Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (2 page)

Early in his exile, still raw with grief and fear, he’d told the eidolon about these fantasies. ‘Agrata should have given me weapons,’ he’d said. ‘Drones. Bomblets.
A gauss rifle or a reaction pistol.’

‘Agrata didn’t want you to fight,’ the eidolon had said. ‘She wanted you to survive.’

She sometimes said something unexpected. Something that made Hari think. He’d thought about that remark for a long time, and it had strengthened his resolve to escape from Themba and reach
Tannhauser Gate. But in spite of trying to fill his hours and days with routine and work and meticulous planning, he was sometimes overcome by a tremendous raging despair at the cosmic injustice of
what had happened to him, to his family. At how their future had been smashed, how he’d been left dazed, stranded in the wreckage. The awful details of the hijack lurked at the edge of his
mind like one of the insanity memes that the True Empire had deployed against its enemies. A monstrous presence haunting the service levels of his mind, an ancient and insane bot raving against the
limits of its protocols.

Anger was an energy, all right. If he wasn’t careful, it would consume him.

At last he had collected his daily quota of beads, and headed home. Scooting in a straight line towards the crater, sunflowers suddenly bristling at the top of a long crest. Their black dishes
were aimed west now, where the sun hung a handspan above the crater’s floor. Hari found the friction track and followed it towards the cluster of spires at the bottom of the slope.

Once, the spire builders had spread across more than a third of the main belt, with outposts in the outer belt and the Hildas and Trojan groups, but like most clades it had overreached itself,
splintering into sects that had fought bitter battles over minor differences in doctrine. The spire builders on Themba had been wiped out when their home had been struck by drones that shredded
into expanding clouds of needles seconds before impact, perforating the spires and their unfortunate inhabitants. Centuries later, the ascetic hermit had settled there. He had removed the bodies of
the spire builders and buried them in a common grave, carved a pocket habitat from the maze of little rooms in the base of one spire, pressurised it, and lit and warmed it using power drawn from
the black paint he’d sprayed on its riddled skin. And then he’d stripped out another spire, and begun to decorate the interior of its shell with intricate murals that combined scenes
and incidents from obscure poems, songs and stories with visions of a marriage between the physical world and the human mind.

The hermit had been working on one of these murals when he had returned to the Wheel. Although, being an ascetic, he would not have thought of his death in that way. There were no heavens or
hells, according to them, no cycles of reincarnation. Hari had found him on a net strung between two I-beams, a shrivelled mummy kneeling in his pressure suit, his paint wand still clutched in his
gloved hand.

According to a book that Hari had found in the shelter, the hermit’s name had been Kinson Ib Kana, and he had died twenty-eight years ago. Or at least, that was the last time he had opened
the book. Hari had learned little else. Kinson Ib Kana’s p-suit was as dead as its owner, and like all followers of his faith he lacked a bios. Hari didn’t know why he’d settled
on Themba, where he had come from, whether he had any family, or how old he’d been when he’d died.

He had wrapped Kinson Ib Kana’s leathery corpse in its particoloured robe and laid it on the ground beyond the spires and covered it with rocks taken from the margins of the big cairn that
marked the common grave of the spire builders. He stopped there now, and with the eidolon standing shadowlike at his back paid his respects to the dead man and told him about his day, then shuffled
across the dusty slope to the blunt cone of his lifepod. He tipped the reaction-mass makings into the maw of its motor, skimmed down the slope to the spires, and cycled through the airlock into the
pocket habitat. He stripped off his p-suit, tumbled his harvest of water-ice, amino acids and aromatics into the hopper of the hermit’s maker. Shat, scrubbed himself clean, ate the ration of
paste and pellets extruded by the maker, worked for a while on a dart thrower, read a story in the ascetic’s book, and at last wrapped himself in the narrow hammock strung between two struts
and told the lights to fade.

