Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  ‘Like that woman we saw,’ Hari said.

  ‘She is from a different people,’ Rav said. ‘They keep herons – birds who use their beaks to spear fish from shallow water. They eat fish caught by their herons, and pluck the flight feathers from the wings of the herons to stop them flying off, and dye them and make headdresses.’

  ‘You know a lot about Ophir.’

  ‘Oh, I lived here, once upon a time,’ Rav said. ‘I’ve lived in a lot of places, but I wouldn’t call any of them home.’

  While the Ardenist told several tall tales about the customs and ceremonies of the peoples who inhabited the wildernesses of the world city, Hari wondered how he had met Gun Ako Akoi, why he had been working for her, whether he still owed her a debt. But he wasn’t ready to ask about it, not yet. He reckoned that it gave him an advantage, an edge, if Rav didn’t know that he knew.

  A narrow valley cut through the forest, the silvery thread of a swift, shallow river sewn into its crease. Rav and Hari turned to follow it, and the valley grew wider and the river meandered through lush meadows and at last emptied into a lake that stretched away to the horizon, its surface mirroring sunlight from a thousand restless points.

  They turned again, following the shoreline. Pine trees crowded a steep slope that rose to a long ridge of bare black rock. Rav pointed to a road that ran along the shore of the lake, a congregation of tents: the festival. Then they swung away and rose towards a castle peak of rock. A solitary figure stood there, a young woman silhouetted against the light of the sunstrip, shading her eyes with a hand as she watched them sidle towards her.

  8

  The young woman, Riyya Lo Minnot, was the daughter of Salx Minnot Flores. Rav had traced her through the legal dispute over the philosopher’s property. When he’d explained that he and Hari were looking for the people who had murdered her father, she had immediately offered her help.

  ‘And now I’m beginning to regret it,’ Riyya Lo Minnot said. ‘It wasn’t easy to get away at short notice. I was nearly caught.’

  ‘But here you are, and here we are, ready to do what we need to do,’ Rav said.

  ‘How did it go at the store?’ Riyya said.

  Hari looked at Rav, making a connection. Rav smiled. ‘I admit that I was given a little help when I reached out to that silly little police inspector,’ he said, ‘but you wouldn’t have seen what you saw without me.’

  ‘You saw the transmitter,’ Riyya said.

  She had a brisk, brittle manner, was dressed in a white shift belted with a broad black belt, black trousers, polished black boots. The uniform of Ophir’s Climate Corps, according to Hari’s bios. Her skin was pale and freckled; the fringe of her red hair was cut straight across her brow. Her bios was locked and displayed no personal data that Hari could access, not even a capsule bio.

  ‘I saw it, and I woke it up,’ Rav said. ‘We were both impressed, weren’t we, youngblood?’

  ‘My father knew your father,’ Hari told Riyya. ‘I wish that he had told me more about the work they did together.’

  ‘I wish that my father had never met Dr Gagarian,’ Riyya said.

  ‘You are both entangled in the failed ambitions of your fathers,’ Rav said. ‘But with my help there’ll be a happy ending.’

  ‘Some kind of ending, anyway,’ Riyya said, and walked to the edge of the platform of bare rock and looked down at the encampment. ‘I still think it would be better to wait until the festival breaks up and this gypsy sect is on the road. I can hit them with a fierce little rainstorm, you can swoop in while they’re dealing with panicked draft animals and wagons bogged down in mud . . . Quick and clean and neat. If we’re lucky, no one will notice the tweak in the weather.’

  ‘We have to do it now,’ Rav said. ‘The bad guys know where we are, hostages have been threatened, tick tick tick. Besides, mounting a raid in the middle of the festival will cause more confusion, and will give us a better chance of making a clean escape. And it will be a lot more fun.’

  ‘It means a bigger tweak. More chance that it will be noticed, more chance that someone will get hurt,’ Riyya said.

  ‘A little rain never hurt anyone,’ Rav said.

  ‘How little you know about rain,’ Riyya said.

  ‘I want to go in just after sunset,’ Rav said. ‘The darkness will add to the confusion. Does that give you enough time to cook up the weather?’

  ‘It will have to be quick and dirty, but I can do it,’ Riyya said.

