by Paul McAuley
2
Hari told Riyya about his adventure in the Commonwealth of Sugar Mountain because he wanted to show her that he knew a little about running away – running away from a family that had mapped out every detail of your future. He wanted her to know that he understood how she felt, that they had something in common, but Riyya pointed out that he was trying to find his way back to his family, hoping to save any still alive and win back Pabuji’s Gift, while she had left everything of her old life behind and had no intention of returning. And besides, leaving the Climate Corps had not been a spur-of-the-moment decision. She had been thinking about it for several years, ever since she’d started to visit her father. Wondering what direction her life might take if, like him, she quit the Corps. Daydreaming about seeing something of the other cities and settlements of the Belt. She’d even ridden up to the docks not so long ago, and found a place where ship crews hung out – although she hadn’t dared say anything to anyone, and had bolted when a woman her age had offered to buy her a drink.
And then she’d met Hari and Rav, and after their little adventure it had become impossible to stay in the Corps, in Ophir.
‘My father showed me that there was more to the world,’ she said. ‘Another reason for my mother to hate him. She was always complaining that the disgrace of his desertion had held her back, that her rivals used it to rob her of opportunities and promotions that were rightfully hers. That was why she put in a claim to his house and the rest of his stuff. He wanted to leave everything to me. He had the crazy idea that I would carry on his work. As soon as my mother heard about it, she put in a counterclaim. She said that even though she had annulled their partnership when he left the Corps, she had a right to be compensated for the way he had hurt her and damaged her reputation. It’s possible, I guess, that she was trying to prevent me from making what she believed would be a bad decision. But the way she went about it only made things worse.’
Riyya made a kind of peace with Rav. She listened with uncritical attention to his tales of unlikely adventures in the cities and settlements of the Belt; Rav questioned her about the Climate Corps and its work, and told Hari that the algorithms that controlled Ophir’s weather systems were trivial, but not without interest. Another day, he asked Hari if he and Riyya were having sex yet.
‘I’d have sex with her, if I was inclined that way and if I happened to be baseline,’ Rav said. ‘She’s what passes for intelligent amongst your people, and as far as I can tell she isn’t deformed. You’ll go your separate ways after this little adventure, so you won’t be inconvenienced by any lasting emotional attachment. And you’d be better for it. It would relieve some of your tension. It would be harmless fun.’
‘Once again, you demonstrate your ignorance of us simple-minded baseliners.’
‘Oho. I’ve embarrassed you. One thing I do know about baseliners: you make basic human interactions needlessly complicated. A consequence of your primitive wiring, I suppose.’
‘It’s true that I don’t know why you spend so much time with her.’
Rav smiled. ‘Perhaps I’m trying to make you jealous.’
He had touched a nerve. Seeing Rav and Riyya together, talking easily, laughing, studying windows and picts hung in the air between them, made Hari feel suspicious and, yes, envious. Made him feel that he was watching the kind of life he wouldn’t ever be able to enjoy, reminded him of the way he’d felt about Sora and Jyotirmoy and all the other passengers he’d briefly befriended, reminded him of the ease and comfort of his family.
The dull ache of grief and loss. Always there, even when he didn’t notice it.
Brighter Than Creation’s Dark maintained a constant distance behind Mr Mussa’s ship. Hari and Rav had no intention of catching up with it. They planned to follow it to Tannhauser Gate, to give Mr Mussa a chance to make contact with the people who wanted to buy Dr Gagarian’s head. The people, Hari was certain, who’d been behind the hijack of Pabuji’s Gift. Who’d be ready to make a deal with him, when they discovered that the files in the tick-tock philosopher’s head had been turned into a spew of random noise.
Early in the voyage, as they cut a chord across the inner edge of the main belt, Hari borrowed time on the ship’s comms and fired off a brief message to Earth, to Ioni Robles Nguini, explaining who he was and why he was interested in the young mathematician’s collaboration with Dr Gagarian. Two days later he received a brief reply from a representative of the Nguini family: a solicitous young woman who offered her condolences for his loss, said that Ioni Robles Nguini was not prepared to discuss his work with Dr Gagarian, asked him to refrain from sending further messages. Hari sent them anyway. They were not answered.
