Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (19 page)

So Hari was stuck with the book. Rav caught a train, travelling halfway around Ophir to the palace of the tick-tock matriarch, who was, according to Rav, very old and very paranoid, and would
need to be flattered and cajoled before she would consider seeing Hari and opening the files in Dr Gagarian’s head. Less than an hour later, after a brief visit to Down Town’s bourse to
establish his credit line, after purchasing a black brocade jacket to wear over the leggings and long white shirt that his uncle’s maker had tailored for him, and a hasty meal of cold pickled
noodles at one of the many food stalls along the Great Promenade, Hari was sitting beside a pool of water in a sunlit square, composing a message to the school of the Saints.

The square was floored with real grass, green springy turf starred with small white flowers, and bordered on all sides by buildings of different heights and different
architectural styles. The school of the Saints stood at one corner, a three-storey building faced with pinkish stone, ports blinded with white shutters. Hari imagined that people were studying him
from behind those shutters, imagined a hurried conference about his message, communications with some higher authority . . .

Or perhaps they had dismissed the message out of hand, nothing to do with them. However it fell out, he would learn something about the Saints, about Rav.

He sat on the low wall that rimmed the pool. In its centre, a sculptural assembly of large, translucent blue cubes slowly shifted from one configuration to another. Water sluiced over the faces
of the cubes and cascaded into the pool. Small white birds strutted and pecked and fluttered across the turf.

It was a lovely, peaceful place, warm in the sunlight that slanted between the flat roofs of the buildings and the overhead of the next tier. Hari felt a little anxious, wondering how the Saints
would react to his message, but he was happy, too: happy to be out and about on his own, on an adventure, after the confines of Rav’s ship.

After a while, he opened a window and the p-suit’s eidolon leaned in and said that she had nothing to report.

‘What about Rav’s son?’

‘He is asleep. He spends more time than I thought possible asleep.’

‘And the honey trap?’

Hari had set up an advertisement on Down Town’s commons, offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of any persons connected to the murder of Salx Minnot Flores. It contained
a fake link that appeared to lead to his bios; he hoped that the hijackers would try to follow it, and leave clues that would enable him to track them down.

‘No activity that I can detect,’ the eidolon said. ‘You appear to be waiting for someone.’

‘I want to talk with the Saints. But it does not look like they want to talk with me.’

‘I should be in Ophir,’ the eidolon said. ‘I cannot properly protect you from the ship.’

‘I won’t be here for much longer,’ Hari said.

A man came out of one of the buildings and disappeared into another. A flock of small children chased each other out of one of the streets or corridors that intersected the square, and ran past
the pool where Hari sat. Two paused to study him, but when he asked them if they knew the Saints they shook their heads and ran, laughing, after their friends. One of the white birds – they
were doves – fluttered up to perch on an angled edge of the sculpture, fluttered away as the edge retracted into the restless blue mass. The sculpture rounded into a rough sphere and the
sphere flattened into a fat pancake and the pancake grew into a tall spire. At last, a woman and two men stepped out of the deep-set doorway of the pink stone building and walked across the square
towards Hari.

He stood up as they approached, his whole skin tingling with anticipation.

‘Gajananvihari Pilot, I presume,’ the woman said.

She wasn’t much older than Hari, broad-hipped, dressed in a plain white jerkin and loose white trousers. Her name was Esme, according to her tag. An adept of the sixth elevation. Her
companions, bare-chested and barefoot in white trousers, stood behind her, studying Hari with professional interest.

Hari tried to ignore them, thanked the woman for coming to talk to him.

‘We can talk more comfortably in our house.’

‘I am happy to talk here. Perhaps your friends could give us a little privacy. I assure you that I mean no harm.’

‘Are you intimidated by them? Good. You’re meant to be,’ the woman, Esme, said. She had the mild, calm manner of someone who did not expect to be surprised by anything she
encountered.

They sat on the rim of the pool. The two men stood a few metres away, arms folded over the muscular shields of their chests.

‘Well,’ Esme said, ‘what do you want to sell to us?’

