The Quantum Thief

attention.

Bathilde looks at the Hallway again. Such an innocent thing from the outside, but, inside, the angles and lights and shapes resonate in the design of any human-derived brain, triggering cortical mechanisms that simulate a near-death experience. An architectural magic trick. She thinks back to her many deaths and births and realises that she has never experienced that before. A genuinely new experience. She smiles to herself: how long has it been since that? She touches the bracelet Watch that Paul gave her, tracing the word Sapientia engraved in it.

‘Hi,’ says the red-haired girl. There, at least, is genuine youth, untouched by death, temporary or otherwise.

‘Hello, Raymonde,’ Bathilde says. ‘Proud of your boyfriend?’

The girl smiles shyly. ‘You can’t imagine,’ she says.

‘Oh, but I can,’ Bathilde says. ‘It is a difficult thing: you watch them do something like that and then you start wondering if you are good enough for them. Am I right?’

The girl stares at her mutely. Bathilde shakes her head. ‘My apologies. I am a bitter old woman. I am happy for you, of course.’ She touches the girl’s gloved hand. ‘What were you going to say? Interrupting is a problem we old people have, we think we have heard it many times before. I’m looking forward to being a Quiet again soon. It will force me to listen.’

Raymonde bites her lip. ‘I wanted to ask you for … advice.’

Bathilde laughs. ‘Well, if you want to hear bitter truths about life filtered through a few centuries of experience, you’ve come to the right place. What do you want to know?’

‘It’s about children.’

‘What is there to know? I’ve had them myself: troublesome, but can be worth it if you are careful. Exomemory tells you all you need to know. Get a Resurrection Man to help you with genome splicing, or go to the black market for offworld designs if you are feeling ambitious. Just add water. And poof.’ Bathilde chides herself for enjoying Raymonde’s expression when she makes an expansive gesture with her hands.

‘That’s not what I was going to ask,’ Raymonde says. ‘I meant … about him. Paul.’ She closes her eyes. ‘I can’t read him. I don’t know if he is ready.’

‘Walk with me,’ Bathilde says. She leads them around the Hallway, towards the phoboi walls. Above, the sky is getting dark.

‘I know this much,’ Bathilde says. ‘When I speak to Paul, he reminds me of someone I knew a long time ago, someone who gave me a little bit of a heartbreak.’ She laughs. ‘I gave as well as I got, to be sure.’ She touches the already crumbling wall of the Hallway. ‘There are those of us who live a really long time,’ she says. ‘We are the ones who learn not to change, no matter what happens. Bodies, gogols, transformations, there is something about us that stays the same. It’s an evolutionary thing; otherwise we would effectively die by metamorphosis, never a light at the end of the tunnel, just time chipping away at us.

‘Whatever Paul has told you, he is one of us, I can tell that much. So you have to decide if the real him – not this smiling architect – is someone you want as the father of your children.

‘But he is trying, and he is trying for you.’

‘Here you are,’ Paul says. ‘My two favourite ladies.’ He embraces Raymonde. ‘Did you go inside yet?’

Raymonde shakes her head.

‘You should go,’ Bathilde says. ‘It’s not as bad as it seems at first. Have fun.’

The two enter the Hallway from the other end. As Bathilde watches, she thinks of that time in the Olympus Palace, a running watercolour of a memory: the time she danced with the King. She wonders if her eyes looked like Raymonde’s then.

11 THE THIEF AND THE TZADDIKIM

The tzaddikim are not what I expect. I imagined a secret lair of some kind, with trophies of past victories, perhaps; a council room with a round table, with high chairs, each customised with each tzaddik’s personal iconography.

Instead, we meet in the Silence’s kitchen.

The Futurist fidgets with her glass impatiently, rolling its base around on the wooden table. She is a red, sleek creature, a cross between a human being and an ancient automobile, unable to stay still.

‘All right,’ she says. ‘Would somebody please tell me what we are doing here?’

The Silence lives in a little zeppelin house in Montgolfiersville: a gondola suspended from a teardrop-shaped bag of gas, tethered to the city. The kitchen is small but has a hightech look to it. In addition to the fabber, it has traditional cooking implements, knives, pots and pans and other chrome and metal instruments I do not recognise: clearly, the Silence is someone who cares about food. Between the two of us and the six tzaddikim, things are somewhat intimate; I’m squeezed between Mieli and a skull-faced tall man in black – the Bishop. His bony knee presses against my thigh.

Our host opens a bottle of wine with a deft motion of his wrist. Like the Gentleman, he wears a faceless mask, but of dark blue, along with a utility fog cloak that makes him look like a living blot of ink. He is tall and even though he hasn’t said anything so far, there is a gravitas about him. He fills our glasses quickly and efficiently, then nods towards Raymonde.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she says, with the rasping voice of her tzaddik persona. ‘I have here two offworld visitors with whom I had a little … misunderstanding two nights ago. I have reason to believe that they might be sympathetic to our cause. Perhaps you can explain it yourself, Jean.’

‘Thanks,’ I say. Mieli agreed to let me do the talking, with the understanding that if things go south, I will be shut down with extreme prejudice. ‘My name is Jean le Flambeur,’ I say. ‘You can ’blink that if you wish.’ I pause for a moment for effect, but it is hard to read an audience wearing masks.

‘I used to be a citizen of the Oubliette, in a past life. My associate here and I are looking for some property that I left here. Your tzaddik colleague, whom I have some previous … familiarity with has assured me that she can help me. In return, we are offering to help you.’ I try the wine. Old Badeker Solarancio. The Silence has good taste.

‘I’m not sure we should be having this conversation,’ the Futurist says. ‘Why would we involve third parties in anything? And for God’s sake – am I the only one who is smelling the Sobornost tech this bitch here is stuffed full of?’ She whips her gaze from Raymonde to the Silence. ‘If anything, we should be interrogating them. At the very least. If you have some personal history with these creatures, deal with it yourself. There is no need to compromise the rest of us.’

‘I take full responsibility for everything, of course,’ Raymonde says. ‘But I believe that what they can do could help us to finally get to grips with the cryptarchs.’

‘I thought you were training your little pet detective for that,’ Cockatrice says. Her outfit is somewhat more revealing than those of the others, a red leotard, a Venetian-style mask that leaves her blond locks free and shows a sensual, large mouth. Under other circumstances, I would be focusing all my attention on her.

Raymonde is quiet for a moment. ‘That is a different discussion, and does not concern us here,’ Raymonde says. ‘In any case, we have to pursue more than one option at a time. What I’ve been trying to say is we are treating the symptoms. Offworld tech. Gogol pirates. But we are just as affected by the underlying infection as the people we are trying to protect.’ She leans across the table. ‘So when I see an opportunity to work with an outside agent who can help us with that, I bring it to your attention.’

‘And the price?’ the Rat King asks. He has a young, high voice and a thick body. His comical-looking rodent mask leaves his chin bare, showing a rough five o’clock shadow.

‘Let me worry about the price,’ Raymonde says.

‘So what exactly can they do that we can’t?’ The Futurist looks at me suspiciously.

I give her a sweet smile. ‘We can come to that in a moment, Mme Diaz.’ I can’t see her face, but a satisfying shudder of shock goes through her, turning her into a red blur for a moment.