‘His family know what happened to my father, and to Dr Gagarian and your family, and the others,’ Riyya said. ‘They’re protecting him.’
‘His family is powerful and wealthy,’ Hari said. ‘It survived several revolutions, and the rise and fall of the True Empire. One of his ancestors was President of Greater Brazil. An aunt and his eldest brother are senators in the government. His mother is the head of the country’s judiciary. Other relatives are senior officers in the army. And they’re frightened of me?’
‘Or the hijackers, the assassins . . .’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Is that a polite way of saying that you don’t think it’s likely?’
‘Perhaps he has secrets that his family doesn’t want us to know. Something he discovered, or something Dr Gagarian told him,’ Hari said. ‘Tamonash said that Mr Mussa tried to distract him by pretending that Ioni Robles Nguini wanted to buy Dr Gagarian’s head. I’m beginning to wonder if it wasn’t some kind of double-bluff.’
‘We’ll find out about the tanky’s client soon enough,’ Rav said.
They were talking in the big spherical compartment that Rav shared with his son. Sitting on what was presently the floor, in the fractional pull of the ship’s acceleration. Padded walls curving around them, randomly studded with light panels. Rav’s son was busy with some menial task in a recess, doing his best to be invisible. When Hari had explained the relationship between Rav and his son to Riyya, she’d said that she thought it horribly sad that they were trapped in a tradition that no longer had any meaning. ‘The son can’t find out who he is until Rav dies, and Rav can’t ever really know his son,’ she’d said, and hadn’t been consoled when Hari had told her that Rav wasn’t interested in anyone but himself.
Now, Riyya studied a pict that Hari had discovered in the public archives of the institute where Ioni Robles Nguini worked, and said, ‘He’s so young. Younger than me.’
‘He’s a mathematician,’ Hari said. ‘And most mathematicians do their best work when they’re young.’
‘A universal fault of baseliners,’ Rav said. ‘You’re cute, as children. Bright-eyed, fearlessly curious, with an insatiable appetite for novelty. And then, all too soon, your brains calcify.’
‘Unlike you, the everlasting child,’ Hari said.
‘Everlastingly creative and ingenious, always open to new ideas,’ Rav said.
‘Easily bored. Never entirely serious.’
‘It’s true,’ Rav said. ‘I am easily bored. I’m bored with speculating about whether this boy-genius could be some kind of criminal mastermind. The Saints hijacked your family’s ship, youngblood, and hired the assassins who killed Riyya’s father and the others. They want the files inside Dr Gagarian’s head, and I have absolutely no doubt that the rogue tanky will try to sell it to them when he reaches Tannhauser Gate.’
‘An ancestor of Ioni Robles Nguini once used cloned assassins,’ Hari said. ‘Grown in ectogenetic incubators, any number of them, tailored and trained for infiltration and murder. Just like Deel Fertita and her sisters.’
‘More than fifteen hundred years ago, during the so-called Quiet War,’ Rav said. ‘Why the look of surprise? Did you think you had at last discovered something I didn’t already know?’
‘Clearly, I discovered something
you didn’t want to tell me about,’ Hari said.
‘Something I didn’t bother to tell you about, because it’s meaningless,’ Rav said. ‘I admit that I fleetingly entertained the idea that either the boy wonder or someone else in his family commissioned the assassins, but tailored clones have been used with varying degrees of success in hundreds of wars and disputes. Human history is finite, and seems to be full of recurring patterns. But coincidences all too often are no more than coincidences, given spurious significance by observer bias.’
‘Yet the assassins killed every one of Dr Gagarian’s associates except Ioni Robles Nguini,’ Hari said.
‘The Saints believe they will become as gods,’ Rav said. ‘But they are not gods yet. They cannot throw lightning bolts to Earth. Everything will become clear when we reach Tannhauser Gate. And then, I promise you, there’ll be a reckoning.’
