I lock the palace behind me, thinking I will never visit it again. I lock it twice: once with a key, once with a price.
I give the key to Raymonde. And for a time, I am light and free and young again. Raymonde and I build a life. I design buildings. I grow flowers. I am happy. We are happy. We make plans.
Until the Box.
I sit down. I touch my face. It feels wrong, like a mask: there is another countenance underneath, another life. For a moment, I want to scratch it until the false layer falls away.
Raymonde looks different too. Not just the freckled girl with music sheets, not the Gentleman. There is a halo of memories around her, ghosts of a thousand moments. And awareness that she is not mine anymore.
‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘To you, to them?’
‘What happens to people? They live. They move on. They go to the Quiet. They come back. They make themselves into something new.’
‘I didn’t remember any of them. Isaac. Bathilde. Gilbertine. Marcel. Everyone else,’ I say. ‘I didn’t remember you. I made myself forget. So if I get caught, no one would ever find you.’
‘I like to think that’s why you did it,’ Raymonde says. ‘But I know you too well. Don’t try to fool yourself. You escaped. You saw something you wanted more than you wanted us.’ She smiles, sadly. ‘Were we really such a bear trap that you had to cut us all off?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t.’
Raymonde sits down next to me. ‘For what it’s worth, I believe you.’ She looks at the balloon houses. ‘It was difficult after you left. I found someone else, for a while. That didn’t help. I went to an early Quiet, for a while. That helped, a little. But when I came back, I was still angry. The Silence showed me I could be angry at something useful.’
She covers her mouth with a hand, eyes closed. ‘I don’t care what your Oort woman wants you to steal for her,’ she says. ‘You already did you worst. You stole what could have been. From me and from yourself. And you can never have it back.’
‘You didn’t tell me what happened to—’ I begin.
‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Just don’t.’
We sit quietly for a while, watching the balloon houses. I have a crazy thought about cutting their tethers so they could float up to the pale Martian sky. But you can’t live in the sky.
‘I have your key,’ Raymonde says. ‘Do you still want it?’
I laugh. ‘I can’t believe I already held it in my hands.’ I close my eyes. ‘I don’t know. I need it. I have a debt to pay.’
A part of me wants it more than anything. But there is the price. Lives of half-remembered strangers. Why should I care?
‘You said something when you gave it to me. “Tell me to go see Isaac.” So I’m telling you.’
‘Thank you.’ I get up. ‘I’m going to go and do that.’
‘All right. I’m going to go and talk to the Silence and the others. Let me know what you decide when you’re done. If you still want it, you only have to ask.’
‘You might have to rewrite that opera when you’re done,’ I say.
She kisses me on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you soon.’
Isaac lives alone in a small Maze tower apartment. I send him an anonymous co-memory to expect a visitor, and get an answer that he is home. When he opens the door, he frowns: but as I open my gevulot, his bearded face lights up.
‘Paul!’ He grabs me in a rib-crushing bear hug. Then he grabs the front of my coat and shakes me, up and down. ‘Where have you been?’ he bellows. I can feel the rumble inside his broad chest.
He drags me bodily inside and tosses me onto a couch like a rat. ‘What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were Quiet, or eaten by the damn Sobornost!’
He rolls up the sleeves of his flannel shirt, revealing thick hairy arms, puffing. There is a thick brass Watch around one massive wrist. Seeing it makes me flinch, even if the word engraved on it is hidden.
‘If you are here to mess with Raymonde again—’ he says.
I lift my hands up. ‘I’m innocent. I’m here on … business. But I wanted to see you.’
‘Hrmph.’ He grunts, looking at me suspiciously from beneath thick eyebrows. Then he grins, slowly. ‘All right. Let’s drink.’
He marches across the room, kicking at some of the debris on the floor – books, clothes, tempmatter sheets, notepads – and makes his way to his small kitchen. The fabber begins to gurgle. I look around the apartment. A guitar hanging from the wall, animated wallpapers with children’s cartoon characters in them, high bookshelves, a desk covered in a perpetual snowfall of e-paper.
‘This place hasn’t changed at all,’ I say.
Isaac returns with a tempmatter bottle of vodka. ‘Are you kidding? It’s only been twenty years. Spring cleaning is every forty.’ He takes a swig from the bottle, then pours each of us two fingers in two glasses. ‘And I’ve only been married twice in that time.’ He holds up his glass. ‘Here’s to women. Don’t talk to me about business. It’s women who brought you here.’
I say nothing and clink my glass against his. We both drink. I cough. He laughs, a rough, booming sound.
‘So, am I going to have to kick your ass or did Raymonde do it already?’ he asks.
‘Over the last few days, people have been queueing for the position.’
‘Well, that’s as it should be.’ He pours more vodka into the glasses in a liberal waterfall that doesn’t spare the floor. ‘Anyway, I should have known that you were coming when the dreams started again.’
‘The dreams?’
‘Puss-in-boots. Castles. I always suspected you had something to do with them.’ He folds his arms. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Have you come back to find true happiness with your true love?’
‘No.’
