Hannu Rajaniemi - The Quantum Thief

I lock the palace behind me, thinking I will never visit it again. I lock it twice: once with a key, once with a price.

I give the key to Raymonde. And for a time, I am light and free and young again. Raymonde and I build a life. I design buildings. I grow flowers. I am happy. We are happy. We make plans.

Until the Box.

I sit down. I touch my face. It feels wrong, like a mask: there is another countenance underneath, another life. For a moment, I want to scratch it until the false layer falls away.

Raymonde looks different too. Not just the freckled girl with music sheets, not the Gentleman. There is a halo of memories around her, ghosts of a thousand moments. And awareness that she is not mine anymore.

‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘To you, to them?’

‘What happens to people? They live. They move on. They go to the Quiet. They come back. They make themselves into something new.’

‘I didn’t remember any of them. Isaac. Bathilde. Gilbertine. Marcel. Everyone else,’ I say. ‘I didn’t remember you. I made myself forget. So if I get caught, no one would ever find you.’

‘I like to think that’s why you did it,’ Raymonde says. ‘But I know you too well. Don’t try to fool yourself. You escaped. You saw something you wanted more than you wanted us.’ She smiles, sadly. ‘Were we really such a bear trap that you had to cut us all off?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t.’

Raymonde sits down next to me. ‘For what it’s worth, I believe you.’ She looks at the balloon houses. ‘It was difficult after you left. I found someone else, for a while. That didn’t help. I went to an early Quiet, for a while. That helped, a little. But when I came back, I was still angry. The Silence showed me I could be angry at something useful.’

She covers her mouth with a hand, eyes closed. ‘I don’t care what your Oort woman wants you to steal for her,’ she says. ‘You already did you worst. You stole what could have been. From me and from yourself. And you can never have it back.’

‘You didn’t tell me what happened to-’ I begin.

‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Just don’t.’

We sit quietly for a while, watching the balloon houses. I have a crazy thought about cutting their tethers so they could float up to the pale Martian sky. But you can’t live in the sky .

‘I have your key,’ Raymonde says. ‘Do you still want it?’

I laugh. ‘I can’t believe I already held it in my hands.’ I close my eyes. ‘I don’t know. I need it. I have a debt to pay.’

A part of me wants it more than anything. But there is the price. Lives of half-remembered strangers. Why should I care?

‘You said something when you gave it to me. “Tell me to go see Isaac.” So I’m telling you.’

‘Thank you.’ I get up. ‘I’m going to go and do that.’

‘All right. I’m going to go and talk to the Silence and the others. Let me know what you decide when you’re done. If you still want it, you only have to ask.’

‘You might have to rewrite that opera when you’re done,’ I say.

She kisses me on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

Isaac lives alone in a small Maze tower apartment. I send him an anonymous co-memory to expect a visitor, and get an answer that he is home. When he opens the door, he frowns: but as I open my gevulot, his bearded face lights up.

‘Paul!’ He grabs me in a rib-crushing bear hug. Then he grabs the front of my coat and shakes me, up and down. ‘Where have you been?’ he bellows. I can feel the rumble inside his broad chest.

He drags me bodily inside and tosses me onto a couch like a rat. ‘What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were Quiet, or eaten by the damn Sobornost!’

He rolls up the sleeves of his flannel shirt, revealing thick hairy arms, puffing. There is a thick brass Watch around one massive wrist. Seeing it makes me flinch, even if the word engraved on it is hidden.

‘If you are here to mess with Raymonde again-’ he says.

I lift my hands up. ‘I’m innocent. I’m here on… business. But I wanted to see you.’

‘Hrmph.’ He grunts, looking at me suspiciously from beneath thick eyebrows. Then he grins, slowly. ‘All right. Let’s drink.’

He marches across the room, kicking at some of the debris on the floor – books, clothes, tempmatter sheets, notepads – and makes his way to his small kitchen. The fabber begins to gurgle. I look around the apartment. A guitar hanging from the wall, animated wallpapers with children’s cartoon characters in them, high bookshelves, a desk covered in a perpetual snowfall of e-paper.

‘This place hasn’t changed at all,’ I say.

Isaac returns with a tempmatter bottle of vodka. ‘Are you kidding? It’s only been twenty years . Spring cleaning is every forty.’ He takes a swig from the bottle, then pours each of us two fingers in two glasses. ‘And I’ve only been married twice in that time.’ He holds up his glass. ‘Here’s to women. Don’t talk to me about business. It’s women who brought you here.’

I say nothing and clink my glass against his. We both drink. I cough. He laughs, a rough, booming sound.

‘So, am I going to have to kick your ass or did Raymonde do it already?’ he asks.

‘Over the last few days, people have been queueing for the position.’

‘Well, that’s as it should be.’ He pours more vodka into the glasses in a liberal waterfall that doesn’t spare the floor. ‘Anyway, I should have known that you were coming when the dreams started again.’

‘The dreams?’

‘Puss-in-boots. Castles. I always suspected you had something to do with them.’ He folds his arms. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Have you come back to find true happiness with your true love?’

‘No.’

‘Well, that’s good, because it’s too late . Idiot. I could see it coming, I have to say. You were always restless. Never happy with anything. Even Raymonde.’ He squints at me. ‘You are not going to tell me where you went, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Doesn’t matter. It’s good to see you. It’s been a dull world without you.’ Our glasses clink again.

‘Isaac-’

‘Are you going to say something mushy?’

‘No.’ I can’t help laughing. I feel like I haven’t been away at all. I can imagine the afternoon running down a stream of vodka, sitting here and talking and drinking until Isaac starts reading his poetry and arguing about theology and talking endlessly about women, daring me to interrupt. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.

And that, of course, is the price.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say and put my glass down. ‘I really have to go.’

He looks at me. ‘Is everything all right? That’s a queer look you’ve got.’

‘It’s fine. Thanks for the drink. I’d stay longer, but-’

‘Phh. So it is a woman. It’s nothing. I’ll have this place tidied up by the time you come next time.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

‘About what? It’s not my business to judge what you do. Enough people around throwing stones.’ He claps my shoulder. ‘Go on. Bring me an offworld girl next time. Green skin would be good. I like green.’

‘Doesn’t it say something about that in the Torah?’ I say.

‘I’ll take my chances,’ Isaac says. ‘ Shalom .’

I feel mildly drunk when I find my way to Raymonde’s apartment.

‘I wasn’t expecting you until much, much later,’ she says, when she lets me in. I squeeze past the inert synthbio drones that have been fixing the place. Tempmatter coverings hang everywhere, like spiderwebs.

‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ she says, ‘but it’s your fault.’

‘I know.’