Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  The inset closed. The weird sisters said, ‘That was the situation exactly one hour ago. We have no doubt that the Saints will soon gain complete control of your ship, and take it where they will.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Hari said.

  He had expected that the Saints would attempt to board Pabuji’s Gift. He had planned for it. And now that it had happened there was no going back. Meanwhile he must remain calm, refuse to be cowed or coerced, project confidence and control.

  ‘You hijacked my ship,’ Hari said. ‘You erased my father, killed the woman who raised me, and killed the tick-tock philosopher Dr Gagarian. I escaped, and vowed to hunt you down and destroy you. But I know now that my brothers were equally guilty. You agreed to help them take control of our ship if they helped you to kill Dr Gagarian and pointed you towards his associates. Have I got it right?’

  ‘We could have done what needed to be done without them. But their help made it easier.’

  ‘Dr Gagarian was close to finding out something important about the Bright Moment. Something you wanted to remain hidden.’

  ‘What people call the Bright Moment was not a gift. It was a message. A message aimed at us, and only us. The method of delivery meant that everyone saw it, but only we understood it.’

  ‘And you are frightened that other people will prove you wrong. By studying it, by discovering what it really means. Is that it? Is that why you killed Dr Gagarian and his colleagues, and stole their discoveries?’

  A silence stretched. Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters hung outside the window, filmy veils fluttering, gill slits pulsing, faces shuttered. Hari began to believe that he’d blown it, that he’d gone in too hard. But then their collective voice whispered in his comms.

  ‘Most care only for the message itself. They imbue it with significance it does not possess. They build religions around it. They see in it, as in a mirror, a reflection of their desires and fears. Our mother would be amused. It would confirm everything she believed was wrong with the human species.

  ‘But a few people were not interested in the message, but in the way it was sent. In how it propagated. In how it acted on each and every human. They were a danger. They were the children whose fingers curl around the trigger of a weapon whose power they cannot comprehend.’

  Hari said, ‘You took it on yourselves to kill the people you believed to be dangerous. You assassinated them. Executed them without any warning.’

  ‘If we told them that what they were doing was dangerous, would it have stopped them?’

  ‘You had no right,’ Hari said.

  ‘Sri Hong-Owen was our mother. Whatever she became, before her vastening and afterwards, she is our mother still. And we are her arm and hand.’

  Hari studied their blank faces and felt sorry for them. The blind worship of the past that had flooded most of what passed for civilisation these days ran deeper here than anywhere else. How could he have thought to overcome the immense foolishness of human history? But he had to try. He had to try to give some shape and meaning to his loss.

  The weird sisters were talking, telling him that his family’s struggle was over. That they would keep what was left of it alive. He realised that they meant him.

  ‘It is good that you came to us. We will keep you here,’ they said. ‘We can learn from you.’

  ‘It isn’t over,’ he said. ‘One of Dr Gagarian’s colleagues still lives. At least one.’

  ‘The boy on Earth? The mathematician? We will reach out to him, by and by. He is not important.’

  ‘And then there’s everyone else,’ Hari said, and explained what he had done.

  Hari had escaped the hijack of Pabuji’s Gift with Dr Gagarian’s files, but by the time he had returned to his family’s ship the so-called secrets hidden inside the files were longer secret. Too many people had been able to examine them, copy them. And then there was the question of revenge.

  ‘I won’t deny that I wanted to hurt you,’ he told Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters. ‘I wanted to avenge what had been done to my family. I wanted to put an end to the intrigue and the killing. And I realised that the best way to do it would be to make it impossible for you to keep your secrets secret. So, after I gained control of Pabuji’s Gift, I broadcast copies of the files across the Solar System.’

