The Quantum Thief

  Mieli almost shoots the detective when the needle spits him out. A part of its jagged dark side turns into a naked body of a young man and falls forward. And then Raymonde is next to him, holding him up.

  ‘He got Pixil,’ the boy mutters.

  They made it to the base of the needle minutes ago. It looks like the pseudomatter Mieli has only seen near Spike remnants, not made from atoms and molecules but something more subtle, quark matter or spacetime foam.

  Mieli, says Perhonen, I’m not sure it’s safe to be there. There is something happening inside that thing. Gamma rays, exotic WIMPs, it’s like a fountain—

  A ripple goes through the structure. And suddenly it is like smoked glass, dark, cold and dense. Like the Prison. He released the Archon.

  Mieli lowers her weapon and touches the wall of the needle. It opens and accepts her like a lover.

  The Archon is happy. New thieves, new things to make, new games to grow, in dense soil that makes its mind expand a thousandfold. Someone touches it: the Oort woman, the fugitive, returning to its embrace. It lets her in. She tastes of cinnamon.

  Isidore aches. His body is new and raw, and inside, Pixil’s death is a fire. But there is no time to think about that, because suddenly he knows everything.

  The exomemory is a sea around him, clear like a tropical ocean. Quiet, Nobles, tzaddikim: every thought ever thought, every memory. They are all his. It is the most beautiful and the most terrible shape he has ever seen or felt. The history. The present: rage, blood and fire. Atlas Quiet, going mad, labouring to keep the city standing. People fighting like puppets, the triggers and knobs and dials in their heads that his father put there turned to madness.

  He speaks to them with the Voice and reminds them of who they are. The Quiet return to man the phoboi walls. The fighting stops.

  And slowly, step by step, the city starts to move again.

  So, here we are again. Doing time.

  I am naked. I keep my eyes closed. On the floor in front of me is a gun. And soon, I am going to pick it up and decide to shoot or not to shoot.

  The sound of shattering glass sounds like music, or like breaking the law. A wind blows through the cell, carrying tiny shards. I open my eyes and see Mieli, wings outspread, a scarred angel in black.

  ‘I was hoping you would come,’ I say.

  ‘Is this the part,’ she says, ‘where you tell me that you are Jean le Flambeur and that you only leave this place when you choose?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s not that part.’

  I take her hand. She embraces me. She beats her wings and we rise up, through the glass sky, away from guns, memories and kings.

  21

  THE THIEF AND THE STOLEN GOODBYE

  I say goodbye to the detective – Isidore – in his kitchen, the day after the zoku brings Pixil back.

  ‘She is different now,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why, but she is different.’

  We sit around his kitchen table, and I try to avoid looking at the sombre, dirty brown wallpaper.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘it only takes a few moments to make you a different person. Sometimes it takes centuries.’ I try to shake off the green creature that has been wandering around the table. It seems to regard me as a natural enemy, and keeps chewing on my sleeve. ‘But of course, you should not really listen to anything I say. Especially about women.’

  I look at him: a bony nose, high cheekbones. The resemblance is there, around the mouth and the jaw and the eyes. I wonder what Raymonde and le Roi would have left to chance. I hope there is more of her in him than me.

  ‘You have changed a lot too,’ I continue. ‘Isidore Beautrelet, Cryptarch of the Oubliette. Or perhaps king would be a better word. What are you going to do next?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I can’t make every decision. I have to give the Voice back to the people. There has to be a better way to make this work. I’m going to give it up as soon as I can. And I have to figure out if … if I’m going to let everyone remember where the Oubliette really came from.’

  ‘Well, a revolution is always a beautiful dream,’ I say. ‘And you have just had a real one. Whatever you do, be careful. The Sobornost is going to come after you, hard and fast. The zoku will help now, I think: but it won’t be easy.’ I smile. ‘It’ll be exciting, too. Big and confusing. Like an opera, someone told me once.’

  He looks out through the window. The city is still healing: it must be a different view than before. And the Prison is visible from here, a diamond needle above the Maze rooftops.

  ‘What about you?’ he asks. ‘Are you going to go off and do something … criminal?’

