by Paul McAuley
‘I won’t be here for much longer,’ Hari said.
A man came out of one of the buildings and disappeared into another. A flock of small children chased each other out of one of the streets or corridors that intersected the square, and ran past the pool where Hari sat. Two paused to study him, but when he asked them if they knew the Saints they shook their heads and ran, laughing, after their friends. One of the white birds – they were doves – fluttered up to perch on an angled edge of the sculpture, fluttered away as the edge retracted into the restless blue mass. The sculpture rounded into a rough sphere and the sphere flattened into a fat pancake and the pancake grew into a tall spire. At last, a woman and two men stepped out of the deep-set doorway of the pink stone building and walked across the square towards Hari.
He stood up as they approached, his whole skin tingling with anticipation.
‘Gajananvihari Pilot, I presume,’ the woman said.
She wasn’t much older than Hari, broad-hipped, dressed in a plain white jerkin and loose white trousers. Her name was Esme, according to her tag. An adept of the sixth elevation. Her companions, bare-chested and barefoot in white trousers, stood behind her, studying Hari with professional interest.
Hari tried to ignore them, thanked the woman for coming to talk to him.
‘We can talk more comfortably in our house.’
‘I am happy to talk here. Perhaps your friends could give us a little privacy. I assure you that I mean no harm.’
‘Are you intimidated by them? Good. You’re meant to be,’ the woman, Esme, said. She had the mild, calm manner of someone who did not expect to be surprised by anything she encountered.
They sat on the rim of the pool. The two men stood a few metres away, arms folded over the muscular shields of their chests.
‘Well,’ Esme said, ‘what do you want to sell to us?’
‘If you know who I am, you know why I am here.’
‘All I know is that you claim to have something we have been looking for. As we haven’t lost anything, it must be something you want to sell.’
‘I have the head of Dr Gagarian,’ Hari said.
There was no change in the woman’s expression, no flicker of recognition in her gaze.
‘Perhaps I am talking to the wrong person,’ Hari said.
‘I’m the only one who will speak to you. Why should we want to buy this head?’
‘I don’t want to sell it. I want to exchange it. I haven’t brought it with me,’ Hari said. ‘It’s in a safe place. If you want to see it, I can take you there.’
He had deposited the cryoflask containing Dr Gagarian’s head in the bonded store in the elevator terminus. Rav had said that it would be safer on his ship, had laughed when Hari said that he had decided to take his advice about trust.
‘I think I understand,’ Esme said. ‘Was it a relative, or a friend?’
‘My family, if they still live. And my family’s ship.’
‘People who join us do so of their own free will,’ Esme said. ‘It is their decision, made without any coercion or intimidation. Your family will have taken a vow of silence during the period of induction, but when that is over you can speak to them. I hope you will. But I should warn you that you will not be able to convince them that they are mistaken. Why? It is simple. They are not mistaken. They have chosen the right path.’
‘My family did not become Saints,’ Hari said. ‘They were taken. Kidnapped. That is, if they were not killed. And our ship was taken, too. It was hijacked. That’s why I’m here. To ransom any of my family who are still alive, and to take back our ship.’
Esme thought about that, then said, softly and sympathetically, ‘I think you have made a mistake.’
Hari couldn’t tell if she was genuinely puzzled or if she was bluffing, but he was determined to see this through. To set out his bait and see if the Saints came snuffling after it. If they did, he would be one step closer to his revenge; if not, then he would know that Rav was either deluded or could not be trusted, and he would have to go on alone, or throw in with his uncle. And he’d be sorry, because he’d grown fond of the big, boisterous, boastful Ardenist. But as Nabhomani had said many times, when it comes to business you have to harden your heart and do what needs to be done to close the deal.
‘I don’t know what an adept of the sixth elevation is,’ Hari said to the Saint, Esme. ‘What rank it is, in your crew. But if you’re telling the truth, if you don’t know why your superiors are interested in Dr Gagarian and his research, perhaps you could pass a message to them. Perhaps you could tell them that I want to talk to them. That I am ready to negotiate.’
