Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)

by Paul McAuley

  ‘I suppose they are rationalisations for waking up. A last attempt to keep the dream coherent as it falls apart.’

  ‘If that’s true, where did you summon those people from?’ the robot said. ‘In any case, that isn’t how it happened in my dream. It did not end when I met the protector of the city. We walked together through the streets and plazas that ran amongst the footings of the skyscrapers, some lined with humbler buildings, some not. The protector explained the functions of the larger buildings, pointed out various monuments and told me about the moments in history long past that they commemorated. They were the only signs that things had once been different from the way they were now, in the city’s eternal day zero. A remembrance of how the city had come into being, and why it must be as it was. I realised then that I was in the very far future. Not hundreds of years from my own time, or even thousands, but millions upon millions. And for most of its long, long history, the city had been changeless. Parts of it had worn out, and buildings or entire blocks had been destroyed in fires or floods, but everything worn away or destroyed had been replaced with an exact replica. And in the same way, the people of the city maintained and preserved their gene line. The city was changeless, and so were they.’

  Hari said that it sounded unlikely.

  ‘Certain species of eusocial insect, like ants and bees and termites, have changed little over more than a hundred million years. Why shouldn’t a species of eusocial human that is able to police its gene pool remain unchanged for even longer? Especially if they remove all competition, all drivers of natural selection. That is what I learnt from my guide as we walked the empty streets. At last we ascended to a monorail station where a single car waited like a bullet in a chamber of a revolver. It sped us through the rest of the city, out across the green farmlands that ringed it, and at last reached a small and lonely platform at the edge of a desert that stretched away in the bloody light of a sun swollen to ten times its usual size and flecked with long chains of black spots.

  ‘My guide explained that most of Earth was desert. The oceans had shrunk; the polar ice-caps had evaporated millions of years ago. A little life persisted in the deserts and what was left of the oceans, but most of what was left was preserved in cities like his. That was why it was important, he said, to exclude anything that threatened their stability. Then the door of the rail car opened, and I stepped out as if I had been commanded to do so. The rail car sped away, dwindling towards the white towers of the city. A squall of dust blew up and whirled around me, and that was when I woke,’ the robot said.

  ‘But the dream did not fade on waking, as most dreams do. I remembered every detail. Much more than I have told you. Some dreams are so powerful that they change us. This was the dream that changed me. The calm horror of it. The sense that it was inevitable. That it was waiting out there in the far future. That the seeds of what the world would become had already been planted in the present.

  ‘At the time of my dream, I was living in a powerful country that had defeated both fascism and a perverted form of communism. This was before the effects of climate change had begun to alter the world and the lives of its people. My country was still the most powerful in the world. It was founded on principles that allowed every citizen to express his or her potential as best they could. It celebrated instances of individual enterprise, imagination, and heroism. It mythologised them. Of course, many people, then as now, were lazy. Or they were like sheep, content to graze their little patch of grass. But I had talent and ambition. I was one of the gifted. And my dream of the bleak changeless future in which everyone was like everyone else, reduced to the lowest common denominator, fed my ambition. I wanted to do all I could to make sure such a future did not come about.

  ‘We had already passed from a mechanical age powered by burning fossil fuels to an electronic age where the sources of power were many. New technologies were creating new varieties of small, smart, efficient machines. Exchange of information was outgrowing exchange of goods. And we were beginning to learn how to tweak plants and animals, and ourselves. To improve existing species, and create new ones. But I knew that would not be enough. The resources of a single planet are not infinitely exploitable. There were already shortages of fresh water, farmland, phosphates, essential rare elements, and much else.

  ‘So I went into the space business. I founded one of the first private space-transport companies, and helped to develop a city on the Moon. The city to which I, and others who had grown rich through talent and ambition, escaped when Earth’s climate and weather systems finally collapsed. We moved outward from there. I was one of the founders of Rainbow Bridge, on Callisto.’ The robot paused, then said, ‘You told me that you met Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters. I met their mother, once, in Rainbow Bridge.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Intense. Solitary. Single-minded. With a brisk and undisguised contempt for everyone she believed to be her inferior, which was just about everyone she met.’

  ‘Her daughters were about the same.’

  ‘It was just before the beginning of the Quiet War, when I met her. Or rather, it had already begun, but we Outers had not yet realised it. Sri Hong-Owen played a role in beginning it, and helped to end it, too. Earth’s three major power blocs briefly occupied and controlled the cities of the outer system, but their rule was overturned, and a long golden age began. By that time I was more than two hundred years old. One of the oldest people to have ever lived. And at last I became what I am now. I translated. First into the mind of a ship, and now here. Where we still strive to keep the flame of individual achievement alight. Where lions and tigers and bears still live.

  ‘Perhaps you think my dream has nothing to do with you. That it’s the rambling justification of someone who has outlived his time and purpose. But I decided to tell you about it because it’s possible that you might be a lion, too. One of those who know how to use knowledge to change the world. Who is not afraid of change.’

  ‘It seems to me that lions can cause all kinds of damage, too,’ Hari said. ‘The leader of the Saints, for instance. Levi. He must have been a lion.’

