Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (30 page)

The next day, Hari rebelled. After the last meeting ended, he and Nabhomani had two hours of so-called free time before the beginning of the long evening meal. Nabhomani retired to his room for
a nap; Hari broke out of the trading centre. Or rather, he simply swam out: the Commonwealth believed that its guests, like its citizens, would unquestioningly obey every rule and regulation, and
did not see the need to enforce any of them. Hari reached the station without encountering any guards, locked doors or paranoid security bots, caught the next rail car out and alighted at the
second stop, one of the guest-worker towns.

He had a simple plan: he wanted to look for the young technician, whose name was Sharma Song. He didn’t much care whether or not she lived in this town (there were dozens of guest-worker
towns, and he couldn’t use his bios to search for her in the Commonwealth’s registry). It was the quest rather than the prize that was important. Escaping the prison of protocol.
Exploring this strange new world. Embarking on an adventure.

The town was a crowded labyrinth of narrow corridors and tunnels and common spaces threaded around, through, and between irregular stacks of buildings. Domed gardens and roofed yards were set in
the perimeter walls, and shafts let in filtered sunlight in some places, but otherwise it was lit by luminous panels and chains of floating lamps. There were workshops and fabbing mills,
cafés with tiny counters and perches for just two or three customers, augmentation parlours specialising in tattoos or cosmetic surgery or implants, little stores selling everything from
handmade food to vat-grown pets. There were churches and chapels and temples, many featuring iconography venerating the Bright Moment: portraits and effigies of the cyclist in a hundred styles,
replicas of his bicycle, looped picts of the flare of light reaching out, engulfing him. Hari found it odd and disturbing to see these familiar images in this strange place.

Most of the town’s inhabitants were smaller than him. Dwarfed descendants of Outers, enclaves of refugees from Earth, a few clades and races that Hari recognised, many he’d never
seen before, an unending stream of strangers hurrying past on mysterious errands and missions, glimpses of incomprehensible lives. Strange buildings, strange signs, strange customs, snatches of
strange music, strange odours from strange food . . .

One sector specialised in manufacturing pressure suits. There were workshops dedicated to making different components – liners, helmets, gloves and boots, lifepacks, avatars. There were
parlours that measured and fitted customers. There were studios where artists worked on customised and elaborate paint jobs for chestplates and helmets, in the ancient tradition of Outers. Familiar
work on familiar, utilitarian equipment.

When Nabhomani found him, Hari was talking to one of the suit painters, an old woman dressed in an ankle-length smock with many pockets. They were sitting outside the spare little cubbyhole of
her workshop, drinking tea and nibbling salted curds, olives, and raw vegetables that were much tastier than anything Hari had eaten in the trading centre. A chestplate stood on a rack, marked out
with the lineaments of a design – a standard, idealised representation of Sri Hong-Owen, her hands cupped around the star Fomalhaut and the halo of its dust ring – that the old woman
was creating for a devout follower of the Church of the Human Uplift.

When Nabhomani swam out of a corridor mouth and drifted past the lighted alcove of a café towards him, Hari wasn’t especially shocked or dismayed. He’d been expecting it.
He’d known that he wouldn’t be able to escape for long.

Nabhomani spoke to the old woman in a language that Hari’s bios didn’t recognise, full of clicks and aspirants (he later learned that it was a bastard dialect of Xhosa and Pinglish).
The old woman replied in the same language, and told Hari in Portuga that it had been a pleasure talking with him, and should he ever need his suit decorated he should come to her. If she could not
satisfy his requirements she knew everyone else in the trade here; she would make sure that he got what he wanted for the best price.

‘Let me give you something for your hospitality, mother,’ Nabhomani said, but the old woman said there was no obligation, it was a pleasure to meet his younger brother.

‘No obligation is the worst kind of obligation,’ Nabhomani told Hari a little later, after he’d found them seats at a tiny bar that sold pineapple juice and spicy bean-sprout
pancakes.

‘We were just talking in a general way,’ Hari said. ‘I didn’t tell her anything about our trade.’

