Hannu Rajaniemi: The Quantum Thief

‘We? Who else is there?’ I ask.

‘No one,’ he says. ‘Well, not anymore. I took care of the others a long time ago. A garden only needs one gardener.’ He reaches out with his free hand and touches the stem of a flower.

‘I was content here, for a while,’ he says. Then his face twists in a grimace. ‘And then you had to come here. You had done so much better than I. All that power, all that freedom. All that, and you went native. You can’t believe how angry that made me.’

Le Roi laughs. ‘You know the feeling as well as I do, wanting something someone else has. So you can imagine how much I wanted what was yours . So after you left, I had what I could. Your woman, for example. She will never be yours again. She thinks you left her with the child you made together and disappeared. I never understood what you saw in her. At least you hid your traces well there, with that memory you split with her: I never knew what this was.’

He holds up the revolver with nine bullets. ‘You thought you were so clever. Hiding your treasure in your little friends’ exomemories. Great minds think alike, so much so I admit I could not find it. But I knew you would come back, and so I laid out a trail for you. The gevulot images came from me. Still, it was the detective who finally put the pieces together for me. Very appropriate.’ He points the gun at me. ‘I even gave you a chance to go through with it: fair is fair, after all. But you didn’t. So now it’s my turn.’

With a shout of red fury, I lunge towards him. The q-gun flashes. I fall to the ground, face hitting the marble hard. The Sobornost body screams for a moment, then applies some merciful anaesthesia, numbing the pain. I roll over and try to get up, only to realise my right leg is a blackened stump, gone from the knee down.

Le Roi looks down at me and smiles. Then he lifts the revolver into the air and starts firing. I try to claw at his legs but he kicks me in the face. I try to count the shots, but lose track.

The ground shudders. Deep beneath the city, the Atlas Quiet who once were my friends awaken with new minds and a new purpose. The memory palaces are parts of them, and with the force of a natural disaster, they want to be together again. A storm of stone rages around us. The buildings around the robot gardens collapse. The palaces loom above them like black sails, ploughing through everything in their way, bearing down on us.

They come together on top of us like the templed fingers of two hands made of black geometry. Then all is dark, and the pins and needles come, taking me and the King apart.

Mieli’s skin tingles from the gevulot locks. But she feels light and weightless again, and Perhonen ’s cockpit is the closest thing to a home she has left. The sense of safety and comfort is almost enough to drown out the raging voice of the pellegrini inside her head.

It’s good to have you back , Perhonen says. The ship’s butterfly avatars dancing around Mieli’s head. I felt like a piece of me was missing .

‘Me too,’ Mieli says, delighting in the familiar tickle of wings fluttering against her skin. ‘A big piece.’

‘How soon can you get back down there?’ demands the pellegrini. The goddess has been Mieli’s constant companion ever since the immigration Quiet delivered her back to the ship and woke her up. Her mouth is a cold red line. ‘This is intolerable. He will have to be punished. Punished.’ She seems to taste the word. ‘Yes, punished.’

‘There is a problem with his biot feed,’ Mieli says. She feels an odd sensation of absence. Can I actually be missing his feed? The poisons you get addicted to .

Just go ahead and admit that you are actually worried, Perhonen says. Don’t tell anyone, but so am I .

‘The last thing that registered is severe damage. And we can’t go down for thirty days, not legally at least.’

‘What is that boy doing? ’ the pellegrini mutters.

The Oubliette orbital control is telling us to get a Highway approach vector, Perhonen says. And they are turning all visitors away from the beanstalk station. There is something happening down in the city .

‘Can we see anything?’ Mieli asks.

The ship’s butterfly avatars open a fan of moving images across various wavelengths in front of her. They show the city, a dark lenticular shape in the orange bowl of the Hellas Basin, blurred by its gevulot cloud.

Something is seriously wrong down there, Perhonen says. It has stopped moving .

There is something else in the images as well. A black fuzzy mass, pouring down from the rims of the impact crater towards the city.

Perhonen ramps up the magnification, and Mieli finds herself looking at a vision from hell.

Those? the ship says. Those are phoboi .

‘What should we do?’ Mieli asks the pellegrini.

‘Nothing,’ the goddess says. ‘We wait. Jean wanted to play games down there: let him play. We wait until he is done.’

‘With all due respect,’ Mieli says, ‘that means the mission is a failure. Are there any remaining agents on the ground who could be used? Gogol pirates?’

‘Do you presume to tell me what to do?’

Mieli flinches.

‘The answer is no. I cannot leave any signs of my presence here. It is time to cut our losses.’

‘We are going to abandon him?’

‘It is a pity, of course. I was a little sentimental about him: it has been a pleasant experience, for the most part. His little betrayal even added some spice. But nothing is irreplaceable. If the cryptarch emerges victorious, perhaps he will be easier to bargain with.’ The pellegrini smiles wistfully. ‘Perhaps not as entertaining, though.’

Whatever problems the city is having, I think they are spreading, Perhonen says. The Quiet fleet is in disorder. In case you are interested, the phoboi will hit the city’s ramparts in approximately thirty minutes .

‘Mistress,’ Mieli says. ‘I have given up everything to serve you. My mind, my body; much of my honour. But the thief has been my koto brother these last few weeks, however reluctantly. I cannot leave him behind and face my ancestors. Let me have that much.’

The pellegrini raises her eyebrows. ‘So, he got through to you in the end, did he? But no, you are far too valuable to risk. We will wait.’

Mieli pauses, looking at the unmoving city in the images. He is not worth it , she thinks. He is a thief, a liar .

But he made me sing again. Even if it was a trick .

‘Mistress,’ Mieli says. ‘Grant me this, and I’m willing to renegotiate our bargain. You can have a gogol of me. If I don’t return, you can resurrect me as you wish.’

Mieli, don’t do this , the ship whispers. You can never go back on that .

That’s the only thing I have left, apart from honour , Mieli says. And it is worth less .

The pellegrini narrows her eyes. ‘Well, that is interesting. All that for him?’

Mieli nods.

‘Very well,’ the goddess says. ‘I accept your offer. With the condition that if anything goes wrong, Perhonen will use the strangelet device on the city: you still carry me inside you, and I cannot be found.’ She smiles. ‘Now, close your eyes and pray to me.’

It only takes minutes to get past the disorganised Quiet sentry fleet. Mieli does not feel like being subtle and burns the ship’s antimatter engines hard. The ship is a sleek diamond dart, slicing through the troposphere, down towards the Hellas Basin.

Show me the phoboi .