‘It’s not just a game,’ Isidore says. ‘I almost died today. A girl killed her father in a horrible way. These things happen, and someone has to solve them.’
‘Solving them makes it better?’
‘It does for me,’ Isidore says quietly. ‘You know that.’
‘Yes, I know. And I thought other people should, too. You are doing well, somebody should be keeping score. So I invited Adrian, here where he could talk to you without any of that gevulot nonsense. He is going to make you famous.’
‘Pixil, that was a bad thing to do. I’m going to be in a lot of trouble because of that. Do you think you can just decide what I need? I’m not part of your zoku. It doesn’t work that way with me.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Pixil says. ‘With the zoku, I don’t have a choice.’ She touches her zoku jewel, embedded at the base of her throat, where her collar-bones meet. ‘With you, it’s because I want to.’
A distant part of him knows that she is lying, but somehow it does not matter, and he kisses her anyway.
‘You know,’ she says, ‘you did lose the bet. Come on. I’m going to show you something.’
Pixil takes his hand and leads him to a plain door that was not there a moment before. Entanglement electric arcs flare up again behind them as they walk through together.
For a moment there is another discontinuity.
They emerge into a huge, cavernous space that is full of black cubes of different sizes, ranging from a cubic metre to the size of a house, stacked on top of each other. The walls, floor and the ceiling – somewhere high, high up – are white and faintly luminescent. The illumination makes even Pixil seem pale.
‘Where are we?’ Isidore asks. His voice has an eerie echo.
‘You know we are mercenaries, right? We raid things. Well, this is where we keep the treasure.’ Pixil lets go of his hand and runs ahead, touching a cube. It flashes into transparency in an instant. Inside, is a strange, glittering beast, like a feathered serpent, swirling in the air, trapped in a cage of light. A floating spime bubble tells him it is a Langton worm, captured in the wilder virtual reaches of the Realm and given physical form.
Pixil laughs. ‘You can find almost anything here.’ She runs around, touching things. ‘Come on, let’s explore.’
There are glass eggs and ancient clocks and candy from old Earth. Isidore finds an ancient spacecraft inside one of the larger cubes. It looks like a giant’s dirty molar, brown stains marring the white ceramic surfaces. Pixil opens a cube full of theatrical costumes and presses a bowler hat on Isidore’s head, laughing.
‘Isn’t someone going to be upset if they find us here?’ Isidore asks.
‘Don’t worry, slave,’ Pixil says, grinning mischievously. She pulls the costumes down and makes a thick pile of them onto the floor, humming to herself. ‘I told you. Resource optimisation.’ She wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him, hard. Her clothes dissolve under her touch. She pulls him down onto the nest of cloaks and dresses. The anger drains from him, and then he has no room for any shape but hers.
Interlude
GOODNESS
Like every Sol Solis, Xuexue comes to the garden to smile at the red robot.
It stands alone, away from the clusters of fighting machines arranged on the black-and-white marble grid. Its design is a little different, too: sleek crimson lines of a sports car beneath a layer of rust, and a glinting little horse on top of its helmet.
Xuexue sits on a small folding chair in front of it, looks directly at the dark slit in its helmet and smiles, keeping as still as she possibly can. Her record is two hours. The hard part is maintaining the feeling of the smile. Today, it is easy: she had a good day with the children in the kindergarten. The little emperors and empresses of the Oubliette – bought dearly with Time by their parents and spoiled accordingly – can be difficult, but they have their moments. Maybe she will break her record today.
‘Excuse me?’ says a voice.
With some effort, Xuexue fights down a frown and keeps smiling, not turning to look.
A hand touches her shoulder and she flinches. Damn it. She should have closed her gevulot, but it would have spoiled the smile.
‘I’m trying to concentrate,’ Xuexue says chidingly.
A young man looks at her, amused. He has jet-black hair and a hint of the sun in his skin, dark eyebrows arching above heavy eyelids. He is dressed as if going to a party, sleek jacket and pants, with a pair of blue-tinted glasses against the bright glare of Phobos above.
