On Earth, says Perhonen, there was this type of fish called sharks. I think the time beggars watch the public exomemory feeds, like from the agoras, no privacy there, so they would have seen you giving Time to a—
Suddenly, the agora is full of the sound of running bare feet, and Mieli finds herself face to face with an army of beggars.
I chase the boy through the Avenue crowd. He stays ahead of me, navigating the forest of legs with ease, his bare feet a blur, like the needle of a fabber. I elbow people aside, shouting apologies, leaving a trail of angry grey gevulot blurs in my wake.
I almost catch him at a spidercab stop, where the Avenue breaks into a hundred different alleys into the Maze. He stands in front of the long-legged machines, ornate horseless carriages with brass legs, curled up beneath them as they wait for passengers, looking at them in fascination.
I approach him slowly, in the crowd. He has different texture from everything else around me, sharper. Maybe it is the dirt on his face or the ragged brown garment he is wearing, or the dark brown eyes so different from those of the Martians. Only metres away—
But he is just taunting me. He lets out a faint peal of laughter as I lunge forward and slips under the long-legged cab carriages. I’m too big to follow and am left negotiating the crowd to get around the vehicles and their waiting passengers.
The boy is me. I remember being him, in my dream. The memories are pressed flat like a butterfly beneath the centuries, fragile, and fall apart when I touch them. There was a desert, and a soldier. And a woman in a tent. Maybe the boy is in my head. Maybe he is some construct that my old self left behind. Either way, I need to know. I shout his name, not Jean le Flambeur, but the older one.
A part of me is counting seconds to when Mieli manages to deal with her little distraction and shuts me down, or sends me to some new hell. I may only have minutes to find out what he has to tell me, without my minder looking over my shoulder. I catch a glimpse of him vanishing down an alley, into the Maze. I curse and keep running.
The Maze is where the larger platforms and components of the city collide, leaving spaces in between for hundreds of smaller jigsaw pieces that constantly move, forming occasional hills and winding alleyways that can slowly shift direction as you walk down them, so smoothly that the only way to tell is to see the horizon moving. There are no maps of the place, just firefly guides that brave tourists follow around.
I run a rough-cobbled steep slope downwards, lengthening my steps. Running on Mars is an art that I’ve never properly mastered, and as the street beneath lurches, I land badly after a particularly high leap, skidding down several metres.
‘Are you all right?’ There is a woman on a balcony above, leaning over the railing, clutching a newspaper.
‘I’m fine,’ I groan, fairly certain that the Sobornost body Mieli gave me is not going to break easily. But the simulated pain from the bruised tailbone is still pain. ‘Did you see a little boy go past?’
‘Do you mean that little boy?’
The rascal is less than a hundred metres away, doubled over with laughter. I scramble up and keep running.
Deep, deep into the Maze we go, the boy always ahead, always rounding a corner, never getting too far ahead, running across cobblestones and marble and smartgrass and wood.
We run through little Chinese squares with their elongated Buddhist temples, red and gold dragons flashing in their facades; through temporary marketplaces full of a synthfish smell, past a group of black-robed Resurrection Men with newly born Quiet in tow.
We race down whole streets – red lights districts, perhaps – blurred with gevulot, and empty streets where slow-moving builder Quiet – larger than elephants, with yellow carapaces – are printing new houses in pastel colours. I almost lose the boy there, lost in the loud hum and the odd seaweed smell of the huge creatures, only to see him wave at me from the back of one of them and then leap down.
For a time, a group of parkroullers follows us, mistaking our race for some urban game, young Martian girls and boys in faux-Kingdom wear of corsets and umbrella skirts and powdered wigs, smartmatter-laced so they know to stay out of the way and flex as the kids bounce off walls and make somersaults across gaps between rooftops, the oversized wheels sticking to every surface. They encourage me with shouts, and for a moment I consider spending some Time and buying a pair of skates from one of them: but the fading imaginary pain in my backside keeps me on foot.
Every second, I wait for my body to shut down, to wait for Mieli to come and give me whatever punishment she has thought up. Still, I wish I could have seen her face.
