Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (39 page)

They curled together, afterwards, on the yielding floor of the pod, in the dim hush of the garden. When Hari woke, daylight shone through the pod’s translucent weave, and he was alone.

Riyya didn’t want to talk about it. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, when Hari tried to talk about it. And: ‘It wasn’t anything. Back in cadet
school, we played around with each other all the time. It didn’t mean anything then, and it doesn’t mean anything now.’ And: ‘Why do people need reasons for what they
do?’

So they didn’t talk about it. She deflected his fumbling attempts at intimacy; he began to resent the way she had used him. For relief, to escape the terror and uncertainty of captivity,
to assert herself. Instead, they had a kind of argument about their adventures, about whose story it really was. Hari tried to tell Riyya that everything would come right, but she wouldn’t
listen to him. ‘Do you think that what the Saints did was necessary?’ she said.

‘Do you think that they tortured you because it served a higher cause? And what about you, Hari? Do you want to punish the people who killed your family because it will satisfy some kind
of cosmic balance? Or is it because you are angry and hurt? Do you think you’ll be any less angry, any less hurt, afterwards?’

At last she walked away and left him alone with his guilt and doubt. He had come to believe that his suffering was necessary. That it was part of a transaction. The Saints wanted to know
everything about Dr Gagarian’s research; he needed their help to reach
Pabuji’s Gift
. But he could think of no good reason for what the Saints had done to Riyya. She had been
humiliated and hurt. Her wounds were still raw. They might never heal. And he was responsible. He had walked into her life. He had drawn the Saints’ attention to the hijack, to Dr
Gagarian’s work and the work of her father.

She came back to him after two days, and they didn’t talk about it again. But Hari’s guilt lingered. Guilt and doubt.

And so the days passed, each much like the rest. One day, they were sitting up on the ledge, looking out across the treetops in companionable silence, when a raw white flash took the world away.
A moment of no time, no thought. And then the world came back, as if it had been rebooted. Hari and Riyya looked at each other, and knew that the Saints had tested her father’s apparatus.

Later that day, two adepts came for Hari, and escorted him down one of the spars to the hub of the wheel habitat, the dock at the spin axis. Levi was waiting for him in a gig, a small
gold-tinted sphere that darted out from the wheel habitat, followed by half a dozen identical gigs, bubbles of air rising through the sunlit black until Hari could blot out the tiny, turning world
with his thumbnail. A ship hung out there, a fat argosy from the last days of the True Empire. As the gig slowly circled it, Levi told Hari about the progress of the Saints’ great work.

‘They have already downloaded a mind sailor,’ Hari said to Riyya, after he returned to the wheel habitat. ‘They took her brain apart, neuron by neuron, and copied her
connectome into a viron. They are trying to do what the Ghosts tried to do, out at Fomalhaut. They were going to create mind sailors too, the Ghosts. Somehow fuse them with the alien intelligence
that inhabits the core of the gas-giant planet, Cthuga.’

‘My father says they failed because there was no alien mind,’ Riyya said. ‘There were epiphenomena, created by the planet’s magnetic field, that mimicked aspects of
intelligent behaviour. Sprites, apparitions. But there was no world-mind until Sri Hong-Owen downloaded or redistributed herself into the sprites.’

‘Well, Levi plans to vasten his mind sailors in a similar way,’ Hari said. ‘He talked for a straight hour about how it’s supposed to work. Half of it philosophy, half
theology. I asked him why the seraphs hadn’t tried to stop him. If he could vasten a human mind and interfere with their control of history, why hadn’t they destroyed the habitat, and
the ship? He said that the human agents who had tried to kill him before couldn’t reach him out here, and the seraphs themselves responded only to immediate threats. He said, “A man
will brush a fly from his face, but he won’t go to war against flies.” Do you have flies, in Ophir?’

‘They’re a useful part of the biosphere,’ Riyya said.

‘I had to ask about them. I told Levi that perhaps the seraphs hadn’t reached out to him because they didn’t consider him a threat. He said they were arrogant, and that would
be their downfall.’

‘You were trying to annoy him.’

‘I discovered that it isn’t possible. His fantasy is entirely airtight.’

