The Quantum Thief

Interlude. WISDOM

It is only a few steps from death back to life. There is light ahead: but every step is like being immersed in water, slow and heavy, and Bathilde feels herself floating upwards, rising out of her quicksuited body. She sees herself struggling forward below, brass helmet gleaming in the light. It seems right, for some reason. She lets her body fall away and rises towards the light above. Finally, she thinks-

– only to step into Martian twilight, almost falling down, but supported by a pair of strong arms. She gasps for breath, blinking. Then she looks back at the Hallway of Birth and Death; a low, long, rectangular structure printed by builder Quiet. It sits in a low ditch a mile away from the city’s path, in Martian desert proper. It is nothing but gravel and sand glued together with bacterial paste, with thin slits and peepholes on its sides. Close to the hulking phoboi wall of the Quiet, it looks like a child’s construction block. But inside-

‘Oh my,’ Bathilde says, drawing a deep breath.

‘So, what did you think?’ asks Paul Sernine, the architect of her brief death. He supports her gently, guiding her away from the exit as other dazed guests emerge. Her protégé is grinning triumphantly behind the glass of his helmet. ‘You look like you could use a drink.’

‘Oh yes,’ says Bathilde. Paul offers her a champagne glass in a little q-dot bubble. She takes it and drinks, glad of the clear taste in the dry air of the helmet. ‘Paul, you are a genius.’

‘You don’t regret your patronage, then?’

Bathilde smiles. All around, the party is getting started. She is glad that the publicity campaign was successful; viral co-memories of the intense moments in the Hallway. And it was a nice symbolic gesture to have it outside the Wall, to add a tiny bit of danger to the proceedings.

‘Not in the slightest. We’ll have to get the Voice to incorporate something like this in the city permanently. It would do us a world of good. Whatever gave you the idea?’

Paul arches his dark eyebrows. ‘You know how much I hate being asked that.’

‘Oh, please,’ Bathilde says. ‘You love talking about yourself.’

‘Well, if you must know – I took inspiration from Noguchi’s Hiroshima piece. Birth and death. Something we’ve forgotten how to face.’

‘Curious,’ Bathilde says. ‘That is not that different from something that Marcel over there’ – she points at a young black man looking at the Hallway’s yawning black exit with a disdainful look – ‘proposed to the Voice a few months ago.’

‘Ideas are cheap,’ Paul says. ‘It’s all in the execution.’

‘Indeed,’ Bathilde says. ‘Or perhaps your new muse helped.’ A red-haired woman in a dark quicksuit is standing a short distance away, touching the rough surface of the Hallway.

‘Something like that,’ Paul says, looking down.

‘Don’t waste more time talking to an old woman,’ Bathilde says. ‘Go and celebrate.’

Paul grins at her again, and for a moment she almost regrets that she decided to be professional with him. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he says, gives her a slight bow and vanishes into the quicksuited crowd, an instant centre of attention.

Bathilde looks at the Hallway again. Such an innocent thing from the outside, but, inside, the angles and lights and shapes resonate in the design of any human-derived brain, triggering cortical mechanisms that simulate a near-death experience. An architectural magic trick. She thinks back to her many deaths and births and realises that she has never experienced that before. A genuinely new experience. She smiles to herself: how long has it been since that? She touches the bracelet Watch that Paul gave her, tracing the word Sapientia engraved in it.

‘Hi,’ says the red-haired girl. There, at least, is genuine youth, untouched by death, temporary or otherwise.

‘Hello, Raymonde,’ Bathilde says. ‘Proud of your boyfriend?’

The girl smiles shyly. ‘You can’t imagine,’ she says.

‘Oh, but I can,’ Bathilde says. ‘It is a difficult thing: you watch them do something like that and then you start wondering if you are good enough for them. Am I right?’

The girl stares at her mutely. Bathilde shakes her head. ‘My apologies. I am a bitter old woman. I am happy for you, of course.’ She touches the girl’s gloved hand. ‘What were you going to say? Interrupting is a problem we old people have, we think we have heard it many times before. I’m looking forward to being a Quiet again soon. It will force me to listen.’

Raymonde bites her lip. ‘I wanted to ask you for… advice.’

Bathilde laughs. ‘Well, if you want to hear bitter truths about life filtered through a few centuries of experience, you’ve come to the right place. What do you want to know?’

‘It’s about children.’

‘What is there to know? I’ve had them myself: troublesome, but can be worth it if you are careful. Exomemory tells you all you need to know. Get a Resurrection Man to help you with genome splicing, or go to the black market for offworld designs if you are feeling ambitious. Just add water. And poof.’ Bathilde chides herself for enjoying Raymonde’s expression when she makes an expansive gesture with her hands.

‘That’s not what I was going to ask,’ Raymonde says. ‘I meant… about him. Paul.’ She closes her eyes. ‘I can’t read him. I don’t know if he is ready.’

‘Walk with me,’ Bathilde says. She leads them around the Hallway, towards the phoboi walls. Above, the sky is getting dark.

‘I know this much,’ Bathilde says. ‘When I speak to Paul, he reminds me of someone I knew a long time ago, someone who gave me a little bit of a heartbreak.’ She laughs. ‘I gave as well as I got, to be sure.’ She touches the already crumbling wall of the Hallway. ‘There are those of us who live a really long time,’ she says. ‘We are the ones who learn not to change, no matter what happens. Bodies, gogols, transformations, there is something about us that stays the same. It’s an evolutionary thing; otherwise we would effectively die by metamorphosis, never a light at the end of the tunnel, just time chipping away at us.

‘Whatever Paul has told you, he is one of us, I can tell that much. So you have to decide if the real him – not this smiling architect – is someone you want as the father of your children.

‘But he is trying, and he is trying for you.’

‘Here you are,’ Paul says. ‘My two favourite ladies.’ He embraces Raymonde. ‘Did you go inside yet?’

Raymonde shakes her head.

‘You should go,’ Bathilde says. ‘It’s not as bad as it seems at first. Have fun.’

The two enter the Hallway from the other end. As Bathilde watches, she thinks of that time in the Olympus Palace, a running watercolour of a memory: the time she danced with the King. She wonders if her eyes looked like Raymonde’s then.