Mars is gone, collapsed into a single point, eaten by the artificial singularity of Phobos, and with it, nearly everyone alive I could call friends and lovers and sparring partners. Raymonde. Isaac. Gilbertine. Xuexue. The foolish, brilliant Isidore. What was left of my other self, Jean le Roi, and his Prison. The Quiet and the phoboi. Gone. Locked behind an event horizon together.
They were never yours. They belonged to the other Jean, the one who betrayed them, the one who left them. You don’t need to miss them.
Perhonen was right when she told me I’m a good liar. But the best lies I save for myself: they are perfectly crafted, indestructible and glittering, like zoku jewels.
My eyes sting. Without thinking, I pinch the bridge of my nose. Then I feel Barbicane’s eyes on me.
‘Raoul? Would you like more tea?’
I smile, giving myself a mental kick. I need to stay sharp. Barbicane is not really a steampunk cyborg gentleman, he’s a quantum-brained posthuman playing one. Of course, for the zoku, the two are close to the same thing. Everything is a game. The tobacco smell in the room, the mahogany tables and armchairs, the gas lamp candelabras made of revolvers, the lemony taste of the Labsang Souchong tea – all of it is defined by the train’s Circle, a game in which we bargain like civilised gentlemen in a nineteenth-century club room.
‘No, thank you. I was just thinking that you start them off in the trade early.’
Barbicane sighs.
‘It’s the zoku volition, dear boy, impossible to resist. We are all made for a purpose! Well, except us old clankers, of course. The young ones make me feel positively ancient, growing up so fast! Tomorrow, they will make Realms and Circles and guns that I can’t even imagine.’ He frowns. ‘Better than this one, I hope!’
‘But you are not a fan of the atompunk aesthetic?’
‘Ha! Indeed not! There is no beauty in an uncontrolled nuclear explosion! Your item, on the other hand—’ He winks.
Now we are in business. I suppress a sigh of relief. Barbicane likes to talk, and during the last hour, I’ve heard more about guns than I ever wanted to know – especially after the intimate lessons my stay in the Dilemma Prison of the Sobornost taught me about their effects. But now it is clear that he wants to buy what I have to sell.
‘I take it you are interested?’
‘Raoul, you know very well that I cannot pass up on a genuine Wang bullet from a 150-kiloton Verne cannon.’
‘I can personally guarantee that it has.’
‘Capital!’
‘Of course, there is still the small matter of the price …’ I set my teacup down and fold my hands.
He raises his eyebrows. ‘Well, we’ll just have to see how the Club feels about that.’ There is a mischievous glint in his eyes. ‘If you will allow me to step outside for a moment?’
I incline my head politely. The boundary of the Circle appears, a silver line on the floor around us. Barbicane hovers up from his chair and crosses it: his appearance wavers slightly. Then he raises his bushbot arm. It fans out into a golden tree that touches a number of the gems in his halo gently, weaving his wish into the zoku’s volition.
I am certain it is mostly for show. Barbicane is an Elder, someone who has achieved the maximum level of advancement in his zoku, by performing actions in accordance with its goals and values – in this case, building bigger and better guns and blowing things up. He won’t have any problems using his entanglement with the rest of the zoku to acquire the paltry item I am asking for: a high-level jewel for a Supra City infrastructure zoku, enough to instantiate a personal Circle in one of the more fashionable zones of the zokus’ Saturnian capital.
What Barbicane doesn’t know is that the real stakes are much bigger than that.
After a second, he smiles and returns to his seat.
‘All good! The shell has been transferred to the Arsenal. And now for the celebratory drink! Stronger than tea! Would you care for a—’
A Realmgate pops into being on the other side of the room with a rush of displaced air and a whiff of ozone, a glowing blue circle two metres in diameter. A zoku trueform pours through it: a shimmering utility fog cloud with a haughty face in the middle, surrounded by a swirling mandala of zoku jewels. The newcomer enters the Circle and the Schroeder tech locks kick in. The foglets hiss and rasp with waste heat as they coalesce into a tall woman, first sketching her as a crystal statue, and then as flesh. Even before she is fully formed, she strides forward towards Barbicane, a pine-scented warm breeze behind her.
‘What in Verne’s name do you think you are doing?’ she says.
She is a honey blonde wearing a rather skimpy version of a pilot’s outfit: a short tan flying jacket that leaves her midriff bare, heavy boots, a cap, a scarf and a fighter pilot’s goggles. Her black eyebrows accentuate the cold beauty of her triangular face. Her ruby mouth is a tight line.
‘What am I doing? What am I doing? Acquiring an important historical artefact!’ Barbicane looks at her incredulously. ‘Chekhova dear, this is most irregular! You are offending our guest! Raoul here is a gentleman!’
‘I know who he is, Elder,’ Chekhova says. ‘The real question is, do you?’
I became Raoul d’Andrezy a subjective week earlier, in the Wardrobe’s vir, four days before the Bob Howard reached Saturn.
I sit at our usual table, a thought-mirror in front of me, a floating glass disc that is actually a vir construct, plugged into my dorsal stream. My face in it morphs from the slightly greying man with pencil eyebrows, hollow temples and Peter Lorre eyes into something darker, younger, more rough-hewn. The face alone is not enough, of course – my minions are also laying down a carefully designed data trail – but it’s a start.
‘What are you doing?’ Matjek asks.
I frown at him. It took a long time to clean up the vir. During my brief absence, Matjek recreated large swathes of Narnia faithfully, stretching the meagre computational capabilities of the Wardrobe to its limits. I have spent a lot of valuable time erasing islands inhabited by one-legged people and chasing down centaurs and talking mice with swords. I’m still not sure I got them all, nor do I fully understand how the boy did it. But given that his future self was the architect of Sobornost’s firmament, I should not be surprised that he cracked the Sobornost-style vir I built on top of the ship’s ancient hardware. And I suspect he had help from the Aun.
I have done my best to lock him in a sandbox, and since then he has been sulking quietly, watching the blue-tinted landscape outside our virtual window, the craggy, multicoloured shapes of the zero-g coral reefs that drift past us and the smooth-skinned, whale-tailed humanoids that dart between them, leaving trails of silvery bubbles. The Wang bullet and the Wardrobe are now safely in the watery belly of The Rorqual’s Revenge, a cetamorph ship, en route to Iapetos.
‘I’m getting ready to be someone else,’ I say. My voice is colder than I intended, but Matjek does not seem to care.
‘Why?’
I run my fingers along the surface of the mirror. My mind feels as smooth and blank. I had to use my metaself to calm down after Isidore’s qupt came. I haven’t been able to analyse the data he sent attached to his final message: it was a mess of quantum information, and the Wardrobe does not have the hardware to untangle it.
‘Everybody does it sometimes.’
Somewhere, deep underneath, I want to get drunk. I want to scream. I want to smash the thought-mirror into a million pieces. I want to tear the vir itself all the way down to firmament. My temples hurt.