Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  Hari drifted sideways as the burning giant yawned and breathed out a ball of flame that engulfed the assassin. She tumbled free, and a black ball thumped against her white shirt and writhed and burst, spurting thousands of threads that tangled around her arms and legs, swiftly wove a cocoon that held her in a close embrace.

  The giant began to shrink and fade. Two broomstick scooters dropped through its dimming image. Khinda Wole steered one, Riyya behind her, clinging to her waist; two men rode the second.

  Khinda Wole halted neatly beside Ang Ap Zhang’s cocooned figure. She pulled the threads from the assassin’s face and met her fierce stare without flinching, then looked at Hari. ‘This is the woman who killed Rember?’

  ‘I think so. Yes. She killed Rav. Her and those women. They must have been working for her . . .’

  ‘I saw it,’ Khinda said. ‘I wish I could say that I was sorry.’

  ‘He knocked us out,’ Riyya said. ‘He came out of the jetty and knocked us all out.’

  Hari was about to ask her exactly what Rav had done when Ang Ap Zhang started to shake and quiver inside the rigid weave of the cocoon.

  ‘Don’t struggle,’ Khinda told her. ‘The threads will keep tightening. All the way down to the bone if you keep it up.’

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ one of the men said.

  There was white foam on Ang Ap Zhang’s lips. Her eyes had rolled up. The two men hauled her close to their broomstick and started to work on her, but she was already dead.

  8

  They left the free zone and returned to the docks without incident. Khinda Wole was in a grim mood. Ang Ap Zhang’s suicide had cheated her of her revenge, and she was still angry about being tricked by Rav.

  Riyya told Hari that Rav had emerged from the main lock of Mr Mussa’s ship. ‘He flew out of the jetty with a pistol in his hand. Shot us with tranquilliser darts. Me and Khinda and her friends. I didn’t know what had happened until I woke up, he moved so quickly. Khinda’s friends in the free zone spotted both of you. When we caught up I tried to use the weather against him, but the machinery was too different.’

  ‘You saved me, anyway,’ Hari said.

  They were swimming down a broad corridor, heading towards Khinda Wole’s workshop. Hari, Riyya and Khinda Wole, Khinda’s friends. Skimming along cordways greasy with the touch of thousands of hands, past walls livid with half-life signs and slogans deposited by rival crews and cults and engaged in a slow and patient Darwinian war for lebensraum that reminded Hari of the vacuum-organism pavements on Themba. And he had the feeling he’d always had under the empty black sky of the asteroid: the tingling sense of being watched, of being stalked by some invisible, implacable and all-knowing enemy. It had never entirely left him, but it was stronger than ever now. He was preternaturally alert, starting every time someone came into view. But they all seemed harmless, the few passers-by, men and women dressed in work clothes and suit liners.

  Pirates of the asteroids.

  He was exhausted, badly bruised, lacerated by the teeth of the assassin’s whip, but he wanted to keep things moving forward. Khinda Wole said that she would attempt to arrange what she called a parlay with the Saints, but Hari wanted to talk to Rav’s son first. He wanted to tell him that his father was dead. He wanted to ask him what Rav had been planning to do. He wanted to try to retrieve Dr Gagarian’s head from Mr D.V. Mussa’s ship, too. But first he needed to rest and regroup, organise his thoughts, work out the extent of this disaster.

  They had turned off the main drag and were swimming down the branch that led to the workshop when it happened. Three figures dressed in white, white masks covering their faces, appeared ahead of them; three more crowded in behind. One of Khinda’s friends reached for the slug pistol on his hip, there was the howl of an energy weapon, its beam hot and bright in the confines of the corridor, and the man spun backwards, trailing globs of blood through the air.

  Riyya, Khinda and the second man held out their empty hands, drifting in mid-air, and Hari felt the hot pulse of the djinn, saw livid tangles of repurposed graffiti whip out at the ambushers, and the air was suddenly full of a blizzard of what looked like scraps of white paper. He thought of Ma Sakitei’s butterflies; he thought of Gun Ako Akoi’s snow. And then he was blinded as a fluttering storm of white scraps whirled around him, fastening to his face and scalp, flowing together, tightening. His body locked in a powerful cramp; his bios blanked; all sense of the djinn vanished.

