The Quantum Thief

  ‘Well,’ Marcel says. ‘Come see for yourself.’

  Owl Boy is in the nicest room in Marcel’s Edge house, looking away from the city. Most of the time he sits by the window quietly in his medfoam cocoon, eyes blank. But every now and then he speaks, long strings of rough throat-tearing clicks and metallic sounds.

  ‘The Resurrection Men don’t understand it,’ Marcel says. ‘There is a permanent coherent state in his brain, like one of the old quantum theories of consciousness: a condensate in the microtubules of his neurons, entangled with his exomemory. He may recover if it collapses, or he may not.’

  ‘I am very sorry to hear that,’ Sernine says. To Marcel’s surprise, the concern in his voice sounds genuine. ‘I wish there is something I could do.’

  ‘There is,’ Marcel says.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m giving up,’ Marcel says. ‘You have obviously found my ideas worth emulating in the past. So I’m going to sell them to you.’ He gestures at the studio. ‘All of them. I know you can afford it.’

  Sernine blinks. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s not worth it,’ Marcel says. ‘There are giants out there. We do not matter. Someone can step on us without noticing. There is no point in making pretty pictures. It’s all been done, anyway. We are ants. The only thing that matters is looking after each other.’

  Marcel touches Owl Boy’s hand. ‘I can do that for him,’ he says. ‘It is my responsibility. I can wait for him until he gets better. But I need Time to do that.’

  Sernine looks at them for a long time. ‘You are wrong,’ he says. ‘We are just as big as they are. Somebody needs to show them that.’

  ‘By building toy houses? If you wish.’ Marcel waves a hand, thinks a gevulot contract at Sernine. ‘It’s all yours. You won.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Sernine says quietly. Then he stands still and listens to the Owl Boy’s sounds. Finally, he clears his throat. ‘If we do this,’ he says slowly, ‘could I visit, from time to time?’

  ‘If you wish,’ Marcel says. ‘It makes a little difference to me.’

  They shake hands on the agreement. Out of courtesy, Marcel offers him cognac, but they drink quietly and after they are finished, Sernine leaves.

  Owl Boy is quieter after Marcel feeds him. He sits with him for a long time, telling the house to play ares nova. But when the stars come out, Marcel closes the curtains.

  13

  THE THIEF IN THE UNDERWORLD

  We stage my death the next morning, at the Place of Lost Time. This is where the Time beggars come to draw their last breath. It is an agora, with dark bronze statues of death and bones and suffering. And it is a show, meant to win the performers a few more precious seconds.

  ‘Time, Time, Time is running out,’ I shout at a passing couple, shaking a musical instrument made from fabber-printed bones. Behind me, two beggars make desperate love in the shadow of the statues. A group of nude morituri with painted faces dance a wild dance, pale bodies twisting and shaking.

  My throat is hoarse from shouting at tourists from other worlds who form the majority of our audience. A puzzled-looking Ganymedean in a willowy exoskeleton keeps throwing us slivers of Time as if feeding pigeons, seemingly missing the point.

  Don’t overdo it, Mieli says in my head. She is observing in the crowd, looking at the danse macabre of the square.

  It has to be believable I tell her.

  Of course you are. Anytime you are ready.

  All right. Go.

  ‘Time is the great Destroyer,’ I yell. ‘I could be Thor the God of Thunder and the Old Age would still wrestle me to the ground.’ I take a bow. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, behold – Death!’

  Mieli shuts me down remotely. My legs give away. My lungs stop working, and there is a terrible sense of drowning. Absurdly, the world remains as crisp and sharp as ever. My mind is still running inside the Sobornost body, but in stealth mode, while the rest of the body shuts down. My view lurches and I fall to the ground, as part of the Danse Macabre pattern I have been practising with my fellow soon-dead for the last couple of days. Our fallen bodies form words on the square: MEMENTO MORI.

  A ragged cheer goes up from the watching crowd, a note that is a mixture of guilt and fascination. There is a moment’s silence. The square resonates to the sound of heavy footsteps, approaching in unison. The Resurrection Men are coming.

