Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  When Hari returned to the caravanserai, he found the Ardenist deep in conversation with Taqi Koothvar, one of the neuters who ran the place. They sat cross-legged on a rug, sharing a smokebubble: Rav hunched in the cowl of his wings; the neuter, a plump, cheerful person dressed in a red silk shirt and shimmering gold trousers. The two of them looking at Hari as he came across the compound.

  Taqi Koothvar blew out a riffle of smoke, handed the mouthpiece to Rav, and told Hari that yo was pleased to hear that he had found someone who could help him.

  ‘I haven’t made up my mind about that yet,’ Hari said.

  ‘Yet here you are, and here I am,’ Rav said. ‘How did it go at the head shop, by the way?’

  ‘Have you been tracking me?’

  Hari’s first thought was that some tiny djinn had been hidden inside the trait that Rav’s friend had given him. His second was that if he’d taken up Eli Yong’s offer to overwrite the trait with the official version, he wouldn’t have been able to trust the replacement, either . . .

  ‘It’s a small city,’ Rav said. ‘Everyone breathes the same air, drinks the same water. Did you learn anything useful? The chances are so vanishingly slight I don’t know why I bother to ask the question, but I’m prepared to be amazed.’

  ‘Not as much as I hoped, but more than I expected,’ Hari said, meeting the Ardenist’s grass-green gaze.

  The water in the smokebubble rattled and frothed as Rav drew on the mouthpiece. He said, his voice tight, pinched, ‘What you choose to tell me is up to you. As for me, I’m always ready to share useful information with my partners.’

  ‘We aren’t in any way partners,’ Hari said. ‘And besides, I’m sure you already know everything you need to know.’

  Rav smiled and blew a smoke ring, then blew a second smaller ring that, rotating counterclockwise, passed through the first.

  ‘Let me have a taste of that,’ Hari said.

  ‘Here’s a youngblood who thinks he’s fully fledged,’ Rav told Taqi Koothvar.

  ‘This is a tweaked strain of kif,’ Taqi Koothvar told Hari. ‘It isn’t meant for baseline humans.’

  ‘The passengers brought all kinds of drugs aboard our ship,’ Hari said. ‘Baseliner, posthuman, it’s all the same to me.’

  He wanted to show them that he wasn’t an innocent tourist, prove that he had knocked about and knew something about the worlds and their illict pleasures. He’d never before tried kif, a drug rumoured to be as old as the human species, but he had several times drunk mildly psychotrophic teas, and had once experienced a long, strange, highly detailed hallucination under the influence of an ephedrine mimic allegedly derived from the cerebrospinal fluid of a posthuman clade, the Quick, that had left the Solar System before the rise of the True Empire.

  The neuter shrugged, handed him the mouthpiece. Yo’s blue-black hair was teased into a kind of disordered wave and yo’s face painted white, with black pigment staining yo’s eye sockets and lips. It was impossible to tell if yo had once been a man or a woman. Elements of both combined in yo to make something else.

  ‘Knock yourself out,’ yo said.

  Hari sucked up cool, mentholated smoke that numbed his mouth. He felt it percolate through the inverted trees of his lungs, felt as if Fei Shen’s gravity had flattened out.

  Rav took the mouthpiece from him and said, ‘Don’t huff too much. We have work to do.’

  ‘You said a friend of yours knows where my family’s ship is,’ Hari said. The free-floating feeling emboldened him.

  ‘It’s his news. He should tell you.’

  ‘Well, take me to him.’

  ‘If you’re staying another night,’ Taqi Koothvar told Hari, ‘you should eat before you leave. The evening meal is included in our fee.’

  Hari was still buzzing from his hit of smoke as he followed Rav through the dusky parkland. His brain seemed to have expanded, separating and disconnecting his thoughts, and everything around him was saturated with arcane significance. The piping call of a night bird. Pale paths scribbled around shadowy stands of trees. Mounds of mosses glowing in pastel shades as if dabbed by a child’s thumb. Fireflies tracing bright signatures through black air . . .

