The Quantum Thief (15 page)

But as always, the quiet sanctuary of the synagogue makes him feel small. The eternal light – a bright q-dot sphere – burns above the doors of the Ark, its glow mixing with the first beams of the dawn, filtering through the through the blue-and-gold patterns of the high stained-glass windows.

Isaac sits down on the chairs facing the reader’s platform, takes his metallic field flask from his jacket pocket and shakes it. It sounds half-empty. ‘Well, here we are,’ he tells Paul. ‘What’s on your mind? Start talking. Otherwise, we’ll have wasted a lot of good booze for nothing.’

‘All right. But first, tell me: why religion?’ Paul asks.

Isaac laughs. ‘Why alcohol? Once you try it, it’s hard to give it up.’ He opens his flask and takes a swig. The vodka burns on his tongue. ‘Besides, this is the faith of champions, my friend: a thousand arbitrary rules you just have to accept, all completely irrational. None of this baby stuff about being saved if you just believe. You should try it sometime.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ Paul walks to the Ark doors, an odd look on his face. ‘The musical sound of breaking the law,’ he mutters. Then he turns around. ‘Isaac, do you know why we are friends?’

‘Because I hate you a little bit less than all the other idiots that this Martian gnat town carries on its back,’ Isaac says.

‘Because you have nothing that I want.’

Isaac looks at Paul. In the stained-glass light and through the vodka haze, he looks very young. He remembers how they met: an argument in an offworlder bar that got out of hand, Isaac’s old anger came out of him in spurts like a cough, bloomed into a fight in which he was delighted to find that the young man did not hide behind gevulot.

Isaac is silent for a moment. ‘I beg to differ,’ he says, holding up the flask. ‘Come and get it.’ He laughs, long and hard. ‘Seriously, what is eating you? I know what these intoxication marathons lead up to. Don’t tell me it’s about that girl again.’

‘Maybe,’ Paul says. ‘I did something very stupid.’

‘I’d expect no less,’ Isaac says. ‘Want me to punish you? Want God to punish you? I’ll gladly oblige. Come here so I can smack you.’

He tries to get up, but his legs refuse to cooperate. ‘Look, you daft bastard. One reason I did not smash your face in the first time we met was that I saw the addiction. I don’t know what it is that you crave, but you can’t hide from it. For me, it’s memes: brain worms, religion, poetry, Kabbalah, revolutions, Fedorovist philosophy, booze. For you, it’s something else.’ Isaac looks for the flask in his jacket pocket, but his hands feel clumsy and large, like mittens. ‘Whatever it is, you are about to throw away a good thing because of it. Get rid of it. Don’t do what I did. Cut it out.’

‘I can’t,’ Paul says.

‘Why not?’ Isaac says. ‘It’ll only hurt once.’

Paul closes his eyes. ‘There is this … thing. I made it. It’s bigger than me. It grew around me. I thought I could get away from it but I can’t: whenever I want something, it tells me to take it. And I can. It’s easy. Especially here.’

Isaac laughs. ‘I don’t pretend to understand any of that,’ he says. ‘This is some offworld nonsense, isn’t it? Embodied cognition. Many minds and bodies and all that crap. Well, to me you sound like a whiny little boy with too many toys. Put them away. If you can’t destroy them, lock them away somewhere where it’ll really hurt to touch them again. Back on Earth, that’s how I was taught to stop biting my fingernails.’ Isaac leans back in his seat and finds that he is slowly sliding on the wooden bench. He looks at the lion carvings in the ceiling. ‘Be a man,’ he says. ‘You’re bigger than the toys. We are always bigger than the things we make. Put them away. Make something new with your life, with your own mind and hands.’

Paul sits next to him and stares at the doors of the Ark. Then he takes Isaac’s metal flask from his pocket and drinks. ‘And how did that work out for you?’ he asks.

Isaac slaps him. To his surprise, he actually connects. Paul drops the flask and stares at him, one hand on his stinging ear and cheek. The flask clatters to the floor, spilling its remaining contents.

‘Now look what you made me do,’ Isaac says.

THE THIEF AND THE PIRATES

The Museum of Contemporary Art is hidden below the street level, a series of transparent tubes, balconies and galleries snaking around the city’s hips like an elaborate glass girdle. The arrangement offers abundant light to the exhibits and amazing views of the legs of the city below, drawing slow arcs in the Hellas Basin.

