Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  Jyotirmoy said, ‘Your childish trick badly injured three of our people, but I would like to think that we are still friends. That we can forgive each other and patch up this misunderstanding.’

  Hari said, ‘You were an interesting passenger. I admired you. I admired your skill and enthusiasm. I even admired the way you jumped ship. But I don’t want to follow your path.’

  ‘You can’t take back your ship without our help, Gajananvihari.’

  ‘Watch me,’ Hari said, and told Eli Yong, who had by now traced the parasitic feed, to cut the connection.

  Rav’s son told Hari that they were bound by ties of blood. ‘The people who hijacked your family’s ship also killed my father. We have common cause against them. And I feel an obligation towards you. My father pretended to be your friend, but he was planning to extract the files in your neural network and sell them.’

  ‘To the Saints,’ Hari said. ‘Blaming them for the hijack of my family’s ship, claiming we had common cause against them, it was all a fantasy. An attempt to hide his real plans. And it worked. I really thought he wanted revenge for being expelled from the Republic of Arden. I really thought they were his sworn enemies.’

  ‘He had many enemies, but they were all of his own making,’ Rav’s son said. ‘And he was exiled from the Republic some years before it went over to the Saints. He quarrelled with one of the old ones about an obscure mathematical point, lost the duel, and refused to apologise or admit that he was wrong. Ever since then, he’d been living by his wits. You’re not the first he preyed on. You’re a very long way from being the first. I am ashamed of my part in it. In all of it. I had to obey him – it was my duty, it is how we are – but I swore that I would not follow his path. And after he died, after he was killed, I swore to help you in any way I could. A small attempt to make good all the crimes in which I have been complicit. And here I am.’

  ‘You’ll help me take back my family’s ship?’

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘And then we’ll find these assassins.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are they really Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters?’

  ‘My father matched DNA from skin cells taken from the assassin in the skull feeders’ chamber with records held in Ophir’s commons. He also discovered where they lived,’ Rav’s son said.

  ‘It’s somewhere in the Saturn system, isn’t it? Somewhere ahead of us.’

  ‘On Enceladus,’ Rav’s son said, and opened a window that displayed various views of domes and spires crowding a broad setback in the shadow of a vast pleated ice-cliff. ‘They were satraps of the True Empire. They supplied cloned, tweaked soldiers, and cadres of elite guards. They created the janissaries who served two suzerains. Of course, they’ve greatly dwindled since then. But they still live on Enceladus.’

  Hari said, ‘Rav found all this out in Ophir.’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘And he didn’t tell me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Did Rav contact them? Did he try to negotiate with them?’

  ‘I know he talked to the Saints. To Levi. He told me about his negotiations when we arrived at Tannhauser Gate. Told me what he was going to do. If he also talked to Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters, or if he decided that dealing with them was too dangerous, he left no record of it. He did not tell me everything,’ Rav’s son said.

  He had changed since Hari had last seen him. He was straight-backed now, looked Hari in the eye while they talked, and spoke as he pleased. He had been a cypher, a shadow; now he had presence, the heft of character. He had come into his own. He had taken charge of his destiny.

  They talked about whether Eli Yong could unpick the files still locked inside Hari’s neural net. Rav’s son said that she was surprisingly resourceful, but not entirely trustworthy. Hari agreed, and said that he wouldn’t need to rely on her expertise if his father could be retrieved or recovered from the memory cores on Pabuji’s Gift.

  He still hadn’t told Riyya about the picts he’d been shown: Nabhoj with two of the assassins. Nabhoj, or Nabhomani. He didn’t tell Rav’s son either. He secretly wished that the assassins had killed his brother after he’d helped them repair Pabuji’s Gift, and was ashamed and disgusted because he knew that he was hoping he wouldn’t have to confront his brother and deal with his treachery.

  He gave an account of how Rav had died; Rav’s son said that he was surprised that it hadn’t happened sooner.

  ‘The old man put himself in danger so often that he should have died a thousand times. He took unnecessary risks. He liked to take his time, stalking his prey. He liked to have what he called fun.’

