Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) (46 page)

Hari told himself that he was doing what his father would have wanted. He told himself that it was possible to win both revenge and redemption.

The five weird sisters sculled up to the window in the pod’s wall and stared in at him. Their faces were identical, with prominent cheekbones and large, black eyes. Racks of red-rimmed
gills slashed their flanks. Organs could be dimly seen through their translucent skin, snugly cased inside chests and abdomens. Beating hearts, trees of blood vessels.

Hari opened the visor of his helmet, breathed in cold damp air, the prickling odour of ammonia. The ghost of his smile floated in the dark window amongst the frank stares of Sri
Hong-Owen’s daughters.

At last, a whisper rustled in his bios: ‘You are the son who inherited the sins of his father.’

‘As you inherited the sins of your mother,’ Hari said.

‘We serve our mother, now and always.’

‘And I came here as the last representative of my family.’

‘You are here because we brought you here.’

‘I chose to come here,’ Hari said, trying to project a confidence he didn’t feel. ‘I came here because I want you to tell me why you tried to destroy my family. And
because I want to make you an offer.’

All five shrugged, a human gesture that made them seem all the more inhuman.

‘The path you followed does not matter, because every path you could have chosen had the same destination,’ they said.

‘I came here to make you an offer,’ Hari said again. ‘But before we can talk about that, you must allow me to communicate with my ship.’

‘There is no point in talking to it because you no longer control it,’ the weird sisters said.

An inset opened in the window, tracking across fields of stars towards a small bright fleck that hung beyond the rippled, ruffled ringlet at the edge of the ring system. Centring on the fleck,
zooming in to reveal the kinked circle of
Pabuji’s Gift
with a splinter jutting from one side: the Saints’ cutter.

Hari imagined the Saints closing on
Pabuji’s Gift
, pinging and signalling and probing, obtaining no response. Sending a scouting team across, trying and apparently succeeding to
hack into the control and command systems. Everything quiet and dead inside the ring ship. Everything abandoned in place. The cutter nosing into the docking garage, its crew disembarking,
scattering through
Pabuji’s Gift
, searching for secret files of forbidden knowledge, and ambushed one by one by manikins, by the djinn . . .

The inset closed. The weird sisters said, ‘That was the situation exactly one hour ago. We have no doubt that the Saints will soon gain complete control of your ship, and take it where
they will.’

‘We’ll see,’ Hari said.

He had expected that the Saints would attempt to board
Pabuji’s Gift.
He had planned for it. And now that it had happened there was no going back. Meanwhile he must remain calm,
refuse to be cowed or coerced, project confidence and control.

‘You hijacked my ship,’ Hari said. ‘You erased my father, killed the woman who raised me, and killed the tick-tock philosopher Dr Gagarian. I escaped, and vowed to hunt you
down and destroy you. But I know now that my brothers were equally guilty. You agreed to help them take control of our ship if they helped you to kill Dr Gagarian and pointed you towards his
associates. Have I got it right?’

‘We could have done what needed to be done without them. But their help made it easier.’

‘Dr Gagarian was close to finding out something important about the Bright Moment. Something you wanted to remain hidden.’

‘What people call the Bright Moment was not a gift. It was a message. A message aimed at us, and only us. The method of delivery meant that everyone saw it, but only we understood
it.’

‘And you are frightened that other people will prove you wrong. By studying it, by discovering what it really means. Is that it? Is that why you killed Dr Gagarian and his colleagues, and
stole their discoveries?’

A silence stretched. Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters hung outside the window, filmy veils fluttering, gill slits pulsing, faces shuttered. Hari began to believe that he’d blown it, that
he’d gone in too hard. But then their collective voice whispered in his comms.

‘Most care only for the message itself. They imbue it with significance it does not possess. They build religions around it. They see in it, as in a mirror, a reflection of their desires
and fears. Our mother would be amused. It would confirm everything she believed was wrong with the human species.

‘But a few people were not interested in the message, but in the way it was sent. In how it propagated. In how it acted on each and every human. They were a danger. They were the children
whose fingers curl around the trigger of a weapon whose power they cannot comprehend.’

Hari said, ‘You took it on yourselves to kill the people you believed to be dangerous. You assassinated them. Executed them without any warning.’

‘If we told them that what they were doing was dangerous, would it have stopped them?’

‘You had no right,’ Hari said.

‘Sri Hong-Owen was our mother. Whatever she became, before her vastening and afterwards, she is our mother still. And we are her arm and hand.’