  With the help of Eli Yong, he had compressed Dr Gagarian’s files and tagged the package with a brief explanation and used Pabuji’s Gift’s comms to send it to as many people as possible. To Ma Sakitei, in Fei Shen. To his uncle, in Ophir. To Khinda Wole, in Tannhauser Gate. To every contact and business associate of his family – scores of government entities, several hundred individuals. To the cities of Saturn’s moons. And to the seraphs, aiming the big dish of Pabuji’s Gift’s comms at each of them in turn. He knew that it was probably as futile as the prayers and petitions of their supplicants, but it had seemed necessary to let them know that merely human minds had attempted to approach the mystery of Sri Hong-Owen’s Becoming. It was a fitting memorial for his father and Dr Gagarian and the others: a kind of closure.

  ‘I don’t know what the seraphs and everyone else will do with the information,’ Hari told the weird sisters. ‘Most will probably decide the files are fake, or pseudo-philosophical gibberish, or some kind of trick. And even if no one finds them interesting, if no one is inspired to set out on the same path as Dr Gagarian and his colleagues, it will have been worth it, because the knowledge you wanted to bury beneath the ice of Enceladus is scattered far and wide across all the worlds beyond. You can’t undo it. You can’t unshatter a broken cup. But there is something you can do. Something we can do together.’

  He paused, waiting to see if they’d take the hook. He felt as if he’d run a long race in deep gravity. Breathless, heart pumping.

  The weird sisters hung beyond the window in the wall, veils beating against some slow cold current. Their large unblinking eyes suggested deep reserves of patience and composure. After all, what was time, down here, where nothing changed and nothing wanted to change?

  Their small mouths did not move, but their collective voice whispered in his comms.

  ‘You underestimate us.’

  ‘I hope I do. I hope you’re better than I think you are. I hope that you’ll work with me, help me make amends for all the people who have died because of this.’

  Another pause. Then:

  ‘How?’

  ‘I was brought up in a family of junk peddlers. We dug through the ruins of history, extracted information and artefacts, and tried to get the best price for our finds. Then my father became involved in the research of Dr Gagarian and his colleagues. He gambled that their work could be used to develop new technologies, to build a business empire. Instead of mining old ideas, we would forge new ones, revitalise philosophical investigation, and sweep away the cults and sects that sprang up in the wake of the Bright Moment. They promise their followers entry into utopias based on claims of exceptionalism. We would provide the foundation for a utopia based on hard facts and philosophical principles, and open to all.

  ‘My father failed,’ Hari said. ‘I freely admit it. He failed because he made the same mistake as you. He thought he could police ideas. That he could collect them and make a profit from by selling them, just as we sold old machines. But ideas aren’t artefacts. They don’t exist in any one place – they can be found by anyone who goes looking. And in any case, there’s no intrinsic value in ideas. It’s what you do with them that counts. You say that you serve Sri Hong-Owen. That you are her arm and hand. Let me help you. You know things other people don’t know. Let me connect you with them.’

  He told the weird sisters about his family’s contacts. He explained that there were still many philosophers in the Belt. Their influence was greatly diminished, he said, and they were scattered amongst the cities and settlements, but they exchanged ideas and argued and collaborated, as Dr Gagarian and his colleagues had collaborated. Hari’s family had been part of that network. Carrying philosophers from rock to roc
k, garden to garden. Giving them a place to work, a place where they could discuss their work. He told the weird sisters that they could join this network. And because they were the daughters of Sri Hong-Owen, one of the greatest philosophers in the history of the human species, they would be an important voice. With his help, they could promote their mother’s ideas and discoveries.

  ‘You know things other people don’t know. We can use that knowledge to make things right. To move forward from the mistakes of the past. You don’t have to give me an answer now. I want you to think about it. I want you to discuss it. But even if you decide against helping me,’ Hari said, ‘you’ll have to let me go.’

  ‘We have others plans,’ the weird sisters said.

  ‘I didn’t come here to surrender. I came to tell you what I did, and to make you an offer. And because we can’t yet trust each other, I took precautions. Keep watching my ship. You’ll soon see what I mean.’

  ‘The ship is not yours to command. The Saints have control of it now.’

  ‘Think it through,’ Hari said. ‘I knew that the Saints were chasing me. I knew that they would try to take my ship, after I left it. Do you really think I’d let them? If they try to start the motor, it will uncouple from the ship. If they don’t, it will uncouple anyway. And when it does, it will fire up and aim itself at the weakest spot in the roof of your little sea. And only I will be able to stop it.’

