Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (52 page)

Hari said, ‘Have you or anyone else here taken up Dr Gagarian’s research?’

‘We have no interest in going where Sri Hong-Owen went. If she went anywhere.’

‘My father wanted things to change, but you’re stuck. You reached your limits long ago.’

‘You aren’t really angry with me,’ the robot said. ‘You’re angry with your father.’

Aakash was watching them with a mild and somewhat quizzical expression, like a child trying to follow the conversation of adults.

‘No, not with him,’ Hari said.

It was true. He wasn’t angry with his father: he was angry with himself for holding on to a last, foolish hope that it had been Dr Gagarian, not his father, who had started the long chain
of causation that had led, step by step, with grave and terrible logic, to Mr Mussa’s daughter approaching Nabhomani in Porto Jeffre, the deal with Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters, the hijack
. . .

His father had not changed after he passed over because the dead did not change. Aakash had so often talked about using the hard logic of philosophy to undercut the crazy beliefs of the end-time
cults, about using technology derived from the Bright Moment to bring about a second age of expansion, and so on and so forth, but his idealism had been no more than a peg for a sales pitch. At
bottom, he had only been interested in how he could profit from Dr Gagarian’s research. He had been, as he had always been, a shrewd, unsentimental trader.

The robot said, ‘I think we are finished here.’

Hari said to Aakash, ‘Do you have anything else to tell me?’

‘You know about the neural network and about the files it contains.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And you saw and understood the record of the last meeting.’

‘It has given me much to think about.’

‘I always wanted to do what was best for my family,’ Aakash said.

‘I know you tried, in your fashion.’

The robot said, ‘We can take care of him. This viron does not take up much space, and he will be able to interact with other incomplete personalities. He might even be able to develop, if
you could supply additional memories of his original.’

‘No,’ Hari said. ‘He has done what he was supposed to do. It is time to let him go.’

‘You would have me erase him?’

‘He’s already gone. What’s left is no more than an eidolon.’

‘And you will go on with this work?’

‘I hope that someone will,’ Hari said, and woke up in the hammock aboard the ship.

‘That didn’t take long,’ Rubber Duck said. ‘Did you get what you wanted?’

At one point on the short voyage to Earth, Hari asked Rubber Duck if he’d ever been tempted to head into the outer dark.

‘When I can’t get any more business, or if I acquire a debt I can’t pay off, then maybe I’ll decide it’s time to go on the drift,’ the tanky said.
‘Hitch a ride on a long-period comet and go to sleep, wake up every century or so to see what’s going on back in the system. Or maybe I’ll go look for the Grey
Harbours.’

‘The place where old ships go to die?’

‘The place where old tanky pilots like me go to merge with a heaven box that runs a parallel universe. Our own version of the Memory Whole, where a hundred thousand worldlets teem with
every kind of civilisation, the free-trading spirit flourishes, and the running is free and easy. But not yet, not yet. I’m still interested in people. I want to find out what happens next.
This thing you’re caught up in, maybe it will shake things up.’

‘Maybe,’ Hari said.

The white pearl of Earth swelled in the window, an equatorial belt of ocean and land clamped between the fretted margins of two huge caps of ice and snow. And then Hari was down, amongst its
cities and people and the weary weight of its gravity and history.

At first, he lived with his cousin, Aamaal, and her family. It took several months for his body to adapt to Earth’s gravity and overcome assaults by viruses and allergies. He spent the
time learning about the family business and absorbing the various protocols for dealing with representatives of the governments and co-ops of the nations and city-states of Earth. Aamaal was much
older than him, a strong intelligent woman in her sixties, with two husbands and three children and five grandchildren. It had been her idea, not her father’s, to set up the import/export
business. She suggested to Hari that he could take charge of the Belt end of things. It was a kind offer, but Hari knew that her crew of factors were experienced and trustworthy and dependable, and
he would be an unnecessary addition. And so he declined, saying that he wanted to see something of Earth before he could begin to think about returning to the Belt.

‘You’re worried that those weird sisters will catch up with you,’ Aamaal said. ‘Or that the Saints will.’