  ‘Almost certainly. I still have a debt to pay, I’m afraid.’ I grin. ‘You are welcome to catch me if you can. But I think you are going to be too busy.’ I give the green creature a dark look. It is now trying to get into my lap. ‘Of course, others here don’t seem to have that problem.’

  I get up. ‘I’d better get going. Mieli hasn’t killed anything for a few days now, and that always puts her in a bad mood.’

  I shake his hand. ‘I’m not your father,’ I say, ‘but you are a better man than I am. Keep it that way. But if you are ever tempted by the other path, let me know.’

  To my surprise, he hugs me, hard.

  ‘No thanks,’ he says. ‘Be seeing you.’

  Can we go yet? Perhonen asks. Do we have to wait for him?

  The ship sits in the walled trail of the city, near the battered and scorched Quiet wall. Mieli is outside in a quicksuit, walking her restlessness away. There are are reliefs on the wall that remind her of Oort, landscapes and rows upon rows of blank faces. She touches them and hears the faint song carved in them, inside her mind.

  ‘Hi,’ says Raymonde. She is wearing her Gentleman outfit, but without a mask, and instead of a suit she wears a faint foglet halo. She notices the reliefs and a look of sadness and guilt passes across her face.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Mieli asks.

  ‘Just remembering that there is someone I need to see.’ Raymonde looks at Perhonen. ‘That’s a beautiful ship.’

  Thank you, Perhonen says. But I’m not just a pretty face. Raymonde gives the ship a bow. ‘You too, have our gratitude,’ she says. ‘You didn’t have to do what you did.’

  You can’t see it, the ship says, sapphire shell gleaming, but I’m blushing.

  Raymonde looks around. ‘He isn’t here yet? No surprise there.’ She kisses Mieli on both cheeks. ‘Good luck, and safe journey. And thank you.’ She pauses. ‘When you opened your gevulot, you showed us your thoughts. I saw why you are doing this. For what it’s worth, I hope you find her.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of hope,’ Mieli says, ‘but will.’

  ‘Good answer,’ Raymonde says. ‘And – don’t be hard on him. I mean – be hard, but not too hard. He can’t help what he is. But he is not as bad as he could be.’

  ‘Are you talking about me?’ the thief says, stepping out of a zoku transport bubble. ‘I knew you would talk about me behind my back.’

  ‘I’ll wait in the ship,’ Mieli says. ‘We are leaving in five minutes.’

  *

  In the end, I don’t know what to say to her. So we stand in silence, on the red sand. The shadows the city casts flicker all around us, wings of light and dark, beating.

  After a while, I kiss her hand. If she has tears in her eyes, the shadows hide them. She kisses me lightly, on the mouth. She stands there, watching, as I walk to the ship. I turn to wave as the ship’s skin opens, and blow her a kiss.

  Inside the ship, I weigh the Box in my hand.

  ‘Are you going to open that thing or not?’ Mieli asks. ‘I’d like to know where we are going.’

  But I already know.

  ‘Earth,’ I say. ‘But can you ask Perhonen to take her time? I’d like to watch the scenery.’

  To my surprise, she does not object. Perhonen rises slowly and makes a turn above the Moving City, over the vein of Persistent Avenue,
the green expanse of the Tortoise Park, the papercraft castles of the Dust District. The city wears a different face now, but I smile it at nevertheless. It ignores me and keeps moving.

  We are halfway to the Highway before I realise that the detective stole my Watch.

  Interlude

  THE HUNTER

  It is springtime, and the Engineer-of-Souls is happy.

  His guberniya virscape is a machine garden, vast and blooming. The seeds he planted during the long Dyson winter when the guberniya slowed itself down to shed its waste heat have blossomed, and now there is variety, variety everywhere.

  His gogols swarm around him like a flock of white-coated birds as he plumbs its depths: plunging a billion pairs of hands into black soil where each particle is a cogwheel that fits together with its neighbours perfectly, to feel the seeds of new composite minds about to bloom. Engineer-Prime himself is everywhere, directing the culling of this memetic tree, watching that flock of genetic algorithms alight into a new parameter space from a branching process.

