Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  Gun Ako Akoi said, ‘None of my children are fools, and they do not choose fools to turn. But it’s clear that Dr Gagarian was a clever man on a foolish quest. He sought knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but he lived in a fallen age where knowledge is currency. Your family knew that. They made their living rooting through ruins, looking for knowledge to sell. And because there’s very little that’s new, Dr Gagarian made himself more valuable with every discovery he made. Until at last someone attempted to snap him up.’

  Hari said, ‘If you think his research foolish, then I suppose I’m also a fool. Because I want to understand what he discovered.’

  ‘No. You want revenge. Which means that you’re very much of your time. As far as you’re concerned, understanding Dr Gagarian’s research is a means to an end. Currency. Trade goods.’

  ‘You see things very clearly,’ Hari said. ‘What do you see inside Dr Gagarian’s head?’

  ‘Forgive the youngblood,’ Rav said. ‘He’s yet to learn any patience.’

  ‘He’s hungry for the future,’ Gun Ako Akoi said. ‘As far as you and I are concerned, the future is only more of the same. To children like him, it’s full of sweet and toothsome possibilities.’

  ‘I’m not yet ready to retire to a mausoleum,’ Rav said.

  ‘Don’t think you’re any better than me, just because you are out and about, walking up and down in the world,’ Gun Ako Akoi said, and looked down at Hari. ‘Every one of my children and grandchildren is a special snowflake, but they are all patterned on me. You know about snowflakes, boy?’

  ‘It’s a kind of water ice,’ Hari said.

  ‘They do snow here, sometimes. The weathermakers. The cloud wranglers, the climate cowboys, the friends of the little friend who is waiting for you outside. It is a special kind of ice. Small crystals with six-fold symmetry,’ Gun Ako Akoi said, and opened a window.

  White crystals slanted through darkness. Each with six facets around its central axis, each different. Some ornamented hexagons, others with six spiky arms, or six fractal branches, or six spikes bearing miniature hexagonal platelets . . .

  ‘The encryption of my changelings is based on snowflake formation,’ Gun Ako Akoi said. ‘Organised according to a certain symmetry, every pattern different from moment to moment. But if you have the base algorithm, you can unlock any of them. As I have unlocked Dr Gagarian’s.’

  The view in the window changed. Dense columns of symbols scrolling down unendingly.

  ‘Unfortunately, there’s a problem,’ Gun Ako Akoi said.

  The view changed again, racing above the columns of symbols as they deformed and branched and tangled into each other like a forest of crippled banyans.

  Rav said, ‘Is that Dr Gagarian’s mindscape?’

  ‘What’s left of it,’ Gun Ako Akoi said. ‘I told you that I mourned my child. This is why. Something has eaten Dr Gagarian’s memory.’

  Hari said, ‘Can’t you fix it?’

  ‘In some other universe shattered fragments may leap up and jigsaw themselves into a cup, complete, whole, unharmed. But not here. And this is not a ruin; it is more like a cancer. It has devoured Dr Gagarian’s files and turned them into something else. Keep the head. You may still have some use for it, and I already have enough mementos.’

  The tick-tock matriarch did not dismiss Rav and Hari. Instead, her manikins parted to form a line on either side, and she mounted the stairs backwards, ascending in silence, step by step by step, into the shadows high above.

  11

  Hari and Rav walked down the long corridor towards the entrance, past banners of red silk and illuminated statues. The manikins marched after them, stepping into doorways one by one.

  ‘Now we know why the skull feeders were so interested in you,’ Rav said, when the last of the manikins had departed.

  ‘Assuming Gun Ako Akoi told us the truth,’ Hari said. ‘Assuming she didn’t show us some kind of illusion.’

  ‘Mmm. I suppose it must be hard, realising that you’ve been made over into a storage device.’

  Hari did his best to ignore the taunt, saying, ‘She could have copied Dr Gagarian’s files, erased the originals, and faked that image of a neural network. Tried to persuade me that it didn’t matter, because I had a copy in my head.’

  ‘We think the files are important,’ Rav said. ‘She doesn’t. She’s a cantankerous old bitch, but she kept to our agreement.’

  ‘For all the good it did,’ Hari said.