‘If they were planning to come after me, they would have done so already. But perhaps I should move on, just in case. I’ve caused so much trouble to so many people . . .’

Hari was thinking of his dead, as he often did. His father and Agrata and Nabhomani. Dr Gagarian and his colleagues. Eli Yong and Levi, Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters. And then there was
Nabhoj, exiled on his lonely little rock . . .

He said, ‘It doesn’t seem right that I should have survived.’

‘We’re all glad that you did.’

‘You don’t know me. I wanted revenge, and the price was paid by others.’

‘Hush,’ Aamaal said. As if speaking to her youngest, soothing him after a nightmare. ‘You’re here now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

In the spring, Hari went out into the world and travelled through the ruins of the True Empire’s hubris, through landscapes damaged by the Long Twilight. He attempted to drum up business,
and delighted in the new places he saw, the new people he met. He tried to contact Ioni Robles Nguini, but the mathematician’s family said that he had given up his research and did not want
to be disturbed, and Hari did not press the matter. He found work for Rubber Duck, hauling cargoes between Earth and the Belt, and intermittently exchanged gossip with the old tanky, but he never
went back up.

Ten years passed. Twenty. Twenty-two.

One night, Hari started awake with a fresh image printed in his mind: a pure white space resonant with arcane significance. People were shouting, somewhere outside his
guest-house room. Angry, panicky voices. He rose and stepped to the window and looked out across the dark, low-rise city. Bamako, the capital of the Azawalk Fealties. It was a clear, cloudless
night. Stars leaned over the city and the black ribbon of the Niger river. Lights were flickering on everywhere. Bells ringing out above a growing and restless murmur. A woman’s voice below
Hari’s window asking the same question over and over. What happened? What just happened?

Hari knew what had happened. He knew what had passed through this world, and all the others.

Soon, the news was everywhere. It had been a second Bright Moment. As before, its wavefront had expanded across the Solar System at the speed of light, and everyone awake or asleep had been
affected by it. But this time its origin had not been outside the Solar System, but within it. At Saturn, where the seraphs had vanished.

In the days that followed there were riots, several instances of mass suicide, flare-ups of old enmities, and other disturbances, but the trouble was localised and ended quickly. Humanity had
survived the first Bright Moment; the second was disquieting, but lacked the shock of the unknown. People weren’t asking what it was, but what it meant.

Hari’s bios filtered messages from people who wanted to contact him, wanted to discuss the research that his father and Dr Gagarian and the others had done so long ago. One message
immediately caught his attention. It was from Ioni Robles Nguini.

Fifteen days later, Hari arrived at Portlandia, an arcology on the western coast of what had once been the northernmost extent of Greater Brazil. He hired a scooter and travelled into the
wilderness, following a broad valley that cut through a mountain range. The scooter was a blunt, powerful machine with a teardrop canopy that sheltered him from the freezing headwind. He flew above
a river mostly covered in ice. Channels of open water smoked in the cold. Tall fir trees crowded the steep banks on either side. Green trees and white ice and black rock under a clear blue sky.
Flying through this cold, clean landscape reminded him of riding with Riyya, in Ophir. The wild chase after Mr Mussa’s daughter.

There was a series of falls bearded with enormous icicles. Hari jockeyed the scooter above them, flew across a broad gravel pan cut by braided, ice-choked channels. Presently, following the
instructions he’d been given, he landed at the edge of the pan and walked up a steep path through stands of Douglas fir. Smaller trees grew in breaks in the thick cover. Yellow pine, sugar
pine. Hemlock, incense cedar, maul oak. Hari began to sweat inside his heavy sweater and blue jerkin. It was very quiet under the trees. An intimidating silence broken only by soft slides of
sloughed snow. No wind. His breathing and pulse loud in his ears.

The path twisted and turned. Sometimes it was hardly there. Dirty laceworks of old snow over slippery drifts of needles. The dry sticks of last year’s weeds.

At some point he became aware that a drone was pacing him, slipping silently through the treetops high above.