‘Are you a religious person, Gajananvihari Pilot?’
‘Do I believe what you believe? No.’
‘But do you belong to a particular faith or sect?’
‘I was taught that the existence of the Universe does not require a first cause. And that its creation and everything in it can be explained by observation and deduction.’
Hari had a sudden sharp, piercing vision of his father walking in the desert viron, studying windows that he pulled out of the air.
‘We celebrate the Bright Moment because it is a sign that something wonderful happened,’ Esme said. ‘Sri Hong-Owen Became something else, and the Bright Moment is an echo of her Becoming. An echo of a moment of transcendence. Of joy. And because it touched everyone, everyone contains the seed of that transcendence. And one day, when things change, when the crooked path is made straight, those seeds will grow into something wonderful. Philosophers cannot understand those seeds any more than they can understand how the Bright Moment touched everyone. They cannot understand how Sri Hong-Owen changed, or what she Became. They cannot understand how we will change, because it has nothing to do with the so-called fundamental truths about the universe “discovered” by philosophical investigation. Because this universe, this reality is nothing. It is an illusion. A veil over deeper and more meaningful realities. So why would we have any interest in anything your Dr Gagarian or his friends claim to have found out?’
‘Does that mean you won’t pass on my message?’
‘I hope your search brings you peace,’ Esme said, and stood up and walked off around the pool, followed by the two men.
Hari watched them cross the square and enter the pink house, then dipped up a handful of water and splashed it on his face.
After Hari had told him about the unsatisfactory confrontation with the Saints, Tamonash said, ‘I suppose it was your friend’s idea.’
‘It was entirely mine,’ Hari said. ‘Rav didn’t want to begin negotiations with the Saints until we had opened Dr Gagarian’s files.’
‘But you are not yet certain that the Saints are the guilty party.’
‘That’s why I made my offer. To see how they reacted.’
Hari and his uncle were talking over supper, at one end of the long room where Tamonash slept, ate, and did most of his business. One wall displayed a view of one of Earth’s oceans, ragged scraps of ice drifting on blue water stretching under a pale blue sky towards a distant horizon where ice cliffs blinked in cold sunlight, a live feed off the coast of Europe, near the Pilot family’s last home on Earth. A coast locked under the ice that, despite the best efforts of climate engineers to reverse the Long Twilight, still covered more than half of Earth’s land surface.
Hari’s father had sometimes shown him archive images from their family’s long, long history. He remembered one in particular: a young man and a young woman in strange clothes standing rigid with pride beside some kind of primitive ground vehicle in a street of two-storey brick houses joined each to each and stepping down a steep corridor towards a simmering basin of brick and smoke. The man had been the first of the Pilot family to leave the mother country; the woman was his bride; the image had been captured so long ago that their family had yet to take up the name Pilot. More than two thousand years. All that history ground away by time, by ice that had marched north and south during the century of
twilight imposed by seraphs at the end of the fall of the Empire of the True.
The ocean panorama tinted the air with shifting blue shadows; blue highlights glinted on the carapaces of the automata lined along the opposite wall. They were arranged by height, from squat domestic servants to a lithe, long-limbed racing strider with a basket saddle behind its tiny head. One of them especially interested Hari. A repurposed battle bot, identical to those used on Pabuji’s Gift for general maintenance on the hull and in the drive chambers. Otherwise, the room was mostly empty, apart from a bed shrouded by a muslin tent, and the chairs on which Hari and Tamonash sat, facing each other across a low table of beaten brass set on a pedestal of raw nickel-iron.
A myrmidon stood behind Tamonash’s chair, slim and tall and alert, several pairs of red eyes burning under the leading edge of the sleek armour that hooded its head. Tamonash had hired it after Hari had contacted him and told him why he was heading towards Ophir.
‘You are as headstrong as your father,’ Tamonash said.
‘I feel this is not a compliment,’ Hari said.
