Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (38 page)

‘The expert will access the files, and determine what needs to be done,’ Jyotirmoy said. ‘And when we have done what needs to be done, we will know everything. And you will
know everything, too. Everything your father did not want you to know. But please, don’t worry about that now. The worst part is over. The exorcism is finished; the files have been extracted.
It is a great thing. A great day. The first of many.’

But it wasn’t really over, of course. The remembrancers subjected Hari to batteries of tests and probes while the sacristans prayed and sang. There were long interviews with the Ardenists,
who showed him the files they’d extracted: raw data and logs from experiments; algorithms and models based on extrapolations and conjectures; notes and picts exchanged between the tick-tock
philosopher and his associates. Hari found most of this stuff as incomprehensible as his father’s monologues, but he quickly realised that something was missing. Although Dr Gagarian had
preserved every message sent by his colleagues, there were no records of his conversations with Aakash. Hari wondered if these were cached inside the encrypted set of files still lodged in his
neural net; wondered what else was hidden there, wondered if he would ever know – after the specialist opened him up, the Saintsmight kill him. Dispose of him, or throw him into some deep
hole for the rest of his life.

But then the Ardenists showed him something else and, for the first time since they’d captured him, Hari allowed himself to feel a little hope.

Several days later, after one of the interminable sessions with the remembrancers and sacristans and Ardenists, Hari was walking in the gardens when Jyotirmoy hailed him. The
young dancer emerged from the spreading shade of a cedar tree at the far end of a long lawn and advanced with small, quick, bouncing steps that terminated in a spin through three-hundred-and sixty
degrees. He landed with arms outspread and one knee bent in a graceful half-bow, and smiled up at Hari. ‘I’ve brought a friend.’

Behind him, someone started across the lawn, walking with the tottering steps of an invalid, dressed all in white. After a few moments of confusion, after wondering if the specialist had finally
arrived, Hari realised that it was Riyya Lo Minnot.

They wandered along paths of black sand, across lawns, through shadow-dappled woods, past stands of bamboo and long banks of flowering bushes. The garden always rising up ahead
of them, green and lovely in the warm chandelier light, as if they were treading a new world into existence.

Riyya had not been awake long. ‘They stored me in a hibernaculum until they needed me, revived me a few days ago. Six days, seven. This is the first time I’ve been allowed
outside.’

‘I’m sorry they brought you here,’ Hari said. ‘Sorry you are caught up in this. But I’m pleased to see you, too. It’s selfish, I know. But still. It’s
good, I think, that they have allowed us to be together. A good sign.
Another
good sign.’

He wanted to reach out to her. He wanted to embrace her, comfort her, wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right, but she was defensive, hunched into herself. She’d
fallen several times as they ambled along, and each time she’d refused Hari’s help, saying that if she had to learn how to walk all over again she’d do it herself. So they walked
and he let her talk, hoping they could get past her anger and bitterness and discuss his great good news, and how they could move forward.

‘I’m your reward,’ she said. ‘For cooperating. For giving them what they wanted.’

‘I didn’t have much choice, Riyya.’

‘I know. They showed me what they did to you.’

Hari felt a blush of shame. ‘That was cruel and unnecessary.’

‘They were proud,’ Riyya said. ‘They were proud of their work. They believed they were doing a great good thing, and wanted to share it with me. I thought they were killing
you.’

‘They didn’t quite manage it, as you can see.’

Riyya gave him a look that turned his heart. Her coppery hair had been cropped short, and her face was thinner than he remembered, pale skin taut on her cheekbones, dark scoops beneath her
eyes.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not quite. But they destroyed your djinn.’

‘And found Dr Gagarian’s files in my head, and pulled them out. But there’s something else in here,’ Hari said, tapping his forehead. ‘Something big and deeply
encrypted. I think it’s a copy of my father. Or, at least, a copy of what he became after he passed over. A copy of a copy. I’ll find out soon enough. The Saints have hired a specialist
to open it.’

‘So it isn’t over,’ Riyya said.

‘The worst of it is over.’

