Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (26 page)

Gun Ako Akoi was taller than Rav, bone-thin, dressed in a crimson, ankle-length dress with a high collar. Her legs moving inside tight fabric as she came down the stair with delicate mincing
steps. White gloves sleeved her arms to the shoulders. Her black hair was done up in a spire with little caves woven into it where insectile machines crouched and blinked coloured pinlights; her
face was masked with an oval dish in which different faces came and went like spectators jostling at a window. At intervals it blanked with a blue as fathomless as the sky of Earth.

Pabuji’s Gift
had several times carried displaced autocrats or minor members of royalty as passengers. Watching the tick-tock matriarch progress towards him, Hari was reminded of
one in particular, Princess-in-Exile Sihan-Djina of the Augusta Archipelago, a young woman about his age who had possessed the tranquil authority of someone accustomed to having their every wish
expedited. Gun Ako Akoi shared the princess’s absolute assurance, but there was something chill and predatory about her, too. Sihan-Djina’s assumption of authority was charming and
naive because it didn’t extend beyond her immediate retinue and a few thousand monarchists scattered across the Belt; Gun Ako Akoi’s authority, in this remote, ruined palace, was
absolute. She could kill Hari on a whim, confiscate the head of her dead scion . . .

As she came down the last of the steps, and her little army parted to let her through, Rav did something that startled Hari: he went down on one knee and bowed his head and held out his arms on
either side so that his wings stretched like a cloak. After a moment, Hari, feeling foolish and more than a little afraid, knelt too.

Gun Ako Akoi laughed, told them to stand. Her familiars clustered around her knees. She spread her left hand on the helmet of the one in the pressure suit. Its visor matched the parade of faces
that came and went on her mask; its jets of white vapour swirled around her thighs.

‘I’ve brought what you asked for,’ Rav said, and held up the vial containing the relic.

‘I never doubted that you would,’ Gun Ako Akoi said.

Her voice was compounded of softly beaten gongs and tinkling bells.

A miniature general marched forward and took the vial from Rav and saluted and marched away across the soft lights of the floor.

‘I see that there are three of you,’ Gun Ako Akoi said.

For a moment, Hari thought that Riyya had crept in behind them; then he realised that the tick-tock woman must be referring to the head of Dr Gagarian. He started to explain how he had come by
his burden, but she raised her right hand and he fell silent. Her fingers were very long, and appeared to have extra joints.

‘I mean the djinn in your skull.’

‘I was wondering about that myself,’ Rav said.

Hari looked at him. ‘The djinn is in Dr Gagarian’s head.’

‘It is in your head, funny little baseliner,’ Gun Ako Akoi said. ‘In your neural network.’

‘Why don’t you show him what you’ve found?’ Rav said. ‘You know how it is with baseliners. Seeing is believing.’

A pict appeared in the dusky air. A head two metres across, semitransparent, slowly rotating, like the pict of Dr Gagarian’s head in the head shop in Fei Shen. But there were no modules
embedded in this head. Instead, a bright, tightly knitted tangle bridged the base of the hemispheres – a bios – and an intricate network of microscopic filaments ramified everywhere . .
.

‘It is very fine work,’ Gun Ako Akoi said. ‘Designed and seeded by the Memory Whole. Those filaments are just twenty nanometres across. You could fit a bundle of several
hundred of them inside a single neuron, and each has a much larger carrying capacity than any axon. Do you remember its inception?’

Hari shook his head. His scalp felt as if it was trying to shrink into his skull.

Rav said, ‘Is it an independent entity?’

‘Aside from the djinn? No. There are few points of contact with the baseliner’s sensory centres, and none in his cerebellum. Most of the traffic appears to be modulated by his bios.
I would guess that it is a high-capacity storage device.’ Gun Ako Akoi stared down at Hari. The face in her mask was that of a young, beautiful girl. ‘You really knew nothing about
this.’

Hari dry-swallowed, nodded.

‘You have no voluntary access.’

‘No. None that I know of.’

‘Then if you want to know what your neural network contains, you must consult its makers. I cannot open it for you.’

Rav said, ‘Surely someone as skilled and puissant as you wouldn’t be troubled by a mere djinn.’

The young girl’s face dissolved, replaced by the face of an old man with blank white eyes and an agonised expression.

