by Paul McAuley
‘Oh, he’s old, all right,’ Rav said. ‘A lot older than you, youngblood. But he still has a lot to learn. I worry, sometimes, that he isn’t bright enough or tough enough to survive on his own after I’m gone.’
The ship cut a long chord across the inner belt, swinging past a single waypoint, a tiny uninhabited rubble pile crushed down to a sphere by the string injected into its centre to deepen its gravity well. Part of an ancient network constructed by Trues, using technology stolen from one of the posthuman clades they had conquered, to facilitate travel throughout the Belt.
Plugged into the ship’s mind, Hari watched the insignificant fleck of the waypoint brighten and swell into a tiny crescent that rushed at the ship and swung beneath its keel. The rigid patterns of the stars swung too, as the ship gained a fraction of the waypoint’s orbital energy from the slingshot encounter, increasing its velocity and altering its trajectory. Heading for the world-city Ophir, the Caves of Steel.
It had been Rav’s idea to go to Ophir. Hari had wanted to light out for Tannhauser Gate, to find out all he could about Deel Fertita and the murders of Rember Wole and Worden Hanburanaman, and to attempt to make contact with the hijackers through one of the agents who arbitrated ransom deals for hostages, ships and cargoes seized by dacoit crews. And if the hijackers refused to talk to him, or demanded a price he couldn’t pay, he would round up a crew of reivers willing to chase after Pabuji’s Gift and take her back by main force.
But Rav had other plans. Tannhauser Gate was presently on the far side of the sun, he said; Ophir was much closer. A diversion that would cost them only a few days. Hari could make himself known to his uncle, who might be able to give him all the help he needed. He could investigate the murder of Salx Minnot Flores. And Rav knew a tick-tock matriarch who lived in Ophir. If she couldn’t crack open Dr Gagarian’s files and find out what they contained, he said, no one could.
Hari suspected that the Ardenist’s interest in his plight would end once he had a copy of Dr Gagarian’s research, but knew that there was no point trying to argue with him. It was Rav’s ship, after all. For the first time in his life, Hari was a passenger.
Even with the gravity-assist manoeuvre, it took fifteen days to reach Ophir. Hari read a long story he found in Kinson Ib Kana’s book, a tragic saga about a bloody civil war between scions of a True suzerain who decided to hand over power to his youngest daughter. Rav examined what was left of the drone he’d taken from the dead woman, Deel Fertita’s sister, and determined that it had been purchased in Fei Shen and modified with black-market combat algorithms. The woman’s genome, read off a skin scraping, didn’t yield a match on any of the databases he was able to consult, but that wasn’t surprising.
‘Most cities and settlements keep the records of their citizens locked, and public catalogues of felons and fanatics are partial and corrupted. She isn’t on any of the watch lists, and neither are any of her close relatives, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t a Saint. She could be a fresh recruit. A clean skin. Or someone operating in deep cover.’
Hari knew that it would be a waste of time to point out that the dead woman and her sisters were most likely dacoits. Most of the stories Rav told about his adventures and escapades were either exaggerations or outright fabrications, but his obsession with the Saints seemed genuine. One of the first things he’d done, after they’d left Fei Shen, was show Hari a saga he’d obtained from a disaffected member of the cult, depicting the mythic origins of its leader, Levi. A rarity that only a few outsiders had seen. Essential background information for their joint mission.
According to the saga, Levi had been born in a remote agricultural garden inhabited by a humble sect, the Congregation of the Children of the True Christ, whose ancestors had quit Earth more than a thousand years ago. They herded skysheep and tended orchards and platform farms. They cultivated vacuum organisms on the small rock which the garden orbited. They had no makers, no QIs or virons. They maintained the ancient machineries that regulated the ecosystem of their garden and repaired their handbuilt pressure suits and scooters, but otherwise rejected every kind of technology.
