Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (50 page)

‘Just so. I accepted that they shared their thoughts, but I did not ask how it was done. Later, I realised that it was a city of communists. That its citizens were in fact the ultimate
expression of communism. All were equal. All shared all. Were they happy? I suppose they were, but only because they did not know any better. Their protectors kept them safe from thoughts that
would contaminate their unthinking purity. I also realised that they had no ambitions, no drive to better themselves. Theirs was a way of life that was changeless, because change would destroy it.
It was a city of the eternal present. A city of the eternal now, where every day was day zero.’

Hari said, ‘There are clades of posthumans who share their thoughts and memories. But I do not think they are anything like the people in your dream city.’

The robot said, ‘But they may be the first step on an evolutionary path that will lead to such cities, such citizens. Despite all we have done to try to avoid that future, it may yet come
about.’

‘You take this dream very seriously.’

‘It was eighteen hundred years ago, and I have not dreamed a dream like it since. But I still remember every detail because it changed my life. I have not yet told you how it ended.
Sometimes, when you meet strong and unique people in a dream, you wake up. As if they are gatekeepers who have the power to prevent you from travelling deeper into the dream. You may have met such
people in your own dreams.’

‘I suppose they are rationalisations for waking up. A last attempt to keep the dream coherent as it falls apart.’

‘If that’s true, where did you summon those people from?’ the robot said. ‘In any case, that isn’t how it happened in my dream. It did not end when I met the
protector of the city. We walked together through the streets and plazas that ran amongst the footings of the skyscrapers, some lined with humbler buildings, some not. The protector explained the
functions of the larger buildings, pointed out various monuments and told me about the moments in history long past that they commemorated. They were the only signs that things had once been
different from the way they were now, in the city’s eternal day zero. A remembrance of how the city had come into being, and why it must be as it was. I realised then that I was in the very
far future. Not hundreds of years from my own time, or even thousands, but millions upon millions. And for most of its long, long history, the city had been changeless. Parts of it had worn out,
and buildings or entire blocks had been destroyed in fires or floods, but everything worn away or destroyed had been replaced with an exact replica. And in the same way, the people of the city
maintained and preserved their gene line. The city was changeless, and so were they.’

Hari said that it sounded unlikely.

‘Certain species of eusocial insect, like ants and bees and termites, have changed little over more than a hundred million years. Why shouldn’t a species of eusocial human that is
able to police its gene pool remain unchanged for even longer? Especially if they remove all competition, all drivers of natural selection. That is what I learnt from my guide as we walked the
empty streets. At last we ascended to a monorail station where a single car waited like a bullet in a chamber of a revolver. It sped us through the rest of the city, out across the green farmlands
that ringed it, and at last reached a small and lonely platform at the edge of a desert that stretched away in the bloody light of a sun swollen to ten times its usual size and flecked with long
chains of black spots.

‘My guide explained that most of Earth was desert. The oceans had shrunk; the polar ice-caps had evaporated millions of years ago. A little life persisted in the deserts and what was left
of the oceans, but most of what was left was preserved in cities like his. That was why it was important, he said, to exclude anything that threatened their stability. Then the door of the rail car
opened, and I stepped out as if I had been commanded to do so. The rail car sped away, dwindling towards the white towers of the city. A squall of dust blew up and whirled around me, and that was
when I woke,’ the robot said.

‘But the dream did not fade on waking, as most dreams do. I remembered every detail. Much more than I have told you. Some dreams are so powerful that they change us. This was the dream
that changed me. The calm horror of it. The sense that it was inevitable. That it was waiting out there in the far future. That the seeds of what the world would become had already been planted in
the present.