  He tried his best to hide his delight in these wonders, but then the path bent around a stand of tall conifers and he was confronted by a magnolia in full bloom, its flowers glowing like a flock of moons, and he couldn’t suppress his cry of delight.

  Rav laughed. ‘You really are high.’

  ‘Perhaps just a little. Where is this friend of yours, anyway?’

  ‘We’re almost there.’

  The path dipped into a little garden where patches of white gravel were raked around stands of bamboo and ragged chunks of black iron. At the far side, Rav hunched into the tent of his wings and ducked under an arch of roughly dressed stone blocks. Hari followed, came out on to a circle of grass that rimmed a pool of cold, faintly sulphurous water. Beneath the surface, a chain of lights dropped towards distant shadows. When Hari leaned out to study their dim vanishing point, Rav put a hand on his shoulder to steady him.

  ‘No need to go swimming,’ he said. ‘My friend’s right here.’

  Ferny platelets of ice rocked on gelid waves as an undulating man-shape rose to the surface and pushed to the edge of the pool. A human face looked up at Hari, large, liquid black eyes, a flattened nose with pinched nostrils. Two lengths of scarlet scarf floated out behind, external gills composed of pseudo-cellular nanotech, half-obscuring a sleek, sinuous body. The legs were fused, and fringed with long fins that met at a broad point where the feet should have been.

  Rav made the introductions. His friend, Vazy Klushtsev, was the ambassador for the Ten Thousand Collectives of Europa.

  ‘It is in fact twelve thousand five hundred and thirty-three at this moment, not counting the Old Deep Ones,’ Vazy said. ‘But ten thousand is a good round number and suggests a certain romance.’

  Hari asked him how he and Rav had first met.

  ‘The youngblood wants a measure of my reputation,’ Rav said. ‘Be kind.’

  ‘I tell the truth, which is kind enough to you. I knew our friend first when I worked in the Office of External Affairs,’ Vazy told Hari. ‘On Europa we have a city from the long ago, when our ancestors had not yet learned to breathe water as well as air. It connects the surface with the world-ocean; visitors live there. Rav helped to fix part of its environmental conditioning system.’

  ‘It was clever enough to have gone insane,’ Rav said, ‘but not clever enough to know that it had.’

  ‘We became friends then,’ Vazy said, ‘and we are friends still. We talk, whenever he comes to Fei Shen, and he tells me about places he has visited, people he has seen. Part of my work is to gather such intelligence.’

  ‘You’re a spy,’ Hari said to Rav.

  He and Rav were sprawled on cushions at the water’s edge. He had splashed icy water on his face, and felt a little less spacey.

  ‘I prefer to think of myself as a trusted source of information,’ Rav said.

  ‘Such things are unfortunately necessary in these debased times,’ Vazy said.

  They were an old clade, the Europans, inhabiting bubble-biomes tethered or adrift in the world-ocean under the icy shell of Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon. Their economy was based on the ancient system of tradable reputation once shared by the cities and settlements of the outer system; Vazy told Hari that when he returned home at the end of the twelve-year span of his appointment, he would have accumulated enough kudos to found his own collective. Meanwhile, he helped to negotiate trade deals and treaties, and represented the interests of the Ten Thousand Collectives at conclaves and conferences. Face-to-face meetings and discussions were increasingly important because the remnants of the system-wide commons was haunted by djinns and trust in avatars and other virtual representations had been undermined by fakes and finger puppets deployed by unscrupulous governments and individuals.

  ‘Once, you gave your word, and it was enough
,’ Vazy said. ‘A handshake, a kiss – the same thing as a contract. Because to renege on an agreement was shameful. A loss of kudos. Now, who cares about kudos? Where is there trust amongst peoples? There are bandits, I don’t need to tell you about them. There are gangs that infiltrate governments of cities and settlements and loot their reserves of consumables and credit. Sell off essentials. They underbid on contracts, this is a new thing. They take control of a city by flattering some senile or docile ruling family, or by bribing it, and they sell off its assets and run up debts and contract out the labour of its citizens at a bargain price. Strip out everything of value and move on. They prey on the small places now, remote and marginal cities unable to put up resistance, but if things do not change they will soon be asset-stripping places like Fei Shen. Because who is to stop them? Once there was consensus, unity. A shared culture. Now there is only mistrust and dissent.’

