by Paul McAuley
Riyya turned to him, said with a sudden flash of bitterness, ‘I betrayed my father – his trust in me. I should feel better because it was pointless?’
‘I meant you did the right thing.’
She didn’t seem to hear him. She said, ‘It was pointless. After we left Tannhauser Gate, their friends on Ophir gained access to my father’s possessions. They bribed one of the police, just like we did. And now they are building a duplicate of his apparatus. They showed it to me. And I don’t know if this is funny or scary, but they expect me to approve of what they are doing. To be pleased that they are carrying on with my father’s work.’
They walked a little way in silence.
Hari said, ‘This copy of your father’s apparatus – does it work?’
‘They are close to finishing it,’ Riyya said. ‘They told me that they want to use it to inject some kind of thought bomb into the information horizon of one of the seraphs. They think it will allow them to get a mind sailor past its defences.’
‘And the mind sailor will vasten, or fuse with the seraph,’ Hari said. ‘And then they will be able to use the vastened mind sailor to reach out to everyone on every world and worldlet, and begin a new age of peace and harmony.’
‘Do you think any of it is possible? Could they actually invade and exploit one of the seraphs? Or use my father’s discovery to manipulate people? Control them, inject ideas into their minds . . .’
‘I think they’ve confused magical thinking with actual philosophy.’
‘I hope you’re right. But they seem so certain. So sure that they are on the threshold of a great change.’
‘They’ve been selling that story for twenty years,’ Hari said. ‘They’re very good at it. But it doesn’t mean it’s true.’
Riyya appeared to think about that. Then she said, ‘They told me something else. They told me that they didn’t have anything to do with the hijack of your family’s ship, or my father’s murder. His assassination. They said that he had been killed by agents of the seraphs. They showed me the confessions of agents they had uncovered. Agents of the seraphs pretending to be Saints . . .’
‘I saw those confessions, too,’ Hari said.
‘You said that they were very good at selling their ideas,’ Riyya said. ‘But those so-called confessions were obviously fakes. Performances by mimesists, or real confessions made by poor, crazy people who believe that the seraphs talk directly to them.’
‘I wondered about that, too. But then they showed me something else.’ Hari was smiling. He couldn’t hold back any longer. ‘They showed me where my family’s ship is. They showed me that they didn’t have anything to do with the hijack.’
It was orbiting close to the outer edge of Saturn’s rings, amongst the pack of ships and bubble habitats and platforms that trailed after the seraphs. The Ardenists had told Hari that it was listed in the registry of the city of Paris, Dione as the Jindray Khinchi, had shown him several picts obtained from a follower who worked there. Picts of its captain supervising repairs in Dione’s orbital docks.
Nabhoj. Nabhoj or Nabhomani, it was hard to tell. He was dressed in a black blouse and black trews, Nabhoj’s habitual costume, but his hair was long and caught up in a net, and he had a neatly trimmed beard. Alive a little over a hundred days ago, long after the hijack, accompanied by a woman whom Hari recognised at once.
His first thought had been that his brother was a prisoner. He’d wanted to believe it. Wanted to believe that his brother had been coerced into cooperating with the hijackers. But then he’d remembered what Khinda Wole had told him. That Nabhomani had known Deel Fertita; that he had told Rember Wole to hire her. And there he was, there was Nabhomani, or maybe it was Nabhoj, with one of Deel Fertita’s sisters . . .
Hari wasn’t ready to tell Riyya about that. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. It was family business.
She said, ‘If the Saints know where your ship is, why haven’t they tried to capture it? It has Dr Gagarian’s equipment on board. It may have copies of his files, too.’
‘Perhaps they don’t care to get too close to the seraphs and their supplicants. Or perhaps they tried to hijack it from the hijackers, and failed,’ Hari said. ‘They didn’t tell me everything.’
‘That’s the one thing we can be certain about,’ Riyya said.
