Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (14 page)

He walked a long way around the city, through hutongs, across avenues. Trying to process what had happened, trying to fit it into what he already knew. Dr Gagarian’s head was protected by
a djinn, that much seemed clear. Eli Yong had triggered it, and no doubt the commissars had also triggered it, when they had attempted to access the tick-tock’s files. He was certain, now,
that the head had been returned to him only after the commissars had tried and failed to crack its encryption, that he had been released from prison as bait for the hijackers or any friends and
allies they might have in the city. He remembered how the p-suit’s eidolon had attacked the hijacker’s drone, wondered if she really had been weaponised, or if she had been ridden by
the djinn. Dr Gagarian’s head had been hidden more than ten kilometres away from the spires, but perhaps the djinn had a long reach. Or perhaps it had made a copy of itself and inserted it
into his p-suit . . .

Thinking about all of this, Hari ate a small meal of sprouting mung beans and steamed fermented tofu at a stall in the Avenue of the Menagerie of Worlds. Behind the triple-paned window of a
neighbouring shop, transparent cryoflasks containing miniature silicon-based biomes stood amongst fuming blocks of nitrogen snow. In another, blobjects tinted with bright primary colours pulsed in
bubbling aquarium tanks. A parade of equally exotic people passed by, bit-players in his story, heroes of their own mysterious lives. Hari sipped from his tumbler of grey, sticky-sweet fruit juice.
One thing was clear. He needed to talk to Rav again.

When Hari returned to the caravanserai, he found the Ardenist deep in conversation with Taqi Koothvar, one of the neuters who ran the place. They sat cross-legged on a rug,
sharing a smokebubble: Rav hunched in the cowl of his wings; the neuter, a plump, cheerful person dressed in a red silk shirt and shimmering gold trousers. The two of them looking at Hari as he
came across the compound.

Taqi Koothvar blew out a riffle of smoke, handed the mouthpiece to Rav, and told Hari that yo was pleased to hear that he had found someone who could help him.

‘I haven’t made up my mind about that yet,’ Hari said.

‘Yet here you are, and here I am,’ Rav said. ‘How did it go at the head shop, by the way?’

‘Have you been tracking me?’

Hari’s first thought was that some tiny djinn had been hidden inside the trait that Rav’s friend had given him. His second was that if he’d taken up Eli Yong’s offer to
overwrite the trait with the official version, he wouldn’t have been able to trust the replacement, either . . .

‘It’s a small city,’ Rav said. ‘Everyone breathes the same air, drinks the same water. Did you learn anything useful? The chances are so vanishingly slight I don’t
know why I bother to ask the question, but I’m prepared to be amazed.’

‘Not as much as I hoped, but more than I expected,’ Hari said, meeting the Ardenist’s grass-green gaze.

The water in the smokebubble rattled and frothed as Rav drew on the mouthpiece. He said, his voice tight, pinched, ‘What you choose to tell me is up to you. As for me, I’m always
ready to share useful information with my partners.’

‘We aren’t in any way partners,’ Hari said. ‘And besides, I’m sure you already know everything you need to know.’

Rav smiled and blew a smoke ring, then blew a second smaller ring that, rotating counterclockwise, passed through the first.

‘Let me have a taste of that,’ Hari said.

‘Here’s a youngblood who thinks he’s fully fledged,’ Rav told Taqi Koothvar.

‘This is a tweaked strain of kif,’ Taqi Koothvar told Hari. ‘It isn’t meant for baseline humans.’

‘The passengers brought all kinds of drugs aboard our ship,’ Hari said. ‘Baseliner, posthuman, it’s all the same to me.’

He wanted to show them that he wasn’t an innocent tourist, prove that he had knocked about and knew something about the worlds and their illict pleasures. He’d never before tried
kif, a drug rumoured to be as old as the human species, but he had several times drunk mildly psychotrophic teas, and had once experienced a long, strange, highly detailed hallucination under the
influence of an ephedrine mimic allegedly derived from the cerebrospinal fluid of a posthuman clade, the Quick, that had left the Solar System before the rise of the True Empire.

The neuter shrugged, handed him the mouthpiece. Yo’s blue-black hair was teased into a kind of disordered wave and yo’s face painted white, with black pigment staining yo’s eye
sockets and lips. It was impossible to tell if yo had once been a man or a woman. Elements of both combined in yo to make something else.

