Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  Rav tossed the vial high into the air and it flashed like a star and he caught it and showed Hari and Riyya his open, empty hand.

  ‘Hey presto!’

  He finished his meal, and explained what he wanted Hari and Riyya to do. Tearing flesh from bones as he talked, cracking the bones between his teeth and sucking out the marrow, tossing the splintered bones over the edge of the sheer drop, licking grease from his fingers.

  ‘Any questions?’ he said. ‘Good. Time’s a-wasting. Let’s go and play our parts.’

  9

  Light in the sunstrip was dying down towards the curved horizon of the lake as Hari followed the white road along the shore towards the festival. The kitbag was slung over his shoulders; the replica of the relic was in the breast pocket of his jacket; he was reviewing Rav’s plan for the ninth or tenth time, the part he had to play.

  Men and women were bathing on the broad beach of black sand at the water’s edge. Standing waist-deep amongst islands of foam, scrubbing their torsos and arms, raising their arms towards the overhead and pressing their hands together and bringing them down and touching fingertips to their foreheads. Further out, children frog-kicked around a raft and clambered on to it and jumped off, locking their hands under knees tucked high and cannonballing into the water with loud screaming and laughter.

  There was an iron smell on the cool breeze blowing off the water. Dark clouds were drifting in above the lake, dimming the last of the light.

  Hari passed pilgrim encampments scattered across a broad meadow, joined a stream of people making their way towards the big tents pitched along the broad white road. Square tents with peaked roofs, long tents, pyramids, transparent domes. Most were reefed open, displaying carved idols standing amongst constellations of flickering flames, or complex light sculptures burning against black backdrops, or heads of humans or animals or chimeras staring out of glass tanks. A bulky white pressure suit with a gold-visored helmet stood in the centre of one tent: the armour of one of the heroes of the long ago, when humans had first ventured beyond the sky of Earth. In another, the brief vision of the Bright Moment played, the man on the bicycle smiling and turning away and vanishing into a flash of light, smiling and vanishing.

  Several passers-by greeted Hari, pressing their hands together, touching fingertips to foreheads. Hari mirrored their gestures, feeling like a fraud. The small weight of the fake relic burned over his heart.

  The crowd thickened. Here were several monks in scarlet robes walking with their hands clasped behind them, talking animatedly. Here was a skyclad sadhu arguing with an invisible opponent, jabbing at the air with clenched fingers. Indigents sat with begging bowls in their laps or at their feet. A naked Blue Man sat cross-legged in the shade of a flowering tree, eyes closed, hands resting on his knees, palms upturned and forefingers and thumbs pinched together.

  Children ran everywhere. Many wore masks. Two men stripped to the waist were stirring a cauldron of soup with wooden paddles. A woman was selling shaved ice in paper cones. A child was selling garlands of white flowers. A man was selling tea, deftly pouring it into white porcelain cups from the long spout of the pot he balanced on a pad on top of his head. Two ascetics went past, clad in their particoloured robes, tapping a slow beat on small drums tucked under their arms. A woman sat cross-legged, playing an unfretted spike fiddle. Another woman sang an atonal praisesong. There were pairs and trios and quartets of musicians spaced along the grassy verge at the edge of the beach, and men and women stopped to listen and then moved on. Banners hung from tall poles, rattling in the breeze off the lake. The silvery teardrop of a balloon floated high above the tents, reflecting the last of the sunlight, and in the basket hung beneath it a holy man sang a wailing prayer.

  As he mingled with the gaudy parade, passing intricately crafted altars and shrines, breathing the odours of sandalwood and incense, woodsmoke and cooking, hearing strange musics drifting on the warm wind, Hari felt an unbounded delight at the rich variety of human imagination. He supposed that his father would have been dismayed by the unabashed veneration of imaginary sky ghosts, the endless elaboration of superstition, the flaunting of pointless scholarship, but it seemed to him that although these people had gathered to honour and exalt their various prophets and gods, what they were really celebrating was themselves. One of the itinerant philosophers who had taken passage on Pabuji’s Gift had once told Hari that small groups of like-minded people generated a gestalt, a group overmind or harmonic mindset that enhanced problem-solving, enhanced empathy, and reduced conflict. A useful survival trait, according to the philosopher, when the ancestors of all human beings had been a few bands of man-apes on the veldts of old Earth. Hari’s father had dismissed this and similar explanations of human behaviour as fairy tales, but it was easy to imagine a kind of benevolent overmind permeating the encampment, binding everyone to a common purpose.

