Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (51 page)

His father wasn’t there and then he was. Standing in front of the cave mouth, saying, as Hari came towards him, ‘You took your time.’

‘You have been keeping watch on me, then. I wondered.’

‘I have a clock that tells me how much time has passed outside this world. I don’t know what you have been doing out there, Gajananvihari, but I do know that I must have died the
true death. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

‘And now you live again.’

‘I am greatly diminished. That is the first thing you should know.’

But he looked like Aakash. Bare-chested and barefoot in a white dhoti. Bead necklaces looped on his chest. White hair brushed back in a wave, his untamed white beard. He sat on a flat rock, and
after a moment’s hesitation Hari sat beside him.

‘What happened?’ Aakash said. ‘What happened, out there? What happened to me?’

Hari told him about the hijack at Jackson’s Reef.

Aakash said, ‘You escaped.’

‘Agrata got me out.’

‘You escaped,’ Aakash said again, and paused. ‘Did you escape with Dr Gagarian?’

‘Not exactly. He was killed, in the hijack. I took his head with me.’

‘Was he alive?’

‘No. He had been killed. Agrata gave me his head.’

‘He was dead.’

‘Yes.’

Hari had been planning to tell his father that Agrata was dead, that Nabhoj and Nabhomani were dead and
Pabuji’s Gift
was lost, but he knew now that it would be cruel and
pointless.

Aakash said, ‘You took Dr Gagarian’s head because it contained a copy of his files.’

‘That’s why Agrata gave it to me.’

‘When you were given the head, did you know that you were already carrying a copy of those files?’

‘I found out about the neural network later.’ Hari paused, then said, ‘Agrata didn’t know about it, did she?’

Aakash didn’t reply. He was staring out at the shimmering desert, stroking his beard with thumb and forefinger. Hari was reminded of an automaton they had once recovered from an old
settlement long abandoned on a lonely rock. It had been woman-shaped, transparent, hollow. Its nervous system and musculature laminated into its thin tough skin. It had been dead for centuries and
centuries, but Agrata had spent some time working on it, and at last it had woken. It was able to perform graceful acrobatics: it might once have been a dancer, or a mimesist. It could sing, too.
It had a clear high voice. The songs were in no language they knew. It followed Agrata around; it had imprinted on her. It was eager to please. It was able to hold limited conversations. If it
didn’t understand something, it smiled and cocked its head and spread its hands, a gesture of helpless apology, and said, ‘I don’t understand.’

After a few days, that was almost all it said.
I don’t understand. I don’t understand.
Smiling, spreading its hands.
I don’t understand.
It stopped singing,
and developed a weakness in its left leg. And it became obsessed with a certain dance move: raising its arms above its head, palms pressed together, and bowing forward and extending the bow into a
somersault. It kept losing its balance, spinning sideways in a thresh of arms and legs, and it would recover and try to repeat the move with dogged, futile persistence.

Agrata tried to fix it, but there was too much cosmic-ray damage to its distributed intelligence. At last, she shut it down and it went into one of the storage modules and Hari didn’t know
whether it had been sold or traded by Nabhomani or whether it had still been in storage when
Pabuji’s Gift
had been broken up.

This copy of Aakash had some of the same traits. Hesitancy and repetition. Gestures used to hide a gap in comprehension. A blankness. A lack of affect.

It broke Hari’s heart.

He said, ‘You had something to tell me.’

His father didn’t look at him. Saying slowly, as if to the air in front of his face, ‘You were the one we chose, Gajananvihari. We did not entirely trust your brothers. We hope we
were not mistaken, but there it is. That is one reason. The other is that you are our true son. And although it may be wrong of us, we love you above everything else.’

‘And I love you,’ Hari said.

But his father did not appear to hear him.

‘I gave you the gift of the neural network, and did not tell anyone else about it,’ he said. ‘I did not tell your brothers. I did not tell Agrata. She might have suspected it
was why we visited the Memory Whole the second time, but she never said anything. I planned to tell you, Gajananvihari, when you were older. When you came into your own. Did that ever
happen?’

