by Paul McAuley
‘But you agreed to this proposition of his anyway.’
‘I wanted to free you of your burden, nephew,’ Tamonash said blandly.
It was impossible to make out if he was telling the truth.
‘You told Mr Mussa where I was going,’ Hari said. ‘And he made arrangements to steal the head.’
Tamonash didn’t deny this.
‘Who ambushed us?’ Hari said ‘Who stole the head? Was he working for you and Mr Mussa, or for this client? Is he still here, on Ophir?’
‘It was Mr Mussa’s daughter. He created her during his last days in corporeal form. She’s a kind of clone. Her genome contains two copies of his X chromosomes, and she has been tweaked, and she is a lot older than she looks. Be careful, if you ever meet her. Hope that you don’t.’
‘Mr Mussa’s ship is heading towards Tannhauser Gate,’ Hari said. ‘Rav’s son tracked it when it left Ophir, and is tracking it as we speak.’
‘You are going to chase after him. You and the Ardenist.’
‘Of course.’
‘I suppose that it would be pointless to attempt to persuade you that it would be dangerous and foolish.’
‘It would.’
‘My offer still stands, nephew. You are welcome to come and work for me. You could spend some time on Earth. You could visit Ioni Robles Nguini. Talk to him. If Dr Gagarian found anything of any significance, if you and Ioni Robles Nguini can work out what it was, I will do my best to help you understand it. I have many contacts. Make use of them. Make use of me. We are, after all, family.’
There it was.
‘I have lost my family,’ Hari said. He pushed to his feet and turned his back on his uncle and walked away. Tamonash calling after him, pleading with him to stay, saying that the people who wanted the head would come after both of them, as he walked through the cold blue light of Earth, walked out of his family’s old home.
The battlebot followed him. As protection, and because he had one more use for it.
‘I would have killed him,’ Rav said.
‘Our peoples are very different,’ Hari said.
‘You are very different. Your blood runs much colder than mine. You realise that your uncle will be targeted by the Saints. They will want to know what you told him, and they won’t want to leave any loose ends . . .’
They were riding the elevator up to the docks, and Brighter Than Creation’s Dark.
‘I’ve taken care of that,’ Hari said. He opened a window showing the viewpoint of the battlebot as it stamped along the road towards Down Town, and told Rav its destination.
Rav laughed. ‘You’re almost as crazy as me. Those particular Saints are strictly local. Low-grade recruiters. They didn’t have anything to do with the hijack. Or with the murder of Salx Minnot Flores, either.’
‘But if their superiors did, if those superiors sent that message to me, well, now I have sent them a reply. Also, the police will trace the battlebot back to my uncle. Maybe they will arrest him, maybe not. But if he has any sense he will tell them the whole wretched story, and ask for protection.’
‘Mmm. That’s actually almost smart.’
‘Thank you.’
’How long will it take that thing to reach Down Town?’
‘About forty minutes. And it will take ten or twenty minutes more to find the school and start its work.’
‘And by then we’ll be on our way to Tannhauser Gate. Which is just as well, because Ophir’s police really won’t be happy about the trouble you’re about to cause.’
‘I have no plans to return,’ Hari said.
PART FOUR
PIRATES OF THE ASTEROIDS
1
At age sixteen, Hari jumped ship.
It was in the Commonwealth of Sugar Mountain, shortly before Dr Gagarian came aboard. Hari had gone shoreside with Nabhomani, his first time off Pabuji’s Gift, to observe how trade negotiations were handled.
‘It will be dull and tedious work, entirely lacking in excitement,’ Nabhomani told Hari. ‘Which is no doubt why Aakash allowed you to come along. The lives of these people are bound by rules and regulations they’ve been accumulating and refining and discussing for over a thousand years. It’s their religion, their great work, but as far as outsiders are concerned it’s about as thrilling as cataloguing every grain of sand on Mars. They even managed to bore the Trues into allowing them to become a neutral enclave, way back when. But boring work, tedious work, that’s no bad thing, Hari. You’ll witness contract negotiations without the usual distractions – drinking, drugging, bribery and corruption, all the other good things that make life worthwhile. Pay attention, little brother, work up a detailed and accurate report for our father who art in his own little heaven, and I’ll make sure we get some of the good stuff next time.’