In the little bubble of the gig, Levi had told Hari that he was looking forward to talking with his father because they had so much in common, had laughed when Hari said that they held
completely opposing views.

‘We have taken different paths, your father and I, but we both started from the same place, and we both want to reach the same destination.’

‘You want to prove that Sri Hong-Owen is a kind of god,’ Hari said. ‘My father and Dr Gagarian wanted to prove that she is not.’

‘She is beyond our understanding,’ Levi said. ‘Beyond the reach of ordinary human comprehension; beyond the reach of philosophy and the experiments of Dr Gagarian.’

He launched into another monologue, telling Hari that philosophy could not give a complete account of the universe because of limitations in its reductive methodology. Philosophy reduced the
universe of things to its components, catalogued them, tried to fit their properties and interactions into mathematical models. Large-scale properties that could not be anatomised – beauty,
grandeur, the splendour and sublimity of scale – were considered to be trivial by-products, emergent accidents that triggered spurious human responses. Philosophy stripped away metaphor, Levi
said. And that was where faith was strongest: bridging the reality of the universe and the reality of human experience.

‘Philosophy also fails to give a complete explanation of the universe on its own terms,’ Levi said. ‘Many properties are chaotic: initial conditions are underdetermined, and
cannot be used to predict accurately the final state. Measurement of the behaviour of every atom in a small volume of gas will not provide any useful information about the way those same atoms
behave in a solid or liquid state on a larger scale, because the phase change from gas to liquid is an emergent property. There is no reconciliation between the very small and the very large, no
smooth transition. So we do not need to invoke a god of the gaps, hiding in places philosophy cannot reach, or a god who intervenes with miracles that circumvent the usual natural order or exploit
causal lacunae. Divine agency is an emergent property of the universe. If the activity of our neurons affects our consciousness from the bottom up, then divinity affects it from the top
down.’

Levi floated above his couch, pale-skinned, dressed all in white, ghostly against the black vacuum. Every now and then a faint tremor passed through his body. He had never completely recovered
from the assassination attempt. There had been irreversible nerve damage; he was in pain all the time. But the pain was useful, according to him. A useful discipline, a reminder that he was mortal,
and fallible.

‘Philosophy may claim that it does not need our faith and beliefs,’ he told Hari. ‘But we do not renounce philosophy. It provides our basic needs. And if you grant the utility
of a maker or an air scrubber, it would be illogical to spurn the rest. The work of Dr Gagarian will be of great use to us; so will the device of the father of your friend. I am told that it is
based on a weapon developed by the Trues. And while it is a very poor imitation of the Bright Moment, and its power diminishes with distance, it will play a crucial role in the vastening of my mind
sailor.

‘And so all things have followed different paths, yet come together at the same point. As if foreordained. As if through the workings of a subtle plan beyond the comprehension of merely
human minds. The work of Dr Gagarian and his colleagues complements our work. Your father complements me. He will challenge my ideas and my faith, and make them stronger. Yes, I very much look
forward to talking with him, and I will not have to wait much longer. And you will help me too, of course, as I will help you. You see how it all fits together?’

Riyya said, ‘He’s crazy, but he thinks that he needs you. That’s a weakness. Something you can exploit.’

‘Unfortunately, I need him,’ Hari said.

They were walking through a grove of birch trees and ferns. Sunlight slanted between the white trunks of the trees and a bird was singing somewhere in the distance – it reminded Hari of
the forest biome where he’d been interviewed by Ma Sakitei. He wondered if the gardens of the wheel habitat had been designed by the Free People.

‘You need him to take back your ship,’ Riyya said. ‘But after that?’

Hari knew that she wanted to know if he had a plan to defeat and escape the Saints, but he couldn’t talk about that, and not only because the Saints were almost certainly
eavesdropping.

‘Levi told me that the specialist will arrive very soon,’ he said. ‘Once the last file left in my neural net is unlocked, he said, I can head out to
Pabuji’s
Gift
. I don’t trust him, Riyya. But if I’m given the chance, I’ll go. Even if there are secrets hidden aboard the ship that will help the Saints get closer to their fantasy,
even if there’s no chance that I’ll be able to escape, I’ll go. Because that’s what this is all about. To find out who hijacked the ship, and employed those
assassins.’