‘I only came into my own after I left the ship,’ Hari said.

‘The neural network. I didn’t tell you about it?’

‘No, you didn’t. I discovered it after I escaped.’

His father was silent for a little while, as if thinking about that. As they sat together on the low flat rock, in the hot bright sunlight, Hari noticed a glitch in the shimmering landscape: an
editing flaw that revealed where the end of a short loop had been stitched to its beginning. He wondered how far he would get, if he walked out into the desert. Not very far, probably.

At last, his father said, ‘I gave you the gift of the neural network. And during our conversations I inserted copies of the results of Dr Gagarian’s research, and the research of his
colleagues. Did you find those files?’

‘I don’t understand much of what they contain, but I hope I have made good use of them.’

‘There is one more file. It is bound with this representation,’ his father said. ‘Would you like to see it?’

‘Very much.’

A window opened in the air. It showed Aakash and Dr Gagarian sitting on canvas chairs inside the cave. A shaft of sunlight angled behind them, falling steeply from a cleft in the overhead and
splashing on ferns and moss that grew on and around a spill of boulders.

Dr Gagarian was talking about his work, about refining measurements he had made several times before. ‘I remain confident that the perturbation of the Higgs field was created by
asymmetrical generation of virtual particles,’ he said, ‘but the question of how the virtual particles were generated is still unanswered. As is the nature of the asymmetry – the
imbalance between annihilation and creator operators.’

‘I thought time reversal accounted for it,’ Aakash said.

‘It accounts for the disappearance of the antiphotons, which travel backwards along the light curve to their inception point. But the creation of baryonic virtual pairs is another
matter.’

‘So that is the next problem. A hard one, I suppose.’

‘I have some ideas about attacking it. Exploring Ioni Robles Nguini’s hypothesis about wave propagation of Heaviside functions, for instance.’

The two men talked about experiments and experimental apparatus. They leaned forward to study windows.

‘More time,’ Aakash said at last. ‘More time, and more credit. Nabhoj and Nabhomani will not be pleased.’

‘They complain that they have no work,’ Dr Gagarian said. ‘But this is work. Real work on a real problem.’

‘A hard problem in a series of hard problems. How close are we? How close are we to understanding this?’

Dr Gagarian sat back and looked up at the stony overhead of the cave. The leathery mask of his face was as inscrutable as ever. After a little while, he said, ‘Long ago, there was a
program that beamed information to extrasolar colonies. And that was based on even older programs, from the time when human beings had barely reached orbit around the Earth, when they had just
begun to search for signals from other civilisations. Non-human civilisations. Aliens. They did not find any. And those who’ve looked since haven’t found any, either. Either because
intelligence is rare, or because in the future we’ll make the universe more hospitable to humans and less hospitable to anything else. And since any alien species would do the same, it
follows that because we exist, there can be no other alien species.

‘But suppose that one existed, and we detected a message it aimed at us. It would not matter at first what the message meant. That we had received it would be enough. Perhaps the Bright
Moment is like that. We don’t know what happened to Sri Hong-Owen, where she went or what she became. We don’t know how it was done. All we know is that she transformed into something
beyond our comprehension. And in the moment of her transformation she manipulated space-time and sent a signal that did not attenuate as it travelled across twenty-five light years, and created an
identical image in the minds of all those it touched.’

Aakash said, ‘We know that she altered the local Higgs field. And we will soon know how she did that. We’ll prove that it is no miracle, and confound the fools who believe otherwise.
And we’ll start a new philosophical revolution, and make back all the credit we’ve invested in this, and much more. That’s what you promised, when we set out. And that’s
what we’ll do. It’s too late to have doubts.’