We wander from one gallery to the next, carrying coffee in tempmatter cups. I’m enjoying it; I’ve always found art calming, even though much of the latest work on display here has a violent, aggressive undercurrent, explosions of colour and sharp edges. But Mieli looks bored. Studying a series of watercolours, she makes a strange, humming sound.

‘Not much of an art enthusiast, are you?’

She laughs softly. ‘Art should not be flat, or dead, like this,’ she says. ‘It should be sung.’

‘I believe they call that music around here.’

She gives me a withering look, and I stay quiet after that, content to look at the older, abstract works and the art student girls.

After a while, we start noticing the gogol pirates.

Mieli got the public keys of the Soborost agents from her employer and sent them co-memories. The museum as a meeting place was my idea. The gevulot here is well-structured, enough agora spaces around the exhibits to discourage violence, but allowing perfect privacy for quiet conversations. But I did not expect them to come in such numbers.

A little girl looking at a painting of a herd of gracile elephants grazing in the Nanedi Valley touches the tip of her nose exactly the same way as a passing couple, holding hands. And their gait is identical to that of a tall female art student in a revealing top, who I can’t help staring at for a moment. An entire family of them goes past, a father with thinning red hair laughing in odd synchrony with his son. And many more, everywhere in the crowd, all around us. I realise they are opening small parts of their gevulot to us to highlight where they are. Strangely, the mannerisms are familiar to me, from a long time ago, from my human days on Earth.

‘They are herding us,’ Mieli whispers to me. ‘This way.’

We end up on a large balcony separated from the main part of the museum by glass doors. There are three fountain sculptures, standing in a large shallow pool of water. They look like totems, made from jagged metallic and organic shapes that – I learn from the little co-memory attached to them – are discarded Quiet body parts. Water trickles from between the seams: the sound would be soothing if it didn’t make me think of blood.

The balcony fills with the pod people, perhaps twenty of them. A group of them position themselves in front of the glass doors firmly, preventing all possibility of escape.

To my surprise, Mieli seems to like the sculptures, standing there for a while, until I touch her arm. ‘I think it’s time.’

‘All right,’ she says. ‘And remember, I’ll do the talking.’

‘Be my guest.’

A little black girl, perhaps six years old, walks up to us. She is wearing a startlingly blue dress, and has pigtails that stick out to both sides of her head. She touches her nub of a nose in a way that is now all too familiar. ‘Are you offworlders?’ she asks. ‘Where are you from? My name is Anne.’

‘Hello, Anne,’ Mieli says. ‘No need to stay in character. We are all friends here.’

‘You can’t be too careful,’ says the leggy art student standing behind us, not looking up from her sketchbook.

‘You have,’ says a woman in a kaleidoscopic dress, holding hands with a young man by the railing of the balcony, ‘one minute to explain how you found us.’

‘After that we find out ourselves,’ finishes Anne.

‘I’m sure you would not want to start anything here,’ Mieli says. ‘This place is full of agoras.’

Anne smiles. ‘We deal with agoras all the time,’ she says. ‘Fifty seconds.’

‘I serve one who serves your copyfather,’ Mieli says. ‘We require assistance.’

‘Show us a seal,’ says the young, red-haired father, trying to calm down his crying baby. ‘We are delighted to serve,’ says the art student. ‘But show us a seal.’ There is a sudden hush in the balcony. Some of them are still carrying on normal conversations, pointing at the statues, laughing. But all their eyes are on us.

‘The Great Common Task requires secrecy, as you know better than I,’ Mieli says. ‘We found you. Is that not proof enough?’

‘Darling, we are going to need a little more than that. We are vasilevs. Few carry out the Great Common Task with more passion than we do.’ Anne grabs the hem of Mieli’s toga with a tiny hand. ‘And we are not going to jump just because a singleton servant of some puny non-Founder clan tells us to.’ She smiles, displaying an uneven row of sugar cube teeth. ‘Time is running out. Perhaps we should have a look inside that pretty head of yours.’

‘We do not need much,’ Mieli says. ‘Merely tools. For gevulot emulation, a Martian identity—’

‘Are you a competitor?’ asks the red-haired father. ‘Why would we do that?’

Mieli tenses. This is about to turn ugly. The Sobornost are not great negotiators: having all your behaviours dictated by your copyclan template does not leave a lot of room for creativity. That’s why I love them, of course. I think about where I last saw the smile, the gestures, the tone of voice. On Earth, centuries ago, in a bar, getting drunk with hackers arguing about politics. Who else was there? Ah, yes. Matjek, short and angry. Matjek, who became a Sobornost god.

