The Quantum Thief

He lets the garden vir dissolve around them. In her Founder form, she is equally beautiful, a creature of spun silver woven from many gogols. He guides her through the Factory to the Orchard, where his favourite things grow. Taking quiet pleasure in the astonishment she radiates, he loses himself in the work. This is a task for a different scale, no longer supervision but craftsmanship: the cognitive modules of the new thing he is making are vast atlases around them, symphonies of neural pathways and thoughts.

With some pleasure he is able to incorporate his new discovery in the design. This Hunter will not be one, but many: able to split itself into many parts and become one again. He gives it a single-mindedness he found in an Oortian sculptor, and the coordination ability of a concert pianist, seasoned with more primitive animal forms from the older libraries: shark and feline. He gives it enough cognitive rights to be intelligent, but not enough to have latency, and allocates a fragment of the guberniya smartmatter to it, so it is ready to be launched when its new mistress commands.

The finished thing does not speak, but regards them both silently, observing, waiting for a target. It has the kind of beauty that weapons often have, the kind that lures you to touch it even though you know that its sharp edges will cut.

‘It’s yours,’ he says. ‘Not Matjek’s. Yours. Just tell it what you want to be found.’

Joséphine Pellegrini smiles, and whispers a name in the Hunter’s ear.