  ‘Dirty is good. Quick is even better. You and Hari should talk. Get to know one another. Bond, or whatever it is you baseliners do,’ Rav said, and turned and took three quick strides to the edge of the drop and leaped into the air. He flared his wings as he fell, swooping down to the trees, catching hold of the top of a tall pine and clinging there with hands and feet as it whipped to and fro, then dropping out of sight.

  Riyya looked at Hari and said, ‘Is he always like this?’

  ‘Rude, arrogant, and annoying? Pretty much.’

  Riyya’s smile was there and gone. ‘How long have you known him?’

  ‘Not long. I hardly know him at all.’

  ‘You had better tell me everything, anyway.’

  They sat on a flat shelf of rock with a view across the tree-clad slope that dropped to the sweep of glittering water. The sunstrip burned with golden light and a warm wind blew from the lake, carrying the clean odour of the pine trees and snatches of music from the tents strung along the edge of the water.

  Riyya told Hari that Rav had explained about the hijack of Pabuji’s Gift, and had sent her a copy of the message from the hijackers.

  ‘It was cruel,’ she said. ‘We’re dealing with dangerous and desperate people.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Hari saw Nabhoj, naked and pleading. He was embarrassed and angry, and trying his best not to show it. When Riyya asked if Dr Gagarian’s head really was in his kitbag, he said, ‘Rav told you everything, didn’t he?’

  ‘He gave me a full briefing. If that upsets you, take it up with him.’

  There was a short silence. Hari realised that Riyya was also embarrassed. They had been thrown together by their losses and by Rav’s scheming, were uncertain how to proceed. He asked her about her father; she said that she’d never been close to him.

  ‘He joined the Climate Corps when he and my mother partnered, but he walked away from everything after the Bright Moment. From my mother, from the Corps. She was pregnant at the time. My mother. She was carrying me. She cut him off. Wouldn’t talk to him. Hardly ever talked about him to me or to my brothers. He was a mystery to me, I wanted to know more about him, so two years ago, when I reached my majority, I contacted him. My mother didn’t like it, but she couldn’t stop me. We started to talk, my father and I, and he invited me to Ophir. I saw him six times, in all. Six times in two years. I was about to visit him again when what happened happened.’ Riyya paused, then said, ‘Rav told me that the woman who killed my father was a sister or clone of the woman who killed Dr Gagarian.’

  ‘As were the two women who tried to catch me on Themba,’ Hari said. ‘One of them killed herself, like your father’s assassin.’

  Riyya nodded.

  ‘Rav really did tell you everything, didn’t he?’

  ‘He was very candid.’

  ‘Do you believe his theory that the hijackers are Saints?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I’m coming around to the idea. Did your father ever mention the Saints? Did he feel threatened by them, or by any of the other cults?’

  ‘My father was a gentle man,’ Riyya said. ‘Very clever, driven, but unworldly. My mother’s family has deep roots in the Climate Corps. Most of them are philosophers and technicians. Practical, pragmatic. My father . . . After the Bright Moment, after he walked away from the Corps, he went to work for one of the trading families. He refurbished the lifesystems of several of their ships, and when he had earned enough credit he disappeared into his work on the Bright Moment. He
wasn’t interested in how it could be used, how to sell it. He was only interested in the problem, in how it had triggered the vision of the man on the bicycle. How it had put the same image in the heads of everyone alive. The same image, the same emotions.’

  He had corresponded with other philosophers who had been working on the Bright Moment, Riyya said. That was how he had met Dr Gagarian. They’d known each other for more than twelve years, had stayed in contact after Dr Gagarian took up with Hari’s family.

  ‘I wouldn’t say they were good friends, but they respected each other’s work,’ she said. ‘And he was collaborating with Dr Gagarian and the others on those experiments. That was why it was such a shock, when Dr Gagarian cut him off.’

  ‘When the ship was hijacked, you mean,’ Hari said.

  ‘No,’ Riyya said, ‘it was before that.’

  It had been about two hundred days before the hijack, according to her. Before Pabuji’s Gift had put in at Porto Jeffre. The tick-tock philosopher had stopped replying to Salx Minnot Flores’ messages, had also cut all contact with Ioni Robles Nguini and Ivanova Galchan.

