Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (5 page)

‘It was her,’ the eidolon said. ‘Wasn’t it?’

‘No. No, it wasn’t.’

‘Are you all right, Gajananvihari?’

Hari blinked and sniffed and swallowed. ‘Shut up and let me finish this work.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re doing.’

‘It’s another surprise.’

Hari finished writing the command strings, ran a simulation. It would have to do. He closed down the interface and shuffled away to a safe distance and initiated the lifepod’s
ground-effect routine. Dust blew straight out all around it and it rose up several metres and settled back, balanced on the faint breath of its motor.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll tell me why you are wasting reaction mass,’ the eidolon said.

‘I decided that I need a distraction,’ Hari said.

This was the tricky part. Themba’s gravity was very shallow; escape velocity was just twenty kilometres per hour. An untethered person could bounce into a long, low suborbital lob using
only the power of their leg muscles. The lifepod see-sawed on minuscule variations in thrust, and it took thirty minutes to walk it down the slope into the deep shadows at the bases of the spires,
and position it in the small space between three of the tallest. One of them was the spire that Kinson Ib Kana had hollowed out – the spire Hari had filled with traps.

‘They are almost certainly watching you,’ the eidolon said.

‘I know.’

‘It is not a good hiding place.’

‘I’m not trying to hide it,’ Hari said.

The lifepod settled in a brief squall of dust. The spires reared above, their tops burning with raw sunlight.

‘They will be able to see its infrared footprint,’ the eidolon said.

‘You really don’t know what I’m doing, do you?’

‘Perhaps it is good that I do not. In case they hack me.’

Hari hadn’t thought of that. He said, ‘Tell me at once if they try.’

‘I may not be able to detect it,’ the eidolon said.

‘You may have been hacked already. Is that what you are telling me?’

‘How does anyone know who they really are?’

Hari was back inside the hollow spire, checking the zipline he’d strung across a short gap to one of the spire’s neighbours, when the eidolon appeared right in front
of him.

‘You asked me to tell you when the ship made its final burn,’ she said. ‘It’s doing it now.’

Hari levered himself halfway out of the hole he’d cut in the triple skin of the spire, hanging on to the taut cable of the zipline as he twisted to look straight up at the black sky. His
helmet visor placed green brackets around the ship’s brilliant star. A block of flickering figures showed changes in delta vee and distance. It was close enough to ping its registry, now: one
of the gigs from
Pabuji’s Gift
,
Little Helper.
It was spiralling in to match Themba’s orbital velocity, sinking towards the western horizon. Hari believed that it
would touch down as soon as it was out of sight, or drop a search party riding scooters or broomsticks. But he didn’t even have that long.

‘Uh-oh,’ the eidolon said.

‘What? What is it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Give me your best guess.’

‘Incoming.’

‘Incoming what?’

‘I don’t know. Small. Fast. Here.’

There was a flash of light far below, beyond the shadows that drowned the spires’ footings. A plume of dust shot up, rising above the sharp tips of the spires, a kilometre tall, two,
three. Its top glowing in sunlight, beginning to evert into complex sheets and folds, its base lifting away from a fresh crater where something small and bright jiggled with frantic energy. Hari
leaned out further, clinging to the zipline, used his visor’s zoom facility, saw a tangle of wires knitting itself into the shape of a man. A man-shaped drone.

It stood up, half-collapsed, rose again. It was five metres tall, and very thin. The red dot burning in the centre of its small cylindrical head turned towards Hari, who flinched away. Then it
leapt. A long and graceful parabola aimed at the spire where he perched.

Hari’s mouth was flooded with the taste of burnt plastic. Gauzy lights shimmered in his left eye, he felt a sudden hot pressure behind it, and something fell away from him.

It was the eidolon, arrowing past the spires, colliding with the drone, vanishing. The machine froze, rigid as a statue, hit the side of the spire and rebounded, soaring away, striking the upper
part of the crater’s slope amidst flying sheets of dust and disappearing beyond the sunflowers at the top of the rim wall.

