Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  ‘I’m afraid that’s outside the Corps’ jurisdiction. As are the troubles of your friend Gajananvihari Pilot. Yes,’ Riyya’s mother said, looking at Hari, ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘Then you’ll also know why your daughter and I are helping each other,’ Hari said.

  ‘And why you should help us,’ Riyya said.

  ‘I’ll help you get through this,’ her mother said. ‘You have my word.’

  ‘But you won’t help me catch the people who killed my father,’ Riyya said.

  ‘You already know the answer to that. We have talked about it a dozen times.’

  ‘And you won’t do anything that will violate protocol. That doesn’t have a precedent,’ Riyya said, and bent and scooped up a handful of fern and mud and flung it at the window.

  Her mother didn’t even blink as the clot spun through her image. ‘You’re still grieving for your father,’ she said. ‘I’ll make sure that the board takes that into account. You’ll be demoted. That’s inevitable. But I promise that any sentence they pass will be suspended. We put this behind us and start over . . . What are you doing, sweetheart? Is that in any way sensible?’

  Hari and Riyya had reached the low rail at the edge of the field. Riyya climbed over it; after a moment’s hesitation Hari followed her. They balanced on a narrow fringe twenty metres above a steady traffic of trucks moving along a roadway. The window hung in the air in front of them.

  ‘I really think you should wait for the police,’ Riyya’s mother said.

  Riyya took Hari’s hand. ‘Ready?’

  Hari looked down at the drop. The railing was pressed against the back of his thighs. ‘I don’t know much about falling. Is this survivable?’

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ Riyya said.

  ‘Don’t let her do this,’ her mother said.

  ‘On the count of three,’ Riyya said. Her grip on Hari’s hand was hot and tight. She was watching a truck approach. Its big hopper was heaped with red sticks.

  ‘Wait,’ her mother said. ‘Wait, youngbloods.’

  Her voice was slurred and something strange was happening to her image. It was stretching, breaking apart in fountains of coloured dots that spun and coalesced.

  ‘Wait,’ Rav said. ‘I’m coming straight for you.’

  Hari looked all around, saw something small and white streaking through the air above the tiers of fields, a small boat or gig in the shape of a white, long-necked bird. Rav sat in the hollow between its furled wings, behind one of Gun Ako Akoi’s manikins, the one with the silvery face and riveted corselet and conical cap.

  The white bird shot past the edge of the field, curved back, and came to a halt directly in front of Hari and Riyya. It was coated in what looked like real feathers, ruffling in the warm breeze. Its small head had a black mask, an orange beak. It extended a short pont towards them and Rav stood up and smiled at Hari.

  ‘You shouldn’t try to fly before you’re fully fledged. Hop aboard, youngblood. The little weathermaker’s friends are on their way.’

  ‘Riyya is coming with us,’ Hari said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then she’s coming with me.’

  ‘And you’ll both go directly to jail,’ Rav said, and pointed towards the elevator stack.

  Four scooters were rising from the collar at the base of the stack, spreading out as they accelerated through the tattered remnants of Riyya’s storm.

  ‘She helped us,’ Hari said. ‘Now we must help her.’

  He and Rav stared at each other; then Rav shrugged. ‘Sentiment will be your downfall, youngblood. Climb aboard, both of you. We’ll give these bravos from the Climate Corps a run for their credit, and when we’ve shaken them off we’ll head directly to the docks.’

  ‘No,’ Hari said. ‘We’ll head to Down Town. I need to have a few words with my uncle before we leave.’

  12

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this on your own?’ Rav said.

  ‘It’s family business,’ Hari said.

  ‘Just you and him and his killing machine.’

  ‘He won’t use it against me.’

  ‘Your people are very different from mine,’ Rav said.

  They were sitting amongst dry weeds on top of a half-ruined tower, looking out across clumps of palms and stretches of zebra grass towards the Pilot family compound. It was early in the morning in Down Town’s sector. Riyya had ridden the elevator to the docks and Rav’s ship, where she would be safe from the Climate Corps police, and her mother.

