Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  ‘It’s a nice thought.’

  ‘It’s a story. What we’re caught up in isn’t anything like that. For one thing, we’re talking about the kind of story we’re caught up in,’ Riyya said. ‘And in those old stories they didn’t ever stop to think if they were doing the right thing in the right way. They just did it.’

  ‘We look backwards for inspiration and guidance because everything’s old. Because everything’s been done before,’ Hari said.

  A sudden sharp breeze blew through the birches and their leaves danced and flickered.

  Riyya said, ‘You know what scares me most? That if we are trapped inside a story, it isn’t yours or mine. It’s Levi’s fantasy of becoming a god.’

  ‘This thing we’re in, whatever it is, we’re in it together,’ Hari said.

  But it didn’t reassure her.

  5

  Several days later, Hari and Riyya were eating breakfast in the shade of the grandfather live oak when Jyotirmoy appeared, traversing the half-life lawn with his usual languid elegance. Hari knew why he had come, knew what he was going to say. Felt it like a stone in his stomach. He scarcely noticed when Riyya reached out and gripped his hand.

  Jyotirmoy took Hari to the little cluster of rooms where he had been exorcised, and the crew of remembrancers and sacristans prepared him in the ordinary way. Stripping off his clothes. Strapping him to the chair. Fitting a mask that delivered a chilly draught of dry, oxygen-rich air. Treating him with drugs that paralysed him and distanced him from the world.

  The remembrancers and a small woman in a grey smock and black leggings were studying windows that showed different views of Hari’s brain and the neural net wrapped around it, quietly conferring with their backs to him. At last the senior remembrancer leaned over Hari, asked him if he was ready. Hari tried to smile. He wanted to let the man know that he wanted to get this done, but could do little more than move his eyes.

  The remembrancer turned and looked at someone and said, ‘He’s yours.’

  The woman in the grey smock stepped towards him. Child-sized, her bare scalp tattooed with spidery symbols. Hari had met her before, in a city halfway around the Belt. The head doctor, Eli Yong.

  She studied him with a cold and clinical gaze, said something to the chief remembrancer. And then there was a blank space, and then she was inside his head.

  Black water lapped islands of white moss. The yellow eyes of torches pulsed in the twilight. Skulls hung from poles like clusters of bony fruit. A sprawl of bodies – the small congregation of skull feeders, the dead woman. The assassin killed by Hari’s djinn. His father’s djinn. She lay on her back, bloody stars glistening on her black bodysuit.

  ‘Trite and melodramatic, I know,’ Eli Yong said. ‘But it’s easy to model and its cues trigger useful subsets in your dynamic core. Do you remember when we last met?’

  She was a solid presence, fully realised, but Hari was little more than a floating viewpoint. He couldn’t move, but discovered that he could speak.

  ‘I remember that you said that you couldn’t help me. Either you lied to me then, or you’re lying to the Saints now.’

  ‘I told you the truth then, and I’ll tell the truth now. I didn’t come here to help the Saints. I came to help you.’

  ‘You had better tell me why.’

  ‘You walked into my shop with an exquisite neural net inside your head, and a djinn fiercer than any I’d ever had to deal with. I wanted to know more, but before I could get in touch with you again, you and Rav had fled Fei Shen after some trouble with a group of skull feeders. I knew Rav by reputation, and reached out to him. He told me that he had other plans for you, involving a tick-tock matriarch in Ophir, but I made myself useful to him. I studied the image of the neural net I’d captured, and researched the techniques of the Memory Whole. I talked to one of the skull feeders. I reported the conversation to Rav and sent him the commissars’ file on this woman,’ Eli Yong said, gesturing towards the dead assassin. ‘She arrived on Fei Shen shortly after you. A trader, according to her bios, but the settlement where she claimed to live had no records of her. She was progeric, and had been tweaked in several interesting and rather antique ways. They used to make warriors like her in the long ago.’

  ‘I know. I’ve met some of her sisters,’ Hari said.

