Hannu Rajaniemi - The Quantum Thief

She rattles off two orders to the waiter drone.

‘I wasn’t really done looking at the menu,’ I say.

‘Rubbish. You are going to have the teriyaki zebra. It’s excellent.’

I spread my hands. ‘All right. I thought that is the way things are done here. So why did you agree to meet with me?’

‘Maybe it’s me who has been stalking you.’

‘Maybe.’

She eats an olive from the starter bowl, and brandishes the pick at me. ‘You were polite about it. You didn’t do a great job with your gevulot. Clearly, you are from somewhere else. That is always interesting. And now you owe me something. That is always handy.’

Damn . I query the pirate engine. It is still trying to find openings in her gevulot, without much success. But obviously she is doing a better job than it is.

‘Guilty as charged. I bought a citizenship. I’m from Ceres, in the Belt.’ She raises her eyebrows. It is not easy to buy a Martian citizenship; usually, it involves a ruling by the Voice. But the gogol pirates seem to have done an airtight job of establishing the backstory of this particular identity, carefully planting things in public exomemories here and there.

‘Interesting. So why here?’

I gesture at our surroundings. ‘You have a sky . You have a whole planet. You have done something with it. You have a dream .’

She looks at me with the same curious intensity she gave her lunchtime apple, and for a moment I wait for the bite. ‘A lot of people think that. But of course, we did have a horrible civil war first that unleashed self-replicating killing machines that undid the terraforming our slaver overlords managed to do before we killed them.’ She smiles. ‘But yes, there is a dream in there, somewhere.’

‘You know, no one has yet told me how often they-’

‘Attack? The phoboi? It depends. Most of the time you don’t even notice, or if you do, it’s this rumble in the distance. The Quiet handle all that. There are kids who go up in gliders to watch, of course. I used to do it when I was younger. It’s spectacular.’

The co-memory she gives me catches me by surprise. A smartmatter glider, white wings; a landscape of thunder and fire below, a dazzling laser tracery inside orange dust, a black avalanche of things breaking against the Quiet troops; a blinding explosion. And someone in there with her, touching her, kissing her neck-

I take a deep breath. The pirate engine seizes the flirtatious memory and starts churning through it.

‘What’s wrong? You look confused,’ she says.

I notice that the food has arrived; the delicious smell pulls me out of the memory, leaving me gasping with a sensory overload. The waiter – a dark-skinned man with flashy white teeth – grins at me. Raymonde nods at him.

‘This is a confusing place,’ I say.

‘All interesting places are. That’s what I’m trying to do with the music you had so many ideas about.’

‘You are trying to give your listeners a heart attack?’

She laughs. ‘No, I mean, we are confused too. It’s nice to talk about the Revolution dream, recreating an Earth, a promised land and all that, but really, it is not that simple. There is a lot of guilt mixed with the dream, too. And the younger generations don’t think the same way. I have been Quiet once, and I don’t want to do it again. And people younger than me, they see zokus coming here, and people like you. They don’t know what to think.’

‘What was it like? Being Quiet?’ I try my food. The zebra is indeed excellent, dark and juicy: she has good taste. Perhaps she picked it up from me.

She crumbles a piece of bread on her plate, lost in thought. ‘It’s difficult to explain. It’s very abrupt: when your Time runs out, the transition happens. The Resurrection Men just come to pick your body up, but you are already there. It’s like having a stroke. Suddenly, your brain works differently, in a different body, with different senses.

‘But after the shock passes, it’s not so bad. You become very focused in your work, and the concentration is quite pleasing. You are wired differently. You can’t speak, but you have these very vivid waking dreams you can share with others. And you are powerful , depending on what kind of body you end up in. That can be… exhilarating.’

‘So there is some sort of Quiet sex life?’

‘Perhaps one day you will find out, offworld boy.’

‘Anyway, it does not sound so bad,’ I say.

‘There have been endless arguments about it. A lot of the kids think it’s just a guilt thing. But the Voice has never had any proposals about overturning the system. You can ask why: could we not do it differently? Could we not use synthbio drones to do it all?

‘But it’s not that simple. When you come back, you are a mess for a while. You look into a mirror and see your other self. And you miss it. It’s like having a conjoined twin. You’ll never really be apart.’

She raises her glass – she also chose the wine, Dao Valley Sauvignon. I distantly recall it is supposed to have aphrodisiac effects. ‘Here’s to confusion,’ she says.

We drink. The wine is rich, brawny, with traces of peach and honeysuckle. With it comes a strange feeling, a mixture of nostalgia and the first flush of fresh infatuation. In a mirror somewhere, my old self must be smiling.

‘They wanted him,’ the vasilev says, eagerly. Every time it answers a question, the surgeon gogol stimulates its pleasure centres. The flipside is that it takes its time answering.

‘Who?’

‘The hidden ones. They rule here. They promised us souls for him, as many as we wanted.’

‘Who are they?’

‘They spoke to us through other mouths, like the Founders sometimes do. We said yes, and why not, why not work with them, the Task will swallow them all in the end, all will be brought down before the altar of Fedorov and can we go back to the museum and look at the elephants?’

‘Show me.’

But the coherence of the vasilev is breaking down. Gritting her teeth, Mieli restores a previous version and tells the surgeon to begin again.

The dinner turns into a dessert and then a walk around the Tortoise Park. We talk, and little by little, her gevulot opens to me.

She is from a Kasei slowtown. She had a wild, Time-wasting youth, then settled down (with an older man, apparently). She does not forget debts: she makes me buy her ice cream from a girl in a white apron, and chooses us flavours; odd synthetic taste symphonies that I can’t even name, a little like honey and melon. I try to hold on to the little things she shares for a moment before throwing them into the pirate engine’s hungry maw.

‘The reason I want to do an opera,’ she says, when we sit down by a Kingdom-style fountain with our cones, ’is that I want to do something big . The Revolution was big. The Oubliette is big. No one tackles it head on. Something grand, something with gogol pirates and zokus and rebellion and noise.’

‘Oubliettepunk,’ I say. She gives me an odd look, then shakes her head. ‘Anyway, that’s what I want to do.’ We can see Montgolfiersville from here, across the park, tethered balloon residences strewn across the horizon like many-coloured fruit. She watches them with an expression of yearning.

‘Have you ever thought about leaving?’ I ask.

‘To go where? I know, there is an infinity of possibilities. Of course I have. But I’m a big fish in a small world, and I sort of prefer it that way. I can make a little bit of difference here, I think. Out there – I don’t know.’

‘I know the feeling.’ And, to my surprise, I do. It is tempting to stay here, to do something on a human scale, to build something. That must be what he felt when he came here. Or maybe that’s how she made him feel.