  Hari said, ‘Of course, if there should be any trouble . . .’

  Rav said, ‘I’ll be right there.’

  ‘I want you to call the police.’

  ‘You think I can’t deal with a single myrmidon?’

  ‘I’m not worried about the myrmidon,’ Hari said. ‘I’m worried that my uncle may have taken other precautions.’

  As he walked along the wide empty road towards the family compound, dawn light brightening in the sunstrip high above, his shadow wheeling hugely behind him, Hari thought that it would be much easier to go up and head out after the thief than do this. Easier, yes, but then he’d never know if his uncle had betrayed him. He’d never know what his uncle knew about his father and his family.

  It was like one of Professor Ari Aluthgamage’s hinge points. Diverging paths leading to very different histories.

  The gate recognised him. He walked past the dry bowl of the fountain in the weed-grown courtyard, down the short corridor with statues of his ancestors on either side, through the big double door into his uncle’s chamber.

  Tamonash Pilot was eating breakfast at the far end of the long, blue-tinted room. Looking up as Hari walked towards him, greeting him warmly, telling him to sit down, asking if he would like a little something.

  ‘I came here to talk,’ Hari said. He shrugged his kitbag from his shoulders and sat on the other side of the little table.

  The myrmidon behind Tamonash was shuttered and still, but Hari felt its attention sweep over him. He had to assume that the machine hadn’t noticed the packet he’d sent before entering the room, or the response he’d received.

  ‘I’ve been very worried,’ Tamonash said, although he did not sound or look worried, perched on his chair in black pyjamas, white hair falling around his face as he bent over his bowl of porridge. ‘You did not come back from your appointment with that tick-tock woman, I could not contact you, and then the Climate Corps contacted me, and asked me to verify your identity. What kind of trouble did you get into, Gajananvihari?’

  ‘Nothing I could not handle, Uncle.’

  ‘The Ardenist led you on, no doubt. You would do better to listen to the advice of your uncle rather than that of your so-called friends.’

  ‘Talking of friends, where is your friend Mr Mussa? His ship has just left Ophir. Did you have a falling-out?’

  ‘Mr Mussa’s business is his business, not mine.’

  They were staring at each other across the breakfast clutter. After a moment, Tamonash smiled and said, ‘You have been on an adventure. Perhaps you’d like to tell your uncle about it. Did the tick-tock woman help you find what you are looking for?’

  ‘Actually, I lost something,’ Hari said, and opened the kitbag and showed Tamonash that it was empty.

  Behind the old man, the myrmidon shifted very slightly.

  Tamonash looked at the kitbag and then looked at Hari, his spoon halfway to his mouth. A pearl of porridge splashed on the hammered-brass tabletop. He said, ‘What have you done with the tick-tock’s head?’

  ‘It was stolen by Mr Mussa.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He is an honest trader.’

  ‘I was knocked out by a little cluster of microbots exactly like the microbots of Mr Mussa’s avatar. You remember, I’m sure, that I told you a djinn is protecting me. It reached out to the microbots, and they exploded. A series of very bright flashes that knocked me out. I chased the thief to the port on the opposite side of the world.
The port from which Mr Mussa’s ship departed soon after the thief escaped.’

  Rav had tagged the cryoflask when he and Hari had arrived at Ophir – ‘Of course I did, youngblood. Don’t expect me to apologise for what turned out to be absolutely necessary’ – and his son had tracked it from Gun Ako Akoi’s palace to the elevator stack, tracked it as it had risen to the docks, and to Mr Mussa’s ship.

  ‘It is a very interesting story,’ Tamonash said, ‘but the evidence is entirely circumstantial.’

  ‘The thief knew the djinn would trigger the microbots. Who told him about it, I wonder?’

  ‘You lost the head of Dr Gagarian, and you come here making wild accusations—’

  ‘Swear,’ Hari said. ‘Swear on the honour of our family that you didn’t.’

