The Quantum Thief

It is the largest restored Kingdom building Isidore has ever seen apart from the Olympus Palace; it is astonishing that it is hidden from public view by gevulot. The last sunbeams of the day glance off two towers that weave left and right as they rise towards the sky, like Oriental daggers. The chateau casts long blue shadows on a field of flowers, laid out with geometrical precision. The flowers form triangles and polygons of many colours, as if the gardener was proving Euclidean theorems. It takes Isidore a moment to realise that they are laid out in the shape of a Darian solar clock, with the shadow of the taller tower as the dial.

There is a tall iron fence with a gate. A Quiet is standing behind it, waiting. It is an unusual creature: a sculpted humanoid, no larger than a man, a golden mask and gloves hiding the angles and edges beneath, wearing blue silver-embroidered livery. It reminds him of the jewelled mannikins in the Kingdom simulation. Naturally, it gives him no greeting, but he feels it is polite to say something.

‘I’m Isidore Beautrelet,’ he says. ‘I’m expected.’

Silently, it opens the gate for him and leads him towards the chateau. They walk through fields of roses, lilies and more exotic flowers he needs to ’blink to recognise. The smell is intoxicating.

The evening sun casts a golden pool in a clearing where a small pagoda-like pavilion stands. A pale-haired young man – barely more than a boy, perhaps six or eight Martian years old – sits inside, reading a book, an empty teacup next to him. He is wearing a plain Revolution uniform that hangs loose on his frame. His thin eyebrows are squeezed together in concentration in a delicate face, rounded by baby fat. The Quiet servant stops and rings a small silver bell. The man looks up slowly and gets up with exaggerated care.

‘Dear boy,’ he says, offering a hand. His fingerbones feel like porcelain in Isidore’s grip. He is taller than Isidore, but almost painfully thin, the elongated Martian bodymorph taken to the extreme. ‘How delightful that you could come. Would you like some refreshments?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Sit, sit. What do you think of my garden?’

‘Impressive.’

‘Yes, my gardener is a genius. A very modest man, but a genius. And that, of course, often applies to other individuals possessing rare talent, such as yourself.’

Isidore watches him quietly for a moment and tries to shake away the disturbance in gevulot. It is not absence of privacy like in the Dust District, but uncertain, as if it could tear any moment.

The young man smiles. ‘And are you genius enough to know who I am?’

‘You are Christian Unruh,’ Isidore says. ‘The millenniaire.’

Finding that out was not difficult, but it occupied him for the other half of the afternoon, going through public exomemories and comparing them to the co-memory the woman in white gave him. Unruh – if that is his name – is a private person even by Oubliette standards: apart from his youth, it is difficult to find out anything about his background. His name comes up mainly in the context of society events and business deals in newspapers. It is obvious that he has more Time than God.

‘You have a personal Time fortune based on gevulot brokering, something the Voice only made possible a few years ago. And clearly, you are worried about something. Gogol piracy?’

‘Oh no. I have been careful to be perfectly ordinary in everything else except making Time. A defence mechanism, you might say. No, what concerns me is this.’

Unruh hands Isidore a note, fine, linen, unmarked paper, with a few words written on it in an elegant, flowing hand.

Dear M. Unruh, it says,

In response to your unsent invitation – I will be delighted to attend your carpe diem party on the 28th sol of Vrishika, 24**. I will bring one guest.

Your obedient servant, Jean le Flambeur.

Isidore has been thinking about le Flambeur all afternoon. The Oubliette exomemory does not have much on him. In the end, he spent Time on an expensive data agent that ventured into the Realm outside the Oubliette noosphere. What it brought back was a mixture of fact and legend. No actual memories or lifecasts, not even video or audio. Fragments from before the Collapse, online speculation about a criminal mastermind operating in Fast London and Paris. Fanciful tales of a sunlifting factory stolen from the Sobornost, a guberniya brain that was broken into; dirty dealings in Realm unreal estate.

It can’t all possibly refer to the same individual, a copy-family perhaps. Or maybe it is a meme, an idea for criminals – whatever that word may mean in different parts of the System – to sign their felonies with. So whatever this is, it must be a prank of some sort. Isidore hands the note back.

‘Your carpe diem party?’ he asks. ‘That’s in a week.’