  With infinite gentleness he pulls up a freshly bloomed shoot of a newly made gogol, one with a rare disorder that makes it think its body would be made of glass, easily shattered: something he thought lost centuries ago. Combined with an exquisite schizophrenia, it will result in a mind that can divide and recombine itself at will, integrating memories: something Matjek’s warminds will love. He splits off a gogol to carry on the mundane details of the work, and returns his attention to the big picture, letting Engineer-Prime shoot upwards to the sky, white lab coat flapping in the fresh breeze. Yes, that patch there will yield a good harvest of Dragonspeakers. In that vast labyrinth, single-minded Pursuers are already gestating: soon they will be ready to explore parameter spaces larger than worlds, mathematical ants, combing the vast Gödel universe for unproven theorems.

  It occurs to the Engineer that he has never been happier: a quick search through his gogol library verifies the fact. He is more content than any Engineer has ever been, since his earliest days as a student in the University of Minsk – although one moment in time, with someone special, comes close. That, in itself, is worth splitting off a gogol and storing it into his Library, frozen in time.

  So of course, it cannot last.

  There is a ripple in the virscape as no less than two other Founders arrive, unannounced: waves of religious terror spread through the lesser gardener gogols, who prostrate themselves among the growing machines. A gestating warm-ind escapes its suddenly distracted handlers, a metallic spider of controlled poisonous aggression, demolishing a promising patch of Dreamers until the Engineer can stretch out one of his billion hands to unmake it. What a waste. Oblivious to the destruction they are causing, the two strangers stride towards the main concourse of the Garden. One of them is a small, unassuming Chinese man with grey hair in sober monkish robes. At least Matjek Chen, the most powerful Founder in all of Sobornost, has the courtesy not to appear in his full Founder form here.

  But the other, a tall woman in a white summer dress, holding a delicate parasol, hiding her face—

  Filled with sudden haste, the Engineer works quickly to contain the visitors in a subvirtual – no mean task, given that with their Founder powers, they could easily rip such illusions apart – and sends Engineer-Prime down to meet them.

  The Garden becomes a true garden, with cherry trees in full bloom. There is a stone fountain in the Fedorovist style, heroic figures of a man and a woman holding a cup aloft. Lesser Engineer gogols arrange refreshments as Engineer-Prime goes to meet his visitors.

  ‘Welcome,’ he says, stroking his beard – a royal gesture, he thinks. He gives the two a slight bow. Chen acknowledges him with a barely perceptible nod. The Engineer tries to judge the seniority of this gogol: not the Prime, certainly, but enough of the Founder aura to hold true power.

  The woman folds her parasol and smiles at him, diamonds glittering around her swanlike neck. ‘Hello, Sasha,’ she says.

  He holds out a chair for her. ‘Joséphine.’

  She sits down gracefully, crossing her legs, leaning delicately on the folded parasol. ‘It is such a lovely garden you have here, Sasha,’ she says. ‘It is no wonder that we never see you anymore. Why, if I lived in a place like this, I would not want to leave.’

  ‘Sometimes it is tempting,’ says Chen, ‘to ignore the realities of the world at large. Unfortunately, not all of us have such luxury.’

  The Engineer gives the old Founder a curt smile. ‘The work I do here is of benefit to all of Sobornost, and the Great Common Task.’

  ‘Of course,’ Chen says. ‘You are uniquely qualified for that work. Indeed, that is why we are here.’ He sits down to the edge of the fountain, touching the water. ‘This is all a little excessive, don’t you think?’ The Engineer remembers that Chen’s own realms tend to be abstract, Spartan places, with bared-down physics and barely enough detail to stay out of the valleys of the uncanny.

  ‘Oh, please, Matjek,’ says Joséphine. ‘Don’t be such a bore. It is beautiful here. And can’t you see that Sasha is busy? He always strokes his beard when he is eager to get back to work but is too polite to say so.’

  ‘He has gogols aplenty to do his work,’ Chen says, ‘but very well.’ He crosses his hands and leans across the table.

