The Quantum Thief

I throw the gun away. It lands in a rosebush. I look at the empty space where my young self stood. ‘Bastard,’ I say. ‘You knew I’d never do it.’

‘That’s all right,’ says a voice. ‘I will.’

The gardener discards his gevulot, holding the gun in his hand. His hair is white, his features carefully aged, but there is something awfully familiar about them. I take a step forward, but a sleek, egg-shaped device – a zoku q-gun – is hovering above his right shoulder, looking at me with a bright quantum eye.

‘I wouldn’t move,’ he says. ‘This thing will make a mess of even that fancy Sobornost body of yours.’

I raise my hands slowly.

‘Le Roi, I presume?’ I say. He smiles, the same smile I saw on the cryptarch in the hotel. ‘So, you are the King here?’ I calculate my chances of survival if I were to rush him. They are not very high. My body is still locked in its human state, and the five metres between us might as well be a lightyear.

‘I prefer to think of myself as just a gardener,’ he says. ‘Remember Sante Prison, on Earth? What you told your cellmate? That the thing you’d really like to steal was a Kingdom of your own. But ruling it would be too much trouble, much better have someone else be the figurehead, watch its people prosper and be happy, while you weed the garden and give flowers to young girls and give things a little nudge every now and then.’ He moves his free hand in a wide arc, encompassing the garden and the city around us. ‘Well, I’m living the dream.’ He sighs. ‘And like all dreams do, it’s getting a little old.’

‘Yes, it is,’ I say. ‘The tzaddikim are about to end it and wake the people up.’ I frown. ‘We were cellmates?’

He laughs. ‘After a fashion. If you want, you can call me le Roi. Jean le Roi, that’s what they called me here, although I don’t much care for the name anymore.’

I stare at him. Now that his gevulot is open, the resemblance is there.

‘What happened?’

‘We were careless before the Collapse,’ he says. ‘And why not? We worked with the Founders. We cracked our cognitive rights management software as soon as Chitragupta came up with it. There were lots of us. And some of us got caught. Like me.’

‘How did you end up here?’ I ask. Then it hits me. ‘This was never a Kingdom, was it?’ I say. ‘It was a prison.’

‘This was supposed to be a new Australia,’ he says. ‘A typical pre-Collapse idea: put criminals inside terraforming machines, get them to pay their debts to society. And we worked hard, believe me, processed regolith and lit up Phobos and melted the ice cap with nukes, all just to be human for a little while again.

‘Of course, they made sure we were safely locked up here. Even now, if I even think about leaving Mars, it hurts like hell. But then the Collapse happened, and the lunatics took over the asylum. We hacked the panopticon system. Turned it into the exomemory. Used it to give the power to us.’

He shakes his head.

‘And we decided to tell the others a nicer story. The Spike was a blessing, wiped out all the traces we left – not that there were many. It was only after the zoku came that we were really able to flesh it out, of course. In retrospect, we should never have let them in here. At the time, we needed something to keep the Sobornost off our backs. Much good that turned out to do. But at least they gave us tools to make pretty dreams.’

‘We? Who else is there?’ I ask.

‘No one,’ he says. ‘Well, not anymore. I took care of the others a long time ago. A garden only needs one gardener.’ He reaches out with his free hand and touches the stem of a flower.

‘I was content here, for a while,’ he says. Then his face twists in a grimace. ‘And then you had to come here. You had done so much better than I. All that power, all that freedom. All that, and you went native. You can’t believe how angry that made me.’

Le Roi laughs. ‘You know the feeling as well as I do, wanting something someone else has. So you can imagine how much I wanted what was yours. So after you left, I had what I could. Your woman, for example. She will never be yours again. She thinks you left her with the child you made together and disappeared. I never understood what you saw in her. At least you hid your traces well there, with that memory you split with her: I never knew what this was.’

He holds up the revolver with nine bullets. ‘You thought you were so clever. Hiding your treasure in your little friends’ exomemories. Great minds think alike, so much so I admit I could not find it. But I knew you would come back, and so I laid out a trail for you. The gevulot images came from me. Still, it was the detective who finally put the pieces together for me. Very appropriate.’ He points the gun at me. ‘I even gave you a chance to go through with it: fair is fair, after all. But you didn’t. So now it’s my turn.’