Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (49 page)

Earth and the Moon floated far off, small, lonely islands in the black sky.

Presently, a drone flashed out from the battered asteroid, trailing a superconducting monocrystalline tether. After some to and fro regarding compatibility and handshaking protocols, it coupled
with one of Rubber Duck’s external interfaces and established a gateway to his fatline. That was how things were done, at the Memory Whole. That was why Hari had to travel to there in person.
Connections to the outside were made through clunky old-fashioned hard links controlled by avatars of the Memory Whole crew. There was no point asking to use a qubit loop, a proxy, or even a
randomly-modulated, highly-directional laser. The discorporate had survived the vastening of the seraphs, the True Empire, the humbling of Earth during the Long Twilight, and much else. They were
paranoid about being hacked, invaded, turned; the boundary of their utopia bristled with security protocols and lethal traps.

Hari linked the fatline to his bios and settled in a hammock and composed himself for a long series of tests and checks. At last he was given the all-clear, and in an eyeblink found himself in
an avatar that mirrored his own body and was dressed in antique clothing: bib coveralls of stiff scratchy blue cloth, and some kind of wide-brimmed hat that was, he discovered when he took it off,
woven from straw. All alone on a log raft riding a red river of molten sulphur.

It was a viron that replicated a section of Jupiter’s moon Io with scrupulous fidelity. The lava river, fed by tributaries that pulsed down the slopes of a volcanic cone at the eastern
horizon, was more than a kilometre wide, channelled between pillowy dykes. The rugged landscape beyond was patchworked in shades of red and yellow, orange and brown. Fallout deposits, fumarolic
materials, remnants of local flows. The sky was hazed with a smog of frozen sulphur dioxide. Jupiter’s huge crescent tilted in the west, and the fat star of one of the other Galilean moons
hung beyond its bright limb.

The air shimmered at the other end of the raft, coalesced into a roughly man-shaped robot clad in silvery skin that reflected the molten river and the raft and Hari’s avatar. The tiller of
a steering paddle was tucked under one of its accordion arms. Its head was a glass turret in which a man’s face floated. Pale skin, sleepy eyes, a neat black beard parting in a smile.

‘Welcome to my favourite moon. Always changing, always the same.’

‘It seems very real,’ Hari said politely.

‘A trivial exercise from my youth, but it makes a handy sandbox. You never know what people may bring with them from the outside. If you try to run some sneaky app or demon you’ll
find out what I mean.’

The robot gestured with its free arm, a curious looping snakelike motion. A plume of smoky gases spurted from the volcanic cone. A moment later, fat ripples coursed down the river’s
sluggish flow. The raft bucked and slewed; Hari danced on the spot, waving his arms to keep his balance. All around, a faint sulphur dioxide snow began to fall, flurries of gritty white flakes
blurring the landscape, flashing into vapour as they kissed the molten currents of the river.

‘I am as a god here,’ the robot said. ‘And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.’

The face’s lips didn’t move when the robot spoke. It gazed out at Hari with a kind of abstracted serenity.

Hari said, ‘I am happy to abide by your rules. My father had an agreement with you. I know you are an honourable people—’

‘You want to invoke the guarantee. Before we get into that, I’d like to know how the client in question failed.’

‘It was not caused by any fault in your work. My family’s ship was attacked. Its systems were compromised. My father and his viron were destroyed. I am carrying his backup in my
neural net.’

‘I designed that backup, you know. Also its security, which I notice is missing.’

‘It became . . . troublesome,’ Hari said.

‘You’re undergoing one of your active periods out there, aren’t you? The so-called Bright Moment has stirred things up. It spawned all kinds of prophets, each believing
themselves to possess the only true key to its enigma. And there was a faction of Belters who were trying to unriddle it using what used to be called the scientific method – your father was
involved in that, and so were you. See, we aren’t as out of touch as you think we are. We keep an eye on developments. Mostly, it’s a steady decline into barbarism, but every now and
then there’s a blip, a vexatious agitation, and we have to take measures to make sure we aren’t affected. So there’s a little more to your visit than honouring a contract. It
could involve us in something we don’t want to be involved in,’ the robot said. ‘That’s why the service isn’t free. That‘s why I require something in
return.’

