Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  ‘You think that is ordinary?’

  He loved the little uptick in the corner of her smile. A sly little warp, a playful complicity. There were five different shades of gold in her eyes.

  He said, ‘It’s just what he does.’

  Sora said, ‘Many of the passengers are scared of him.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘Of course not. Well, just a tiny bit. Actually, Agrata scares me more. I don’t think she likes me.’

  ‘Agrata can be . . . abrupt, I suppose. It’s hard to know what she likes and doesn’t like, but I bet she’d like you, once she got to know you.’

  ‘That’s sweet of you, Hari.’

  Hari loved Sora’s small kindnesses, her unaffected sophistication, was jealous when she paid attention to anyone else, envious of the easy way Jyotirmoy talked with her about details of the performance, of the way the two of them hung close together, studying sketches for costumes, watching recordings of rehearsals, discussing staging and the movements of performers, where they should start and where they should come to rest, and half a hundred other things whose significance Hari barely understood. For the first time, he saw himself as others might see him. An outsider. An awkward, peculiar kid who knew everything about his ship and his family’s trade, and almost nothing about anything that really mattered.

  But when Jyotirmoy at last led his crew into the hollow sphere of the stage, with the adult passengers hung all around its perimeter, Hari dissolved into his role and the gestalt of the performance. Costumed in fluttering silks, faces painted white, lips tinted black, eyes emphasised by red and gold make-up, he and the other players flitted through the web of ratlines and perches, through washes of light and music, like the little birds in Aakash’s viron. Breaking into freefall dances, freezing in tableaux when one of the principals performed a solo part. Jyotirmoy played Pabuji; Hari played Pabuji’s friend, the snake god Gogaji; Sora played Gogaji’s bride and Pabuji’s niece, Kelam; Sora’s brother, Jubilee, played Ravana the Demon King, from whom Pabuji stole the she-camels he gave as a wedding present to Gogaji and Kelam; the other children doubled as wedding guests and the camels.

  Hari inhabited the intricate sequence of his role with a kind of exalted serenity. Every move, every pose, sprang from memories laid down in his bios and muscles during the painstaking rehearsals, a single thread in the weave of the whole. Coming together, spinning apart. His concentration broke only once. Moving out of the dance in which he and Sora mirrored each other’s gestures and poses in an expression of joyful fidelity, he overshot the perch where he would rest in shadow while Pabuji, with comically elaborate caution, stalked the she-camels. Jyotirmoy caught his arm and halted and turned him, and their gazes met. A strange moment of doubling, seeing Jyotirmoy’s concern flash in Pabuji’s mask. And then Hari was in the correct position, and Pabuji soared away into a cone of light, and Hari was caught up again in the flow of the dance and the unfolding dream logic of the story, waking at the end of it, dazed and happy and exhausted, to the audience’s applause.

  At the party after the performance, still wearing Gagaji’s green tunic and trousers, Hari dared to ask Sora if she wanted to see his favourite place on the ship, a diamond composite blister where you could switch off all the lights and lose yourself in the rapture of the starry dark. And was amazed, even though he’d so often imagined floating in the small intimate space with her, her warmth, her touch, when she smiled and said why not? It was as if he still inhabited the dream reality of the play. Anything seemed possible. But when they started across the crowded space Agrata materialised out of the throng and told Hari that Sora’s mother wanted to congratulate him on his performance. And Agrata’s look told Hari that she knew. She knew all about his plan, his private fantasy.

  He submitted, of course. He didn’t know what else to do. Following Agrata, smiling and nodding while Sora’s mother talked, hardly hearing what she said to him or what he said to her, Sora somewhere else in the big, crowded, noisy volume, the moment lost. And that was that. The next day, Pabuji’s Gift docked at Trantor, unloaded its cargo of refined rare earths, let off a few passengers, took on a few more. Sora and her family were among those who disembarked. And Jyotirmoy vanished. Abandoned his parents and jumped ship.

  Agrata didn’t say anything about Jyotirmoy’s defection or Hari’s unrequited love for Sora, but one day, during a discussion about reconfiguring passenger accommodation, she began to talk about the early days of the ship.