‘I’m not worried about that. You don’t know anything about anything worth knowing. But I am worried that you fell into that old she-devil’s clutches,’ Nabhomani
said. ‘I bet you don’t even know who she is.’

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me she doesn’t really paint p-suits.’

‘She also runs this ward, which means she runs about a quarter of the town. And she does most of her business through a system of favours . . . Did she offer to introduce you to that
technician you were mooning over? Or tell you where she lived?’ Nabhomani smiled. As always, he was impeccably groomed, hair lustrous with scented oil, his shirt luminously white and fastened
by silver pins, little finger cocked as he fed himself a morsel of pancake. ‘You’re going to tell me I’m a hypocrite. That you only wanted to have a little adventure, like the
adventures I’m always talking about. The thing is, Hari, there’s a time and a place. It isn’t just that the old woman would have expected you do to her a favour in return for her
help. If you’d found that technician, if you’d slept with her, it would have been an act of industrial sabotage. It would have blown the deal. You would have been arrested, I would have
been arrested, and I don’t like to think what would have happened to the technician.’

‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘And no harm’s been done. I patched over your absence at dinner. And tomorrow, after we’ve endured the contract-signing ceremony, we’re finished here.’

‘Assuming I come back with you.’

Hari felt guilty, was angry because he felt guilty. He hadn’t told the old woman about Sharma Song, but he had been thinking about telling her. He knew he’d done wrong, knew his
so-called rebellion was dull and obvious, but resented Nabhomani’s patronising homilies.

Nabhomani sucked on his bulb of pineapple juice, pretending to think about that. He said, ‘It isn’t difficult to become a guest worker, but it is almost impossible to leave if you
do. And even more difficult to become a citizen of the Commonwealth.’

‘Who says I want to become a citizen?’

‘I know I wouldn’t. The endless debates, endlessly considering and voting on infinitesimally trivial matters . . . It must be like being stuck in a trade meeting for the rest of your
life. No, it would be much better to claim refugee status. After two or three years of trying to live on welfare you’d be allowed to become a guest worker. And then you’d have to learn
a trade, and stick at it for your entire life, never doing anything that other people haven’t already done. Because that’s how it is here. Custom and convention stifles enterprise and
innovation. Maybe you’d even meet someone you liked enough to partner, although your choices would be pretty limited because there isn’t much exogamy here. The clades and clans and
enclave nations like to stick to their own. And, of course, you’d spend your whole life in a little town like this one,’ Nabhomani said, ‘because guest workers aren’t
allowed to leave Sugar Mountain, ever.’

‘You’re good at this,’ Hari said. ‘At selling a place.’

‘If I’m selling anything, I’m selling you what you already have, because it’s a better deal than anything you’ll find here.’

‘Yet the people here seem happy.’

‘Because they don’t know any better. And because they are too polite to express their real feelings. Politeness is a survival trait in crowded, confined places. If the denizens of
this town weren’t so incredibly polite, they’d all have killed each other long ago. But you know more than they do, Hari. You know what’s out there. All kinds of people, all kinds
of places, all kinds of ways of living. Cities and settlements, worlds and worlds and worlds. You want to jump ship for the first place you’ve seen? Fine. But if you want my opinion, you
should see a few other places first. Live a little, little brother. I know I have,’ Nabhomani said, and commenced to tell several improbable stories that at last wore through Hari’s
shell of sulky resentment and won a couple of smiles from him.

They swam through the town’s mazy corridors to the station and rode the next rail car back to the trade centre, and caught a few hours’ sleep before the last round of negotiations,
and the interminable contract-signing ceremony. And that was the end of Hari’s first and last act of rebellion against his family and his birthright.

Hari told Riyya about his adventure in the Commonwealth of Sugar Mountain because he wanted to show her that he knew a little about running away – running away from a
family that had mapped out every detail of your future. He wanted her to know that he understood how she felt, that they had something in common, but Riyya pointed out that he was trying to find
his way back to his family, hoping to save any still alive and win back
Pabuji’s Gift
, while she had left everything of her old life behind and had no intention of returning. And
besides, leaving the Climate Corps had not been a spur-of-the-moment decision. She had been thinking about it for several years, ever since she’d started to visit her father. Wondering what
direction her life might take if, like him, she quit the Corps. Daydreaming about seeing something of the other cities and settlements of the Belt. She’d even ridden up to the docks not so
long ago, and found a place where ship crews hung out – although she hadn’t dared say anything to anyone, and had bolted when a woman her age had offered to buy her a drink.

