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

As Hari grew older, his conversations with his father increasingly turned to the influence of cults on the politics of the surviving cities and settlements of the Belt and Mars and the moons of
the outer planets, the personalities and backgrounds of key players, how various scenarios might be gamed, whether attempts to begin a dialogue with certain powers on Earth were useful or foolish,
rumours about the suppression of philosophical explorations and research into the cause and nature of the Bright Moment, and so on, and so forth.

Nabhomani, who after Rakesh’s death had taken charge of negotiations with politicians and officials in the cities and settlements visited by the ship, said that the old man had retreated
into a fantasy world of conspiracies and hypotheses because he no longer had any traction or influence outside the little world of his ship. That was why he wouldn’t allow Hari to explore any
of
Pabuji’s Gift
’s ports of call, Nabhomani said. Not because Hari wasn’t old enough to take care of himself, but because Aakash didn’t want him exposed to
inconvenient truths.

Agrata, as usual, took Aakash’s side. The last of the original crew, tirelessly loyal, she had been on the ship ever since it had been refurbished and relaunched. She said that everything
had been thrown into hazard by the shock of the Bright Moment. Old certainties were crumbling, political alliances were shifting, the influence of the end-time cults was spreading in strange and
unpredictable ways.

‘We must do our best to understand these changes if we are to survive,’ she said.

‘And this obsession with the Bright Moment?’ Nabhomani said. ‘How will that help us survive?’

‘Aakash hopes to keep a little light of reason alive in a growing sea of darkness. I see no harm in it.’

‘You can’t reason with people whose beliefs are based on unreason,’ Nabhomani said. ‘I should know. I must deal with them at every port.’

Nabhoj, as usual, wouldn’t be drawn into these arguments. He had a ship to run.

Nabhomani and Nabhoj were clones of Aakash, physically identical but with very different personalities. Nabhomani was affable, convivial, rakish, dressed in a vivid motley of fashions picked up
from the cities and settlements he visited, loved gossip, and possessed a sharp eye for the affectations and foolishness of others. Nabhoj was a phlegmatic technician who rarely socialised with the
passengers, and could sulk for days if he lost an argument about how best to solve a problem encountered during salvage work. Once, when Hari had been helping him try to free a recalcitrant
pressure-hose coupling, he’d fetched a diamond knife and methodically hacked the coupling to a cloud of splinters. And then the fit had passed, and he’d given Hari one of his rare
smiles and told him that although it wasn’t a standard procedure it had solved the problem quite neatly.

Hari was schooled in every aspect of the family trade by Agrata and his two brothers, received a patchwork education in philosophical truths and methods from his father and various travelling
scholars, and played with the children of passengers and specialists in the many disused volumes of his family’s ship. It was a ring ship,
Pabuji’s Gift
, a broad ribbon caught
in a circle five hundred metres across, with a twist that turned it into the single continuous surface of a Möbius strip. The ship’s motor hung from a web of tethers and spars at the
centre of the ring; its hull was studded with the cubes and domes that contained workshops, utility bays, power units, an industrial maker, and the giant centrifuges, light chromatographs, and
cultures of half-life nematodes and tailored bacteria; its interior was partitioned into cargo holds, garages for gigs and the big machines used in salvage work, and the lifesystem. Much of this
space was unused. The ship could support more than a thousand people, but even when Hari’s father had been alive it had never carried more than a tenth of that number.

Hari and the children of passengers and specialist crews had the run of the empty cargo holds, habitats and modules, the mazes of ducts and serviceways. A world parallel to the world of the
adults, with a social structure equally complicated, possessing its own traditions and myths, rivalries and challenges, fads and fashions. Endless games of tig on one voyage; hide-and-seek on
another. One year, Hari organised flyball matches inside a cylinder turfed with halflife grass; when interest in that began to wane, he divided the children into troops that fought each other for
possession of tagged locations scattered through the ship.

