Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (24 page)

Riyya said, ‘One of the sects in Down Town believes that the seraphs are a kind of distraction. That the QIs didn’t vasten after all, but went into hiding. That after causing the
Long Twilight and the fall of the True Empire, they have continued to secretly manipulate human history.’

Hari said, ‘If that’s true, they can’t be very smart. Based on the evidence.’

Riyya laughed. He discovered that he liked to make her laugh.

He told her about his adventures on Vesta and in Fei Shen, how he had met Rav. They talked about what the Ardenist might be planning, about what might be inside Dr Gagarian’s head, and why
Rav was really interested in it. They talked about growing up in the Climate Corps and aboard
Pabuji’s Gift
, and discussed the small coincidences of their lives – that they
were more or less the same age, that they both had two brothers, had both served apprenticeships in practical philosophies, and so on, and so forth.

In the company of this forthright young woman, in sunlight and fresh air, with the tremendous view spread to the horizon, Hari was possessed by a premonition that the world was trembling on the
threshold of something new and wonderful, felt that he had reached a point where things could only get better, that he would soon discover the secrets hidden inside Dr Gagarian’s head and
find and destroy his enemies, begin his life again . . .

At last, late in the afternoon, Rav came scrambling up the rocky slope, carrying a brace of rabbits.

‘We should eat before we set out,’ he said.

Hari and Riyya shared rice cakes and savoury bean paste that she fetched from her scooter; Rav skinned and gutted and quartered the rabbits, and roasted the joints using a signal laser at its
highest setting.

‘I don’t know why you baseliners are so squeamish,’ he said. ‘You’re made of meat, so why not eat meat? Or are you worried about consuming the animals’ souls,
or some such groundless superstition?’

‘Tell us about your plan,’ Riyya said.

‘Tell us everything,’ Hari said.

Rav made a pass with his hands, held up a faceted vial containing a dark sliver. A replica of the trinket that he’d fabricated in a maker while Hari had been redeeming Dr Gagarian’s
head from the bonded store.

‘All we have to do is substitute this for the original. The Masters of the Measureless Mind worship the idea it represents. As long as they don’t know it’s a copy, a copy will
serve their needs as well as the original. But Gun Ako Akoi needs the original, because only the original can do what she wants it to do.’

‘Is it really part of a seraph?’ Riyya said.

‘A fragment of one of the self-aware QIs that vastened into the seraphs,’ Rav said. ‘One that called itself the Lonesome Road of Exculpation. They were sprawling, complex
things, those old QIs. They accumulated self-awareness the way a genome accumulates complexity. By accidents of transcription, deletions, repurposing, borrowing from smaller intelligences,
infections and infestations, and so on. Each one was different, and all of them were dead ends, leftovers of the dreams of an age long past. Created to show it was possible to create real
self-aware machine intelligence, and then abandoned. Until they were vastened by a shared conceptual breakthrough, they were each about as intelligent as the average baseliner.

‘Some say that they were vastened when the Trues attacked them, and infected them with djinns. Some say they became portals, neither wholly in this universe or in the pocket universe they
opened up or created or became. The Saints and other equally deluded cults want to penetrate their information horizons because they think it will open the way to their individual versions of
heaven. Others think the seraphs have become frozen accidents, consumed by self-engulfing iterations of an incomprehensible message from the far side. Who knows? Who cares? All that matters is that
Gun Ako Akoi wants the original fragment of that old QI, wants to use it as the substrate for a new companion, or a memory engine, or some such tinker work. And we’ll get what we want if she
gets what she wants.’

Rav tossed the vial high into the air and it flashed like a star and he caught it and showed Hari and Riyya his open, empty hand.

‘Hey presto!’

He finished his meal, and explained what he wanted Hari and Riyya to do. Tearing flesh from bones as he talked, cracking the bones between his teeth and sucking out the marrow, tossing the
splintered bones over the edge of the sheer drop, licking grease from his fingers.

‘Any questions?’ he said. ‘Good. Time’s a-wasting. Let’s go and play our parts.’