  ‘Lions kill because it’s the nature of lions to kill. But without lions the common herd would grow weak and debased. Lions are a challenge, a test that all must pass if they are to survive. And since the weak fail that test more often than the strong, the fitness of the herd is increased. Lions drive change, and change is good. Change strengthens us all. You hoped to change the course of human history when you broadcast the research of the tick-tock philosopher and his friends. It didn’t work out the way you hoped it would. Perhaps that’s why you really came here. Not because you want to restore your father,’ the robot said. ‘Or not only that. But because you hope his backup contains information that the tick-tock philosopher’s files lacked. Because you still hope to change things.’

  ‘I was hoping to find out how he had changed me,’ Hari said. ‘Can you help me or not?’

  ‘Of course. But if you want to talk to him, you’ll have to do it here.’

  ‘I don’t believe that’s part of the guarantee.’

  ‘Don’t presume to tell me what I can or cannot do,’ the robot said. ‘You are in my realm now.’

  ‘My avatar is represented here. I am elsewhere.’

  ‘Then go back,’ the robot said, ‘if it’s that easy.’

  That was when Hari realised that the link to the ship and his bios had vanished.

  He said, ‘I need to talk with my father. If you truly want to help me, you’ll grant me that.’

  A big wave passed down the molten river. It lifted the raft and dropped it and Hari fell down and clung to the raft’s rough planks as it tipped and tilted. Geysers opened all around in the raw red lava – no, they were human mouths, each screaming at a different pitch, all spitting vapours that fed an acrid yellow fog. The ground on either side of the river broke apart and bright fountains of molten sulphur erupted. The robot grew, doubling in height, doubling again. The mi
ld face in the glass turret of its head darkened, sprouting horns and a beard of writhing snakes; its eyes burned like red stars.

  For a moment, Hari couldn’t breathe. His mouth and nose filled with a parching reek. His coveralls were smouldering and his skin was burning, withering, as the heat of the lava river beat over him. Then heat and stench blew away on a cool breeze, and the robot dwindled, and its human face laughed.

  ‘I control the physics here,’ it said. ‘I decide whether you can stay or leave.’

  Hari stood up cautiously, saying, ‘It’s family business. It isn’t of any interest to anyone else.’

  He was trying his best to seem calm, to show that he had not been intimidated by the petty display of power. Telling himself that sooner or later Rubber Duck would realise what was going on and break the link. But what would happen then? Would he wake, back in his body, back on the ship? Would he be damaged by the equivalent of a hard reset? Or would his mind remain here while the uninhabited shell of his body aged and died? Perhaps his mind had been copied during the uplink. He would wake on the ship, but this version of himself would be trapped here for ever . . .

  ‘I’ll decide what’s interesting to me and what isn’t,’ the robot said. ‘If you don’t want me listening to your conversation, you can leave.’

  ‘If I agree to your terms, if I let you listen in to whatever I have to say to my father, and whatever he has to say to me, maybe you can tell me something first.’

  A slow raster line passed across the image of the face in the robot’s head.

  ‘That depends on what you ask,’ it said.

  ‘On whether you can answer it?’

  ‘On whether I want to.’

  ‘It’s simple enough. When my father passed over, did you encourage him in any way? In any particular direction?’

  ‘When people come to us, they generally know what they want. They have a good idea of the shape their lives will take when they pass over. Of where they want to go and what they want to do.’

  ‘Do you know what my father wanted to do?’

  ‘He did not want to leave his family.’

  ‘That’s what he told you.’

  ‘That’s what he implied.’

  ‘Perhaps he meant that he didn’t want to lose control.’

  ‘You must ask him that.’

  ‘You helped him to pass over. And then he came back here some years later. After his son Rakesh had died. After I had been quickened, but just before I was decanted. He paid you to install a neural net in my head. Did he tell you why?’

  ‘He wanted a place where he could hide a backup of his personality.’

  ‘And did you do anything else?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did you talk with him about the Bright Moment?’

  ‘You think we set him on that path?’

  ‘It occurred to me.’

  ‘Many believe that we turn people who come to us for help into our agents,’ the robot said. ‘That we sit at the centre of a web of intrigue and influence, plucking one thread, pulling another, reaching out to change things beyond our small world. It’s understandable. We are old, and we possess certain powers and a great store of knowledge that’s been lost or forgotten elsewhere. And this is an irrational age, where rumour is interchangeable with hard fact. But we have no such agents. We have no inclination to meddle in the affairs of the worlds outside our world, and we learn all we need to know about them from news feeds, such as they are.

  ‘Your father was already set on his path before he came back to us. His first true son had been killed. He quickened you as a replacement. And he wanted some kind of revenge. He wanted to prove that the cults and sects were fools and charlatans. That’s all I can tell you because that’s all I know.’

  ‘That’s about all I know, too,’ Hari said. ‘That’s why I need to talk to him.’

  ‘I should warn you that the backup you carry was never intended to provide a full restoration. It isn’t big enough. It lacks detail and nuance.’