‘I do apologise,’ he says with a hint of mirth in his voice. ‘What did I interrupt?’
Xuexue sighs. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’ He removes his glasses and regards Xuexue with a curious expression. His complexion is just a little too perfect, a different style from standard Oubliette bodies. He is smiling, but there is a distracted look in his eyes, as if he were listening to more than one conversation.
‘I have been smiling at the red gladiator,’ she says. ‘For the last year or so. At least an hour every week.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, there is a theory that there are slow gogols running inside them,’ she says. ‘An old Kingdom game. For them, this is a fierce battle. They are fighting for their freedom. They move, you know, if you look long enough. So I figured that they must see us, too. If we stand very still. Like ghosts, perhaps.’
‘I see.’ He squints at the robots. ‘I don’t think I would have enough patience for that. And why that one in particular?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It looks lonely.’
The young man touches the robot’s breastplate. ‘Don’t you think it’s possible that you’ll end up distracting it? So that it loses the fight? Never gets to go free?’
‘The Kingdom is gone. They have been free almost a hundred years,’ she says. ‘I think someone should tell them.’
‘It’s a nice thought.’ He offers her his hand. ‘I am Paul. I got a little lost: all those moving streets. I was hoping you could tell me the way out.’
A trickle of emotion bleeds through his rough visitor’s gevulot: a sense of unease, a weight, a guilt. Xuexue can imagine the old man of the sea sitting on his back. It feels very familiar. And suddenly it is more important to talk to the stranger than to smile at the robot.
‘Sure I can,’ she says. ‘But why don’t you stay for a little while? What brings you to the Oubliette?’ As she speaks, she crafts a gevulot contract in her mind and offers it to Paul. He blinks. ‘What is that?’
‘No one else will remember or know what we are going to say here,’ she says. ‘Even I will forget, unless you let me remember.’ She smiles. ‘This is the way things work here. No one has to be a stranger.’
‘It’s like you have a portable confession booth.’
‘Something like that.’
Paul sits down on the ground next to Xuexue, looking up at the robot.
‘You know,’ he says, ‘it is rare to meet a genuinely altruistic person. That is quite admirable.’
Xuexue smiles. ‘You don’t consider yourself to be one?’
‘I took a different turn on the evolutionary highway, quite far back. Somewhere between the dinosaurs and the birds.’
‘It’s never too late,’ she says. ‘Especially here.’
‘What do you mean?’ he says.
‘This is the Oubliette. The place of forgetting. Here, you can meet a Kingdom tyrant or a Revolution leader and never know. Or sit next to someone worse, like me.’ She sighs.
He looks up at her, eyes wide. She peels her gevulot open like an onion and offers him a memory.
Xuexue sold immortality. She went to towns and villages ravaged by earthquakes or mudslides, to fishing villages by dried-up lakes. She looked at children’s brains with the MRI scanner in her phone and talked to their desperate parents about life without flesh. She showed the children videos from Heaven, where gods and goddesses spoke about eternal life as gardeners of code. The c
hildren laughed and pointed. In every village, there were a few who wanted to go. She gathered them in automated trucks with the help of company drones and took them to the Iridescent Gateway of Heaven.
The Gateway consisted of hastily erected barracks in the Ordos desert, covered in camouflage cloth. The latrines smelled. The camp beds were dirty.
They did not have a shower for the first two weeks, but Xuexue and the other instructors – most of them faces on the display screens of the teleoperated drone guards – said that it did not matter, that soon they would transcend the needs of the flesh.
The first stage of the transformation took place in the classroom. The children wore itchy skullcaps that told the company machines what they were thinking. Xuexue watched over them through the harsh training: hours and hours of programming, forming code blocks and sequences of symbols in their minds, receiving orgasmic jolts of pleasure through the cap’s transcranial magnetic stimulator for every success and experiencing a little hell for being slow or failing. There was no talking in class, only chorused cries of agony and ecstasy.
