Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (37 page)

During the days of Hari’s long exorcism, Jyotirmoy told him stories about Levi’s life and the rise of the Saints. Dancing for Hari as he had once danced on
Pabuji’s Gift
, now as then teaching him how to make the appropriate genuflections and expressions, how to flow from position to position, moment to moment. Telling the story of
Levi’s rebellion after the Bright Moment, and his revelation during his exile. Telling the story of Levi’s overthrow of the elders of his church and the establishment of the company of
Saints, of how Levi had led the first Saints out of their garden into cities and settlements of the Belt, where they discovered that dozens of sects had sprung up in the aftermath of the Bright
Moment, each claiming to possess exclusive knowledge about its true meaning. But only Levi and the Saints knew the truth, Jyotirmoy said. That was why so many had recognised him as a true prophet.
That was why, just three years after his rebellion against the elders of his church, he had been at the head of an army of tens of thousands, and had begun to plan his assault on the false gods of
the seraphs.

The story of Levi’s invitation to the Republic of Arden and his long discussions with the old philosophers was Jyotirmoy’s masterpiece: a virtuoso performance that evoked the aerial
displays and fights of the Ardenists, and the slow forging of a plan to use the information horizons of the seraphs as portals to a universe whose physics would allow merely human intelligence to
vasten, as Sri Hong-Owen’s intelligence had been vastened.

It was not a new idea. Several cults had already tried and failed to destroy, invade, or co-opt the seraphs. Others trailed after the seraphs as they orbited Saturn, transmitting prayers and
petitions and entreaties. But Levi and the Ardenists believed that they alone would triumph because only they could forge an alloy of faith and philosophy into a blade that could cut through the
seraphs’ defences. Jyotirmoy told Hari how Levi and the old ones from the Republic of Arden had supervised the voyage of the wheel habitat to Saturn. How, after a great ceremony of prayer and
blessing and purification, a capsule containing the first of the mind sailors had been shot into the folds of frozen light around one of the seraphs. How the capsule had vanished in a flare of
false photons and hard radiation, and a djinn, or something as relentlessly aggressive and unforgiving as a djinn, had violated the ship from which the mind sailor had been launched, driving its
crew insane and firing up its motor and committing it to a trajectory that had intersected with Saturn’s atmosphere.

Two more attempts had likewise failed, and then someone had tried to assassinate Levi while he was preaching in one of the floating cities of Ceres. It was a low point for the Saints. Their
dream of vastening a human agent had been thwarted; their leader had been infected with a virulent half-life virus, and spent three years in coldsleep while his physicians devised a cure.

But now, according to Jyotirmoy, Hari would help the Saints to achieve their holy mission.

‘You did not know it, but you were travelling along a predestined path,’ Jyotirmoy told Hari. ‘And at last it brought you here. Just as my own path brought me to
Pabuji’s Gift
, four years ago. We did not meet by chance, Hari. We are here because we are meant to be here.’

Hari did not question any of the stories, and Jyotirmoy never asked him if he believed any of Levi’s teachings. The Saints were not interested in testing his faith. They were entirely
focused on purging the djinn that stood at the entrance to his neural net.

The djinn defended Hari by subverting and twisting the functions and capabilities of other machine intelligences. It had used the eidolon of Hari’s p-suit, the algorithms in the skulls of
the skull feeders, the signage in the free zone of Tannhauser Gate, and much else. And the Saints were using that ability to destroy it. At each stage of the exorcism, Hari’s neural net was
stimulated to trigger the djinn, and its manifestation was captured in a sandbox where simulations of various machines churned in futile cycles. While sacristans prayed over Hari, remembrancers
located areas in his brain and neural net where activity was correlated with the djinn’s ferocious attempts to escape the trap, and zapped them with tightly collimated beams of neutrons that
created microscopic cascades of lethal radiation where they crossed.

The remembrancers assured Hari that his brain would find routes around the damaged areas, and because his bios had been deactivated, and because he inhabited his damage and could not see it from
the outside, he had no way of knowing how much he’d been changed. But after each session he was aware that his thoughts had become a little foggier, could feel that some small part of him had
been cut away. A word he could not quite remember, a pict half-glimpsed in the moment of its dissolution.

