The Quantum Thief

See? That’s what really matters, isn’t it? Have fun. Bastard. And then she is gone.

‘And how is young Pixil?’ asks the Gentleman.

Isidore does not reply and tries to walk faster.

The chocolate shop is in one of the wide shopping streets of the Edge, a gently curving avenue that follows the southern rim of the city. The platforms here are relatively large, and the layout stable, so maps exist. Hence, it is where many offworlders come to catch a glimpse of the Oubliette. The restaurants and cafes are just opening, lighting heaters to make the chilly Martian air palatable to early customers. Purple and green biodrones cluster around them, holding their spindly limbs out for warmth.

The Gentleman stops in front of a narrow shop window. Remarkable objects are on display: a football-sized sphere that looks like a scale model of Kingdom-era Deimos, dotted with multicoloured candy, and an intricate chandelier hanging from the ceiling, both made from chocolate. But a large object next to them is the one that draws Isidore’s attention. It is a dress: a sober, high-collared affair with a sash at the waist and a flowing skirt, frozen in a swirly chocolate snapshot.

The tzaddik opens the door, and a brass bell rings. ‘Here we are. As your lady friend might put it – the game is afoot. I’ll be nearby: but I’ll let you do the talking.’ He fades out of sight, suddenly, a ghost in the pale morning sun.

The shop is a narrow space with a long glass counter on the left and display shelves on the right, brightly lit. There is a pleasant, sweet smell of chocolate and caramel, not at all like the raw leather of the factory. Beneath the counter, moulded pralines glitter, like bright-carapaced insects. The showpieces are on the right, ornate chocolate sculptures. There is an arching butterfly wing as tall as a man, with an etching of a woman’s face, and what looks like a death mask, impossibly thin, made out of chocolate the colour of terra-cotta.

For a moment, Isidore is captivated by a pair of red shoes with flowing chocolate ribbons. He files them away for future reference: Pixil’s current mood may require some offerings on his part.

‘Looking for something special?’ asks a voice, familiar from exomemory. Siv Lindstrom. She looks more tired than the memory, lines in her pretty face. But her blue shop uniform is smooth, and her hair carefully arranged. Their Watches exchange a brief burst of standard shop gevulot, enough for her to know that he does not really know much about chocolate but has Time enough to afford it – and for him to glimpse public exomemories about her and the shop. Her gevulot must be hiding an emotional reaction of some kind, but to Isidore she presents a perfect facade of good service.

‘We have a very nice range of macarone, fresh from the factory.’ She motions towards a counter, busily restocked by a synthbio drone Isidore saw earlier, placing the colourful chocolate discs in neat rows.

‘I was thinking,’ says Isidore, ‘about something … more substantial.’ He points at the chocolate dress in the window. ‘Like this one. Could I have a closer look at this?’

The assistant walks around the counter and opens the glass panel that separates the window from the shop. She walks in with that abrupt, shuffling step of old Martians, flinching in the absence of Earth’s gravity: like a dog that has been beaten too many times, expecting a blow when receiving a caress. Up close, Isidore can see the intricate details of the dress, how the fabric seemingly flows, how vivid the colours are. Maybe I’m wrong about this. But then he can feel her gevulot shifting, just a little. Or not.

‘Well,’ she says, tone unchanged. ‘This is certainly something very special. It is modelled after a Noblewoman dress from the Olympian Court, made from Trudelle-style chocolate: we had to try the mixture four times. Six hundred aromatic constituents, and you have to get them just right. Chocolate is fickle, it keeps you on your toes.’

‘How interesting,’ says Isidore, trying to affect the world-weary tone of a Time-rich young man. He takes out his magnifying glass and studies the hem of the dress. The swirly shape becomes a crystalline grid of sugars and molecules. He probes deeper into his fresh chocolate memories. But then the shop gevulot interferes, detecting an unwanted invasion of privacy, and turns the image into a blur.

‘What are you doing?’ asks Lindstrom, staring at him as if seeing him for the first time.

Isidore frowns, looking at the white noise.

‘Damn. I almost had it,’ he says. He gives Lindstrom his best smile, the one Pixil says turns older women’s bones to water. ‘Could you please taste it? The dress?’

The assistant looks at him incredulously.

‘What?’

‘My apologies,’ he says. ‘I should have told you. I am investigating what happened to your employer.’ He opens his gevulot just enough for her to know his name. Her clear green eyes glaze over for a moment as she ’blinks him. Then she takes a deep breath.

‘So, you are the wonderboy they keep talking about. Who sees things the tzaddikim don’t.’ She walks back to the counter. ‘Unless you are going to buy something, I’d appreciate it if you left. I’m trying to keep the shop open. It’s what he would have wanted. Why should I talk to you? I already told them everything I know.’

‘Because,’ says Isidore, ‘they are going to think you had something to do with it.’

‘Why? Because I found him? I barely had enough of his gevulot to know his last name.’

‘Because it fits. You are of the First Generation, I can see it in the way you walk. That means you spent almost a century as a Quiet. That can do strange things to a person’s mind. Sometimes enough to make them want to be a machine again. The gogol pirates could make that happen, for a price. If you did them a favour. Like helped them to steal the mind of a world-famous chocolatier—’

Her gevulot closes completely, and she becomes a blurry placeholder for a person, wrapped in privacy: at the same time, Isidore knows he is a non-entity for her. But it only lasts for a moment. Then she is back, eyes closed, fists pressed against her chest as if she’s holding something in, knuckles hard and white against her dark skin.

‘It was not like that,’ she says quietly.

‘No,’ Isidore says. ‘Because you had an affair with him.’

His Watch tickles at his mind. She offers him a gevulot contract, like a cautious handshake. He accepts: the conversation over the next five minutes will not go into his exomemory.

‘You really are not like them, are you? The tzaddikim.’

‘No,’ Isidore says. ‘I am not.’

She holds up a praline. ‘Do you know how hard it is to make chocolate? How long it takes? He showed me that it wasn’t just candy, that you could put yourself into it, make something with your hands. Something real.’ She cradles the candy, as if it were a talisman.

‘I was in the Quiet for a long time. You are too young, you don’t know what it’s like. You are yourself, but not yourself: the part of you that speaks is doing other things, machine things. And after a while, that is the way things should be. Even after. You feel wrong. Unless someone helps you find yourself again.’

She puts the half-melted praline away. ‘The Resurrection Men say they can’t bring him back.’

‘Miss Lindstrom, they might be able to, if you help me.’

She looks at the dress. ‘We made it together, you know. I wore one like it once, in the Kingdom.’ Her eyes are far away.

‘Why not?’ she says. ‘Let’s have a taste. In his memory, if nothing else.’

Lindstrom takes a small metal instrument from behind the counter and opens the glass door hesitantly. With infinite care, she carves a small chip from the hem and puts it in her mouth. She stands still for almost a minute, expression unreadable.

‘It’s not right,’ she says, eyes widening. ‘It’s not right at all. The crystal structure is not right. And the taste … This is not the chocolate we made. Almost, but not quite.’ She hands another small piece to Isidore: it dissolves on his tongue almost instantly, leaving a bitter, faintly nutty taste.

Isidore smiles. The feeling of triumph is almost enough to wipe the lingering tension of Pixil’s qupts from his mind.

‘Can I ask what the difference is, from a technical point of view?’

Her eyes brighten. She licks her lips. ‘It’s the crystals. In the last stage, you reheat and cool the chocolate, many times; you get something that does not melt in the room temperature. There are crystals in chocolate: there is a symmetry there, that’s what keeps it together, made from hot and cold. We always try to make type V, but