The Quantum Thief

She closes her eyes for a moment, savouring the memory. ‘I don’t know if you just made that up,’ she says. ‘But you deserve a little reward.’

She kisses me. For a moment, I try to figure out what her ice cream tastes like. Then I’m lost in the sensation of her lips, her tongue flicking against mine. She passes me a flirtatious co-memory, the kiss from her perspective, a reversal of viewpoints.

In my head the pirate engine lets out a shout of joy: it has found a loop, a memory of me, a hole in her gevulot that opens into a yawning chasm of deja vu. Another kiss, a long time ago, superimposed with this one; a chimera of present and past. I ignore the pirate engine’s roar of triumph and return the kiss, then and now.

‘Tell me about the tzaddikim,’ Mieli says. She could let the gogol surgeon do this. But this is dishonourable enough as it is. At least she is prepared to carry the burden herself.

‘Anomalies,’ the vasilev says, wistfully. ‘Our worst enemy. Zoku technology. There are power struggles here, unseen, between the hidden ones and the zoku colony. The tzaddikim are a weapon. Quantum technology. Theatrics. The people here trust them. We try to assassinate them when we can, but they guard their identities well.’

‘Who are they?’

‘The Silence. Brutal. Efficient. The Futurist. Fast. Playful.’ The vasilev juggles colourful names and images with apparent glee. A blue-cloaked, masked figure; a red blur that moves like the Quick Ones on Venus. Hypothetical identities, possible targets; agora views and cracked exomemories.

‘The Gentleman.’ The man in the silver mask. And behind it—

‘No, no, no,’ whispers Mieli. ‘Dark Man take me.’

She tries to reach for the thief, but the biot link is silent.

Much later, we make it to her apartment, laughing, stumbling and stopping to make out surrounded by gevulot blur – and wide in the open, sometimes. I feel drunk on an emotional cocktail: lust mixed with guilt mixed with nostalgia, propelling me on a trajectory that leads to a collision with the hard, unforgiving surface of the present.

Her place is in one of the inverted towers, beneath the city. As we take the elevator down, I kiss her neck, hands wandering under her blouse, across her silky belly. She laughs. The pirate engine is seizing every touch, every shared caress that we allow each other to remember, digging mercilessly into her gevulot.

Inside, she disentangles herself from my grip, pressing a finger against my lips. ‘If we are going to remember this,’ she says, ‘it might as well be memorable. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be back in a moment.’

I sit on her couch and wait. The apartment has high ceilings, with shelves that display both Martian art and old Earth artefacts. They look familiar. There is an old gun, a revolver, in a glass casing. It reminds me uncomfortably of the Prison. There are books and an old piano. The mahogany surface is a sharp contrast to all the glass and metal. She is letting me see and remember all this, and I can feel the gogol pirate engine approaching critical mass, almost ready to leech out all her memories.

Music starts, almost a whisper at first, then louder; a piano piece, a beautiful melody broken by occasional, achingly deliberate discord.

‘So, tell me, Raoul,’ she says, sitting next to me in a black silk gown, holding two champagne glasses, ‘what exactly is wrong with it?’ The soft lights of the Quiet move below us in the blue night, thousands of them, large and small, like a starry sky inverted.

‘Absolutely nothing,’ I say. We clink glasses. Her fingers brush mine. She kisses me again, slowly, deliberately, with one hand touching my temple lightly. ‘I want to remember this,’ she says. ‘I want you to remember this.’

Her warm soft weight is on me, her perfume a pine forest, her hair tickling my face like

rain, getting drunk with Isaac the rabbi in the rain and singing, wandering home late at night and dragging her outside with me to see the clouds under the dome of the angelnet and her hair getting wet

as the music swells around us I remember

when she played for me for the first time, after we made love, naked, fingers light and slow on the black and ivory keys

her hands trace lines on my chest

maps and drawings, architecture, shapes fitting together, long hours; and she picks up one of the sketches and tells me they look like musical scores

‘Tell me,’ she says

and I do, about being a thief, about the boy in the desert who wanted to be a gardener, about wanting to make a new life, and to my surprise she does not run away but just laughs

softly

like the paws of a dancing cat in a flamboyant hat, a puss-in-boots, like something out of a dream, in the corridor of a castle—

‘You fucking bastard. You unbelievable fucking bastard,’ Raymonde screams.

The present is a champagne bottle, breaking across my head. I black out a moment, and when my vision returns, I am lying on the floor and she is standing over me, an old cane in her hand.

‘Have you. Any idea. What you did?’

Her face is a silver mask. Her voice is a chorus rasp. Just when I was wondering where the police are on this world, I wonder weakly, just before Mieli crashes through the window.

Mieli shatters the pseudoglass with her wings. The shards billow across the room in slow motion like snow. The metacortex floods her with information. The thief is here, the tzaddik there, a fleshy human core surrounded by a cloud of combat utility fog.

She dropped all subtlety hunting the thief down, telling Perhonen to risk its cover again and run WIMP scans, to find the spot where the biot feed signal was lost. Then she took to the skies in a gevulot blur, flicking through the ship’s dossier on the woman. Putting the pieces together seemed to take forever, but she is not surprised to find the tzaddik has taken the thief to her home.

She tries to grab the thief and leave as quickly as she came, but the fog is faster, surrounding her wings in a layer of thick gel, trying to force itself down into her lungs, blocking her ghostgun ports. She fires a q-dot, in blind/stun mode. It goes off like a miniature sun. But the fog stays ahead. It turns into a white opaque cloud around the pinpoint of brightness, not letting out much more than a lava lamp. Then her wings’ waste-heat radiators are blocked too, and she has to drop back to slowtime.

The tzaddik’s foglet-enhanced blow is like colliding with an Oortian comet. It takes her through a glass shelving unit and the wall behind it. The plaster and ceramics feels like wet sand when she passes through it. Her armour screams and a quickstone-enhanced rib actually snaps. Her metacortex muffles the pain; she gets up in a cloud of debris. She is in the bathroom. A monster angel stares at her in the bathroom mirror.

More blows. She tries to block them, but they flow and snake around her arms. The tzaddik is out of reach, the foglets forming amorphous extensions of her will. Mieli is fighting a ghost. She needs space. She channels power from the fusion reactor in her thigh into the microfans of the wings. A mighty wind howls. The foglets scatter. She grabs a handful, swallows, sets a gogol to work on them. There. Outdated Protocol War combat fog. It will take the gogol a few moments to find the right countermeasures.

Wings clear, she dumps enough waste heat to go into quicktime. Now approaching the tzaddik is a leisurely walk, ducking beneath static foglet tendrils, hanging in the air in her enhanced vision like frozen soap bubble streams. The tzaddik is a silver-masked statue. Mieli hits her, a carefully placed blow on a soft, human, base of her neck, just enough to take her out—

—and her hand passes through a foglet image.

The Godel attack is a 120-decibel speaker pressed to her eardrum. Genetic algorithm viruses flood her systems, trying to get past the machines and into her human brain. The countermeasure gogol’s whiny voice says something. She launches it at the fog and shuts all her systems down.

The sudden humanity feels like a bad cold. For a moment, she is helpless in the grip of the foglet tendrils, her wings hanging limply down her back. Then the countermeasures bite and the fog explodes into inert white powder. She falls to the floor, gasping, coughing, flesh and blood.