The Quantum Thief

‘That’s all right,’ says a voice. ‘I will.’

The gardener discards his gevulot, holding the gun in his hand. His hair is white, his features carefully aged, but there is something awfully familiar about them. I take a step forward, but a sleek, egg-shaped device – a zoku q-gun – is hovering above his right shoulder, looking at me with a bright quantum eye.

‘I wouldn’t move,’ he says. ‘This thing will make a mess of even that fancy Sobornost body of yours.’

I raise my hands slowly.

‘Le Roi, I presume?’ I say. He smiles, the same smile I saw on the cryptarch in the hotel. ‘So, you are the King here?’ I calculate my chances of survival if I were to rush him. They are not very high. My body is still locked in its human state, and the five metres between us might as well be a lightyear.

‘I prefer to think of myself as just a gardener,’ he says. ‘Remember Sante Prison, on Earth? What you told your cellmate? That the thing you’d really like to steal was a Kingdom of your own. But ruling it would be too much trouble, much better have someone else be the figurehead, watch its people prosper and be happy, while you weed the garden and give flowers to young girls and give things a little nudge every now and then.’ He moves his free hand in a wide arc, encompassing the garden and the city around us. ‘Well, I’m living the dream.’ He sighs. ‘And like all dreams do, it’s getting a little old.’

‘Yes, it is,’ I say. ‘The tzaddikim are about to end it and wake the people up.’ I frown. ‘We were cellmates?’

He laughs. ‘After a fashion. If you want, you can call me le Roi. Jean le Roi, that’s what they called me here, although I don’t much care for the name anymore.’

I stare at him. Now that his gevulot is open, the resemblance is there.

‘What happened?’

‘We were careless before the Collapse,’ he says. ‘And why not? We worked with the Founders. We cracked our cognitive rights management software as soon as Chitragupta came up with it. There were lots of us. And some of us got caught. Like me.’

‘How did you end up here?’ I ask. Then it hits me. ‘This was never a Kingdom, was it?’ I say. ‘It was a prison.’

‘This was supposed to be a new Australia,’ he says. ‘A typical pre-Collapse idea: put criminals inside terraforming machines, get them to pay their debts to society. And we worked hard, believe me, processed regolith and lit up Phobos and melted the ice cap with nukes, all just to be human for a little while again.

‘Of course, they made sure we were safely locked up here. Even now, if I even think about leaving Mars, it hurts like hell. But then the Collapse happened, and the lunatics took over the asylum. We hacked the panopticon system. Turned it into the exomemory. Used it to give the power to us.’

He shakes his head.

‘And we decided to tell the others a nicer story. The Spike was a blessing, wiped out all the traces we left – not that there were many. It was only after the zoku came that we were really able to flesh it out, of course. In retrospect, we should never have let them in here. At the time, we needed something to keep the Sobornost off our backs. Much good that turned out to do. But at least they gave us tools to make pretty dreams.’

‘We? Who else is there?’ I ask.

‘No one,’ he says. ‘Well, not anymore. I took care of the others a long time ago. A garden only needs one gardener.’ He reaches out with his free hand and touches the stem of a flower.

‘I was content here, for a while,’ he says. Then his face twists in a grimace. ‘And then you had to come here. You had done so much better than I. All that power, all that freedom. All that, and you went native. You can’t believe how angry that made me.’

Le Roi laughs. ‘You know the feeling as well as I do, wanting something someone else has. So you can imagine how much I wanted what was yours. So after you left, I had what I could. Your woman, for example. She will never be yours again. She thinks you left her with the child you made together and disappeared. I never understood what you saw in her. At least you hid your traces well there, with that memory you split with her: I never knew what this was.’

He holds up the revolver with nine bullets. ‘You thought you were so clever. Hiding your treasure in your little friends’ exomemories. Great minds think alike, so much so I admit I could not find it. But I knew you would come back, and so I laid out a trail for you. The gevulot images came from me. Still, it was the detective who finally put the pieces together for me. Very appropriate.’ He points the gun at me. ‘I even gave you a chance to go through with it: fair is fair, after all. But you didn’t. So now it’s my turn.’

With a shout of red fury, I lunge towards him. The q-gun flashes. I fall to the ground, face hitting the marble hard. The Sobornost body screams for a moment, then applies some merciful anaesthesia, numbing the pain. I roll over and try to get up, only to realise my right leg is a blackened stump, gone from the knee down.

Le Roi looks down at me and smiles. Then he lifts the revolver into the air and starts firing. I try to claw at his legs but he kicks me in the face. I try to count the shots, but lose track.

The ground shudders. Deep beneath the city, the Atlas Quiet who once were my friends awaken with new minds and a new purpose. The memory palaces are parts of them, and with the force of a natural disaster, they want to be together again. A storm of stone rages around us. The buildings around the robot gardens collapse. The palaces loom above them like black sails, ploughing through everything in their way, bearing down on us.

They come together on top of us like the templed fingers of two hands made of black geometry. Then all is dark, and the pins and needles come, taking me and the King apart.

19 THE DETECTIVE AND THE RING

Mieli’s skin tingles from the gevulot locks. But she feels light and weightless again, and Perhonen’s cockpit is the closest thing to a home she has left. The sense of safety and comfort is almost enough to drown out the raging voice of the pellegrini inside her head.

It’s good to have you back, Perhonen says. The ship’s butterfly avatars dancing around Mieli’s head. I felt like a piece of me was missing.

‘Me too,’ Mieli says, delighting in the familiar tickle of wings fluttering against her skin. ‘A big piece.’

‘How soon can you get back down there?’ demands the pellegrini. The goddess has been Mieli’s constant companion ever since the immigration Quiet delivered her back to the ship and woke her up. Her mouth is a cold red line. ‘This is intolerable. He will have to be punished. Punished.’ She seems to taste the word. ‘Yes, punished.’

‘There is a problem with his biot feed,’ Mieli says. She feels an odd sensation of absence. Can I actually be missing his feed? The poisons you get addicted to.

Just go ahead and admit that you are actually worried, Perhonen says. Don’t tell anyone, but so am I.

‘The last thing that registered is severe damage. And we can’t go down for thirty days, not legally at least.’

‘What is that boy doing?’ the pellegrini mutters.

The Oubliette orbital control is telling us to get a Highway approach vector, Perhonen says. And they are turning all visitors away from the beanstalk station. There is something happening down in the city.

‘Can we see anything?’ Mieli asks.

The ship’s butterfly avatars open a fan of moving images across various wavelengths in front of her. They show the city, a dark lenticular shape in the orange bowl of the Hellas Basin, blurred by its gevulot cloud.

Something is seriously wrong down there, Perhonen says. It has stopped moving.

There is something else in the images as well. A black fuzzy mass, pouring down from the rims of the impact crater towards the city.

Perhonen ramps up the magnification, and Mieli finds herself looking at a vision from hell.