Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  Anyone watching Enceladus would have seen a new geyser rising from the south pole.

  The p-suit’s radar pinged. Shapes were sliding towards him through the streaming rush of fog. Two, three of them, platforms perched on squat reaction motors, ridden by people in antique p-suits. Assassins.

  As they manoeuvred close, calling to Hari, telling him to surrender, something fell out of the sky. At first Hari thought that it was some great shard of the cliff; then he realised that it was a ship.

  His p-suit’s radar showed a figure detaching from its bulk, flying with astonishing speed and accuracy at the assassins. They peeled away, and the figure bounded after them, leaping from point to point in the shattered, restless chaos, launching in a long and graceful arc, colliding with one of the platforms and embracing its rider in a quick vicious struggle, leaping away as the platform spun towards the cliff.

  A quick blink of fire lit the fog. Rav’s son howled in triumph and chased after the two remaining assassins.

  Now something else detached from the ship: a figure riding a broomstick scooter that swooped past Hari, halted with a flourish of reaction jets, sidled back.

  Riyya leaned towards him. ‘Climb on,’ she said.

  Far off in the fog, two tiny stars bloomed and died. Rav’s son howled again.

  ‘Wait,’ Hari said.

  A copy or fragment of the djinn had tried to use the cleaning bot against the assassins. And he knew where it was lodged.

  He stepped towards the edge of the long lead of boiling water. A wave washed to his knees, a seethe of froth and fog. When he pulled the book from the pouch of his p-suit, the fog lit up and his father stood there. Dressed as usual in a white dhoti, bare-chested, lips moving in his white beard.

  ‘Don’t be foolish, Gajananvihari. I’m here to help you.’

  ‘It was never about me,’ Hari said. ‘It was always about you.’

  Faces crowded in, long-jawed, red-eyed, raving. Warnings popped across the display in Hari’s visor: something was forcing its way through his comms. Within moments, it would be trying to get inside his head. Hari raised the book, skimmed it towards the water. Burning faces screamed at him, and then it smacked into the churning flood and whirled and tilted and sank, and the faces guttered out.

  Hari turned away, and walked back to where Riyya was waiting for him.

  PART SIX

  DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH

  1

  Three years after Hari’s confrontation with Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters on Enceladus, the Saints mounted a second crusade against the seraphs. By then, Hari was working with a tanky free trader who called himself Rubber Duck, on the shifting triangle run between the Flora Wolds, the Koronis Emirates, and Ceres. They’d just left Ceres when Riyya, presenting as an eidolon in the cramped lifesystem of Rubber Duck’s dropship, contacted Hari and gave him an account of the crusade. She was working with Rav’s son, helping to refurbish an old garden that orbited in the Cassini Division in Saturn’s rings, and had more details of the debacle than any of the news services.

  She showed Hari several views of Levi’s argosy, accompanied by a small constellation of gigs, lumbering towards the seraph’s vast, gauzy blossom, told him that the gigs had aimed transmissions packed with so-called holy algorithms into the seraph’s information horizon. Based on her father’s work, the algorithms had been meant to paralyse the seraph with topological hallucinations so that mind sailors could infiltrate and vasten themselves.

  The plan had failed, spectacularly. Hari watched three tiny capsules, each containing the stripped personality of a mind sailor, fly out from the argosy. They fell free on diverging trajectories, spiralling down the funnel-flower of pastel veils towards the dark star at its root. But long before they reached the seraph’s information horizon, the capsules began to slow, ploughing up shock waves that thickened around them in layers of nacreous luminescence. Corona discharges flickered around the capsules and they grew hot and bright, miniature novas that burned through their pearlescent shrouds before flaring and fading. Beyond the seraph, the argosy and its retinue of gigs were flung abruptly sideways towards the ring plane, as if struck by a hurricane blast. One view tracked the argosy as it ploughed through mountainous clouds of material at the outer edge of the B ring. The fat ship jolting and spinning as a hail of icy pellets hammered into it, sections of its hull peeling away, debris spewing from ruptured compartments, until at last it collided with a bolide twenty metres across and disintegrated in a flash of superheated gases.