He almost told her then, but she had turned away to watch a flock of scarlet parakeets burst from a stand of trees, chase each other above a lawn, and disappear into the green shade of the trees
on the other side.

Quietly, dispassionately, as if reporting something that had happened to someone else, far away and long ago, she said, ‘I told them everything. They showed me instruments, after they
revived me. They explained what would happen to me if I did not answer their questions. They gave me a demonstration, with what they called an excruciation needle. Just the lightest touch. It felt
as if I’d been burned to the bone. So I told them everything. I told them about my father and his work. I told them about you. Everything. Because I was scared of what they would do it if I
didn’t.’

‘Don’t feel bad,’ Hari said. ‘Everything you told them, it’s probably in the files they pulled out of my neural net.’

Riyya turned to him, said with a sudden flash of bitterness, ‘I betrayed my father – his trust in me. I should feel better because it was pointless?’

‘I meant you did the right thing.’

She didn’t seem to hear him. She said, ‘It
was
pointless. After we left Tannhauser Gate, their friends on Ophir gained access to my father’s possessions. They bribed
one of the police, just like we did. And now they are building a duplicate of his apparatus. They showed it to me. And I don’t know if this is funny or scary, but they expect me to approve of
what they are doing. To be pleased that they are carrying on with my father’s work.’

They walked a little way in silence.

Hari said, ‘This copy of your father’s apparatus – does it work?’

‘They are close to finishing it,’ Riyya said. ‘They told me that they want to use it to inject some kind of thought bomb into the information horizon of one of the seraphs.
They think it will allow them to get a mind sailor past its defences.’

‘And the mind sailor will vasten, or fuse with the seraph,’ Hari said. ‘And then they will be able to use the vastened mind sailor to reach out to everyone on every world and
worldlet, and begin a new age of peace and harmony.’

‘Do you think any of it is possible? Could they actually invade and exploit one of the seraphs? Or use my father’s discovery to manipulate people? Control them, inject ideas into
their minds . . .’

‘I think they’ve confused magical thinking with actual philosophy.’

‘I hope you’re right. But they seem so certain. So sure that they are on the threshold of a great change.’

‘They’ve been selling that story for twenty years,’ Hari said. ‘They’re very good at it. But it doesn’t mean it’s true.’

Riyya appeared to think about that. Then she said, ‘They told me something else. They told me that they didn’t have anything to do with the hijack of your family’s ship, or my
father’s murder. His assassination. They said that he had been killed by agents of the seraphs. They showed me the confessions of agents they had uncovered. Agents of the seraphs pretending
to be Saints . . .’

‘I saw those confessions, too,’ Hari said.

‘You said that they were very good at selling their ideas,’ Riyya said. ‘But those so-called confessions were obviously fakes. Performances by mimesists, or real confessions
made by poor, crazy people who believe that the seraphs talk directly to them.’

‘I wondered about that, too. But then they showed me something else.’ Hari was smiling. He couldn’t hold back any longer. ‘They showed me where my family’s ship is.
They showed me that they didn’t have anything to do with the hijack.’

It was orbiting close to the outer edge of Saturn’s rings, amongst the pack of ships and bubble habitats and platforms that trailed after the seraphs. The Ardenists had
told Hari that it was listed in the registry of the city of Paris, Dione as the
Jindray Khinchi
, had shown him several picts obtained from a follower who worked there. Picts of its captain
supervising repairs in Dione’s orbital docks.

Nabhoj. Nabhoj or Nabhomani, it was hard to tell. He was dressed in a black blouse and black trews, Nabhoj’s habitual costume, but his hair was long and caught up in a net, and he had a
neatly trimmed beard. Alive a little over a hundred days ago, long after the hijack, accompanied by a woman whom Hari recognised at once.

His first thought had been that his brother was a prisoner. He’d wanted to believe it. Wanted to believe that his brother had been coerced into cooperating with the hijackers. But then
he’d remembered what Khinda Wole had told him. That Nabhomani had known Deel Fertita; that he had told Rember Wole to hire her. And there he was, there was Nabhomani, or maybe it was Nabhoj,
with one of Deel Fertita’s sisters . . .

Hari wasn’t ready to tell Riyya about that. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. It was family business.