He reached the edge of the trees, climbed through a nursery plantation where dense rows of seedlings grew in plastic tubes. Several bipedal, man-sized machines were working on the raw terraces
of a distant slope. The path topped out on a broad bench that ran under the brow of a cliff, with a view across the valley towards a range of snow-clad mountains and a glacier spilling from the
vast ice plain that covered what had once been high desert.

A small dwelling crouched under a bulge of stone deeply scored by ice-flow. A tan ferrocrete dome with skylight strips, a couple of outbuildings, a vegetable patch that was all tilled earth and
dead stubs in this early season. A man stood where the vegetable patch gave way to rough grass. A large liver-coloured dog squatted at his side, rising as Hari approached.

‘I came alone,’ Hari said, spreading his empty hands at the level of his shoulders.

‘I know you did,’ Ioni Robles Nguini said.

‘Maybe you could tell your dog I’m not a threat. I’ve been living on this world for more than twenty years, but I’m still not used to animals.’

‘You don’t have to worry about him if you don’t give him anything to worry about. Come and sit down.’

They sat on a paved terrace that looked south-east, towards the iceblink of the glacier. The air was cold, but the terrace cupped the warmth of the sun. Ioni Robles Nguini poured spiced tea into
translucent porcelain cups, set out a plate of honey biscuits.

Hari said, ‘I suppose you know that I was looking for you, once upon a time.’

‘That wasn’t why I came out here to live. I haven’t been hiding from you.’

‘Did your family pass on my messages?’

‘They told me that you were looking for me,’ Ioni Robles Nguini said. ‘That’s all. And to be frank, I didn’t ask. I wanted to put it all behind me.’

‘I was angry, at the time,’ Hari said. ‘I felt cheated. I felt that the story I had been caught up in hadn’t ended. I suppose I was still hoping for some kind of justice
for what happened to me. To my family.’

‘What do you feel now?’

‘That the past I thought I’d left behind has caught up with me.’

‘The past doesn’t change, does it?’

‘It’s still there, same as it ever was. But we see it differently as we get older.’

‘Yes. We do, don’t we?’ Ioni Robles Nguini said.

He was a slim, thoughtful man. Curly black hair clipped short and receding from a high forehead, three-day stubble. He was dressed in a woollen shirt and a sheepskin jacket, red jeans and sturdy
boots. His dog lay near his feet, watching Hari.

Hari said, ‘Are you still working on the Bright Moment?’

‘I’ve begun to think about it again.’

‘And this new Bright Moment, does it change anything?’

‘It appears to possess the same properties as the first. There was a perturbation of the Higgs field, as before. The same characteristic propagation. The same universal effect on
observers.’

‘Sri Hong-Owen used the perturbation to send a message. The seraphs didn’t.’

Ioni Robles Nguini smiled. ‘Didn’t they?’

‘There wasn’t any information.’

‘There was a field of uniform information that our minds translated as a blankness.’

‘An empty screen. Untrodden snow.’

‘Similes are inaccurate. But yes, something like that.’

Hari was reminded of his conversations with his father. He said, ‘They didn’t have anything to say to us. That was their message. No last words, no farewell. They just did
it.’

‘I was never interested in why Sri Hong-Owen vastened herself, what she became, where she went,’ Ioni Robles Nguini said. ‘It’s like asking what happened before the Big
Bang. As with her, so with the seraphs. All we can do is speculate.’

‘Dr Gagarian once said something like that.’

‘He was a wise man.’

‘Are you still working on the Higgs field? How to manipulate it, and how to fold information into it . . .’

‘In my profession, you do your best work when you are young. And I’m no longer young.’ Ioni Robles Nguini paused, then added, ‘For many years I have been blocked. I have
been unable to see any way forward. But now I am touched by the same enthusiasm I felt when I first began to think about the problem. I see new possibilities, new angles of attack.’

‘What would your family say, about you telling me this? About us meeting?’

‘Now we’re getting to it, aren’t we?’

‘The sooner we get to it, the sooner we can get past it,’ Hari said.

There was a short silence. They drank tea. They looked off at the view.