by Paul McAuley
Tamonash Pilot, Hari’s uncle, his father’s younger brother, was about the same age now as Aakash had been when he’d passed over. He told Hari that he and Rav could stay in the family compound for as long as they liked, said that he would try to help in any way he could, but feared that it wouldn’t amount to much. He and Aakash had fallen out years before Hari had been born, during the refurbishment of Pabuji’s Gift. He had paid little attention to his brother’s career after that, Tamonash said, knew nothing about Aakash’s interest in the Bright Moment and his partnership with Dr Gagarian, and regretted that he had far less influence with the authorities than he deserved. Times were hard. Scoundrels prospered at the expense of honest, hard-working people.
‘I will of course do all I can to help you find the villains who hijacked your ship and gave my brother the true death,’ he said. ‘But I must warn you that it will not amount to much. I am an honest businessman. I have never dealt with dacoits or reivers, and have no experience in ransoming hostages or hijacked goods. And as you can see, while I have every hope that my prospects will soon improve, at the moment I am grievously short of credit.’
Tamonash’s partner had died more than twenty years ago; his daughter and her family had emigrated to Earth. He lived alone, in a big room in the old family compound on the floor of Ophir’s largest chamber, a little way beyond the shadow cast by the chandelier city, Down Town. The place was half-ruined. Hari swept decades of detritus and dust from the small room Tamonash gave him, draped the mattress over the sill of one of the unglazed slit ports in a futile attempt to get rid of a strong odour of mould.
The room was at the top of a slim tower, with a view across the overgrown gardens of the compound towards the looming stalactite of Down Town. A cone of ring-shaped tiers spindled around a central core, the smallest at the top, beneath the overhead, the largest at the base, its edge ornamented with the villas and alcazars of the wealthy. When the Trues had constructed Ophir, they had hung Down Town and their palaces, bastions, and pleasure domes from the shell wrapped around the world city, high above a fantasy patchwork of parklands and wildernesses landscaped across its floor. Much later, after the fall of the True Empire, parts of the floor had been colonised, but anyone who was anyone lived aloft.
Tamonash told Hari that he had devoted his life to the elevation of his family, and with a kind of mordant relish described various business schemes which had foundered on bad luck, bad faith, betrayal by his partners, and astounding levels of corruption in the governments of Ophir and other cities. If he’d had no more than ordinary luck, if his business partners had been only averagely dishonest, Tamonash said, he would have made his fortune several times over, and be living in a villa at the edge of the lowest tier of Ophir. As it was, he had poured all that remained of his credit into selling novel vacuum organisms and rare biologics to Earth’s governments.
Earth was beginning to open up to trade with Mars and the Belt, and Tamonash had won an early foothold in what, according to him, would soon be a vastly profitable market. His daughter and her family had recently moved to Cape Town, where they were cultivating contacts and contracts; he could put Hari’s experience in the salvage business to good use, he said, dealing with prospectors and free traders in the Belt, locating and mining previously undiscovered sources, and so on. The Pilot family had fallen on hard times, but they had standards to maintain. It would not do to lose any degree of auqat, the measure of the respect of their neighbours and peers.
‘Apni auqat mat bhool,’ he told Hari. ‘Don’t forget where you belong. Don’t do anything that would bring shame on you and your family.’
This was after Hari had contacted Ophir’s police and asked to speak to someone about the woman, Angley Li, who had murdered Salx Minnot Flores. The officer who had taken his call told him that the inspector in charge of the investigation was unavailable, and cut short his explanation about the connection between the death of the philosopher and the hijack of Pabuji’s Gift. Angley Li had killed herself rather than be arrested; she had been acting alone; the case was closed.
It was a political decision, according to Tamonash. The government of Ophir didn’t have the resources or inclination to mount an investigation beyond their jurisdiction, so the murder had been given a narrative – rivalry between philosophers that had flared into violence – and folded away.