‘I could dismiss the djinn easily enough, but the network is a very old design, based on obsolete principles,’ Gun Ako Akoi said. ‘They’re older than me, those tankies
down in the Memory Whole. Very conservative, very clever.’

‘I have already paid you,’ Rav said.

‘You paid me to open Dr Gagarian’s head. And this is no ordinary neural network. It has grown and elaborated itself from a seed rooted in the boy’s brain. Before I could begin
to unpick its encryption I would have to reverse-engineer and build the necessary tools, a task that would be neither quick nor easy. We would have to come to a new agreement, and in any case I
doubt that you could afford my fee.’

Rav smiled. ‘Are you telling me that you don’t want to do it, or you can’t do it?’

‘I’m telling you that it would be easier to consult the makers of the net, or the person who commissioned it.’

‘The person who commissioned it is dead,’ Hari said.

He felt faintly insubstantial. If it was real, if there really was a neural network inside his head, woven through his brain, if it wasn’t some kind of trick cooked up by Rav and the
tick-tock matriarch, his father must have put it there. His father must have commissioned it. Who else had known? Nabhomani? Nabhoj? Had Agrata known about it? If she had, Worden Hanburanaman had
probably known about it, too.
Worden will help you understand Dr Gagarian’s work, and how to carry it forward
. And Worden Hanburanaman had been kidnapped and killed, and Nabhoj was a
prisoner of the hijackers, so they probably knew about it too . . .

He said, ‘I need to know. I need to know what’s inside my head.’

The pict dwindled to a point of light, winked out.

‘You will have to visit the Memory Whole, and find the tanky who designed and planted the seed,’ Gun Ako Akoi said. ‘Meanwhile, there is this other business – the head of
my grandchild, Dr Gagarian.’

‘Are you certain that you can open that?’ Rav said.

Gun Ako Akoi ignored him and said to Hari, ‘Dr Gagarian was murdered by the people who hijacked your ship.’

‘Yes.’

‘They wanted his head. You took it from them, and now you want to use it to ransom the ship and any hostages.’

‘I want to find out why they want it. I came here because I was told that you could help me,’ Hari said.

But he was wondering what he was carrying in his own head, next to his thoughts. He was wondering what his father had written into the neural network during those sessions when he had seemed to
spend only an hour or two in the viron while days had passed outside, in the real world.

Gun Ako Akoi said, ‘And if I claim the head of my murdered grandchild?’

Rav said, ‘We have an agreement. I’ve done my part. Now it’s your turn.’

‘Remember that you are in my house.’

‘Oh, is that how it is?’

‘It is as it always has been.’

‘Things have changed,’ Rav said. ‘I know that’s hard for you to understand, living as you do in this tomb. But I owe you nothing, now. And you owe me.’

The Ardenist and the tick-tock matriarch stared at each other. Rav was smiling, showing all his teeth, and his wings were half-unfurled. The manikin familiars rustled around Gun Ako Akoi, hands
finding swords and holsters.

Hari shrugged off the kitbag, held it out to Gun Ako Akoi. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘But if you love Dr Gagarian half as much as I love my family, you’ll want revenge for his
murder. We can help you get it, if you give us copies of his files.’

Gun Ako Akoi’s laugh was like a hundred small bells cascading down a staircase. The face in her mask was the face of a sleepy young boy. ‘I never met Dr Gagarian,’ she said.
‘Yet I know him, and I love him. I love all my children, and I love all their children, and their children’s children. Ours is the truest form of human AI. We are woven from algorithms
that learn to mimic particular elements in our global neural maps. And at the same time our neural maps learn to exploit the higher functions of the algorithms. It is a dynamic process that
requires close supervision and takes many hundreds of days. Longer than the gestation of any mammal. I know all of my children intimately, and they know me. We share the same algorithms, similar
patterns of thought, similar emotional riffs, similar inventories of qualia. And so it is between them and their children. We are all of us variations of a single intricate theme. The death of one
diminishes the rest. The death of Dr Gagarian diminishes me.’

Gun Ako Akoi’s mask darkened. The face looking out now was inhuman. Grey skin, huge black eyes, a small downturned mouth. The familiars lowered their heads and clasped their hands to their
breasts.

‘I want to know how he met his end,’ she told Hari. ‘We’ll talk about that, you and I.’