‘Agents of the seraphs, according to Levi.’

‘We’ll see.’

Riyya said, ‘If this was one of the old stories, we’d somehow escape just before Levi launched his mind sailor. There would be a desperate fight for control of a crucial machine, and
at the last moment one of us would key in a sequence that would shut it down. The seraph would no longer be distracted, the mind sailor would be destroyed and the Saints would be thwarted, the
universe would be saved.’

‘It’s a nice thought.’

‘It’s a story. What we’re caught up in isn’t anything like that. For one thing, we’re talking about the kind of story we’re caught up in,’ Riyya said.
‘And in those old stories they didn’t ever stop to think if they were doing the right thing in the right way. They just did it.’

‘We look backwards for inspiration and guidance because everything’s old. Because everything’s been done before,’ Hari said.

A sudden sharp breeze blew through the birches and their leaves danced and flickered.

Riyya said, ‘You know what scares me most? That if we are trapped inside a story, it isn’t yours or mine. It’s Levi’s fantasy of becoming a god.’

‘This thing we’re in, whatever it is, we’re in it together,’ Hari said.

But it didn’t reassure her.

Several days later, Hari and Riyya were eating breakfast in the shade of the grandfather live oak when Jyotirmoy appeared, traversing the half-life lawn with his usual languid
elegance. Hari knew why he had come, knew what he was going to say. Felt it like a stone in his stomach. He scarcely noticed when Riyya reached out and gripped his hand.

Jyotirmoy took Hari to the little cluster of rooms where he had been exorcised, and the crew of remembrancers and sacristans prepared him in the ordinary way. Stripping off his clothes.
Strapping him to the chair. Fitting a mask that delivered a chilly draught of dry, oxygen-rich air. Treating him with drugs that paralysed him and distanced him from the world.

The remembrancers and a small woman in a grey smock and black leggings were studying windows that showed different views of Hari’s brain and the neural net wrapped around it, quietly
conferring with their backs to him. At last the senior remembrancer leaned over Hari, asked him if he was ready. Hari tried to smile. He wanted to let the man know that he wanted to get this done,
but could do little more than move his eyes.

The remembrancer turned and looked at someone and said, ‘He’s yours.’

The woman in the grey smock stepped towards him. Child-sized, her bare scalp tattooed with spidery symbols. Hari had met her before, in a city halfway around the Belt. The head doctor, Eli
Yong.

She studied him with a cold and clinical gaze, said something to the chief remembrancer. And then there was a blank space, and then she was inside his head.

Black water lapped islands of white moss. The yellow eyes of torches pulsed in the twilight. Skulls hung from poles like clusters of bony fruit. A sprawl of bodies – the
small congregation of skull feeders, the dead woman. The assassin killed by Hari’s djinn. His father’s djinn. She lay on her back, bloody stars glistening on her black bodysuit.

‘Trite and melodramatic, I know,’ Eli Yong said. ‘But it’s easy to model and its cues trigger useful subsets in your dynamic core. Do you remember when we last
met?’

She was a solid presence, fully realised, but Hari was little more than a floating viewpoint. He couldn’t move, but discovered that he could speak.

‘I remember that you said that you couldn’t help me. Either you lied to me then, or you’re lying to the Saints now.’

‘I told you the truth then, and I’ll tell the truth now. I didn’t come here to help the Saints. I came to help you.’

‘You had better tell me why.’

‘You walked into my shop with an exquisite neural net inside your head, and a djinn fiercer than any I’d ever had to deal with. I wanted to know more, but before I could get in touch
with you again, you and Rav had fled Fei Shen after some trouble with a group of skull feeders. I knew Rav by reputation, and reached out to him. He told me that he had other plans for you,
involving a tick-tock matriarch in Ophir, but I made myself useful to him. I studied the image of the neural net I’d captured, and researched the techniques of the Memory Whole. I talked to
one of the skull feeders. I reported the conversation to Rav and sent him the commissars’ file on this woman,’ Eli Yong said, gesturing towards the dead assassin. ‘She arrived on
Fei Shen shortly after you. A trader, according to her bios, but the settlement where she claimed to live had no records of her. She was progeric, and had been tweaked in several interesting and
rather antique ways. They used to make warriors like her in the long ago.’