And so it went, a brutal cycle of ceremonial torture and recovery, and each time Hari was weaker and more tractable than the last. Until, one day, he woke at the end of a session to find Levi
studying him.

As usual Hari was seated in a padded chair with a flock of small drones hung around him, measuring his metabolic activity and the activity of his brain and major organs. The
remembrancers and sacristans stood to one side, heads bowed. And Levi stood in front of Hari, with the Ardenists and the adepts and the mind sailors at his back.

His blond hair was done up in tight cornrows; his face was ashen, as white as the skulls and long bones that Hari and his family had once discovered stacked in neat patterns along the walls of
an ossuary in an airless settlement. As if something paler and colder than blood ran in his veins. His hands joined prayerwise just below his chin, fingertip to fingertip, he studied Hari with a
tranquil unblinking gaze while one of the adepts sang a kind of sura and the others chanted
Praise God
at the end of each verse.
Praise God. Praise God.
When at last they fell
silent, Levi stepped forward and cradled Hari’s face in his cool hands, and kissed him on the forehead and drew back and made a small gesture.

Sacristans and remembrancers, the Ardenists and the adepts and the five mind sailors in their gold one-piece suits, plugs and implants bristling from their bare scalps, left the room in a bustle
of respectful obedience. The drones rose up and followed, and the little lights scattered across the ceiling of the room dimmed until only Levi’s face was illuminated.

Hari did his best to meet the prophet’s gaze. It took all his concentration, all his strength. He began to sweat, felt as if he was being forced backwards, crowded into a smaller and
smaller space. A pressure grew behind his eyes. He wondered if the djinn would step out, but it did not. The pressure swelled, squeezing out his thoughts until only Levi’s implacable gaze was
left. Hari felt that he was falling into it, a dust mote spiralling down a beam of light.

Then Levi laughed, and closed his eyes. His lids were each painted gold, with a red dot in the centre. The pressure in Hari’s skull vanished, but the blind unblinking stare of the painted
eyes held him fast.

Levi said, ‘Do you believe in karma?’

His voice was soft, with the faintest trace of a lisp.

It took Hari a moment to gather his thoughts. ‘My father taught me that we are responsible for our actions, and we are judged by them in this life, not in any other.’

‘Yet both of us are shaped by previous lives. Your father turned you into a vessel for his heresies; I am the reborn prophet of an ancient cult. We are emergent patterns that repeat over
and again in the warp of history. Hero and nemesis. Prophet and sacred book. You are part of my story, and I am part of yours. It was inevitable that you would be delivered to me.’

Hari remembered Professor Aluthgamage, and thought of the steps that had brought him here. Any one of which, by some small deviation, could have led him elsewhere.

He said, ‘Prove that it was inevitable.’

‘Here you are. What other proof do you need?’

Levi opened his eyes. The shock of his ocean-blue gaze was like a physical blow.

‘I was gifted with a vision,’ he said. ‘I saw how history has diverged from the holy ideal. I saw the Bright Moment could help us make that crooked way straight. And I also saw
how history has been manipulated and is still being manipulated by the seraphs. Just as they once locked Earth into the long winter from which it is still recovering, they want to lock history to
its present path.

‘The missions of my mind sailors were sabotaged by agents of the seraphs. I was almost murdered by one of them. And your family’s ship was hijacked by their agents, and they murdered
Dr Gagarian and your family. They attempted to suppress me, and attempted to suppress your family. Yet I survived, and you escaped, and your search for those who stole your ship has brought us
together, and delivered to me the means of creating a new crusade that will at last storm the citadels of the seraphs. You still do not believe in karma, Gajananvihari Pilot?’

Hari said, ‘I believe that it wasn’t chance that brought me here. You have been searching for me ever since your followers hijacked my family’s ship and I escaped. I escaped
you over and again, but then my luck ran out.’

‘We did not hijack your ship. Your enemies are our enemies.’

‘Prove it. If you didn’t hijack the ship, show me who did.’

‘All in good time. The remembrancers tell me that the djinn or demon that once rode you has been entirely excised. Let’s test that, shall we?’