‘At the time of my dream, I was living in a powerful country that had defeated both fascism and a perverted form of communism. This was before the effects of climate change had begun to
alter the world and the lives of its people. My country was still the most powerful in the world. It was founded on principles that allowed every citizen to express his or her potential as best
they could. It celebrated instances of individual enterprise, imagination, and heroism. It mythologised them. Of course, many people, then as now, were lazy. Or they were like sheep, content to
graze their little patch of grass. But I had talent and ambition. I was one of the gifted. And my dream of the bleak changeless future in which everyone was like everyone else, reduced to the
lowest common denominator, fed my ambition. I wanted to do all I could to make sure such a future did not come about.

‘We had already passed from a mechanical age powered by burning fossil fuels to an electronic age where the sources of power were many. New technologies were creating new varieties of
small, smart, efficient machines. Exchange of information was outgrowing exchange of goods. And we were beginning to learn how to tweak plants and animals, and ourselves. To improve existing
species, and create new ones. But I knew that would not be enough. The resources of a single planet are not infinitely exploitable. There were already shortages of fresh water, farmland,
phosphates, essential rare elements, and much else.

‘So I went into the space business. I founded one of the first private space-transport companies, and helped to develop a city on the Moon. The city to which I, and others who had grown
rich through talent and ambition, escaped when Earth’s climate and weather systems finally collapsed. We moved outward from there. I was one of the founders of Rainbow Bridge, on
Callisto.’ The robot paused, then said, ‘You told me that you met Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters. I met their mother, once, in Rainbow Bridge.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Intense. Solitary. Single-minded. With a brisk and undisguised contempt for everyone she believed to be her inferior, which was just about everyone she met.’

‘Her daughters were about the same.’

‘It was just before the beginning of the Quiet War, when I met her. Or rather, it had already begun, but we Outers had not yet realised it. Sri Hong-Owen played a role in beginning it, and
helped to end it, too. Earth’s three major power blocs briefly occupied and controlled the cities of the outer system, but their rule was overturned, and a long golden age began. By that time
I was more than two hundred years old. One of the oldest people to have ever lived. And at last I became what I am now. I translated. First into the mind of a ship, and now here. Where we still
strive to keep the flame of individual achievement alight. Where lions and tigers and bears still live.

‘Perhaps you think my dream has nothing to do with you. That it’s the rambling justification of someone who has outlived his time and purpose. But I decided to tell you about it
because it’s possible that you might be a lion, too. One of those who know how to use knowledge to change the world. Who is not afraid of change.’

‘It seems to me that lions can cause all kinds of damage, too,’ Hari said. ‘The leader of the Saints, for instance. Levi. He must have been a lion.’

‘Lions kill because it’s the nature of lions to kill. But without lions the common herd would grow weak and debased. Lions are a challenge, a test that all must pass if they are to
survive. And since the weak fail that test more often than the strong, the fitness of the herd is increased. Lions drive change, and change is good. Change strengthens us all. You hoped to change
the course of human history when you broadcast the research of the tick-tock philosopher and his friends. It didn’t work out the way you hoped it would. Perhaps that’s why you really
came here. Not because you want to restore your father,’ the robot said. ‘Or not only that. But because you hope his backup contains information that the tick-tock philosopher’s
files lacked. Because you still hope to change things.’

‘I was hoping to find out how he had changed me,’ Hari said. ‘Can you help me or not?’

‘Of course. But if you want to talk to him, you’ll have to do it here.’

‘I don’t believe that’s part of the guarantee.’

‘Don’t presume to tell me what I can or cannot do,’ the robot said. ‘You are in my realm now.’

‘My avatar is represented here. I am elsewhere.’

‘Then go back,’ the robot said, ‘if it’s that easy.’

That was when Hari realised that the link to the ship and his bios had vanished.

He said, ‘I need to talk with my father. If you truly want to help me, you’ll grant me that.’

A big wave passed down the molten river. It lifted the raft and dropped it and Hari fell down and clung to the raft’s rough planks as it tipped and tilted. Geysers opened all around in the
raw red lava – no, they were human mouths, each screaming at a different pitch, all spitting vapours that fed an acrid yellow fog. The ground on either side of the river broke apart and
bright fountains of molten sulphur erupted. The robot grew, doubling in height, doubling again. The mild face in the glass turret of its head darkened, sprouting horns and a beard of writhing
snakes; its eyes burned like red stars.

