Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (29 page)

‘I failed to see that Mullai was falling in love with your father, even while she was still in love with me, and I with her. I was so in love, in fact, that when one of my friends tried to
warn me I had him banished from the crew. We baseliners pride ourselves that we are a kinder, more rational people than the True. But in truth, like them, we have not lost all of our ape heritage.
We are drawn to powerful people. And Aakash was one such. I was – I am – clever enough. I am admired by those who share my special interests. But Aakash had that particular quality that
transmutes base admiration to the gold of love. He was one of those men for whom people will give up their lives. They will leave everything behind to follow him. They will die for him. That was
how I lost Mullai.’

Tamonash was looking past Hari. Looking past everything in the room, the compound, the world city.

‘The ship was not finished when Aakash took her on her shakedown voyage. I spent every waking hour fixing systems that had revealed flaws when they became fully operational, attempting to
complete work that should have been finished before we set out. I was very busy, but I was also a fool. A blind fool. I did not see what was happening. I did not know anything about it until we
returned to the docks at Ophir, and Mullai told me. Told me that she had been Aakash’s lover for some time before we had set out, and that during that voyage she had realised that she must
choose between him and me. And she had chosen him. So that was the end of that, and that was the end of my relationship with Aakash. I allowed him to buy out my share in the ship. I stayed here, in
the family home. Where I have been ever since.

‘Your father is a selfish man, Gajananvihari, as many powerful men are. Ambitious, single-minded, and utterly selfish. Unable to see that other people may have other ambitions, other
dreams. That is why he made your two brothers in his likeness. That is why he chose to pass over into a kind of life after death, rather than give himself back to the Wheel. Yes, I know that your
brothers are his clones, and I know how Mullai died, and Rakesh. I kept track. I even tried to contact Aakash, once or twice. After Mullai died, after he passed over. He never replied. I told
myself it did not matter. I made a life for myself here. I partnered with a kind and loving woman, may she rest in peace. I have a strong, capable daughter, and she has given me two grandchildren
and we are building a business together.

‘And then Aakash’s ship was hijacked, and you arrived here. Perhaps you do not know it, but you look so much like your mother. And you were – you are – caught up in your
father’s obsession. It broke my heart to see it. When Mr Mussa came to me with his plan, his proposition, I thought that if the damned head was gone you would be free. You would be able to
take up your own life. Perhaps you would come to work for me, perhaps not. But you would be free of your father’s influence. And yes, I admit it, I would have been free of it too,’
Tamonash said, looking at Hari with a steady gaze. ‘Well, who knows why we do the things we do? But I did not think, I really did not, that it would end as it has.’

Hari didn’t know how much of the story to believe. He knew only that he couldn’t forgive his uncle. Couldn’t accept his confession, or his guilt. He was gripped by a cold,
angry purpose.

He said, ‘Tell me about Mr Mussa’s proposition. Tell me everything.’

Tamonash said, ‘You share half my brother’s genome, and you have something of his single-mindedness, and something of his ability to attract and influence other people. You
don’t realise that yet, I think. I doubt that you were given much of a chance to use it, on the ship. It is a gift, a very useful gift, but be careful. Like a coin, it has two
sides.’

‘Humour my single-mindedness, Uncle.’

‘Mr Mussa told me that he had a client who wanted to know what Dr Gagarian had discovered. He promised me that no harm would come to you or the Ardenist. And in that, at least, he has kept
his word.’

‘Who is this client?’

Tamonash studied Hari for a moment, hands steepled under his chin. Then he said, ‘When we made our arrangement, Mr Mussa told me that he would be able to sell the knowledge to a rival of
Dr Gagarian’s. He did not give his client’s name, but dropped enough hints to allow me to guess it. To let me think I had discovered a secret he wanted hidden. The person he pointed me
towards was Ioni Robles Nguini, a philosopher who lives in Greater Brazil, on Earth. I see you recognise the name.’

‘He was working with Dr Gagarian and my father,’ Hari said. ‘Is he still alive? Have you talked to him?’

‘I talked to a representative of his family, who claimed to know nothing about Mr Mussa. I suppose that he was attempting to conceal the identity of his real client by pointing me in the
wrong direction.’