Levi’s parents were sheep herders. He was their only child. Until the age of fourteen, he had lived an unremarkable life in the free-fall orchards and farms of his home. And then the wavefront of the Bright Moment passed through the Solar System. The inhabitants of the Congregation’s garden, no more than two hundred souls, were badly traumatised by its brief universal vision. There were outbreaks of panic and hysteria. Two men killed themselves; another murdered his wife and child, then swam out of an airlock into vacuum.
The elders told the Congregation that the vision was yet another false miracle in an age of false miracles and prophets put up by the Great Enemy to tempt people from the True Way. These things had happened before, and would happen again. The Great Enemy worked through cursed technology created by posthumans who believed themselves little gods. He worked through the seraphs. He worked through the weaknesses of otherwise blameless men and women. We must all stand firm, the elders said. We must know and understand that even though the Great Enemy frightens and tempts us with visions sent directly into our minds, as the Christ was tempted in the desert, those visions are false. Our souls will remain unsullied as long as our faith remains strong, and our faith will be strengthened by our refusal to be tempted.
Every so often a ship visited the garden to trade essential goods and machine parts for the exquisite rugs that the Congregation’s children wove on hand looms. When it returned, a couple of hundred days after the Bright Moment, its captain, the only outsider allowed into the garden, told the elders that the vision had been experienced by every living human being in the Solar System, and its origin had been discovered in ancient files on Earth: a pict of the father of an ancient gene wizard, Sri Hong-Owen. The Bright Moment, the captain said, was a signal created when she had fused with entities in the atmosphere of Fomalhaut’s only gas-giant planet, and had undergone a transformation similar to the vastening of the seraphs.
The elders seized on this story and made it their own. They told the Congregation that Sri Hong-Owen had dared to believe that she could challenge the Creator. She had tried to vasten herself using evil technology derived from a Godless alien intelligence, and she had been punished for her hubris. The Bright Moment was a warning: a glimpse of her headlong rush into the arms of the Great Enemy, who had likewise rebelled, and had been expelled from Heaven. The Christ, in the image of her father, had tried to save her, and she had refused to be saved, and because of her pride she had been cast out of His light into perpetual darkness.
Levi thought differently. He had always been an independent and wayward child. He had been beaten by his parents many times, had been publicly flogged for challenging the elders. But he refused to stop asking questions because he knew that unexamined faith was worthless. Belief was weakened and compromised if its tenets were never challenged; interpretations of holy writ must be tested and retested until every flaw had been exposed and corrected.
Slowly, he began to formulate his own exegesis of the Bright Moment. The QIs that had vastened themselves into seraphs had never been anything other than machines, but Sri Hong-Owen had once been human. If she had become something like a seraph, it would be no ordinary seraph, and her vastening would be no ordinary vastening. And even though it had required the intervention of some kind of alien intelligence, it could still be a holy act proceeding from the will of the Creator. After all, the entire universe was holy, because everything in it had once been enclosed within the cosmic point quickened by the Creator. Time and space, light and matter, stars, planets, human beings – even, why not, the alien intelligence in the gas giant orbiting Fomalhaut. It was entirely possible, Levi thought, that the Bright Moment was a vision of an apotheosis rather than a fall from grace. The equivalent of an ascension to Heaven by someone yet living, as achieved by certain saints of the long ago.
He tried to discuss his ideas with his friends, and
one of them immediately denounced him to the elders. He was accused of subversion, flogged, and sentenced to spend a hundred days in a hut hung close to the roof of the garden, to think about his sins and to pray for forgiveness.
After the elaborate dance sequence depicting his trial and punishment, the saga cut to an image of Levi clad in a holy nimbus as he knelt in prayer at the edge of the little world. In one direction was everything he knew and loved: a sea of green islands floating at various depths around the sunlamp at the centre of the garden. In the other was the stark inhospitality of the outer dark, visible through the long slit of a window set in the rind of water-ice and foamed fullerene that protected the garden from solar and cosmic radiation, and from strikes by flecks of debris too small to trigger the attention of the anti-collision guns.