  ‘We’ve come this far, you and I, because we both wanted to know what’s in Dr Gagarian’s files. We’ve had a setback. Things didn’t work out the way we hoped. But the hunt is still on. What we need to do now is find out what’s stashed inside your head. We need to find a really good head doctor.’

  ‘Or go to the Memory Whole.’

  ‘I can’t afford the Memory Whole’s fees, and neither can you. So we’ll have to make do. But don’t worry,’ Rav said, ‘I’m very good at improvising. This is a setback, but nothing I can’t fix.’

  ‘I should be angry,’ Hari said. ‘My father used me, and he didn’t tell me how, or why. I should be angry, but I’m not. Because he trusted me. He trusted me to keep his work safe—’

  Rav had seized hold of Hari and pushed him against one of the walls and pressed a hand over his mouth. Hari tried to struggle, but the Ardenist held him firm, and smiled down into his face.

  ‘Don’t come out until I tell you that it is safe,’ he said, and bounded down the corridor and ran straight through the square doorway.

  Hari counted out a minute, and another, then crept forward. Light and shadow flickered beyond the doorway. There was the soft sound of falling rain. Hari called to Rav, took another step towards the doorway, and a tiny dark star floated in: a cluster of tiny needles, microbots. His bios locked on to them as they fanned out and whispered through the air towards him. He couldn’t look away. Pain swelled behind his left eye and something reached past him towards the needles and they exploded in a stuttering sequence of supernovas. The corridor swung around him, the floor struck the length of his body, and someone was pinching his cheek, telling him to wake up.

  It was Riyya. Her coppery hair was plastered to her scalp and water beaded her shift and trousers and dripped on Hari as she helped him to stand. His legs were unhinged, and the walls of the corridor and the doorway’s carved columns seemed to reel around him as he and Riyya staggered into the rainy dark. Rav sat just outside, the cloak of his wings folded around him, droplets of rain running down his face and bare chest. Light beat at the bottom of the staircase. One of the scooters was burning from stem to stern, the bones of its frame white-hot inside a haze of hot blue flame and steam. The other scooter, Riyya’s, was parked beyond it.

  Rav turned his head and looked at Hari. His vertical pupils were huge ovals. ‘Old,’ he said, speaking with a deliberate effort. ‘Getting old and slow.’

  ‘He took your kitbag,’ Riyya told Hari.

  ‘Rav?’

  ‘The thief. He drove me off with a smart bullet and set fire to your scooter. When your friend came running out, a swarm of little drones zapped him. The thief went inside, came back out with your kitbag, rode off.’

  Hari tried to pull his thoughts together. His left eye pulsed hotly. His tongue felt swollen, scorched. He was trying to remember where he’d seen something like the dark little star before, and then he had it. Mr Mussa’s avatar. Its nucleus of microbots.

  ‘Where?’ he said. ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘We’ll find out,’ Riyya said, and pulled Hari towards the steps.

  Rav called out. Hari turned, saw that the Ardenist had managed to get to his feet.

  ‘The thief is getting away,’ Riyya said. ‘Stay or come. It’s all the same to me.’

  Rav tottered forward, swaying like a man crossing a tilting deck. His wings flared as he tried and failed to keep his balance. He fell to his knees, reached towards Hari.

  ‘Wait,’ he said.

  Hari said to Riyya
, ‘Can you catch him?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Do your best.’

  Hari swung into the saddle behind her, a transparent canopy closed over them, and the scooter rose, turned, tilted its nose down, and shot out into sheer air, curving past the tapering base of the palace, flying out of the shadow of the clouds into sunlight. The drumming of rain on the canopy stopped so suddenly that Hari thought for a moment he’d lost his hearing.

  Riyya said that she was tracking the thief using the Climate Corps’ panopticon. ‘Strictly against regs. But so is conjuring a storm without permission.’

  She’d been waiting outside the entrance, she said, using the panopticon to keep watch in case the Corps came looking for her, when she’d spotted a smart bullet coming in over the horizon.

