Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (48 page)

Now Hari asked her eidolon if she had ever heard anything from the weird sisters, asked if they had shown any interest in the Saints, or in the work of Rav’s son and his friends.
Riyya’s eidolon told him that if any were still alive they were keeping a low profile. Perhaps they had all been killed, or perhaps they had retreated to the depths of their pocket sea to
contemplate their next move. No one knew, and neither Riyya nor Rav’s son had tried to contact them.

‘We are thinking about our future,’ Riyya’s eidolon said, ‘not our past.’

She and Hari talked about their diverging lives. Riyya’s eidolon told him that she was busy with work that was good and satisfying, and as far as she was concerned that would do for now.
Rav’s son, who now called himself Ji, the first syllable of what he hoped would grow into a long and storied name, had gathered a crew of like-minded refugees from the Republic of Arden, and
they had colonised an abandoned garden and were delving deep into the intricate puzzles that Dr Gagarian had not had time to solve. It would take years, according to Ji. Decades. Meanwhile, Riyya
was tweaking the garden’s climate control, and helping the Ardenists to design and populate its biome. Ji already had a son, and was talking about quickening a second. He, at least, was
content.

‘And you?’ Riyya’s eidolon asked Hari. ‘Are you happy?’

‘I hope I’m getting there,’ Hari said.

He was busy, anyway. Even though Rubber Duck said that there had never been a worse time for trade, they were always on the move, plying their regular three-cornered route and making the odd
side trip to chase down unique machines and other artefacts Hari found through his contacts.

Rubber Duck claimed to be more than a thousand years old, claimed that he’d been piloting his ship before the rise of the True Empire. Tankies were given to boasting that they had
witnessed or played crucial roles in turning points in history, or that they were actual historical personages who’d passed over to cheat death, or had been resurrected by faithful followers,
and so on and so forth, attempts to make them seem important to a future that didn’t really care. But whether or not Rubber Duck was older than the True Empire, his ship was definitely very
old, the oldest that Hari had ever seen: an old dropship powered by three pulsed fusion motors, with a stubby utility spine that sported a pair of comb racks for self-guided pods that, in the
halcyon days of centuries long past, had been dropped off or picked up in transit during long, looping runs through the Belt. Half a dozen pods of various sizes were permanently welded to the racks
now. One contained Rubber Duck’s extensive collection of trinkets and memorabilia; two more were tricked out to accommodate passengers; the rest stored cargo and trade goods.

Rubber Duck was inextricably wedded to his ancient ship, stripped back to his nervous system and plaited though her spine, augmented by traits he’d been using for so long he couldn’t
remember what was original and what wasn’t. When she goes dark, he liked to say, so will I. ‘That’s why we have the same handle. She’s my muscle; I’m her
brains.’

The tanky was represented in what he called the happening world by a semi-autonomous avatar and a trio of maintenance robots that took care of parts of the dropship’s structure and systems
that were no longer (or never had been) self-repairing. But mostly he presented as a face in a window. The face was, according to him, the face of his lost meat self: a cheerful old man with unruly
white hair bushed up by a scarf neatly folded to display his logo, a bright yellow cartoon duck with a red bill and large blue human eyes.

Rubber Duck claimed that the scarf and his persona were part of a rebranding he’d undergone a century before the rise of the True Empire. At one point, he said, there had been a small
franchise of Rubber Ducks weaving through the Belt, but he was the only one left. ‘I’m pretty sure I’m the original. Not that it matters. We shared everything, back
then.’

Hari revived the old contacts that Nabhomani had used when
Pabuji’s Gift
had still been in the salvage business, and worked up several more. After three years, Rubber Duck made
him an equal partner in their enterprise, and began to talk about reviving the old franchise. But there really wasn’t that much trade, any more. Travel to the outer belt was increasingly
risky; and dacoits were beginning to harass or hijack ships along the outer edge of the main belt.

