The Quantum Thief

‘What was it like? Being Quiet?’ I try my food. The zebra is indeed excellent, dark and juicy: she has good taste. Perhaps she picked it up from me.

She crumbles a piece of bread on her plate, lost in thought. ‘It’s difficult to explain. It’s very abrupt: when your Time runs out, the transition happens. The Resurrection Men just come to pick your body up, but you are already there. It’s like having a stroke. Suddenly, your brain works differently, in a different body, with different senses.

‘But after the shock passes, it’s not so bad. You become very focused in your work, and the concentration is quite pleasing. You are wired differently. You can’t speak, but you have these very vivid waking dreams you can share with others. And you are powerful, depending on what kind of body you end up in. That can be … exhilarating.’

‘So there is some sort of Quiet sex life?’

‘Perhaps one day you will find out, offworld boy.’

‘Anyway, it does not sound so bad,’ I say.

‘There have been endless arguments about it. A lot of the kids think it’s just a guilt thing. But the Voice has never had any proposals about overturning the system. You can ask why: could we not do it differently? Could we not use synthbio drones to do it all?

‘But it’s not that simple. When you come back, you are a mess for a while. You look into a mirror and see your other self. And you miss it. It’s like having a conjoined twin. You’ll never really be apart.’

She raises her glass – she also chose the wine, Dao Valley Sauvignon. I distantly recall it is supposed to have aphrodisiac effects. ‘Here’s to confusion,’ she says.

We drink. The wine is rich, brawny, with traces of peach and honeysuckle. With it comes a strange feeling, a mixture of nostalgia and the first flush of fresh infatuation. In a mirror somewhere, my old self must be smiling.

‘They wanted him,’ the vasilev says, eagerly. Every time it answers a question, the surgeon gogol stimulates its pleasure centres. The flipside is that it takes its time answering.

‘Who?’

‘The hidden ones. They rule here. They promised us souls for him, as many as we wanted.’

‘Who are they?’

‘They spoke to us through other mouths, like the Founders sometimes do. We said yes, and why not, why not work with them, the Task will swallow them all in the end, all will be brought down before the altar of Fedorov and can we go back to the museum and look at the elephants?’

‘Show me.’

But the coherence of the vasilev is breaking down. Gritting her teeth, Mieli restores a previous version and tells the surgeon to begin again.

The dinner turns into a dessert and then a walk around the Tortoise Park. We talk, and little by little, her gevulot opens to me.

She is from a Kasei slowtown. She had a wild, Time-wasting youth, then settled down (with an older man, apparently). She does not forget debts: she makes me buy her ice cream from a girl in a white apron, and chooses us flavours; odd synthetic taste symphonies that I can’t even name, a little like honey and melon. I try to hold on to the little things she shares for a moment before throwing them into the pirate engine’s hungry maw.

‘The reason I want to do an opera,’ she says, when we sit down by a Kingdom-style fountain with our cones, ’is that I want to do something big. The Revolution was big. The Oubliette is big. No one tackles it head on. Something grand, something with gogol pirates and zokus and rebellion and noise.’

‘Oubliettepunk,’ I say. She gives me an odd look, then shakes her head. ‘Anyway, that’s what I want to do.’ We can see Montgolfiersville from here, across the park, tethered balloon residences strewn across the horizon like many-coloured fruit. She watches them with an expression of yearning.

‘Have you ever thought about leaving?’ I ask.

‘To go where? I know, there is an infinity of possibilities. Of course I have. But I’m a big fish in a small world, and I sort of prefer it that way. I can make a little bit of difference here, I think. Out there – I don’t know.’

‘I know the feeling.’ And, to my surprise, I do. It is tempting to stay here, to do something on a human scale, to build something. That must be what he felt when he came here. Or maybe that’s how she made him feel.

‘That doesn’t mean I’m not curious, of course,’ she says. ‘Maybe you could show me what it’s like, where you come from.’

‘I’m not sure it’s that interesting.’

‘Come on. I want to see.’ She takes my hand and squeezes it. Her fingers are warm, and a little sticky from the ice cream. I scan my fragmented memory for images. An ice castle in Oort, comets and fusion reactors tethered together into a glittering orrery, winged people chasing them. Supra City, where buildings are the size of planets, domes and towers and arcs rising up to meet Saturn’s ring. The Beltworlds and wild synthbio covering them in coral and autumn colours. The guberniya brains of the Inner System, diamond spheres adorned with the faces of the Founders, filled with undeath and intrigue.