‘Angley Li wasn’t a philosopher,’ Hari said. ‘She was an assassin.’
He’d found images of her in Down Town’s commons: the murder had created a small, transient sensation that had left traces in news and gossip nodes. Slim, pale-skinned, Angley Li was the identical twin of Deel Fertita, of the woman who had come after him in Fei Shen.
‘I need to find out where she came from,’ he told Tamonash. ‘Where she lived, in Ophir. Who she talked to. Anything that might help me identify the hijackers.’
‘I know someone in the Ministry of Justice. I will ask him to find out what he can, but I should warn you that these things take time,’ Tamonash said, and launched into a lecture about the intractable bureaucracies that maintained the support systems and what was left of civil order in Ophir, and the intrigues and complex relationships of what he called the major players in the world city’s politics.
‘Be patient, Gajananvihari,’ he said. ‘Tread cautiously. You do not want to attract the attention of the wrong kind of people, or stir up trouble with the police. You will not advance your cause by being arrested, or by being expelled from Ophir.’
But Hari had no intention of taking Tamonash’s advice. It was more than two hundred days since the hijack; he had not yet begun to negotiate the release of any survivors and the ship; assassins were chasing him from worldlet to worldlet. He didn’t have time to cultivate patience. And he didn’t believe that his uncle would be able to provide much in the way of practical assistance. Tamonash lacked credit, influence and useful connections, and it was clear that he was scared of what had happened to his brother’s family in the outer dark, was scared that it might reach out to him, here in Ophir.
No, if he was going to track down the hijackers, Hari would have to rely on Rav, and this mysterious tick-tock matriarch. And he had a few ideas of his own, too.
The next day, he and Rav returned to Down Town. The Ardenist was heading out around Ophir, to petition the tick-tock matriarch; amongst other things, Hari wanted to transfer credit from Tannhauser Gate’s bourse, find an ascetic and pass on the book of Kinson Ib Kana, and scope out the house of the murdered philosopher Salx Minnot Flores.
It was at the edge of one of Ophir’s lower tiers, the house, a squat stone tower rising from a garden of flowering bushes and trees. Its circular ports were shattered and sooty, and part of one wall had collapsed: the assassin, Angley Li, had set fire to it after she had tortured and killed Salx Minnot Flores. The security system of a neighbouring property had captured images of the assassin as she strolled away from the blaze, and the police had quickly tracked her to the docks, but when they had tried to arrest her she had blown herself up with explosives cached in the long bones of her legs, killing two officers outright and injuring half a dozen others.
Hari and Rav studied the ruins from the corridor – the street. There were rope-and-plank walkways strung between the big trees at the far edge of the garden. Hari imagined Salx Minnot Flores strolling there at the evening’s dimming. Looking out across the panorama of the world city’s floor while he grappled with some esoteric philosophical problem.
Rav pointed out a small drone that hung under a scorched tree, watching them. ‘Now the police know we are interested,’ he said.
‘They already know,’ Hari said. ‘And don’t care.’
‘I could easily confuse that silly little machine if you want to explore the place,’ Rav said, ‘but what’s the point? Anything useful will have been destroyed or confiscated.’
‘I needed to see it,’ Hari said. ‘I needed to see where she had been, and what she did.’
‘It wasn’t elegant
, but it was effective.’
‘There was a desperate violence to it. The fire, her suicide. A kind of anger.’
Rav looked down at him. ‘I believe that you are trembling on the edge of an insight.’
‘Do the Saints have a history of violence?’
‘They were born in violence. Baptised in blood. Could they have sanctioned something like this?’ Rav said. ‘Easily. All too easily.’