Hari took her to his favourite place in the garden. They sat at the edge of the little pool and looked out across the treetops, the sea of leaves heaving in the restless wind. Coriolis wind, according to Riyya. The wheel habitat was spinning to deepen its gravity: objects near its floor moved slightly faster than objects near its overhead because the path around the centre of spin was slightly longer. That was why water fell at a slant. And as with water, so with air. Different layers of air moved at different speeds, and friction between the layers created eddies. Climate-control machinery and landscaped windbreaks broke up these eddies before they grew too big, but couldn’t eliminate all turbulence.
‘I suspect a parable,’ Hari said, trying to keep things light.
‘It is what it is. A simple philosophical statement. This is an old world,’ Riyya said. ‘An old design from the age of expansion. At least a thousand years old, maybe more. A lovely place, but fragile.’
They sat side by side on a saddle of black rock in the sunlight that fell through the window-strip in the overhead, sipping from beakers of hot chocolate delivered by a pair of hummingbird-sized drones. Their bare feet planted on a thin gutter of damp moss, the drop to the treetops directly below. Rainbows glimmered in the feathering braid of water that fell from the pool’s lip.
‘All gardens are fragile,’ Hari said. ‘Too big, too open, stuck in their orbits, unable to manoeuvre . . .’
‘This one’s more fragile than most,’ Riyya said. She drank off the last of her hot chocolate and tossed the beaker out into the empty air. It was blue, the beaker. Blue plastic with a frieze of white interlocked squares at its lip. As it tumbled past the black blockwork of the cliff, a drone flashed through the air and caught it and carried it off. A gust blew across the treetops and leaves heaved and tossed and showed their silvery undersides, a furrow of silver racing after the drone, racing away around the wheel of the world.
Hari said, ‘The Saints made me an offer. They want me to help them capture Pabuji’s Gift. They’ll get any files and equipment left on board; I’ll get the ship, and the hijackers.’
‘It was cruel of them to show you your ship, Hari. Cruel of them to give you hope.’
‘We’ll find who killed our people, Riyya. And we’ll get our revenge. I swear it.’
Riyya gave him a strange, tender look. ‘That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Revenge. That’s all you have left.’
‘They owe us for what they did,’ Hari said. ‘And I intend to make them pay.’
4
Hari and Riyya explored the gardens, walking around and around the little world. They kept away from the Saints, and the Saints kept away from them. They found a cluster of woven sleeping pods hung from the lower branches of a grandfather live oak. Humps in the half-life lawn beneath the tree’s canopy formed seats and tables. There were pools of warm water amongst the black rocks beyond, and a patch of smart sand that absorbed bodily wastes. Drones brought food, the simple fare of the Saints – discs of unleavened bread, harrisa, chickpeas in salted vinegar, ripe figs, apples, pomegranates.
Every day, Hari felt a little stronger. Every day, his mind was a little clearer. He and Riyya told each other stories about their childhoods and their very different lives. There was little left to say about their plight, no point yet in making plans for the future.
One night, Hari woke to find Riyya leaning over him in the faint luminescence of the pod’s weave. He started to speak, fell silent when she pressed a finger against his lips. His mouth was dry and he had an airy feeling of falling. He’d been forbidden to sleep with any of the passengers, but he’d sometimes fantasised that Sora or one of the other young women travelling on the
ship would come to find him. Now, as in his fantasies, the pleasure was heightened by the excitement of transgression, the electric immediacy of Riyya’s presence. She reached down, moved her hips against his until he slid into her heat. The pod rocking as they rocked against each other. Hari came almost at once, and Riyya held him inside herself and ground against him until she gasped and trembled.
They curled together, afterwards, on the yielding floor of the pod, in the dim hush of the garden. When Hari woke, daylight shone through the pod’s translucent weave, and he was alone.
Riyya didn’t want to talk about it. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, when Hari tried to talk about it. And: ‘It wasn’t anything. Back in cadet school, we played around with each other all the time. It didn’t mean anything then, and it doesn’t mean anything now.’ And: ‘Why do people need reasons for what they do?’
