire mind. That’s where these new edits to Unruh’s mind c
ame from. The cryptarchs must have some sort of automated system that modifies everybody who passes through the Quiet.
‘Mother Ilmatar,’ Mieli breathes. ‘So potentially—’
—if they want, they can view and change every memory and thought of anyone who has been a Quiet. Of course, that is too much information for any one person to keep track of, so I assume they have some mechanical ways of augmenting it. Given the minor edits they have made to Unruh’s mind, I would imagine that they only have limited resources to do this.
But the bottom line is, the Oubliette is not a place of forgetting. It’s not a privacy heaven. It’s a panopticon.
It has been a long time. So at first, everything is a hot fast blur of flesh and skin and mouths and touches and bites. She is much stronger than me, and not afraid to show it. She plays with Mieli’s enhancements too, teasing me with a hot q-dot at her fingertip, grinning like a cat.
By the third time, we discover that her wings are touch-sensitive, and that’s when things get really interesting.
‘So what can we do with this?’
Well, we can’t do anything about the root access. But – the gogols say – we can put another encryption layer on top of all that. With the pirate engines, we can make fake Oubliette identities. We made a few of those with keys that did not come from the Oubliette key generator interface.
‘And?’
Well, that allowed us to make co-memories that the cryptarchs will never have access to. Anyone we share those with will be inoculated against any manipulation by the cryptarchs, passing through Quiet or otherwise. It’s viral: you can pass it on to as many people as you want. And we made another that makes you forget the edits that have already been made. In fact, the thief suggested publishing them through a newspaper—
‘Wait. The thief suggested what?’
Yes, we had this conversation already. While you were singing. It really did not take that long for the maths gogols to come up with all this.
‘He knows about this already? Does he have the co-memories?’
Yes. The ship pauses. He played me, didn’t he? Bastard. Mieli lets it sink in. ‘Yes. Yes, he did. And I think someone else is about to be played too.’
It is early morning before we stop to rest. At some point, we made it to my bedroom. I lean back on the pillows, eyes half-closed, and look at her, reclining on the other side of the bed, naked apart from her temporary Watch, wings still half-open, catching the light of the dawn.
‘I did teach you well, didn’t I?’ she says.
‘You did. Were we … you know, alone?’
‘Oh, you are worried about hurting poor little Mieli’s feelings? How nice of you to get attached to her. I admit I’m a little sentimental about her as well. It’s like having a favourite pen or a lucky charm.’ She stretches. Even the scar looks different on her face, more mischievous. ‘But don’t worry, she is with the ship. We are all alone. I have you all to myself. I should have done this sooner, but there are only so many of me, you know.’
‘It’s hard to believe that I don’t remember you,’ I say. ‘Except – when I came out from the Prison, there was a flash. Another prison, on Earth. I was reading a book—’
‘That was the first time we met,’ she says. ‘You were a street apache, back then, in the big city, with desert sand between your toes. So rough, so brave. And look at you now. A diamond. Or you will be one again soon. And then—’ she smiles – ‘and then you can thank me properly.’
‘You heard what I told Mieli, right?’ I say. ‘I don’t approve of what you are doing with the cryptarchs.’
She waves her hand. ‘Nonsense. Jean, you don’t know anything about what is really going on here. They have done a good job with this place. The Oubliette works. They are happy here. Even you thought you were happy here when you came here, last time.’ She looks at me, with a hint of poison in her eyes. ‘I think your idealism has less to do with politics than with a desire to impress that freckle-faced little bitch.’
‘A prison is a prison even if you don’t know it is one,’ I say. ‘And I have a problem with prisons.’
‘Poor baby. I know you do.’
‘And do you know what else I have a problem with? Breaking promises.’ I swallow. ‘I know I owe you. And I will pay my debt no matter what. But I’m not going to go back on my word, not even for you.’
‘And how are you going to keep your promises, my little flower prince?’
‘Well,’ I say. ‘I promised to be a good boy. So I’m going to start by getting arrested.’
‘What?’
‘You know that q-spider I made? The time-stealing trick? Well, I made two.’ I look at my Watch. ‘This would never have worked on Mieli: I have to say it seems she knows me much better than you do. And you were much more susceptible to certain … distractions: you should have seen the charm I turned on her last night, with no results. But you? You are about to run out of Time.’
She moves, faster than I can see. Her knee presses painfully in my stomach. Her hands are around my throat. Her face is a mask of rage. I can’t breathe. I can see the dial of her Watch, ticking towards zero—
‘I’m – going to—’ she screams.