The Commonwealth was a free-fall reef, seven gardens between one and five kilometres in diameter set at irregular intervals along a central spine spun from comet CHON. The whole looking, as Pabuji’s Gift approached it, like a string of soap bubbles pierced by a needle, each bubble brilliantly lit by banks of sun-mirrors.
Hari and Nabhomani rode for some sixty kilometres down the spine in a rail car with fittings of real wood and metal, and padded walls clad in hand-sewn tapestries showing heroic scenes from the construction of the reef. Once luxurious, the rail car’s appointments were now worn and shabby. Like everywhere else, Sugar Mountain was pinched by the long, belt-wide recession.
The rail car traversed three bubble habitats – gulfs of sunlight and air and cloud forests, stacks of tethered or floating platforms – before arriving at the trading centre, which was set just outside the interchange station of the fourth and largest habitat. A cylindrical installation of about twenty storeys, offices and meeting rooms, and chilly guest suites where Hari and Nabhomani were the only occupants.
The negotiations concerned the renewal of the Commonwealth’s collision-protection system, using components that Pabuji’s Gift had salvaged from a dead garden. Terms of payment for the components and for the supply of rare earths and metals required for fabrication of spare parts, contractual guarantees, penalties for overrun costs . . . Arid and interminably prolonged discussions that anatomised every clause and footnote in interminable detail. The Commonwealth’s officials were tall and mostly pale-skinned, dressed in trousers and collarless tunics of various shades of grey. Austere, earnest, unsmiling. Hari and Nabhomani were restricted to the trading centre, shuttling between their guest suite, presentations by various officials and endless discussions of minor changes to sub-sub-clauses in contracts, and formal meals where edible morsels were extracted with special instruments from stringy pods or spiny clusters of leaves, and dipped in simmering pots of melted cheese or bubbling oil using another set of special instruments, with appropriate gestures of politeness and in strict rotation amongst the diners.
Despite the tedium, Hari was constantly on edge, worried that he’d violate some important protocol or custom, or fall asleep at the dining table while one of their hosts was explaining the superiority of the Commonwealth’s culture and biomes, its arts (very long atonal operas, nanosculpture, dabbing pigments on stretched canvas to represent mindscapes produced by exotic mathematics, flower-breeding) and, most of all, its political system, in which every citizen voted ten or twenty times a day on the distribution of various resources between habitats, minor changes in civil and judicial codes, and so on and so forth, boredom and fear and resentment knotting inside Hari’s chest until he felt that he could scarcely breathe.
The third meeting of the second day was enlivened by the attendance of several technicians who gave short presentations about potential problems uncovered during inspection of the control system. One of the technicians immediately caught Hari’s attention: she looked a little like Sora Exodus Adel. Sora, whom he still loved with a kind of hopeless Platonic idealism because she represented the possibility of a life other than the life he had. It wasn’t so much the physical resemblance as the way th
e technician held her head and tilted her chin, the way she sometimes smiled when one of her co-workers made a point, a brief faint twitch at the corners of her mouth, sly and private. After she and the other technicians had finished their presentations and left, Hari felt a dull echo of the hopeless yearning sadness that had swamped him after Sora had disembarked at Trantor, and Jyotirmoy had run away from his parents.
Nabhomani told Hari that introducing the technicians into the negotiations was an attempt to drive down the price of the components.