Tamonash still had not explained the circumstances of the rift between himself and Hari’s father, but it was clear that it was deep and bitter.
‘You should not have talked to those fanatics,’ Tamonash said. ‘What if they decide to steal this head? To take it by force instead of bargaining with you.’
‘I told them it was stored in a safe place, Uncle. So you have nothing to worry about.’
‘Why would they believe you? And if they don’t believe you, where would they look first?’
It was a good point. Hari apologised, said that he would contact the Saints at once, and offer to take them to the bonded store and show them the head.
‘The damage is already done,’ Tamonash said. ‘You may do more, trying to undo it.’
Hari apologised again. They ate in silence for a while.
At last, Tamonash said, ‘Perhaps you would like to tell me about your visit to the house of the dead philosopher.’
‘Have you been spying on me, Uncle?’
‘My contact in the Ministry of Justice tells me that the police started a file on you after you pestered them with impertinent questions about Flores’ death. Your visit was noted.’
‘I did nothing wrong.’
‘The police may not agree.’
‘I assume that you don’t, either.’
‘The hijackers want the files cached inside the tick-tock’s head. Open them. Study them. Learn all you can about what you need to sell to get your family and your ship back.’
‘The hijackers were interested in Salx Minnot Flores’ work, too,’ Hari said. ‘That’s why they had him killed. That’s why I need to know what the police know about the woman who killed him. And why I need to find out all I can about his research.’
Tamonash leaned back in his chair and studied Hari over steepled fingertips. ‘Yes, you are just like your father.’
‘I’m doing this for him, and for my brothers, and Agrata. For my family, Uncle. My family, and yours.’
‘You won’t give up this foolish idea.’
‘You know that I can’t.’
‘Then perhaps you should meet an acquaintance of mine. A business acquaintance. Mr D.V. Mussa, a free trader. I purchase vacuum organism strains from him, but he deals in many other things. I happened to talk to him today, and mentioned your predicament. And it turns out that Mr Mussa supplied Salx Minnot Flores with certain pieces of apparatus, and may know something about his research.’
Hari wanted to trust his uncle. He’d been raised to believe that no bond was stronger than blood on blood. That genes sing to genes, as his father liked to say. But although Tamonash lived like an eccentric recluse in the ruins of his family’s compound and his family’s history, he was a shrewd and manipulative businessman, and Hari suspected that he’d have to pay this free trader for information about Salx Minnot Flores, and Tamonash would take a cut. But he didn’t care. He needed to know. He needed to know everything.
‘I think I should meet this friend of yours as soon as possible,’ he said.
Tamonash smiled. ‘Can you contain your impatience until tomorrow?’
4
‘Salx Minnot Flores was a regular customer of mine,’ Mr D.V. Mussa told Hari, ‘but I didn’t pay much attention to his work. Frankly, I didn’t think much of it. He was a little like one of those end-time cultists who examines images of the Bright Moment for hidden messages. More than a little.’
The philosopher had been trying to replicate the Bright Moment, according to Mr Mussa. The image it triggered.
‘My avatar was not affected by his apparatus, of course, but he once showed me a clip he claimed to have transmitted into the visual centre of his own brain. A kind of jerky stick figure that was, apparently, the cue or seed that stimulated a more complex image. Baseline human memory is a construct, patched together from real memories, approximations, and stock images. Only part of it is true, and none of it is real. As with memory, so with his version of the Bright Moment. Or so Flores said.’
Mr D.V. Mussa was a tanky, an adherent of an old form of amortality that involved extracting the brain and essential parts of the organ-tree and maintaining them in amniotic fluid laced with mites and engineered bacteria. His avatar was a fist-sized glob of white light like a cut diamond with a dark cross in its centre: a nucleus or hive of microbots that could each act independently, or merge with as many of its neighbours as necessary to perform tasks involving gross manipulation of objects and materials. It slowly revolved as it hung in the air, casting swarms of fleeting stars across the floor and walls and overhead of the long room (it was night, on Earth, dark waves rolling across a dark sea, cloud-shadows scudding across a star-spattered sky).