Another day gone. As always, he fell asleep while thinking about what he would do once he reached civilisation. He was supposed to make his way to Tannhauser Gate and, with the help of his
family’s broker, contact the hijackers and offer to trade Dr Gagarian’s head for the release of any hostages, and the ship. But he was late, so very late, and it was highly probable
that only he had survived. Agrata had said as much. His father’s viron had been erased; she had lost contact with his brothers and their bioses had fallen silent. It was possible that the
hijackers had taken her alive, but when he’d left her, when he’d been shot out of the ship in the lifepod, she had been getting ready to fight them to the death. He’d get to
Tannhauser Gate, he’d try to negotiate with the hijackers, but if there were no survivors, if they didn’t want to give up the ship, he’d crack open the files cached in Dr
Gagarian’s head and sell them. He’d mine old databases, locate a trove of ancient treasures in the outer dark, and convince some freebooter to enter into a partnership and make his
fortune. He’d pull off a coup in a city bourse, become the bodyguard of some rich trader and save her life, work ten or twenty years in the docks, do everything and anything he could to raise
enough funds to hire a gang of reivers and track down the people who had murdered his family and wrecked his life. And then, oh then, he would have his revenge . . .

Another day passed, and another. Early one morning, he woke to find the eidolon bending over him, the twin stars of her eyes gleaming above the sketch of her smile.

‘I have news, Gajananvihari! I have good news! It is Agrata! It is Agrata Konwas! She is alive! And I have a message from her!’

In the long ago, in their motherland on Earth, Gajananvihari Pilot’s family would have been called kabadiwallahs. Junk peddlers. They located derelict gardens and
settlements, salvaged machines that could be refurbished or repurposed, isolated and cultured novel vacuum organisms and biologics, concentrated and refined rare earths and metals. They burrowed
through the remains of grand schemes abandoned in place or wrecked by war. They ransacked homes and public spaces. They were not sentimental about their work. They were grateful to the dead, but
did not try to appease them. The dead no longer had any claim over what they’d left behind, no longer needed it.

There were thousands of derelict settlements, gardens and habitats in the Belt, tens of thousands of abandoned way stations, refuges, supply dumps, observatories, quarries, strip mines, and
refineries, but salvage was not an easy way of making a living. Most of the ruins whose orbits brought them close to the remaining cities and settlements had been stripped out long ago; those so
far untouched traced distant or eccentric paths, and were often laced with lethal traps and unexpected dangers.

Forty years before Hari had been quickened, his mother, Mullai, had succumbed to a rogue prion that had infected her while she had been cataloguing the feral biosphere of an ancient garden, and
converted her brain to tangles of pseudo-organic fibrils. His father, Aakash, after surviving radiation poisoning, six different cancers, and injuries caused by two serious accidents, had passed
over fifteen years later, and migrated into a viron. And then Mullai and Aakash’s first son, Rakesh, had been killed when he was caught up in riots sparked by one of the end-time cults.

This was several years after the Bright Moment, when everyone everywhere, awake or asleep, baseliner or posthuman, had been struck by the same brief vision: a man on a bicycle turning to look at
the viewer as he glided away into a flare of light. It was generally agreed that this vision had been caused or created by an ancient gene wizard, Sri Hong-Owen. At the beginning of the Great
Expansion she had left the Solar System in a ship fashioned from a fragment of one of Saturn’s moons, and after a troubled voyage of more than fifteen hundred years had arrived in the middle
of a war between colonists over control of Fomalhaut’s gas-giant planet Cthuga, whose core was rumoured to be inhabited by a vast and ancient intelligence. Sri Hong-Owen’s ship had
plunged into Cthuga, and twenty years later something strange and wonderful had happened in the depths of the gas giant. Something that had kindled the Bright Moment.

Hundreds of sects, cults, and circles of magicians, hieratics, teleothetics, psychomancers and idiolaters had sprung up in its wake, like crystals condensing out of a shocked supersaturated
solution. They believed that human history had been abruptly and utterly transformed, that the Bright Moment was the harbinger of a final reckoning in which only the elect would be saved, that it
was a magical solution to the problems that oppressed their worlds: the static hierarchies that governed them; the centuries-long, belt-wide economic recession; reliance on ancient, half-understood
machines and technologies; the lack of new political and philosophical ideas. Some broke away from established religions; others were founded by charismatic self-styled prophets or revelators. Some
were violently aggressive; others manifested an ethereal spirituality. Some believed that the Bright Moment commemorated the vastening of an ascended god created by the fusion of Sri
Hong-Owen’s mind with Cthuga’s alien intelligence, foreshadowing an age in which all of humanity would enter a new state of being; others preached that it was a sign that something
inhuman and inimical had intruded into the universe, the beginning of a final war between good and evil. They squabbled over minor and major points of doctrine and interpretation, accused each
other of heresy and apostasy, and fissioned into a bewildering variety of squabbling schismatic sects.