  ‘It was aimed right at me. I barely had time to fire up the scooter, and I flew like I’d never flown before, dodging and diving around the walls. And I managed to conjure a quick rainstorm, too. I thought it would confuse the damn bullet, but it was persistent. It was locked on to me. At last, I swung close around a giant statue and the bullet smacked into the statue’s head. Blew it clean off. It screamed at me, just before it exploded,’ Riyya said. ‘I can still hear that scream. So then I headed back, arrived just in time to see the thief zap your friend and steal your kitbag. And then I found you, and here we are.’

  Hari leaned against the length of Riyya’s back, into the warm scent of her hair. ‘Do you know where he’s going?’

  ‘There’s nothing in this sector but scrub and swamp and saurians. If he doesn’t double back, if he keeps heading antispinward, I reckon he’s heading for the port.’

  ‘All the way around the world to Down Town?’

  ‘There’s a second port, opposite Down Town,’ Riyya said. ‘They counterbalance each other.’

  Hari remembered watching Ophir as Rav’s ship had spiralled in. A silvery sphere shining in the sunlit dark, a thin thread extending from its waist, thickening into a spiky little blob at its far end: the beanstalk elevators running out to the docks in synchronous orbit. But as the world city had revolved another beanstalk had appeared, exactly opposite the first. As if Ophir had been pierced by a very long and slender needle.

  ‘He’s going to leave,’ he said. ‘He’s going to meet a ship and leave Ophir.’

  ‘If he gets there first,’ Riyya said. ‘He has a good head start, but his scooter is a civilian model. Mine is a little faster.’

  ‘Fast enough?’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  They were following a roadway now. A black line slashed straight through scrub and red rocks. Rugged cliffs rolled up from the horizon, with a transparent bulkhead looming above. Hari felt an airy rush in his stomach as the scooter swooped down and the cliffs smashed towards them. Towering masses of obdurate rock. He flinched with his whole body, and the scooter shot through a round hatchway, the smooth walls of a tunnel blurring past on either side, and came out into sunlight and rose above thick forest studded with grassy clearings in which white pyramids stood.

  ‘There he is,’ Riyya said, pointed to a small black pip high in the air.

  Hari’s bios gave him a close-up of the thief’s scooter. He glimpsed its rider, a small slim person in black, pale-skinned like Riyya, and then it was gone, dropping sharply towards the trees.

  Riyya said, ‘He knows we’re following him.’

  ‘Can’t you bring him down with some kind of weather?’

  ‘He’s travelling too fast. But if he’s heading where I think he’s heading, I may be able to work up a little surprise.’

  The thief’s scooter was flying just above the treetops now. They chased after it over long reaches of forest, past clusters of white pyramids. There was no sign that any were inhabited. The only animals Hari saw were birds labouring in a ragged vee above the forest’s green sea, scattering when the scooter overtook them.

  Spires and stacks of rock came up over the curve of the horizon, standing at the foot of the sector’s far bulkhead. The thief’s scooter shot between two spires and disappeared. Riyya whooped and flew at the spires full tilt, passing so close to one of them that Hari could have reached out and touched its back flank. The scooter kicked, rising above a rocky turret. The branches of a thorn tree rooted on its flat top passed just a metre below. Riyya dropped down again, into the long groove of a gully, heading towards the foot of one of the biggest of the spires. Hari glimpsed the round mouth of another tunnel; then the scooter shot into it and they were suddenly in twilight with dabs of luminous stuff flickering past on either side.

  Hari put his mouth close to Riyya’s ear. ‘How do you know he went this way?’

  ‘It’s the only way out of this sector for thirty klicks on either side,’ Riyya said. ‘The elevators to the port are beyond. Don’t worry. We chase each other like this all the time, for fun.’

  ‘This is fun?’

  ‘If it isn’t, I don’t know what fun is.’

  A small circle of brassy light appeared ahead, rushed towards them. A few moments later the scooter shot out into open air and immediately began to climb. Riyya’s head turned this way and that as she searched the sky for her prey.

  ‘There!’

  Hari followed the line of her arm, saw a small bead against the sunstrip’s glare.

  Below, broken roads crossed sandy scrubland potholed with craters. Another ancient battleground. Ahead, a lip of green appeared at the horizon with a thread rising beyond it – the slim shaft of the elevator stack, rising straight up from the floor and punching through the overhead, the shell of the world city. Clouds hung close to its lower levels, growing thicker and darker, grey and purple-black, merging, revolving, like a giant version of one of Rav’s smoke rings. Light blinked in the shadows they cast and a few moments later Hari heard a distant drum roll.