‘There is a theory that when symmetry broke in the first few femtoseconds after the Big Bang, it determined not only the parameters of the four fundamental forces but also the limits of
our intelligence,’ Dr Gagarian said. ‘One thing that we do know about Sri Hong-Owen, thanks to the observations of the colonists of the Fomalhaut system, is that she disappeared when
she vastened. Her discorporate personality inhabited vortices and knots in the electromagnetic field of the gas giant Cthuga, and they moved away in a direction orthogonal to every known dimension.
No one knows where she went, but the least worst guess is that she created a new universe that could support a higher level of intelligence, just as other universes in the calculable range of
possible universes support different values for the fundamental forces, and other universal constants. The seraphs are rumoured to have done something similar. And if she did, it follows that we
can never understand where she went, or what she became. Because we are constrained by the limits of this universe, and she slipped free of those constraints.’

After a short silence, Aakash said, ‘We have not yet reached the limits of things we can understand, so there is no need to invoke other universes and higher planes of consciousness. Which
sounds to me perilously close to the kind of nonsense touted by the end-time sects.’

Dr Gagarian said, ‘Yet time and again we have seen how posthuman clades falter and fail, or become trapped in abstract and increasingly recursive speculation. Time and again they have
demonstrated that boosting human intelligence may be of little or no benefit.’

Aakash said, ‘The True comforted themselves with that notion. It didn’t do them much good, in the end.’

‘The Trues were wrong about many things. It does not mean that they were wrong about everything.’

‘Are you are trying to tell me that you don’t think you can do what you said you could do?’

‘I am confident that it will be possible to understand how the message was sent, and how it was received. I am not confident about understanding anything else. Why it was sent. What Sri
Hong-Owen was becoming, when she sent it. What she became, and where she went, afterwards.’

‘Well, as long as we can find out how to manipulate the Higgs field, the rest does not matter.’

‘It matters to me,’ Dr Gagarian said.

‘You want every question answered, everything squared away. It’s in your nature. But if you started asking why people do the things they do, you’d never get to the end of it.
And even if you could answer those questions, what use would those answers be?’

‘I do not share your utilitarian outlook.’

‘Perhaps not, but we do have an agreement that most would call utilitarian. I help you with your research, and we divide the profits.’

‘I have not forgotten it. I do not forget anything.’

‘Then you remember what we agreed about your colleagues.’

‘I do. But it is not yet time. I still need their help.’

‘You’ll have to manage without it,’ Aakash said. ‘We’re close to cracking this problem. If your colleagues know everything we know, it will be hard to make any kind
of profit from it. They’ll undercut our price, or give away the information. We still need Worden’s help. And besides, he’s my friend, and the partner of my broker. But
your
friends – Ioni Robles Nguini, Salx Minnot Flores, Ivanova Galchan – we’re cutting them loose. You knew the time would come when I invoked that part of our agreement.
Here it is.’

‘And if I refuse to cooperate?’

‘We’re planning to make a run to Porto Jeffre for resupply as soon as you finish this present run of measurements. If we can no longer work together, I think we should head there at
once. And when we arrive, you can disembark and begin to look for another sponsor. I’ll keep all the equipment, of course. The probes and the rest. I paid for them; my son built them. Maybe
Worden and I can find some use for them. Maybe we’ll find another philosopher who can complete your work. I’d rather not do it. I hope I don’t have to. But there it is.’

Dr Gagarian stared unblinkingly at Aakash. At last, he said, ‘You know that I cannot leave. Not now. Not yet.’

‘Good. We both have a lot invested in this thing of ours. I would hate to see you throw it away on a point of principle.’

‘My colleagues have invested much time and credit, too.’

‘You can finish your work without them.’

‘I think so. Yes.’

‘But they can’t finish it without you.’

‘Of course not.’

‘There it is. I hope you see why it’s the right thing to do.’

‘I see why you are doing it.’

‘We will go on together. We will put an end to all the nonsense that surrounds the Bright Moment, and get filthy rich.’

Dr Gagarian smiled his small, stiff smile. ‘Yes, why not?’

The window closed and Hari saw that the robot was standing behind his father. Its silvery flanks and the glass turret of its head gleamed in the hot sunlight.

‘I had hoped your father would be a lion,’ it said. ‘It seems that he was no more than a weak soul who tried and failed to match the reach of his ambition. He wanted to change
the world, but only because he hoped to make a profit from it.’