The Quantum Thief

‘Iz?’ she asks. She studies traditional animation and comes from a smalltown in Nanedi Valley. There is a look of concern on her round face, and paint stains in her hair.

‘Yes?’

‘I saw the paper. I had no idea that it was you who did all that stuff. My cousin was in Schiaparelli.’

Isidore says nothing. He looks at her expression and wonders if he should try to figure out what it means, but there does not seem to be any point.

‘Really, I had no idea. I’m sorry you ended up in the paper, though.’ She sits down at the table and leans across towards him. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I have to study.’

‘Oh. Well, let me know if you want to go for a drink later.’

‘Probably not.’

‘Okay.’ She picks up something from the table, wrapped in cloth. ‘You know, I was thinking about you yesterday, and I made this.’ She hands the bundle to him. ‘You spend so much time alone, I thought you could use some company.’

Slowly, he unwraps the thing. It is an odd, cartoonish green creature, all head with large eyes and tentacles, the size of his fist. It starts moving in his grip, inquisitive. It smells faintly of wax. It has large white eyes, with two black dots for pupils.

‘I found this old chemical bot design and put a syntbio brain in it. You can give him a name. And let me know about that drink.’

‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I appreciate it. Really.’ Is this what I have to look forward to? Pity? Misguided gratitude?

‘Don’t work too hard.’ And then she is gone again, behind her own gevulot wall.

In his room, Isidore sets the creature on the floor and starts thinking about Heian Kyo influences in Kingdom architecture. It is easier to focus surrounded by his own things, a couple of his father’s old sculptures, books and the large tempmatter printer. His floor and desk are covered in three-dimensional building sketches, both imaginary and real, dominated by a scale model of the Ares Cathedral. The green creature hides behind it. Smart move, little fellow. It’s a big, bad world out there.

Many of his fellow students find studying frustrating. As perfect as exomemory is, it only gives you short-term memories. Deep learning still comes from approximately ten thousand hours of work on any given subject. Isidore does not mind: on a good day, he can get lost in the purity of form for hours, exploring tempmatter models of buildings, feeling each detail under his fingertips.

He summons up a text on the Tendai sect and the Daidairi Palace and starts reading, waiting for the contemporary world to fade.

How are you, lover? Pixil’s qupt startles him. It comes with an euphoric burst of joy. Great news. Everybody thought you were adorable. They want you back. I spoke to my mother, and I really think you are just paranoid—

He yanks the entanglement ring off and throws it away. It ricochets among the Martian model buildings. The green monster scutters away and hides beneath his bed. He kicks at the cathedral. A part of it dissolves into inert tempmatter, and white dust rises into the air. He continues to break the models, until the floor is full of dust and fragments.

He sits among the ruins for a while and tries to figure out how to reassemble them in his head. But his grip keeps slipping, and it feels like no two pieces fit together anymore.

The next day it is Sol Martius, and as always, Isidore goes to see his father in the land of the dead.

He walks down the long, winding steps of the Inverted Tower with the other mourners, in silence, eyes aching from a sleepless night. The Tower hangs from the belly of the city like a crystal teat. They can see the city’s shadow for the whole journey, the slow rhythmic rise and fall of the city’s legs. Above, the platforms of the city shift and interlock as the city optimises its weight distribution with each step. Everything is tinted with orange dust. The light of Phobos – a former moon, now turned into a star by the tiny singularity inside it – gives the world an odd, timeless, twilight feel.

There are few mourners this morning. Isidore walks behind a black man whose back is bent by the weight of his quicksuit.

Every now and then, they pass a platform manned by a silent, masked Resurrection Man. The movements of the Quiet below are obscured by the dust cloud, but the phoboi walls are visible. The ramparts stretch towards the horizon and define the city’s planned route. They contain the trail of new life behind the city, a paintbrush streak of synthbio fields and terraforming machinery. Like its brothers and sisters, the city tries to paint Mars green again. But in the end, the phoboi always come.

At the bottom of the Tower, there are elevators waiting. Resurrection Men give them fireflies to follow, accompanied by stern instructions to make it back by noon. One of them helps Isidore don his quicksuit, Oubliette make, with modern programmable materials but with far too much design effort spent on it, brass and leather, so that it looks like an ancient diving suit. The gloves are clumsy and it is difficult to hold on to the bouquet of flowers he has brought. They crowd into the elevator through an airlock – a simple platform suspended from nanofilament – and descend through the orange mist, swinging back and forth with the city’s motion. And then they are on the surface, slow-moving figures in bell-like helmets, each following a firefly.

The vast mass of the city looms above like a second, heavier sky, with fractures and seams where the different platforms meet, moving and shifting slowly like clockwork. From this vantage point, the legs – a forest of multi-jointed shafts – seem too frail to hold it up. The thought of a falling sky makes Isidore uncomfortable, and after a while, he decides to focus his gaze on the firefly.

The sand beneath his feet is beaten hard by legs and tracks and other locomotion methods of the Quiet. They are everywhere here, tiny ones that scatter to make way for his feet, as if he were a giant City striding across their landscape. There are terraforming Quiet, bigger than a man, moving in herds, toiling on the algae and regolith. An Atlas Quiet strides past, making the ground shake, a six-limbed caterpillar larger than a skyscraper, on its way to correct the balance of a city leg or to make sure the ground is safe when it completes its arc. He sees an air factory Quiet in the distance, a plant on tracks that is like a small city in itself, with swarms of flying Quiet around it. But the firefly does not let him linger. It leads him across the shadow of the city at a rapid pace, up and ahead where his father is helping to build phoboi ramparts.

His father is ten metres tall, with an elongated insect body. He burrows into the Martian regolith with a grinding noise, pulling up powdered rock through a chemical processing system, mixing it with synthbio bacteria, turning it into a construction material for the wall. His dozen limbs – spindly and fast-moving – shape the material flow from his beaklike mouth, laying down the wall, layer by layer. His carapace has a metallic hue that looks rusty in the orange light. There is a dent on his side, with another limb bud growing from it; a memory of a recent phoboi battle.

He labours side by side with a hundred others; some of them climb on top of each other, making the wall taller and taller. But his father’s section of the wall looks different. It is full of faces, reliefs and shapes. A lot of them are almost immediately shattered by the smaller mechanic Quiet who come and install the wall’s weaponry. But Isidore’s father does not seem to care.

‘Father,’ Isidore says.

The Quiet interrupts his work and turns to Isidore slowly. His metal carapace snaps and groans as it cools. The usual fear chills Isidore, the awareness that he is going to be inside a body like that one day. His father looms above him in the orange dust like a bladed tree, the mechanisms of his hands slowly spinning down.

‘I brought you some flowers,’ Isidore says. The bouquet is full of his father’s favourites, tall Argyre lilies, and he places it on the ground carefully. His father picks it up gently, with exaggerated care. His blades spin again for an instant, and the spidery shaper limbs dance. The Quiet places a tiny statue in front of Isidore, made from the dark wall material, a man making a bow and smiling.

‘You’re welcome,’ Isidore says.

They stand in silence for a moment. Isidore looks at the crumbling relief on the wall, all the faces and landscapes his father has carved into it. There is a tree lovingly rendered in stone, its branches full of large-eyed owls. Maybe Elodie was right, he thinks. It is all unfair.

‘I have something to tell you,’ he says. The guilt clings to his back and shoulders and belly, wet and heavy,