Hannu Rajaniemi - The Quantum Thief

There are few mourners this morning. Isidore walks behind a black man whose back is bent by the weight of his quicksuit.

Every now and then, they pass a platform manned by a silent, masked Resurrection Man. The movements of the Quiet below are obscured by the dust cloud, but the phoboi walls are visible. The ramparts stretch towards the horizon and define the city’s planned route. They contain the trail of new life behind the city, a paintbrush streak of synthbio fields and terraforming machinery. Like its brothers and sisters, the city tries to paint Mars green again. But in the end, the phoboi always come.

At the bottom of the Tower, there are elevators waiting. Resurrection Men give them fireflies to follow, accompanied by stern instructions to make it back by noon. One of them helps Isidore don his quicksuit, Oubliette make, with modern programmable materials but with far too much design effort spent on it, brass and leather, so that it looks like an ancient diving suit. The gloves are clumsy and it is difficult to hold on to the bouquet of flowers he has brought. They crowd into the elevator through an airlock – a simple platform suspended from nanofilament – and descend through the orange mist, swinging back and forth with the city’s motion. And then they are on the surface, slow-moving figures in bell-like helmets, each following a firefly.

The vast mass of the city looms above like a second, heavier sky, with fractures and seams where the different platforms meet, moving and shifting slowly like clockwork. From this vantage point, the legs – a forest of multi-jointed shafts – seem too frail to hold it up. The thought of a falling sky makes Isidore uncomfortable, and after a while, he decides to focus his gaze on the firefly.

The sand beneath his feet is beaten hard by legs and tracks and other locomotion methods of the Quiet. They are everywhere here, tiny ones that scatter to make way for his feet, as if he were a giant City striding across their landscape. There are terraforming Quiet, bigger than a man, moving in herds, toiling on the algae and regolith. An Atlas Quiet strides past, making the ground shake, a six-limbed caterpillar larger than a skyscraper, on its way to correct the balance of a city leg or to make sure the ground is safe when it completes its arc. He sees an air factory Quiet in the distance, a plant on tracks that is like a small city in itself, with swarms of flying Quiet around it. But the firefly does not let him linger. It leads him across the shadow of the city at a rapid pace, up and ahead where his father is helping to build phoboi ramparts.

His father is ten metres tall, with an elongated insect body. He burrows into the Martian regolith with a grinding noise, pulling up powdered rock through a chemical processing system, mixing it with synthbio bacteria, turning it into a construction material for the wall. His dozen limbs – spindly and fast-moving – shape the material flow from his beaklike mouth, laying down the wall, layer by layer. His carapace has a metallic hue that looks rusty in the orange light. There is a dent on his side, with another limb bud growing from it; a memory of a recent phoboi battle.

He labours side by side with a hundred others; some of them climb on top of each other, making the wall taller and taller. But his father’s section of the wall looks different. It is full of faces, reliefs and shapes. A lot of them are almost immediately shattered by the smaller mechanic Quiet who come and install the wall’s weaponry. But Isidore’s father does not seem to care.

‘Father,’ Isidore says.

The Quiet interrupts his work and turns to Isidore slowly. His metal carapace snaps and groans as it cools. The usual fear chills Isidore, the awareness that he is going to be inside a body like that one day. His father looms above him in the orange dust like a bladed tree, the mechanisms of his hands slowly spinning down.

‘I brought you some flowers,’ Isidore says. The bouquet is full of his father’s favourites, tall Argyre lilies, and he places it on the ground carefully. His father picks it up gently, with exaggerated care. His blades spin again for an instant, and the spidery shaper limbs dance. The Quiet places a tiny statue in front of Isidore, made from the dark wall material, a man making a bow and smiling.

‘You’re welcome,’ Isidore says.

They stand in silence for a moment. Isidore looks at the crumbling relief on the wall, all the faces and landscapes his father has carved into it. There is a tree lovingly rendered in stone, its branches full of large-eyed owls. Maybe Élodie was right , he thinks. It is all unfair .

‘I have something to tell you,’ he says. The guilt clings to his back and shoulders and belly, wet and heavy, like the old man of the sea. It is difficult to speak while in its grip.

‘I did something stupid. I talked to a journalist. I was drunk.’

He feels weak and sits down on the sand, taking his father’s statuette in his hand. ‘It was inexcusable. I’m sorry. I’ve already had some trouble, and you may have some too.’

Two statuettes this time, the larger holding his hand across the smaller one’s back.

‘I know you trust me,’ Isidore says. ‘I just wanted to tell you.’ He gets up and looks at the relief: running horses, abstract shapes, faces, Noble, Quiet. The quicksuit lets some of the gunpowder smell of the freshly worked stone through.

‘The reporter asked me why I try to solve things. I told him something stupid.’ He pauses.

‘Do you remember what she looked like? Did she leave you that?’

The Quiet stands up, all angles and metal. It runs its shaper limbs along a row of blank female faces, each subtly different, each an attempt to capture something he has lost.

Isidore remembers the day he stopped remembering his mother, when her gevulot closed. There was sudden awareness of an absence . Before, there was always a sense of safety, that someone always knew where he was, always knew what he was thinking.

The Quiet makes another statue in the sand, a female one, faceless, holding an umbrella above the other two.

‘I know you think she was trying to protect us. I don’t believe that.’ He kicks at the statue. It crumbles back to dust. The regret comes immediately.

‘I didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry.’ He looks back at the wall, at his father’s endless labour. They break it, and he makes it again. Only the phoboi here to see it . Suddenly, he feels foolish. ‘Let’s not talk about her.’

The Quiet sways, like a tree in the wind. Then it makes another pair of statues, with familiar features, holding hands. ‘Pixil’s fine,’ Isidore says. ‘I… I don’t know where we are going. But once we figure it out, I’ll bring her to see you again.’

He sits down again, leaning against the wall. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you have been up to?’

Back in the city, in the bright daylight, Isidore feels lighter again, and it is not just the lack of the quicksuit’s weight. He is carrying the first statue in his pocket: its weight is comforting.

He treats himself to lunch in a fancy Italo-Chinese place along Persistent Avenue. The Ares Herald is still running the story, but this time he is able to focus on his food instead.

‘Don’t worry, M. Beautrelet,’ a voice says. ‘All publicity is good publicity.’

Startled, Isidore looks up. There is a woman sitting on the other side of the table. He didn’t sense even a ripple in the gevulot. She has a tall, young designer body, a face that is beautiful in a carefully unconventional fashion: short-cropped hair, a strong, sweeping nose, full lips and arching eyebrows. She is dressed in white, a Xanthean jacket over an expensive variant of the Revolution uniform. Two tiny jewels wink at him from her earlobes.