  ‘There wasn’t much to it,’ she said. ‘Just two modules powered and pressurised, one for crew, one for the farm that fed the crew. A handful of gigs, most of them still in need of complete overhaul. Very little in the way of equipment. Your father refurbished it himself, with the help of a small crew he recruited from people who answered a note he’d posted in the commons. We were idealists, but we were not daydreamers or utopians. We knew what was possible and what was not. We were practical. We made plans and we worked together to make those plans possible. We were all like your father, in short. As he was then.’

  ‘He changed, and you didn’t,’ Hari said.

  ‘I’ve told you this many times before, I know. Yes, he changed. There were just ten of us, when the ship set out on its maiden voyage. Nominally, we were a collective, but Aakash was in charge. A benevolent despot who ruled by charisma and an intimidating intellect. No one could argue with him because he had an answer to every question, every objection. I remember when he tried to introduce democracy to our little crew. One of his enthusiasms. He had so many, in those days. It was part of his charm, and bled off his excess energy. Like most of them, democracy did not last, but it was fun while it did. Now we’re all bound by custom. Even your father. We do things in a certain way because that’s the way we do things.’

  They were sitting in the omphalos, at the heart of the passengers’ quarters. Pale walls of architectural weave wrapped around an open cylindrical core lightly webbed by walkways and ziplines. The architectural weave knotted at various levels into platforms, like the one on which Hari and Agrata sat, or thickened into suites of rooms. Only a few people were about. Hari usually liked the drowsy peace of the omphalos, but now it seemed to close in on him like a helmet filled with stale rebreathed air.

  He said, ‘I’d like to take this ship to new places. Places people don’t go any more. To Neptune’s Trojans. To the Centaurs, and the scattered disc. To the Kuiper belt. There are all kinds of places out there, places no one has visited for centuries. Who knows what we might find?’

  Agrata said, ‘You want to shake things up.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Yes, why not? The family needs to be challenged if it is to stay strong. But I don’t think you’re telling me what you want to do,’ Agrata said. ‘I think you’re really telling me what you don’t want to do.’

  ‘You think I should do what I’m told. Even though I think it’s wrong.’

  ‘Rakesh once said more or less the same thing. He was about your age, as I recall.’

  ‘I suppose we’ve all done the same things or wanted the same things,’ Hari said.

  Sometimes he felt that every thought, every idea, was an echo of the thoughts and ideas of his brothers and his father. That everything that happened to him had already happened to them. That there were no new stories.

  Agrata studied him. She was more than a century old, and because she lacked every trace of vanity, and because it gave her authority with the passengers, she let her age show. Her face was creased and lined; her skin was freckled with pale spots where viral treatment had removed incipient carcinomas; her coarse grey hair was brushed back from her forehead and braided into a long rope coiled at her back.

  She said, ‘You feel sorry for yourself. Hard done by.’

  ‘Rakesh didn’t have to deal with Aakash’s fantasies about the Bright Moment and the cults and all the rest.’

  ‘Now you sound like Nabhomani.’

  ‘Perhaps Nabhomani is right.’

&
nbsp; ‘You should talk to your father about your ideas. Argue with him. Start to take the initiative. The worst that can happen is that he won’t listen to you.’

  Hari tried his best. And at first Aakash seemed to take note of his comments. At least, he did not dismiss them immediately.

  ‘You’ve been taking advice from the old woman,’ he said.

  Hari admitted it.

  His father was amused. ‘We’ve been together a long time. She knows how I think; I know how she thinks. She believes that I can’t change. What about you?’

  They were sitting cross-legged on a slab of warm sandstone at the entrance to the cave, in the shadow of the cliffs.

  Hari said, ‘I think you want what you think is best for the ship.’

  ‘A diplomat’s answer. Maybe you’re learning something. I want what’s best for you, too. You may not think it, but I do. You’ll see how it all works out.’