Rubber Duck claimed to have known some of the first dacoits, tanky pilots who’d gone rogue, preying on other ships for consumables and reaction mass. He talked about black fleets that had
set up a network of stealthed bases on comets and kobolds, run by slaves recruited from the crews and passengers of ships they’d infiltrated or chased down. He talked about the time that
several cities had united and gone to war against the dacoits, breaking up the black fleets and rescuing the surviving slaves.

‘
Those
were dacoits,’ he said. ‘These newbies, they’re just chancers who sometimes trade and sometimes raid. Part-time pirates who don’t have any respect
for tradition.’

‘I heard some of the old-time dacoits are still out there,’ Hari said.

As a child, he’d been fascinated by his father’s tales of the wars against the black fleets. Colourful, grand, and simplistic dramas of good versus evil. Stories that might have
shaped him, he thought now; that had perhaps influenced him when he had decided to set out on his path of revenge.

Rubber Duck said that there were all kinds of stories about the remnants of the old black fleets.

‘Some say that the survivors are heading out to settled stellar systems, aiming to kick up trouble there. Others that they are aiming for systems that aren’t yet settled, planning to
set up their own brand of civilisation. Or that they have been lurking in the outer dark all this time, sleeping it out, waiting for an opportunity to take control of the Belt. Which might be soon,
the way things are going. Posthumans are disappearing up their own assholes, and don’t need or want to trade. And base-liner worldlets and gardens are growing poorer, trading less and less.
How many ships were docked at Tannhauser Gate, when we were last there? I’ll tell you. Twenty-two. Back in the day, there would have been ten times that number. And nine of those twenty-two
were semipermanently docked, no place to go, unable to pay off debts accruing each day. That’s how it is everywhere. Not enough work to go around, and if you don’t find work you end up
stuck, trying and failing to work off your debts. Becoming indentured labour for whatever worldlet you end up on.’

They didn’t talk about the hijack of
Pabuji’s Gift
, Hari’s abduction by Saints, his confrontation with Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters. Hari was trying to put that
behind him. He’d broadcast the contents of Dr Gagarian’s files to every part of the Solar System: it was up to others to make of it what they would. He tried to keep current on the
various nets used by philosophers, but there was little talk of the Bright Moment. Only a few people had ever been interested in the philosophy of its propagation, and Dr Gagarian’s research
had barely caused a ripple of interest.

Maybe Rav’s son, Ji, and his crew of young Ardenists would make a breakthrough. Maybe someone else would, in ten or a hundred years. Hari tried to let it go, tried to move on.

He ploughed the triangle run over and again with Rubber Duck, making a few deals on the side, hoping to save enough to purchase or rent his own ship and get back into the salvage trade, perhaps
start his own family. And one day, a little over six years after the debacle of the Saints’ second crusade, he received a message from Ophir. His Uncle Tamonash had died, and Hari had
inherited a portion of the old family estate.

Hari was surprised. He’d never tried to contact Tamonash after he’d left Ophir, and Tamonash hadn’t tried to contact him, either. He talked with Tamonash’s daughter,
Aamaal, who was still living and working on Earth, and quickly reached an agreement about selling the estate. Hari’s inheritance was by no means enough to purchase a ship, but he worked out
that he could at last pay to have a question answered, and for the first time in their partnership he and Rubber Duck quit the Belt and headed sunwards, towards Earth, and the Memory Whole.

The dropship looped around Earth’s Moon and closed on a small, stony asteroid, one of several orbiting the L5 point. A Greater Brazilian corporado had deflected it from
its Earth-crossing orbit fifteen hundred years ago, and mined its regolith for platinum-group metals, rare-earth elements, and hydrogen and oxygen. Now it housed the Memory Whole.

Hari appraised it as the dropship spiralled into a close orbit. An irregular, heavily cratered spheroid with a major axis of a little less than a kilometre, gouged by strip mines, riddled with
test bores and extraction shafts. Plantations of vacuum organisms that resembled black, bushy rocket ships packed the floors of craters and marched in phalanxes across inter-crater plains. A rack
of railgun catapults. The remains of an ancient refinery. An interesting labyrinth of interconnected pods buried under a mound of shaly spall. You could always find something useful in old
installations. Construction steel, cables and ancient electronics that could be rendered down for copper and germanium and gallium, personal artefacts abandoned by former occupants . . .

