Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  Another day passed, and another. Early one morning, he woke to find the eidolon bending over him, the twin stars of her eyes gleaming above the sketch of her smile.

  ‘I have news, Gajananvihari! I have good news! It is Agrata! It is Agrata Konwas! She is alive! And I have a message from her!’

  2

  In the long ago, in their motherland on Earth, Gajananvihari Pilot’s family would have been called kabadiwallahs. Junk peddlers. They located derelict gardens and settlements, salvaged machines that could be refurbished or repurposed, isolated and cultured novel vacuum organisms and biologics, concentrated and refined rare earths and metals. They burrowed through the remains of grand schemes abandoned in place or wrecked by war. They ransacked homes and public spaces. They were not sentimental about their work. They were grateful to the dead, but did not try to appease them. The dead no longer had any claim over what they’d left behind, no longer needed it.

  There were thousands of derelict settlements, gardens and habitats in the Belt, tens of thousands of abandoned way stations, refuges, supply dumps, observatories, quarries, strip mines, and refineries, but salvage was not an easy way of making a living. Most of the ruins whose orbits brought them close to the remaining cities and settlements had been stripped out long ago; those so far untouched traced distant or eccentric paths, and were often laced with lethal traps and unexpected dangers.

  Forty years before Hari had been quickened, his mother, Mullai, had succumbed to a rogue prion that had infected her while she had been cataloguing the feral biosphere of an ancient garden, and converted her brain to tangles of pseudo-organic fibrils. His father, Aakash, after surviving radiation poisoning, six different cancers, and injuries caused by two serious accidents, had passed over fifteen years later, and migrated into a viron. And then Mullai and Aakash’s first son, Rakesh, had been killed when he was caught up in riots sparked by one of the end-time cults.

  This was several years after the Bright Moment, when everyone everywhere, awake or asleep, baseliner or posthuman, had been struck by the same brief vision: a man on a bicycle turning to look at the viewer as he glided away into a flare of light. It was generally agreed that this vision had been caused or created by an ancient gene wizard, Sri Hong-Owen. At the beginning of the Great Expansion she had left the Solar System in a ship fashioned from a fragment of one of Saturn’s moons, and after a troubled voyage of more than fifteen hundred years had arrived in the middle of a war between colonists over control of Fomalhaut’s gas-giant planet Cthuga, whose core was rumoured to be inhabited by a vast and ancient intelligence. Sri Hong-Owen’s ship had plunged into Cthuga, and twenty years later something strange and wonderful had happened in the depths of the gas giant. Something that had kindled the Bright Moment.

  Hundreds of sects, cults, and circles of magicians, hieratics, teleothetics, psychomancers and idiolaters had sprung up in its wake, like crystals condensing out of a shocked supersaturated solution. They believed that human history had been abruptly and utterly transformed, that the Bright Moment was the harbinger of a final reckoning in which only the elect would be saved, that it was a magical solution to the problems that oppressed their worlds: the static hierarchies that governed them; the centuries-long, belt-wide economic recession; reliance on ancient, half-understood machines and technologies; the lack of new political and philosophical ideas. Some broke away from established religions; others were founded by charismatic self-styled prophets or revelators. Some were violently aggressive; others manifested an ethereal spirituality. Some believed that the Bright Moment commemorated the vastening of an ascended god created by the fusion of Sri Hong-Owen’s mind with Cthuga’s alien intelligence, foreshadowing an age in which all of humanity would enter a new state of being; others preached that it was a sign that something inhuman and inimical had intruded into the universe, the beginning of a final war between good and evil. They squabbled over minor and major points of doctrine and interpretation, accused each other of heresy and apostasy, and fissioned into a bewildering variety of squabbling schismatic sects.