  A small parade was coming down the road. Eight men holding poles on which was balanced a huge red skull with elongated, toothy jaws, followed by men beating drums or tossing firecrackers to the left and right, and a man who swigged a clear greasy liquid from a bottle and touched a burning torch to his lips and breathed out fire. As the crowds parted to let them pass, Hari saw the tent of the Masters of the Measureless Mind on the other side of the road, square and butter-yellow, just as Rav had described it. A black pennant strung from the top of its central pole snapped in the wind.

  One side of the tent was open to the road. Inside, a dozen men and women sat cross-legged on rugs that covered the floor. They were swaying from side to side, arms raised, hands fluttering, chanting a slow and steady prayer. The altar reared above them, a starburst of silver and gold centred on a crystal lens that housed the relic, the real fragment of the QI. According to Rav, the Masters of the Measureless Mind believed that it emanated rays which, when the brains of the congregation were appropriately tuned by chants and devotional exercises, multiplied the complexity of their neuronal pathways.

  Hari loitered on the other side of the road while the congregation inside the tent chanted and swayed. Dusk stained the air. Cloud sheeted the overhead. Dark layers, wispy streamers slowly turning. Something cold kissed Hari’s cheek and he touched the spot with a fingertip and it came away wet. Another kiss, and another. People around him looked up, hurried on. He looked up too, and a drop of water struck his eye. He thought of the showers on the ship, how a cloud of droplets expanded from every direction. Here, droplets condensed inside clouds, and fell straight down. Here, the overhead wept . . .

  It was part of Rav’s plan. Riyya was using the climate machinery to wedge a cold front under the warm, moist air above the lake. There would be rain and strong winds, and in the confusion of the storm Rav would sneak into the tent and smash the altar and steal the relic. Hari would chase after Rav, chase him into the trees, and then he’d return, claiming he had confronted the thief and retrieved the relic, and present it – the fake relic – to the Masters of the Measureless Mind. And no one would know that the real relic, the fragment of the QI, had been stolen.

  Hari heard a familiar music and saw the old ascetic he’d met at Down Town’s train station, her patchwork coat billowing around her as she walked through the crowd of passers-by at the head of her little band of acolytes, their drums and guitars. She raised a hand when she saw Hari. Her acolytes halted and stopped playing, and she stepped towards him.

  ‘It seems obvious to me now,’ she said, ‘but if you had told me in Down Town that the different paths we follow would cross here I would have called you a fabulist.’

  Hari remembered the fragment that the book had displayed after the hermit had thrown it from his tree. ‘ “Streams rise in many places and flow by many paths, but all at last reach the sea.” ’

  ‘You have been reading in your book.’

  ‘I’m not sure how much I understand.’

  ‘Some of those gathered here will claim that they can help you understand. A few might even be right, but amongst those o
f true faith there are many frauds and false prophets. We’ve already drawn out some, and we’ll draw out more before the dogs bark and the caravan moves on,’ the ascetic said. ‘We have a lot of fun, teasing them, and sometimes we learn something from them, and sometimes they learn something from us. Of course, we don’t have anything to lose. We’re free to talk to fools, or to make fools of ourselves. But you should be more careful, I think. Be careful about who to trust.’

  ‘I’m not going to give the book away to anyone who asks for it, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘You asked me a question when we met before, and I gave you an answer. What you make of it is up to you.’ A rainy gust blew over them. The ascetic drew her coat around her and said, ‘We are camped in the meadow beyond these tents. If you need shelter and food, you are welcome to share what little we have. Perhaps you can teach me a song from your book, and we’ll teach you one in return.’