‘Knock yourself out,’ yo said.

Hari sucked up cool, mentholated smoke that numbed his mouth. He felt it percolate through the inverted trees of his lungs, felt as if Fei Shen’s gravity had flattened out.

Rav took the mouthpiece from him and said, ‘Don’t huff too much. We have work to do.’

‘You said a friend of yours knows where my family’s ship is,’ Hari said. The free-floating feeling emboldened him.

‘It’s his news. He should tell you.’

‘Well, take me to him.’

‘If you’re staying another night,’ Taqi Koothvar told Hari, ‘you should eat before you leave. The evening meal is included in our fee.’

Hari was still buzzing from his hit of smoke as he followed Rav through the dusky parkland. His brain seemed to have expanded, separating and disconnecting his thoughts, and everything around
him was saturated with arcane significance. The piping call of a night bird. Pale paths scribbled around shadowy stands of trees. Mounds of mosses glowing in pastel shades as if dabbed by a
child’s thumb. Fireflies tracing bright signatures through black air . . .

He tried his best to hide his delight in these wonders, but then the path bent around a stand of tall conifers and he was confronted by a magnolia in full bloom, its flowers glowing like a flock
of moons, and he couldn’t suppress his cry of delight.

Rav laughed. ‘You really are high.’

‘Perhaps just a little. Where is this friend of yours, anyway?’

‘We’re almost there.’

The path dipped into a little garden where patches of white gravel were raked around stands of bamboo and ragged chunks of black iron. At the far side, Rav hunched into the tent of his wings and
ducked under an arch of roughly dressed stone blocks. Hari followed, came out on to a circle of grass that rimmed a pool of cold, faintly sulphurous water. Beneath the surface, a chain of lights
dropped towards distant shadows. When Hari leaned out to study their dim vanishing point, Rav put a hand on his shoulder to steady him.

‘No need to go swimming,’ he said. ‘My friend’s right here.’

Ferny platelets of ice rocked on gelid waves as an undulating man-shape rose to the surface and pushed to the edge of the pool. A human face looked up at Hari, large, liquid black eyes, a
flattened nose with pinched nostrils. Two lengths of scarlet scarf floated out behind, external gills composed of pseudo-cellular nanotech, half-obscuring a sleek, sinuous body. The legs were
fused, and fringed with long fins that met at a broad point where the feet should have been.

Rav made the introductions. His friend, Vazy Klushtsev, was the ambassador for the Ten Thousand Collectives of Europa.

‘It is in fact twelve thousand five hundred and thirty-three at this moment, not counting the Old Deep Ones,’ Vazy said. ‘But ten thousand is a good round number and suggests a
certain romance.’

Hari asked him how he and Rav had first met.

‘The youngblood wants a measure of my reputation,’ Rav said. ‘Be kind.’

‘I tell the truth, which is kind enough to you. I knew our friend first when I worked in the Office of External Affairs,’ Vazy told Hari. ‘On Europa we have a city from the
long ago, when our ancestors had not yet learned to breathe water as well as air. It connects the surface with the world-ocean; visitors live there. Rav helped to fix part of its environmental
conditioning system.’

‘It was clever enough to have gone insane,’ Rav said, ‘but not clever enough to know that it had.’

‘We became friends then,’ Vazy said, ‘and we are friends still. We talk, whenever he comes to Fei Shen, and he tells me about places he has visited, people he has seen. Part of
my work is to gather such intelligence.’

‘You’re a spy,’ Hari said to Rav.

He and Rav were sprawled on cushions at the water’s edge. He had splashed icy water on his face, and felt a little less spacey.

‘I prefer to think of myself as a trusted source of information,’ Rav said.

‘Such things are unfortunately necessary in these debased times,’ Vazy said.

They were an old clade, the Europans, inhabiting bubble-biomes tethered or adrift in the world-ocean under the icy shell of Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon. Their economy was based on the
ancient system of tradable reputation once shared by the cities and settlements of the outer system; Vazy told Hari that when he returned home at the end of the twelve-year span of his appointment,
he would have accumulated enough kudos to found his own collective. Meanwhile, he helped to negotiate trade deals and treaties, and represented the interests of the Ten Thousand Collectives at
conclaves and conferences. Face-to-face meetings and discussions were increasingly important because the remnants of the system-wide commons was haunted by djinns and trust in avatars and other
virtual representations had been undermined by fakes and finger puppets deployed by unscrupulous governments and individuals.