  Only a few survived the first decade after the Bright Moment. Most were short-lived: brief, bright candles consumed by the fever-frenzy of their faith. Some imploded when their leaders were assassinated or arrested; some destroyed themselves in mass suicides, believing that death at an auspicious hour would allow them to ascend into the new heaven created by Sri Hong-Owen, or to create new heavens of their own; some were overthrown when they went to war against the governments and polis of their cities and settlements.

  Rakesh was caught up in one of these insurrections. He was negotiating the sale of salvaged machinery in New Shetland when a radical cult, the Exaltation of the Free Mind, began to attack posthumans, accusing them of using memes implanted during the Bright Moment to control the thoughts and actions of baseliners. Riots broke out across the city; Rakesh was killed while trying to reach the elevators to the docks.

  Hari was quickened soon afterwards, cloned from Rakesh’s gene library. His childhood was tinted by the death of his predecessor and his father’s forthright hatred of the Exaltation of the Free Mind and the rest of the end-time cults. According to him, they threatened to create an age of superstition and unreason worse than the tyranny of the True Empire. He was particularly exercised by claims that the Bright Moment was a miracle that circumvented or violated natural laws: an intervention by a supernatural deity that stood outside the ordinary flow of events and could not be parsed by the ordinary human mind. The Bright Moment’s challenge to our world-picture should stimulate our curiosity, Aakash said, not close it down. It was a question of epistemology, not eschatology.

  Hari loved talking with his father, loved stepping through the translation frame into the viron where Aakash had made his home after he had passed over. It mirrored the desert homeland of one of the Pilot family’s ancestors, on Earth. The blue and starless sky, dominated by the platinum coin of the sun. Red rocks and red sand studded with vegetation, stretching towards a flat horizon. Rugged cliffs rooted in talus slopes, a narrow path winding through boulder fields to the tall cave mouth where Aakash met his visitors. A magical place where even time was different. Sometimes Hari would emerge from the viron and discover that hours or days had flown by, out in the real world.

  Sometimes he and his father would sit on slabs of warm sandstone outside the cave while they talked; sometimes they wandered through the desert. The old man bare-chested in a crisp white dhoti, stocky, broad-shouldered, a head shorter than Hari. His searching gaze and gentle voice. One hand combing the snowy flood of his beard while he anatomised some arcane nugget of philosophy or history.

  Because Aakash believed that everything was connected to everything else, that every detail in the world’s vast tapestry was significant, his conversations tended to veer in sudden and unexpected directions or lose themselves in digressions about the culture of ancient universities, the chemistry and manufacture of the oil paints used by Renaissance masters, the intractable problem of qualia, or some other topic suggested by what appeared to be random association. He’d always been like this, Agrata said, but his tendency to ramble far from his starting point had become more pronounced after he’d passed. He was no longer anchored to common clock time in his viron, and could extemporise for hours on any subject that caught and held his interest.

  As Hari and his father followed long meandering paths through the desert, windows would pop open to illustrate a point Aakash was making, diagrams would scribble across the sand, equations would ink themselves across the screen of the sky. The pocket universe of the viron was contiguous with Aakash’s thoughts, an extension of his mind, but its detailed, self-consistent landscape was also interesting in its own right. An expression of an ancient, alien logic. Ripples of sand formed ridged cells like those Hari’s tongue could parse on the roof of his mouth. Little crescent dunes were patched here and there, none higher than his knees. Scatterings of stones. Gravel pans. Interlocking circles of thorny bushes. Pa
lisades of spiny paddles. Lizards darting across bare rock like small green lightnings. Small birds flicking between clumps of vegetation or hovering on a blur of wings as they inserted their hypodermic beaks into flowers. Larger birds tracing patient circles high above. All of this generated from rules that mimicked a place long ago lost under ice, on Earth.

  As Hari grew older, his conversations with his father increasingly turned to the influence of cults on the politics of the surviving cities and settlements of the Belt and Mars and the moons of the outer planets, the personalities and backgrounds of key players, how various scenarios might be gamed, whether attempts to begin a dialogue with certain powers on Earth were useful or foolish, rumours about the suppression of philosophical explorations and research into the cause and nature of the Bright Moment, and so on, and so forth.