  Vazy reminded Hari of garrulous old scholars who’d bought passage on Pabuji’s Gift. Custodians of outmoded and half-forgotten doctrines who venerated a personal golden age because they didn’t understand the present and feared the future, who had an opinion about every topic and a repertoire of anecdotes and mordant observations, who always had to have the last word.

  ‘I had several dealings with your father when I was working with the office of external affairs,’ Vazy told Hari. He leaned against the pool’s rim, his chin resting on his folded arms. ‘He was of the old school. A man of his word, very much so. I was sorry to hear of it, when he passed over. And sorry also to hear of your family’s recent bad luck.’

  ‘I am told you may have some good news about my family,’ Hari said. ‘Or at least, about our ship.’

  The Europan’s large eyes were blanked by semitranslucent membranes for a few seconds. ‘Your father and this tick-tock, Dr Gagarian, were working on the physics of the Bright Moment with several like-minded philosophers. Including a former Europan, recently deceased.’

  ‘Ivanova Galchan,’ Hari said, with a dropping feeling. ‘Do you know how she died?’

  ‘It seems that she disappeared on the day your family’s ship was hijacked. Her body was found many days afterwards, in a remote part of the aquatic quarter of her adopted home, Chavez Labyrinth. There were signs that she had been tortured. The city police are searching for the murderer, so far without success. It is a big, busy place, Chavez Labyrinth. More than a hundred ships passed through its docks in the time between her disappearance and the discovery of her body. Her former collective was notified, but her remains have not been repatriated. It seems that she entered into a multiple partnership, and her partners chose to commit her remains to the biome of her adopted home. Nevertheless, she was born on Europa, and her death diminishes us all,’ Vazy said. ‘And that is why I have an interest in the connection between her death and the hijack of your ship.’

  ‘I think you should tell him what you found, before he bursts with impatience,’ Rav said.

  ‘We maintain a good traffic control system around Jupiter,’ Vazy said. ‘It is very old, very powerful. And necessary, for Jupiter is the broom of the system. Many things approaching the Sun from the outer reaches are swept into his gravity well. And many ships steal from his angular momentum to throw themselves further outward. The traffic system watches for comets and rocks, and also tracks ships. And one of them, it was your family’s ship.’

  Hari said, ‘At Jupiter? When? Where is it now?’

  ‘It passed through one hundred and fifty-two days ago,’ Vazy said. ‘It was flying under a new name and registry, but our traffic system recognised it in any case.’

  The Europan opened a window that showed Pabuji’s Gift’s twisted ring in sharp silhouette against the white swirls of Jupiter’s equatorial band. It hadn’t made orbit around Jupiter or any of his moons, Vazy said, and threw up a rotating glyph showing the ship’s track through the Jupiter system and its changes in delta vee. Instead, like many other ships transiting through the system, it had used a gravity-assist manoeuvre to gain velocity and bend its course outward. Towards Saturn, which was presently on the same side of the sun as Jupiter.

  ‘Here’s an interesting fact,’ Rav said. ‘The Saints own a wheel habitat that orbits Saturn. That’s where Levi lives.’

  ‘Many others live there too,’ Vazy said. ‘Including the seraphs.’

  ‘But only the Saints would be interested in the research of Dr Gagarian and his friends,’ Rav said.

  Hari couldn’t look away from the image of his family’s ship. Wondering if any of his family were still alive, wondering who was piloting it, where it was now.

  Vazy told him that it had long since passed beyond the volume monitored by Jupiter’s traffic control system. ‘Still, I hope it is useful, the information. I give it to help you and your family out of friendship. And in the hope that you might return the favour, should you find anything about the death of Ivanova Galchan.’

  ‘Vazy is a good person,’ Rav told Hari, ‘but he has one weakness. His sentimentality.’

  ‘Lucky for you I have this so-called weakness,’ Vazy said. ‘You are a very long way from the definition of a “good person”, but for sentimental reasons I still consider you my friend.’