  ‘The engineer in Tannhauser Gate, Worden Hanburanaman, stopped communicating with them too,’ Riyya said. ‘My father was very upset. He talked about travelling to Tannhauser Gate, to confront him.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Hari said.

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘I didn’t know. Really. I didn’t talk much with Dr Gagarian. He gave me my instructions, I did whatever needed doing. He wasn’t secretive, exactly, but he didn’t have any small talk.’

  But his father must have known, Hari thought. Aakash must have known that Dr Gagarian had stopped talking to his friends and collaborators. Had cut them out of the loop. His father must have known, and he’d never told him . . .

  ‘My father thought that Dr Gagarian must have made a breakthrough,’ Riyya said. ‘That he’d discovered something important, and decided to keep it to himself.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Hari said.

  But he was wondering if that was why Aakash had agreed to break off the experimental work, and head out to Jackson’s Reef.

  Riyya said, ‘My father and the others, Ioni Robles Nguini and Ivanova Galchan, pooled their data and spent a lot of time trying to work out what Dr Gagarian might have discovered. I don’t think they had much success. And my father had his own work, of course. He threw himself into that. And then he was killed. Then that woman killed him.’

  There was a brief silence. Riyya was staring out towards the lake, but Hari was certain that she was looking at something else. Her hair was tucked behind the pale shells of her ears. It was the colour of raw copper. A stray lock fluttered in the wind.

  She said, ‘For a long time, I thought Dr Gagarian had something to do with it. That he’d paid reivers to eliminate anyone who knew about his work. I had all kind of mad fantasies about revenge. And then Rav contacted me, and told me about the hijack of your family’s ship.’

  ‘I’m going to find out who did it,’ Hari said. ‘Who hijacked the ship, and killed everyone else. It’s all connected.’

  ‘He was so very close,’ Riyya said. ‘So very close to completing his work. I saw what he could do. It was the second time we met, the first time I visited his house.’

  ‘Rav switched on the apparatus in the store,’ Hari said. ‘I saw a white flash. A white light right in the middle of my head.’

  ‘That was an early prototype,’ Riyya said. ‘I saw a man riding a bicycle into a flare of light. Riding along, and vanishing. Dissolving into light. Have you ever been caught by one of those rogue shrines in Down Town? It was a little like that, but it didn’t get into my head through my bios. It was more personal. Unfiltered, raw. Like a memory or a thought. My father said it was only an approximation of the Bright Moment, but even so, it was . . . astonishing.’

  Another silence. They were embarrassed again.

  Riyya said, ‘My father was fearless. He liked to argue with end-timers. With anyone.’

  ‘About his work.’

  ‘About the Bright Moment. It was all he wanted to talk about. It was all he had in his life.’

  Salx Minnot Flores had been experimenting with entoptics, according to Riyya. Basic visual patterns hardwired into the human visual system. She picted a brief flutter of images. Cave paintings. Markings on a desert playa. Details of paintings. A sequence of geological features on planets and rocks that resembled human faces.

  ‘He used a pulsed magnetic field to trigger them,’ she said. ‘He said that it wasn’t anything like the way the Bright Moment had been triggered, but the effects were very similar. That was what Dr Gagarian and the others were working on, weren’t they?’

  ‘On how it was transmitted,’ Hari said.

  ‘My father was interested in how it affected the brain’s visual system – the entoptics built into the visual pathway. If they are triggered in the right sequence, they create a rough outline, and your mind puts it together. We see what we want to see, my father said. The trick was to push it in the right direction.’

  Hari, remembering that Mr D.V. Mussa had said something similar, asked Riyya if she had ever met the tanky.

  ‘I didn’t meet any of my father’s friends,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he had very many.’

  There was another short, uncomfortable silence. Hari thought of Dr Gagarian. It wasn’t hard to imagine the tick-tock deciding to cut off all contact with people he didn’t need any more. A purely practical decision, lacking any measure of human emotion or empathy.

  ‘Those people down there,’ Riyya said, pointing with her chin towards the bright little tents of the festival. ‘They’re celebrating their different versions of hidden truths. My father and yours, Dr Gagarian and the others, they were searching for a different kind of truth. The real truth, the truth at the bottom of everything. But what good did it do them?’

