I remember Perhonen. What are you going to do when this is over? the ship asked me once. I think of Mieli, and Matjek.
Who have I been kidding? It’s never going to be over.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘I’m in.’
He clasps his hands together and grins. ‘Excellent! Let’s seal it with a drink.’
We clink glasses.
‘Here’s to being Prometheus,’ he says.
‘That sort of thing,’ I say, nodding.
We drink. He is right: there is a warm undercurrent in the whisky that tickles the throat and makes you want to laugh. And an afterglow that settles into a heavy feeling in the bottom of your stomach. But that’s not alclass="underline" something else passes into me with the complex quantum information that encodes the taste, a liquid key. Then the Leblanc is back in my head, with Prime authorisation this time. I can see the firmament underlying the Gallery, software cages for past sins.
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’ he says.
I nod and place the glass back on the table, stretching.
‘Much better. Thank you.’
‘Now, do you want to hear what the plan is?’ He smiles conspiratorially.
‘No.’ I wink at him.
Then I punch him in the face as hard as I can.
It’s not much of a blow. It glances off the underside of his jaw, and the impact of bone on bone jars my hand painfully. But it is quite satisfying to watch him fall down, eyes rolling in his head. I take the bottle of whisky from the table and walk to the door.
He looks up at me, genuinely astonished, rubbing his jaw. ‘What the hell was that for?’
‘For a lot of things. We’re done here. I just played along to get the Leblanc back. I do have one last job to do, but it’s not yours. I’m going to save Mieli, pay my debts, and then it is over. No more Jean le Flambeur.’
‘You don’t know what you are saying. You are not that different from me. That’s just a story you have told yourself. The only way to escape the desert is to turn it into a garden. Trust me.’
‘Not trusting myself was a lesson I learned pretty well in the Dilemma Prison.’
He gets up, slowly, face dark with anger now. ‘Do you really think you can just walk away? I have protocols for scenarios like this. You are not the only le Flambeur out there. There are plenty more in the Prison.’ A shudder goes through the Leblanc’s systems: a sudden conflict with access rights. The partial me is attempting to regain its control of the ship. That’s not good. The Ganimard-zoku can’t be far behind.
‘There is always a way out,’ I quote myself.
‘Not always,’ he says with a sad smile.
I grin and hold up the small golden key I stole from him when I smashed my glass.
‘Touché,’ I say. ‘Goodbye.’
Wait!’
I slam the glass door in his face and turn the key. It makes a small, final click in the lock. The glass frosts, and the other me becomes a statue, hands pressed against the door, mouth open to say words I no longer want to hear.
I stand in the Gallery, looking at the endless rows of frozen statues. I think about the other me – not the partial, the Prime who died to become me. What could have been so bad that he decided to become somebody else?
Here we are. All of us.
I could find out. All that I ever was that I thought was worth saving, past selves and identities, they are here, put in boxes like old letters that you can’t bring yourself to throw away.
I close my eyes. He was right about one thing. It is time for a spring cleaning.
I reach out my hands and mind to the Leblanc, and close the Gallery around me. I hold it in my lap. There is sunlight on my face again. The world is rocking, gently. There are screams of birds, and the soft, endless sound of the sea.
‘What is it that you are reading, Monsieur d’Andrezy?’ asks a female voice.
I blink, remove my sunglasses and squint at Miss Nellie Underdown, who is looking at me from beneath a white parasol with her great dark eyes, smiling. ‘It’s just that you seem so terrifically engrossed in it, I should want to read it after you. One does get bored on this long voyage, you know!’
‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ I get up and give her a slight bow. ‘Just a collection of rather weak detective stories. I could not finish it, in fact, and cannot in all honesty recommend it to you. But if you wish to be entertained, I am, of course, at your service.’ I offer her my arm. ‘How about a walk to the upper decks?’
She smiles demurely and hooks her small arm into mine. Later, standing in the bow of the ship, I make her gasp by throwing the book far into the sea. Its pages flutter like wings as it goes, and then it is lost in the foam of the Provence’s wake.
15
MIELI AND PROMETHEUS
The thief looks at Mieli. He looks younger than she remembers: his hair is thicker and jet-black, his eyebrows charcoal-dark. But his eyes and his arrogant smile are the same.
‘Dear friend,’ he says. ‘I am Jean le Flambeur. I steal things. Maybe you don’t remember me. I have been away a long time.’
‘Jean?’ she asks, in spite of herself. Her heart pounds. If he made it, maybe Perhonen did, too. She bites her lip. It is too early to give in to false hopes. The sting of Zinda’s betrayal is too fresh in her mind for her to have any confidence in the Universe.
The thief raises his eyebrows. ‘I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage!’
Of course. It’s just a partial, not a full gogol, just a conversation tree with a few neural states for colour. Mieli wraps her freshly fabbed toga tighter around her, suddenly self-conscious. Barbicane is looking at her thoughtfully. They are in a featureless grey room in the Invisible Realm of the Great Game, and the Elder looks just as out of place as she does. It feels like only the thief belongs there, in his minimalistic white suit, leaning back in the metal chair.
‘Never mind,’ she tells it. ‘Go on.’
‘I freely admit I have a lot of catching up to do, especially when it comes to making the acquaintance of charming ladies. The fault is all mine.’ He leans forward towards Mieli. ‘To make it very clear to the entire System, I am going to demonstrate what I do. A comeback with a splash, if you will, as I already told your colleagues. Any signal boost would be much appreciated – I don’t want anyone to miss it!’
He looks at a large silver watch on his wrist and taps it with a deft forefinger. ‘In approximately fifty-six minutes, baseline time, I am going to steal all the quantum information stored in the F-ring of this planet.’
Mieli looks at Barbicane. ‘What does he mean?’
‘An excellent question!’ the thief-partial says. ‘You will have to ask your friends at the Gringotts-Zoku if you want a full answer to that one. But to put it briefly, no self-respecting zoku member wants to carry all their zoku jewels around all the time – a bit incovenient without Bags of Holding. And in case of wars, accidents and such, you want to keep at least a part of your q-self stashed away somewhere safe, so that if the Reaper visits, you don’t have to start again as the quantum equivalent of a level one kobold.’ He sighs.
Mieli frowns. He doesn’t seem like himself. There is some hidden purpose behind this. But the thief she knows is only the latest chapter in his long life, and flamboyant announcements of upcoming crimes are something that the Jean le Flambeur of times past was well known for.
‘Apparently, one hot jewel banking trend these days is that sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from nature. So if you want really long-term storage, you make your quantum memory look like natural objects. The rings are a good candidate. Introduce some rubidium impurities into the icy bodies there, couple them to the magnetosphere of Saturn, and you have a natural setting for quantum information storage. Hard vacuum, cold temperatures – a bit retro, but much more long-lived than the warm wet synthbio components the routers use. The F-ring has a few petaqubits of zoku data, mostly relating to Supra City infrastructure zokus, as I understand.’