‘But you will honour the guarantee,’ Hari said.

‘First, you’re going to tell me exactly how the original was destroyed. Take your time. This river is fresh and hot. It runs on for several hundred klicks before it finally cools and
hardens. And anyway, time as you understand it isn’t a consideration. Every second that passes in your universe is a second lost for ever, and they pass at a steady rate. Here, in my
universe, I control the rate at which time passes. You can spend an hour on your story, and when you are done we will still be in the same place. So speak out, kid. Tell me everything you
know.’

What harm could it do to tell his story one more time? Hari started from the beginning, when he’d discovered that he’d been locked in the storage bay, moving from one incident to the
next as if crossing a river on stepping stones. The escape from
Pabuji’s Gift
with Dr Gagarian’s head. Waking to find himself marooned on the rock. His escape from the two
cloned assassins, his shipwreck on Vesta, and so on, and so on.

The face in the robot’s glass turret watched him as he spoke, its expression carefully neutral. The particoloured landscape slid by on either side of the lava river. Ever-changing. Ever
the same.

When Hari was finished, the robot said, ‘It reminds me of an old joke. What do you get when you play a country-and-western song backwards?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You came here to fix the story of your life. Trouble is, it wasn’t much of a story to begin with.’

‘It is the only one I have.’

‘Did your father crack the meaning of the Bright Moment? Him and this Dr Gagarian?’

‘I don’t think so. But they might have made a good beginning.’

‘Maybe it doesn’t matter. Aside from the people who wanted to kidnap or kill you, no one else seems to have any interest in it. It isn’t your fault, kid. Not many people want
to do any heavy lifting any more. This is an age of superstition and wishful thinking. The sky is full of evening’s empires, and every one of them is founded on sand.’

‘I can’t help what other people think,’ Hari said. ‘You’ve heard my story. It’s as truthful as I could make it. Perhaps it isn’t as exciting as you
hoped, and has little in the way of revelation or resolution, but it’s all I have.’

‘Your wife comes back, your dog’s alive again, and your pickup truck hasn’t broken down,’ the robot said. ‘That’s what happens when you play a
country-and-western song backwards. You hope that the backup copy of your father might know something. Something that might unriddle the Bright Moment, maybe. Or something that will give shape and
meaning to what happened to you. That will restore order. Fix your broken life. I hate to disappoint you, but life usually isn’t that simple.’

‘When Dr Gagarian came aboard, my father made me his assistant,’ Hari said. ‘Dr Gagarian designed experiments, my father sourced the hardware he needed, I helped to construct
the probes and bits and pieces of experimental apparatus. Dr Gagarian didn’t tell me what he was doing, or what he found, or what it meant, and I didn’t ask. He discussed his work with
my father, and my father tried to explain it to me, but I wasn’t a diligent pupil. Oh, I truly believed that the work would change everything, but only because I believed everything my father
told me. I never questioned it. I never asked what he really wanted from me. Perhaps the copy of my father that’s cached inside my neural net can help me understand what I was caught up in.
Perhaps not. Perhaps I won’t ever be free of him, his influence. But I can’t even try to begin to escape my past while he’s still inside my head, and that’s why I’m
here. I want to get him out of my head. And I want to talk to him, one last time.’

‘The past is always with us,’ the robot said. ‘It’s where we came from. It’s what we make, day by day. We leave it behind, but we can’t escape it. All we can
do is come to terms with it.’

It made the curious looping gesture with its arm again, indicating the lava river and the dykes of congealed sulphur along its edge, the riven landscape beyond, Jupiter’s swollen,
candy-striped crescent above.

‘You might think that this sandbox is like a dream. A harmless hallucination from which you can wake at any time, and take up your life as if nothing had happened. The question is, can
dreams change dreamers?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hari said. ‘Perhaps – if it is the right dream, at the right time.’