  Hari said that his father thought that it was important because it would demystify the Bright Moment. ‘He wanted to use philosophy to drive out superstition. He wanted to prove that Sri Hong-Owen, whatever she’d become, wherever she went, hadn’t broken the fundamental laws of physics. He wanted to prove that the Bright Moment wasn’t some kind of miracle, that she hadn’t become some kind of god. It was like the seraphs, my father said. They had become something else, but they weren’t gifted with superhuman powers. They were still only machines, constrained by the same laws that constrain everything else in the universe.’

  Riyya said, ‘One of the sects in Down Town believes that the seraphs are a kind of distraction. That the QIs didn’t vasten after all, but went into hiding. That after causing the Long Twilight and the fall of the True Empire, they have continued to secretly manipulate human history.’

  Hari said, ‘If that’s true, they can’t be very smart. Based on the evidence.’

  Riyya laughed. He discovered that he liked to make her laugh.

  He told her about his adventures on Vesta and in Fei Shen, how he had met Rav. They talked about what the Ardenist might be planning, about what might be inside Dr Gagarian’s head, and why Rav was really interested in it. They talked about growing up in the Climate Corps and aboard Pabuji’s Gift, and discussed the small coincidences of their lives – that they were more or less the same age, that they both had two brothers, had both served apprenticeships in practical philosophies, and so on, and so forth.

  In the company of this forthright young woman, in sunlight and fresh air, with the tremendous view spread to the horizon, Hari was possessed by a premonition that the world was trembling on the threshold of something new and wonderful, felt that he had reached a point where things could only get better, that he would soon discover the secrets hidden inside Dr Gagarian’s head and find and destroy his enemies, begin his life again . . .

  At last, late in the afternoon, Rav came scrambling up the rocky slope, carrying a brace of rabbits.

  ‘We should eat before we set out,’ he said.

  Ha
ri and Riyya shared rice cakes and savoury bean paste that she fetched from her scooter; Rav skinned and gutted and quartered the rabbits, and roasted the joints using a signal laser at its highest setting.

  ‘I don’t know why you baseliners are so squeamish,’ he said. ‘You’re made of meat, so why not eat meat? Or are you worried about consuming the animals’ souls, or some such groundless superstition?’

  ‘Tell us about your plan,’ Riyya said.

  ‘Tell us everything,’ Hari said.

  Rav made a pass with his hands, held up a faceted vial containing a dark sliver. A replica of the trinket that he’d fabricated in a maker while Hari had been redeeming Dr Gagarian’s head from the bonded store.

  ‘All we have to do is substitute this for the original. The Masters of the Measureless Mind worship the idea it represents. As long as they don’t know it’s a copy, a copy will serve their needs as well as the original. But Gun Ako Akoi needs the original, because only the original can do what she wants it to do.’

  ‘Is it really part of a seraph?’ Riyya said.

  ‘A fragment of one of the self-aware QIs that vastened into the seraphs,’ Rav said. ‘One that called itself the Lonesome Road of Exculpation. They were sprawling, complex things, those old QIs. They accumulated self-awareness the way a genome accumulates complexity. By accidents of transcription, deletions, repurposing, borrowing from smaller intelligences, infections and infestations, and so on. Each one was different, and all of them were dead ends, leftovers of the dreams of an age long past. Created to show it was possible to create real self-aware machine intelligence, and then abandoned. Until they were vastened by a shared conceptual breakthrough, they were each about as intelligent as the average baseliner.

  ‘Some say that they were vastened when the Trues attacked them, and infected them with djinns. Some say they became portals, neither wholly in this universe or in the pocket universe they opened up or created or became. The Saints and other equally deluded cults want to penetrate their information horizons because they think it will open the way to their individual versions of heaven. Others think the seraphs have become frozen accidents, consumed by self-engulfing iterations of an incomprehensible message from the far side. Who knows? Who cares? All that matters is that Gun Ako Akoi wants the original fragment of that old QI, wants to use it as the substrate for a new companion, or a memory engine, or some such tinker work. And we’ll get what we want if she gets what she wants.’