The Quantum Thief

  Keeping an eye on Mieli, I take a sip from the one champagne glass that has miraculously survived the destruction. It helps my throat a little. Then I sit down on a wall fragment. Mieli and my ex-girlfriend look at each other, then slowly position themselves so that they can keep an eye on both each other and me.

  ‘Now, it is flattering to have women fight over me, but trust me, I’m not really worth it.’

  ‘At least we agree on something,’ Raymonde says.

  You know, says Perhonen, I’m about four hundred ks up, but I can still burn your hand off if you don’t drop that gun.

  Ouch.

  Please. It’s an antique. It probably doesn’t even work. I’m bluffing. Please don’t tell Mieli. I’m trying to resolve this without anyone getting hurt. Pretty please?

  For such a fast-thinking gogol, the ship considers its response for an uncomfortably long time. All right, it finally says. One minute.

  Time constraints again. You are worse than she is.

  ‘Raymonde, meet Mieli. Mieli, meet Raymonde. Raymonde and I used to be an item; Mieli, on the other hand, tends to treat me like an item. But I have something of a debt of honour to discharge to her, so I don’t complain. Much.’ I take a deep breath. ‘Raymonde, it was nothing personal. I just need to have my old self back.’ She rolls her eyes. She looks achingly familiar now.

  I turn to Mieli. ‘And seriously, was this really necessary? I had things under control.’

  ‘I was about to tear your head off,’ Raymonde says.

  ‘I suppose the safe word is one of the many things I don’t remember,’ I say and sigh. ‘Look. Forget about you and me. I am looking for something. You can help me. You are a tzaddik – very cool, by the way – so I’m betting there is something we can help you with in turn. For example, gogol pirates. Lots of them. On a platter.’ They both look at me for a moment, and I’m certain the fighting is about to start again.

  ‘All right,’ Raymonde says. ‘Let’s talk.’

  Breathing a sigh of relief, I toss the gun to the floor with a clatter, and thank Hermes that it doesn’t go off.

  ‘I don’t suppose we could have some privacy?’ I say, looking at Mieli. She looks like a wreck: her toga is in tatters again, and her wings look like a pair of ragged, bare tree branches. But she still looks threatening enough to tell me what she thinks without words. ‘Forget I asked.’

  Raymonde stands in front of the shattered window, hands shoved in the sleeves of her gown. ‘What happened?’ I ask her. ‘Who was I here? Where did I go?’

  ‘You really don’t remember?’

  ‘I really don’t.’ Not yet, anyway. The new memories are still reassembling themselves in my head, too much to take in at a moment’s notice; I can feel a strange headache coming on with them.

  She shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I left something here. Secrets. Tools. Memories. Not just the exomemory, but something else, bigger. Do you know where?’

  ‘No.’ She frowns. ‘But I have an idea. It’s going to take something bigger than just gogol pirates to get me to help you, though. And your new girlfriend owes me a new apartment.’

  Interlude

  WISDOM

  It is only a few steps from death back to life. There is light ahead: but every step is like being immersed in water, slow and heavy, and Bathilde feels herself floating upwards, rising out of her quicksuited body. She sees herself struggling forward below, brass helmet gleaming in the light. It seems right, for some reason. She lets her body fall away and rises towards the light above. Finally, she thinks—

  —only to step into Martian twilight, almost falling down, but supported by a pair of strong arms. She gasps for breath, blinking. Then she looks back at the Hallway of Birth and Death; a low, long, rectangular structure printed by builder Quiet. It sits in a low ditch a mile away from the city’s path, in Martian desert proper. It is nothing but gravel and sand glued together with bacterial paste, with thin slits and peepholes on its sides. Close to the hulking phoboi wall of the Quiet, it looks like a child’s construction block. But inside—

  ‘Oh my,’ Bathilde says, drawing a deep breath.

  ‘So, what did you think?’ asks Paul Sernine, the architect of her brief death. He supports her gently, guiding her away from the exit as other dazed guests emerge. Her protégé is grinning triumphantly behind the glass of his helmet. ‘You look like you could use a drink.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Bathilde. Paul offers her a champagne glass in a little q-dot bubble. She takes it and drinks, glad of the clear taste in the dry air of the helmet. ‘Paul, you are a genius.’