For a moment, nothing moved but ropes and threads of dust falling out of the giant plume, glowing golden-brown in the level, late-afternoon sunlight. Then the eidolon was suddenly beside Hari,
sitting at the lip of the round opening in the spire’s silvery skin, saying, ‘Did you see? Did you? Did you see?’

‘I saw it. I’m not sure what it was.’

Hari was still watching the top of the rim wall, half-expecting the drone to come bounding back like some demented conjuror’s trick.

‘I neutralised it. Did you see? I am weaponised. I didn’t know until I needed to know.’

‘Is it dead?’

‘It is neutralised.’

‘If you could force it to work for me it would be a useful weapon.’

‘I stripped out its protocols. Erased them. I don’t know how to put them back.’

Hari studied the eidolon. The sparks of her eyes glimmering in the ghostly sketch of her face. ‘What else can you do?’

‘I don’t know! Isn’t that amazing?’

‘Could you protect me from the hijackers, when they come? Could you disable their suits, disable their weapons?’

‘Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know.’ The eidolon paused, then said, ‘Agrata wants to talk to you again.’

‘Tell her to come find me.’

The long, slow paths that
Pabuji’s Gift
traced between cities and settlements and the distant and obscure ruins where Hari’s family searched for salvage
sometimes attracted itinerant philosophers who needed seclusion and tranquillity to concentrate on their studies. One of them, Professor Ari Aluthgamage, was developing a taxonomic scheme that
classified hinge points in history by type and significance and would eventually, according to her, frame an objective assessment of claims by end-timers that the Bright Moment had jolted history
on to a new path and opened up previously inaccessible possibilities. She entertained Hari with stories about obscure pivotal moments in the long ago, and tried to teach him something of quantum
philosophy; he learned that he really wasn’t much good at grasping the mathematics that described the architecture of the various possible species of multiverse – quilted, inflationary,
cyclic, landscape, holographic, and so on – but never forgot one of the professor’s analogies. The multiverse, she said, was like an old library whose shelves were packed with books
arranged by a cataloguing system that ranked them according to similarity, each book containing within its covers a story that varied only slightly from the stories of its immediate neighbours, but
by increasing degrees from those of increasingly distant books. Yet even books whose covers were jammed together, whose contents differed by just a single letter, were discrete and self-contained
entities. No information could cross from one to the other.

There are billions of possible histories, Professor Aluthgamage told Hari, but ours is the only one we can experience, the only one whose existence is beyond doubt. This is this.

Although the underlying mathematics were dauntingly complex, it was easy to imagine how histories could diverge at the whim of the assassin’s bullet or bomb, because of a general’s
decision, or a chance meeting, or the accidental death of a philosopher before she came into her full power. Professor Aluthgamage told Hari about refinements of the old argument about whether the
influence of one person was more important than the political situation in which they were embedded. It took her two minutes to teach him an ancient rhyme about a nail, a shoe, a horse, and a
battle and a kingdom lost; two days to explain its context.

She was especially interested in the many hinge-points in the long life of the gene wizard Sri Hong-Owen, and was anatomising the possible histories that they might have generated in other
universes. Hari knew most of the story already. His father often talked about Sri Hong-Owen, how she’d grown up in a small town in the ruined rainforests of Greater Brazil, developed weapons
that had helped to defeat the Outer city states of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and synthesised new wonders based on techniques harvested from the Outers’ knowledge bases; how she’d
used those techniques to create hundreds of orbital gardens, a significant contribution to the peaceful expansion of human civilisation into every part of the Solar System, before lighting out for
Fomalhaut with a crew of strange children she’d tailored from her own genome, and so on, and so forth.

‘Surely all that matters is what she became, not what she was,’ Hari told Professor Aluthgamage. ‘And we have no idea what she became because we aren’t capable of
understanding it.’

He’d had enough of history for one day, and had long ago learned that testing his teacher’s patience with impertinent and contrarian assertions was an effective way of ending a
seemingly interminable lecture or lesson. But Professor Aluthgamage was one of those philosophers who thrived on dissent.