He was fifteen then. Tall and slender, glossy black hair done up in corn rows woven with glass beads. Even though every adult – everyone over the age of twenty – still seemed
impossibly old, adulthood was no longer mysterious and unattainable, but a condition he was advancing towards day by day. He knew that he would soon have to give up childish games and shoulder his
share of the family’s work. He was beginning to understand the limits of his life, beginning to realise how small his world really was, how little it counted in the grand scheme of
things.

And then he fell in love for the first time.

Her name was Sora Exodus Adel. A passenger travelling with her brother and her mother between Tannhauser Gate (where
Pabuji’s Gift
had unloaded most of the salvage from her last
job) and Trantor (where she would unload the rest). Sora was a year older than Hari, languidly elegant, too old for the kind of games that Hari felt he was too old for now.

He couldn’t tell Sora how he felt. He and his brothers were not allowed to have what Agrata called intimate relations with any of the passengers or specialists. Nabhoj was partnered to the
ship; Nabhomani told Hari outrageous stories about debauchery with women and men he met during his negotiations in cities and settlements, promised to let Hari have a taste of the good life when
Hari was at last allowed to go ashore. Hari could admire Sora Exodus Adel from a distance, engage in a little light banter, no more than that. Better to avoid her altogether, he thought. Find some
work he could vanish into until the ship docked at Trantor and Sora disembarked. Then one of the other passengers, Jyotirmoy Hala, came up with a plan to put on a dance performance based on one of
the stories about the parochial god from whom the ship had taken its name.

Jyotirmoy was three years older than Hari, the only child of two philosophers who were studying the topology of the space-time distortions around the seraphs, and expected their son to take up
their work. Jyotirmoy did not argue with his parents. He simply refused to listen to them. He spent a dozen hours a day practising dance and the art of gesture. The only way to be good at
something, he told Hari, was to let it take over your life. To dedicate yourself to it. You had to practise an elevation or a gesture over and over until you had it right. Or at least, until you
stopped making obvious mistakes. And then you could get down to the serious work. Then you could think about making something new.

Agrata approved of Jyotirmoy’s idea, and Hari found himself helping to put a troupe selected from the younger passengers, including Sora, through twenty days of rehearsals. Jyotirmoy
plotted the choreography, chose the music from the ship’s library, and supervised the design and manufacture of costumes and masks; Hari spent as much time as he could with Sora. He learned
that she and her brother had been born on Mars but for most of their lives had been travelling with their mother, a musician who played ancient symphonies using an orchestra thing controlled by the
play of her hands through columns of light. Sora maintained the orchestra thing; her brother organised events and arranged travel. She liked the gypsy life, she said, but she wouldn’t work
for her mother for ever: she’d settle down eventually, design gardens, and raise children. She and Hari talked about the places she had visited, the people who lived there. Admirers of her
mother’s work. Collaborators. Other artists. Hari was still young enough to believe that the world was sensitive to his emotions and moods, that everyone was a player in the drama of his
life. It gave him an odd, lonesome feeling to think of Sora leaving the ship, travelling on without him to places he’d never see, the precious time they had together dwindling to an anecdote,
a memory.

Sora said that she found it odd that Hari had never gone ashore at any of the cities and settlements
Pabuji’s Gift
had visited, said that his life and his family were very
strange.

‘Really?’

‘You don’t see it because you don’t know anything else,’ Sora said. ‘But in all the cities and settlements I’ve visited, all the ships I’ve travelled
on, I’ve never before met someone like you.’

‘We’re just ordinary people, trying to get by.’

‘Don’t you think it’s the tiniest bit weird, being born after your parents died?’

Hari loved Sora’s bold, straightforward manner. Her candid gaze. She had a way, while talking, of running a hand through the cloud of her hair and twisting a clump of it in her fingers and
turning it to and fro, as if trying to tune into stray thoughts. She had long, dexterous fingers. Her fingernails were tinted dark green, with mica flecks.

Hari said, ‘My father passed over. He isn’t exactly dead.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘You could ask him.’

‘He is like a ghost. A haunt who manifests himself in the drones and manikins. Can he really operate several of them at once?’

‘Of course. He assigns their addresses to temporary sub-selves, and reintegrates when he has finished.’

‘You think that is ordinary?’

