Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3)
Read Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) Online
Authors: Paul McAuley
Paul McAuley
EVENING’S EMPIRES
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
To Georgina,
and to Jon Courtenay Grimwood
‘In good times magicians are laughed at. They’re a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy
perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.’
Fritz Leiber,
Poor Superman
‘No thought can perish.’
Edgar Allan Poe,
The Power of Words
CONTENTS
PART ONE
It was a remote and unremarkable C-type asteroid, a dark, dust-bound rock pile with a big dent smacked into its equator by some ancient impact. There were thousands like it in
the Belt. Hundreds of thousands. It was mostly known by its original name, 207061 Themba, the name it had been given when it had been discovered in the long ago. It lacked significant deposits of
metals or rare earths, and its eccentric orbit, skirting the outer edge of the Belt, didn’t bring it within easy reach of any centres of civilisation. Even so, it had been touched by human
history.
About a thousand years ago, for instance, towards the end of the Great Expansion, someone had seeded it with a dynamic ecology of vacuum organisms. Its undulating intercrater plains were mantled
with pavements of crustose species; briar patches of tangled wires spread across the floors of many of its craters; tall spindly things a little like sunflowers stood on wrinkle ridges and crater
walls. A cluster of sunflowers up on the rim of a large circular crater stirred now, the dishes of their solar collectors turning eastward as the horizon dropped away from the sun. Boulders
scattered across the upper slopes of the crater threw long shadows. Sunlight starred the needle-point caps of a cluster of silvery spires and gleaming streaks shot down their tapering flanks as
darkness drained away, shrank to overlapping pools cast around their footings.
One spire near the edge of the little crowd had been painted black. A small movement twinkled at its base. A door dilating, a circle of weak yellow light framing a human shadow. The only
inhabitant of these ruins, of this ordinary rock, stepping out into another day of silence and exile.
It was forty-two days after Gajananvihari Pilot had woken in a crippled lifepod on the cold hillside of the crater’s inner slope, one hundred and seventy-four days after he had escaped
from the hijack of
Pabuji’s Gift.
He’d been aimed at the first of a chain of waypoints that would help him reach Tannhauser Gate, had been sinking into the deep sleep of
hibernation, when the motor of his lifepod had suffered a near-catastrophic failure and lost most of its reaction mass. The lifepod’s little mind had recalculated its options, used the
waypoint to change course and establish a minimum-energy trajectory to Themba.
Repair mites had patched up the motor while the lifepod was in transit, but the asteroid was a long way from anywhere else. Hari was grievously short of reaction mass, and couldn’t call
for help because the outer belt lacked a general commons, and a distress signal might attract the attention of the hijackers or some other villainous crew. Besides, he’d been taught to
distrust everyone but his family. His father, his two brothers, Agrata. All most likely dead now. Murdered, as he would have been murdered if he hadn’t escaped.
He was nineteen years old, alone for the first time in his life.
He’d channelled his grief and anger into a single-minded determination to save himself. He’d synched his internal clock to Themba’s fourteen-hour day, established a strict
routine. Waking just before dawn, drinking a protein shake while examining the latest products of the maker and checking his comms (picking up only the ticking of distant beacons; no general
traffic, no threats or warnings from the hijackers). Hauling on his pressure suit and leaving his cosy little nest in the spire, climbing a friction track laid down by the spire builders, following
it over the crater’s rim and through sunflower thickets to the plains beyond.
That day, like every other day, Hari paused at the far side of the sunflowers and used his pressure suit’s radar and optical systems to survey each quarter of the visible sky. As usual,
the p-suit’s eidolon manifested beside him. A shadowy sketch of a slim young woman in a white one-piece bodysuit and an unlikely bubble helmet, her eyes smudged hollows in which faint stars
twinkled.
‘There appears to be nothing out there,’ she said.
‘Nothing but stars and planets and moons and rocks,’ Hari said. ‘Garden habitats. Various kinds of human civilisation.
Pabuji’s Gift
, if the hijackers
didn’t destroy her.’
‘No ships. No immediate danger.’
‘No hope of rescue, either.’
It was more or less the same exchange they had every day. Like most QIs, the eidolon wasn’t fully conscious. Her conversations were shaped by decision trees and phatic responses.
She said, as she’d said many times before, ‘You will survive this, Gajananvihari. I have great faith in your resourcefulness and resolve.’
‘Don’t forget anger, suit.’
‘Anger has no utility, Gajananvihari.’
‘Anger is an energy. Anger feeds my resolve. Anger keeps me going.’
Hari was staring at a faint, fuzzy star above the western horizon. Jackson’s Reef, where
Pabuji’s Gift
had been hijacked. More than seventy million kilometres distant. He
studied it every day, to renew his determination to escape and have his revenge on the criminals who’d murdered his family and stolen their ship and destroyed his life, and to search for the
spark of a fusion motor.
Pabuji’s Gift
or some other ship, come looking for him.
But that day, like every other day, there was no spark, no ship.