She said, ‘If the Saints know where your ship is, why haven’t they tried to capture it? It has Dr Gagarian’s equipment on board. It may have copies of his files,
too.’

‘Perhaps they don’t care to get too close to the seraphs and their supplicants. Or perhaps they tried to hijack it from the hijackers, and failed,’ Hari said. ‘They
didn’t tell me everything.’

‘That’s the one thing we can be certain about,’ Riyya said.

Hari took her to his favourite place in the garden. They sat at the edge of the little pool and looked out across the treetops, the sea of leaves heaving in the restless wind.
Coriolis wind, according to Riyya. The wheel habitat was spinning to deepen its gravity: objects near its floor moved slightly faster than objects near its overhead because the path around the
centre of spin was slightly longer. That was why water fell at a slant. And as with water, so with air. Different layers of air moved at different speeds, and friction between the layers created
eddies. Climate-control machinery and landscaped windbreaks broke up these eddies before they grew too big, but couldn’t eliminate all turbulence.

‘I suspect a parable,’ Hari said, trying to keep things light.

‘It is what it is. A simple philosophical statement. This is an old world,’ Riyya said. ‘An old design from the age of expansion. At least a thousand years old, maybe more. A
lovely place, but fragile.’

They sat side by side on a saddle of black rock in the sunlight that fell through the window-strip in the overhead, sipping from beakers of hot chocolate delivered by a pair of hummingbird-sized
drones. Their bare feet planted on a thin gutter of damp moss, the drop to the treetops directly below. Rainbows glimmered in the feathering braid of water that fell from the pool’s lip.

‘All gardens are fragile,’ Hari said. ‘Too big, too open, stuck in their orbits, unable to manoeuvre . . .’

‘This one’s more fragile than most,’ Riyya said. She drank off the last of her hot chocolate and tossed the beaker out into the empty air. It was blue, the beaker. Blue plastic
with a frieze of white interlocked squares at its lip. As it tumbled past the black blockwork of the cliff, a drone flashed through the air and caught it and carried it off. A gust blew across the
treetops and leaves heaved and tossed and showed their silvery undersides, a furrow of silver racing after the drone, racing away around the wheel of the world.

Hari said, ‘The Saints made me an offer. They want me to help them capture
Pabuji’s Gift
. They’ll get any files and equipment left on board; I’ll get the ship,
and the hijackers.’

‘It was cruel of them to show you your ship, Hari. Cruel of them to give you hope.’

‘We’ll find who killed our people, Riyya. And we’ll get our revenge. I swear it.’

Riyya gave him a strange, tender look. ‘That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Revenge. That’s all you have left.’

‘They owe us for what they did,’ Hari said. ‘And I intend to make them pay.’

Hari and Riyya explored the gardens, walking around and around the little world. They kept away from the Saints, and the Saints kept away from them. They found a cluster of
woven sleeping pods hung from the lower branches of a grandfather live oak. Humps in the half-life lawn beneath the tree’s canopy formed seats and tables. There were pools of warm water
amongst the black rocks beyond, and a patch of smart sand that absorbed bodily wastes. Drones brought food, the simple fare of the Saints – discs of unleavened bread, harrisa, chickpeas in
salted vinegar, ripe figs, apples, pomegranates.

Every day, Hari felt a little stronger. Every day, his mind was a little clearer. He and Riyya told each other stories about their childhoods and their very different lives. There was little
left to say about their plight, no point yet in making plans for the future.

One night, Hari woke to find Riyya leaning over him in the faint luminescence of the pod’s weave. He started to speak, fell silent when she pressed a finger against his lips. His mouth was
dry and he had an airy feeling of falling. He’d been forbidden to sleep with any of the passengers, but he’d sometimes fantasised that Sora or one of the other young women travelling on
the ship would come to find him. Now, as in his fantasies, the pleasure was heightened by the excitement of transgression, the electric immediacy of Riyya’s presence. She reached down, moved
her hips against his until he slid into her heat. The pod rocking as they rocked against each other. Hari came almost at once, and Riyya held him inside herself and ground against him until she
gasped and trembled.