I climb down the robot, slowly.
‘What were you doing up there, anyway?’ he asks, looking puzzled.
‘I just wanted to get a better view of the gameboard,’ I say. ‘You could say I’m something of a games enthusiast.’ I dust off dirt from my jacket. ‘Is it you who maintains all the flowers here? It’s beautiful.’
‘That’s me.’ He hooks his thumbs under the suspenders of his coveralls, grinning. ‘Years of work. It’s always been a place for lovers. I’m too old for that – a few rounds as a Quiet takes those kinds of thoughts out of you – but I enjoy keeping it nice for the young people. Are you visiting?
‘That’s right.’
‘Well spotted; this is the kind of place most tourists would not find. Your girlfriend seems to like it, too.’
‘What do you mean my girlfriend – oh.’
Mieli is standing in the shadow of one of the bigger robots, with a firefly guide hovering above her head. ‘Hello, darling,’ she says. I tense, expecting to be plunged into an inferno. But she just smiles like an icicle.
‘Did you get lost?’ I ask her. ‘I missed you.’ I wink at the gardener.
‘I’ll give you youngsters some privacy. Nice meeting you,’ the gardener says and blurs out, disappearing into the robot ruins.
‘You know,’ Mieli says, ‘a while back you said that we were going to be professionals.’
‘I can explain-’
I don’t even see the punch coming, just feel a sudden impact on my nose, calculated precisely to cause maximum amount of pain without breaking the bone, that tosses me back against the robot. Then, a series of kicks that hammer me against it and empty my lungs, setting my solar plexus on fire. And finally, light knuckle percussions on my cheekbones and one that rattles my jaw. Ever faithful to its cruel parameters, my body leaves me gasping for breath and feeling oddly disassociated, as if looking at Mieli’s impossibly fast movements from the outside.
‘That is me being professional,’ she hisses. ‘In my koto in Oort, we never cared that much for explanations.’
‘Thanks,’ I gasp. ‘For not pressing the hell button.’
‘That’s because you found something.’ She gets a distant look that tells me she is going through this body’s short-term memories. ‘Let’s see it.’ She holds out a hand.
I pass her the Watch. She tosses it up and down thoughtfully. ‘All right. Get up. We will talk about this later. Sightseeing is over.’
‘I know you are thinking about stealing it back,’ she says as we take a spidercab back to the hotel. She seems to be enjoying the ride as the diamond legs of the carriage-like vehicle telescope out, taking it up to the rooftops of the Maze.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. I can recognise the signals now. You caught me twice with that pickpocket trick, but not again.’
‘Sorry, it’s a reflex. Makes it more of a challenge, I suppose,’ I say, massaging my smarting face. ‘How long does it take for this body to heal?’
‘As long as I want it to.’ She leans back. ‘What is it about it, anyway? Stealing.’
‘It’s…’ It’s an instinct, I want to say. It’s like making love. It’s becoming more than I am. It’s art. But she would not understand, so I merely repeat the old joke. ‘It’s about respecting other people’s property. I make it my property so that I can properly respect it.’
She is silent after that, watching the scenery leap past.
The hotel is a massive building near the glider port where we arrived from the beanstalk station. We have a set of large, impressively Time-consuming rooms near the top floor, not decorated opulently enough for my taste (sleek lines and glass surfaces of Xanthean designers), but at least there is a fabber so I can replace my clothes.
Except that I don’t get a chance. She points at the small table and chair in front of the balcony. ‘Sit.’ She places the Watch in front of me. ‘Talk to me. What in Dark Man’s name happened at the agora?’ She clenches and unclenches her fingers. I swallow.
‘All right. I saw myself.’ She raises her eyebrows.
‘It was not another memory, not like on the ship. It must have been a gevulot construct of some kind: somebody else saw it too. It led me to the garden. So clearly, we are getting somewhere.’
‘Perhaps. It did not occur to you to fill me in on this? Are there any reasons for me to let you out of my sight again? Or not to recommend to my employer that we should take off the silk gloves and take a more… direct approach with your brain?’
‘It was… sudden.’ I look down at the Watch. The sunlight glints off it, and again, I notice the engravings on the side. ‘It felt… private.’
She grabs my face with impossibly strong fingers and turns it up. Her eyes look unblinking into mine, angry and green.
‘As long as we are in this together, there is no private. Do you understand? If I need to know, you will tell me your every childhood memory, every masturbation fantasy, every teenage embarrassment. Is that clear?’
‘I do wonder,’ I say slowly and carefully, ‘if there is something affecting your professionalism. And I would note that I’m not the one who screwed up the Prison exit. I’m just the one who got us out of it.’
She lets go and looks out of the window for a moment. I get up and get a drink from the fabber, Kingdom-era cognac, without offering her a glass. Then I study the Watch again. There are zodiac symbols, in a grid of seven by seven, Mars, Venus, and others I don’t recognise. And underneath, cursive script: To Paul, with love, from Raymonde. And that word again, Thibermesnil, in copperplate typeface.
Could you have a look at these? I whisper to Perhonen. You will still talk to me without hitting me, right?
I don’t need to hit you, the ship says. I have lasers. I’ll see what I can find. Its tone is unusually terse: I’m not surprised. I tell myself it’s the cognac alone that makes my face burn.
‘All right,’ Mieli says. ‘Let’s talk about this thing you stole.’
‘Found.’
‘Whatever.’ She holds it up. ‘Tell me about this. The Oubliette data I have is clearly obsolete.’ Her tone is colourless. A part of me wants to break that icy veneer again, dangerous or not, to see how deep it goes.
‘It’s a Watch. A device that stores Time as quantum cash – unforgeable, uncopyable quantum states that have finite lifetimes, counterfeit-proof, measures the time an Oubliette citizen is allowed in a baseline human body. Also responsible for their encrypted channel to the exomemory. A very personal device.’
‘And you think it was yours? Does it have what we need?’ ‘Maybe. But we are missing something. The Watch is meaningless on its own, without the public keys – gevulot – inside the brain.’
She taps the Watch with a fingernail. ‘I see.’
‘This is how it works. The exomemory stores data – all data – that the Oubliette gathers, the environment, senses, thoughts, everything. The gevulot keeps track of who can access what, in real time. It’s not just one public/private key pair, it’s a crazy nested hierarchy, a tree of nodes where each branch can only by unlocked by the root node. You meet someone and agree what you can share, what they can know about you, what you can remember afterwards.’
‘Sounds complicated.’
‘It is. The Martians have a dedicated organ for it.’ I tap my head. ‘A privacy sense. They feel what they are sharing, what is private and what isn’t. They also do something called co-remembering, sharing memories with others just by sharing the appropriate key with them. We just have the baby version. They give the visitors a bit of exomemory and an interface to it, reasonably well-defined. But there is no way we can appreciate the subtleties.’