A small bright ball of white light snapped on, hanging in the air between Hari and Levi. It seethed and spun and crackled, and radiated heat like a tiny sun.

‘If the remembrancers are wrong, your djinn will defend you,’ Levi said. ‘It will push away this little star before it can harm you. It will use it to attack me.’

The bright hot light drifted towards Hari. Its heat began to scorch his face.

‘Push it away, if you can,’ Levi said. ‘Take hold of it and throw it at me. I am quite undefended. You could kill me. I know you want to. Do it!’

The hot glare blotted out Levi’s face. Hari tried to flinch away from it, but a strap across his forehead held him fast. The scorching air stank of electricity. He screwed his eyes shut;
the light burned blood-red on his eyelids and grew brighter and hotter. His skin was withering, shrinking against the bones of his face, his eyes were boiling in their sockets . . .

Then the light vanished. There was a point of intense pain at the centre of his forehead, but otherwise he seemed unharmed. He opened his eyes. Somewhere beyond the afterimages swarming in the
dark, Levi said, ‘Now we can begin our real work. My people will extract the secrets locked in your head, and they will explain why we are not your enemies, and how we can work
together.’

After the remembrancers and the sacristans returned, after they worked on him for several hours, Hari was set free and allowed to wander out into the gardens. It was night. The
half-life lawn glowed with soft red light. Fireflies pulsed in trees and bushes. He made his way to the pool on the ledge above the treetops, splashed water on the puffy burn in the centre of his
forehead, stretched out on a flat rock. Saturn’s ringed ball, tiny as a toy, hung in the black sky beyond the dim architecture of the roof.

This is real, he told himself. I am really here.

He tried to process what had happened, what Levi had told him, but he was so very tired, and his head felt like a hollow gourd stuffed with black sand. He slept, and if he dreamed he did not
remember his dreams, and woke to sunlight and bird song. Jyotirmoy sat nearby, watching Hari, smiling like a small child on the dawn of its birthday. Every trace of the djinn had been exorcised and
the files were at last accessible, he said. The remembrancers had extracted them and the adepts were even now studying them.

‘We believe that we have all of Dr Gagarian’s work, and the work of his associates,’ he said. ‘We have everything we need. Your long trial is over, Hari! You have borne
it well and bravely, and it is almost over! Almost, but not quite. But there is still some work to do. Your neural net still contains a set of files protected by deep layers of encryption. The
remembrancers believe that they were created when the seed of the net was planted in your skull by the tankies of the Memory Whole. They also believe, from their size and structure, that they are a
copy of a human personality. A copy of your father, perhaps.’

Hari laughed. ‘Who else would it be?’

‘You knew, and you did not tell us?’

‘I didn’t know, but I should have known,’ Hari said. ‘I should have guessed.’

Like all those who passed over, his father had cached a copy of himself in a safe place. And because he didn’t trust strangers, he’d kept it close. On the ship, inside the family.
Updating it and checking it when Hari had visited his viron. All those times when only an hour or so had seemed to pass inside the viron, but days had gone by in the real world . . .

Jyotirmoy said that Levi had hired a specialist skilled in the old techniques used by the Memory Whole. She was on her way, riding a swift ship from Tannhauser Gate. She would crack open the
last of his files, and then there would be no more secrets.

‘It must be a shock,’ he said, ‘to discover how badly your father used you.’

‘It’s a shock to discover how badly I failed him.’

Hari was certain now that Agrata hadn’t aimed him at Tannhauser Gate so that he could open the files cached in Dr Gagarian’s head, and enter into negotiations with the hijackers. No,
Worden Hanburanaman would have translated the copy of his father into a new viron. And even though Aakash and Agrata hadn’t trusted him, had manipulated him, used him, lied to him, Hari would
have been proud to have helped to resurrect his father, would have been proud and happy to carry out his every wish, obey his every order.

‘I suppose you will want to quicken him,’ he said. ‘So that you can force him to tell you everything he knows.’

He thought of his father waking and realising where he was and somehow taking control, but knew it was a hopeless fantasy. If the Saints ever quickened his father, they’d do it inside a
sandbox, and vivisect him.