  ‘You don’t regret your patronage, then?’

  Bathilde smiles. All around, the party is getting started. She is glad that the publicity campaign was successful; viral co-memories of the intense moments in the Hallway. And it was a nice symbolic gesture to have it outside the Wall, to add a tiny bit of danger to the proceedings.

  ‘Not in the slightest. We’ll have to get the Voice to incorporate something like this in the city permanently. It would do us a world of good. Whatever gave you the idea?’

  Paul arches his dark eyebrows. ‘You know how much I hate being asked that.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ Bathilde says. ‘You love talking about yourself.’

  ‘Well, if you must know – I took inspiration from Noguchi’s Hiroshima piece. Birth and death. Something we’ve forgotten how to face.’

  ‘Curious,’ Bathilde says. ‘That is not that different from something that Marcel over there’ – she points at a young black man looking at the Hallway’s yawning black exit with a disdainful look – ‘proposed to the Voice a few months ago.’

  ‘Ideas are cheap,’ Paul says. ‘It’s all in the execution.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Bathilde says. ‘Or perhaps your new muse helped.’ A red-haired woman in a dark quicksuit is standing a short distance away, touching the rough surface of the Hallway.

  ‘Something like that,’ Paul says, looking down.

  ‘Don’t waste more time talking to an old woman,’ Bathilde says. ‘Go and celebrate.’

  Paul grins at her again, and for a moment she almost regrets that she decided to be professional with him. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he says, gives her a slight bow and vanishes into the quicksuited crowd, an instant centre of attention.

  Bathilde looks at the Hallway again. Such an innocent thing from the outside, but, inside, the angles and lights and shapes resonate in the design of any human-derived brain, triggering cortical mechanisms that simulate a near-death experience. An architectural magic trick. She thinks back to her many deaths and births and realises that she has never experienced that before. A genuinely new experience. She smiles to herself: how long has it been since that? She touches the bracelet Watch that Paul gave her, tracing the word Sapientia engraved in it.

  ‘Hi,’ says the red-haired girl. There, at least, is genuine youth, untouched by death, temporary or otherwise.

  ‘Hello, Raymonde,’ Bathilde says. ‘Proud of your boyfriend?’

  The girl smiles shyly. ‘You can’t imagine,’ she says.

  ‘Oh, but I can,’ Bathilde says. ‘It is a difficult thing: you watch them do something like that and then you start wondering if you are good enough for them. Am I right?’

  The girl stares at her mutely. Bathilde shakes her head. ‘My apologies. I am a bitter old woman. I am happy for you, of course.’ She touches the girl’s gloved hand. ‘What were you going to say? Interrupting is a problem we old people have, we think we have heard it many times before. I’m looking forward to being a Quiet again soon. It will force me to listen.’

  Raymonde bites her lip. ‘I wanted to ask you for … advice.’

  Bathilde laughs. ‘Well, if you want to hear bitter truths about life filtered through a few centuries of experience, you’ve come to the right place. What do you want to know?’

  ‘It’s about children.’

  ‘What is there to know? I’ve had them myself: troubleso
me, but can be worth it if you are careful. Exomemory tells you all you need to know. Get a Resurrection Man to help you with genome splicing, or go to the black market for offworld designs if you are feeling ambitious. Just add water. And poof.’ Bathilde chides herself for enjoying Raymonde’s expression when she makes an expansive gesture with her hands.

  ‘That’s not what I was going to ask,’ Raymonde says. ‘I meant … about him. Paul.’ She closes her eyes. ‘I can’t read him. I don’t know if he is ready.’

  ‘Walk with me,’ Bathilde says. She leads them around the Hallway, towards the phoboi walls. Above, the sky is getting dark.

