The Quantum Thief

She returns to the vasilev with an acid taste in her mouth.

‘Hello, darling,’ it says, in an odd, euphoric tone. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘You can start by telling me everything you know about Jean le Flambeur,’ Mieli says.

Raymonde arrives late, taking care to walk across the small agora, hand in hand with a tall, handsome man with leonine hair, younger than her. He gives her a goodbye kiss. Then she waves at me. I get up and hold the chair for her as she sits down. She accepts the gesture, slightly cockily.

I have been sitting at the small restaurant she chose, outside by the heater. It is a strange little place, with plain glass doors and a blank sign; but the inside is a riot of colour and exotica, jars filled with exotic taxidermy, glass eyes and lush paintings. I have been replaying our first meeting, thinking about what she reacted to – not the mystery, but the banter. I have even altered my appearance subtly, nothing that could not be expected with more revealing gevulot, but appearing ever so slightly more mischievous. It is enough to warm her smile a degree.

‘How was the class?’

‘Good. A young couple’s daughter. Lots of potential.’

‘Potential is what it’s all about. Like your music.’

‘Not really,’ she says. ‘I’ve been thinking. You are bluffing. There is nothing wrong with that piece. I’ll have you know that this is the Oubliette, and I am a beautiful girl. That means this stuff happens all the time.’ She cocks her head, letting her hair hang loose. ‘A mysterious stranger. Serendipity. Seriously? Old hat.’

She rattles off two orders to the waiter drone.

‘I wasn’t really done looking at the menu,’ I say.

‘Rubbish. You are going to have the teriyaki zebra. It’s excellent.’

I spread my hands. ‘All right. I thought that is the way things are done here. So why did you agree to meet with me?’

‘Maybe it’s me who has been stalking you.’

‘Maybe.’

She eats an olive from the starter bowl, and brandishes the pick at me. ‘You were polite about it. You didn’t do a great job with your gevulot. Clearly, you are from somewhere else. That is always interesting. And now you owe me something. That is always handy.’

Damn. I query the pirate engine. It is still trying to find openings in her gevulot, without much success. But obviously she is doing a better job than it is.

‘Guilty as charged. I bought a citizenship. I’m from Ceres, in the Belt.’ She raises her eyebrows. It is not easy to buy a Martian citizenship; usually, it involves a ruling by the Voice. But the gogol pirates seem to have done an airtight job of establishing the backstory of this particular identity, carefully planting things in public exomemories here and there.

‘Interesting. So why here?’

I gesture at our surroundings. ‘You have a sky. You have a whole planet. You have done something with it. You have a dream.’

She looks at me with the same curious intensity she gave her lunchtime apple, and for a moment I wait for the bite. ‘A lot of people think that. But of course, we did have a horrible civil war first that unleashed self-replicating killing machines that undid the terraforming our slaver overlords managed to do before we killed them.’ She smiles. ‘But yes, there is a dream in there, somewhere.’

‘You know, no one has yet told me how often they—’

‘Attack? The phoboi? It depends. Most of the time you don’t even notice, or if you do, it’s this rumble in the distance. The Quiet handle all that. There are kids who go up in gliders to watch, of course. I used to do it when I was younger. It’s spectacular.’

The co-memory she gives me catches me by surprise. A smartmatter glider, white wings; a landscape of thunder and fire below, a dazzling laser tracery inside orange dust, a black avalanche of things breaking against the Quiet troops; a blinding explosion. And someone in there with her, touching her, kissing her neck—

I take a deep breath. The pirate engine seizes the flirtatious memory and starts churning through it.

‘What’s wrong? You look confused,’ she says.

I notice that the food has arrived; the delicious smell pulls me out of the memory, leaving me gasping with a sensory overload. The waiter – a dark-skinned man with flashy white teeth – grins at me. Raymonde nods at him.

‘This is a confusing place,’ I say.

‘All interesting places are. That’s what I’m trying to do with the music you had so many ideas about.’

‘You are trying to give your listeners a heart attack?’

She laughs. ‘No, I mean, we are confused too. It’s nice to talk about the Revolution dream, recreating an Earth, a promised land and all that, but really, it is not that simple. There is a lot of guilt mixed with the dream, too. And the younger generations don’t think the same way. I have been Quiet once, and I don’t want to do it again. And people younger than me, they see zokus coming here, and people like you. They don’t know what to think.’