They rose to the jostle and buzz of the commercial tiers. Down Town had once been one of the centres of baseline philosophical research. Now it was a dense patchwork of rival religions, crowded with churches and temples, cathedrals and mosques, basilicas and tabernacles. Every day was a holy day for some congregation or assembly. Always some procession of monks, or ecstatics, or skyclad sadhus. Always some itinerant preacher proclaiming that the apocalypse was imminent, or had just happened, or could be prevented by a bonfire of the vanities or by petitioning the seraphs. Prayer drones roamed everywhere. Shops sold holy medals, prayer beads, relics, and tweaks supposedly leaked from the information horizons of seraphs. Shrines to gods and seraphs stood in recesses in walls, or under trees; many were equipped with traps that plunged unwary passers-by into brief but intense chiliastic visions. The second time Hari was snagged by one of these traps, Rav teased him so unmercifully that he called up a map to the nearest head shop and borrowed credit from Rav and purchased a trait for his bios that would give him immunity.
‘It is the best,’ the head doctor assured him, when Hari tried to negotiate a better price for the trait. ‘Released yesterday. I guarantee that you will be fully protected for at least six days before the shrines work out how to break it.’
‘What do I do then?’
‘Come back to me and I will sell you a patch. The best, at the best price.’
The head doctor pointed Hari towards an ascetic hermit, reputedly the holiest man in the city. He lived in a tree, one of the big coral trees that shaded the broad boulevard that circled the edge of the highest and largest of Ophir’s terraces. He had not touched the ground for more than forty years. He chewed the tree’s alkaloid-rich seeds and leaves and spoke with gods and monsters. People made donations of food and water which he drew up in the same bucket he used to dispose of his wastes.
Hari and Rav stepped through circles of offerings and prayers spread around the tree. Hundreds of dip candles flickered in the green shade. Aromatic smoke curled from incense sticks jammed into the rough bark of its branches and trunk.
‘You could leave the book here,’ Rav said.
‘I have to explain how I came by it,’ Hari said. ‘I have to explain my debt.’
He joined a small queue of penitents and, paid a fee to a steward, who explained that he could have exactly ten minutes in the holy presence, inclusive of the time it took to climb up to him.
‘Those of true faith fly up the tree,’ the steward said. ‘Those who are merely curious find the way harder. So balance and harmony are achieved.’
‘Do you also count the time it takes to climb back down?’ Rav said.
‘Of course not. But do not overstay your allotted time,’ the steward said. ‘Many want to see the master, and I control drones that will persuade you to leave more quickly than you thought possible.’
Another steward tried to sell to Hari a medal that would absorb the blessing of the hermit’s holy presence. Rav was delighted by this, and told Hari to buy as many as possible. ‘Think of the armour they’ll make.’
Although there were ladders and ropeways strung up the tree’s broad trunk it was a hard scramble in Ophir’s deepened gravity. Hari was slick with sweat and his heart was jackhammering in his chest when he at last reached the crux between two high branches where the hermit sat cross-legged. A small man dressed in a multicoloured patchwork coat, black hair hanging in ringlets around his thin, calm face. His eyes were closed and he was chewing leaves, plucking them one after the other from a broken branch he held in one hand, milling them between strong yellow teeth and spitting out the pulp. He did not open his eyes or in any way acknowledge Hari’s presence while Hari explained how the dead hermit Kinson Ib Kana had saved his life, a debt he hoped to pay by passing Kinson Ib Kana’s book to one of his fellow ascetics.
After Hari had finished speaking, he became aware of the small sounds around him. Wind moving through the drifts of leaves and bright red flowers. The buzz of an erratic traffic of live drones that his bios identified as bees, the mingled noise of the city beyond. The hermit spat a dribble of green pulp and plucked another leaf and pushed it into his mouth. At last, a bell rang far below, signalling that Hari’s time was up, and he set the book in a hollow near the hermit’s feet and climbed down to the deck, the ground.
‘Did you learn anything?’ Rav said.
‘Only that I am a fool,’ Hari said. ‘But it’s done.’
‘We should have bought medals,’ Rav said. ‘I know I’ll regret it later.’
‘I’m glad you find our quaint baseliner customs so amusing.’