  Hari thanked him, and the Europan talked briefly with Rav about people and places Hari didn’t know, then wished Hari luck and said that he hoped they would meet again in happier circumstances. ‘Please give your father my regards, if it is ever possible.’

  Coming back through the luminous park, Hari pulled up the charges for sending messages to the Saturn system. They were startlingly exorbitant. Even if he managed to trade his rights to the lifepod, he would be able to afford only a few minutes’ access to the commons of any of the cities and settlements of Saturn’s moons.

  He said, ‘We should go there. Right now.’

  ‘It’s a long old trip,’ Rav said. ‘And what would you do, when you arrived?’

  ‘Take back my ship, of course. Free my family.’

  ‘If they are alive.’

  ‘Take back the ship and have my revenge, if they are dead.’

  ‘Take it back by force, against an unknown number of opponents? I’m good, but not quite that good.’

  ‘What about your friends?’

  ‘It’s the Republic they want to liberate, not your ship. We need to find out what the hijackers want, to begin with,’ Rav said. ‘Find out what’s inside Dr Gagarian’s head, find out why they want it, what they want to do with it. Once we know that, we can work out what to do next. There’s no point plunging into a cloud in the hope that some tasty morsel is hiding inside it. If you want to track something down, you must first learn its habits—’

  ‘What is it?’

  Rav had stopped, was looking all around. ‘Someone is following us,’ he said, and ran full-tilt at a tree and scrambled up its trunk, vanishing inside a shadowy cloud of leaves that suddenly shattered as he launched himself into the air. And twisted sideways, wings folding, and tumbled head over heels into a dense stand of bushes.

  As Hari started towards him, Rav thrashed out of the bushes, clutching a bouquet of red flowers to his chest. Falling to his knees, looking at Hari, his mouth working, holding out the flowers like a suitor in a dance.

  ‘Run,’ he said. ‘Run while you can.’

  Something struck Hari’s chest. A red flower had sprung up from his jerkin. No, it was the fletching of a dart, similar to the darts with which the ship’s security bots were armed. Hari pulled it out and showed it to Rav, but the Ardenist was sprawled under the cowl of his wings, and the world was swaying wildly. Hari lost his balance and sat down hard, and everything swung around him and fell away.

  8

  Hari’s father hung in the air above a circular pool of water that reflected with absolute fidelity the argosy of white clouds that sailed the blue sky. His bare feet, toes pointing down like a sadhu in an ancient pict, almost touched their reflection. All around, the stony desolation of the desert. And now Aakash Pilot revo
lved and looked at Hari and told him that he could walk out across the water. All he needed was faith. Believe in me, his father said. Trust me. Everything follows from the first step.

  But Hari, standing on a slab of rock at the edge of the pool, somehow regressed to age four and dressed in pantaloons and a vest as blue as the sky and decorated with six-pointed silver stars, was too scared to take that step. Hot and slick with embarrassment and shame and fear. Fear of failure. Fear of falling. His father was explaining the physics of his viron, but he spoke in a mumbling whisper and it was difficult to hear what he was saying, and something was stalking through the desert, shaking it with huge, regular footfalls. The pool’s mirror shattered. Rocks jumped and rolled. And Hari was on his back, looking up at clouds and sky, trying to tell his father that it wasn’t his fault he had fallen . . .

  Drums. The sharp pulse of a headache behind his eyes, filling his head, crowding out thought. His blood beating in his ears. The pitter-patter of small drums rapped by fingertips, echoing in a large open space.

  Hari tried and failed to open his eyes. He tried and failed to move his hands, his arms.

  His head felt as if it had been pierced by razor-edged skewers and then kicked down every corridor of the ship by a manic crew of futzball players. He scarcely noticed the tight feeling in his shoulders and back and buttocks, the cold damp air on his skin. He was naked, hanging naked somewhere, arms stretched up above his head. He could hear the drums. Water dripping into water.

  He tried to speak, but his mouth was sealed. Tried again, using the back of his throat and his nasal cavity, shaping words that were mostly vowels. ‘Uh mmm ah? Oo ah u?’