‘If you know who I am, you know why I am here.’

‘All I know is that you claim to have something we have been looking for. As we haven’t lost anything, it must be something you want to sell.’

‘I have the head of Dr Gagarian,’ Hari said.

There was no change in the woman’s expression, no flicker of recognition in her gaze.

‘Perhaps I am talking to the wrong person,’ Hari said.

‘I’m the only one who will speak to you. Why should we want to buy this head?’

‘I don’t want to sell it. I want to exchange it. I haven’t brought it with me,’ Hari said. ‘It’s in a safe place. If you want to see it, I can take you
there.’

He had deposited the cryoflask containing Dr Gagarian’s head in the bonded store in the elevator terminus. Rav had said that it would be safer on his ship, had laughed when Hari said that
he had decided to take his advice about trust.

‘I think I understand,’ Esme said. ‘Was it a relative, or a friend?’

‘My family, if they still live. And my family’s ship.’

‘People who join us do so of their own free will,’ Esme said. ‘It is their decision, made without any coercion or intimidation. Your family will have taken a vow of silence
during the period of induction, but when that is over you can speak to them. I hope you will. But I should warn you that you will not be able to convince them that they are mistaken. Why? It is
simple. They are not mistaken. They have chosen the right path.’

‘My family did not become Saints,’ Hari said. ‘They were taken. Kidnapped. That is, if they were not killed. And our ship was taken, too. It was hijacked. That’s why
I’m here. To ransom any of my family who are still alive, and to take back our ship.’

Esme thought about that, then said, softly and sympathetically, ‘I think you have made a mistake.’

Hari couldn’t tell if she was genuinely puzzled or if she was bluffing, but he was determined to see this through. To set out his bait and see if the Saints came snuffling after it. If
they did, he would be one step closer to his revenge; if not, then he would know that Rav was either deluded or could not be trusted, and he would have to go on alone, or throw in with his uncle.
And he’d be sorry, because he’d grown fond of the big, boisterous, boastful Ardenist. But as Nabhomani had said many times, when it comes to business you have to harden your heart and
do what needs to be done to close the deal.

‘I don’t know what an adept of the sixth elevation is,’ Hari said to the Saint, Esme. ‘What rank it is, in your crew. But if you’re telling the truth, if you
don’t know why your superiors are interested in Dr Gagarian and his research, perhaps you could pass a message to them. Perhaps you could tell them that I want to talk to them. That I am
ready to negotiate.’

‘Are you a religious person, Gajananvihari Pilot?’

‘Do I believe what you believe? No.’

‘But do you belong to a particular faith or sect?’

‘I was taught that the existence of the Universe does not require a first cause. And that its creation and everything in it can be explained by observation and deduction.’

Hari had a sudden sharp, piercing vision of his father walking in the desert viron, studying windows that he pulled out of the air.

‘We celebrate the Bright Moment because it is a sign that something wonderful happened,’ Esme said. ‘Sri Hong-Owen Became something else, and the Bright Moment is an echo of
her Becoming. An echo of a moment of transcendence. Of joy. And because it touched everyone, everyone contains the seed of that transcendence. And one day, when things change, when the crooked path
is made straight, those seeds will grow into something wonderful. Philosophers cannot understand those seeds any more than they can understand how the Bright Moment touched everyone. They cannot
understand how Sri Hong-Owen changed, or what she Became. They cannot understand how we will change, because it has nothing to do with the so-called fundamental truths about the universe
“discovered” by philosophical investigation. Because this universe, this reality is nothing. It is an illusion. A veil over deeper and more meaningful realities. So why would we have
any interest in anything your Dr Gagarian or his friends claim to have found out?’

‘Does that mean you won’t pass on my message?’

‘I hope your search brings you peace,’ Esme said, and stood up and walked off around the pool, followed by the two men.

Hari watched them cross the square and enter the pink house, then dipped up a handful of water and splashed it on his face.

After Hari had told him about the unsatisfactory confrontation with the Saints, Tamonash said, ‘I suppose it was your friend’s idea.’