Only a few survived the first decade after the Bright Moment. Most were short-lived: brief, bright candles consumed by the fever-frenzy of their faith. Some imploded when their leaders were
assassinated or arrested; some destroyed themselves in mass suicides, believing that death at an auspicious hour would allow them to ascend into the new heaven created by Sri Hong-Owen, or to
create new heavens of their own; some were overthrown when they went to war against the governments and polis of their cities and settlements.

Rakesh was caught up in one of these insurrections. He was negotiating the sale of salvaged machinery in New Shetland when a radical cult, the Exaltation of the Free Mind, began to attack
posthumans, accusing them of using memes implanted during the Bright Moment to control the thoughts and actions of baseliners. Riots broke out across the city; Rakesh was killed while trying to
reach the elevators to the docks.

Hari was quickened soon afterwards, cloned from Rakesh’s gene library. His childhood was tinted by the death of his predecessor and his father’s forthright hatred of the Exaltation
of the Free Mind and the rest of the end-time cults. According to him, they threatened to create an age of superstition and unreason worse than the tyranny of the True Empire. He was particularly
exercised by claims that the Bright Moment was a miracle that circumvented or violated natural laws: an intervention by a supernatural deity that stood outside the ordinary flow of events and could
not be parsed by the ordinary human mind. The Bright Moment’s challenge to our world-picture should stimulate our curiosity, Aakash said, not close it down. It was a question of epistemology,
not eschatology.

Hari loved talking with his father, loved stepping through the translation frame into the viron where Aakash had made his home after he had passed over. It mirrored the desert homeland of one of
the Pilot family’s ancestors, on Earth. The blue and starless sky, dominated by the platinum coin of the sun. Red rocks and red sand studded with vegetation, stretching towards a flat
horizon. Rugged cliffs rooted in talus slopes, a narrow path winding through boulder fields to the tall cave mouth where Aakash met his visitors. A magical place where even time was different.
Sometimes Hari would emerge from the viron and discover that hours or days had flown by, out in the real world.

Sometimes he and his father would sit on slabs of warm sandstone outside the cave while they talked; sometimes they wandered through the desert. The old man bare-chested in a crisp white dhoti,
stocky, broad-shouldered, a head shorter than Hari. His searching gaze and gentle voice. One hand combing the snowy flood of his beard while he anatomised some arcane nugget of philosophy or
history.

Because Aakash believed that everything was connected to everything else, that every detail in the world’s vast tapestry was significant, his conversations tended to veer in sudden and
unexpected directions or lose themselves in digressions about the culture of ancient universities, the chemistry and manufacture of the oil paints used by Renaissance masters, the intractable
problem of qualia, or some other topic suggested by what appeared to be random association. He’d always been like this, Agrata said, but his tendency to ramble far from his starting point had
become more pronounced after he’d passed. He was no longer anchored to common clock time in his viron, and could extemporise for hours on any subject that caught and held his interest.

As Hari and his father followed long meandering paths through the desert, windows would pop open to illustrate a point Aakash was making, diagrams would scribble across the sand, equations would
ink themselves across the screen of the sky. The pocket universe of the viron was contiguous with Aakash’s thoughts, an extension of his mind, but its detailed, self-consistent landscape was
also interesting in its own right. An expression of an ancient, alien logic. Ripples of sand formed ridged cells like those Hari’s tongue could parse on the roof of his mouth. Little crescent
dunes were patched here and there, none higher than his knees. Scatterings of stones. Gravel pans. Interlocking circles of thorny bushes. Palisades of spiny paddles. Lizards darting across bare
rock like small green lightnings. Small birds flicking between clumps of vegetation or hovering on a blur of wings as they inserted their hypodermic beaks into flowers. Larger birds tracing patient
circles high above. All of this generated from rules that mimicked a place long ago lost under ice, on Earth.