  ‘I know this much,’ Bathilde says. ‘When I speak to Paul, he reminds me of someone I knew a long time ago, someone who gave me a little bit of a heartbreak.’ She laughs. ‘I gave as well as I got, to be sure.’ She touches the already crumbling wall of the Hallway. ‘There are those of us who live a really long time,’ she says. ‘We are the ones who learn not to change, no matter what happens. Bodies, gogols, transformations, there is something about us that stays the same. It’s an evolutionary thing; otherwise we would effectively die by metamorphosis, never a light at the end of the tunnel, just time chipping away at us.

  ‘Whatever Paul has told you, he is one of us, I can tell that much. So you have to decide if the real him – not this smiling architect – is someone you want as the father of your children.

  ‘But he is trying, and he is trying for you.’

  ‘Here you are,’ Paul says. ‘My two favourite ladies.’ He embraces Raymonde. ‘Did you go inside yet?’

  Raymonde shakes her head.

  ‘You should go,’ Bathilde says. ‘It’s not as bad as it seems at first. Have fun.’

  The two enter the Hallway from the other end. As Bathilde watches, she thinks of that time in the Olympus Palace, a running watercolour of a memory: the time she danced with the King. She wonders if her eyes looked like Raymonde’s then.

  11

  THE THIEF AND THE TZADDIKIM

  The tzaddikim are not what I expect. I imagined a secret lair of some kind, with trophies of past victories, perhaps; a council room with a round table, with high chairs, each customised with each tzaddik’s personal iconography.

  Instead, we meet in the Silence’s kitchen.

  The Futurist fidgets with her glass impatiently, rolling its base around on the wooden table. She is a red, sleek creature, a cross between a human being and an ancient automobile, unable to stay still.

  ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Would somebody please tell me what we are doing here?’

  The Silence lives in a little zeppelin house in Montgolfiersville: a gondola suspended from a teardrop-shaped bag of gas, tethered to the city. The kitchen is small but has a hightech look to it. In addition to the fabber, it has traditional cooking implements, knives, pots and pans and other chrome and metal instruments I do not recognise: clearly, the Silence is someone who cares about food. Between the two of us and the six tzaddikim, things are somewhat intimate; I’m squeezed between Mieli and a skull-faced tall man in black – the Bishop. His bony knee presses against my thigh.

  Our host opens a bottle of wine with a deft motion of his wrist. Like the Gentleman, he wears a faceless mask, but of dark blue, along with a utility fog cloak that makes him look like a living blot of ink. He is tall and even though he hasn’t said anything so far, there is a gravitas about him. He fills our glasses quickly and efficiently, then nods towards Raymonde.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ she says, with the rasping voice of her tzaddik persona. ‘I have here two offworld visitors with whom I had a little … misunderstanding two nights ago. I have reason to believe that they might be sympathetic to our cause. Perhaps you can explain it yourself, Jean.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. Mieli agreed to let me do the talking, with the understanding that if things go south, I will be shut down with extreme prejudice. ‘My name is Jean le Flambeur,’ I say. ‘You can ’blink that if you wish.’ I pause for a moment for effect, but it is hard to read an audience wearing masks.

  ‘I used to be a citizen of the Oubliette, in a past life. My associate here and I are looking for some property that I left here. Your tzaddik colleague, whom I have some previous … familiarity with has assured me that she can help me. In return, we are offering to help you.’ I try the wine. Old Badeker Solarancio. The Silence has good taste.

  ‘I’m not sure we should be having this conversation,’ the Futurist says. ‘Why would we involve third parties in anything? And for God’s sake – am I the only one who is smelling the Sobornost tech this bitch here is stuffed full of?’ She whips her gaze from Raymonde to the Silence. ‘If anything, we should be interrogating them. At the very least. If you have some personal history with these creatures, deal with it yourself. There is no need to compromise the rest of us.’

  ‘I take full responsibility for everything, of course,’ Raymonde says. ‘But I believe that what they can do could help us to finally get to grips with the cryptarchs.’

  ‘I thought you were training your little pet detective for that,’ Cockatrice says. Her outfit is somewhat more revealing than those of the others, a red leotard, a Venetian-style mask that leaves her blond locks free and shows a sensual, large mouth. Under other circumstances, I would be focusing all my attention on her.