‘Well, that’s good, because it’s too late. Idiot. I could see it coming, I have to say. You were always restless. Never happy with anything. Even Raymonde.’ He squints at me. ‘You are not going to tell me where you went, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s good to see you. It’s been a dull world without you.’ Our glasses clink again.
‘Isaac—’
‘Are you going to say something mushy?’
‘No.’ I can’t help laughing. I feel like I haven’t been away at all. I can imagine the afternoon running down a stream of vodka, sitting here and talking and drinking until Isaac starts reading his poetry and arguing about theology and talking endlessly about women, daring me to interrupt. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.
And that, of course, is the price.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say and put my glass down. ‘I really have to go.’
He looks at me. ‘Is everything all right? That’s a queer look you’ve got.’
‘It’s fine. Thanks for the drink. I’d stay longer, but—’
‘Phh. So it is a woman. It’s nothing. I’ll have this place tidied up by the time you come next time.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘About what? It’s not my business to judge what you do. Enough people around throwing stones.’ He claps my shoulder. ‘Go on. Bring me an offworld girl next time. Green skin would be good. I like green.’
‘Doesn’t it say something about that in the Torah?’ I say.
‘I’ll take my chances,’ Isaac says. ‘Shalom.’
I feel mildly drunk when I find my way to Raymonde’s apartment.
‘I wasn’t expecting you until much, much later,’ she says, when she lets me in. I squeeze past the inert synthbio drones that have been fixing the place. Tempmatter coverings hang everywhere, like spiderwebs.
‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ she says, ‘but it’s your fault.’
‘I know.’
She looks at me sharply. ‘So?’
‘Let me see it.’
I sit down on a freshly printed, flimsy-looking chair and wait. Raymonde returns and hands me an object, wrapped in a cloth.
‘You never told me w
hat it actually does,’ she says. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’
I take the gun out and look at it. It feels heavier than the last time I held it, ugly with its snub barrel and bulbous chamber with the nine bullets, nine dignities of God. I put it in my pocket. ‘I need to go and do some thinking,’ I tell Raymonde. ‘And if I don’t see you again – thank you.’
She does not say anything and looks away.
I close the door behind me and take the elevator back to the street level. I feel an odd tingling in my gevulot, and suddenly there is someone walking with me down the Avenue, a dark-haired young man wearing a dashing suit, matching my step. His face is mine, but his easy smile is not. I gesture him to lead on and follow.
Interlude
VIRTUE
Gilbertine dreams about the puss-in-boots again. It is a streaky tom on two legs, wearing a flamboyant hat and heavy boots. It leads her through marble-and-gold corridors of a palace, with rows of doors on both sides. One door is open.
‘What is in there?’ she asks the cat. It looks up at her with strange, glittering eyes. ‘You will know,’ it says, in a high-pitched quivering voice, ‘when the master comes back.’
She wakes up in her Montgolfiersville apartment, next to the warm, snoring body of her latest lover, whose name is already fading from her memory. Her gevulot contracts are always well-crafted, a minimum of disruption for everybody, leaving only pleasing memories of flesh here and there, hot flushes of emotion associated with tastes and places.
The dreams have been more frequent lately. And her own memories feel loose, uncomfortable. She wonders if she is getting old, not in the old-fashioned way but developing the malady of immortals that Bathilde talks about, being erased and rewritten too many times.
The co-memory message comes when she is in the shower with her lover, his nameless fingers lathering her back. It is full of sudden anxiety and urgency. Raymonde.
She disappears from beneath his touch into a gevulot blur. That was always the plan anyway. She stops only to pick up her Watch from her night table: she hates wearing it when making love. The word Virtus engraved on it has always felt too much like a bad joke.
Raymonde waits for her in her Belly apartment. Her face is pale and drawn, and her freckles stand out against her skin.
‘What’s wrong?’ Gilbertine asks.
‘Paul. He is gone.’
‘What?’
‘He is gone. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know what to do.’
Gilbertine embraces her friend, anger rising inside her. ‘Sssh. Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.’
‘Is it?’ Raymonde’s shoulders shake. ‘How is it going to be fine?’
Because I’m going to find him and make him pay, Gilbertine thinks.
Her gevulot contracts are always well-crafted, even the old ones. And they always have emergency clauses.
To her satisfaction, she actually surprises him. He is in the strange robot garden of the Maze, sitting on a small luggage pod, smiling at empty space. He wears a sleek dark blue full-body garment, zoku style, not quite matter, not quite light. He holds a small box that he keeps turning in his hands, round and round.
When she lets him see her, for a fleeting moment he looks like a frightened little boy. Then he smiles.
‘Ah, there you are.’ Paul says. But he does not look like the Paul that Gilbertine remembers, the sometimes foolish, self-centred architect hopelessly in love with her friend. His eyes are clear and emotionless, and the smile playing on his lips is cold. ‘Can you remind me what your name is?’
‘Don’t you remember?’
He spreads his hands. ‘I made myself forget,’ he says.
Gilbertine takes a deep breath. ‘I am Gilbertine Shalbatana. You are Paul Sernine. You loved my friend Raymonde. She is hurting. You need to go back. Or at least have the guts to say goodbye. She already forgave you once.’