‘But you agreed to this proposition of his anyway.’

‘I wanted to free you of your burden, nephew,’ Tamonash said blandly.

It was impossible to make out if he was telling the truth.

‘You told Mr Mussa where I was going,’ Hari said. ‘And he made arrangements to steal the head.’

Tamonash didn’t deny this.

‘Who ambushed us?’ Hari said ‘Who stole the head? Was he working for you and Mr Mussa, or for this client? Is he still here, on Ophir?’

‘It was Mr Mussa’s daughter. He created her during his last days in corporeal form. She’s a kind of clone. Her genome contains two copies of his X chromosomes, and she has been
tweaked, and she is a lot older than she looks. Be careful, if you ever meet her. Hope that you don’t.’

‘Mr Mussa’s ship is heading towards Tannhauser Gate,’ Hari said. ‘Rav’s son tracked it when it left Ophir, and is tracking it as we speak.’

‘You are going to chase after him. You and the Ardenist.’

‘Of course.’

‘I suppose that it would be pointless to attempt to persuade you that it would be dangerous and foolish.’

‘It would.’

‘My offer still stands, nephew. You are welcome to come and work for me. You could spend some time on Earth. You could visit Ioni Robles Nguini. Talk to him. If Dr Gagarian found anything
of any significance, if you and Ioni Robles Nguini can work out what it was, I will do my best to help you understand it. I have many contacts. Make use of them. Make use of me. We are, after all,
family.’

There it was.

‘I have lost my family,’ Hari said. He pushed to his feet and turned his back on his uncle and walked away. Tamonash calling after him, pleading with him to stay, saying that the
people who wanted the head would come after both of them, as he walked through the cold blue light of Earth, walked out of his family’s old home.

The battlebot followed him. As protection, and because he had one more use for it.

‘I would have killed him,’ Rav said.

‘Our peoples are very different,’ Hari said.

‘You are very different. Your blood runs much colder than mine. You realise that your uncle will be targeted by the Saints. They will want to know what you told him, and they won’t
want to leave any loose ends . . .’

They were riding the elevator up to the docks, and
Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
.

‘I’ve taken care of that,’ Hari said. He opened a window showing the viewpoint of the battlebot as it stamped along the road towards Down Town, and told Rav its
destination.

Rav laughed. ‘You’re almost as crazy as me. Those particular Saints are strictly local. Low-grade recruiters. They didn’t have anything to do with the hijack. Or with the
murder of Salx Minnot Flores, either.’

‘But if their superiors did, if those superiors sent that message to me, well, now I have sent them a reply. Also, the police will trace the battlebot back to my uncle. Maybe they will
arrest him, maybe not. But if he has any sense he will tell them the whole wretched story, and ask for protection.’

‘Mmm. That’s actually almost smart.’

‘Thank you.’

’How long will it take that thing to reach Down Town?’

‘About forty minutes. And it will take ten or twenty minutes more to find the school and start its work.’

‘And by then we’ll be on our way to Tannhauser Gate. Which is just as well, because Ophir’s police really won’t be happy about the trouble you’re about to
cause.’

‘I have no plans to return,’ Hari said.

PART FOUR

PIRATES OF THE ASTEROIDS

At age sixteen, Hari jumped ship.

It was in the Commonwealth of Sugar Mountain, shortly before Dr Gagarian came aboard. Hari had gone shoreside with Nabhomani, his first time off
Pabuji’s Gift
, to observe how
trade negotiations were handled.

‘It will be dull and tedious work, entirely lacking in excitement,’ Nabhomani told Hari. ‘Which is no doubt why Aakash allowed you to come along. The lives of these people are
bound by rules and regulations they’ve been accumulating and refining and discussing for over a thousand years. It’s their religion, their great work, but as far as outsiders are
concerned it’s about as thrilling as cataloguing every grain of sand on Mars. They even managed to bore the Trues into allowing them to become a neutral enclave, way back when. But boring
work, tedious work, that’s no bad thing, Hari. You’ll witness contract negotiations without the usual distractions – drinking, drugging, bribery and corruption, all the other good
things that make life worthwhile. Pay attention, little brother, work up a detailed and accurate report for our father who art in his own little heaven, and I’ll make sure we get some of the
good stuff next time.’