  The crowd parts to let them pass. Over the years, the whole thing has been turned into a ritual, and even the Resurrection Men have accepted it. They walk to the square in rows of three, perhaps thirty of them, red-robed, with very tight gevulot hiding their faces and gait, Decanters hanging from their belts. A group of Resurrection Quiet follow them. They are vaguely humanoid but huge, three or four metres in height, with blank slabs of black shiny carapace for faces and a cluster of arms from their torso. I can feel their footsteps in the ground below me.

  A red-hooded figure appears above me, and holds a Decanter above my hacked Watch. For a moment, I feel irrational fear: surely these grim reapers have seen every possible attempt to cheat Death. But the brass device makes whirring sounds and then chimes, once. Gently, the Resurrection Man bends over and closes my eyes with one flick of his fingertips, a quick, professional movement. A Quiet lifts me up, and the slow drumming of the footsteps begins again, carrying me to the underworld.

  I can’t see anything, I tell Mieli. Any other senses you could turn on for me?

  I don’t want them noticing anything. And besides, you are supposed to play your part properly.

  It is an odd feeling, being carried through the tunnels into the underworld, listening to the echoes of footsteps in the city beneath the city and smelling the odd seaweed smell of the Quiet. The movement lulls me into a strange melancholy. I’ve never died, not in all my centuries. Perhaps the Oubliette has it right, the right approach to immortality; die every now and then and appreciate life.

  Still having fun? Perhonen asks.

  Hell, yes.

  I find that worrying. Time to wake up.

  I am back from the dead a second time, but without transition dreams. My eyes feel like they are covered in a layer of dust. I float in a clammy gel in a small space. It takes only a moment to regurgitate the little q-stone tool I brought and open the coffin door. It is not sealed with gevulot, simply with a mechanical lock: it is amazing how traditionalist the Resurrection Men are. The door slides aside, and I crawl out.

  I almost fall down: I am high up on the wall of a huge cylindrical chamber with metal walls, covered by a grid of little hatches. It makes me think of a filing cabinet. Vertical cables run through it. Below, a Quiet – an octopus-like cluster of machinery and arms – hangs from them. It is placing fresh bodies into storage. I close the hatch, leaving a small opening to see through, and wait for it to leave. It zooms up past me, climbing up the cables like a spider. Then I venture out again. Gel dripping from my skin, I look for handholds.

  All right, Perhonen says. I’m getting some imagery now. There are some maintenance shafts below: you can get Mieli in through there.

  I reconfigure the q-dot layer under my skin to grab the material on the wall and climb down the coffins of the sleeping dead.

  There is a constant background noise, a mix of distant and nearby hisses, rumbles and thumps. This is where the organs of the city are, pistons and engines and tubes where the synthbio repair organisms circulate, and the vast artificial muscles that move the city’s legs.

  A splay of transparent tubes snakes down a series of shafts along the edges of the chamber, with rungs along them clearly designed for smaller Quiet. They are just big enough for me to squeeze in. Perhonen is feeding me ghost images she can get from my WIMP beacon: around me there is a chaotic anatomy of chambers, tunnels and machines.

  I climb downward for more than fifty metres, skin scraping against the tubes and the walls of the shaft, stopping whenever I hear the scuttling of a Quiet. Once, a swarm of beetlesized Quiet swarms past me, ignoring me, climbin
g all over me, tiny eyes aglow in the dark, and it is hard to keep from screaming.

  Finally, there is another horizontal tunnel, this one made from some ceramic material, slick with bitter-smelling slippery fluids that drip from the porous walls. It is completely dark, and I switch to infrared, trying to ignore the ghost world of giants moving at the edge of my vision, focusing on the destination.

  After a dark eternity of crawling, the tunnel widens and slopes down: I have to struggle to keep from sliding. Finally, there is some light, an orange dusk in the distance, and I can feel a freezing cold wind. In the light, I can see that the tunnel widens into a sloping shaft, ending in a fine mesh that lets the light from the outside through.

  Tell Mieli I’m ready when she is, I tell Perhonen.

  She’s following your beacon. Should be there any moment.