He loved the little uptick in the corner of her smile. A sly little warp, a playful complicity. There were five different shades of gold in her eyes.

He said, ‘It’s just what he does.’

Sora said, ‘Many of the passengers are scared of him.’

‘Are you scared?’

‘Of course not. Well, just a tiny bit. Actually, Agrata scares me more. I don’t think she likes me.’

‘Agrata can be . . . abrupt, I suppose. It’s hard to know what she likes and doesn’t like, but I bet she’d like you, once she got to know you.’

‘That’s sweet of you, Hari.’

Hari loved Sora’s small kindnesses, her unaffected sophistication, was jealous when she paid attention to anyone else, envious of the easy way Jyotirmoy talked with her about details of
the performance, of the way the two of them hung close together, studying sketches for costumes, watching recordings of rehearsals, discussing staging and the movements of performers, where they
should start and where they should come to rest, and half a hundred other things whose significance Hari barely understood. For the first time, he saw himself as others might see him. An outsider.
An awkward, peculiar kid who knew everything about his ship and his family’s trade, and almost nothing about anything that really mattered.

But when Jyotirmoy at last led his crew into the hollow sphere of the stage, with the adult passengers hung all around its perimeter, Hari dissolved into his role and the gestalt of the
performance. Costumed in fluttering silks, faces painted white, lips tinted black, eyes emphasised by red and gold make-up, he and the other players flitted through the web of ratlines and perches,
through washes of light and music, like the little birds in Aakash’s viron. Breaking into freefall dances, freezing in tableaux when one of the principals performed a solo part. Jyotirmoy
played Pabuji; Hari played Pabuji’s friend, the snake god Gogaji; Sora played Gogaji’s bride and Pabuji’s niece, Kelam; Sora’s brother, Jubilee, played Ravana the Demon
King, from whom Pabuji stole the she-camels he gave as a wedding present to Gogaji and Kelam; the other children doubled as wedding guests and the camels.

Hari inhabited the intricate sequence of his role with a kind of exalted serenity. Every move, every pose, sprang from memories laid down in his bios and muscles during the painstaking
rehearsals, a single thread in the weave of the whole. Coming together, spinning apart. His concentration broke only once. Moving out of the dance in which he and Sora mirrored each other’s
gestures and poses in an expression of joyful fidelity, he overshot the perch where he would rest in shadow while Pabuji, with comically elaborate caution, stalked the she-camels. Jyotirmoy caught
his arm and halted and turned him, and their gazes met. A strange moment of doubling, seeing Jyotirmoy’s concern flash in Pabuji’s mask. And then Hari was in the correct position, and
Pabuji soared away into a cone of light, and Hari was caught up again in the flow of the dance and the unfolding dream logic of the story, waking at the end of it, dazed and happy and exhausted, to
the audience’s applause.

At the party after the performance, still wearing Gagaji’s green tunic and trousers, Hari dared to ask Sora if she wanted to see his favourite place on the ship, a diamond composite
blister where you could switch off all the lights and lose yourself in the rapture of the starry dark. And was amazed, even though he’d so often imagined floating in the small intimate space
with her, her warmth, her touch, when she smiled and said why not? It was as if he still inhabited the dream reality of the play. Anything seemed possible. But when they started across the crowded
space Agrata materialised out of the throng and told Hari that Sora’s mother wanted to congratulate him on his performance. And Agrata’s look told Hari that she knew. She knew all about
his plan, his private fantasy.

He submitted, of course. He didn’t know what else to do. Following Agrata, smiling and nodding while Sora’s mother talked, hardly hearing what she said to him or what he said to her,
Sora somewhere else in the big, crowded, noisy volume, the moment lost. And that was that. The next day,
Pabuji’s Gift
docked at Trantor, unloaded its cargo of refined rare earths,
let off a few passengers, took on a few more. Sora and her family were among those who disembarked. And Jyotirmoy vanished. Abandoned his parents and jumped ship.

Agrata didn’t say anything about Jyotirmoy’s defection or Hari’s unrequited love for Sora, but one day, during a discussion about reconfiguring passenger accommodation, she
began to talk about the early days of the ship.