Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (17 page)

Levi’s parents were sheep herders. He was their only child. Until the age of fourteen, he had lived an unremarkable life in the free-fall orchards and farms of his home. And then the
wavefront of the Bright Moment passed through the Solar System. The inhabitants of the Congregation’s garden, no more than two hundred souls, were badly traumatised by its brief universal
vision. There were outbreaks of panic and hysteria. Two men killed themselves; another murdered his wife and child, then swam out of an airlock into vacuum.

The elders told the Congregation that the vision was yet another false miracle in an age of false miracles and prophets put up by the Great Enemy to tempt people from the True Way. These things
had happened before, and would happen again. The Great Enemy worked through cursed technology created by posthumans who believed themselves little gods. He worked through the seraphs. He worked
through the weaknesses of otherwise blameless men and women. We must all stand firm, the elders said. We must know and understand that even though the Great Enemy frightens and tempts us with
visions sent directly into our minds, as the Christ was tempted in the desert, those visions are false. Our souls will remain unsullied as long as our faith remains strong, and our faith will be
strengthened by our refusal to be tempted.

Every so often a ship visited the garden to trade essential goods and machine parts for the exquisite rugs that the Congregation’s children wove on hand looms. When it returned, a couple
of hundred days after the Bright Moment, its captain, the only outsider allowed into the garden, told the elders that the vision had been experienced by every living human being in the Solar
System, and its origin had been discovered in ancient files on Earth: a pict of the father of an ancient gene wizard, Sri Hong-Owen. The Bright Moment, the captain said, was a signal created when
she had fused with entities in the atmosphere of Fomalhaut’s only gas-giant planet, and had undergone a transformation similar to the vastening of the seraphs.

The elders seized on this story and made it their own. They told the Congregation that Sri Hong-Owen had dared to believe that she could challenge the Creator. She had tried to vasten herself
using evil technology derived from a Godless alien intelligence, and she had been punished for her hubris. The Bright Moment was a warning: a glimpse of her headlong rush into the arms of the Great
Enemy, who had likewise rebelled, and had been expelled from Heaven. The Christ, in the image of her father, had tried to save her, and she had refused to be saved, and because of her pride she had
been cast out of His light into perpetual darkness.

Levi thought differently. He had always been an independent and wayward child. He had been beaten by his parents many times, had been publicly flogged for challenging the elders. But he refused
to stop asking questions because he knew that unexamined faith was worthless. Belief was weakened and compromised if its tenets were never challenged; interpretations of holy writ must be tested
and retested until every flaw had been exposed and corrected.

Slowly, he began to formulate his own exegesis of the Bright Moment. The QIs that had vastened themselves into seraphs had never been anything other than machines, but Sri Hong-Owen had once
been human. If she had become something like a seraph, it would be no ordinary seraph, and her vastening would be no ordinary vastening. And even though it had required the intervention of some
kind of alien intelligence, it could still be a holy act proceeding from the will of the Creator. After all, the entire universe was holy, because everything in it had once been enclosed within the
cosmic point quickened by the Creator. Time and space, light and matter, stars, planets, human beings – even, why not, the alien intelligence in the gas giant orbiting Fomalhaut. It was
entirely possible, Levi thought, that the Bright Moment was a vision of an apotheosis rather than a fall from grace. The equivalent of an ascension to Heaven by someone yet living, as achieved by
certain saints of the long ago.

He tried to discuss his ideas with his friends, and one of them immediately denounced him to the elders. He was accused of subversion, flogged, and sentenced to spend a hundred days in a hut
hung close to the roof of the garden, to think about his sins and to pray for forgiveness.

After the elaborate dance sequence depicting his trial and punishment, the saga cut to an image of Levi clad in a holy nimbus as he knelt in prayer at the edge of the little world. In one
direction was everything he knew and loved: a sea of green islands floating at various depths around the sunlamp at the centre of the garden. In the other was the stark inhospitality of the outer
dark, visible through the long slit of a window set in the rind of water-ice and foamed fullerene that protected the garden from solar and cosmic radiation, and from strikes by flecks of debris too
small to trigger the attention of the anti-collision guns.

