Isidore looks at her, calmly. It is always fascinating to watch what people do when they feel they can talk to you: he briefly wonders if he would lose that as a tzaddik. But then there would be other ways to find things out.
‘Were you aware of any new friends that M. Deveraux might have made recently?’
‘No. Why?’
Élodie gives her mother a tired look. ‘That’s how they operate, Mom. The pirates. Social engineering. They gather bits of your gevulot so they can decrypt your mind.’
‘Why would they want him? He was nothing special. He could make chocolate. I don’t even like chocolate.’
‘I think your husband was exactly the kind of person the gogol pirates would be interested in, a specialised mind,’ Isidore says. ‘The Sobornost have an endless appetite for deep learning models, and they are obsessed with human sensory modalities, especially taste and smell.’
He takes care to include Élodie in the conversation’s gevulot. ‘And his chocolate certainly is special. His assistant was kind enough to let me try some when I visited the shop: freshly made, a sliver of that dress that arrived from the factory this morning. Absolutely incredible.’
Disgust twists Élodie’s face into a mask, like an echo of the chocolatier’s death. Then she vanishes behind the blur of a full privacy screen, jumps up and runs up the stairs with three hasty, low-gravity leaps.
‘My apologies,’ says Isidore. ‘I didn’t mean to upset her.’
‘Don’t worry. She has been putting on a brave face, but this is very difficult for us.’ She puts out her cigarette and wipes her eyes. ‘I suspect she will run off and see her boyfriend and then she’ll come back and not talk to me. Children.’
‘I understand,’ Isidore says, getting up. ‘You have been very helpful.’
She looks disappointed. ‘I thought… that you would ask more questions. My daughter said you always do, that you always ask something the tzaddiks never think of.’ There is a strange eagerness on her face.
‘It is not always about the questions,’ Isidore says. ‘My condolences again.’ He tears a page from his notebook and scrawls a signature on it, attaching a small co-memory. Then he hands it to the woman. ‘Please give it to Élodie, as a form of apology. Although I’m not sure if she is a fan anymore.’
As he leaves, he can’t help whistling: he has the full shape of the mystery now. He runs a finger along it in his mind, and it makes a clear sound, like a half-full glass of wine.
Isidore eats octopus risotto for lunch in a small restaurant on the edge of the park. The ink leaves interesting patterns in the napkin when he dabs his lips. He sits and watches the people in the park for half an hour, scribbling in his notebook, making observations. Then he gets up and goes back to the chocolate factory to spring his trap.
The biodrones let him in. At some point the Resurrection Men have come and taken the body away. Its outline and the chocolate stain remain on the floor, but obscured by privacy fog now, like the discarded skin of a snake, made of light. Isidore sits on a rickety metal chair in a corner and waits. The sound of the machines is strangely soothing.
‘I know you are here, you know,’ he says after a while.
Élodie steps out from behind one of the machines, unblurred by gevulot. She looks older, showing more of her true self: her eyes are hard.
‘How did you know?’
‘Footprints,’ Isidore says, pointing at the chocolate stains on the floor. ‘Not as careful as last time. Also, you are late.’
‘The co-memory you left with your note was crap,’ she says. ‘It took me a while to figure out you wanted to meet here.’
‘I thought you were interested in detecting. But then, first impressions can be deceiving.’
‘If this is about my father again,’ Élodie says, ‘I’m just going to leave. I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend.’
‘I’m sure you are. But it’s not about your father, it’s about you.’ He wraps his words in gevulot so tight that only the two of them will hear them, or will ever remember them being spoken. ‘What I’m wondering about is if it really was that easy for you.’
‘What?’
‘Not thinking about consequences. Giving your father’s private gevulot keys to a stranger.’
She says nothing, but she is staring at him now, every muscle tense.
‘What did they promise you? Going to the stars? A paradise, all for you, like a Kingdom princess, only better? It doesn’t work that way, you know.’
Élodie takes a step towards him, spreading her hands slowly. Isidore rocks back and forth on his chair.
‘So the keys did not work. And Sebastian – vasilev boyfriend, one of them – was not happy. He does not really care about you, by the way: it is just someone else’s emotion they put in him, a mashup.
‘But it seemed real enough. He got angry. Maybe he threatened to leave you. You wanted to please him. And you knew that your father had a place with gevulot, where one could do things undisturbed. Maybe he came with you to do it.
‘I have to say you were very clever. The chocolate tasted subtly wrong. He is in the dress, isn’t he? His mind. You used the fabber to put it there. They had just finished the originaclass="underline" you melted it and made a copy. The drones delivered it to the shop.
‘All that data, encoded in chocolate crystals, ready to be bought and shipped away to the Sobornost, no questions asked, not like trying to set up a pirate radio to transmit it, a mind all wrapped up in a nice chocolate shell, like an Easter egg.’
Élodie stares at him, blank-faced.
‘What I don’t understand is how you could bring yourself to do it,’ he says.
‘It didn’t matter,’ she hisses. ‘He didn’t make a sound. There was no pain. He wasn’t even dead when I left. No one lost anything. They will bring him back. They bring us all back. And then they make us Quiet.
‘It’s unfair. We didn’t fuck up their fucking Kingdom. We didn’t make the phoboi. It’s not our fault. We should live forever properly, like they do. We should have the right.’
Élodie opens her fingers, slowly. Hair-thin rainbows of nanofilament shoot out from underneath her fingernails, stretching out like a fan of cobras.
‘Ah,’ says Isidore. ‘Upload tendrils. I was wondering where those were.’
Élodie walks towards him in odd, jerky steps. The tips of the tendrils glow. For the first time, it occurs to Isidore that he might indeed be very late for the party.
‘You should not have done this in a private place,’ she says. ‘You should have brought your tzaddik. Seb’s friends will pay for you as well. Maybe even more than for him.’
The upload filaments snap forward, whips of light, towards his face. There are ten pinpricks in his skull, and then an odd dullness. He loses control of his limbs, finds himself getting up from the chair, muscles responding involuntarily. Élodie stands in front of him, arms outspread, like a puppeteer.
‘Is that what he said? That it wouldn’t matter? That they would fix your father no matter what?’ His words come out in a stutter. ‘Have a look.’
Isidore opens his gevulot to her, giving her the co-memory from the underworld, the chocolatier screaming and fighting and dying again and again in the room below the ground.
She stares at him, open-eyed. The tendrils drop. Isidore’s knees give way. The concrete floor is hard.
‘I didn’t know,’ she says. ‘He never-’ She stares at her hands. ‘What did I-’ Her fingers clench into claws, and the tendrils follow, flashing towards her head, vanishing into her hair. She falls to the ground, limbs spasming. He does not want to watch, but he has no strength to move, not even to close his eyes.