3
Anyone could sell anything to anyone else in Tannhauser Gate’s free zone, but all goods were tagged on entry, every transaction had to be certified and taxed by its bourse, and its owners, the League of Christ Militant, severely punished anyone caught trying to evade paying their dues by smuggling contraband, japing tags, or bribing officials and brokers. Hari used Rav’s account to access the bourse’s register, looking for someone who specialised in tracing dubious deals and tracking down stolen property. He found something else. He found Rember Wole’s sister. And when he reached out to her, he discovered that she had been looking for him.
Her name was Khinda. Khinda Wole. Like her brother, she was a broker. A friend in Tannhauser Gate’s police had told her that the commissars of Fei Shen had tried to contact her brother; that they’d been seeking information about the son of one of his clients, who claimed to have escaped from dacoits. She had sent a message to Hari, but he had already fled the city. And she had also traced Tamonash Pilot, who had promised that he would pass on any news about his nephew or any other members of his family.
‘But I heard nothing, and thought it was a dead end,’ she said. ‘Imagine my surprise to hear from you now.’
‘My uncle is somewhat unreliable,’ Hari said.
It was difficult to hold any kind of conversation because of the signal lag between Brighter Than Creation’s Dark and Tannhauser Gate. They sent short statements back and forth. Speaking, waiting for a reply, responding.
Hari told Khinda about the hijack of Pabuji’s Gift and his adventures on Themba and in Fei Shen and Ophir, told her about Mr Mussa’s theft of Dr Gagarian’s head. She told him that Rember and Worden had disappeared after setting out for a meeting with the crew of a salvage ship.
‘It seems that they were lured into a trap,’ Khinda said. ‘No one in the salvage crew talked to them – the police questioned them and checked their comms records, and there is no evidence that Rember and Worden went anywhere near their ship. Their bodies were found in the free zone two days later. Their bioses and the files and caches in their workshop had been purged. And there were signs that they had been tortured. The police believe that it was a transaction that had gone badly wrong. One of the hazards of trying to make illegal trades in the free zone, they said. I tried to tell them that Rember and Worden had never dealt with dacoits or reivers, that they’d always worked through the bourse, but the police wouldn’t listen. I don’t have any traction with them, or with the synod, because I’m not a member of the League, and neither were my brother or Worden. So that was that, file closed. My friends and I have been trying to find out what we can, but we haven’t turned up anything useful. And now you tell me that it is something to do with the hijack of your ship. Okay. What I want to know is, how can you be so sure?’
Hari told Khinda about Deel Fertita and Angley Li and the other assassins, told her that Angley Li had travelled to Ophir from Tannhauser Gate, asked her to find out what she could about the woman, her friends and associates, whether they had any connection with the Saints. He sent the pict of Angley Li he’d found in Ophir’s commons, told Khinda that one or more of her sisters might be living in Tannhauser Gate.
A long wait, then Khinda asked if he thought that one of Deel Fertita’s sisters had killed her brother and his partner.
‘It is possible,’ Hari said. ‘But there is more to this than these women. They work for the hijackers. Who may be the Saints, or may be someone else. That is why we need to find out who Mr Mussa contacts, when he arrives at Tannhauser Gate. Who he meets. Every detail of any transaction he makes on the bourse. My friend thinks we should hire an impartial broker. I think he’s wrong. What do you say?’
‘That was a good touch,’ Rav said, afterwards, ‘making her think I don’t think she can do the job. A nice bit of reverse psychology.’
Hari said, ‘It’s the truth, isn’t it?’
‘It’s true that I don’t trust people I haven’t met. Are you sure she won’t go to the police?’
‘Even if she did, the police wouldn’t care. And even if the police did take an interest, they wouldn’t stop Mr Mussa from trying to sell the head. He’s just another trader in stolen goods. As long as the League gets its cut, he can sell whatever he likes to whoever he likes.’
‘Sometimes – not often, but once in a while – I think I’ve underestimated you.’
‘We were lucky to find her,’ Hari said. ‘And we need all the luck we can get.’
‘Luck is something you make, not something you’re given,’ Rav said. ‘Has it occurred to you that she might be using us, just as we’re using her?’
‘I hope that we are all helping each other, because we all want the same thing.’
Rav smiled. ‘Yes, why not?’