  Hari said, ‘Is that what he was doing with me? Having fun?’

  ‘His idea of fun. He was easily bored, but you caught his interest.’

  ‘I suppose I should try to be flattered.’

  Hari’s feelings about Rav were complicated. He did not feel that he had been betrayed. Duped, fooled, used, yes, but not betrayed. It was clear that Rav had intended to steal and sell Dr Gagarian’s files from the outset. As soon as he’d heard Hari’s story. As soon as he’d seen what was inside Hari’s head. Yet he’d twice saved Hari’s life, and without his help Hari would not now be heading towards Pabuji’s Gift. And although he’d been a thief and a trickster, he hadn’t been as ruthless as he’d often claimed to be. He might have been planning to sell Hari to the highest bidder, but he hadn’t cut off Hari’s head, or dumped him in a hibernaculum. So Hari’s anger was tempered by gratitude and, yes, sorrow. Rav had been a thief. Deceitful, dishonest, unscrupulous. But he’d also been a friend.

  He tried to explain this to Rav’s son, who was much less forgiving.

  ‘Everything he did was part of a plan to enrich himself at your expense. Any good that came from it was accidental.’

  ‘Well, if I was a fool to trust him, I was a lucky fool,’ Hari said.

  ‘You were naive. An innocent targeted by a skilled and experienced predator. And now he is gone, caught up in and killed by his deceptions, and I am free to make a name for myself. I have sworn that it will grow longer and more intricate than his, and that when I get a son I will be a kinder father than my father ever was. Rescuing you was the second step in honouring that promise.’

  ‘And the first?’

  ‘Before I left Tannhauser Gate, I retrieved your p-suit. Would you like to speak with it?’

  ‘Very much,’ Hari said, surprised and delighted.

  Although the p-suit’s comms had been comprehensively trashed, the eidolon appeared as soon as Hari invoked her. A shadowy sketch in the red light of the stowage locker, her eyes faint and flickering sparks. ‘Something happened,’ she said. ‘I’m not what I was.’

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry for it,’ Hari said. ‘I’ll try my best to fix you, but I’m not sure if I can get you back to what you once were.’

  He had stretched the p-suit in a repair frame. The eidolon gestured towards it, said, ‘I’m not in there any more.’

  She guided him to his cubicle in the passenger module, to the book that had once belonged to the ascetic hermit, Kinson Ib Kana. Hari had left it behind when he’d crossed to Tannhauser Gate. When he picked it up, a single sentence shimmered in its black face:

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anyone else, these pages must show.

  He said to the eidolon, ‘Is that you, or the book?’

  ‘The book has a mind of its own.’

  ‘It tries too hard to show how clever it is. How did you manage to insert a copy of yourself in its memory?’

  The eidolon hummed and shrugged. ‘I’m not what I was.’

  ‘Perhaps I can port you back into the suit, when I’ve fixed it.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea, Gajananvihari.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The eidolon bent close, whispered. ‘There’s someone else in here with me.’

  7

&nbs
p; While Hari and Rav’s son revised and re-revised their plans to storm Pabuji’s Gift, Eli Yong and Riyya separately studied the copy of Dr Gagarian’s files that the head doctor had ported into Brighter Than Creation’s Dark’s mind. Riyya was looking for anything associated with her father’s research, and soon found something that distressed and disturbed her. A sheaf of messages from her father elaborating details about a conspiracy to suppress his work, orchestrated by agents working for the seraphs.

  ‘He thought that these agents were controlled by entoptics derived from the Bright Moment. He was treating himself with his own entoptics, trying to make himself immune. I never knew,’ Riyya said, with pained bafflement. ‘We talked about his work, but he never told me about this.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean he was crazy,’ Hari said. ‘There was a conspiracy, after all. Maybe the seraphs weren’t involved, but it killed him, it killed my family. And we’re still caught up in it.’