  Nabhomani, who after Rakesh’s death had taken charge of negotiations with politicians and officials in the cities and settlements visited by the ship, said that the old man had retreated into a fantasy world of conspiracies and hypotheses because he no longer had any traction or influence outside the little world of his ship. That was why he wouldn’t allow Hari to explore any of Pabuji’s Gift’s ports of call, Nabhomani said. Not because Hari wasn’t old enough to take care of himself, but because Aakash didn’t want him exposed to inconvenient truths.

  Agrata, as usual, took Aakash’s side. The last of the original crew, tirelessly loyal, she had been on the ship ever since it had been refurbished and relaunched. She said that everything had been thrown into hazard by the shock of the Bright Moment. Old certainties were crumbling, political alliances were shifting, the influence of the end-time cults was spreading in strange and unpredictable ways.

  ‘We must do our best to understand these changes if we are to survive,’ she said.

  ‘And this obsession with the Bright Moment?’ Nabhomani said. ‘How will that help us survive?’

  ‘Aakash hopes to keep a little light of reason alive in a growing sea of darkness. I see no harm in it.’

  ‘You can’t reason with people whose beliefs are based on unreason,’ Nabhomani said. ‘I should know. I must deal with them at every port.’

  Nabhoj, as usual, wouldn’t be drawn into these arguments. He had a ship to run.

  Nabhomani and Nabhoj were clones of Aakash, physically identical but with very different personalities. Nabhomani was affable, convivial, rakish, dressed in a vivid motley of fashions picked up from the cities and settlements he visited, loved gossip, and possessed a sharp eye for the affectations and foolishness of others. Nabhoj was a phlegmatic technician who rarely socialised with the passengers, and could sulk for days if he lost an argument about how best to solve a problem encountered during salvage work. Once, when Hari had been helping him try to free a recalcitrant pressure-hose coupling, he’d fetched a diamond knife and methodically hacked the coupling to a cloud of splinters. And then the fit had passed, and he’d given Hari one of his rare smiles and told him that although it wasn’t a standard procedure it had solved the problem quite neatly.

  Hari was schooled in every aspect of the family trade by Agrata and his two brothers, received a patchwork education in philosophical truths and methods from his father and various travelling scholars, and played with the children of passengers and specialists in the many disused volumes of his family’s ship. It was a ring ship, Pabuji’s Gift, a broad ribbon caught in a circle five hundred metres across, with a twist that turned it into the single continuous surface of a Möbius strip. The ship’s motor hung from a web of tethers and spars at the centre of the ring; its hull was studded with the cubes and domes that contained workshops, utility bays, power units, an industrial maker, and the giant centrifuges, light chromatographs, and cultures of half-life nematodes and tailored bacteria; its interior was partitioned into cargo holds, garages for gigs and the big machines used in salvage work, and the lifesystem. Much of this space was unused. The ship could support more than a thousand people, but even when Hari’s father had been alive it had never carried more than a tenth of that number.

  Hari and the children of passengers and specialist crews had the run of the empty cargo holds, habitats and modules, the mazes of ducts and serviceways. A world parallel to the world of the adults, with a social structure equally complicated, possessing its own traditions and myths, rivalries and challenges, fads and fashions. Endless games of tig on one voyage; hide-and-seek on another. One year, Hari organised flyball matches inside a cylinder turfed with halflife grass; when interest in that began to wane, he divided the children into troops that fought each other for possession of tagged locations scattered through the ship.

  He was fifteen then. Tall and slender, glossy black hair done up in corn rows woven with glass beads. Even though every adult – everyone over the age of twenty – still seemed impossibly old, adulthood was no longer mysterious and unattainable, but a condition he was advancing towards day by day. He knew that he would soon have to give up childish games and shoulder his share of the family’s work. He was beginning to understand the limits of his life, beginning to realise how small his world really was, how little it counted in the grand scheme of things.