But these ruins were inhabited. The discorporate tankies who had founded the Memory Whole had used intersecting beams of protons and antiprotons to bore a shaft through the asteroid’s
rotational axis, and the fused rock wall of the shaft was coated with a network whose complexity was several orders of magnitude larger than that of the human brain. Parts of it were based on a
variety of hardwired platforms, but the majority was rooted in probability fields generated by billions of loops of metal-rich ZNA within clades of slow-growing alife bacteria.

This was the information sea where the founders of the Memory Whole now lived. They had been discorporate for more than fifteen hundred years, early pioneers whose brains had been scanned by a
variety of primitive techniques and replicated in digital simulations. Although they claimed to be the first true posthumans, the first to have transcended baseline human consciousness and escaped
what they called meatspace, their minds were crude, unaugmented replicas of their original selves. This was partly due to technical limitations, but was also the expression of a shared ideology.
The discorporate of the Memory Whole wanted to live for ever, but they did not want to change. They wanted to preserve themselves as they had been in their so-called prime, and that they had
largely succeeded was both their glory and their failure. They had won the amortality they craved, but did not realise that they had built a prison and willingly entered it. They were the last
remnant of the old Western cults which had venerated the primacy of the individual. The ghosts of libertarians trying to keep their little candle-flames of ego-self alight for as long as possible,
refusing to understand that flames are never the same but are always dancing, always changing.

After the first swaggering flush of creation, when they had constructed solipsistic kingdoms and squabbled and gone to war with each other, re-enacting universe-spanning crusades out of the
fantasies of the long ago, they had settled into a long, staid era of mutual cooperation. They had become conservators of their own legend. They had taken in other simulations, given homes to
failed attempts at true artificial intelligence. They had, like many of their kind, dabbled in projects to reach out to alien civilisations, and had created simulations of universes inhabited by
all kinds of intelligent species. In one of those, Rubber Duck told Hari, a group of the discorporate claimed to have created a genuine self-aware civilisation and had contacted it and watched it
recoil and self-destruct. There was another group who after centuries of research claimed to have solid evidence that the observable universe was also a simulation: that humans had been created by
aliens like unto gods. And so on, and so forth.

‘They do like their secrets and their conspiracies. They like to make themselves out to be more than they are. They want to believe that they are the last keepers of the true flame. That
they haven’t been left behind. That they are still
relevant
,’ Rubber Duck said, with uncharacteristic scorn. ‘When all they do, like the posthumans they clearly
aren’t, is burrow deeper and deeper into fantasy.’

The discorporate were, he said, the mirror image of posthumans. Posthumans tended to vanish into their own heads while they searched for the ultimate truths that underpinned the observable
reality of the universe. The discorporate had vanished inside fantasies in which they were the microcosmic gods of their own creations. And meanwhile, human history flowed on around them both.

The Memory Whole’s only connection with the rest of humanity was through the services they offered. Their techniques were old but entirely reliable, and had been modified to take advantage
of new technologies. They traded in various forms of life after death, could implant all kinds of augmentations, provide backup systems and exo-memories, and install secure neural networks.
Hari’s father had gone to the Memory Whole when he had decided that his time had come. He had been discorporated and loaded into a corner of
Pabuji’s Gift
’s shipmind.
Later, he had returned and paid to have a neural network installed in his newly decanted son, with a copy of himself woven into its root.

That copy was still there. It had never shown any sign of wakening, but it was impossible to forget its presence. It was like a mortal illness, a shadow always at Hari’s back. He knew that
his life could never truly be his own until he had freed himself of his burden.

Rubber Duck did not dock the dropship because there was nowhere to dock. Instead, he matched delta vee with the Memory Whole’s unprepossessing rock, standing off at twenty
kilometres as requested.