You belong to Mars, it says. You will never leave.
Fists clenched, the King makes himself look as long as he can bear it, rattling the chain in his mind. Then he closes his eyes and starts looking for the other invisible man.
He lets his mind wander through the crowd, looking through other eyes, looking for traces of manipulation in fresh memories like disturbed leaves in a forest. He should have done this before. There is something pure about being here in person. For the King, memories and actions have almost become one over the years, and the sharp taste of reality is exhilarating.
The memory trap is subtle, hidden in the fresh exomemory of a Realm flesh-avatar whose eyes the King looks through. It is recursive: a memory of a memory itself, almost swallowing the King in an infinite tunnel of déjà vu, like the vertigo of the beanstalk, pulling him inwards.
But the memory game is the King’s game. With an effort of will, he anchors himself back in the present, isolates the toxic memory, follows it back to its source, peels back the layers of exomemory until only the kernel of reality is left: a thin, bald man with hollow temples and an ill-fitting Revolutionary uniform, standing a few metres away from him and staring at him with dark eyes.
‘André,’ the King says chidingly. ‘What do you think you are doing?’
The man gives him a defiant look, and for a moment there is an older memory that comes from deep within the King, a real memory: of the hell that they went through together. Such a pity.
‘I come here sometimes,’ André says. ‘To look out from our goldfish bowl. It’s good to see the air and giants beyond, you know.’
‘But that is not why you are here,’ the King says softly. His tone is gentle, fatherly. ‘I don’t understand. I thought we agreed. No more deals with them. And here you are. Did you really think I would not find out?’
André sighs. ‘A change is coming,’ he says. ‘We can’t survive much longer. The Founders have been weak, but that won’t last. They are going to eat us, my friend. Even you can’t stop it.’
‘There is always a way out,’ the King says. ‘But not for you.’
Out of courtesy, the King grants him a quick truedeath. A flash of a zoku q-gun, a breeze through exomemory eradicating all traces of the person once called André, his friend. He absorbs all of André that he needs. Passersby flinch at the sudden heat and then forget it.
The King turns to leave. Then he sees the man and the woman, the first in a dark suit and blue-tinted glasses, the second hunched in the gravity like a crone. And for the first time in the spaceport, the King smiles.
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 t
hey 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, th
e 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?