As he and Rav picked their way through the litter of offerings and candles, Hari heard a scream of fright or rage high above and looked up and saw something small and dark smashing through the fans of leaves. Rav stepped forward, moving quickly but without haste, and plucked the falling book from the air and handed it to him.
Black letters on its white face:
Streams rise in many places and flow by many paths, but all at last reach the sea.
‘I suppose it’s some kind of answer,’ Rav said, ‘even if it isn’t the one you wanted.’
Hari had no better luck with a group of ascetics he and Rav met at the train station: an old woman enveloped in an ankle-length patchwork coat, and her acolytes, young men and women in plain white shirts, chanting verses of an epic to the rhythm of small drums and finger cymbals and three droning electric guitars. They listened to Hari’s story and the old woman examined the book with tender reverence, declaring at last that the person who had owned it had been very close to the great bliss of the void that was the goal of every ascetic.
‘Perhaps he found it when he died. But if he did, he cannot tell us, and we can never know,’ she said, and gave the book back to Hari.
‘I was hoping that you could pass it on to his family, or to someone who knew him,’ Hari said.
‘We come into this world with nothing, and leave with nothing. We honour our dead by singing their songs, not by curating their relics,’ the old woman said. She was a small plump woman, with a mass of dreadlocked white hair that framed her round, wrinkled face, and a gentle, kindly manner. ‘You believe that Kinson Ib Kana saved your life. You could not thank him, since he is dead, so you rescued his treasury of songs and stories and proverbs and carried them out into the world. You hope to find a place where they can live again. But they already live, through you. And will continue to live, for as long as you read them. Is that such a great obligation?’
So Hari was stuck with the book. Rav caught a train, travelling halfway around Ophir to the palace of the tick-tock matriarch, who was, according to Rav, very old and very paranoid, and would need to be flattered and cajoled before she would consider seeing Hari and opening the files in Dr Gagarian’s head. Less than an hour later, after a brief visit to Down Town’s bourse to establish his credit line, after purchasing a black brocade jacket to wear over the leggings and long white shirt that his uncle’s maker had tailored for him, and a hasty meal of cold pickled noodles at one of the many food stalls along the Great Promenade, Hari was sitting beside a pool of water in a sunlit square, composing a message to the school of the Saints.
3
The square was floored with real grass, green springy turf starred with small white flowers, and bordered on all sides by buildings of different heights and different architectural styles. The school of the Saints stood at one corner, a three-storey building faced with pinkish stone, ports blinded with white shutters. Hari imagined that people were studying him from behind those shutters, im
agined a hurried conference about his message, communications with some higher authority . . .
Or perhaps they had dismissed the message out of hand, nothing to do with them. However it fell out, he would learn something about the Saints, about Rav.
He sat on the low wall that rimmed the pool. In its centre, a sculptural assembly of large, translucent blue cubes slowly shifted from one configuration to another. Water sluiced over the faces of the cubes and cascaded into the pool. Small white birds strutted and pecked and fluttered across the turf.
It was a lovely, peaceful place, warm in the sunlight that slanted between the flat roofs of the buildings and the overhead of the next tier. Hari felt a little anxious, wondering how the Saints would react to his message, but he was happy, too: happy to be out and about on his own, on an adventure, after the confines of Rav’s ship.
After a while, he opened a window and the p-suit’s eidolon leaned in and said that she had nothing to report.
‘What about Rav’s son?’
‘He is asleep. He spends more time than I thought possible asleep.’
‘And the honey trap?’
Hari had set up an advertisement on Down Town’s commons, offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of any persons connected to the murder of Salx Minnot Flores. It contained a fake link that appeared to lead to his bios; he hoped that the hijackers would try to follow it, and leave clues that would enable him to track them down.
‘No activity that I can detect,’ the eidolon said. ‘You appear to be waiting for someone.’
‘I want to talk with the Saints. But it does not look like they want to talk with me.’
‘I should be in Ophir,’ the eidolon said. ‘I cannot properly protect you from the ship.’