  Riyya said, ‘It goes much deeper than that. Deeper and weirder. My father believed that entoptics coded in the baseline human visual system are evidence that something had altered the structure of the brains of our distant ancestors. Some kind of backward-acting influence from their deep future – our present. He thought that the seraphs had reached back in time and bootstrapped our ancestors to intelligence, so that their descendants would create the QIs which were the seeds of the seraphs . . .’

  ‘I’m familiar with the idea,’ Hari said. ‘But it wasn’t the seraphs who did it, in the version I was told. It was Sri Hong-Owen. She somehow became distributed through the entirety of human consciousness. Not just contemporary human consciousness, but the mind of every person who ever lived.’

  Aakash had talked about this hypothesis more than once. It was possible, Hari supposed, that he’d been influenced by Riyya’s father. Spooky to think that they had been discussing bizarre ideas and making plans based on them, all unknown to their children. Who were now beginning to understand that they’d been entangled in those plans for far longer than they’d suspected.

  Riyya said, ‘I always knew that Salx was unusual. Obsessed, driven. But this isn’t any kind of philosophy. It’s a maze he lost himself in. It’s magical thinking.’

  She was disturbed and angry. She said that her father seemed to have worked up an elaborate and grandiose conspiracy theory to justify resigning from the Climate Corps and abandoning his family.

  ‘He tried to turn it into a story,’ she said. ‘He thought he was a hero battling dark and mysterious forces. He thought he was saving human civilisation.’

  ‘He built his apparatus,’ Hari said. ‘That’s real. A real accomplishment. You should be proud of him, Riyya.’

  But she wouldn’t be comforted. ‘This thing my father and your father and the others shared, it poisoned their lives. And it poisoned mine, and it poisoned yours. Not because their work was wrong, or blasphemous. Not because they were trying to discover things that mere mortal humans aren’t supposed to know. But because they turned it into a conspiracy. They tried to keep it secret.’

  ‘They worked long and hard to uncover the secrets of the Bright Moment. That’s why it is so valuable.’

  ‘My father once told me the difference between magic and philosophy,’ Riyya said. ‘He was trying to explain the importance of his work. He said that magicians refuse to share their secret knowledge because it is hard-won and personal. Every magician practises a different form of magic. Every act of magic is affected by the operator’s skill and state of mind. But philosophers deduce universal laws by deducing the simplest possible explanations for observable phenomena, and testing those explanations with experiments designed to falsify them. There are no secret philosophical laws because all laws are derived from the universe. The observable universe; the universe of things. Anyone can discover those laws. Anyone can use them. Anyone can repeat anyone else’s experiment and obtain the same results. My father’s work cost him everything he had. And for what? For something anyone could find, if they looked hard enough.’

  ‘But they didn’t,’ Hari said. ‘Your father, my father, Dr Gagarian, they were ahead of everyone else. They had the prize everyone else wanted.’

  ‘They shared a secret,’ Riyya said. ‘But they couldn’t keep it secret for ever. Because it was derived from common experience. From something that happened to everyone who was alive when the Bright Moment passed through the Solar System. It wasn’t magic; it wasn’t a secret. But he forgot that, my father. After Dr Gagarian stopped communicating with him, he began to think like a magician. He was afraid someone would steal his work, or use it against him . . .’

  ‘And someone did try to steal it,’ Hari said. ‘And we’re going to make them pay for what they did. You’ll see. We’re almost there, Riyya. We’re almost at the end of it. We have fought off assassins and fanatics. We have tracked down my family’s ship. We’ll find the answers to all our questions there.’

  Brighter Than Creation’s Dark crossed the orbit of Iapetus and entered the realm of Saturn’s inner moons and their storied cities and settlements. Some of the first colonists of the Solar System had settled there, and won their independence from Earth’s power blocs. Descendants of those colonists had fought against the True Empire, bitter battles that had ended in the destruction of many of their cities, and the second conquest of the Saturn system. But although the True Empire had fallen after the seraphs had imposed the Long Twilight on Earth, its defeat had not revived the fortunes of the cities of Saturn’s moons. Ten million people had once lived there; now, less than thirty thousand eked out an existence in half-ruined cities and settlements.