  ‘It’s a kind thought, but I’m waiting for a friend.’

  ‘The Ardenist? He’s also welcome to share with us, but I rather think he prefers to walk alone.’

  The ascetic bowed to Hari and walked on, and her acolytes struck up a new tune as they followed her. He felt a surprising pang as he watched them disappear into the crowds. As if a path he could have followed into another life had closed up.

  But he wasn’t following a path, hadn’t set out on a spiritual quest or some kind of wandering, unfocused personal journey. He was on a mission. He was fixing a great wrong, repairing a hole or rupture in the world just as he would have repaired a broken machine, by working through a logical sequence of tasks, ticking them off one after the other.

  Steal the relic, open the files in Dr Gagarian’s head, discover what the hijackers wanted and use it against them.

  The rain was falling harder now. Falling from clouds that seemed to squat about ten metres above his head, driven here and there in unfurling gusts. Hawkers were folding their blankets. Acolytes and priests and monks scurried about, gathering possessions, pounding loose stays into the ground, ducking inside tents. Tents were closing like flowers, like fists. Tents were altering their shapes. The tent of the Masters of the Measureless Mind extruded flaps and sealed itself up and hunkered down.

  Hari joined several people in the scant shelter of a solitary pine tree. Waves slapped the beach, broke in lines of white foam. Rain billowed through the dark air. Tents flapped and strained. The silver balloon was hauled down, settling amongst the peaks and crowns of the tents like a clumsy bird. Rain walked and seethed in water running off the white road. One by one the people under the tree ran off in search of better shelter until only Hari was left.

  He turned up the collar of his jacket, clutched it around himself. Water beaded its black brocade, dripped from its hem. His slippers were soaked through. He was wondering if something had gone wrong, was debating whether or not he should call Rav, when he saw something moving across the dark and restless lake. A tall whirling figure that cut a foaming white groove in the waves, drunkenly bending and tottering, wandering right and left, but steadily advancing, suddenly towering above the shoreline. Wind howled around Hari and a sudden smash of water drenched him, knocked him down. He staggered to his feet, spluttering and coughing. A swathe of tents had been flattened, including the butter-yellow tent of the Masters of the Measureless Mind.

  Hari ran across the road. He had forgotten Rav’s plan, was caught up in the moment, thinking that he could burrow under the ruin, find the altar, and replace the relic with its replica. People were beginning to struggle from the pancaked heap of sodden cloth. Hari circled left, and someone loomed out of the pelting rain. It was Rav, gripping his shoulder, bearing down, forcing him to his knees, leaning over him and saying, ‘My game, my rules.’

  An electric shock numbed Hari from head to toe; the Ardenist’s hard fingers had pinched a nerve cluster. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe.

  Rav shouted into the rain and wind that he’d caught a thief, then reached into the pocket of Hari’s jacket and pulled out the fake relic and held it up. ‘Here it is. Here’s what he stole,’ he sang out, and when the men and women came crowding up he gave Hari a shove that sent him sprawling, and tossed the relic into the air.

  Someone jumped high and caught it as it fell; others seized Hari, hauled him to his feet. He tried to speak, but his tongue was a blunt knot. Men gripped his arms, a woman shouted at him, her face thrust into his, and a clean cold spear pierced his head.

  Light glowed on the blur of faces crowding in around him, sharp blue light that transmuted blowing raindrops into fugitive stars. The men let go of Hari’s arms and stepped backwards. Several people knelt, knuckling their foreheads. Others stared gape-mouthed, sapphire sparks shining in their eyes.

  A shadow stooped down. Hari flinched, saw blue highlights sliding over the fairing of a scooter, felt a wash of air as the machine settled in front of him. Rav leaned from the saddle and grabbed his arm and hauled him aboard.

  The scooter rose into the wind and rain, cut a half-circle above the tents and shot out across the lake. Hari, hunched in the shelter of Rav’s bulk, said, ‘What were you trying to do?’

  ‘I improvised. After Riyya conjured that waterspout and smashed down the tent, I dived under wreckage and snatched the relic. And then it occurred to me that there was no need to pretend I had stolen it.’