I finally run out of breath when we reach the old robot garden. I curse the fact that I can’t override the strictly baseline human parameters of the body as I lean on my knees, wheezing, the sweat stinging my eyes.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘Let’s be reasonable. If you are a part of my brain, I’d expect you to be reasonable.’ Then again, I probably was anything but reasonable at that age. Or at any other age.
The garden looks strangely familiar. It is some piece of the old Kingdom that the city picked up and swallowed somewhere during its passage through the Martian desert, and its strange urban metabolism has brought it here. It is an open space within the Maze, protected by a cluster of tall synagogues around it, made from black and white tiles of marble perhaps five metres square, forming a ten-by-ten grid. Someone has planted trees here, and flowers: green and red and white and violet spill over the neat monochrome borders on the ground. The boy is nowhere in sight.
‘I don’t have a lot of time. The scar-faced lady is going to come for us both soon, and she’s not going to be happy.’
In each square stands a giant machine: medieval knights and samurai and legionnaires, with intricately carved armour, yawning helmets and fearsome, spiked weapons. The plates are rusty and weather-beaten, and the empty helmets of some have been turned into flower-pots, with clusters of begonias and pale-hued Martian roses peeking out of them. Some of them are to be frozen in mid-combat – except that, as I catch my breath, they appear to be slowly moving. Something tells me that if I stayed and watched, they would play out a slow game set in motion by players long dead.
The laughter again. I turn around. The boy dangles from the arm of a red robot apart from the others, frozen with its scythelike weapon raised up. I jump forward, trying to catch him in a bear grip, but he is no longer there. I fall down a second time during the chase, right into a bed of roses.
Still out of breath, I roll over slowly. The thorns tear at my clothes and skin.
‘Little bastard,’ I say. ‘You win.’
A ray from bright Phobos – on its eight-hour passage through the sky – hits the robot’s open helmet. Something glints inside, something silver. I get back to my feet, reach up and climb up the robot’s armour; that, at least, is easier in Martian gravity. I dig in the dirt in the helmet and uncover a metal object. It is a Watch, with a heavy silver wristband and a brass face. The dial rests solidly at zero. I quickly put it in my pocket for a later, thorough inspection.
There are footsteps, along with a sharp gevulot request. I don’t bother trying to hide. ‘All right, Mieli,’ I say. ‘I can’t run anymore. Please don’t send me to hell, I’ll come nicely.’
‘Hell?’ says a gruff voice. ‘Hell is other people.’ I look down. A man with a carelessy aged face and a shock of white hair, in blue coveralls, is staring at me, leaning on a rake. ‘It’s not an apple tree, you know,’ he says.
Then he frowns.
‘I’ll be damned. Is that you?’
‘Uh, have we met?’
‘Aren’t you Paul Sernine?’
5
THE DETECTIVE AND THE ZOKU
Isidore almost makes it in time.
The spidercab races across the rooftops of the city. It costs a hundred kiloseconds, but it is the only option to get even close. He holds on tight to his safety belt. The carriage lurches back and forth as the vehicle – the bastard child of a spider
, a H. G. Wells war machine and a taxi – leaps over rooftops and clings to walls.
He drops the box of chocolates and curses as it bounces back and forth in the cabin.
‘Are you okay back there?’ asks the driver, a young woman in the traditional red, webbed domino mask of the cabbies. In a shifting city where many places are permanently hidden by gevulot, their job is to figure out how to get you from point A to point B. There is a certain amount of pride that comes with that. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you there.’
‘I’m fine,’ says Isidore. ‘Just go faster.’
The zoku colony is near the prow of the city, in the Dust District, just above where the Atlas Quiet prepare Martian sand to bear the weight of the city. It is easy to see where the colony’s boundary lies: beneath the red dust clouds the wide avenues with their belle époque fronts and cherry trees give way to fairy-tale castles of diamond, like mathematics given physical form. Evening light refracts and bounces among the buildings’ glossy surfaces, prismatic and dazzling. The zoku colony has been here for more than twenty years, since they requested asylum during the Protocol War; but rumour has it it was grown from a nanoseed in a single night. A shard of the quantum tech empire that rules the outer planets, here on Mars. Ever since he started dating Pixil, Isidore has made attempts to understand the odd non-hierarchy of the zokus, but without much success.