  And then he fell in love for the first time.

  Her name was Sora Exodus Adel. A passenger travelling with her brother and her mother between Tannhauser Gate (where Pabuji’s Gift had unloaded most of the salvage from her last job) and Trantor (where she would unload the rest). Sora was a year older than Hari, languidly elegant, too old for the kind of games that Hari felt he was too old for now.

  He couldn’t tell Sora how he felt. He and his brothers were not allowed to have what Agrata called intimate relations with any of the passengers or specialists. Nabhoj was partnered to the ship; Nabhomani told Hari outrageous stories about debauchery with women and men he met during his negotiations in cities and settlements, promised to let Hari have a taste of the good life when Hari was at last allowed to go ashore. Hari could admire Sora Exodus Adel from a distance, engage in a little light banter, no more than that. Better to avoid her altogether, he thought. Find some work he could vanish into until the ship docked at Trantor and Sora disembarked. Then one of the other passengers, Jyotirmoy Hala, came up with a plan to put on a dance performance based on one of the stories about the parochial god from whom the ship had taken its name.

  Jyotirmoy was three years older than Hari, the only child of two philosophers who were studying the topology of the space-time distortions around the seraphs, and expected their son to take up their work. Jyotirmoy did not argue with his parents. He simply refused to listen to them. He spent a dozen hours a day practising dance and the art of gesture. The only way to be good at something, he told Hari, was to let it take over your life. To dedicate yourself to it. You had to practise an elevation or a gesture over and over until you had it right. Or at least, until you stopped making obvious mistakes. And then you could get down to the serious work. Then you could think about making something new.

  Agrata approved of Jyotirmoy’s idea, and Hari found himself helping to put a troupe selected from the younger passengers, including Sora, through twenty days of rehearsals. Jyotirmoy plotted the choreography, chose the music from the ship’s library, and supervised the design and manufacture of costumes and masks; Hari spent as much time as he could with Sora. He learned that she and her brother had been born on Mars but for most of their lives had been travelling with their mother, a musician who played ancient symphonies using an orchestra thing controlled by the play of her hands through columns of light. Sora maintained the orchestra thing; her brother organised events and arranged travel. She liked the gypsy life, she said, but she wouldn’t work for her mother for ever: she’d settle down eventually, design gardens, and raise children. She and Hari talked about the places she had visited, the people who lived there. Admirers of her mother’s work. Collaborators. Other artists. Hari was still young enough to believe that the world was sensitive to his emotions and moods, that everyone was a player
in the drama of his life. It gave him an odd, lonesome feeling to think of Sora leaving the ship, travelling on without him to places he’d never see, the precious time they had together dwindling to an anecdote, a memory.

  Sora said that she found it odd that Hari had never gone ashore at any of the cities and settlements Pabuji’s Gift had visited, said that his life and his family were very strange.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You don’t see it because you don’t know anything else,’ Sora said. ‘But in all the cities and settlements I’ve visited, all the ships I’ve travelled on, I’ve never before met someone like you.’

  ‘We’re just ordinary people, trying to get by.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s the tiniest bit weird, being born after your parents died?’

  Hari loved Sora’s bold, straightforward manner. Her candid gaze. She had a way, while talking, of running a hand through the cloud of her hair and twisting a clump of it in her fingers and turning it to and fro, as if trying to tune into stray thoughts. She had long, dexterous fingers. Her fingernails were tinted dark green, with mica flecks.

  Hari said, ‘My father passed over. He isn’t exactly dead.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘You could ask him.’

  ‘He is like a ghost. A haunt who manifests himself in the drones and manikins. Can he really operate several of them at once?’

  ‘Of course. He assigns their addresses to temporary sub-selves, and reintegrates when he has finished.’