  ‘Brother, we have a slight problem with one of your creations. The Dilemma Prison has been breached.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘See for yourself.’ The virscape wavers as Chen passes the Engineer a memory: for a moment, he sees the Founder gogol as he truly is, the voice of trillions of Chens, stretching across all the vast guberniyas and oblasts and raions of the Sobornost, not so much a person but a limb. Then he is holding a frozen gogol that he recognises as his own handiwork instantly, a little experiment with games and obsessions he had almost forgotten about. An Archon, he called it, made to hold the mad ones and bad ones of Sobornost somewhere far away. He peels it open like an orange, and absorbs its memories.

  ‘How strange,’ he says, watching the Prison spit out three minds into a fragile matter shell. He feels a sting of admiration for the little thing in the Oortian ship that manages to fool his own creation, and makes a note to make sure that the next Archon generation has the ability to distinguish between different layers of reality.

  ‘We would not have even noticed,’ says Chen, ‘if they had not made a mistake. But they did: they were supposed to take out two gogols, not three. The third one is quite interesting, as you can see.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ says the Engineer, feeling grandparental pride at the Archons’ creation. ‘The defector. Fascinating.’

  ‘Founder codes. Somebody opened the Prison with Founder codes. We need to know why.’ Chen slams a fist against the table. ‘We are at war, all of us, between ourselves, some of us even against ourselves. But there are some things we agreed not to do.’

  ‘Perhaps you did, Matjek,’ says Joséphine, running a finger along the rim of her glass of water. ‘Somebody else clearly did not.’

  ‘We need those gogols back: we – I – need to know what they know.’

  ‘And have you not gogols aplenty of your own to accomplish that?’ asks the Engineer, feeling satisfied that he can hold the older Founder’s gaze for a moment. ‘There are greater works to be begun and completed.’ He can feel Chen’s irritation gathering behind the gogol’s calm veneer, like static electricity in the air.

  ‘Sasha,’ Joséphine says. ‘We are not children. We – I – would not come to ask if we did not need you.’ She touches his hand, and smiles: and even after three centuries and billions of branchings, the Engineer finds it difficult not to smile back. ‘Matjek, perhaps you should let me talk to Sasha alone.’ She holds the old Founder’s gaze for a moment. To the Engineer’s surprise, he looks away. ‘All right,’ Chen says. ‘Perhaps a child can talk some sense to another child. I will be back soon.’ He leaves the virscape ungracefully, pulling the gogol avatar into a rupture in space so violently that the Engineer ha
s to struggle to smooth it out.

  Joséphine shakes her head. ‘We all talk about change,’ she says. ‘There are some things that do not change.’ Then she looks at him, luminous eyes aglow. ‘But you have. I love all these things you have built. It’s amazing. I wonder – did you always have it in you, even back then? Or did you grow up?’

  ‘Joséphine,’ he says. ‘Just tell me what it is that you want.’

  She pouts. ‘I’m not sure I like this grown-up Sasha. You are not even blushing.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘All right.’ She looks up and takes a deep breath. ‘They are killing me. The others. Things have changed during your last Winter, changed a lot. Anton and Hsien are together now. Chitragupta is … well, it is itself. But me – they never liked me. And I am weak, weaker than you can believe.’

  The Engineer stares at her in disbelief. ‘Gogolcide? Have we come that far?’

  ‘Not yet, but that is what they intend. Matjek is my only hope, and he knows that you will listen to me. It is not really about the Prison, you understand: he just wants a weapon against the others. And your support.’

  ‘I could …’ He hesitates. ‘I could protect you.’

  ‘You are sweet, but we both know you could not. This place is something that the others give you because you are useful. If that ceases, so will this. Help Matjek, and he will help us both. Make something that will catch the little runaways. It is a small thing, but it will show him that you listen to me. And that will make me valuable to him.’

  The Engineer closes his eyes. He can feel his Garden, alive and growing, his billion hands in its soil: all inside a mighty guberniya brain, eating matter and energy from the sun itself, a diamond sphere the size of old Earth, containing his trillion gogols and the Dragons within. And yet he feels small.

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Just this once. For old times’ sake.’