  ‘Will he be able to tell me what I need to know?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘All right,’ Hari said, and then he was somewhere else.

  3

  It was his father’s old viron. A parched landscape saddling away to a shimmering horizon; scoured cliffs rising above fans of rubble; the hot blue sky and the unblinking glare of the platinum sun. Hari climbed the familiar path to the cave mouth. It seemed as real as the discorporate’s sandbox. It seemed unchanged. And if it was unchanged, then his father must be unchanged, too . . .

  His father wasn’t there and then he was. Standing in front of the cave mouth, saying, as Hari came towards him, ‘You took your time.’

  ‘You have been keeping watch on me, then. I wondered.’

  ‘I have a clock that tells me how much time has passed outside this world. I don’t know what you have been doing out there, Gajananvihari, but I do know that I must have died the true death. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘And now you live again.’

  ‘I am greatly diminished. That is the first thing you should know.’

  But he looked like Aakash. Bare-chested and barefoot in a white dhoti. Bead necklaces looped on his chest. White hair brushed back in a wave, his untamed white beard. He sat on a flat rock, and after a moment’s hesitation Hari sat beside him.

  ‘What happened?’ Aakash said. ‘What happened, out there? What happened to me?’

  Hari told him about the hijack at Jackson’s Reef.

  Aakash said, ‘You escaped.’

  ‘Agrata got me out.’

  ‘You escaped,’ Aakash said again, and paused. ‘Did you escape with Dr Gagarian?’

  ‘Not exactly. He was killed, in the hijack. I took his head with me.’

  ‘Was he alive?’

  ‘No. He had been killed. Agrata gave me his head.’

  ‘He was dead.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Hari had been planning to tell his father that Agrata was dead, that Nabhoj and Nabhomani were dead and Pabuji’s Gift was lost, but he knew now that it would be cruel and pointless.

  Aakash said, ‘You took Dr Gagarian’s head because it contained a copy of his files.’

  ‘That’s why Agrata gave it to me.’

  ‘When you were given the head, did you know that you were already carrying a copy of those files?’

  ‘I found out about the neural network later.’ Hari paused, then said, ‘Agrata didn’t know about it, did she?’

  Aakash didn’t reply. He was staring out at the shimmering desert, stroking his beard with thumb and forefinger. Hari was reminded of an automaton they had once recovered from an old settlement long abandoned on a lonely rock. It had been woman-shaped, transparent, hollow. Its nervous system and musculature laminated into its thin tough skin. It had been dead for centuries and centuries, but Agrata had spent some time working on it, and at last it had woken. It was able to perform graceful acrobatics: it might once have been a dancer, or a mimesist. It could sing, too. It had a clear high voice. The songs were in no language they knew. It followed Agrata around; it had imprinted on her. It was eager to please. It was able to hold limited conversations. If it didn’t understand something, it smiled and cocked its head and spread its hands, a gesture of helpless apology, and said, ‘I don’t understand.’

  After a few days, that was almost all it said. I don’t understand. I don’t understand. Smiling, spreading its hands. I don’t understand. It stopped singing, and developed a weakness in its left leg. And it became obsessed with a certain dance move: raising its arms above its head, palms pressed together, and bowing forward and extending the bow into a somersault. It kept losing its balance, spinning sideways in a thresh of arms and legs, and it would recover and try to repeat the move with dogged, futile persistence.

  Agrata tried to fix it, but there was too much cosmic-ray damage to its distributed intelligence. At last, she shut it down and it went into one of the st
orage modules and Hari didn’t know whether it had been sold or traded by Nabhomani or whether it had still been in storage when Pabuji’s Gift had been broken up.

  This copy of Aakash had some of the same traits. Hesitancy and repetition. Gestures used to hide a gap in comprehension. A blankness. A lack of affect.

  It broke Hari’s heart.

  He said, ‘You had something to tell me.’

  His father didn’t look at him. Saying slowly, as if to the air in front of his face, ‘You were the one we chose, Gajananvihari. We did not entirely trust your brothers. We hope we were not mistaken, but there it is. That is one reason. The other is that you are our true son. And although it may be wrong of us, we love you above everything else.’

  ‘And I love you,’ Hari said.

  But his father did not appear to hear him.

  ‘I gave you the gift of the neural network, and did not tell anyone else about it,’ he said. ‘I did not tell your brothers. I did not tell Agrata. She might have suspected it was why we visited the Memory Whole the second time, but she never said anything. I planned to tell you, Gajananvihari, when you were older. When you came into your own. Did that ever happen?’

  ‘I only came into my own after I left the ship,’ Hari said.

  ‘The neural network. I didn’t tell you about it?’

  ‘No, you didn’t. I discovered it after I escaped.’

  His father was silent for a little while, as if thinking about that. As they sat together on the low flat rock, in the hot bright sunlight, Hari noticed a glitch in the shimmering landscape: an editing flaw that revealed where the end of a short loop had been stitched to its beginning. He wondered how far he would get, if he walked out into the desert. Not very far, probably.