They talked a long time. Gun Ako Akoi wanted to know every detail of Dr Gagarian’s work, and Hari had to apologise over and again because he couldn’t answer most of her questions.
For the tenth or twentieth time, he wished that he had paid more attention when he had set up the tick-tock philosopher’s experimental apparatus, wished that he’d asked more questions,
cursed the indolence of his younger self.

‘He was a romantic,’ Gun Ako Akoi said, at last. She spoke slowly and sonorously. She was composing an epitaph for her dead grandchild. ‘He believed that the universe was
comprehensible, that its complexity was an emergent property of a few fundamental rules. He believed that attempting to understand it was the finest occupation to which any kind of human being
could aspire. The Bright Moment challenged his perception of the universe, and he tried to rise to that challenge. He saw giants where we see windmills. He tried to fly to the Sun. He searched for
the Holy Grail. And like all such searches, his search ended in tragedy. Poor Gagarian. Poor parfait knight.’

There was a long silence in the shadowy chamber. The tick-tock matriarch was looking beyond Hari and Rav, looking at something in her past. The face in her mask was Dr Gagarian’s, black
leather and gristle twisted around a slot mouth and burning red eyes. Around her, the familiars stood still and silent, heads bowed, faces shuttered.

Hari said, ‘I did not know him very well, but it seems to me that he wasn’t given a chance to fail.’

‘That’s part of his tragedy,’ Gun Ako Akoi said, her mask now showing the face of a young woman glowing with a warrior’s fierce arrogant beauty. ‘He was chasing a
prize others wanted. He failed to see that. Or if he did see it, he failed to understand the consequences. And your father failed too, but because he was time-bound and unable to adapt to new
circumstances that’s not so surprising.’

Hari said, ‘I think that Dr Gagarian and my father were murdered because they were right. Because they were close to success.’

Rav was giving him a hard stare, but he didn’t care what the Ardenist thought. Didn’t care in that moment whether or not Gun Ako Akoi would grant their wish. He wanted to defend his
father and his family. And he wanted to justify his quest for revenge.

Bells tumbled and tinkled and clanged. The manikins around Gun Ako Akoi laughed too. Childish giggles, high ululations, a shrill whistle as the pressure-suited figure vented a tremendous blast
of vapour.

Gun Ako Akoi said, ‘None of my children are fools, and they do not choose fools to turn. But it’s clear that Dr Gagarian was a clever man on a foolish quest. He sought knowledge for
knowledge’s sake, but he lived in a fallen age where knowledge is currency. Your family knew that. They made their living rooting through ruins, looking for knowledge to sell. And because
there’s very little that’s new, Dr Gagarian made himself more valuable with every discovery he made. Until at last someone attempted to snap him up.’

Hari said, ‘If you think his research foolish, then I suppose I’m also a fool. Because I want to understand what he discovered.’

‘No. You want revenge. Which means that you’re very much of your time. As far as you’re concerned, understanding Dr Gagarian’s research is a means to an end. Currency.
Trade goods.’

‘You see things very clearly,’ Hari said. ‘What do you see inside Dr Gagarian’s head?’

‘Forgive the youngblood,’ Rav said. ‘He’s yet to learn any patience.’

‘He’s hungry for the future,’ Gun Ako Akoi said. ‘As far as you and I are concerned, the future is only more of the same. To children like him, it’s full of sweet
and toothsome possibilities.’

‘I’m not yet ready to retire to a mausoleum,’ Rav said.

‘Don’t think you’re any better than me, just because you are out and about, walking up and down in the world,’ Gun Ako Akoi said, and looked down at Hari. ‘Every
one of my children and grandchildren is a special snowflake, but they are all patterned on me. You know about snowflakes, boy?’

‘It’s a kind of water ice,’ Hari said.

‘They do snow here, sometimes. The weathermakers. The cloud wranglers, the climate cowboys, the friends of the little friend who is waiting for you outside. It is a special kind of ice.
Small crystals with six-fold symmetry,’ Gun Ako Akoi said, and opened a window.

White crystals slanted through darkness. Each with six facets around its central axis, each different. Some ornamented hexagons, others with six spiky arms, or six fractal branches, or six
spikes bearing miniature hexagonal platelets . . .

‘The encryption of my changelings is based on snowflake formation,’ Gun Ako Akoi said. ‘Organised according to a certain symmetry, every pattern different from moment to
moment. But if you have the base algorithm, you can unlock any of them. As I have unlocked Dr Gagarian’s.’