The elders expected Levi to meditate on the contrast between his own insignificant life and the inhuman scale of the universe. The billions of stars and planets of the Milky Way, the billions of galaxies beyond. A cosmic hymn to the Creator’s power. Instead, Levi was increasingly troubled by thoughts of the cruelty, waste and stupidity of human history. The world was fallen, and those in it could be redeemed only by the blood sacrifice of the Christ, but almost four thousand years later human history was still far from the path of the righteous. One day, he was visited by a terrifying revelation. He saw that the Bright Moment was a sign that the universe had reconfigured itself to accommodate the possibility of vastenings of human beings; a small window of hope which those who possessed true faith could widen into a new golden age. They would share in the miracle it symbolised, sweep away false idols, from posthumans to seraphs, and raise themselves into a state of grace.
Levi knew what he must do. He understood the great burden that had been laid upon him and he prayed that he would prove himself worthy. He received no answer, but knew that he could not do anything other than that which he had been born to do.
The saga showed him returning to the Congregation, and preaching, and everyone falling at his feet in wonder and amazement before rising and uniting in a final dance sequence. ‘What actually happened,’ Rav told Hari, ‘was that he came back from exile, pretended that he’d seen the error of his ways, and secretly recruited four of his closest friends. They armed themselves with agricultural implements. At the next meeting, he stood up and told the Congregation about his vision. His friends killed two elders who tried to stop him, and subdued everyone else, and he preached for a day and a night. He told the Congregation that they were God’s chosen messengers. He told them that they were Saints. Those who refused to join him were killed. And when the freighter that traded with the garden next put in, Levi and his Saints captured it and voyaged out into the Belt to begin their so-called holy work.’
Levi had taken his name from an earlier prophet, the leader of a cult that had called themselves Ghosts. They’d tried to take control of the settlements and cities on Saturn’s moons; Sri Hong-Owen had helped to defeat them. Later, they had established a colony in the asteroid belt of the star beta Hydrus, and had attempted seize Fomalhaut’s gas-giant planet, Cthuga. And once again, Sri Hong-Owen had been involved in their defeat. The original Levi had claimed that a message from his future self would change the human history; his followers had called themselves Ghosts because they believed that they were living in a history that was provisional, soon to be rewritten. The leader of the Saints claimed that he was the true incarnation of the Ghosts’ leader, that his incarnation was only possible because the past had been changed by Sri Hong-Owen’s Becoming, and that he and his followers were the vanguard of a utopian era in which all true believers would be vastened as the seraphs and Sri Hong-Owen had been vastened, and each would become the totipotent deity of their own universe.
‘I sometimes wonder,’ Rav said, ‘if Sri Hong-Owen would be amused or appalled to discover that she’s the inspiration for a bad copy of the cult she twice defeated.’
The Saints had established schools in most of the major cities in the Belt, and offered to teach anyone willing to listen the secrets that Levi had unpicked from the Bright Moment. Students were offered free audits, and then were asked to pay for counselling sessions that would raise them, degree by degree, towards true enlightenment. Levi had proven adept at flattering iconoclasts, had wooed and won the Old Ones of the Republic of Arden, and had caused a schism in the Koronis Emirates. One of its scions had given him a wheel garden, and his disciples had moved it outward, into orbit around Saturn.
That was where Levi was now, Rav said, planning some kind of assault on the seraphs. Many end-time cults believed the seraphs could provide direct vastening of baseliner minds, but the Saints’ approach was more pragmatic than most.
‘They are training adepts who will enter the information horizons of seraphs, vasten, and use their new superhuman powers to usher in Levi’s utopia. Peace and harmony and universal brotherhood, and so on. The precursor to a final battle in which the Saints’ enemies will be defeated and the Saints will be vastened into their individual versions of heaven. The usual end-timer utopian cant, dressed up in pseudoscientific drivel. My guess is that they found out about the research of your Dr Gagarian and think that it could help them breach the seraphs’ defences.’