  Riyya’s eidolon said that Levi and his Ardenist advisers had been aboard the argosy. ‘Also Eli Yong. She’d been working with the Saints for the past two years.’

  ‘She had a knack for choosing the wrong side,’ Hari said.

  The eidolon said that the Saints had not given up their holy mission. ‘They claim that Levi was instantly reincarnated. They are preparing a mission to find the vessel of that reincarnation and install him in their wheel habitat.’

  ‘I feel sorry for them,’ Hari said. ‘They won’t ever give up because they really do believe that history is on their side. That something elsewhere or elsewhen, some impossible ideal, is shaping their destiny.’

  ‘None of us can escape who we are,’ Riyya’s eidolon said, reminding Hari of their quarrels before they had agreed to part company.

  After the Saints had abandoned it, Hari had sold salvage rights to the wreck of Pabuji’s Gift to the government of Paris, Dione. He had briefly returned to the ringship, but had found no trace of either the eidolon or the djinn. The ship’s mind and control systems had been ransacked and destroyed by the Saints, and they had futzed the power systems, too, and left the lifesystem open to hard vacuum. And because the Saturn system had a surplus of wrecked and obsolete ships, the sale hadn’t yielded as much credit as Hari had hoped. It had been barely enough to purchase citizenship on Ceres for himself and Riyya; he’d used most of what was left to purchase Dr Gagarian’s head from the synod of Tannhauser Gate, which had confiscated Mr Mussa’s ship and its contents in lieu of docking fees. He’d sent a message to Gun Ako Akoi, asking if she wanted to take custody of the mortal remains of her grandchild, and when it became clear that she wasn’t going to reply he’d had the head and its scrambled files incinerated, and one bright day he and Riyya had hired a skiff and scattered the ashes on the frigid waters of Ceres’s Piazzi Sea.

  Riyya had taken up a position with the biosystem management of one of the dwarf planet’s floating cities, but Hari had found it hard to settle down. He’d been convinced that either the Saints or Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters would try to kidnap or assassinate him, had spent too much time chasing down rumours about them. He’d tried his hand at various menial jobs, tramped all the way around the equator on what the locals called a wanderjahr, and at last had taken up with Rubber Duck. Shortly afterwards, Riyya had returned to the Saturn system. She had never really forgiven Hari for betraying her and trying to deal with Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters on his own, and after their adventure had ended there had been little to keep them together.

  Now Hari asked her eidolon if she had ever heard anything from the weird sisters, asked if they had shown any interest in the Saints, or in the work of Rav’s son and his friends. Riyya’s eidolon told him that if any were still alive they were keeping a low profile. Perhaps they had all been killed, or perhaps they had retreated to the depths of their pocket sea to contemplate their next move. No one knew, and neither Riyya nor Rav’s son had tried to contact them.

  ‘We are thinking about our future,’ Riyya’s eidolon said, ‘not our past.’

  She and Hari talked about their diverging lives. Riyya’s eidolon told him that she was busy with work that was good and satisfying, and as far as she was concerned that would do for now. Rav’s son, who now called himself Ji, the first syllable of what he hoped would grow into a long and storied name, had gathered a crew of like-minded refugees from the Republic of Arden, and they had colonised an abandoned garden and were delving deep
into the intricate puzzles that Dr Gagarian had not had time to solve. It would take years, according to Ji. Decades. Meanwhile, Riyya was tweaking the garden’s climate control, and helping the Ardenists to design and populate its biome. Ji already had a son, and was talking about quickening a second. He, at least, was content.

  ‘And you?’ Riyya’s eidolon asked Hari. ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘I hope I’m getting there,’ Hari said.

  He was busy, anyway. Even though Rubber Duck said that there had never been a worse time for trade, they were always on the move, plying their regular three-cornered route and making the odd side trip to chase down unique machines and other artefacts Hari found through his contacts.