Light in the sunstrip was dying down towards the curved horizon of the lake as Hari followed the white road along the shore towards the festival. The kitbag was slung over his
shoulders; the replica of the relic was in the breast pocket of his jacket; he was reviewing Rav’s plan for the ninth or tenth time, the part he had to play.

Men and women were bathing on the broad beach of black sand at the water’s edge. Standing waist-deep amongst islands of foam, scrubbing their torsos and arms, raising their arms towards
the overhead and pressing their hands together and bringing them down and touching fingertips to their foreheads. Further out, children frog-kicked around a raft and clambered on to it and jumped
off, locking their hands under knees tucked high and cannonballing into the water with loud screaming and laughter.

There was an iron smell on the cool breeze blowing off the water. Dark clouds were drifting in above the lake, dimming the last of the light.

Hari passed pilgrim encampments scattered across a broad meadow, joined a stream of people making their way towards the big tents pitched along the broad white road. Square tents with peaked
roofs, long tents, pyramids, transparent domes. Most were reefed open, displaying carved idols standing amongst constellations of flickering flames, or complex light sculptures burning against
black backdrops, or heads of humans or animals or chimeras staring out of glass tanks. A bulky white pressure suit with a gold-visored helmet stood in the centre of one tent: the armour of one of
the heroes of the long ago, when humans had first ventured beyond the sky of Earth. In another, the brief vision of the Bright Moment played, the man on the bicycle smiling and turning away and
vanishing into a flash of light, smiling and vanishing.

Several passers-by greeted Hari, pressing their hands together, touching fingertips to foreheads. Hari mirrored their gestures, feeling like a fraud. The small weight of the fake relic burned
over his heart.

The crowd thickened. Here were several monks in scarlet robes walking with their hands clasped behind them, talking animatedly. Here was a skyclad sadhu arguing with an invisible opponent,
jabbing at the air with clenched fingers. Indigents sat with begging bowls in their laps or at their feet. A naked Blue Man sat cross-legged in the shade of a flowering tree, eyes closed, hands
resting on his knees, palms upturned and forefingers and thumbs pinched together.

Children ran everywhere. Many wore masks. Two men stripped to the waist were stirring a cauldron of soup with wooden paddles. A woman was selling shaved ice in paper cones. A child was selling
garlands of white flowers. A man was selling tea, deftly pouring it into white porcelain cups from the long spout of the pot he balanced on a pad on top of his head. Two ascetics went past, clad in
their particoloured robes, tapping a slow beat on small drums tucked under their arms. A woman sat cross-legged, playing an unfretted spike fiddle. Another woman sang an atonal praisesong. There
were pairs and trios and quartets of musicians spaced along the grassy verge at the edge of the beach, and men and women stopped to listen and then moved on. Banners hung from tall poles, rattling
in the breeze off the lake. The silvery teardrop of a balloon floated high above the tents, reflecting the last of the sunlight, and in the basket hung beneath it a holy man sang a wailing
prayer.

As he mingled with the gaudy parade, passing intricately crafted altars and shrines, breathing the odours of sandalwood and incense, woodsmoke and cooking, hearing strange musics drifting on the
warm wind, Hari felt an unbounded delight at the rich variety of human imagination. He supposed that his father would have been dismayed by the unabashed veneration of imaginary sky ghosts, the
endless elaboration of superstition, the flaunting of pointless scholarship, but it seemed to him that although these people had gathered to honour and exalt their various prophets and gods, what
they were really celebrating was themselves. One of the itinerant philosophers who had taken passage on
Pabuji’s Gift
had once told Hari that small groups of like-minded people
generated a gestalt, a group overmind or harmonic mindset that enhanced problem-solving, enhanced empathy, and reduced conflict. A useful survival trait, according to the philosopher, when the
ancestors of all human beings had been a few bands of man-apes on the veldts of old Earth. Hari’s father had dismissed this and similar explanations of human behaviour as fairy tales, but it
was easy to imagine a kind of benevolent overmind permeating the encampment, binding everyone to a common purpose.