So they didn’t talk about it. She deflected his fumbling attempts at intimacy; he began to resent the way she had used him. For relief, to escape the terror and uncertainty of captivity, to assert herself. Instead, they had a kind of argument about their adventures, about whose story it really was. Hari tried to tell Riyya that everything would come right, but she wouldn’t listen to him. ‘Do you think that what the Saints did was necessary?’ she said.
‘Do you think that they tortured you because it served a higher cause? And what about you, Hari? Do you want to punish the people who killed your family because it will satisfy some kind of cosmic balance? Or is it because you are angry and hurt? Do you think you’ll be any less angry, any less hurt, afterwards?’
At last she walked away and left him alone with his guilt and doubt. He had come to believe that his suffering was necessary. That it was part of a transaction. The Saints wanted to know everything about Dr Gagarian’s research; he needed their help to reach Pabuji’s Gift. But he could think of no good reason for what the Saints had done to Riyya. She had been humiliated and hurt. Her wounds were still raw. They might never heal. And he was responsible. He had walked into her life. He had drawn the Saints’ attention to the hijack, to Dr Gagarian’s work and the work of her father.
She came back to him after two days, and they didn’t talk about it again. But Hari’s guilt lingered. Guilt and doubt.
And so the days passed, each much like the rest. One day, they were sitting up on the ledge, looking out across the treetops in companionable silence, when a raw white flash took the world away. A moment of no time, no thought. And then the world came back, as if it had been rebooted. Hari and Riyya looked at each other, and knew that the Saints had tested her father’s apparatus.
Later that day, two adepts came for Hari, and escorted him down one of the spars to the hub of the wheel habitat, the dock at the spin axis. Levi was waiting for him in a gig, a small gold-tinted sphere that darted out from the wheel habitat, followed by half a dozen identical gigs, bubbles of air rising through the sunlit black until Hari could blot out the tiny, turning world with his thumbnail. A ship hung out there, a fat argosy from the last days of the True Empire. As the gig slowly circled it, Levi told Hari about the progress of the Saints’ great work.
‘They have already downloaded a mind sailor,’ Hari said to Riyya, after he returned to the wheel habitat. ‘They took her brain apart, neuron by neuron, and copied her connectome into a viron. They are trying to do what the Ghosts tried to do, out at Fomalhaut. They were going to create mind sailors too, the Ghosts. Somehow fuse them with the alien intelligence that inhabits the core of the gas-giant planet, Cthuga.’
‘My father says they failed because there was no alien mind,’ Riyya said. ‘There were epiphenomena, created by the planet’s magnetic field, that mimicked aspects of intelligent behaviour. Sprites, apparitions. But there was no world-mind until Sri Hong-Owen downloaded or redistributed herself into the sprites.’
‘Well, Levi plans to vasten his mind sailors in a similar way,’ Hari said. ‘He talked for a straight hour about how it’s supposed to work. Half of it philosophy, half theology. I asked him why the seraphs hadn’t tried to stop him. If he could vasten a human mind and interfere with their control of history, why hadn’t they destroyed the habitat, and the ship? He said that the human agents who had tried to kill him before couldn’t reach him out here, and the seraphs themselves responded only to immediate threats. He said, “A man will brush a fly from his face, but he won’t go to war against flies.” Do you have flies, in Ophir?’
‘They’re a useful part of the biosphere,’ Riyya said.
‘I had to ask about them. I told Levi that perhaps the seraphs hadn’t reached out to him because they didn’t consider him a threat. He said they were arrogant, and that would be their downfall.’
‘You were trying to annoy him.’
‘I discovered that it isn’t possible. His fantasy is entirely airtight.’
In the little bubble of the gig, Levi had told Hari that he was looking forward to talking with his father because they had so much in common, had laughed when Hari said that they held completely opposing views.
‘We have taken different paths, your father and I, but we both started from the same place, and we both want to reach the same destination.’
‘You want to prove that Sri Hong-Owen is a kind of god,’ Hari said. ‘My father and Dr Gagarian wanted to prove that she is not.’
‘She is beyond our understanding,’ Levi said. ‘Beyond the reach of ordinary human comprehension; beyond the reach of philosophy and the experiments of Dr Gagarian.’