  Hari sweated out a short silence. He’d made his pitch; Nabhomani couldn’t have done better. What happened next was up to the clients.

  ‘When we return, we will wake your father,’ the weird sisters said at last. ‘He will live again, and we will force him to help us. You, unfortunately, will not survive the process. We will have to strip your brain neuron by neuron, your neural net link by link. But be comforted that your death will help us find a way of undoing the harm you have done.’

  ‘You can’t unshatter a cup. You can’t unring a bell.’

  ‘You underestimate us. As Aakash Pilot will discover, when he wakes.’

  ‘I’m your prisoner, but you are prisoners too. Sri Hong-Owen quit the Solar System more than fifteen hundred years ago. She reached Fomalhaut, and then she went somewhere else. And you’re still here. Trapped in this little pocket sea under the surface of this small moon. Trapped in a fantasy that you can police or suppress investigations of the Bright Moment. I’ve shown you that you can’t. Everything you’ve done since the hijack of my family’s ship shows that you can’t. Think about that, but don’t take too long. If the Saints don’t trigger it first, the motor will fire itself up in a little over an hour.’

  ‘We will return,’ the weird sisters said, and the window blanked.

  ‘Sooner than you think,’ Hari said.

  14

  The wait was much worse, the second time. Hari told himself that everything had gone as expected. That this was just a stage in the process. The weird sisters wanted to see if he had been telling the truth; they’d come back as soon as they saw the motor fire up. And if they didn’t, well, he would die a good death. He’d have the revenge he’d dreamed about, back on Themba. At least he’d have that.

  He talked to the insane cleaning bot, tried to persuade it that its work was done, that it could rest. It wouldn’t listen.

  He tried to read in his book, a long story about a young man trying to escape a vast, ancient, populous city, but the words and sentences wouldn’t stay put. He’d look away for a moment, distracted by some stray thought, and discover that he’d lost his place. He’d find himself reading the same paragraph or line for the second or third time.

  Thirty minutes passed. An hour. The clock counted down to zero, began to count up.

  Hari supposed that condemned men knew how this felt. How it felt to watch the approach of the preordained moment of your death.

  At last, without warning, a window opened and Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters were there, leaning in the black water.

  An inset opened too, showing a chunky cylinder throwing out a long violet spear of fusion light. Pabuji’s Gift’s motor, flying free. Hari felt a clean shock of relief. His plan had worked. Either because the Saints had tried to start the motor, or because the clock he’d set up in the motor’s mind had been triggered. In any case, the explosive charges had severed the motor’s cables and spars, and the motor had fired up and aimed itself at a particular spot in Enceladus’s south pole.

  ‘You will stop it,’ the weird sisters said.

  Hari stowed the book in his p-suit’s pouch, saying, ‘I can change its course, if you let me speak to it.’

  ‘Speak, then.’

  Channels opened in Hari’s bios.

  He said, ‘I’ll order it to miss Enceladus on this pass, but it will swing around Saturn and come back. And it won’t change course a second time. If you let me go, I’ll send a command as soon as I return to my gig. The motor will destroy itself. Flare its reaction mass and blow itself into harmless fragments. There may be some damage to surface structures, but the roof of your little world will protect you. But if you don’t let me go . . .’

  ‘You will die too.’

  ‘I’m prepared to die. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come here. But I wanted to meet you. To talk, face to face. To tell you about what I did, yes, but also to make my offer. And if you let me go, I hope you’ll think about that offer. I hope you’ll think about it seriously, and I hope that we will be able to discuss it seriously. I want to honour my father’s memory by continuing his work. As I think you want to honour your mother’s memory.’

  ‘We will talk about this when you have done what needs to be done.’

  ‘Of course,’ Hari said, and opened a link to the motor.

  For a moment, he inhabited its control system. He saw that it was burning harder than it should be and that it was much closer to Enceladus than he’d anticipated. Very much closer: alarmingly close. He called up the eidolon, but something else leaned towards him and smiled in his face. His father’s sly, shrewd smile, worn by the djinn.