For a moment, Hari couldn’t breathe. His mouth and nose filled with a parching reek. His coveralls were smouldering and his skin was burning, withering, as the heat of the lava river beat
over him. Then heat and stench blew away on a cool breeze, and the robot dwindled, and its human face laughed.

‘I control the physics here,’ it said. ‘I decide whether you can stay or leave.’

Hari stood up cautiously, saying, ‘It’s family business. It isn’t of any interest to anyone else.’

He was trying his best to seem calm, to show that he had not been intimidated by the petty display of power. Telling himself that sooner or later Rubber Duck would realise what was going on and
break the link. But what would happen then? Would he wake, back in his body, back on the ship? Would he be damaged by the equivalent of a hard reset? Or would his mind remain here while the
uninhabited shell of his body aged and died? Perhaps his mind had been copied during the uplink. He would wake on the ship, but this version of himself would be trapped here for ever . . .

‘I’ll decide what’s interesting to me and what isn’t,’ the robot said. ‘If you don’t want me listening to your conversation, you can leave.’

‘If I agree to your terms, if I let you listen in to whatever I have to say to my father, and whatever he has to say to me, maybe you can tell me something first.’

A slow raster line passed across the image of the face in the robot’s head.

‘That depends on what you ask,’ it said.

‘On whether you can answer it?’

‘On whether I want to.’

‘It’s simple enough. When my father passed over, did you encourage him in any way? In any particular direction?’

‘When people come to us, they generally know what they want. They have a good idea of the shape their lives will take when they pass over. Of where they want to go and what they want to
do.’

‘Do you know what my father wanted to do?’

‘He did not want to leave his family.’

‘That’s what he told you.’

‘That’s what he implied.’

‘Perhaps he meant that he didn’t want to lose control.’

‘You must ask him that.’

‘You helped him to pass over. And then he came back here some years later. After his son Rakesh had died. After I had been quickened, but just before I was decanted. He paid you to install
a neural net in my head. Did he tell you why?’

‘He wanted a place where he could hide a backup of his personality.’

‘And did you do anything else?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did you talk with him about the Bright Moment?’

‘You think we set him on that path?’

‘It occurred to me.’

‘Many believe that we turn people who come to us for help into our agents,’ the robot said. ‘That we sit at the centre of a web of intrigue and influence, plucking one thread,
pulling another, reaching out to change things beyond our small world. It’s understandable. We are old, and we possess certain powers and a great store of knowledge that’s been lost or
forgotten elsewhere. And this is an irrational age, where rumour is interchangeable with hard fact. But we have no such agents. We have no inclination to meddle in the affairs of the worlds outside
our world, and we learn all we need to know about them from news feeds, such as they are.

‘Your father was already set on his path before he came back to us. His first true son had been killed. He quickened you as a replacement. And he wanted some kind of revenge. He wanted to
prove that the cults and sects were fools and charlatans. That’s all I can tell you because that’s all I know.’

‘That’s about all I know, too,’ Hari said. ‘That’s why I need to talk to him.’

‘I should warn you that the backup you carry was never intended to provide a full restoration. It isn’t big enough. It lacks detail and nuance.’

‘Will he be able to tell me what I need to know?’

‘You’ll have to ask him.’

‘All right,’ Hari said, and then he was somewhere else.

It was his father’s old viron. A parched landscape saddling away to a shimmering horizon; scoured cliffs rising above fans of rubble; the hot blue sky and the unblinking
glare of the platinum sun. Hari climbed the familiar path to the cave mouth. It seemed as real as the discorporate’s sandbox. It seemed unchanged. And if it was unchanged, then his father
must be unchanged, too . . .