He launched into another monologue, telling Hari that philosophy could not give a complete account of the universe because of limitations in its reductive methodology. Philosophy reduced the universe of things to its components, catalogued them, tried to fit their properties and interactions into mathematical models. Large-scale properties that could not be anatomised – beauty, grandeur, the splendour and sublimity of scale – were considered to be trivial by-products, emergent accidents that triggered spurious human responses. Philosophy stripped away metaphor, Levi said. And that was where faith was strongest: bridging the reality of the universe and the reality of human experience.
‘Philosophy also fails to give a complete explanation of the universe on its own terms,’ Levi said. ‘Many properties are chaotic: initial conditions are underdetermined, and cannot be used to predict accurately the final state. Measurement of the behaviour of every atom in a small volume of gas will not provide any useful information about the way those same atoms behave in a solid or liquid state on a larger scale, because the phase change from gas to liquid is an emergent property. There is no reconciliation between the very small and the very large, no smooth transition. So we do not need to invoke a god of the gaps, hiding in places philosophy cannot reach, or a god who intervenes with miracles that circumvent the usual natural order or exploit causal lacunae. Divine agency is an emergent property of the universe. If the activity of our neurons affects our consciousness from the bottom up, then divinity affects it from the top down.’
Levi floated above his couch, pale-skinned, dressed all in white, ghostly against the black vacuum. Every now and then a faint tremor passed through his body. He had never completely recovered from the assassination attempt. There had been irreversible nerve damage; he was in pain all the time. But the pain was useful, according to him. A useful discipline, a reminder that he was mortal, and fallible.
‘Philosophy may claim that it does not need our faith and beliefs,’ he told Hari. ‘But we do not renounce philosophy. It provides our basic needs. And if you grant the utility of a maker or an air scrubber, it would be illogical to spurn the rest. The work of Dr Gagarian will be of great use to us; so will the device of the father of your friend. I am told that it is based on a weapon developed by the Trues. And while it is a very poor imitation of the Bright Moment, and its power diminishes with distance, it will play a crucial role in the vastening of my mind sailor.
‘And so all things have followed different paths, yet
come together at the same point. As if foreordained. As if through the workings of a subtle plan beyond the comprehension of merely human minds. The work of Dr Gagarian and his colleagues complements our work. Your father complements me. He will challenge my ideas and my faith, and make them stronger. Yes, I very much look forward to talking with him, and I will not have to wait much longer. And you will help me too, of course, as I will help you. You see how it all fits together?’
Riyya said, ‘He’s crazy, but he thinks that he needs you. That’s a weakness. Something you can exploit.’
‘Unfortunately, I need him,’ Hari said.
They were walking through a grove of birch trees and ferns. Sunlight slanted between the white trunks of the trees and a bird was singing somewhere in the distance – it reminded Hari of the forest biome where he’d been interviewed by Ma Sakitei. He wondered if the gardens of the wheel habitat had been designed by the Free People.
‘You need him to take back your ship,’ Riyya said. ‘But after that?’
Hari knew that she wanted to know if he had a plan to defeat and escape the Saints, but he couldn’t talk about that, and not only because the Saints were almost certainly eavesdropping.
‘Levi told me that the specialist will arrive very soon,’ he said. ‘Once the last file left in my neural net is unlocked, he said, I can head out to Pabuji’s Gift. I don’t trust him, Riyya. But if I’m given the chance, I’ll go. Even if there are secrets hidden aboard the ship that will help the Saints get closer to their fantasy, even if there’s no chance that I’ll be able to escape, I’ll go. Because that’s what this is all about. To find out who hijacked the ship, and employed those assassins.’
‘Agents of the seraphs, according to Levi.’
‘We’ll see.’
Riyya said, ‘If this was one of the old stories, we’d somehow escape just before Levi launched his mind sailor. There would be a desperate fight for control of a crucial machine, and at the last moment one of us would key in a sequence that would shut it down. The seraph would no longer be distracted, the mind sailor would be destroyed and the Saints would be thwarted, the universe would be saved.’