The Quantum Thief

‘I know you don’t.’

‘What? Was I supposed to let her go? Show mercy?’ Isidore bites her lip. ‘That’s not how mysteries get solved.’

‘No,’ says the Gentleman.

There is a shape in the one word, Isidore can feel it: not solid, not certain, but unmistakably there. Anger makes him reach out and grasp it.

‘I think you are lying,’ says Isidore. ‘I’m not a tzaddik because I’m not a healer. The Silence is not a healer. It’s because you don’t trust someone. You want a detective who has not Resurrected. You want a detective who can keep secrets.

‘You want a detective who can go after the cryptarchs.’

‘That word,’ the Gentleman says, ‘does not exist.’ He puts on his hat and gets up. ‘Thank you for your help.’ The tzaddik touches Isidore’s face. The touch of the velvet is strangely light and gentle.

‘And by the way,’ the Gentleman says, ‘she will not like the chocolate shoes. I got you something with truffles instead.’

Then he is gone. There is a box of chocolates in the grass, neatly tied with a red ribbon.

Interlude THE KING

The King of Mars can see everything, but there are places where he chooses not to look. Usually, the spaceport is one of them. But today, he is there in person, to kill an old friend.

The arrival hall is built in the old Kingdom style, a vast, grand space with a high dome. It is barely filled by the colourful crowd of visitors from other worlds, walking gingerly in the unfamiliar Martian gravity, trying to get used to the feel of guest gevulot on their skin.

Invisible and inaudible to all, the King walks through the throng of aliens: Realm avatars, scrawny Belt people in their medusa-like exoskeletons, flittering Quick Ones, Saturnian zoku folk in baseline bodies. He stops by a statue of the Duke of Ophir and looks up past the cracked features, defiled by the Revolutionaries. He can see the beanstalk through the dome high above, an impossible line shooting up at the rust-coloured sky, a pit of vertigo if you try to follow it with your gaze. Nausea assaults him: the compulsion implanted in him by rough hands centuries ago is still there.

You belong to Mars, it says. You will never leave.

Fists clenched, the King makes himself look as long as he can bear it, rattling the chain in his mind. Then he closes his eyes and starts looking for the other invisible man.

He lets his mind wander through the crowd, looking through other eyes, looking for traces of manipulation in fresh memories like disturbed leaves in a forest. He should have done this before. There is something pure about being here in person. For the King, memories and actions have almost become one over the years, and the sharp taste of reality is exhilarating.

The memory trap is subtle, hidden in the fresh exomemory of a Realm flesh-avatar whose eyes the King looks through. It is recursive: a memory of a memory itself, almost swallowing the King in an infinite tunnel of deja vu, like the vertigo of the beanstalk, pulling him inwards.

But the memory game is the King’s game. With an effort of will, he anchors himself back in the present, isolates the toxic memory, follows it back to its source, peels back the layers of exomemory until only the kernel of reality is left: a thin, bald man with hollow temples and an ill-fitting Revolutionary uniform, standing a few metres away from him and staring at him with dark eyes.

‘Andre,’ the King says chidingly. ‘What do you think you are doing?’

The man gives him a defiant look, and for a moment there is an older memory that comes from deep within the King, a real memory: of the hell that they went through together. Such a pity.

‘I come here sometimes,’ Andre says. ‘To look out from our goldfish bowl. It’s good to see the air and giants beyond, you know.’

‘But that is not why you are here,’ the King says softly. His tone is gentle, fatherly. ‘I don’t understand. I thought we agreed. No more deals with them. And here you are. Did you really think I would not find out?’

Andre sighs. ‘A change is coming,’ he says. ‘We can’t survive much longer. The Founders have been weak, but that won’t last. They are going to eat us, my friend. Even you can’t stop it.’

‘There is always a way out,’ the King says. ‘But not for you.’

Out of courtesy, the King grants him a quick truedeath. A flash of a zoku q-gun, a breeze through exomemory eradicating all traces of the person once called Andre, his friend. He absorbs all of Andre that he needs. Passersby flinch at the sudden heat and then forget it.

The King turns to leave. Then he sees the man and the woman, the first in a dark suit and blue-tinted glasses, the second hunched in the gravity like a crone. And for the first time in the spaceport, the King smiles.

4 THE THIEF AND THE BEGGAR

The Moving City of the Oubliette, the Persistent Avenue on a bright morning, hunting for memories.

The streets here shift and change as walking platforms join or leave the city’s flow, but the wide Avenue always comes back, no matter what. It is lined with cherry trees, with streets and alleyways leading off it to the Maze, where the secrets are. The shops that you find only once, selling Kingdom toys or old tin robots from old Earth, or dead zoku jewels that fell from the sky. Or doors that only show themselves if you speak the right word or have eaten the right food the day before, or are in love.

‘Thank you,’ says Mieli, ‘for bringing me to hell.’

I lift my blue-tinted shades and smile at her. She is suffering visibly in the gravity, moving like an old woman: she has to keep her enhancements down while we are temporary citizens.

I have been to few places that look less infernal. The deep indigo of the Hellas Basin sky above, and clouds of white gliders, huge wingspans clinging to thin Martian air. The tall, intricate buildings, like belle epoque Paris without the burden of gravity, spires of red-tinted stone, wearing walkways and balconies. Spidercabs scampering up their sides, leaping across rooftops. The shining dome of the zoku colony near the Dust District where the red cloud raised by the city’s feet billows upwards like a cloak. The gentle swaying, if you stand very still: a reminder that this is a city that travels, carried on the backs of Titans.

‘Hell,’ I tell her, ‘is where all the interesting people are.’

She squints at me. Earlier, in the beanstalk, she had that bored deja vu look that told me she was running virs, preparing. ‘We are not here to sightsee,’ she says.

‘Actually, we are. There is another associative memory here somewhere, and I need to find it.’ I wink at her. ‘It could take a while. So try to keep up.’

Muscle memory is back, at least, so I put distance between us, easing into the low, gliding John Carter lope of the tall Martians all around.

Fashions have changed while I’ve been away. Fewer people now wear the nondescript white shirts and trousers, based on the old Revolutionary uniform. Instead, there are Kingdom frills and hats and flowing dresses, alongside abstract zoku smartmatter creations, not so much clothing as geometry. Almost no one hides beneath a full gevulot privacy screen here. This is the Avenue: you are supposed to flaunt it.

The one constant, of course, are the Watches – in all shapes and forms, in wristbands and belt buckles and necklaces and rings. All measuring Time, Noble Time, time as a human being – time that you have to earn back through back-breaking labour as a Quiet. I have to suppress pickpocket instincts.

I stop at the Revolution Agora to wait for Mieli. It is a square where one of the Revolution monuments stands, a low slab of volcanic rock, sculpted by the Quiet. It is engraved with the billions of names of the gogols