‘The Bright Moment is merely the climax of a long chain of hinge points. Sri Hong-Owen could not have reached that final step without travelling through its many predecessors. And any
point in that chain is no more or less important than any other. Everything we do has a consequence, Gajananvihari,’ she said, and proceeded to expound upon a long list of examples.

Professor Aluthgamage spent many hours discussing her work with Hari’s father, but after she left the ship Hari never learned if she ever completed her taxonomic analysis of other
histories. Probably not. The various philosophers who travelled on
Pabuji’s Gift
usually valued the chase far more than the prize.

Like the rest of his family, Hari preferred to deal with practical problems. Fixing malfunctioning machinery, devising work-arounds and short cuts, overcoming constraints imposed by lack of time
or slender resources. By the age of eighteen he had worked in every part of the ship and on every aspect of the family trade, and was developing plans to explore the outer reaches of the Solar
System and discover long-forgotten settlements. He correlated information mined from obscure and debased databases, borrowed time on the ship’s navigation system to plot the orbits of distant
kobolds and model multibody trajectories that optimised expenditure of reaction mass and time. He believed that he was mapping out a new future for his family, and was grievously upset and dismayed
when his father told him that he must set aside his plans and become a full-time assistant to the ship’s latest guest, Dr Gagarian.

Dr Gagarian was a tall skinny tick-tock person some three hundred years old. His jointed carapace of black fibrogen resembled an ambulatory pressure suit or an animated man-sized insect; his
major organs had been replaced by machine equivalents; his brain was laced with neural nets that formed a kind of shadow mind that stored his every thought and reaction; his eyes were dull white
stones in a leathery inexpressive face. A remote, forbidding figure. Inhuman, barely mammalian. In an age where there was very little philosophical investigation, and most of that was theoretical,
he was an incredibly rare beast: an experimental physicist. For the past twenty years, he and his small crew of collaborators had been attempting to identify, measure and define changes in the fine
grain of space-time caused by the passing of the Bright Moment.
Pabuji’s Gift
, whose exploration of remote ruins often took it far from the background noise of human civilisation,
was an ideal platform for his latest experiments, and its store of ancient machines and the debris of half a hundred clades and cultures provided useful components for his experiment apparatus.

Nabhomani believed that Dr Gagarian was a charlatan. A magician disguised as a philosopher, consumed by a fantasy of mastering secret powers. Nabhoj and Agrata had little time for Dr
Gagarian’s experiments, either. But Aakash was convinced that the tick-tock philosopher and his collaborators were engaged on a hugely important project.

‘We are able to make a living from mining the past because so many of the old technologies have been forgotten,’ he told Hari. ‘Baseliners have given up on philosophy, and
posthuman clades prefer theory to application. We live in an age that cannibalises its past because it has lost faith in its future. But with our help, Dr Gagarian and his friends will change that.
We will be at the root of a great new flowering of practical philosophy. Think of what we will be able to do, once we master the principles that created the Bright Moment! New kinds of
communication devices. Unlimited computational capacity within the metrical frame of space-time. New technologies, Hari. New technologies and new ideas.’

‘Will we be rich?’ Hari said.

‘Everyone will be enriched,’ Aakash said. ‘That’s the important thing. Everyone will benefit, and everyone will be enriched.’

A year after Dr Gagarian came aboard,
Pabuji’s Gift
dropped off the last of its other passengers and gave itself over entirely to his research. Running silent and dark for days at
a time, every system powered down, while Dr Gagarian attempted to make delicate measurements involving teleportation of entangled virtual particles, or created high-energy Planck-scale entities and
analysed their decay. Cruising above the plane of the ecliptic, where the planets and most asteroids traced their orbits, dropping off autonomous probes that when linked together would form a
long-baseline interferometer.

Hari’s family had abandoned their salvage work, were surviving on reserves of credit that had been greatly depleted by purchase of components and raw materials essential to Dr
Gagarian’s experiments. They were indentured to the tick-tock philosopher’s research and their father’s monomania.