The Quantum Thief

slow-moving builder Quiet – larger than elephants, with yellow carapaces – are printing new houses in pastel colours. I almost lose the boy there, lost in the loud hum and the odd seaweed smell of the huge creatures, only to see him wave at me from the back of one of them and then leap down.

For a time, a group of parkroullers follows us, mistaking our race for some urban game, young Martian girls and boys in faux-Kingdom wear of corsets and umbrella skirts and powdered wigs, smartmatter-laced so they know to stay out of the way and flex as the kids bounce off walls and make somersaults across gaps between rooftops, the oversized wheels sticking to every surface. They encourage me with shouts, and for a moment I consider spending some Time and buying a pair of skates from one of them: but the fading imaginary pain in my backside keeps me on foot.

Every second, I wait for my body to shut down, to wait for Mieli to come and give me whatever punishment she has thought up. Still, I wish I could have seen her face.

I finally run out of breath when we reach the old robot garden. I curse the fact that I can’t override the strictly baseline human parameters of the body as I lean on my knees, wheezing, the sweat stinging my eyes.

‘Look,’ I say. ‘Let’s be reasonable. If you are a part of my brain, I’d expect you to be reasonable.’ Then again, I probably was anything but reasonable at that age. Or at any other age.

The garden looks strangely familiar. It is some piece of the old Kingdom that the city picked up and swallowed somewhere during its passage through the Martian desert, and its strange urban metabolism has brought it here. It is an open space within the Maze, protected by a cluster of tall synagogues around it, made from black and white tiles of marble perhaps five metres square, forming a ten-by-ten grid. Someone has planted trees here, and flowers: green and red and white and violet spill over the neat monochrome borders on the ground. The boy is nowhere in sight.

‘I don’t have a lot of time. The scar-faced lady is going to come for us both soon, and she’s not going to be happy.’

In each square stands a giant machine: medieval knights and samurai and legionnaires, with intricately carved armour, yawning helmets and fearsome, spiked weapons. The plates are rusty and weather-beaten, and the empty helmets of some have been turned into flower-pots, with clusters of begonias and pale-hued Martian roses peeking out of them. Some of them are to be frozen in mid-combat – except that, as I catch my breath, they appear to be slowly moving. Something tells me that if I stayed and watched, they would play out a slow game set in motion by players long dead.

The laughter again. I turn around. The boy dangles from the arm of a red robot apart from the others, frozen with its scythelike weapon raised up. I jump forward, trying to catch him in a bear grip, but he is no longer there. I fall down a second time during the chase, right into a bed of roses.

Still out of breath, I roll over slowly. The thorns tear at my clothes and skin.

‘Little bastard,’ I say. ‘You win.’

A ray from bright Phobos – on its eight-hour passage through the sky – hits the robot’s open helmet. Something glints inside, something silver. I get back to my feet, reach up and climb up the robot’s armour; that, at least, is easier in Martian gravity. I dig in the dirt in the helmet and uncover a metal object. It is a Watch, with a heavy silver wristband and a brass face. The dial rests solidly at zero. I quickly put it in my pocket for a later, thorough inspection.

There are footsteps, along with a sharp gevulot request. I don’t bother trying to hide. ‘All right, Mieli,’ I say. ‘I can’t run anymore. Please don’t send me to hell, I’ll come nicely.’

‘Hell?’ says a gruff voice. ‘Hell is other people.’ I look down. A man with a carelessy aged face and a shock of white hair, in blue coveralls, is staring at me, leaning on a rake. ‘It’s not an apple tree, you know,’ he says.

Then he frowns.

‘I’ll be damned. Is that you?’

‘Uh, have we met?’

‘Aren’t you Paul Sernine?’

5 THE DETECTIVE AND THE ZOKU

Isidore almost makes it in time.

The spidercab races across the rooftops of the city. It costs a hundred kiloseconds, but it is the only option to get even close. He holds on tight to his safety belt. The carriage lurches back and forth as the vehicle – the bastard child of a spider, a H. G. Wells war machine and a taxi – leaps over rooftops and clings to walls.

He drops the box of chocolates and curses as it bounces back and forth in the cabin.

‘Are you okay back there?’ asks the driver, a young woman in the traditional red, webbed domino mask of the cabbies. In a shifting city where many places are permanently hidden by gevulot, their job is to figure out how to get you from point A to point B. There is a certain amount of pride that comes with that. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you there.’

‘I’m fine,’ says Isidore. ‘Just go faster.’

The zoku colony is near the prow of the city, in the Dust District, just above where the Atlas Quiet prepare Martian sand to bear the weight of the city. It is easy to see where the colony’s boundary lies: beneath the red dust clouds the wide avenues with their belle epoque fronts and cherry trees give way to fairy-tale castles of diamond, like mathematics given physical form. Evening light refracts and bounces among the buildings’ glossy surfaces, prismatic and dazzling. The zoku colony has been here for more than twenty years, since they requested asylum during the Protocol War; but rumour has it it was grown from a nanoseed in a single night. A shard of the quantum tech empire that rules the outer planets, here on Mars. Ever since he started dating Pixil, Isidore has made attempts to understand the odd non-hierarchy of the zokus, but without much success.

After several more stomach-churning leaps, the spider-cab comes to a stop. They are in front of a cathedral- like building made from glass and light, with towers and spires and organic-looking Gothic arches jutting from its sides at random intervals.

‘Well, here we are,’ the driver says. ‘Friends in high places, eh? Don’t let them quantum your brain.’

Isidore pays, watching the dial of his Watch lurch downwards in dismay. Then he picks up the box of chocolates and assesses the damage. It is slightly dented, but otherwise intact. She won’t be able to tell the difference anyway. He jumps out, slams the door of the cab harder than necessary and starts walking up the stairway to the massive pair of doors. His bow tie is choking him, and he adjusts it nervously, hands shaking.

‘Invitation only,’ says a voice that sounds like it is coming from underground.

A monster steps through the door. The material behaves like the surface of a vertical pond, rippling around the creature’s massive form. It is wearing a blue doorman’s uniform and a cap. It is almost three metres tall, with green skin, a face like a dried prune, tiny eyes and two massive yellow tusks. One of them has a clear, tiny zoku jewel embedded in it. Its voice is deep and unnaturally resonant, but human.

The creature holds out a massive hand. There are horned ridges running along its forearms, black and sharp, glistening with a liquid of some sort. It smells of liquorice. Isidore swallows.

‘I have an invitation,’ he says. He holds out his entanglement ring. The monster bends down and studies it.

‘The party has already started,’ the monster says. ‘Guest tokens expire.’

‘Look,’ he says. ‘I am a little late, but Lady Pixil is waiting for me.’

‘Sure she is.’

I’m at the door, he qupts at Pixil desperately. I’m running late, I know, but I’m here. Please come let me in. There is no reply.

‘That’s not going to work,’ says the monster. It clears its throat. ‘The Tangleparty is an important tradition representing the unity and cohesiveness of the zoku, dating back to the days of the ancestral metaverse guilds. On this day of celebration, we are as our ancestors were. They are not going to interrupt it to let a latecomer in.’

‘If it’s so important,’ says Isidore, ‘what are you doing here?’

The monster looks oddly sheepish. ‘Resource optimisation,’ it mutters. ‘Somebody has to do the door.’