The Commonwealth was a free-fall reef, seven gardens between one and five kilometres in diameter set at irregular intervals along a central spine spun from comet CHON. The whole looking, as
Pabuji’s Gift
approached it, like a string of soap bubbles pierced by a needle, each bubble brilliantly lit by banks of sun-mirrors.

Hari and Nabhomani rode for some sixty kilometres down the spine in a rail car with fittings of real wood and metal, and padded walls clad in hand-sewn tapestries showing heroic scenes from the
construction of the reef. Once luxurious, the rail car’s appointments were now worn and shabby. Like everywhere else, Sugar Mountain was pinched by the long, belt-wide recession.

The rail car traversed three bubble habitats – gulfs of sunlight and air and cloud forests, stacks of tethered or floating platforms – before arriving at the trading centre, which
was set just outside the interchange station of the fourth and largest habitat. A cylindrical installation of about twenty storeys, offices and meeting rooms, and chilly guest suites where Hari and
Nabhomani were the only occupants.

The negotiations concerned the renewal of the Commonwealth’s collision-protection system, using components that
Pabuji’s Gift
had salvaged from a dead garden. Terms of
payment for the components and for the supply of rare earths and metals required for fabrication of spare parts, contractual guarantees, penalties for overrun costs . . . Arid and interminably
prolonged discussions that anatomised every clause and footnote in interminable detail. The Commonwealth’s officials were tall and mostly pale-skinned, dressed in trousers and collarless
tunics of various shades of grey. Austere, earnest, unsmiling. Hari and Nabhomani were restricted to the trading centre, shuttling between their guest suite, presentations by various officials and
endless discussions of minor changes to sub-sub-clauses in contracts, and formal meals where edible morsels were extracted with special instruments from stringy pods or spiny clusters of leaves,
and dipped in simmering pots of melted cheese or bubbling oil using another set of special instruments, with appropriate gestures of politeness and in strict rotation amongst the diners.

Despite the tedium, Hari was constantly on edge, worried that he’d violate some important protocol or custom, or fall asleep at the dining table while one of their hosts was explaining the
superiority of the Commonwealth’s culture and biomes, its arts (very long atonal operas, nanosculpture, dabbing pigments on stretched canvas to represent mindscapes produced by exotic
mathematics, flower-breeding) and, most of all, its political system, in which every citizen voted ten or twenty times a day on the distribution of various resources between habitats, minor changes
in civil and judicial codes, and so on and so forth, boredom and fear and resentment knotting inside Hari’s chest until he felt that he could scarcely breathe.

The third meeting of the second day was enlivened by the attendance of several technicians who gave short presentations about potential problems uncovered during inspection of the control
system. One of the technicians immediately caught Hari’s attention: she looked a little like Sora Exodus Adel. Sora, whom he still loved with a kind of hopeless Platonic idealism because she
represented the possibility of a life other than the life he had. It wasn’t so much the physical resemblance as the way the technician held her head and tilted her chin, the way she sometimes
smiled when one of her co-workers made a point, a brief faint twitch at the corners of her mouth, sly and private. After she and the other technicians had finished their presentations and left,
Hari felt a dull echo of the hopeless yearning sadness that had swamped him after Sora had disembarked at Trantor, and Jyotirmoy had run away from his parents.

Nabhomani told Hari that introducing the technicians into the negotiations was an attempt to drive down the price of the components.

‘They insist that the flaws they have uncovered are worse than they actually are; we must pretend that we are not insulted by the implication that we are trying to sell them damaged goods,
and prove that the flaws are minor and easy to fix. What you have to remember, brother, is that the good citizens of the Commonwealth love this kind of thing. They live for it. When they
aren’t negotiating with traders and other governments, the Commonwealth’s habitats are negotiating amongst themselves, or arguing over refinements of their political system. It’s
a massive sink of time and human energy, and generates nothing of any value. That’s why the Commonwealth has such a huge internal economy, but so little trading credit. All it has to offer in
exchange for essential imports is the use of its ship-repair facility – which admittedly is much better than most – and the products of its guest workers. Who because they get their
hands dirty doing actual work are never allowed to become citizens.’