I shift my posture, like I was a short man wanting to be taller. I pull my shoulders back. I twist my face into a scowl of righteous anger.

‘Do you know who I am?’

A ripple of fear runs across the vasilevs’ faces. The art student drops her sketchbook into the pool with a splash. Gotcha.

‘My servant does not need to explain herself. I trust I do not have to explain myself. The Great Common Task requires faith. You have been found wanting.’ Mieli stares at me, wide-eyed. Just play along, I whisper in my feed. I’ll explain later.

‘Do you need seals and symbols to know that a Founder walks among you? I need tools. I have a mission here. The Task takes us to unexpected places, so I did not come prepared. You will give me what I need, immediately.’

‘But—’ Anne pipes.

‘I have a fragment of a Dragon with me,’ I hiss. ‘Perhaps you would like to be a part of it?’

The vasilevs are silent for a moment. Then a burst of data hits me. I can feel the Sobornost body recognising it, cataloguing it. Personality templates, gevulot sense emulators, the works: everything you need to maintain a false identity in the Oubliette. Goodness me, it actually worked—

Suddenly, Anne shudders and her eyes go blank. The data stream stops, as abruptly as it began. Maintaining my posture, I let my gaze wander around the room, trying to project regal displeasure. ‘What is the meaning of this? Did I not make myself clear?’

‘Perfectly, M. le Flambeur,’ the vasilevs say in unison. ‘Now please stay still. Our friends would like to talk to you.’

Crap.

I turn to look at Mieli to tell her that I’ve got what we need and that she needs to get us out of here, but before I can complete the thought, the fireworks begin.

Mieli watches the thief’s gambit with a mixture of shock and astonishment. She has met Matjek Chen, and the thief imitates his voice and body language perfectly. To the Sobornost minds inside the stolen Martian bodies, it is quite literally like standing in the presence of a divine being. And when they attack, it is with the ferocity of true believers faced with a blasphemer. To hell with subtlety. I’m taking them down.

Her metacortex online, she slows time to give herself time to think, pulling down the veil of combat autism.

Perhonen. Sweep.

Far above, the ship sends down a burst of exotic weakly interacting particles through the room. The skeletons of the vasilevs ghost in her vision. Her metacortex matches patterns, classifies hidden weapons. Ghostguns. Sobornost weapons, with bullets that take over your mind. Damn it. With a thought, she brings her own systems online.

Her right hand contains a q-dot gun, a linear accelerator firing semi-autonomous coherent payloads. Her left has a ghostgun with an array of nanomissiles: each has a war gogol ready to invade enemy systems, to flood them with copies of itself. The programmable matter layer under her epidermis becomes armour, her fingernails harder than diamond. The fusion reactor in her right thighbone spins up. The metacortex Nash engine chooses a set of optimal targets and a cover position for the thief.

Fire support. On my mark, she tells Perhonen.

I’m going to have to change orbits, the ship says. There will be trouble with the orbital Quiet.

Do it.

Mieli feels the knife edge of nearby death. She is a singleton, truly finite: anything else would be betraying her ancestors. She won’t get a second chance if she fails. And sometimes, that edge makes all the difference, especially against the Sobornost.

The gogol pirates are speeding up too, but they are infiltrators. Their synthbio bodies do not have the same level of military enhancements. Still, they have ghostguns, implanted in eyes, hands and torsos. After ten milliseconds they fire the first volley, stars of infrared playing across their faces like glittering makeup as the nanomissiles are launched. The room explodes into a deadly spiderweb of vectors and trajectories in Mieli’s vision.

She grabs the thief and throws him against the base of the middle statue, into a gap in the web. At the same time, she fires a burst of q-dots. It feels like fingerpainting in the air, each stroke leaving a glowing trace. The dots – each a Bose-Einstein condensate, charged with energy and quantum logic – become extensions of her mind, like disembodied limbs. She uses three of them as a flail to swat missiles out of the air, tearing the deadly web to give herself room to manoeuvre. The other two flash towards the vasilev crowd, ready to explode into bursts of coherent light.

The vasilev missiles respond, targeting her. Others shift their trajectories to curve towards the thief. The vasilev crowd splits, trying to avoid the incoming q-dots, but too slowly. The dots blossom into white laser suns that light up the interior of the gallery, melting glass, synthbio bodies and priceless art.