The elders expected Levi to meditate on the contrast between his own insignificant life and the inhuman scale of the universe. The billions of stars and planets of the Milky Way, the billions of
galaxies beyond. A cosmic hymn to the Creator’s power. Instead, Levi was increasingly troubled by thoughts of the cruelty, waste and stupidity of human history. The world was fallen, and
those in it could be redeemed only by the blood sacrifice of the Christ, but almost four thousand years later human history was still far from the path of the righteous. One day, he was visited by
a terrifying revelation. He saw that the Bright Moment was a sign that the universe had reconfigured itself to accommodate the possibility of vastenings of human beings; a small window of hope
which those who possessed true faith could widen into a new golden age. They would share in the miracle it symbolised, sweep away false idols, from posthumans to seraphs, and raise themselves into
a state of grace.

Levi knew what he must do. He understood the great burden that had been laid upon him and he prayed that he would prove himself worthy. He received no answer, but knew that he could not do
anything other than that which he had been born to do.

The saga showed him returning to the Congregation, and preaching, and everyone falling at his feet in wonder and amazement before rising and uniting in a final dance sequence. ‘What
actually happened,’ Rav told Hari, ‘was that he came back from exile, pretended that he’d seen the error of his ways, and secretly recruited four of his closest friends. They
armed themselves with agricultural implements. At the next meeting, he stood up and told the Congregation about his vision. His friends killed two elders who tried to stop him, and subdued everyone
else, and he preached for a day and a night. He told the Congregation that they were God’s chosen messengers. He told them that they were Saints. Those who refused to join him were killed.
And when the freighter that traded with the garden next put in, Levi and his Saints captured it and voyaged out into the Belt to begin their so-called holy work.’

Levi had taken his name from an earlier prophet, the leader of a cult that had called themselves Ghosts. They’d tried to take control of the settlements and cities on Saturn’s moons;
Sri Hong-Owen had helped to defeat them. Later, they had established a colony in the asteroid belt of the star beta Hydrus, and had attempted seize Fomalhaut’s gas-giant planet, Cthuga. And
once again, Sri Hong-Owen had been involved in their defeat. The original Levi had claimed that a message from his future self would change the human history; his followers had called themselves
Ghosts because they believed that they were living in a history that was provisional, soon to be rewritten. The leader of the Saints claimed that he was the true incarnation of the Ghosts’
leader, that his incarnation was only possible because the past had been changed by Sri Hong-Owen’s Becoming, and that he and his followers were the vanguard of a utopian era in which all
true believers would be vastened as the seraphs and Sri Hong-Owen had been vastened, and each would become the totipotent deity of their own universe.

‘I sometimes wonder,’ Rav said, ‘if Sri Hong-Owen would be amused or appalled to discover that she’s the inspiration for a bad copy of the cult she twice
defeated.’

The Saints had established schools in most of the major cities in the Belt, and offered to teach anyone willing to listen the secrets that Levi had unpicked from the Bright Moment. Students were
offered free audits, and then were asked to pay for counselling sessions that would raise them, degree by degree, towards true enlightenment. Levi had proven adept at flattering iconoclasts, had
wooed and won the Old Ones of the Republic of Arden, and had caused a schism in the Koronis Emirates. One of its scions had given him a wheel garden, and his disciples had moved it outward, into
orbit around Saturn.

That was where Levi was now, Rav said, planning some kind of assault on the seraphs. Many end-time cults believed the seraphs could provide direct vastening of baseliner minds, but the
Saints’ approach was more pragmatic than most.

‘They are training adepts who will enter the information horizons of seraphs, vasten, and use their new superhuman powers to usher in Levi’s utopia. Peace and harmony and universal
brotherhood, and so on. The precursor to a final battle in which the Saints’ enemies will be defeated and the Saints will be vastened into their individual versions of heaven. The usual
end-timer utopian cant, dressed up in pseudoscientific drivel. My guess is that they found out about the research of your Dr Gagarian and think that it could help them breach the seraphs’
defences.’

Hari said, ‘I should let them know that I am willing to exchange Dr Gagarian’s head for the ship, and any hostages they hold.’

‘You want to trade with them.’

‘If they are the hijackers.’

‘You want to talk to Levi.’

Rav was amused.

‘If I can find someone who will pass my message to him,’ Hari said, ‘he will want to talk to me.’