Hari asked if the philosopher had ever talked about Dr Gagarian’s work.
‘I supplied him with components for his apparatus, and he told me about the progress of his work. That’s as far as it went,’ Mr Mussa said. ‘I didn’t know that he was collaborating with your Dr Gagarian until Tamonash told me about the hijack of your family’s ship.’
They talked about the assistance that Hari’s family had given to the tick-tock philosopher. Hari was careful not to reveal too much, parried the free trader’s questions as best he could, and turned the conversation back to Salx Minnot Flores and his work.
Mr Mussa gave a portrait of a harmless obsessive who lived on the residue of a long-lost family business, was estranged from his partner and children, and had given himself entirely to his work.
‘I’d see him in town,’ Mr Mussa said. His avatar had a soft, mellifluous baritone voice. It sounded amused, indulgent. Like a parent recalling the harmless transgressions of a small child. ‘Talking to street preachers and end-timers. Sometimes in quiet discussion, sometimes in fierce argument. Hard to tell, I would think to myself, which was the philosopher and which the fanatical cultist.’
Hari said, ‘Did he ever talk with any of the Saints?’
‘Not that I know of. You are thinking of the woman who killed him, of course. Who you think might have been a Saint. What did they have to say to you about that, by the way?’
Hari gave Tamonash a sharp look; Tamonash looked away.
‘Your uncle mentioned your encounter,’ Mr Mussa said, ‘but I had already heard about it. I have, let us say, my sources.’
‘In the Saints?’
‘In the government. Someone like me, in the import/export business, benefits from friends who can influence decisions about the movement of goods, obtain answers to urgent questions, and so on. Friends who can do all kinds of favours, for the right price.’
There it was. The hook. Hari saw it plain and clear, but took it anyway.
‘Perhaps your friends could help me find out a little more about Salx Minnot Flores’ research.’
‘Of course,’ Mr Mussa said. ‘Although you will have to cover certain expenses. Bribes, that kind of thing.’
Tamona
sh cleared his throat. ‘There’s a saying that Ophir has the best government and police that credit can buy. And it’s absolutely true.’
Hari shot Mr D.V. Mussa half the credit he’d transferred from the ship’s account in Tannhauser Gate. The next day, Tamonash and the free trader took him to meet Chum Vahsny, the Under-Minister for External Traffic. She shook Hari’s hand and introduced him to one of her secretaries, who listened to Hari’s story with absent-minded politeness, took many notes, and told him that the under-minister would attempt to ask the police about progress regarding the investigation into the most regrettable death of the philosopher, and try to trace any relevant files.
Hari, who had been taught enough about negotiations to recognise the secretary’s evasive tactics – answering questions not asked, countering direct questions with other questions, managing expectations with ambiguous promises – was convinced that the under-minister would do nothing of the kind. Two days passed. These things take time, Tamonash said. There were complex webs of checks and balances to be negotiated, protocols to be followed.
‘On another matter, Mr D.V. Mussa tells me that he knows several tick-tock philosophers. Any one of them could open the files in Dr Gagarian’s head.’
‘Do they live here, in Ophir?’
‘One lives in Gan ’Éden, which is presently just two days’ travel away.’
‘If Gun Ako Akoi is unsuccessful,’ Hari said, ‘I’ll certainly consider it.’
‘Why put your trust in strangers, Gajananvihari? We should keep this in the family.’
‘With respect, Uncle, everyone is a stranger to me.’
Tamonash put on a credible display of wounded indignation. ‘Your father and I had our differences, nephew. But that’s ancient history. I hope things can be different between us.’
‘I hope so too.’
Hari felt sorry for him, really: his petty scheming, his circumscribed life in the wreckage of his dreams.
‘Mr Mussa also told me that he is making good progress,’ Tamonash said. ‘He hopes to talk with a senior police officer tomorrow. So if you could supply just a little more credit . . .’