  ‘So why did you pretend I had?’

  ‘You had the replica. You couldn’t just hand it over, could you?’

  ‘Where is it?’

  Rav held up his right hand, the relic’s crystal vial pinched between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘I meant the head,’ Hari said. ‘What have you done with Dr Gagarian’s head?’

  His own head felt as if it had been split with an axe. A sharp stink of char seared his nostrils.

  Rav said, ‘You’re sitting on it. There’s a locker under the saddle. I took it to keep it safe from the angry acolytes.’

  ‘There was no need.’

  ‘So I saw. That trick with the light was interesting. Did you mean to do it?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened,’ Hari said.

  ‘No doubt it was the djinn, stepping in to save you once again. I wonder if that’s what the hijacker saw after she took down the skull feeders. A veil or shell of virtual light. Luckily, the Masters of the Measureless Mind aren’t the kind of holy fools who give up their bioses so that they might see their god more clearly.’

  ‘Yes, otherwise they might have lynched me.’

  ‘I came back as quickly as I could. You’re angry because you think I set you up. But it was part of the trick. Your surprise, when you discovered that you were the thief and I was the hero, played very nicely. And now we have Gun Ako Akoi’s trinket, and the Masters of the Measureless Mind think that the replica is their holy relic. Everybody’s happy. All’s well that ends well.’

  Hari was wondering about what might have happened if the djinn hadn’t conjured the shell of virtual light. Wondering if Rav had been planning to run off with the head and the relic, and leave him to the mercy of the mob.

  He said, ‘Where’s Riyya?’

  ‘Directly behind us.’

  Hari twisted around in his seat, searched the dark sky. After a few moments, his bios vectored in on a tiny shadow rising towards them.

  Rav said, ‘Shall we lose her?’

  ‘She knows where we’re going. And she deserves to know what Dr Gagarian knew.’

  ‘Once again I am reminded that you baseliners think that sentiment is a virtue.’

  10

  The two scooters flew side by side through the tattered fringes of rain clouds, crossing the dark lake and flying above the forest beyond, turning to follow a road that cut through the trees. Hari’s bios enhanced the crepuscular night glow of the sunstrip – everything seemed to be its own ghost, pale and insubstantial. Pale road, pale trees, a scattering of pale buildings in a clearing wheeling by, vanishing into the gloaming. The pale shadow of a bu
lkhead rose up, advanced with unnerving speed. Hari felt an airy rush in his blood as Rav angled their scooter into a steep dive. The bulkhead leaned above and they dropped with a plunging jolt and shot through a square port and began to rise again.

  A narrow margin of forest gave way to threadbare grassland punctuated by stands of thorny trees and crests of bare rock like the thrusting prows of ships from the long ago, ships that had sailed the seas of Earth. The scooters flew on, travelling antispinward, a little faster than the rotation of the world city. Presently, light flared at the horizon and began to fill the skystrip.

  Rav said that this sector had been one of the hunting grounds of the True optimates who had ruled Ophir at the height of their pomp. When Hari asked what they had hunted, the Ardenist pointed off to the left. Hari saw something move in the middle distance, zoomed in, saw large, bipedal animals standing knee-deep in a meadow of ferns. Muscular hind legs and shrunken forelimbs, paddle-tails fringed with dark feathers, feathers cresting along prominent ridges of their spines. Several stood watch, small eyes alert under bulging foreheads that were mostly bone, while the rest grazed. His bios couldn’t identify them, but they looked a little like the animals carved into the roof beams of houses of the Nihongoni.

  ‘I thought all the big dragons had been hunted to extinction,’ he said.

  ‘They’re better than any dragon,’ Riyya said. She was flying off to their right, matching the long curves Rav that put into their course. ‘The ancestors of birds, conjured by gene wizards from fossil genes and guesswork. One of the wonders of Ophir. We have more of Earth’s history than is left on Earth. I could show you the Taj Mahal. The pyramid of Cheops, and the Sphinx. Ankor Watt. The Library of Alexandria.’