‘And you’ll do what? Ask him if he ordered the hijack? Do you think he’d admit it? No,’ Rav said, ‘Before we do anything else, we must find out what’s in
those files. When we know that, we’ll know what the Saints want. And then we’ll be able to use it against them.’

Aakash would have been able to discuss the scientism of the Saints with Rav; Nabhomani would have matched Rav’s unlikely yarns of his exploits with equally unlikely yarns of his own; even
Nabhoj would have been able to talk about Rav’s ship, its systems, its capabilities. Hari, lacking their experience and knowledge, listened patiently to the Ardenist’s stories about
Levi and the Saints, his vague, grandiose fantasies about uniting the exiled Ardenists and leading them in a crusade to take back the Republic. Agrata had taught Hari that if you allowed people to
talk they often revealed their true selves; he learnt that Rav was conceited, brilliant, vain, capricious, resourceful, a scholar of history (which he called human foolishness) and arcane
mathematics, insightful about everyone but himself. Although he didn’t treat Hari with the rough contempt he showed towards his son, it was clear that he didn’t think they were equal
partners in what he called their joint enterprise. As far as he was concerned, the files in Dr Gagarian’s head were a means to an end. Something he could use to unite the exiled Ardenists
against their old enemy, if he was telling the truth. Something he could steal and sell if he wasn’t.

Rav had helped to save Hari’s life, he was a useful ally, and there was, after all, a small chance that the Saints really had been behind the hijack. The Saints, or some other crew of
end-time fanatics. But Hari didn’t trust the Ardenist, and made his own plans about what he would do when he reached Ophir.

He talked to the p-suit’s eidolon, asked her about the skull feeders and the hijacker and the djinn. She claimed to know nothing about it. ‘You told me to call your friend and tell
him where you were,’ she said. ‘And that’s what I did. Was that the right thing to do?’

‘Of course,’ Hari said.

‘I wish I could have done more.’

‘I wish I knew what you are capable of doing.’

He was thinking of the djinn that the head doctor, Eli Yong, had woken when she’d tried to look inside Dr Gagarian’s head. Later, it had attacked the woman who had infiltrated the
lair of the skull feeders, probably because she had also tried to open the head.

Rav was wrong, he thought. I’m not the one with serious protection. It’s Dr Gagarian’s head. And it has an agenda of its own . . .

He borrowed time on the ship’s comms, searching for and failing to find evidence for the final destination of
Pabuji’s Gift,
and exchanging messages with his uncle,
Tamonash, who offered to assist in any way he could.

‘We are family, Gajananvihari,’ he said in one message. ‘And that is the beginning and end of everything.’

Rav, who made no secret about listening to these exchanges, said that this sentimental assertion was about the only thing Hari should believe, as far as his uncle was concerned.

‘There are all kinds of traps in this sorry universe,’ he said, ‘but families are the hardest to escape.’

‘If we can’t trust our families, who can we trust?’ Hari said.

‘If you want to survive this, youngblood, don’t put your trust in anyone.’

‘Not even in you?’

‘If I were you? I wouldn’t even trust myself.’

Hari followed Rav out of the booming elevator they’d ridden down from the docks and for a moment thought he saw his father standing in the bustle and flow of the
dispersing passengers. A stocky old man with the familiar hawkish profile and bristling white eyebrows, but clean-shaven, dressed in a long black jacket elaborately embroidered with gold thread,
black pyjama trousers. Smiling now, holding out his hands, saying, ‘Nephew! Gajananvihari! How good it is to meet you at last! I am Tamonash. Welcome to Down Town. Welcome to
Ophir.’

Tamonash Pilot, Hari’s uncle, his father’s younger brother, was about the same age now as Aakash had been when he’d passed over. He told Hari that he and Rav could stay in the
family compound for as long as they liked, said that he would try to help in any way he could, but feared that it wouldn’t amount to much. He and Aakash had fallen out years before Hari had
been born, during the refurbishment of
Pabuji’s Gift
. He had paid little attention to his brother’s career after that, Tamonash said, knew nothing about Aakash’s interest
in the Bright Moment and his partnership with Dr Gagarian, and regretted that he had far less influence with the authorities than he deserved. Times were hard. Scoundrels prospered at the expense
of honest, hard-working people.