The thief looks at Mieli from behind steepled fingers. ‘I am going to take it all.’ He glances at his watch again. ‘In fifty-six minutes! We’re in a fast-time Realm, I see. Very clever.’ He looks around. ‘Is that why the setting is so pedestrian? Or is it just traditional? Is one of you the bad cop?’ He leans towards Mieli again. ‘Is it you? You are far too beautiful to be the bad cop.’
Mieli narrows her eyes. ‘You have no idea,’ she says.
‘Ooh! Now I’m intrigued! At least it sounds like we have time to get to know each other. And by all means, think as hard as you can. It won’t help you.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ Mieli asks.
‘Why does a scorpion sting? It’s in my nature!’ He purses his lips. ‘But yes, I know, property! How pedestrian, Jean!’ He winks at Mieli. ‘Well to be completely honest, this whole thing is a farewell gig. I have decided to retire after this one last job, and this little planet of yours caught my eye – Saturn is the god of old age, after all. And Jean le Flambeur, King of Saturn has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?’
Mieli turns to Barbicane.
‘What are you – we – doing about this?’ She glances at the partial. It is smiling impassively, and giving her a lewd look she does not care for at all. ‘I take it can’t eavesdrop?’
‘No, we are in a sandbox here – nothing gets out.’ Barbicane plays with the coarse red hairs of his sideburns, braiding them with the tiny golden fingers of his manipulator arm.
‘My dear, the problem is not so much the nature of his crime, but certain information we believe he has in his possession. That is the reason we are involved. Please go on, my villainous friend.’
‘Thank you,’ the thief says. ‘You are far more polite than most of the people I have been speaking to. And your sandbox is hardly secure, by the way. Well, if you are a three-year-old child, perhaps—’
‘Please,’ Barbicane says, exasperated.
‘Just pointing out obvious facts! And speaking of obvious, I know what you must be thinking. You are zoku – distributed quantum minds with billions of members! What is to stop you from forming a dedicated detective zoku to apprehend Jean le Flambeur, that mischief-maker, and just throwing enough jewelled sleuths at the problem until you catch me?’
The thief inspects his fingernails. ‘How did it work out for you last time, Barbicane?’
Mieli takes a deep breath. In a way, the purpose radiating from the Great Game jewel and a touch of her old irritation at the thief make her feel clear-headed. Perhaps this is an opportunity, she thinks. If I provide useful information to the Great Game, I can get closer to the Kaminari jewel again.
But it means betraying the thief.
The thought makes her gut wrench. We had our differences, but we fought side by side. This place deserves every misery he can serve them. Is it really even him, or some other copy from the Dilemma Prison?
Or – is he still working for the pellegrini? He must be after the Kaminari jewel. He knows they have it. Then this is a distraction. I can reveal anything that does not compromise the true goal. It might even help him.
How do I get a message to him?
She looks at the partial. It is tapping at the surface of the table now with its fingers in an annoying irregular rhythm.
‘Young lady, you seem thoughtful,’ Barbicane says. ‘It goes without saying that anything you can share with the zoku about your experiences with young le Flambeur here would be much appreciated.’ The zoku Elder’s expression is grim. The jolly gentleman is gone, and only something much harder and older and colder remains.
He lowers his voice. ‘Let us be grown-ups here. We are aware of your background, Mieli. We offered you an opportunity to start again. Your quantum self is all that matters to us. If you feel any misplaced loyalty towards le Flambeur, I suggest you discard it quickly. You have formed your own zoku here already. There are people here who care for you. Do you want him to destroy all that?’
Barbicane hovers up from his chair and floats next to the thief-partial. It looks at him curiously, with uncharacteristic, infinite patience.
‘Let me tell you something about le Flambeur. You may think you know him, but you don’t. He will charm you. He will wear whatever face he needs to get what he wants. I knew him, when I was young and foolish, and he did that to me. But when the time comes, you are just another tool to him, to be used and discarded when you have served your purpose.
‘When he disappeared, I thought his sins had caught up with him, or that he had finally abandoned his profession. He reappeared a few days ago. He came to my old primary zoku, the Gun Club, in disguise, to steal an old ship of his. Making it was one of those youthful follies I regret. Making his escape, he killed one of the younger Gun Club members, a girl called Chekhova, not much older than you. A truedeath: all her jewels were destroyed with her mind. She got in his way.’ He leans closer to the partial. ‘I don’t think you can hear me, le Flambeur,’ he says, ‘but if you can, you are not going to get away with that.‘
He presses his gun arm against the partial’s head. There is a boom and a white flash, and the dull wet thump of falling simulated flesh.
Barbicane takes a deep breath. ‘Excuse me,’ he says. ‘I feel a little better now.’ He extends his manipulator arm to Mieli. ‘Shall we go and talk to the rest of the zoku now?’
In the Invisible Realm, fifty-six minutes is a long time. Mieli was expecting something like the battlespace virs of Sobornost, direct sensory awareness of vast and complex systems, a hub of coordination and control. Instead, it resembles nothing as much as a vast board game, played with thoughts; an endless black space, where colourful beads joined by silver string form a labyrinth of threads. She can zoom in to each of them with a thought, receive a qupt of the most recent thought in the chain, contribute her own insights, routed to where they matter the most by quantum coordination algorithms. It feels like being inside a vast song.
She picks a thread at random.
—Purpose. Lenormand of the Ganimard-zoku, devoted to the meme of crime in the posthuman context. What is his purpose, really? I do not believe this is the real le Flambeur but a work of conceptual art created by an as yet unidentified zoku—
—Conceptual art: our Martian agents have indicated that le Flambeur under the alias of Paul Sernine has a history of conceptual art—
Mieli feels lost in the torrent of thought, tells her gogols and metacortex to condense it as much as possible. The Realm allows her to glimpse the entire history of the zoku’s thought-web at will, and the current threads are thin and frayed compared to the vast, shining tapestries of the past.
She turns her attention back to the thread she was following. I do need to contribute. Barbicane is watching me. She looks for a connection and casts the first thought that comes into her mind into the mix. Other minds seize it immediately and devour it.
—Paul Sernine – in his case, the conceptual artwork was created to conceal stored quantum information—