The Quantum Thief

She looks down. ‘I don’t know where they are.’

‘Oh.’

‘I was bluffing. I was angry. I wanted to show you … what I had become. That I had moved on. And I wanted some leverage.’

‘I understand.’

‘Jean, you are a bastard. You will always be a bastard. But you did good this time. I don’t know what else to say.’

‘You can let me remember being a bastard,’ I say. ‘All of it.’

She takes my hand. ‘Yes,’ she says.

They are her memories, not mine. But when she opens her gevulot, something clicks. It is as if a flower opens in my head, fed by what she is giving, blooming, growing; parts of me joining with parts of her, making something more. A shared secret, hidden from the Archons.

Mars, twenty years ago. I am tired. There is a weight that comes from years and transformations, from being a man and a gogol and a zoku member and a copyfamily, from living in one body, many bodies, in particles of thinking dust; from stealing jewels and minds and quantum states and worlds from diamond brains. I am a shadow, thin, faded, stretched.

The Oubliette body I wear makes things simpler, a heartbeat in unison with the ticking of a Watch, making things delightfully finite. I walk along Persistent Avenue and listen to human voices. Everything feels new again.

A girl sits on a park bench, looking at light dancing among the balloons of Montgolfiersville. She is young, and has a look of wonder on her face. It looks like a reflection. I smile at her. And, for some reason, she smiles back.

It is hard to forget what you are, even with Raymonde. Her friend Gilbertine gives her lover a look that I want to steal. Raymonde finds out. She leaves me, and goes back to her slowtown.

I follow her, to Nanedi City, where white houses climb up the sides of the valley like a smile. I ask for forgiveness. I beg. She doesn’t listen.

So I tell her about the secrets. Not all of them, just enough that she understands the weight. I tell her I don’t want them anymore.

And she forgives.

But it still isn’t enough. The temptation is there, always, to take on a different form, to escape.

My friend Isaac tells me about memory palaces and the nine Dignities of God.

I make a memory palace of my own. It is not just a mental space to store memorised images. My secrets are heavier than that. Hundreds of years of life. Artifacts stolen from the Sobornost and the zokus, minds and lies and bodies and tricks.

I craft it from buildings and human beings and entangled qubits; out of the fabric of the City itself. And most of all, my friends. They are all so trusting, so open, so accepting. They suspect nothing, not even when I give them custom-made Watches, my nine Dignities. I fill their exomemories with things that belong to me. I put picotech assemblers stolen from Sobornost in nine buildings, to remake it all if I need to.

I lock the palace behind me, thinking I will never visit it again. I lock it twice: once with a key, once with a price.

I give the key to Raymonde. And for a time, I am light and free and young again. Raymonde and I build a life. I design buildings. I grow flowers. I am happy. We are happy. We make plans.

Until the Box.

I sit down. I touch my face. It feels wrong, like a mask: there is another countenance underneath, another life. For a moment, I want to scratch it until the false layer falls away.

Raymonde looks different too. Not just the freckled girl with music sheets, not the Gentleman. There is a halo of memories around her, ghosts of a thousand moments. And awareness that she is not mine anymore.

‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘To you, to them?’

‘What happens to people? They live. They move on. They go to the Quiet. They come back. They make themselves into something new.’

‘I didn’t remember any of them. Isaac. Bathilde. Gilbertine. Marcel. Everyone else,’ I say. ‘I didn’t remember you. I made myself forget. So if I get caught, no one would ever find you.’

‘I like to think that’s why you did it,’ Raymonde says. ‘But I know you too well. Don’t try to fool yourself. You escaped. You saw something you wanted more than you wanted us.’ She smiles, sadly. ‘Were we really such a bear trap that you had to cut us all off?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t.’

Raymonde sits down next to me. ‘For what it’s worth, I believe you.’ She looks at the balloon houses. ‘It was difficult after you left. I found someone else, for a while. That didn’t help. I went to an early Quiet, for a while. That helped, a little. But when I came back, I was still angry. The Silence showed me I could be angry at something useful.’

She covers her mouth with a hand, eyes closed. ‘I don’t care what your Oort woman wants you to steal for her,’ she says. ‘You already did you worst. You stole what could have been. From me and from yourself. And you can never have it back.’

‘You didn’t tell me what happened to—’ I begin.

‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Just don’t.’

We sit quietly for a while, watching the balloon houses. I have a crazy thought about cutting their tethers so they could float up to the pale Martian sky. But you can’t live in the sky.

‘I have your key,’ Raymonde says. ‘Do you still want it?’

I laugh. ‘I can’t believe I already held it in my hands.’ I close my eyes. ‘I don’t know. I need it. I have a debt to pay.’

A part of me wants it more than anything. But there is the price. Lives of half-remembered strangers. Why should I care?

‘You said something when you gave it to me. “Tell me to go see Isaac.” So I’m telling you.’

‘Thank you.’ I get up. ‘I’m going to go and do that.’

‘All right. I’m going to go and talk to the Silence and the others. Let me know what you decide when you’re done. If you still want it, you only have to ask.’

‘You might have to rewrite that opera when you’re done,’ I say.

She kisses me on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

Isaac lives alone in a small Maze tower apartment. I send him an anonymous co-memory to expect a visitor, and get an answer that he is home. When he opens the door, he frowns: but as I open my gevulot, his bearded face lights up.

‘Paul!’ He grabs me in a rib-crushing bear hug. Then he grabs the front of my coat and shakes me, up and down. ‘Where have you been?’ he bellows. I can feel the rumble inside his broad chest.

He drags me bodily inside and tosses me onto a couch like a rat. ‘What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were Quiet, or eaten by the damn Sobornost!’

He rolls up the sleeves of his flannel shirt, revealing thick hairy arms, puffing. There is a thick brass Watch around one massive wrist. Seeing it makes me flinch, even if the word engraved on it is hidden.

‘If you are here to mess with Raymonde again—’ he says.

I lift my hands up. ‘I’m innocent. I’m here on … business. But I wanted to see you.’

‘Hrmph.’ He grunts, looking at me suspiciously from beneath thick eyebrows. Then he grins, slowly. ‘All right. Let’s drink.’

He marches across the room, kicking at some of the debris on the floor – books, clothes, tempmatter sheets, notepads – and makes his way to his small kitchen. The fabber begins to gurgle. I look around the apartment. A guitar hanging from the wall, animated wallpapers with children’s cartoon characters in them, high bookshelves, a desk covered in a perpetual snowfall of e-paper.

‘This place hasn’t changed at all,’ I say.

Isaac returns with a tempmatter bottle of vodka. ‘Are you kidding? It’s only been twenty years. Spring cleaning is every forty.’ He takes a swig from the bottle, then pours each of us two fingers in two glasses. ‘And I’ve only been married twice in that time.’ He holds up his glass. ‘Here’s to women.