  Riyya’s weather.

  ‘We can’t catch him before he reaches the elevators,’ Riyya said. ‘But the storm might bring him down. Hang on. We’re in for a bumpy ride.’

  The churning cloud ring trailed skirts of rain. The thief’s scooter was silhouetted against them as it fled across a series of tiered structures. Riyya and Hari followed. Flat platforms packed with soldierly rows of plants rose in helices around central columns, and the columns were linked by slender swooping ramps to roadways that ran between their footings towards the elevators.

  Lightning lit the interior of the clouds, flashed rain into silvery sheets. The thief’s scooter jinked and lunged as it dropped towards the collar of buildings at the base of the elevator stack.

  ‘I’m having a problem,’ Riyya said.

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘They’ve found me. And they’ve commandeered my scooter.’

  She was hunched forward in her seat, twitching the steering yoke as the scooter slowed and began to plane through the air in a long, curving fall.

  Hari said, ‘Is this the thief’s friends?’

  Riyya gave the yoke a final twist and sat back and pushed her hands through her coppery hair. ‘The Corps. They’ve been looking for me ever since that unscripted rainstorm at the festival. And now they’ve locked me out. Of the scooter, of everything. I’m sorry, Hari. I malfed our mission.’

  ‘It isn’t over yet,’ Hari said.

  But he felt a cold dismay as the scooter fell between tiers of elevated fields. The ring of clouds around the elevators was thinning. Breaking up into ragged fragments. There was no sign of the thief. And the scooter was skimming towards a flat, vivid green meadow, slowing, thumping down, slewing to a halt in a fantail of mud and water.

  ‘That’s that,’ Riyya said, and popped the canopy.

  Hari asked if the port had a train station.

  ‘Of course it does. But we won’t be able to catch the thief now. And the Corps police will be coming for us.’

  ‘I think I know who the thief is working for, so I’m not about to give up the chase yet. How about you?’

  Riyya turned in her seat an
d studied him. Her expression was grim, pinched with frustration, but after a moment a small smile plucked at the corners of her mouth and she said, ‘Why not? I can hardly get into more trouble than I’m already in.’

  As they splashed through ankle-deep water blanketed with ferny fragments – azolla, according to Hari’s bios – towards the edge of the field, Hari told Riyya about Mr D.V. Mussa. His interest in Dr Gagarian’s head, his avatar and its nucleus of microbots.

  ‘He paid someone to follow me,’ Hari said. ‘To take Dr Gagarian’s head after the tick-tock matriarch had unlocked it. He’s a free trader. He has a ship. That’s where the thief must be headed.’

  ‘You think he’s planning to leave Ophir,’ Riyya said.

  ‘Rav has a ship too. It’s docked at Down Town’s port.’

  ‘He might not forgive you for leaving him behind.’

  ‘He needs me. And it seems that I still need him.’

  ‘But can you trust—’

  A window scrolled open in the air directly in front of them. A woman looked out, looked at Riyya.

  ‘There you are, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘What a time we’ve had, looking for you.’

  ‘I’m not coming back,’ Riyya said. ‘I won’t come back.’

  She stepped sideways, but the window drifted in front of her.

  ‘I don’t believe I’ve met your little friend. Did he put you up to this?’

  The woman was smiling, but there was no warmth in it. Her skin was pale and her hair was wheat-coloured and cropped short, but Hari could see the resemblance to Riyya in the bones of her face, the shape of her eyes. There were two gold bars pinned to the collar of her white shift.

  ‘It was entirely my idea,’ Riyya said, and began to walk forward.

  Hari walked beside her, sloshing through ferny water. The window drifted ahead of them.

  ‘You will have to stand in front of a disciplinary board, but I’ll be there with you,’ Riyya’s mother said. ‘I’ll speak for you. I’ll help you in every way I can.’

  ‘If you want to help, stop and arrest the thief we’re chasing,’ Riyya said. ‘He stole something that’s connected to the murder of my father, and the hijack of my friend’s ship. We need to catch him, and the person who hired him. We need to ask them some serious questions. You can help us, or you can get out of our way.’