  Someone gripped his shoulder, turned him. A woman spoke in his ear.

  ‘The Saints bid you welcome, Gajananvihari Pilot.’

  PART FIVE

  THE COLD EQUATIONS

  1

  Afterwards, after each session of the long, slow exorcism, the Saints allowed him to wander out into their garden. Gradually, he would remember who he was, where he was. Why he was there. He would say his name. He would say the names of his dead. Speaking slowly, shaping the syllables as if they had never before been uttered. He would sit on the blood-red lawn outside the tented cluster of rooms and stroke the half-life grass. Tough haulms hissing under his palms.

  ‘This is real,’ he’d say. ‘This is really happening.’

  He walked paths with no particular destination in mind, stopping now and then to stare at the trail of footprints he had made in the black sand, an echo of a half-remembered story. The nearest and newest were white and sharply printed; those further back were losing definition, dissolving into the default black of the smart grains. He climbed the endless slope of the garden, wandering among trees and meadows until he found the place he recalled from times before, and climbed the steep stair to his favourite vantage point.

  It was a broad ledge rebated under the top of a cliff assembled from chunky blocks of flowstone. Rivulets of seep-water pulsed amongst mosses and ferns that grew in the erratic joints of the clifftop, feeding a braided stream that tinkled into a pool of clear water. He liked to study the intricate miniature jungles of liverworts and mosses and ferns. Droplets beading actual leaves and stems. Laddered arches of leaves. Transparent hairs bristling from ridged stems. He studied the falling water, the ripples in the pool. He studied the tiny transparent shrimp that flicked over black sand like erratic ghosts, like his thoughts. Water lipped the edge of the pool and fell past the cliff, angling away, torn to mist before it reached the treetops.

  On either side of his perch the rising curve of the gardened floor bent towards the vanishing points where floor and roof intersected, and the inner surface of the wheel habitat flexed above, the bright stars of chandelier lights hung beneath a pale blue overhead interrupted at regular intervals by window-strips. One hung directly above the ledge, a long, narrow quilt of diamond panes. It glowed with weak, reflected sunlight during the day, and at night, when the chandelier lights dimmed, gave Hari a view of spars dwindling towards the white cylinder of the central hub, and the arch of the opposite side of the wheel, more than two kilometres away.

  Mostly, he liked to sit on a saddle of stone and look out across the treetops. Wind walked and whispered in the leaves. Birds sang, bright interrogative threads of music rising near and far. There was always a drone hanging close by, watching him, sometimes asking him questions, sometimes darting off and returning with morsels of food or a thimble of red tea or gritty black java.

  Sooner or later Jyotirmoy would find him, stepping lightly up the stair of artfully set stones to the ledge, sitting beside him, telling him that he’d done well.

  Hari had only hazy memories of the exorcisms. Perhaps it was a kindness of the remembrancers and philosophers, or perhaps it was a side effect of their drugs and the clamp on his bios. In any case, he was grateful that he couldn’t remember much, because what he could remember was bad enough. What was done to him, to wake the djinn. Its inchoate rage and pain.

  It was powerful and stubborn, but the exorcists were making progress, according to Jyotirmoy.

  ‘The djinn is subtle and malicious,’ he told Hari. ‘We can’t begin to
recover the files until every trace of it has been eliminated, and eliminating it has been harder than we first thought it would be because it has deep roots in your brain and in your nervous system. But the worst is over, now. Your father used you cruelly. He turned you into a slave, and burdened you with his secrets and lies. But with our help you will be able to unlock his shackles and remove that burden. With our help, you’ll soon be truly free, free to find out who you really are.’

  ‘You pretend that this is for my own good. You pretend to be kind,’ Hari said, with a feeble flicker of defiance. ‘It would be kinder to kill me.’