After several more stomach-churning leaps, the spider-cab comes to a stop. They are in front of a cathedral-like building made from glass and light, with towers and spires and organic-looking Gothic arches jutting from its sides at random intervals.
‘Well, here we are,’ the driver says. ‘Friends in high places, eh? Don’t let them quantum your brain.’
Isidore pays, watching the dial of his Watch lurch downwards in dismay. Then he picks up the box of chocolates and assesses the damage. It is slightly dented, but otherwise intact. She won’t be able to tell the difference anyway. He jumps out, slams the door of the cab harder than necessary and starts walking up the stairway to the massive pair of doors. His bow tie is choking him, and he adjusts it nervously, hands shaking.
‘Invitation only,’ says a voice that sounds like it is coming from underground.
A monster steps through the door. The material behaves like the surface of a vertical pond, rippling around the creature’s massive form. It is wearing a blue doorman’s uniform and a cap. It is almost three metres tall, with green skin, a face like a dried prune, tiny eyes and two massive yellow tusks. One of them has a clear, tiny zoku jewel embedded in it. Its voice is deep and unnaturally resonant, but human.
The creature holds out a massive hand. There are horned ridges running along its forearms, black and sharp, glistening with a liquid of some sort. It smells of liquorice. Isidore swallows.
‘I have an invitation,’ he says. He holds out his entanglement ring. The monster bends down and studies it.
‘The party has already started,’ the monster says. ‘Guest tokens expire.’
‘Look,’ he says. ‘I am a little late, but Lady Pixil is waiting for me.’
‘Sure she is.’
I’m at the door, he qupts at Pixil desperately. I’m running late, I know, but I’m here. Please come let me in. There is no reply.
‘That’s not going to work,’ says the monster. It clears its throat. ‘The Tangleparty is an important tradition representing the unity and cohesiveness of the zoku, dating back to the days of the ancestral metaverse guilds. On this day of celebration, we are as our ancestors were. They are not going to interrupt it to let a latecomer in.’
‘If it’s so important,’ says Isidore, ‘what are you doing here?’
The monster looks oddly sheepish. ‘Resource optimisation,’ it mutters. ‘Somebody has to do the door.’
‘Look, what is the worst that can happen if you let me in?’
‘Could get thrown out of the zoku, unentangled. On my own on an alien planet. Not good.’
‘Is there any way to,’ Isidore hesitates. ‘you know, to bribe you?’
The monster studies him. Damn. Have I offended it now?
‘Any gems? Jewels? Gold?’
‘No.’ Come on, Pixil, this is absurd! ‘Chocolate?’
‘What is that?’
‘Cocoa beans, processed in a very particular way. Delicious. For, ah, baselines anyway. This was meant as a present for Lady Pixil herself. Try one.’ He struggles to get the box open, then loses his patience and tears the lid. He tosses a beautifully crafted chocolate nugget to the monster: it snatches it from mid-air.
‘Delicious,’ it says. Then it tears the box from Isidore’s hands. It disappears down its throat with a shredder-like sound. ‘Absolutely delicious. Could I have the spime as well, please? They are going to love these in the Realm.’
‘That was it.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t have any more. It was just a physical object, one of a kind.’
‘Oh crap,’ the monster says. ‘Oh man. That’s way too much. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to – look, I think I can regurgitate it and we can put it back together again—’
‘Really, it’s fine.’
‘You know, it was a reflex, this body just has to conform to all kinds of narrative stereotypes. I’m sure I can come up with some sort of replica at least—’ The monster opens its mouth wide and starts pushing one of its arms in, at an impossible angle.
‘Can I just go in?’
The monster makes a gurgling sound. ‘Sure. Sure. We’ll say no more about it. I didn’t mean to be an asshole, okay? Have fun.’