There is a little brass ting from her Watch. She becomes a black, still statue. Whatever you say about Oubliette technology, the temporary gevulot system they give visitors is pretty good, almost like military-grade utility fog. You don’t go to the Quiet, but it cuts you off from the rest of the world, shuts your vital functions down. Her grip on my throat loosens and she topples off the bed, a winged statue of black marble, unmoving.
I shower and get dressed, whistling to myself. Down at the hotel lobby, I tip my hat to the white-uniformed immigration official and the two large Quiet with him: I love it when civil servants do their jobs efficiently.
Outside, it is going to be a beautiful day. I put on my blue-tinted glasses and go looking for Raymonde.
16
THE THIEF AND MEMORY
I send Raymonde a co-memory to meet me at the park, on our vantage point near Montgolfiersville. The reply comes quickly: I remember she will be there. I make my way through the Maze in a full gevulot wrapping, hoping that Perhonen’s new anti-cryptarch co-memory will do its job according to plan.
She is there before me, sitting on our bench with a temp-matter coffee cup, watching the balloons. She raises her eyebrows when she sees I’m alone.
‘Where is your Oortian chaperone? If you think this is going to be another one of your romantic encounters—’
‘Ssh.’ I flick the viral co-memory at her. She accepts it and wrinkles her nose. Her expression changes from a frown to pain to astonishment. Good. It worked. The only side effect I noticed was the lingering bad smell.
‘What the hell was that?’ She blinks. ‘I have a headache now.’
In words and co-memories, I fill her in on the results of the Unruh operation, the visit from the cryptarchs and my disagreement with Mieli’s employer – although I leave out a few more intimate details about the latter.
’You did this?’ she says. ‘I never thought you would—’
‘You can do whatever you want with it,’ I say. ‘Stage a revolution. Give them to the other tzaddikim as a weapon. I don’t care. We don’t have a lot of time. When Mieli comes back online, she is going to shut me down: if you have any pull with the immigration Quiet, please try to get them to slow the process down. I need to find my secrets before that.’
She looks down. ‘I don’t know where they are.’
‘Oh.’
‘I was bluffing. I was angry. I wanted to show you … what I had become. That I had moved on. And I wanted some leverage.’
‘I understand.’
‘Jean, you are a bastard. You will always be a bastard. But you did good this time. I don’t know what else to say.’
‘You can let me remember being a bastard,’ I say. ‘All of it.’
She takes my hand. ‘Yes,’ she says.
They ar
e her memories, not mine. But when she opens her gevulot, something clicks. It is as if a flower opens in my head, fed by what she is giving, blooming, growing; parts of me joining with parts of her, making something more. A shared secret, hidden from the Archons.
Mars, twenty years ago. I am tired. There is a weight that comes from years and transformations, from being a man and a gogol and a zoku member and a copyfamily, from living in one body, many bodies, in particles of thinking dust; from stealing jewels and minds and quantum states and worlds from diamond brains. I am a shadow, thin, faded, stretched.
The Oubliette body I wear makes things simpler, a heartbeat in unison with the ticking of a Watch, making things delightfully finite. I walk along Persistent Avenue and listen to human voices. Everything feels new again.
A girl sits on a park bench, looking at light dancing among the balloons of Montgolfiersville. She is young, and has a look of wonder on her face. It looks like a reflection. I smile at her. And, for some reason, she smiles back.
It is hard to forget what you are, even with Raymonde. Her friend Gilbertine gives her lover a look that I want to steal. Raymonde finds out. She leaves me, and goes back to her slowtown.
I follow her, to Nanedi City, where white houses climb up the sides of the valley like a smile. I ask for forgiveness. I beg. She doesn’t listen.
So I tell her about the secrets. Not all of them, just enough that she understands the weight. I tell her I don’t want them anymore.
And she forgives.
But it still isn’t enough. The temptation is there, always, to take on a different form, to escape.
My friend Isaac tells me about memory palaces and the nine Dignities of God.
I make a memory palace of my own. It is not just a mental space to store memorised images. My secrets are heavier than that. Hundreds of years of life. Artifacts stolen from the Sobornost and the zokus, minds and lies and bodies and tricks.
I craft it from buildings and human beings and entangled qubits; out of the fabric of the City itself. And most of all, my friends. They are all so trusting, so open, so accepting. They suspect nothing, not even when I give them custom-made Watches, my nine Dignities. I fill their exomemories with things that belong to me. I put picotech assemblers stolen from Sobornost in nine buildings, to remake it all if I need to.