The floor, the surface of the asteroid, sloped away in every direction to the irregular circle of the horizon, still and quiet under the black sky. Vacuum-organism pavements stretched
everywhere, patchwork blankets of big, irregular polygons in various shades of red or brown or black, outlined by pale necrotic borders where neighbouring species strove to overgrow each other,
punctuated by the slumped bowls of small craters, spatters of debris, scattered boulders. Everything untagged, unaugmented, unadorned by overlays or indices. Naked. Unmapped. Hari had learned to
read the contours and patterns of the landscape, but still felt a faint hum of caution when he set out across the surface. He was an intruder in this vast emptiness. A ghost in the desert of the
real.
He moved with a sliding shuffle in the negligible gravity, using ski sticks to keep his balance while tethers whipped from his waist, gecko-pads at their tips slapping against the rock-hard
surface of the vacuum-organism pavement, retracting, whipping out again. The eidolon drifted beside him. Hari had been born and raised in microgravity –
Pabuji’s Gift
was
thrifty with reaction mass and spent most of its time coasting in free fall – but he wasn’t used to unbounded spaces and found it hard to keep a sense of orientation in the rolling
landscape. Everything was either too far away or too close. Sometimes he seemed to be climbing a wall; sometimes he seemed to be descending a near-vertical ramp, moving faster and faster, feeling
that he was about to fall away into the sky. Fall, and keep falling for ever. Then he’d stop and catch his breath before setting off again.
Jupiter’s brilliant star rose in the east, chasing the sun towards zenith. Themba was small, with an average diameter of just six kilometres. Even at Hari’s cautious pace, it was
easy to outwalk the day.
His bright yellow p-suit was tanned to the hips with inground dust, and dust had worked into its joints, stiffening the left knee, limiting the rotation of the right shoulder. It had already
reached the limits of self-repair. Hari hadn’t been able to print new parts or adapt spares scavenged from the antique p-suits of Themba’s dead, but he was determined to keep working
until he had finished refuelling the lifepod.
That day, like every day, he prospected for beads of water-ice, amino acids, and polycylic aromatics extruded by the lobes and ruffles of the vacuum-organism pavements. He swept up the beads
with an extension tool and dumped them into a bag hung from his waist; when the bag was full, he sealed it and headed towards a patch of vacuum organism he’d infected with a virus from the
lifepod’s library. This was a dark red crustose species with pillowy lobes at its margins which, after the virus had reprogrammed its metabolism, had begun to accumulate organic precursors
and elements that the lifepod’s hybrid motor could use to synthesise reaction mass. Clusters of flaky crystals glittered with green sparks in the beam of the p-suit’s black-light lamp;
Hari swept them up into a fresh bag. It was his second harvest from this patch, one of the first he’d turned. Synthesis was slow in the freezing vacuum, but he had over six hectares in
production now. Pretty soon he’d have enough reaction mass to reach the nearest settlement, a trip of three hundred days or so. A long stretch in hibernation, but not impossible . . .
It was his only real hope of escaping Themba. Any ships the spire builders might have possessed were long gone, taken as trophies of war or claimed by scavengers, and the rock’s most
recent inhabitant, an ascetic hermit who had died long before Hari’s arrival, must have hitched a ride to it with someone who’d traded the favour for good karma. Hari had searched long
and hard in and around the spires and the crater, had probed permanent shadows in scores of crevasses and pits, but had found no trace of a lifepod or gig.
He moved on to another patch of modified vacuum organism, and another. Spiralling outward, skirting a huge boulder socketed in a fat collar of vacuum-organism growth, climbing a wrinkle ridge,
passing the slim black rectangle of the monolith set on top. A sect of philosopher-monks had planted them on asteroids across the Belt during the Great Expansion. They were different sizes, but all
possessed the same proportions – 1:4:9 – and anyone who touched the black mirrors of their faces elicited a radio squeal aimed at the core of the galaxy. Some thought that it brought
good luck, to touch a monolith. Others believed that their stuttering pulses might one day alert some vast, cool, implacably hostile intelligence, which was why only a few survived intact, usually
on remote and untenanted rocks.
Themba’s monolith was four times Hari’s height. Jupiter’s bright star hung above it. As usual, he gave it a wide berth. If he set it off, the hijackers or some wandering dacoit
ship might detect the signal, would know at once that Themba was inhabited.
Sometimes, though, he was tempted to step up to the monolith and set his gloved hand against its black face and trigger its here-I-am squeal. Sometimes he hoped the hijackers would track him
down. He had no defence against them except for a few simple traps and tricks, they’d almost certainly capture or kill him, but one way or another it would put an end to the torment and
uncertainty of his exile. And perhaps he’d be able to take some of them with him before he was overwhelmed. He pictured them jerking in nets. Impaled by spikes. He pictured himself slashing
at a horde of faceless figures with an incandescent energy beam. He pictured himself attacking them with fists and feet. He hadn’t been able to take part in the fight to save the ship. He
swore that he wouldn’t miss his chance next time.