The two doors swing open. The world clicks into something else when Isidore walks through. The constant tinkering with reality is something that he really hates about the Dust District. The zokus do not have the decency to hide their secrets under the surface of the mundane, but plaster them all over your visual cortex, in layers and layers of spimes and augmented reality, making it impossible to see what truly lies beneath. And the sudden feeling of openness, no boundaries of gevulot, makes him feel something akin to vertigo.
There is no diamond cathedral inside. He is standing at the entrance of a large open space, with pipes and wires in the walls and the high ceiling. The air is hot and smells of ozone and stale sweat. The floor is unpleasantly sticky. There are dim neon lights, and ancient-looking, clunky flatscreens on low tables, showing either rough animated characters or abstract dancing shapes. Loud music with a headache-inducing beat fills the space.
The party crowd is moving between the tables, talking to each other. They all look surprisingly … human. They wear homemade chainmail bikinis over pale bodies. Some carry padded swords. Others are clad in cardboard boxes. But all carry boxes with wires, or have circuit boards strapped to their belts.
‘Hey. Want to entangle?’
The girl looks like a plump, pink-haired elf. She is wearing large cat ears, far too much makeup and an uncomfortably tight T-shirt in which a large-eyed female is doing something obscene with something. She is also carrying twin phallic silvery rockets in a backpack, connected to a touchscreen phone in her hand with a thick umbilical cable.
‘Uh, I would love to, but—’ He loosens his bow tie again. ‘I’m actually looking for Pixil.’
The girl stares at him, eyes wide. ‘Ooooh.’
‘Yes, I know, I’m late, but—’
‘It’s all right, it’s not really even started yet, people are just starting to entangle. You are Isidore, right? That is so cool!’ She waves her arms and almost jumps up and down. ‘Pixil talks about you all the time! Everybody knows about you!’
‘You know Pixil?’
‘Silly boy, of course I do! I’m Cyndra. I’m her Epic Mount!’ She squeezes her tiny left boob through the pink fabric. ‘Great avatar, huh? Sue Yi, from the original Qclan! I bought her old lifestream off a – hang on, I shouldn’t tell you that, you play that “detective” game, right? Sorry.’
Isidore ’blinks at the words ‘Epic Mount’, but here i
n the zoku colony, the Oubliette exomemory system is silent. I really hope it’s a metaphor.
‘So, uh, could you tell me where to find Pixil?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Silly boy, can’t you tell – it’s a costume party! We’ll have to go and figure out what she is wearing.’ And before Isidore knows it, Cyndra’s sweaty hand is squeezing his and pulling him into the thick of the crowd.
‘You have no idea how many people want to meet you.’ She winks at him. ‘You know, we are all in awe. An Oubliette boy! The things you do with your bodies. Bad, bad, bad.’
‘She told you about—’
‘Oh, she tells me everything. Here, they’ll know where she is.’ Cyndra steers them to a cluster of old computers that hum and radiate heat, surrounded by bean-bags.
There are three people huddled around the machines. To Isidore’s eye they don’t look very much like he would expect Pixil to look. Two of them have beards, to begin with. One of the males, tall and lean, wears a yellow cape, a domino mask, shorts and some sort of red tunic. The other is more heavyset, in a loose blue cape with a ragged edge, wearing a pointy-eared mask.
The third is a small, older-looking woman, with thin blond hair, lined face and glasses, in uncomfortable-looking leather armour, sitting with a sword across her knees. Both men are bouncing back and forth in their chairs to the tune of tinny explosions.
Cyndra slaps the lean man on the back, triggering a thunderous on-screen blast. ‘Shit,’ he says, tearing his goggles off. ‘Look at what you did!’
The man in the cape leans back in his chair. ‘You have much to learn, Boy Wonder.’
Isidore’s mouth is dry. He is used to the gevulot handshakes that link names with faces and establish social context. But these are actual strangers.
‘Has anyone seen Pixil?’ Cyndra asks.
‘Hey! Stay in character!’ growls the pointy-eared man.
‘Oh, pshaw,’ says Cyndra. ‘This is important.’
‘She was here a moment ago,’ says the lean man, not taking his eyes off the screen, moving a little white device around furiously with his right hand. It makes clicking sounds.