Usually, they were ready within six weeks, permanent burns on their shaved, hollow-templed heads, half-closed eyes twitching like in REM sleep. Then she took them to the Celestial Doctor one by one, telling them that they would now get their peach of immortality. No one ever returned from the Doctor’s tent. In the evening Xuexue would set up the superdense datalink to the company satellite, sending up the petabytes harvested from young brains, fresh gogols to spin code in the cloud software farms.
Afterwards, she allowed herself a brief oblivion, achieved with cheap rice wine and drugware, before setting out to the world again.
Ten years of work for the company, and she would have true immortality of her own. A high-fidelity Moravec upload, no break in her consciousness, a slow surgery in which her neurons would be replaced by artificial emulations, one by one: a true transformation into something digital. A Realm of her own design, in the cloud.
It was going to be worth it, she told herself.
She had just arrived with a new group of recruits when the Western micro UAVs came down from the sky in angry buzzing clouds, burning everything. For a moment, it felt right, and she just stood there, watching the Gateway die. Then the black terror of death came, and she did the only thing she could: ran into the Doctor’s tent.
Her second birth inside is lost to her even now, except for a sea of bright red pinpoints, a clamp around her skull, a grinding sound.
Xuexue opens her eyes. The memory pours off her like cold water. Paul stares at her, eyes wide.
‘What happened then?’ he whispers.
‘Nothing, for a long time,’ she says. ‘I was brought here with the King’s billion gogols. I woke up as a Quiet. The Revolution was good for me. We really did something new. We made a place without little immortals.’ She looks at the robot. ‘I suppose I’m still trying to make up for them. It will never be enough, but it’s good to try. One thing at a time.’
‘Maybe it is,’ Paul says. He smiles at her, and there is genuine warmth in his eyes this time. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ Xuexue says. ‘I’m here every week. Come by again if you decide to stay.’
‘Thanks,’ Paul says. ‘Maybe I will.’
They sit together and look at the robot. Slowly, her smile returns. She listens to the young man’s breathing. Maybe she will break her record today.
6
THE THIEF AND PAUL SERNINE
‘Time, just a little Time, please, miss—’
‘I am going to be a Quiet for the third time, I have paid my debts, please help—’
‘I am a craftsman, a tailor, you can have my mind for a little Time, it will fetch a good price—’
Mieli is struggling in the crowd of Time beggars. Some are naked like the first one, others look just like everybody else on the Avenue, but they all share a look of hunger and desperation. Some wear masks and hoods. They are pushing at each other to get to her, a tangled ring of heaving bodies tightening around her, and some of her more autonomous defence gogols are waking up. I need to get out of here before I blow my cover.
She pushes one beggar aside, rams another with her shoulder: they go down, in a mess of limbs. She rushes past. One of the beggars on the ground grabs her leg. She falls. One of her elbows makes a painful impact with the pavement. An arm tightens around her throat. A voice hisses in her ear.
‘Give us Time or we’ll see if the Resurrection Men will bring you back, offworld bitch.’
‘Help!’ she shouts. Her vision goes black, and her temples start pounding. Her metacortex wakes up and muffles the pain, slows time down and starts waking the rest of her systems up. It would be so easy to sweep this rabble aside like so many rag dolls—
A wind rises. The pressure around her throat disappears. Someone screams, and running feet echo in the agora. She opens her eyes.
There is a man in black and silver floating in the air, perfectly polished shoes two metres above the ground, holding a cane. A living wind dances around him, a heat ripple, full of the telltale ozone smell of combat utility fog. They should not have that here, she thinks.
Hands made from heat haze hold the masked beggars on the ground – countless nanites, forming invisible structures that are the extensions of the black-clad man’s limbs. Other beggars make a run for it past the boundary of the agora and turn into gevulot blurs, disappearing into the crowd.