  Jyotirmoy sat quietly, looking off in the distance, while Hari wept. He was a slim, handsome, elegantly composed person, glossy black hair swept back from his high forehead and gathered at the back of his neck in a short pigtail. Like Hari, he wore a white spidersilk jacket fastened by two rows of plastic toggles, white spidersilk trousers. Perched on the rock, his back straight and his legs crossed at the ankles and his hands resting on his thighs, he gave the impression that he had paused in the middle of a dance. He made Hari feel like a clumsy child.

  Hari’s old friend had joined the Saints soon after he had jumped ship and run away from his parents. The work he’d found in the docks of Trantor, driving dumb, strong machines, had left him too tired to practise properly, or to work on his choreography. Sometimes he would perform solos from old classics in one or another of the city’s parks, but few people were interested in him or in the stories his dances evoked.

  Every day, he’d see the Saints process through the streets of the city. They were enthusiastic, but lacked skill and discipline. They shuffled along with lumpen solemnity; when they struck poses while their leader declaimed a short piece against the seraphs or about the triumph to come, their transitions were stiff and awkward and their expressions were little better than frozen grimaces. Masks they did not properly inhabit.

  He mentioned this to one of the Saints who asked him for a donation to support their cause, and a few days later a young woman approached him after he’d finished one of his routines in the park, asking questions about his dancing, why he did it, the meaning of his performance, and so on, and so forth. She was waiting for him in the park the next day; they talked again. She asked him why he had run away from his parents, asked him what he wanted from life, and explained how she had come to realise that the Saints spoke the truth, how she had decided that she must help them take their message to every part of the Belt. They talked a long time, sitting in the park, rambling through streets. They ate at a stall. At last, Jyotirmoy took the woman to the cubicle he rented in a stack near the docks. Early the next morning he woke to find that she was already dressed, sitting on the edge of the sleeping niche, watching him. ‘You should meet some friends of mine,’ she said. ‘I think you can help them.’

  And so Jyotirmoy began to visit the school of the Saints. He led classes in movement and dance. He listened to the sermons of the adepts, took part in group discussions. Soon, he gave up his rented cubicle and his job, moved into the school, and began to lead their processions through the city. He did not sleep with the woman again, but after he had been baptised he sometimes accompanied her when she went out into the city to recruit new members.

  Forty days ago, almost three years to the day after he had joined the Saints, he had been summoned to a meeting with a high adept, who told him that dacoits had hijacked a ship whose crew and only passenger, a tick-tock philosopher, had been working on the problem of the Bright Moment. Jyotirmoy knew the ship, the adept said. Pabuji’s Gift. She told him that one of the crew, a young man named Gajananvihari Pilot, had escaped the hijack and taken important files with him, and now he had fallen into the hands of the blessed.

  ‘You were his friend,’ the adept said. ‘You will help us bring him into the true light.’

  And then Jyotirmoy knew with a great glad surge that his entire life had been shaped towards a single purpose.

  ‘You are part of a noble and holy work,’ Jyotirmoy said, after Hari’s slow seep of tears had ceased. ‘With your help we will do things that will echo down the halls of human history.’

  ‘I’m trying my best.’

  Hari was embarrassed by his stupidity and weakness. He knew that it was a side effect of the drugs that helped his brain and body endure the exorcisms, but he hated himself for it. Hated the way his emotions spilled like water from his cupped hands.

  ‘We know it is hard,’ Jyotirmoy said, ‘but the end is in sight. Soon, we will be able to access the files cached in your neural net. Soon, we will know what the tick-tock philosopher discovered, and we will use that knowledge to reshape history. We will make the crooked way straight. We will walk the true path, in light and in love.’

  His face shone with a pure, simple joy. He took Hari’s hands in his.

  ‘We’re so fortunate to live in such times!’

  2

  Sometimes, Hari would see Levi walking in the garden. A tall, slender man dressed like any ordinary Saint in a plain white jerkin and white trousers, ankling along at the head of a small congregation of adepts and sacristans, the five mind sailors in their golden suits, and the drones that recorded his every moment. Intricate patterns unfurled from his footsteps, racing out across the path in a steady and unbroken wave of white on black. Pictures from his life. The faces of martyrs. Over and again, a single moment from the Bright Moment. The young man on his bicycle, turning to look out at the viewer before he was engulfed in a flare of light.