She hurls the memory at him, opening her gevulot.
Raymonde introduced them. Raymonde, Gilbertine’s comrade-in-arms ever since she came from Nanedi; a slow-town girl in the big city, wanting to make music. Secretly, Gilbertine hated her easy grace, the way things fell into place for her, seemingly without effort. He was one of those things. So of course she wanted him. And making him want things he did not have was not difficult.
But it did not last. He went back to her, content not to even remember who Gilbertine was, chased after Raymonde to Nanedi and back. She accepted it as the way of things. But this, this she won’t accept.
Paul looks at her with a detached look on his face. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have enough from you before.’ To her horror, she can feel something eating through her gevulot.
‘But you are quite right,’ Paul says quietly. ‘Paul Sernine could never leave. But he is staying here, you see, inside you and the others. Whereas me – there is somewhere else I need to be. Stealing the fire of the gods. Being Prometheus. That sort of thing.’
‘I don’t care,’ Gilbertine says. ‘You have a child with that girl.’
He flinches. ‘I would have remembered that,’ he says. ‘No, that does not seem right.’
‘Damn right it doesn’t,’ Gilbertine says, filling her voice with as much venom as she can draw from the old hurt.
‘You don’t understand. I would have not forgotten that.’ He shakes his head. ‘In any case, it doesn’t matter. We are not here to talk about me. This is all about you.’
Gilbertine pulls her shoulders back, reaching for the exomemory. ‘You are insane.’ A tingling sensation crawls across her scalp, and suddenly there is just a wall where the part of her that is connected to everything else should be. It is like having a phantom limb, trying to convince you that it is not gone, only inside her mind.
Paul stands up. ‘I’m afraid I’ve cut off your exomemory link. Don’t worry, you’ll get it back in a moment.’
Gilbertine takes a step back. ‘What are you?’ she hisses. ‘A vampire?’
‘Not at all,’ Paul says. ‘Now stay still. This will hurt a little.’
Gilbertine runs. It is hard to think, with the hole inside her head. The Watch. Whatever he is doing, it must be through the Watch. She claws at her wrist, to get it off—
—but she is not really running, it’s just a memory of running, and she is still standing in front of Paul whose eyes look a lot like those of the puss-in-boots—
He holds up the box. ‘See? I found out about this from the dreams of a poor boy hurt in the Spike. I took it from the zoku: they will never miss it.’
‘What is it?’ Gilbertine whispers.
‘A trapped god,’ Paul says. ‘I need to put it somewhere. That’s why you are here.’
The box starts to glow. It disappears from Paul’s hand. And then it is inside her head.
She remembers abstract shapes, a data structure like a vast metallic snowflake, sharp edges pressing against the soft parts of her mind. A flood of alien sensations passes through her exomemory. For a moment it is like a hot metal rod being pushed through her temples. Then the pain is gone, but a sense of weight remains.
‘What did you do to me?’
‘The same thing I did to all of you. Put things in a place where no one will look for them. In your exomemories, protected by the best cryptography in the System. In a place that will claim a price if I want them back. That was the last thing I had to dispose of. I am sorry about the discomfort. I hope you can forgive me.’ The not-Paul sighs. ‘For what it’s worth, your Paul had nothing to do with this.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Gilbertine says. ‘It’s not all about memory. A part of you is Paul, no matter who you think you are, no matter what you have done to your brain, no matter if he was just a mask you wore. And I hope he burns in hell.’ She wants to claw at his face. But the faint foglet halo around whatever the creature wearing Paul’s shape tells her that violence would be useless.
‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’ he says. ‘I can’t let you remember an
y of this, of course. I hope you can comfort Raymonde in some way.’
‘Do what you want to my memory,’ she says. ‘I’m going to make sure she hates you forever.’
‘Perhaps I deserve that,’ he says. ‘Goodbye.’
He touches her forehead, and a wind blows through her mind—
*
Gilbertine blinks at the bright Phobos light. She is standing alone in the robot garden. She feels disoriented, and it takes a few moments to remember meeting Raymonde. What did she do after that? She ’blinks at the last few minutes, but finds them empty. Damn. Must be another Spike legacy glitch.
For some reason, she remembers the dream she had last night: a puss-in-boots, a closed door. Did she have a dream?
For a moment, she considers ’blinking the dream, too, but decides against it. There is too much to do in the waking world.
17
THE DETECTIVE AND THE GORDIAN KNOT
It takes Isidore the rest of the day to recover. The Quiet medics refuse to let him go before he is pumped full of synthbio nanodocs. His thoughts are a confused jumble, racing in all directions at once: but when he gets home, the exhaustion takes over and he collapses in his bed. He wakes up late after a long, dreamless sleep.
Frustratingly, rest does not offer any solutions, so he sits at the breakfast table for a long time, staring at the world through the kitchen window, trying to grasp where everything belongs, where the seams are, where everything fits together: the tzaddik, the thief, Time, the memory palaces. The wallpapers are a complex Escheresque jungle again, garish in the bright, mixed daylight. His thoughts are interrupted by a cheerful gevulot request.
‘Good morning,’ Lin says.