  How it worked out, a little over a year after Hari started to push back against his father’s ideas, after he had for the first time left the ship to observe how Nabhomani negotiated with officials on Sugar Mountain and had, not very seriously and for only a few hours, run away, Aakash announced that the family would suspend its salvage work for a while. They were going to try a new direction, he said. They were going to help a very good friend of his complete his research into the nature of the Bright Moment.

  Some fifty days later, Pabuji’s Gift reached Ceres and the tick-tock philosopher Dr Gagarian came aboard, and everything changed.

  3

  The pressure suit’s eidolon possessed a childlike naivety. Usually, her unaffected optimism and innocence was charming. Playful. But sometimes, as when Hari tried to explain the hijackers’ subterfuge, why he knew that Agrata wasn’t really Agrata, it seemed like wilful obstinacy, a capricious refusal to acknowledge unpalatable facts.

  He was working while he talked to her, inside the spire that the ascetic hermit, Kinson Ib Kana, had hollowed out and decorated with murals. Checking his traps, greasing pawls and ratchets, making sure that lines were strung tight, bladders containing his special chemical mix hadn’t hardened off, and nets were packed just so. Working as steadily as he could, despite tremors in his fingers and the soup of mercury and molten poison cooking in his bowels.

  ‘I’ve known her all my life,’ he told the eidolon. ‘We talked every day. And the person I talked to isn’t that person.’

  ‘Did she give the wrong answers to your questions?’

  The eidolon was perched on the intersection of two crossbeams. Her eyes gleaming in the shadows.

  ‘Not at all. She knew everything. They’d done their research. But Agrata – the real Agrata – wouldn’t have tried to answer those questions.’

  No, she would have told him to stop being so silly. She would have told him to be sensible. That was one of her favourite words. Sensible. Also trust, pride, loyalty, duty. Hari desperately wanted it to be Agrata come to rescue him, to take him home, but he knew that it was his duty to keep Dr Gagarian’s head safe and reach Tannhauser Gate and begin negotiations with the hijackers. It was his duty to make sure that his heart did not overrule his judgement.

  ‘I suppose there is a small chance that Agrata might be a prisoner. Saying whatever the hijackers tell her to say because they are holding hostages they have promised to hurt of kill if she does not cooperate. But I don’t think she is a prisoner,’ Hari said, and felt a freezing pinch in his heart again. ‘I think she’s a djinn, probably generated from her bios. It is a good copy, but not quite good enough.’

  He was trying to quantify an instinctive feeling of wrongness, searching for an explanation of something deeper than reason. Because what is the mass of a feeling? What is its wavelength, its position on the electromagnetic spectrum?

  ‘But if it’s really the hijackers,’ the eidolon said, ‘why would they want to talk to you? Why would they warn you that they were coming here?’

  Hari had to remind himself that this artless simplicity was a feature of her mindscape, not a bug.

  ‘They spotted the lifepod, and knew I was here. And they also knew that they were within range of the lifepod’s radar. They knew I would know they were approaching Themba. So they tried to convince me that I was going to be rescued rather than be captured or killed. Because if they stayed silent, I would know at once that I was in danger.’

  Hari had finished checking the alignment of the last of the traps; now he pushed off towards the floor. Picts flared as he dropped past murals, wrapping him in momentary sensations of colour and movement, triggering fleeting emotions he couldn’t quite name. Strange cousins of wonder and awe and agape. Nostalgia for things he’d never seen or experienced. A profound and disorientating déjà vu. He hoped the murals would distract his enemies. If they did, he’d build a shrine to honour the memory of Kinson Ib Kana.

  He hit the floor, swaying as his boots stuck and waist tethers shot out and anchored him, and the eidolon appeared at his side, saying, ‘Isn’t that why you made all this? Because you knew you were in danger?’

  Hari watched the glow of the murals die back into darkness. Scattered lamps shone out of the shadows around him. He could see the wires and rigging of the traps around the hatch, told himself that he could see them because he knew where to look. Told himself that even if the hijackers spotted them, they would think they were part of the spire’s internal construction.