‘Are you all right?’ the man says, in a strange rasping voice. He comes down next to Mieli, shoes hitting the marble with a sharp tap. He is wearing a polished metal mask that covers his entire head: Mieli is fairly certain it is a q-dot bubble. He holds out a white-gloved hand. Mieli takes it and allows herself to be helped up.
A tzaddik. Great. The Sobornost database she studied during the journey had scant details on the Oubliette vigilantes. They have been active for two decades or so, and clearly have access to technology from outside Mars. Sobornost vasilevs – infiltrator agents – operating with the local gogol pirates, speculate they have something to do with the zoku colony established on the planet after the Protocol War.
‘I’m fine,’ Mieli says. ‘Just a little shaken.’
My, my, Perhonen says. Who is this? A handsome prince on a white horse?
Shut up and figure out how I avoid blowing my cover.
‘Let’s get you away from the agora before the journalists arrive,’ the tzaddik says, offering Mieli his arm. To her surprise, her legs are a little shaky, so she takes it and lets him lead her back to the shade of the cherry trees and the noise of the Persistent Avenue. There are people – mainly tourists – watching the scene, but the tzaddik gestures, and Mieli can tell that they are now private again.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Journalists?’
‘Yes, they tend to watch agoras very carefully. As do we. As do beggars looking for easy prey, as you found out.’ He motions towards the masked attackers on the ground with his cane.
‘What is going to happen to them?’
The tzaddik shrugs. ‘That will depend on what the Voice decides. An early or extended Quiet, probably: but that’s what was waiting for them anyway.’ There is a strange, angry note in its chorus voice. ‘That is the price we pay for the other good things here, I’m afraid.’ Then he takes off his hat and bows. ‘But my apologies. The Gentleman – which is the nom de guerre I have been given – at your service. I hope your day has not been completely ruined.’
He is flirting with you, Perhonen says. Oh my god. He so is.
Of course he isn’t. He has no face. Mieli feels a tickle that tells her the tzaddik is scanning her. Nothing that will penetrate the camouflage layers beneath her gevulot, but serves as another reminder that the natives have more than just bows and arrows.
Neither do I, and that has never stopped me.
Never mind. What do I do? I can’t tap into the thief’s feed with him scanning me.
He’s a do-gooder. Ask him for help
. Stick to your cover, silly girl. Just try being nice for a change.
Mieli tries to smile, trying to think what her cover identity – a tourist from a mixed asteroid belt habitat – would say. ‘You are a policeman, yes? A sysadmin?’
‘Something like that.’
‘I lost my friend when … they came. I don’t know where he is.’ Perhaps the ship is right: the thief is not the only one who can do a little social engineering.
‘Ah, I see. And you don’t know how to use co-memories to send him a message? You did not share gevulot to know where you are? Of course you didn’t. It is really terrible: the customs Quiet are very strict about leaving all your native tech behind, but never really tell you how to use ours.’
‘We just wanted to see the sights,’ Mieli says. ‘The Olympus Palace, maybe go on a phoboi hunt.’
‘Here is what we can do,’ the Gentleman says. ‘Let’s have a look at the agora memory – like this.’ The sensation is sudden, like finally finding the word that was at the tip of your tongue. Mieli remembers seeing the agora from high up, in incredible detail, knowing that she can recall every face in the crowd. She has a clear memory of the thief running across the agora.
‘Oh,’ the Gentleman says. There is a sudden gevulot request from him, asking her to forget his reaction. She accepts: the metacortex will store it anyway. She bookmarks it for later perusal. Curious.
‘What I can do is bend the rules a little to help you find him. We tzaddiks have some … special resources.’ The tzaddik unscrews the top of his cane. A tiny sphere of utility fog bops out, like a soap bubble. It hovers in the air next to Mieli, and starts glowing. ‘That should do it: just follow the firefly, and it will take you to him.’
‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure. Just stay out of trouble.’ The tzaddik tips its hat again, is surrounded by heat haze, and rises up to the air.