The Quantum Thief

The boy is me. I remember being him, in my dream. The memories are pressed flat like a butterfly beneath the centuries, fragile, and fall apart when I touch them. There was a desert, and a soldier. And a woman in a tent. Maybe the boy is in my head. Maybe he is some construct that my old self left behind. Either way, I need to know. I shout his name, not Jean le Flambeur, but the older one.

A part of me is counting seconds to when Mieli manages to deal with her little distraction and shuts me down, or sends me to some new hell. I may only have minutes to find out what he has to tell me, without my minder looking over my shoulder. I catch a glimpse of him vanishing down an alley, into the Maze. I curse and keep running.

The Maze is where the larger platforms and components of the city collide, leaving spaces in between for hundreds of smaller jigsaw pieces that constantly move, forming occasional hills and winding alleyways that can slowly shift direction as you walk down them, so smoothly that the only way to tell is to see the horizon moving. There are no maps of the place, just firefly guides that brave tourists follow around.

I run a rough-cobbled steep slope downwards, lengthening my steps. Running on Mars is an art that I’ve never properly mastered, and as the street beneath lurches, I land badly after a particularly high leap, skidding down several metres.

‘Are you all right?’ There is a woman on a balcony above, leaning over the railing, clutching a newspaper.

‘I’m fine,’ I groan, fairly certain that the Sobornost body Mieli gave me is not going to break easily. But the simulated pain from the bruised tailbone is still pain. ‘Did you see a little boy go past?’

‘Do you mean that little boy?’

The rascal is less than a hundred metres away, doubled over with laughter. I scramble up and keep running.

Deep, deep into the Maze we go, the boy always ahead, always rounding a corner, never getting too far ahead, running across cobblestones and marble and smartgrass and wood.

We run through little Chinese squares with their elongated Buddhist temples, red and gold dragons flashing in their facades; through temporary marketplaces full of a synthfish smell, past a group of black-robed Resurrection Men with newly born Quiet in tow.

We race down whole streets – red lights districts, perhaps – blurred with gevulot, and empty streets where slow-moving builder Quiet – larger than elephants, with yellow carapaces – are printing new houses in pastel colours. I almost lose the boy there, lost in the loud hum and the odd seaweed smell of the huge creatures, only to see him wave at me from the back of one of them and then leap down.

For a time, a group of parkroullers follows us, mistaking our race for some urban game, young Martian girls and boys in faux-Kingdom wear of corsets and umbrella skirts and powdered wigs, smartmatter-laced so they know to stay out of the way and flex as the kids bounce off walls and make somersaults across gaps between rooftops, the oversized wheels sticking to every surface. They encourage me with shouts, and for a moment I consider spending some Time and buying a pair of skates from one of them: but the fading imaginary pain in my backside keeps me on foot.

Every second, I wait for my body to shut down, to wait for Mieli to come and give me whatever punishment she has thought up. Still, I wish I could have seen her face.

I finally run out of breath when we reach the old robot garden. I curse the fact that I can’t override the strictly baseline human parameters of the body as I lean on my knees, wheezing, the sweat stinging my eyes.

‘Look,’ I say. ‘Let’s be reasonable. If you are a part of my brain, I’d expect you to be reasonable.’ Then again, I probably was anything but reasonable at that age. Or at any other age.

The garden looks strangely familiar. It is some piece of the old Kingdom that the city picked up and swallowed somewhere during its passage through the Martian desert, and its strange urban metabolism has brought it here. It is an open space within the Maze, protected by a cluster of tall synagogues around it, made from black and white tiles of marble perhaps five metres square, forming a ten-by-ten grid. Someone has planted trees here, and flowers: green and red and white and violet spill over the neat monochrome borders on the ground. The boy is nowhere in sight.

‘I don’t have a lot of time. The scar-faced lady is going to come for us both soon, and she’s not going to be happy.’