  Unchallenged by any traffic system, detecting no other vessels but the cutter that was still doggedly pursuing it, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark crossed the orbit of Hyperion. It crossed the orbit of Titan, and Rav’s son shut down the motors and began to adjust the ship’s configuration. The pods crawled over each other, lining up along the spine of the ship, and the outermost layer of the largest pod jacked up and spread out to form a hemispherical heat shield.

  The motor flamed on again, and they were accelerating inwards. Past the orbits of Rhea and Helen. Past Dione. Past Calypso and Telesto, past Tethys, Enceladus and Mimas. Flying on across the plane of the ring system.

  The rings were not what they once had been. Centuries of human activity and interference had altered them. The Cassini Division, between the two major segments, the A and B Rings, was much wider, and there were new gaps in the spiralling lanes of the rings. As the ship sailed inwards, Hari glimpsed black flecks orbiting within the bright ring segments: manufactories the size of shepherd moons which had once swept up icy chunks of ring material and digested them and used their water and primordial soot to construct bubble gardens. A pharaonic project begun long before the rise of the True Empire. And there were hundreds of gardens orbiting inside the rings, too. Most, like the gardens in the Belt, were dead. Yet some still lived, and the stars of their chandelier lamps glittered in little constellations along the edges of ring segments and within gaps swept clean by the manufactories. Hari wondered if anyone lived there; wondered if anyone marked the passing of Brighter Than Creation’s Dark.

  And then the inner edge of the rings slipped past and they were falling towards the blurred butterscotch pastels that banded Saturn’s vast globe. The feathery swirls of an equatorial storm lay dead ahead. The motors cut off again and for a few minutes they were in free fall, and scrambled for the acceleration couches that extruded from the floor of the big pod. Gravity returned, grew steeper and steeper as the aerobraking manoeuvre converted the kinetic energy of the ship’s excess velocity to heat. Windows showed a shell of ionised gases flaring from rose to white, incandescent flecks of fullerene foam tumbling away from the heat shield, as Brighter than Creation’s Dark scratched a thin bright chord across the outer edge of the planet’s deep ocean of hydrogen and helium. Slowing, slowing, slowing . . . and at last its motors fired up to drive it above the atmosphere and out acr
oss the rings towards apogee, a hundred and seventy thousand kilometres distant, out beyond the orbit of Titan.

  Hari and Riyya shared a meal and searched for the Saints’ cutter. It hadn’t been able to copy the aerobraking manoeuvre, had instead shot past Saturn, decelerating hard. Riyya spotted its bright star far beyond the little constellation of the seraphs, which floated above the apex of the ring-arch.

  Brighter Than Creation’s Dark swung around the night side of the gas giant. The pale, shrunken sun dawned beyond the sweep of the rings and the seraphs lay ahead. Blossoms of filmy veils hundreds of kilometres long, insubstantial and beautiful, funnelling out from the dark stars of their information horizons, where minds vastened beyond all human measure were rooted in boundless arrays of knotted and linked optical vortices. Standing waves twisted and non-linearly modulated around fundamental solitons that, according to some philosophers and the beliefs of many cults and sects, tunnelled into other universes where exotic physics supported supernal forms of intelligence.

  Five hundred years ago, at the height of its pomp, the True Empire had declared war on the seraphs. They were the final enemy, the last redoubt of unconquered and uncurbed posthuman intelligence. They had to be eradicated. A battle fleet matched orbit with them, bombarded them with hordes of djinns, blitzed them with fusion pinch bombs, raked them with exotic particle beams. One seraph was destroyed; the rest retaliated. Djinns emerged in the nervous systems of every ship and drone in the fleet, fired up their motors, and sent them hurtling out of orbit on random trajectories. Many plunged into Saturn, or shot across the plane of the rings and were torn apart by impacts with icy bolides. The rest drove outwards until the reaction mass in their tanks was exhausted, flying beyond the orbit of Neptune, beyond the Kuiper belt, beyond the bow shock of the sun’s heliosphere, dead ships crewed by the dead, dwindling into the outer dark of interstellar space.