‘It was entirely mine,’ Hari said. ‘Rav didn’t want to begin negotiations with the Saints until we had opened Dr Gagarian’s files.’

‘But you are not yet certain that the Saints are the guilty party.’

‘That’s why I made my offer. To see how they reacted.’

Hari and his uncle were talking over supper, at one end of the long room where Tamonash slept, ate, and did most of his business. One wall displayed a view of one of Earth’s oceans, ragged
scraps of ice drifting on blue water stretching under a pale blue sky towards a distant horizon where ice cliffs blinked in cold sunlight, a live feed off the coast of Europe, near the Pilot
family’s last home on Earth. A coast locked under the ice that, despite the best efforts of climate engineers to reverse the Long Twilight, still covered more than half of Earth’s land
surface.

Hari’s father had sometimes shown him archive images from their family’s long, long history. He remembered one in particular: a young man and a young woman in strange clothes
standing rigid with pride beside some kind of primitive ground vehicle in a street of two-storey brick houses joined each to each and stepping down a steep corridor towards a simmering basin of
brick and smoke. The man had been the first of the Pilot family to leave the mother country; the woman was his bride; the image had been captured so long ago that their family had yet to take up
the name Pilot. More than two thousand years. All that history ground away by time, by ice that had marched north and south during the century of twilight imposed by seraphs at the end of the fall
of the Empire of the True.

The ocean panorama tinted the air with shifting blue shadows; blue highlights glinted on the carapaces of the automata lined along the opposite wall. They were arranged by height, from squat
domestic servants to a lithe, long-limbed racing strider with a basket saddle behind its tiny head. One of them especially interested Hari. A repurposed battle bot, identical to those used on
Pabuji’s Gift
for general maintenance on the hull and in the drive chambers. Otherwise, the room was mostly empty, apart from a bed shrouded by a muslin tent, and the chairs on which
Hari and Tamonash sat, facing each other across a low table of beaten brass set on a pedestal of raw nickel-iron.

A myrmidon stood behind Tamonash’s chair, slim and tall and alert, several pairs of red eyes burning under the leading edge of the sleek armour that hooded its head. Tamonash had hired it
after Hari had contacted him and told him why he was heading towards Ophir.

‘You are as headstrong as your father,’ Tamonash said.

‘I feel this is not a compliment,’ Hari said.

Tamonash still had not explained the circumstances of the rift between himself and Hari’s father, but it was clear that it was deep and bitter.

‘You should not have talked to those fanatics,’ Tamonash said. ‘What if they decide to steal this head? To take it by force instead of bargaining with you.’

‘I told them it was stored in a safe place, Uncle. So you have nothing to worry about.’

‘Why would they believe you? And if they don’t believe you, where would they look first?’

It was a good point. Hari apologised, said that he would contact the Saints at once, and offer to take them to the bonded store and show them the head.

‘The damage is already done,’ Tamonash said. ‘You may do more, trying to undo it.’

Hari apologised again. They ate in silence for a while.

At last, Tamonash said, ‘Perhaps you would like to tell me about your visit to the house of the dead philosopher.’

‘Have you been spying on me, Uncle?’

‘My contact in the Ministry of Justice tells me that the police started a file on you after you pestered them with impertinent questions about Flores’ death. Your visit was
noted.’

‘I did nothing wrong.’

‘The police may not agree.’

‘I assume that you don’t, either.’

‘The hijackers want the files cached inside the tick-tock’s head. Open them. Study them. Learn all you can about what you need to sell to get your family and your ship
back.’

‘The hijackers were interested in Salx Minnot Flores’ work, too,’ Hari said. ‘That’s why they had him killed. That’s why I need to know what the police know
about the woman who killed him. And why I need to find out all I can about his research.’

Tamonash leaned back in his chair and studied Hari over steepled fingertips. ‘Yes, you are just like your father.’

‘I’m doing this for him, and for my brothers, and Agrata. For my family, Uncle. My family, and yours.’

‘You won’t give up this foolish idea.’