  Getting to this point involved a lot of planning. The gevulot around the base of the city is incredibly thick: the Oubliette does not want to make the lives of gogol pirates any easier. So the only way to get in was from the inside.

  I take out the q-tool again and cut a hole in the mesh. It eats through the material smoothly. I feel a moment of vertigo, looking down. Then there is a gust of hot wind, and Mieli is there, hovering beneath the opening, wings extended.

  ‘What took you so long?’ I ask.

  She looks at me disapprovingly.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I say. ‘I should put some clothes on when I come back from the dead.’

  Mieli leads us through the tunnels towards the q-spider’s beacon that tells us where Unruh’s body is kept. I’m glad she is here: the tunnels and corridors are a blur. A few times she surrounds us with stealth fog as bigger Quiet pass us, wheezing and rumbling, carrying a stench of the sea.

  Then there are the crypt chambers, cylindrical rooms a hundred metres in diameter, surgically clean and chromed in contrast to the dark tunnels, coffin hatches engraved with names and codes. We find Unruh in the third one.

  As I enter, there is a hissing sound above: the mortician octopod Quiet has spotted us. It plummets down the cables towards me.

  Mieli shoves me aside and fires her ghostgun at it. There is a grinding sound as it brings itself to a stop, metres above me, hanging from the cables like a puppet, swaying back and forth. I look at its mandibled non-face and swallow.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Mieli says. ‘My gogol just took over its motor functions. The mind inside is going to be fine. We wouldn’t want to violate your professional ethics.’

  ‘I’m not so worried about that,’ I say. Mieli brought smart-fabric overalls for me, but I still feel cold. She gestures, and obediently the Quiet climbs up to fetch Unruh’s body. In a few moments, the coffin is on the floor in front of us. I open it with the q-tool.

  ‘Like I told Raymonde,’ I say, ‘we take from the rich and give to the poor.’

  The former millenniaire is pale, white and naked apart from the black disc of his Watch. Go on, I tell Perhonen. Its particle beam shows up in my augmented vision, a white pencil of light playing on the Watch, quantum teleporting the minute we stole back. The augmented view explodes into white noise as the ambient resurrection system starts working, dumping the latest synchronised version of Unruh’s mind back into his body from exomemory.

  Unruh’s body shudders. He draws a deep, wet, ragged breath. He coughs, and his eyes fly open.

  ‘What – where—’

  ‘I’m sorry, M. Unruh, this will only take a moment.’ Mieli hands me the upload helmet, a featureless black cap. I place it onto his head, and it sticks to his skull eagerly.

  Unruh laughs, only to be broken by a cough. ‘You again?’ He shakes his head. ‘I am disappointed. I did not expect you to be some common gogol pirate.’

  I smile. ‘I assure you that I don’t have a sliver of your gevulot, and I have returned all I stole from you. This is about something else. Hold still.’

  It was the obvious thing to do. How do you find out if there are shadowy forces manipulating people’s minds? You find a clean template, and make a before-and-after comparison. Unruh was young, with no previous resurrections or Quiet time: his mind as a whole had never passed through the resurrection system. Now it has, and if someone has done something to it, we will find out. If not – well, I have been to worse parties.

  ‘If I must.’ Unruh sighs. ‘I see. You stole a minute of my Time, and gave it back? To get access to my mind here? Interesting. I can’t imagine why. This is a very strange crime, M. le Flambeur. I wish I could stay and watch young M. Beautrelet catch you.’

  ‘I will pass him your regards,’ I say. ‘And by the way, I apologise for the surroundings. I wish we could have at least arranged a drink.’

  ‘It’s fine. I have recently experienced much more discomfort.’

  ‘While we wait,’ I say, ‘I wonder if you mind me asking how you knew we were going to be at your party?’

  ‘The letter.’ He waves a hand.

  ‘A letter?’

  He looks at me curiously. ‘It wasn’t from you? Oh, this is even richer than I imagined. Such a shame that I have to miss all this. A letter in my library, from you. We could not figure out how it got there. M. Beautrelet thought there was something wrong with the exomemory—’

  We are getting the data now, Perhonen says. It does indeed look like there have been some changes, especially in the—

  Unruh’s features twist into a snarl. He goes for my throat, white fingers digging into my flesh. He screams, a terrible, tearing sound, slamming his forehead against my face. My vision goes red in a haze of pain.