Hari said, ‘I should let them know that I am willing to exchange Dr Gagarian’s head for the ship, and any hostages they hold.’
‘You want to trade with them.’
‘If they are the hijackers.’
‘You want to talk to Levi.’
Rav was amused.
‘If I can find someone who will pass my message to him,’ Hari said, ‘he will want to talk to me.’
‘And you’ll do what? Ask him if he ordered the hijack? Do you think he’d admit it? No,’ Rav said, ‘Before we do anything else, we must find out what’s in those files. When we know that, we’ll know what the Saints want. And then we’ll be able to use it against them.’
Aakash would have been able to discuss the scientism of the Saints with Rav; Nabhomani would have matched Rav’s unlikely yarns of his exploits with equally unlikely yarns of his own; even Nabhoj would have been able to talk about Rav’s ship, its systems, its capabilities. Hari, lacking their experience and knowledge, listened patiently to the Ardenist’s stories about Levi and the Saints, his vague, grandiose fantasies about uniting the exiled Ardenists and leading them in a crusade to take back the Republic. Agrata had taught Hari that if you allowed people to talk they often revealed their true selves; he learnt that Rav was conceited, brilliant, vain, capricious, resourceful, a scholar of history (which he called human foolishness) and arcane mathematics, insightful about everyone but himself. Although he didn’t treat Hari with the rough contempt he showed towards his son, it was clear that he didn’t think they were equal partners in what he called their joint enterprise. As far as he was concerned, the files in Dr Gagarian’s head were a means to an end. Something he could use to unite the exiled Ardenists against their old enemy, if he was telling the truth. Something he could steal and sell if he wasn’t.
Rav had helped to save Hari’s life, he was a useful ally, and there was, after all, a small chance that the Saints really had been behind the hijack. The Saints, or some other crew of end-time fanatics. But Hari didn’t trust the Ardenist, and made his own plans about what he would do when he reached Ophir.
He talked to the p-suit’s eidolon, asked her about the skull feeders and the hijacker and the djinn. She claimed to know nothing about it. ‘You told me to call your friend and tell him where you were,’ she said. ‘And that’s what I did. Was that the right thing to do?’
‘Of course,’ Hari said.
‘I wish I could have done more.’
‘I wish I knew what you are capable of doing.’
He was thinking of the djinn that the head doctor, Eli Yong, had woken when she’d tried to look inside Dr Gagarian’s head. Later, it had attacked the woman who had infiltrated the lair of the skull feeders, probably because she had also tried to op
en the head.
Rav was wrong, he thought. I’m not the one with serious protection. It’s Dr Gagarian’s head. And it has an agenda of its own . . .
He borrowed time on the ship’s comms, searching for and failing to find evidence for the final destination of Pabuji’s Gift, and exchanging messages with his uncle, Tamonash, who offered to assist in any way he could.
‘We are family, Gajananvihari,’ he said in one message. ‘And that is the beginning and end of everything.’
Rav, who made no secret about listening to these exchanges, said that this sentimental assertion was about the only thing Hari should believe, as far as his uncle was concerned.
‘There are all kinds of traps in this sorry universe,’ he said, ‘but families are the hardest to escape.’
‘If we can’t trust our families, who can we trust?’ Hari said.
‘If you want to survive this, youngblood, don’t put your trust in anyone.’
‘Not even in you?’
‘If I were you? I wouldn’t even trust myself.’
2
Hari followed Rav out of the booming elevator they’d ridden down from the docks and for a moment thought he saw his father standing in the bustle and flow of the dispersing passengers. A stocky old man with the familiar hawkish profile and bristling white eyebrows, but clean-shaven, dressed in a long black jacket elaborately embroidered with gold thread, black pyjama trousers. Smiling now, holding out his hands, saying, ‘Nephew! Gajananvihari! How good it is to meet you at last! I am Tamonash. Welcome to Down Town. Welcome to Ophir.’