A small parade was coming down the road. Eight men holding poles on which was balanced a huge red skull with elongated, toothy jaws, followed by men beating drums or tossing firecrackers to the
left and right, and a man who swigged a clear greasy liquid from a bottle and touched a burning torch to his lips and breathed out fire. As the crowds parted to let them pass, Hari saw the tent of
the Masters of the Measureless Mind on the other side of the road, square and butter-yellow, just as Rav had described it. A black pennant strung from the top of its central pole snapped in the
wind.

One side of the tent was open to the road. Inside, a dozen men and women sat cross-legged on rugs that covered the floor. They were swaying from side to side, arms raised, hands fluttering,
chanting a slow and steady prayer. The altar reared above them, a starburst of silver and gold centred on a crystal lens that housed the relic, the real fragment of the QI. According to Rav, the
Masters of the Measureless Mind believed that it emanated rays which, when the brains of the congregation were appropriately tuned by chants and devotional exercises, multiplied the complexity of
their neuronal pathways.

Hari loitered on the other side of the road while the congregation inside the tent chanted and swayed. Dusk stained the air. Cloud sheeted the overhead. Dark layers, wispy streamers slowly
turning. Something cold kissed Hari’s cheek and he touched the spot with a fingertip and it came away wet. Another kiss, and another. People around him looked up, hurried on. He looked up
too, and a drop of water struck his eye. He thought of the showers on the ship, how a cloud of droplets expanded from every direction. Here, droplets condensed inside clouds, and fell straight
down. Here, the overhead wept . . .

It was part of Rav’s plan. Riyya was using the climate machinery to wedge a cold front under the warm, moist air above the lake. There would be rain and strong winds, and in the confusion
of the storm Rav would sneak into the tent and smash the altar and steal the relic. Hari would chase after Rav, chase him into the trees, and then he’d return, claiming he had confronted the
thief and retrieved the relic, and present it – the fake relic – to the Masters of the Measureless Mind. And no one would know that the real relic, the fragment of the QI, had been
stolen.

Hari heard a familiar music and saw the old ascetic he’d met at Down Town’s train station, her patchwork coat billowing around her as she walked through the crowd of passers-by at
the head of her little band of acolytes, their drums and guitars. She raised a hand when she saw Hari. Her acolytes halted and stopped playing, and she stepped towards him.

‘It seems obvious to me now,’ she said, ‘but if you had told me in Down Town that the different paths we follow would cross here I would have called you a fabulist.’

Hari remembered the fragment that the book had displayed after the hermit had thrown it from his tree. ‘ “Streams rise in many places and flow by many paths, but all at last reach
the sea.” ’

‘You have been reading in your book.’

‘I’m not sure how much I understand.’

‘Some of those gathered here will claim that they can help you understand. A few might even be right, but amongst those of true faith there are many frauds and false prophets. We’ve
already drawn out some, and we’ll draw out more before the dogs bark and the caravan moves on,’ the ascetic said. ‘We have a lot of fun, teasing them, and sometimes we learn
something from them, and sometimes they learn something from us. Of course, we don’t have anything to lose. We’re free to talk to fools, or to make fools of ourselves. But you should be
more careful, I think. Be careful about who to trust.’

‘I’m not going to give the book away to anyone who asks for it, if that’s what you mean.’

‘You asked me a question when we met before, and I gave you an answer. What you make of it is up to you.’ A rainy gust blew over them. The ascetic drew her coat around her and said,
‘We are camped in the meadow beyond these tents. If you need shelter and food, you are welcome to share what little we have. Perhaps you can teach me a song from your book, and we’ll
teach you one in return.’

‘It’s a kind thought, but I’m waiting for a friend.’

‘The Ardenist? He’s also welcome to share with us, but I rather think he prefers to walk alone.’

The ascetic bowed to Hari and walked on, and her acolytes struck up a new tune as they followed her. He felt a surprising pang as he watched them disappear into the crowds. As if a path he could
have followed into another life had closed up.

But he wasn’t following a path, hadn’t set out on a spiritual quest or some kind of wandering, unfocused personal journey. He was on a mission. He was fixing a great wrong, repairing
a hole or rupture in the world just as he would have repaired a broken machine, by working through a logical sequence of tasks, ticking them off one after the other.