  ‘I constructed this simulation from a file Rav sent me. Isn’t the level of detail wonderful? He has eidetic recall – if only I’d been able to look inside his head,’ Eli Yong said. ‘As I anticipated, Rav had no luck in Ophir. Tick-tocks are skilful, in their own way, but rather specialised. I knew the matriarch wouldn’t be able to get past your djinn, although I expect she faked disinterest to disguise her failure.’

  ‘We went to her to open Dr Gagarian’s files,’ Hari said. ‘But they had been destroyed.’

  ‘That’s why you went. Rav wanted to look inside the tick-tock philosopher’s head, yes, but he also wanted to know what you were carrying inside that neural net of yours. When it didn’t work out, he called me. As I knew he would. I was supposed to meet him at Tannhauser Gate, but by the time I arrived he was dead and you had vanished. So I made a new arrangement.

  ‘The Saints were once a power, but they are much reduced now. The near-assassination of their leader, schisms during his long recovery, the failures of their so-called mind sailors . . . It was easy to intercept the message to their school in Tannhauser Gate, easy to fool them into thinking I was an agent of the Memory Whole. I gave them advice about dealing with the djinn, then told them I would have to unlock the last of your files in person. And here I am,’ Eli Yong said. ‘And I will unlock those files. But not now, and not here. A ship is ready to take us away: Brighter Than Creation’s Dark. I believe you know it.’

  ‘Rav’s son. You were working for Rav, and now you’re working for his son.’

  ‘With him, not for him. Luckily for you, he isn’t anything like his father. He has interests of his own. He’ll tell you all about them when we get back to the ship.’

  ‘It’s a pretty story. Why should I believe you?’

  ‘This little shared experience is taking place in only a few seconds as measured in the world outside, and our time is almost up. But to prove that we want to help you, I’ll tell you the name of the original of this assassin and her sisters. The name of her mother. The commissars couldn’t find a match for her genotype, but they were looking in the wrong place. Looking for people still alive. Rav found her elsewhere. In the deep past.’ The head doctor, Eli Yong, smiled at Hari. ‘It turns out that the assassins are tweaked clones of Sri Hong-Owen.’

  ‘She went to Fomalhaut,’ Hari said. ‘She and her children left the Solar System for Fomalhaut fifteen hundred years ago.’

  ‘Not all of them, it seems. I know where they live. If you want to find out, come with me,’ Eli Yong said. ‘And now it’s time to wake up.’

  ‘Tell me what you and Rav hoped to find. Why you wanted to open my neural—’

  Hari woke to the roar of wind and water blowing somewhere outside the dim room. A light flickering in one eye, then the other.

  ‘You’ll do,’ Eli Yong said, and helped him sit up.

  He was naked. A fat white patch was stuck on his right arm. Eli Yong crossed the room, stepping around the bodies of adepts and remembrancers and sacristans, came back with his clothes.

  ‘Can you dress yourself? Of course you can. Quickly now. We don’t have much time.’

  Hari wanted to get out, wanted to follow the woman – it was a physical desire, a force lifting him out of himself – but a stubbornness at his core resisted the impulse. ‘Wait,’ he said, and ripped the patch from his arm.

  ‘That was feeding you antidotes to the remembrancers’ drugs,’ Eli Yong said.

  ‘And what else? Something to make me obedient, compliant?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s probably done its work by now. Get dressed. Hurry.’

  ‘I need to understand something.’

  ‘I’m he
re to rescue you from these fanatics,’ Eli Yong said. ‘That’s all you need to know for now. Get dressed, I’ll explain everything else on the ship.’

  Hari remembered the question he had tried to ask in the dream. ‘Why did you and Rav want to open my neural net?’

  ‘To find out what was inside, of course.’

  ‘I had a lot of time to think about what Rav wanted,’ Hari said. ‘Why he was happy to take me to Tannhauser Gate. Why he turned on my friends there. Why he wanted to hide me on his ship. He wanted you to pull the files from my neural net, yes, but not because he wanted to help me. It was because he wanted to sell them.’

  ‘We really don’t have time for this,’ Eli Yong said.

  ‘Who was he going to sell the files to?’