  Mieli pulls him off me, twisting his arms behind his back. ‘Le Flambeur!’ he shouts, in a different voice. ‘He will come for you. Le Roi will come for you!’

  Then he goes limp in Mieli’s grip as his Time runs out again.

  I massage my throat. ‘Well,’ I say. ‘I’d say that if further proof of manipulation of Oubliette minds is required, we’ve got it.’

  We got the data, Perhonen says. It is very strange.

  Mieli cocks her head, listening. ‘Someone is coming,’ she says. And then I hear it too, distant footsteps and approaching Quiet.

  ‘Oh my,’ I say. ‘I think the teen sleuth actually worked out what we were going to do.’

  Mieli grabs my arm. ‘You can play games later,’ she says. ‘We need to go.’

  Mieli studies the three-dimensional map Perhonen has been compiling from their sensor data, looking for escape routes.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be running?’ the thief asks.

  ‘Ssh.’ The metacortex suggests ways out, computing paths with minimal probability of a hostile encounter. She has no desire to fight their way out. There: a possible path, up this chamber and then through—

  The ground and the walls shake. There is a groaning sound, and the map changes. She realises what the large clumps of artificial muscle, heat and energy in the map are: Atlas Quiet. They balance the city platforms and its internal structure. They must be directly below the Maze, where the things change the most. The Resurrection Men are using the Quiet to corner them, blocking escape routes. That means a fight. Unless—

  ‘This way,’ she snaps at the thief and starts running down the tunnel, towards the voices.

  ‘More to the point,’ says the thief, ‘shouldn’t we be running away from them?’ Not wanting to argue, Mieli gives him a little jolt through their biot link.

  ‘There was absolutely no need for that!’

  The tunnel running through the crypt chamber is wide and cylindrical, widening as they go. Her metacortex spots the echoes of the Quiet and Resurrection Men ahead. But they are not what she is interested in.

  They enter a wide, low chamber a hundred metres in diameter. It is lit dimly by fluorescence from synthbio tubes. One of the walls is rough and organic, moving and pulsing, a scaled carapace of something alive: the side of an Atlas Quiet. Mieli summons her combat autism, mapping the geometry of the underworld around them, the platforms, the seams, how the pieces
fit together.

  ‘Stop!’ shouts a voice. On the other side of the chamber, a group of hooded Resurrection Men enter, flanked by hulking war Quiet.

  Mieli fires her ghostgun at the Atlas Quiet’s side, loading it with a simple slave gogol that will self-destruct after a few iterations. The walls and the floor begin to shake. The Quiet wall spasms. Its scales break. With a tremendous crack, the chamber splits open in the middle. Daylight shoots up from the yawning chasm. Mieli grabs hold of the thief and jumps.

  They fall through the wound in the flesh of the city. Synthbio solutions rain around them like blood. And then they are outside, in the middle of the forest of the city legs, blinking at the bright daylight.

  Mieli opens her wings to catch their fall, wraps them in gevulot and starts the flight back to the city of the living.

  My spirits are high when we return to the hotel.

  Under my gevulot, I’m covered in dirt and grime, shaky from yet another Mieli-powered flight, but elated. A part of me is thinking about whatever took over Unruh. But it is overruled by the majority that wants to celebrate.

  ‘Come on,’ I tell Mieli. ‘We have to celebrate. It’s traditional. And you are an honorary thief now. This is when one traditionally gets caught, by the way; arguing over loot, or bungling the getaway. But we did it. I can’t believe it.’

  My head is buzzing. In the last few hours, I have been a Belt emigré, a detective, a Time beggar and a corpse. This is what it must have felt like before. It is difficult to stay still.

  ‘You did good. Like an Amazon.’ I am babbling, but I don’t care. ‘You know, when this is over, I might just come and settle here again. Do something modest. Grow roses. Steal girls’ hearts and some other things every now and then.’