  Raymonde is quiet for a moment. ‘That is a different discussion, and does not concern us here,’ Raymonde says. ‘In any case, we have to pursue more than one option at a time. What I’ve been trying to say is we are treating the symptoms. Offworld tech. Gogol pirates. But we are just as affected by the underlying infection as the people we are trying to protect.’ She leans across the table. ‘So when I see an opportunity to work with an outside agent who can help us with that, I bring it to your attention.’

  ‘And the price?’ the Rat King asks. He has a young, high voice and a thick body. His comical-looking rodent mask leaves his chin bare, showing a rough five o’clock shadow.

  ‘Let me worry about the price,’ Raymonde says.

  ‘So what exactly can they do that we can’t?’ The Futurist looks at me suspiciously.

  I give her a sweet smile. ‘We can come to that in a moment, Mme Diaz.’ I can’t see her face, but a satisfying shudder of shock goes through her, turning her into a red blur for a moment.

  I haven’t been idle for the two days it has taken Raymonde to set the meeting up. Mieli gave me a database whose source I did not dare to ask about, containing fairly solid leads to the identities of all the tzaddikim. I was able to confirm most of it with a little footwork and gevulot pilfering. As a result, I don’t know the names of their pets or favourite sexual positions, but I know enough.

  ‘But before we come to that, it might be useful for us to understand what exactly it is that you people are trying to do.’

  ‘Three things,’ Raymonde says. ‘To uphold the ideals of the Oubliette. To protect its people from gogol pirates and other outside forces. And to find out who really rules it, and destroy them.’

  ‘It started with the Voice,’ Raymonde says. A quick ’blink fills me in on the details of the Oubliette e-democracy system; specialised co-memories serving as votes and public policy decisions, implemented by the office of the Mayor and the public Quiet servants. ‘There were … strange patterns in the decisions. Opening up to the outside world. Granting citizenship to offworlders. Weakening tech restrictions.

  ‘Soon after that, the first gogol pirates started appearing. The Silence was among the first who suffered.’ She touches the tall tzaddik’s hand. ‘Our system is not stable if you introduce outside forces. The Quiet could not deal with technology disruptions. So we decided to. We have backers. With their own interests, of course. But aligned with those of the Oubliette.

  ‘We were able to do good. But whenever we saw a pattern, a way to fix things more permanently – to shut down a pirate radio transmitting stolen uploads, or excise a polluted gevulot network – things tended to disappear. The pirat
es know how to choose their targets and how to get close to them. They are good at what they do, but it is clear that they have help.

  ‘For some time now we have known that exomemory has been compromised. There are people, one or more, who are manipulating it. To what extent, how or why, we don’t know. We call them cryptarchs. The hidden rulers. Or, as the Futurist puts it, fucking bastards.

  ‘We believe in what the Revolution stood for. A human Mars. A place where everyone owns their own minds, a place where we belong to ourselves. And that is not possible when someone behind the curtain is pulling our strings.’

  Raymonde looks at me. ‘So that’s our price. Give us a way to find the cryptarchs, and we will give you what is yours.’

  ‘Of course,’ says the Bishop, ‘that assumes that the Gentleman’s high opinion of you is in any way justified.’

  ‘M. Reverte.’ I give him my most sharklike grin. ‘It took me two days to find out who you are. These cryptarchs – they know you. In fact, I think they keep you around. You fit the system they have created. You keep it stable. And that’s exactly what they want.’

  I drain my glass and lean back in my chair. ‘You never play dirty. You are glorified cops, when you need to be revolutionaries. Criminals. And that’s definitely something I can help you with. Is there any wine left?’

  ‘Frankly,’ says the Futurist, ‘this is exactly what we should be fighting. Offworld influences who think they are better than us.’ She looks around the room. ‘I vote we kick them off the planet and get back to the real business. And the Gentleman should be reprimanded for her behaviour.’

  There are nods around the table, and I curse myself for not reading them right; I’m still not quite as good with gevulot as a native Martian, in spite of the gogol pirate engines. This is not going to end well.