The Quantum Thief

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.

8 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.’