‘Once, you gave your word, and it was enough,’ Vazy said. ‘A handshake, a kiss – the same thing as a contract. Because to renege on an agreement was shameful. A loss of
kudos. Now, who cares about kudos? Where is there trust amongst peoples? There are bandits, I don’t need to tell you about them. There are gangs that infiltrate governments of cities and
settlements and loot their reserves of consumables and credit. Sell off essentials. They underbid on contracts, this is a new thing. They take control of a city by flattering some senile or docile
ruling family, or by bribing it, and they sell off its assets and run up debts and contract out the labour of its citizens at a bargain price. Strip out everything of value and move on. They prey
on the small places now, remote and marginal cities unable to put up resistance, but if things do not change they will soon be asset-stripping places like Fei Shen. Because who is to stop them?
Once there was consensus, unity. A shared culture. Now there is only mistrust and dissent.’

Vazy reminded Hari of garrulous old scholars who’d bought passage on
Pabuji’s Gift
. Custodians of outmoded and half-forgotten doctrines who venerated a personal golden age
because they didn’t understand the present and feared the future, who had an opinion about every topic and a repertoire of anecdotes and mordant observations, who always had to have the last
word.

‘I had several dealings with your father when I was working with the office of external affairs,’ Vazy told Hari. He leaned against the pool’s rim, his chin resting on his
folded arms. ‘He was of the old school. A man of his word, very much so. I was sorry to hear of it, when he passed over. And sorry also to hear of your family’s recent bad
luck.’

‘I am told you may have some good news about my family,’ Hari said. ‘Or at least, about our ship.’

The Europan’s large eyes were blanked by semitranslucent membranes for a few seconds. ‘Your father and this tick-tock, Dr Gagarian, were working on the physics of the Bright Moment
with several like-minded philosophers. Including a former Europan, recently deceased.’

‘Ivanova Galchan,’ Hari said, with a dropping feeling. ‘Do you know how she died?’

‘It seems that she disappeared on the day your family’s ship was hijacked. Her body was found many days afterwards, in a remote part of the aquatic quarter of her adopted home,
Chavez Labyrinth. There were signs that she had been tortured. The city police are searching for the murderer, so far without success. It is a big, busy place, Chavez Labyrinth. More than a hundred
ships passed through its docks in the time between her disappearance and the discovery of her body. Her former collective was notified, but her remains have not been repatriated. It seems that she
entered into a multiple partnership, and her partners chose to commit her remains to the biome of her adopted home. Nevertheless, she was born on Europa, and her death diminishes us all,’
Vazy said. ‘And that is why I have an interest in the connection between her death and the hijack of your ship.’

‘I think you should tell him what you found, before he bursts with impatience,’ Rav said.

‘We maintain a good traffic control system around Jupiter,’ Vazy said. ‘It is very old, very powerful. And necessary, for Jupiter is the broom of the system. Many things
approaching the Sun from the outer reaches are swept into his gravity well. And many ships steal from his angular momentum to throw themselves further outward. The traffic system watches for comets
and rocks, and also tracks ships. And one of them, it was your family’s ship.’

Hari said, ‘At Jupiter? When? Where is it now?’

‘It passed through one hundred and fifty-two days ago,’ Vazy said. ‘It was flying under a new name and registry, but our traffic system recognised it in any case.’

The Europan opened a window that showed
Pabuji’s Gift
’s twisted ring in sharp silhouette against the white swirls of Jupiter’s equatorial band. It hadn’t made
orbit around Jupiter or any of his moons, Vazy said, and threw up a rotating glyph showing the ship’s track through the Jupiter system and its changes in delta vee. Instead, like many other
ships transiting through the system, it had used a gravity-assist manoeuvre to gain velocity and bend its course outward. Towards Saturn, which was presently on the same side of the sun as
Jupiter.

‘Here’s an interesting fact,’ Rav said. ‘The Saints own a wheel habitat that orbits Saturn. That’s where Levi lives.’

‘Many others live there too,’ Vazy said. ‘Including the seraphs.’

‘But only the Saints would be interested in the research of Dr Gagarian and his friends,’ Rav said.