  Now he knew that they were coming for him, he was excited and scared. Excited because he would soon have a chance to confront them. Scared because he might fail. This was this, as Professor Aluthgamage had liked to say. There were a trillion trillion trillion alternate versions of the universe, a trillion trillion trillion realities, but this was the only one Hari inhabited, the only one he knew. And his only defence against his enemies was a handful of childish tricks and traps built from junk.

  ‘I wasn’t one hundred per cent certain that they would find me,’ he said. ‘I hoped that they wouldn’t. I really did. But it made sense to prepare a little welcoming party just in case. And besides, it kept me busy. It passed the time.’

  The eidolon shrugged. An unsettlingly human gesture. ‘You will look foolish if you are wrong, and catch Agrata in your traps.’

  ‘I will be dead if I’m right, and don’t do anything.’

  Hari ducked out of the hatch at the base of the spire, and shuffled across the dusty ground towards the lifepod. Jupiter was following the sun down towards the western horizon. The spark of the hijacker’s ship hung high above. It was one of the brightest stars in the sky now. It would reach Themba in a little under three hours.

  The eidolon drifted beside him, saying, ‘Are you are planning to escape? I thought that the lifepod lacked sufficient reaction mass.’

  ‘I have another use for it,’ Hari said.

  He reached into the hard-code matrix of the lifepod, reconfigured its proximity and navigation protocols, and began to write the first of two short command strings. He’d been working for ten minutes when the eidolon spoke. Saying that Agrata wanted to talk to him again.

  ‘She says she will be with you soon. She says she looks forward to embracing you and telling you everything.’

  ‘Don’t reply,’ Hari said. ‘The hijackers are wondering what I’m doing. Let them.’

  ‘I’m scared, Gajananvihari.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I’m scared that you may be right. And if you are right, if the ship is piloted by the hijackers, if they are trying to fool you with a copy of Agrata, shouldn’t you reply? Otherwise, they will realise that you know that she is not who she claims to be.’

  It was a good point.

  Hari thought for a moment, then told the eidolon to open the channel. At once, Agrata’s face appeared in a small window. It looked exactly like her. Her grey hair brushed back from her forehead. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepening when she smiled and asked him what he was doing.

  ‘Packing up.’

  ‘There�
��s nothing you need in that little capsule.’

  The hijackers were watching him. Of course they were.

  He stepped on his anger and fear and said, ‘I’m salvaging a few things.’

  ‘You have kept the head safe?’

  ‘As I told you.’

  ‘You should retrieve it now. So we can leave as soon as possible.’

  ‘Remember how I used to play hide-and-seek? Me and the other children. We’d switch off our bioses and scatter, and the person appointed seeker would have to find the rest. Every person the seeker found had to help him until only one person – the winner – was left undiscovered. I wasn’t much use at being a seeker, but I was very good at hiding.’

  There was a pause. Agrata – no, not Agrata, it was some kind of djinn, a puppet manipulated by his enemies – was still smiling, but more than ever her face seemed like a mask. At last, she said, ‘This isn’t a game.’

  ‘I managed to stay hidden for a whole day, once. Long after the game was supposed to end. The others searched and searched but they couldn’t find me. They were so angry when I came out of hiding. So were you, because you thought I’d come to some harm.’

  ‘I’m not angry. I am pleased that you stayed hidden and kept the head safe. And I am pleased to have found you alive and well.’

  ‘I’m good at hiding. And I’m good at hiding things, too. You won’t ever find it without me.’

  He wanted the hijackers to know that if they killed him they would have a hard time tracking down Dr Gagarian’s head.

  Another pause, not so long this time.

  ‘I’m not surprised that you’re scared, Gajananvihari. It must have been a terrible trial, hiding on this lonely rock, wondering if anyone would ever come to rescue you. Well, here I am. Ready to take you back to the ship. Where you’ll be given a hero’s welcome.’

  No one in Hari’s family would have said take you back to the ship. They would have said, bring you home.

  He said, ‘Will you let me become a pilot?’

  ‘You can be anything you want to be, Gajananvihari.’