  ‘I was able to knock out most of the Saints because their bioses are cross-linked via the commons of this garden. A foolish and easily exploitable design flaw. But I couldn’t incapacitate everyone – I couldn’t touch the Ardenists. They are rebooting the system right now. And the others won’t remain unconscious for long. Get dressed. We need to leave right now.’

  ‘I won’t leave until you tell me who Rav’s clients were,’ Hari said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter any more. Rav is dead. Things have changed.’

  ‘Prove that I can trust you. Answer the question.’

  They were staring at each other. Eli Yong looked away, looked back.

  ‘It was the Saints,’ she said. ‘The Saints, to begin with.’

  ‘He hated the Saints. He wanted to destroy them.’

  ‘Is that what he told you? He told me that he had talked to Levi. He wanted to sell them Dr Gagarian’s head, at first. And when that didn’t work out, he was going to sell you,’ Eli Yong said. ‘That’s why he didn’t simply steal the tick-tock’s head. He knew about your neural net even before I told him, guessed that your father had stashed a copy of the files inside it.’

  ‘X-ray spex,’ Hari said.

  ‘I told him I could get inside your neural net and copy whatever it contained. I also told him that he needed to keep you alive. That your neural net wasn’t anything like the tick-tock’s storage modules: the files it contained might be compromised if he killed you and cut off your head. I saved your life then, and now I’m saving it again, if you’ll let me,’ Eli Yong said.

  ‘Gun Ako Akoi tried and failed to open my neural net. That’s when Rav accepted your offer.’

  ‘He told me to travel to Tannhauser Gate. If I could extract the files from your net, he was going to sell copies through its free zone to whoever wanted them. The Saints, the assassins . . . And if I couldn’t extract the files, he was going to sell you. But none of that matters now,’ Eli Yong said.

  ‘You and Rav. And now you and Rav’s son,’ Hari said, and pulled on his trousers.

  ‘Rav’s son doesn’t want to sell you or your cache of files to anyone. He wants to know what Dr Gagarian knew. He wants to carry it forward. You can talk about it, the two of you, on the ship. Are you ready? Come on, then.’

  They hurried through the chain of rooms, out into the lashing roar and sulphur light of a storm. Wind and rain smashed into Hari, drenching him from head to foot; Eli Yong grabbed his elbow, pulled him across the drowned lawn. They splashed through ankle-deep water, ploughed through squalls that lashed rain sideways.

  ‘Your friend is helping us out,’ the head doctor shouted. Her tattooed scalp gleamed. Her grey smock was plastered to her slender body. ‘In exchange for a ride.’

  Hari followed Eli Yong up a steep slope of trees and black rocks. Trees heaved and writhed as if trying to tear themselves out of the ground. Splintered branches and windrows of green leaves lay everywhere and whirled on the wind and smashed against Hari’s body, his face. He clawed them off, slogged on up the muddy slope, possessed by a fierce wild elation that Riyya’s storm had woken in his blood, in the marrow-heart of his bones.

  Eli Yong climbed ahead of him, small and hunched and tenacious. He yelled to her, asked if they were heading towards an airlock. The docks were at the hub in the centre of the turning ring of the habitat, but there might be emergency airlocks along the rim . . .

  ‘There’s another way!’ Eli Yong shouted back. Her sodden leggings and smock were spattered with mud and there was mud streaked on her face. She looked like a proxy got up for war.

  A path threw narrow switchbacks as it climbed towards the overhead. Water cascaded from level to level. The wind was growing stronger, a relentless howling force, but when Hari and Eli Yong reached the top of the path the rain suddenly stopped, the last of it torn into scattershot fusillades that blew away down a long pavement of bare black rock.

  Riyya stepped from the shelter of one of the folds in the low cliff on the other side of the pavement. She was soaked from head to toe. Her cropped hair was plastered to her skull. Her fierce smile reminded Hari of Rav.

  She said, ‘You took your time. I almost ran out of rain.’

  Hari said, ‘How do we get to the ship?’

  Riyya pointed at the overhead. One of the habitat’s window-strips was directly above them, and something hung beyond its diamond panes. A froth of spherical pods, a long spine tapering away . . .

  ‘Rav’s ship!’