‘They insist that the flaws they have uncovered are worse than they actually are; we must pretend that we are not insulted by the implication that we are trying to sell them damaged goods, and prove that the flaws are minor and easy to fix. What you have to remember, brother, is that the good citizens of the Commonwealth love this kind of thing. They live for it. When they aren’t negotiating with traders and other governments, the Commonwealth’s habitats are negotiating amongst themselves, or arguing over refinements of their political system. It’s a massive sink of time and human energy, and generates nothing of any value. That’s why the Commonwealth has such a huge internal economy, but so little trading credit. All it has to offer in exchange for essential imports is the use of its ship-repair facility – which admittedly is much better than most – and the products of its guest workers. Who because they get their hands dirty doing actual work are never allowed to become citizens.’
The next day, Hari rebelled. After the last meeting ended, he and Nabhomani had two hours of so-called free time before the beginning of the long evening meal. Nabhomani retired to his room for a nap; Hari broke out of the trading centre. Or rather, he simply swam out: the Commonwealth believed that its guests, like its citizens, would unquestioningly obey every rule and regulation, and did not see the need to enforce any of them. Hari reached the station without encountering any guards, locked doors or paranoid security bots, caught the next rail car out and alighted at the second stop, one of the guest-worker towns.
He had a simple plan: he wanted to look for the young technician, whose name was Sharma Song. He didn’t much care whether or not she lived in this town (there were dozens of guest-worker towns, and he couldn’t use his bios to search for her in the Commonwealth’s registry). It was the quest rather than the prize that was important. Escaping the prison of protocol. Exploring this strange new world. Embarking on an adventure.
The town was a crowded labyrinth of narrow corridors and tunnels and common spaces threaded around, through, and between irregular stacks of buildings. Domed gardens and roofed yards were set in the perimeter walls, and shafts let in filtered sunlight in some places, but otherwise it was lit by luminous panels and chains of floating lamps. There were workshops and fabbing mills, cafés with tiny counters and perches for just two or three customers, augmentation parlours specialising in tattoos or cosmetic surgery or implants, little stores selling everything from handmade food to vat-grown pets. There were churches and chapels and temples, many featuring iconography venerating the Bright Moment: portraits and effigies of the cyclist in a hundred styles, replicas of his bicycle, looped picts of the flare of light reaching out, engulfing him. Hari found it odd and disturbing to see these familiar images in this strange place.
Most of the town’s inhabitants were smaller than him. Dwarfed descendants of Outers, enclaves of refugees from Earth, a few clades and races that Hari recognised, many he’d never seen before, an unending stream of strangers hurrying past on mysterious errands and missions, glimpses of incomprehensible lives. Strange buildings, strange signs, strange customs, snatches of strange music, strange odours from strange food . . .
One sector specialised in manufacturing pressure suits. There were workshops dedicated to making different components – liners, helmets, gloves and boots, lifepacks, avatars. There were parlours that measured and fitted customers. There were studios where artists worked on customised and elaborate paint jobs for chestplates and helmets, in the ancient tradition of Outers. Familiar work on familiar, utilitarian equipment.
When Nabhomani found him, Hari was talking to one of the suit painters, an old woman dressed in an ankle-length smock with many pockets. They were sitting outside the spare little cubbyhole of her workshop, drinking tea and nibbling salted curds, olives, and raw vegetables that were much tastier than anything Hari had eaten in the trading centre. A chestplate stood on a rack, marked out with the lineaments of a design – a standard, idealised representation of Sri Hong-Owen, her hands cupped around the star Fomalhaut and the halo of its dust ring – that the old woman was creating for a devout follower of the Church of the Human Uplift.
When Nabhomani swam out of a corridor mouth and drifted past the lighted alcove of a café towards him, Hari wasn’t especially shocked or dismayed. He’d been expecting it. He’d known that he wouldn’t be able to escape for long.
Nabhomani spoke to the old woman in a language that Hari’s bios didn’t recognise, full of clicks and aspirants (he later learned that it was a bastard dialect of Xhosa and Pinglish). The old woman replied in the same language, and told Hari in Portuga that it had been a pleasure talking with him, and should he ever need his suit decorated he should come to her. If she could not satisfy his requirements she knew everyone else in the trade here; she would make sure that he got what he wanted for the best price.