  Rubber Duck claimed to be more than a thousand years old, claimed that he’d been piloting his ship before the rise of the True Empire. Tankies were given to boasting that they had witnessed or played crucial roles in turning points in history, or that they were actual historical personages who’d passed over to cheat death, or had been resurrected by faithful followers, and so on and so forth, attempts to make them seem important to a future that didn’t really care. But whether or not Rubber Duck was older than the True Empire, his ship was definitely very old, the oldest that Hari had ever seen: an old dropship powered by three pulsed fusion motors, with a stubby utility spine that sported a pair of comb racks for self-guided pods that, in the halcyon days of centuries long past, had been dropped off or picked up in transit during long, looping runs through the Belt. Half a dozen pods of various sizes were permanently welded to the racks now. One contained Rubber Duck’s extensive collection of trinkets and memorabilia; two more were tricked out to accommodate passengers; the rest stored cargo and trade goods.

  Rubber Duck was inextricably wedded to his ancient ship, stripped back to his nervous system and plaited though her spine, augmented by traits he’d been using for so long he couldn’t remember what was original and what wasn’t. When she goes dark, he liked to say, so will I. ‘That’s why we have the same handle. She’s my muscle; I’m her brains.’

  The tanky was represented in what he called the happening world by a semi-autonomous avatar and a trio of maintenance robots that took care of parts of the dropship’s structure and systems that were no longer (or never had been) self-repairing. But mostly he presented as a face in a window. The face was, according to him, the face of his lost meat self: a cheerful old man with unruly white hair bushed up by a scarf neatly folded to display his logo, a bright yellow cartoon duck with a red bill and large blue human eyes.

  Rubber Duck claimed that the scarf and his persona were part of a rebranding he’d undergone a century before the rise of the True Empire. At one point, he said, there had been a small franchise of Rubber Ducks weaving through the Belt, but he was the only one left. ‘I’m pretty sure I’m the original. Not that it matters. We shared everything, back then.’

  Hari revived the old contacts that Nabhomani had used when Pabuji’s Gift had still been in the salvage business, and worked up several more. After three years, Rubber Duck made him an equal partner in their enterprise, and began to talk about reviving the old franchise. But there really wasn’t that much trade, any more. Travel to the outer belt was increasingly risky; and dacoits were beginning to harass or hijack ships along the outer edge of the main belt.

  Rubber Duck claimed to have known some of the first dacoits, tanky pilots who’d gone rogue, preying on other ships for consumables and reaction mass. He talked about black fleets that had set up a network of stealthed bases on comets and kobolds, run by slaves recruited from the crews and passengers of ships they’d infiltrated or chased down. He talked about the time that several cities had united and gone to war against the dacoits, breaking up the black fleets and rescuing the surviving slaves.

  ‘Those were dacoits,’ he said. ‘These newbies, they’re just chancers who sometimes trade and sometimes raid. Part-time pirates who don’t have any respect for tradition.’

  ‘I heard some of the old-time dacoits are still out there,’ Hari said.

  As a child, he’d been fascinated by his father’s tales of the wars against the black fleets. Colourful, grand, and simplistic dramas of good versus evil. Stories that might have shaped him, he thought now; that had perhaps influenced him when he had decided to set out on his path of revenge.

  Rubber Duck said that there were all kinds of stories about the remnants of the old black fleets.

  ‘Some say that the survivors are heading out to settled stellar systems, aiming to kick up trouble there. Others that they are aiming for systems that aren’t yet settled, planning to set up their own brand of civilisation. Or that they have been lurking in the outer dark all this time, sleeping it out, waiting for an opportunity to take control of the Belt. Which might be soon, the way things are going. Posthumans are disappearing up their own assholes, and don’t need or want to trade. And base-liner worldlets and gardens are growing poorer, trading less and less. How many ships were docked at Tannhauser Gate, when we were last there? I’ll tell you. Twenty-two. Back in the day, there would have been ten times that number. And nine of those twenty-two were semipermanently docked, no place to go, unable to pay off debts accruing each day. That’s how it is everywhere. Not enough work to go around, and if you don’t find work you end up stuck, trying and failing to work off your debts. Becoming indentured labour for whatever worldlet you end up on.’