‘You told me the story of how you got here. Let me tell you a story in return, about a dream I had when I was about your age. I dreamed that I had entered a great white city, and I knew,
in the dream, that I had also travelled into the future, although I cannot tell you how I knew. Perhaps because such cities were often represented in popular fiction about the future, although the
one into which I walked, in my dream, was far more detailed than any of those make-believe cities. There were many tall buildings, all built of white stone and fretted with rows of windows. Some
cylindrical and buttressed with fins, like the dreams of the first spaceships before the first spaceships were built. Some narrow rectangles. Some square in profile. Some tapering to points. All
shining white and clean in the bland sunlight. They stood in clusters, and at their feet were smaller buildings. All again built of white stone. Elevated roadways and monorail lines ran past the
buildings or looped around them at different levels. There were open spaces, but they contained only gardens of raked gravel and stone fountains, and statues of people in heroic and noble poses. No
trees, no growing things of any kind, no decoration or signs. In the time when I lived, cities were full of signs advertising all kinds of goods and services. Here, the buildings were blank
canvases, and the everyday life of the city was unreadable.

‘In many dreams, you are a bodiless viewpoint. People in the dream talk with you as if you were one of them, but you have no sense of your body. You are an observer. That was not the case
in this dream. I was aware of every footstep, and the people who inhabited the city looked at me as I passed. Perhaps because I was dressed as I would have been dressed in waking life, which to
them must have seemed as strange as a man in a suit of armour walking up Broadway.

‘The people of the city all seemed to be members of the same family. They had light brown skin and black hair cut in various styles, and wore long shirts over loose trousers in
combinations of pastel colours. In my day, birds nested on ledges of buildings, as if on cliffs, and people kept certain species of animals as pets. There were no animals that I could see. And no
children. Only men and women of varying ages. There were a great number of them, but the walkways and monorail cars were not crowded because the city was so large.

‘I wandered a long time, but did not dare to enter any building. At last, with shadows engulfing the feet of the tall buildings and reddened sunlight burning on their western sides, at the
foot of a huge statue of a bare-breasted woman holding up a strand of DNA to the blank dish of her face (none of the statues had features), a man came up to me, and asked me if I was a traveller. I
told him that I was dreaming. Often we do not know in dreams that we are dreaming, but I knew. I also told him that I believed that I was dreaming about the future. He looked at me quizzically, and
said that this was his present, but not necessarily my future. He said that I might reach it, one day in the waking world, but there were other paths I might take instead.’

The robot paused, then said, ‘Some philosophers claim that we are composites of multiple personalities, of agents. They share a common substrate of memory and traits, these agents, but are
discrete entities, each knowing certain things that are forever hidden from all the others. If that’s the case, then the people we meet only in dreams are part of us, yet not part of us. We
do not find it difficult to believe that such a stranger would know things we do not. So it is in dreams, where we sometimes meet people who reveal to us new truths, or reveal to us that things we
have always believed to be true are in fact false.

‘The man who greeted me in that white city of the future was one such. He was tall, in his middle years, and strongly built. And he was confident, easily carrying the power he had been
lent by his fellow citizens. The power he represented. His black hair was cut level with his eyes and shaved high around his ears and at the back of his neck, so that it resembled a cap tilted
forward. His gaze I remember still. It was friendly, but it looked right through me. He told me that he was one of the citizens who had been chosen by lottery to protect the city. I asked him what
he protected it from, and he looked at me gravely and said that he protected it from people like me. People who thought differently. Visitors from the outside. And then he laughed, and said that
his job was easy because people like me were solitons, while the citizens all shared their thoughts, united and indivisible.’

Hari said, ‘Did they possess a common bios?’

‘I did not ask how they shared their thoughts. When monsters appear in dreams, you are as terrified as you would be in what is commonly called real life, but you don’t ask why they
have appeared or where they come from, or what they eat when they aren’t chasing dreamers.’

‘Because you know it is a dream. And you knew this story you’re telling me was a dream.’