  The myrmidon jacked to its full height, turret head prickling with the muzzles of various anti-personnel armaments, targeting systems throwing a pattern of red and green cross-hairs and dots across Hari’s torso.

  ‘I would be careful, if I were you,’ Tamonash said. ‘Making wild and unfounded accusations can be very dangerous.’

  ‘We should both be careful,’ Hari said, and sent a command to the repurposed battlebot that stood amongst the line of old machines that faced the view of Earth’s icy sea.

  The myrmidon took a step forward, flanking Tamonash, as the battlebot marched to the centre of the room. Its clanking tread shivered the floor. It raised its two pairs of flexible arms, the multitools at their ends spun, and the teardrop of its body blistered and dimpled with internal adjustments. Many of its sensors were offline or permanently disconnected, but Hari believed that the basic array would be more than enough to deal with the myrmidon, believed that the myrmidon’s tactical weapons, designed to put down human assassins, would be no match for the bot’s mass and armour and hardened nervous system.

  ‘Now I did not know that was still functional,’ Tamonash said thoughtfully.

  ‘There’s only a fractional charge in its fission batteries,’ Hari said. ‘But it should be more than enough.’

  For a moment, there was dead silence in the cold, blue room. Then Tamonash smiled and gave a verbal command to the myrmidon, telling it to stand down. Saying to Hari, ‘We are family. We should be able to talk to each other without making silly threats.’

  Beside him, the myrmidon retracted various muzzles and discharge spikes.

  Hari sent a command to the battlebot. Sharp spurts of compressed air hissed as it lowered its arms.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ he said.

  ‘It is a long story, nephew. Long and painful. It began many years before I met Mr Mussa.’

  ‘Then you admit that you and he—’

  ‘Allow me to tell it my way. From the beginning. But first, please, have some tea,’ Tamonash said, and poured a measure into a white porcelain cup and set it in front of Hari.

  Hari drank the bitter black tea and smashed the cup down. ‘Now tell me everything. From the beginning.’

  ‘Do you know what a coin is?’

  ‘A kind of portable credit.’

  Nabhomani had once brought several coins back to the ship. Handing them out as presents, laughing, saying, ‘Look! Look how far we’ve fallen!’

  Tamonash said, ‘When it comes to family, love and hate are two sides of the same coin. I’m sure you were sometimes angry with your brothers, Gajananvihari. But you always loved them, no matter what. It was like that with me and your father. I loved Aakash when I was about as young as you were now, and he was two years older. And then things changed, and the coin flipped from love to hate. All because of your mother. All because of Mullai. Who was once my lover. Did Aakash ever tell you about that? I thought not.’

  Tamonash leaned back in his chair and crooked one leg over the other and clasped his hands across his belly. The nails of his bare feet were painted bright red. He wore a silver ring on one big toe.

  ‘It began when Aakash had the idea to turn our family’s fortune around by buying a wreck of a ship, renovating it, and using it as a base for trade and the research into old technologies in which we were both interested. We were young, we were ambitious, it seemed that there was nothing we couldn’t do. And I was in love with Mullai, and she was in love with me.

  ‘We had first met, Mullai and I, when we bid against each other for various salvaged machines. This was on Ceres, where she had been born and raised. I won the bid, we fell to talking about the defunct ship that Aakash and I were refurbishing, and when I returned to Ophir she came with me and joined our crew.

  ‘I named it. Did you know that? I named the ship Pabuji’s Gift. An homage to our family’s long history. The fashion amongst baseliner families and clans to undo the homogenisation of the True Empire by reviving old traditions and customs is beginning to fade now, but it was still strong then. Like many others, our family had traced their ancestors, given their children names of their storied dead. So why not name our ship for the local god of the region where our family lived before it was scattered across Earth and other worlds? Aakash said at first that it was a silly superstition, but I prevailed. And I wonder now if it was part of the reason for his betrayal. That he betrayed me to assert his strength, his will over mine.