And then she’d met Hari and Rav, and after their little adventure it had become impossible to stay in the Corps, in Ophir.

‘My father showed me that there was more to the world,’ she said. ‘Another reason for my mother to hate him. She was always complaining that the disgrace of his desertion had
held her back, that her rivals used it to rob her of opportunities and promotions that were rightfully hers. That was why she put in a claim to his house and the rest of his stuff. He wanted to
leave everything to me. He had the crazy idea that I would carry on his work. As soon as my mother heard about it, she put in a counterclaim. She said that even though she had annulled their
partnership when he left the Corps, she had a right to be compensated for the way he had hurt her and damaged her reputation. It’s possible, I guess, that she was trying to prevent me from
making what she believed would be a bad decision. But the way she went about it only made things worse.’

Riyya made a kind of peace with Rav. She listened with uncritical attention to his tales of unlikely adventures in the cities and settlements of the Belt; Rav questioned her about the Climate
Corps and its work, and told Hari that the algorithms that controlled Ophir’s weather systems were trivial, but not without interest. Another day, he asked Hari if he and Riyya were having
sex yet.

‘I’d have sex with her, if I was inclined that way and if I happened to be baseline,’ Rav said. ‘She’s what passes for intelligent amongst your people, and as far
as I can tell she isn’t deformed. You’ll go your separate ways after this little adventure, so you won’t be inconvenienced by any lasting emotional attachment. And you’d be
better for it. It would relieve some of your tension. It would be harmless fun.’

‘Once again, you demonstrate your ignorance of us simple-minded baseliners.’

‘Oho. I’ve embarrassed you. One thing I do know about baseliners: you make basic human interactions needlessly complicated. A consequence of your primitive wiring, I
suppose.’

‘It’s true that I don’t know why you spend so much time with her.’

Rav smiled. ‘Perhaps I’m trying to make you jealous.’

He had touched a nerve. Seeing Rav and Riyya together, talking easily, laughing, studying windows and picts hung in the air between them, made Hari feel suspicious and, yes, envious. Made him
feel that he was watching the kind of life he wouldn’t ever be able to enjoy, reminded him of the way he’d felt about Sora and Jyotirmoy and all the other passengers he’d briefly
befriended, reminded him of the ease and comfort of his family.

The dull ache of grief and loss. Always there, even when he didn’t notice it.

Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
maintained a constant distance behind Mr Mussa’s ship. Hari and Rav had no intention of catching up with it. They planned to
follow it to Tannhauser Gate, to give Mr Mussa a chance to make contact with the people who wanted to buy Dr Gagarian’s head. The people, Hari was certain, who’d been behind the hijack
of
Pabuji’s Gift
. Who’d be ready to make a deal with him, when they discovered that the files in the tick-tock philosopher’s head had been turned into a spew of random
noise.

Early in the voyage, as they cut a chord across the inner edge of the main belt, Hari borrowed time on the ship’s comms and fired off a brief message to Earth, to Ioni Robles Nguini,
explaining who he was and why he was interested in the young mathematician’s collaboration with Dr Gagarian. Two days later he received a brief reply from a representative of the Nguini
family: a solicitous young woman who offered her condolences for his loss, said that Ioni Robles Nguini was not prepared to discuss his work with Dr Gagarian, asked him to refrain from sending
further messages. Hari sent them anyway. They were not answered.

‘His family know what happened to my father, and to Dr Gagarian and your family, and the others,’ Riyya said. ‘They’re protecting him.’

‘His family is powerful and wealthy,’ Hari said. ‘It survived several revolutions, and the rise and fall of the True Empire. One of his ancestors was President of Greater
Brazil. An aunt and his eldest brother are senators in the government. His mother is the head of the country’s judiciary. Other relatives are senior officers in the army. And they’re
frightened of me?’