  Hari tried to imagine how Rav’s son had managed to match the spin of the inner surface of the wheel. Crabbing his ship down one of the spokes with cables and grapples, perhaps, or gradually increasing its velocity as it spiralled out from the hub . . .

  Eli Yong said, ‘I’ve just lost my connection to the system. We must keep moving.’

  They climbed a helical stairway to a service walkway beneath the overhead. Wind lashed them; the stairway hummed like a plucked wire. Far below, clumps of debris pelted through the air and trees heaved and surged, mostly stripped of leaves now. Riyya clutched Hari’s arm, pointed. Small black shapes, scooters, were coming towards them, riding close to the overhead.

  ‘We need ninety seconds,’ Eli Yong said.

  She was clinging to the rail of the walkway with both hands and looking up at the ship. A rectangle of dim red light had opened in the curve of the largest of its pods, above the far end of the window-strip.

  Hari understood, and said, ‘Where’s our emergency lock?’

  ‘We don’t have one,’ the head doctor said.

  A sudden raw blast struck Hari and drove him against the rail. His wet clothes flattened against his skin. The scooters were very close now. Levi rode in the lead, standing in his saddle, aiming a short black staff at Hari. The Ardenists were right behind him. Then a howl of wind struck them and they checked and slid backwards, bucking and spinning. One of the Ardenists leaped from his machine, wings outspread, was caught in a gust that tumbled him head over heels, and dropped straight down and smashed into the restless trees. Levi brought his scooter around and looked straight at Hari, and wind struck him broadside and swept him away.

  ‘Twenty seconds!’ Eli Yong said.

  Something moved in the warm red light, a figure emerging, casting something on to the panes of the window-strip, retreating. Hari grabbed Riyya by the waist, clung tight to the rail. There was a sharp crack, a vast howling scream: a ragged hole had been blown into the triple layers of the window-strip and a torrent of air was blasting through it into vacuum.

  Half a dozen thick black cables dropped down, their blunt ends studded with little red lights, questing this way and that. A cable whipped around Eli Yong, lifted her, dragged her through the hole. Two more snaked towards Hari and Riyya. He told Riyya to close her eyes, felt a cable loop around them and tighten, and pushed away from the rail as hard as he could.

  The rush of escaping air spun them as they were hauled up. Hari yelled in exhilaration and terror. His ears popped and he and Riyya jerked to a halt, spinning clockwise, counterclockwise. There was a rushing roar and his ears popped again. He opened his eyes, saw that he and Riyya were hanging inside the padded cubical space of a cargo pod, saw someone in a p-suit standing beside the rim of a
big hatch, reaching up, unlatching his helmet, smiling at Hari.

  ‘Welcome back,’ Rav’s son said.

  6

  The wheel habitat of the Saints traced an orbit some twenty-five million kilometres from Saturn, a sixth of the distance between the sun and Earth. Recklessly squandering reaction mass, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark drove inwards, outpacing the cutter that had belatedly given chase, crossing the retrograde orbits of shoals of irregular outer moons. The Saints bombarded its comms with pleas and threats. If Hari returned, all would be forgiven; if he failed to honour the agreement he’d made, he and his friends would suffer Levi’s wrath. Once, one of the drones launched by the cutter managed to evade the collision-protection system, clamp itself to the hull, and extrude threads that infiltrated the outskirts of the ship’s mind. A few moments later, Jyotirmoy’s eidolon floated in front of Hari, asking him to make direct contact, promising him every kind of help with his quest if only he would return.

  ‘You have what you wanted,’ Hari told him. ‘Now I’m going to take back what’s mine.’

  ‘You need our help,’ Jyotirmoy said.

  ‘I have all the help I need.’

  ‘No, you don’t. There are many people who want to know what you know. Who would kill you and your friends to get it. We can protect you from them, and help you take back your ship.’

  ‘How’s the storm, by the way? Has it blown out yet?’

  Riyya had found it easy to infiltrate the wheel habitat’s old, open-source climate-control machinery. When Eli Yong had locked out the Saints and given her complete command, she’d turned all the ventilators in the same direction and set them pulsing on maximum thrust, ramping up a storm that had grown towards hurricane force as it chased its tail around the world.