Hannu Rajaniemi - The Quantum Thief

‘I understand.’

‘No matter. I will send what you need to that cute little ship of yours. I am satisfied with your progress: do not worry about failures.’

Mieli swallows. The question comes out unbidden.

‘Am I being punished?’

‘What do you mean? Of course not.’

‘Then why am I treating the thief with velvet gloves? In the war, the warminds would take prisoners and find the tiniest things hidden in their minds. Why is the thief any different?’

‘He isn’t,’ the pellegrini says. ‘But he will be.’ ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t have to. Trust me, you were carefully chosen for this task. Carry it out as you have, and both I and your friend will see you here soon, in the flesh.’

Then Mieli is back in the rose-scented room. Slowly, she gets up and makes herself another drink.

While Mieli is away, Perhonen and I work on the Watch. Or she does; I mainly act as her hands. Apparently, Mieli has given the ship a degree of access to this body’s sensory systems. It is an odd feeling, holding the Watch in my hands while thin q-dot probes crawl from my fingers into it.

‘I always liked these,’ I say aloud. ‘The Watches. Coupling entangled states with oscillators and mechanics. Large and small. Beautiful.’

Hm. Lift it closer to your eye .

While Perhonen carries out the analysis, I’m flicking through exomemories of memory palaces, fighting the resulting headache with drink.

‘You know, I think I was off my head. Memory palaces?’ An elaborate memory system, based on a technique of impressing places and images on the mind. Imaginary loci where symbols representing memories could be stored. Used by Greek orators, medieval scholars and Renaissance occultists. Made obsolete by the advent of printing .

I wave the Watch in frustration. ‘You know, I would have thought that the whole point of hiding things here would have been for me to find them easily again. It’s almost as if I don’t want myself to discover anything.’

Hold still .

‘I can’t find anything on Paul Sernine, no public exomemories, not that it’s surprising. I do wonder what I was doing on Mars, apart from this Raymonde girl.’

Stealing something, probably .

‘I love this place, but looking at my previous career, there isn’t that much here to steal. And I would not have gone into the gogol piracy business.’

Are you sure? Now put it back on the table .

‘Yes, of course I’m sure. What is your problem, anyway?’

The ship sighs, an odd, imaginary sound. You are. You may think you are charming, but you are causing distress to my friend. She does not do riddles or prison breaks. She is not even a warrior, not really .

‘So why is she doing all this? Serving the Sobornost?’

Why does anyone ever do anything? For someone. Don’t ask so many questions, I’m trying to concentrate. The ion traps in these things are delicate .

‘All right. Well, the sooner we crack this, the sooner we can all get on with bigger and better things.’

I feel the thing in my hands. The letters on the word Thibermesnil are raised slightly. ‘Ah ha.’ I suddenly make the connection. When I came back, there was a dream, and there was a book, a book about the flower thief. And a story. Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late . A secret passage, unlocked by-

I press the letter H with a fingernail. After some pressure, it turns. So do R and L. The cover of the Watch opens. Inside, is a picture of a man and a woman. The man is me, younger, black-haired, smiling. The woman has reddish brown hair and a dash of freckles across her nose.

‘Well, hello, Raymonde,’ I say.

Isidore blinks at the Phobos-light in the morning. His mouth tastes foul, and his head pounds. For a moment, he buries his face in Pixil’s hair, holding on to her warmth. Then he forces himself to open his eyes, slowly easing his hand out from underneath her.

The vault looks different in the morning. The walls and other surfaces let light filter through, and he can see the red line of Hellas Basin’s edge in the distance. It feels like waking up outside, in a strange geometric forest.

The previous night is a haphazard jumble of images, and he instinctively reaches out for the exomemory, to remind himself what happened: but of course, here, he only finds a blank wall.

He looks at Pixil’s sleeping face. Her lips are curled in a little smile, and her eyes are fluttering beneath the eyelids. The zoku jewel glitters in the morning light at the base of her throat, against her olive skin. What the hell am I doing? he thinks. She is right, it is just a game .

It takes a while to find his clothes in the pile, and he almost puts on a pair of pantaloons by mistake. Pixil breathes steadily all the way through the operation, and does not wake up even when he tiptoes away.

In daylight, the cubes in the vault resemble a labyrinth, and it is difficult to tell where they entered, even with a sense of direction honed by living in the Maze. As always, the lack of gevulot confuses Isidore, and thus finding the portal comes as a relief. That must be it . A silver arch, a perfect semicircle with intricate filigree work along its edge. He takes a deep breath and walks through. The discontinuity is even sharper this time-

‘More wine, my lord?’

– and he is in a vast ballroom that cannot be anything else but the Hall of the King in Olympus Palace. Glittering gogol slave dancers with jewelled bodies twist themselves into impossible configurations atop high pillars, performing slow, mechanical acrobatics. A machine servant in red livery is offering him a glass with a mandible-like limb. He realises he is wearing a Martian noble’s attire, a living cloak over a dark q-fabric doublet, wearing a sword. Everywhere around him there are people in even more elaborate finery, bathing in Phobos-light from a huge window with a view down the slope of Olympus Mons. The domed ceiling far, far above is like a golden sky.

It all feels completely real, and he accepts the offered glass, dumbfounded.

‘Would you care for a dance?’

A tall woman in a Venetian mask, lush body barely contained in a network of straps and jewels, her skin strikingly auburn red, offers him a hand. Still reeling, he allows himself to be led to a clear space in the crowd where a many-handed gogol plays achingly beautiful melodies with brass flutes. She moves lightly, tiptoed, following his lead like a writer’s pen; his hand rests on the smooth curve of her hip.

‘I want to make my husband jealous,’ she whispers, smelling of exotic wine.

‘And who is your husband?’

‘Up there, on the dais.’ Isidore looks up when they swirl around. And there, of course, stands the Martian King, a laughing figure in white and gold, surrounded by a coterie of admirers and courtiers. He turns to tell the red-skinned woman he really should be going, when everything freezes.

‘What are you doing ?’ asks Pixil. She is looking at him, arms folded, looking completely awake now, in her plain zoku daysuit.

‘Dancing,’ he says, disentangling himself from the red woman who has become a statue.

‘Silly boy.’

‘What is this place?’

‘An old Realmspace. Something Drathdor whipped together once, I think. He’s a romantic.’ Pixil shrugs. ‘Not really my kind of thing.’ She gestures, and the semicircle is back behind her. ‘I was going to make you breakfast. The whole zoku is still asleep.’

‘I didn’t want to wake you.’

The discontinuity is a relief this time, restoring him and the world to a degree of normalcy.