  They didn’t talk about the hijack of Pabuji’s Gift, Hari’s abduction by Saints, his confrontation with Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters. Hari was trying to put that behind him. He’d broadcast the contents of Dr Gagarian’s files to every part of the Solar System: it was up to others to make of it what they would. He tried to keep current on the various nets used by philosophers, but there was little talk of the Bright Moment. Only a few people had ever been interested in the philosophy of its propagation, and Dr Gagarian’s research had barely caused a ripple of interest.

  Maybe Rav’s son, Ji, and his crew of young Ardenists would make a breakthrough. Maybe someone else would, in ten or a hundred years. Hari tried to let it go, tried to move on.

  He ploughed the triangle run over and again with Rubber Duck, making a few deals on the side, hoping to save enough to purchase or rent his own ship and get back into the salvage trade, perhaps start his own family. And one day, a little over six years after the debacle of the Saints’ second crusade, he received a message from Ophir. His Uncle Tamonash had died, and Hari had inherited a portion of the old family estate.

  Hari was surprised. He’d never tried to contact Tamonash after he’d left Ophir, and Tamonash hadn’t tried to contact him, either. He talked with Tamonash’s daughter, Aamaal, who was still living and working on Earth, and quickly reached an agreement about selling the estate. Hari’s inheritance was by no means enough to purchase a ship, but he worked out that he could at last pay to have a question answered, and for the first time in their partnership he and Rubber Duck quit the Belt and headed sunwards, towards Earth, and the Memory Whole.

  2

  The dropship looped around Earth’s Moon and closed on a small, stony asteroid, one of several orbiting the L5 point. A Greater Brazilian corporado had deflected it from its Earth-crossing orbit fifteen hundred years ago, and mined its regolith for platinum-group metals, rare-earth elements, and hydrogen and oxygen. Now it housed the Memory Whole.

  Hari appraised it as the dropship spiralled into a close orbit. An irregular, heavily cratered spheroid with a major axis of a little less than a kilometre, gouged by strip mines, riddled with test bores and extraction shafts. Plantations of vacuum organisms that resembled black, bushy rocket ships packed the floors of craters and marched in phalanxes across inter-crater plains. A rack of railgun catapults. The remains of an ancient refinery. An interesting labyrinth of interconnected pods buried under a mound of shaly spall. You could always find something useful in old installations. Construction steel, cables and ancient electronics that could be rendered down for copper and
germanium and gallium, personal artefacts abandoned by former occupants . . .

  But these ruins were inhabited. The discorporate tankies who had founded the Memory Whole had used intersecting beams of protons and antiprotons to bore a shaft through the asteroid’s rotational axis, and the fused rock wall of the shaft was coated with a network whose complexity was several orders of magnitude larger than that of the human brain. Parts of it were based on a variety of hardwired platforms, but the majority was rooted in probability fields generated by billions of loops of metal-rich ZNA within clades of slow-growing alife bacteria.

  This was the information sea where the founders of the Memory Whole now lived. They had been discorporate for more than fifteen hundred years, early pioneers whose brains had been scanned by a variety of primitive techniques and replicated in digital simulations. Although they claimed to be the first true posthumans, the first to have transcended baseline human consciousness and escaped what they called meatspace, their minds were crude, unaugmented replicas of their original selves. This was partly due to technical limitations, but was also the expression of a shared ideology. The discorporate of the Memory Whole wanted to live for ever, but they did not want to change. They wanted to preserve themselves as they had been in their so-called prime, and that they had largely succeeded was both their glory and their failure. They had won the amortality they craved, but did not realise that they had built a prison and willingly entered it. They were the last remnant of the old Western cults which had venerated the primacy of the individual. The ghosts of libertarians trying to keep their little candle-flames of ego-self alight for as long as possible, refusing to understand that flames are never the same but are always dancing, always changing.