This was some two hundred hours before Mr D.V. Mussa’s ship was due to dock at Tannhauser Gate. Brighter Than Creation’s Dark was twenty-six hours behind it.
Hari discussed tactics with the eidolon of his p-suit, which possessed a cache of old war-gaming files. He practised negotiations with her. He worked up various strategies he could fall back on in case the negotiations failed. The eidolon advised him that they were all too dangerous, said that he did not know enough about his enemies, and lacked the capability to confront them safely.
‘When I neutralised the hijackers’ drone on Themba,’ she said, ‘I accessed combat files I did not know that I possessed. Unfortunately, I am unable to access them now. Perhaps I require a trigger to do so.’
‘Perhaps,’ Hari said.
He hadn’t told her about the neural net in his skull, and the djinn that crouched inside it. He hadn’t told Riyya, either; neither had Rav.
‘She’s a minor player in a game much bigger than she can imagine,’ the Ardenist said. ‘The less she knows the better.’
They all had their secrets.
Sometimes Hari sat quiet and still in his little sleeping compartment, eyes closed, mumbling his little mantra, all things shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, trying and failing to feel his way into the neural net that was wrapped around the inside of his skull, trying and failing to evoke the djinn. Sometimes he’d open a mirror window and study his reflection: gaze into his own eyes. He knew it was foolish, pure superstition, but he looked anyway, trying and failing to catch a glimpse of a spark or a shadow, daring the djinn to show itself.
He read in his book. It was presenting him with more stories now, as if responding to the way he flicked – tap tap tap, on/off – past everything else.
Two in particular stayed with him. In the first, a young woman on Saturn’s giant moon Titan discovered one of the fabled gardens created by the great gene wizard Avernus, hidden inside a bubble habitat buried at the bottom of a deep rift. When she cycled through its airlock the young woman found that it was still lovely and perfect centuries after the gene wizard’s death: groves of slender birch trees standing amongst black rocks and lawns of thick black moss, lit by bright chandeliers. But as she walked through it, it began to die. Chandelier light dimmed to an eldritch glow. Her p-suit boots left white prints in the moss that began to
grow like puddles of spilt milk. The fresh green leaves of the birches around her darkened, turned red, and began to fall, a red snow fluttering down across the dying piebald lawns. And the paper-white bark of the trees began to darken too, turning black as soot. The young woman realised that she had triggered the garden’s death, that she had become Avernus’s collaborator in a work of art. That she was the sole witness to its transient beauty. The spills of white widening across the floor. The red leaves fluttering down. The skeletons of the leafless trees blackening as if consumed by an invisible fire. She sat in the middle of the garden, aching with sorrow and wonder and awe.
The second story began in a holy city threatened with invasion by a True battle fleet. The city’s two priest-kings burned the sole copy of the sacred book at the heart of their religion, so that it would not fall into the hands of the infidels, and divided their people into two groups and fled into the Kuiper belt. The priest-kings had memorised every word in the book; each established a refuge where the children and children’s children of their followers learned the sacred text by heart. But as generation succeeded generation errors crept into the memorised text, subtly changing it, subtly changing the creed and customs of the religion. A million years passed. At last, the long, slow orbits of the icy kobolds of the refuges brought them close. After first contact the two groups immediately declared war, each convinced that the other was a nest of heretics, and the bitter battles left no survivors.
Hari discussed these stories with Riyya, and she told him stories about her work with the Climate Corps. Tending the superconducting nets that balanced temperatures across the world city, the air-conditioning plants with their vast grids of catalytic polymers that absorbed excess carbon dioxide and generated oxygen. Generating weather by altering the strength and direction of air currents, heating or cooling them, seeding them with moisture. Precipitating falls of rain or snow by lifting and cooling moist air currents, or by spraying aerosols of microscopic particles that nucleated raindrops or snowflakes. Creating radiation fog, advection fog, evaporation fog, supercooled freezing fog . . . Weather-work was an art, and Riyya had been learning how to be good at it: how to make rain fall in an area as small as a field or a town block for a precise duration; how to ramp up a storm or a blizzard; how to prevent chaotic runaway events in which small errors could, if not checked, quickly become magnified into catastrophes.