  ‘As always, I do your father’s will when you will not,’ it said.

  The connection snapped shut. Hari tried and failed to reopen it.

  ‘It still comes,’ the weird sisters said.

  ‘Wait,’ Hari said. His thoughts fluttering like a panic of wings as he tried to understand what had just happened. The eidolon was supposed to be riding the motor, driving it towards Enceladus, towards the weak spot that Hari had mapped in the icy floor of the rift; the djinn was supposed to be aboard Pabuji’s Gift, harrying and distracting the Saints . . .

  ‘You lied,’ the weird sisters said, and turned as one and swiftly swam away.

  The moon pool burst open and two assassins shot through, masked, dressed in supple skintight black. At once, a churning ghost light filled the pod, alive with snapping jaws and burning eyes. The cleaning bot sprang at one of the assassins and she knocked it aside and it smashed into the pool and sank. The ghost light snapped off and both assassins dived at Hari.

  He barely had time to close up the visor of his helmet before he was dragged through the pool into open water beyond. The assassins spun him, crammed him into a net, scrambled onto a scooter and took off, dragging him behind them.

  Down, down.

  All around, rafts were sinking through the water, seeking refuge in the depths. A school of pods scattered away into darkness. There was a flash of light far above, a concussion like the door to another universe slamming shut. Hari saw bright lines whipping through black water. Shock waves. Then they hit.

  The scooter was wrenched sideways and went tumbling end over end. Hari slammed into it, was jerked away, slammed into it again. His p-suit’s tethers whipped out and fastened to the scooter’s flank and he clung there, still wrapped in the net. The two assassins were gone, ripped away. He tumbled in a wild welter of bubbles and clashing currents.

  Then the last of the shock waves passed. Debris sank all around him, silhouetted against a wedge of weak light.

&n
bsp; The scooter, obeying some kind of survival tropism, was rising. A collapsed chain of rafts, crumpled as if squeezed by a giant hand, frames stripped of weed, drifted past. Debris spun in cross-currents. The p-suit’s collision warning flashed and Hari looked all around, expecting to see a raft or pod bearing down on him, saw by deep radar a complex shear surface rising through black water – the reflections of the shock waves from the floor of the pocket sea.

  A strong and pitiless force caught him and spun him, and he was suddenly rushing upwards. Smashing through a seething shudder of water boiling at less than zero degrees Celsius. Hari’s p-suit stiffened to protect him as the scooter bucked and slammed, rising between ice walls on a seething wave that broke and dropped it with a precipitous lurch. The scooter skidded and slewed in a receding wash. Hari saw something looming out of a freezing fog and closed his eyes. The scooter slammed into it. And stopped.

  All around, a furious froth of water was draining from a broad setback littered with fragments of ice large and small. It bubbled and boiled, exploded into storms of ice crystals, feeding a fog that thickened in veils and blew sideways to reveal glimpses of smashed and broken ice.

  A fresh wave broke, caught Hari and the scooter, dragged them towards a seething churn that slopped at the edge of a long gash in the ice.

  The net was wrapped tightly around him, binding his arms and legs. He extruded cutting edges from the fingers of his gloves, sawed at the mesh as best he could. Water washed over him, pulled him closer to the gash, coated his p-suit in a glaze of ice that crackled and broke as he wriggled and sawed. At last, he freed one hand, quickly cut himself out of the net and pushed to his feet.

  He had washed up on a tilted slab of ice jammed amongst a shattering of shards and blocks. Everything was obscured by restless billows and sheets of icy fog. Radar showed the footings of the great cliff of the rift’s wall rearing up three hundred metres away, but there was no sign of the tented settlement or the cableway, and chunks were falling from the cliff in swooning slow motion and bursting on impact. The slab shuddered and bucked; there was a general grinding vibration. The fog blew aside for a moment and Hari glimpsed a vast rushing column leaning into black space, rooted at the close horizon of the little moon, the point of impact of the motor of Pabuji’s Gift.