‘Let me give you something for your hospitality, mother,’ Nabhomani said, but the old woman said there was no obligation, it was a pleasure to meet his younger brother.
‘No obligation is the worst kind of obligation,’ Nabhomani told Hari a little later, after he’d found them seats at a tiny bar that sold pineapple juice and spicy bean-sprout pancakes.
‘We were just talking in a general way,’ Hari said. ‘I didn’t tell her anything about our trade.’
‘I’m not worried about that. You don’t know anything about anything worth knowing. But I am worried that you fell into that old she-devil’s clutches,’ Nabhomani said. ‘I bet you don’t even know who she is.’
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me she doesn’t really paint p-suits.’
‘She also runs this ward, which means she runs about a quarter of the town. And she does most of her business through a system of favours . . . Did she offer to introduce you to that technician you were mooning over? Or tell you where she lived?’ Nabhomani smiled. As always, he was impeccably groomed, hair lustrous with scented oil, his shirt luminously white and fastened by silver pins, little finger cocked as he fed himself a morsel of pancake. ‘You’re going to tell me I’m a hypocrite. That you only wanted to have a little adventure, like the adventures I’m always talking about. The thing is, Hari, there’s a time and a place. It isn’t just that the old woman would have expected you do to her a favour in return for her help. If you’d found that technician, if you’d slept with her, it would have been an act of industrial sabotage. It would have blown the deal. You would have been arrested, I would have been arrested, and I don’t like to think what would have happened to the technician.’
‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘And no harm’s been done. I patched over your absence at dinner. And tomorrow, after we’ve endured the contract-signing ceremony, we’re finished here.’
‘Assuming I come back with you.’
Hari felt guilty, was angry because he felt guilty. He hadn’t told the old woman about Sharma Song, but he had been thinking about telling her. He knew he’d done wrong, knew his so-called rebellion was dull and obvious, but resented Nabhomani’s patronising homilies.
Nabhomani sucked on his bulb of pineapple juice, pretending to think about that. He said, ‘It isn’t difficult to become a guest worker, but it is almost impossible to leave if you do. And even more difficult to become a citizen of the Commonwealth.’
‘Who says I want to become a citizen?’
‘I know I wouldn’t. The endless debates, endlessly considering and voting on infinitesimally trivial matters . . . It must be like
being stuck in a trade meeting for the rest of your life. No, it would be much better to claim refugee status. After two or three years of trying to live on welfare you’d be allowed to become a guest worker. And then you’d have to learn a trade, and stick at it for your entire life, never doing anything that other people haven’t already done. Because that’s how it is here. Custom and convention stifles enterprise and innovation. Maybe you’d even meet someone you liked enough to partner, although your choices would be pretty limited because there isn’t much exogamy here. The clades and clans and enclave nations like to stick to their own. And, of course, you’d spend your whole life in a little town like this one,’ Nabhomani said, ‘because guest workers aren’t allowed to leave Sugar Mountain, ever.’
‘You’re good at this,’ Hari said. ‘At selling a place.’
‘If I’m selling anything, I’m selling you what you already have, because it’s a better deal than anything you’ll find here.’
‘Yet the people here seem happy.’
‘Because they don’t know any better. And because they are too polite to express their real feelings. Politeness is a survival trait in crowded, confined places. If the denizens of this town weren’t so incredibly polite, they’d all have killed each other long ago. But you know more than they do, Hari. You know what’s out there. All kinds of people, all kinds of places, all kinds of ways of living. Cities and settlements, worlds and worlds and worlds. You want to jump ship for the first place you’ve seen? Fine. But if you want my opinion, you should see a few other places first. Live a little, little brother. I know I have,’ Nabhomani said, and commenced to tell several improbable stories that at last wore through Hari’s shell of sulky resentment and won a couple of smiles from him.
They swam through the town’s mazy corridors to the station and rode the next rail car back to the trade centre, and caught a few hours’ sleep before the last round of negotiations, and the interminable contract-signing ceremony. And that was the end of Hari’s first and last act of rebellion against his family and his birthright.