  ‘I failed to see that Mullai was falling in love with your father, even while she was still in love with me, and I with her. I was so in love, in fact, that when one of my friends tried to warn me I had him banished from the crew. We baseliners pride ourselves that we are a kinder, more rational people than the True. But in truth, like them, we have not lost all of our ape heritage. We are drawn to powerful people. And Aakash was one such. I was – I am – clever enough. I am admired by those who share my special interests. But Aakash had that particular quality that transmutes base admiration to the gold of love. He was one of those men for whom people will give up their lives. They will leave everything behind to follow him. They will die for him. That was how I lost Mullai.’

  Tamonash was looking past Hari. Looking past everything in the room, the compound, the world city.

  ‘The ship was not finished when Aakash took her on her shakedown voyage. I spent every waking hour fixing systems that had revealed flaws when they became fully operational, attempting to complete work that should have been finished before we set out. I was very busy, but I was also a fool. A blind fool. I did not see what was happening. I did not know anything about it until we returned to the docks at Ophir, and Mullai told me. Told me that she had been Aakash’s lover for some time before we had set out, and that during that voyage she had realised that she must choose between him and me. And she had chosen him. So that was the end of that, and that was the end of my relationship with Aakash. I allowed him to buy out my share in the ship. I stayed here, in the family home. Where I have been ever since.

  ‘Your father is a selfish man, Gajananvihari, as many powerful men are. Ambitious, single-minded, and utterly selfish. Unable to see that other people may have other ambitions, other dreams. That is why he made your two brothers in his likeness. That is why he chose to pass over into a kind of life after death, rather than give himself back to the Wheel. Yes, I know that your brothers are his clones, and I know how Mullai died, and Rakesh. I kept track. I even tried to contact Aakash, once or twice. After Mullai died, after he passed over. He never replied. I told myself it did not matter. I made a life for myself here. I partnered with a kind and loving woman, may she rest in peace. I have a strong, capable daughter, and she has given me two grandchildren and we are building a business together.

  ‘And then Aakash’s ship was hijacked, and you arrived here. Perhaps you do not know it, but you look so much like your mother. And you were – you are – caught up in your father’s obsession. It broke my heart to see it. When Mr Mussa came to me with his plan, his proposition, I thought that if the damned head was gone you would be free. You would be able to take up your own life. Perhaps you would come to work for me, perhaps not. But you would be free of your father’s influence. And yes,
I admit it, I would have been free of it too,’ Tamonash said, looking at Hari with a steady gaze. ‘Well, who knows why we do the things we do? But I did not think, I really did not, that it would end as it has.’

  Hari didn’t know how much of the story to believe. He knew only that he couldn’t forgive his uncle. Couldn’t accept his confession, or his guilt. He was gripped by a cold, angry purpose.

  He said, ‘Tell me about Mr Mussa’s proposition. Tell me everything.’

  Tamonash said, ‘You share half my brother’s genome, and you have something of his single-mindedness, and something of his ability to attract and influence other people. You don’t realise that yet, I think. I doubt that you were given much of a chance to use it, on the ship. It is a gift, a very useful gift, but be careful. Like a coin, it has two sides.’

  ‘Humour my single-mindedness, Uncle.’

  ‘Mr Mussa told me that he had a client who wanted to know what Dr Gagarian had discovered. He promised me that no harm would come to you or the Ardenist. And in that, at least, he has kept his word.’

  ‘Who is this client?’

  Tamonash studied Hari for a moment, hands steepled under his chin. Then he said, ‘When we made our arrangement, Mr Mussa told me that he would be able to sell the knowledge to a rival of Dr Gagarian’s. He did not give his client’s name, but dropped enough hints to allow me to guess it. To let me think I had discovered a secret he wanted hidden. The person he pointed me towards was Ioni Robles Nguini, a philosopher who lives in Greater Brazil, on Earth. I see you recognise the name.’

  ‘He was working with Dr Gagarian and my father,’ Hari said. ‘Is he still alive? Have you talked to him?’

  ‘I talked to a representative of his family, who claimed to know nothing about Mr Mussa. I suppose that he was attempting to conceal the identity of his real client by pointing me in the wrong direction.’