  Levi and his crew trod on holy ground.

  Three of the adepts were Ardenists, broad-shouldered giants whose faces and arms and chests were scarred by old disputes, the folds of their wings falling from shoulders to wrists and hips like leathery cloaks, golden hair bushed out from white ribbons knotted at their brows. They talked gravely with Levi as they walked, conjuring windows and picts.

  Hari had felt a cold, sharp pang the first time he saw them. The memory of his friend, his friend’s betrayal and fall, pierced him like sunlight falling through glass. His feelings about Levi were more complicated.

  He had not yet met the prophet. The leader of the Saints. He watched the procession from a distance but didn’t dare approach it. Here was his enemy. Here was the man who had changed the course of his life, passing by in his pomp.

  Jyotirmoy and other adepts had told him that the Saints were not responsible for hijacking his family’s ship and the murders of Dr Gagarian and his associates. They said that the assassins were nothing to do with them, that they had not sent the messages, that they were not holding Nabhoj or any other members of his family prisoner. Hari didn’t believe them. He was stupefied by drugs and bone-deep exhaustion, but whenever he saw Levi walking in the garden he felt the beast stir in its basement lair. Had fantasies of flying at him, attacking him with a stone, a broken branch, fists, teeth.

  He never acted on these fantasies. Never took one step towards Levi when he passed by at the head of the little procession. He forced himself to watch, to stand calmly with no particular expression on his face. It was a discipline, this small show of defiance: like all prisoners, Hari had discovered the importance of self-control. But although he told himself that attacking Levi would be futile, that he would be shot or peppered with paralysing darts, zapped by drones or brought down and beaten by acolytes, that it was better to watch the man and sharpen his hatred and wait for the moment when he could act quickly and decisively, when he could scream and stoop, he knew that the moment would never come, knew that it was a fantasy as futile as the fantasies of revenge he’d conjured in the long and lonely days of exile on Themba, and felt a filthy mixture of fascination and anger and helpless self-loathing wash through him like a sickness.

  The worst thing of all was that neither Levi nor any of his followers spared him a glance. No one noticed Hari’s tremendous simulation of calm. He was invisible, of no consequence. He didn’t matter. The pain inflicted on him didn’t matter. Only what he carried in his head mat
tered. Only that. The remembrancers and sacristans told him that the ceremonies of exorcism were done with all of their love, but it was a lie. It had to be a lie, because how could anyone love someone they did not care about?

  Hari always tried to remember that. Tried to remember that he meant nothing to the Saints. That he should never hope for mercy or kindness. It was another form of discipline.

  During the days of Hari’s long exorcism, Jyotirmoy told him stories about Levi’s life and the rise of the Saints. Dancing for Hari as he had once danced on Pabuji’s Gift, now as then teaching him how to make the appropriate genuflections and expressions, how to flow from position to position, moment to moment. Telling the story of Levi’s rebellion after the Bright Moment, and his revelation during his exile. Telling the story of Levi’s overthrow of the elders of his church and the establishment of the company of Saints, of how Levi had led the first Saints out of their garden into cities and settlements of the Belt, where they discovered that dozens of sects had sprung up in the aftermath of the Bright Moment, each claiming to possess exclusive knowledge about its true meaning. But only Levi and the Saints knew the truth, Jyotirmoy said. That was why so many had recognised him as a true prophet. That was why, just three years after his rebellion against the elders of his church, he had been at the head of an army of tens of thousands, and had begun to plan his assault on the false gods of the seraphs.

  The story of Levi’s invitation to the Republic of Arden and his long discussions with the old philosophers was Jyotirmoy’s masterpiece: a virtuoso performance that evoked the aerial displays and fights of the Ardenists, and the slow forging of a plan to use the information horizons of the seraphs as portals to a universe whose physics would allow merely human intelligence to vasten, as Sri Hong-Owen’s intelligence had been vastened.