Hari studied their blank faces and felt sorry for them. The blind worship of the past that had flooded most of what passed for civilisation these days ran deeper here than anywhere else. How
could he have thought to overcome the immense foolishness of human history? But he had to try. He had to try to give some shape and meaning to his loss.

The weird sisters were talking, telling him that his family’s struggle was over. That they would keep what was left of it alive. He realised that they meant him.

‘It is good that you came to us. We will keep you here,’ they said. ‘We can learn from you.’

‘It isn’t over,’ he said. ‘One of Dr Gagarian’s colleagues still lives. At least one.’

‘The boy on Earth? The mathematician? We will reach out to him, by and by. He is not important.’

‘And then there’s everyone else,’ Hari said, and explained what he had done.

Hari had escaped the hijack of
Pabuji’s Gift
with Dr Gagarian’s files, but by the time he had returned to his family’s ship the so-called secrets
hidden inside the files were longer secret. Too many people had been able to examine them, copy them. And then there was the question of revenge.

‘I won’t deny that I wanted to hurt you,’ he told Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters. ‘I wanted to avenge what had been done to my family. I wanted to put an end to the
intrigue and the killing. And I realised that the best way to do it would be to make it impossible for you to keep your secrets secret. So, after I gained control of
Pabuji’s Gift
, I
broadcast copies of the files across the Solar System.’

With the help of Eli Yong, he had compressed Dr Gagarian’s files and tagged the package with a brief explanation and used
Pabuji’s Gift
’s comms to send it to as many
people as possible. To Ma Sakitei, in Fei Shen. To his uncle, in Ophir. To Khinda Wole, in Tannhauser Gate. To every contact and business associate of his family – scores of government
entities, several hundred individuals. To the cities of Saturn’s moons. And to the seraphs, aiming the big dish of
Pabuji’s Gift
’s comms at each of them in turn. He knew
that it was probably as futile as the prayers and petitions of their supplicants, but it had seemed necessary to let them know that merely human minds had attempted to approach the mystery of Sri
Hong-Owen’s Becoming. It was a fitting memorial for his father and Dr Gagarian and the others: a kind of closure.

‘I don’t know what the seraphs and everyone else will do with the information,’ Hari told the weird sisters. ‘Most will probably decide the files are fake, or
pseudo-philosophical gibberish, or some kind of trick. And even if no one finds them interesting, if no one is inspired to set out on the same path as Dr Gagarian and his colleagues, it will have
been worth it, because the knowledge you wanted to bury beneath the ice of Enceladus is scattered far and wide across all the worlds beyond. You can’t undo it. You can’t unshatter a
broken cup. But there is something you can do. Something we can do together.’

He paused, waiting to see if they’d take the hook. He felt as if he’d run a long race in deep gravity. Breathless, heart pumping.

The weird sisters hung beyond the window in the wall, veils beating against some slow cold current. Their large unblinking eyes suggested deep reserves of patience and composure. After all, what
was time, down here, where nothing changed and nothing wanted to change?

Their small mouths did not move, but their collective voice whispered in his comms.

‘You underestimate us.’

‘I hope I do. I hope you’re better than I think you are. I hope that you’ll work with me, help me make amends for all the people who have died because of this.’

Another pause. Then:

‘How?’

‘I was brought up in a family of junk peddlers. We dug through the ruins of history, extracted information and artefacts, and tried to get the best price for our finds. Then my father
became involved in the research of Dr Gagarian and his colleagues. He gambled that their work could be used to develop new technologies, to build a business empire. Instead of mining old ideas, we
would forge new ones, revitalise philosophical investigation, and sweep away the cults and sects that sprang up in the wake of the Bright Moment. They promise their followers entry into utopias
based on claims of exceptionalism. We would provide the foundation for a utopia based on hard facts and philosophical principles, and open to all.

‘My father failed,’ Hari said. ‘I freely admit it. He failed because he made the same mistake as you. He thought he could police ideas. That he could collect them and make a
profit from by selling them, just as we sold old machines. But ideas aren’t artefacts. They don’t exist in any one place – they can be found by anyone who goes looking. And in any
case, there’s no intrinsic value in ideas. It’s what you do with them that counts. You say that you serve Sri Hong-Owen. That you are her arm and hand. Let me help you. You know things
other people don’t know. Let me connect you with them.’

He told the weird sisters about his family’s contacts. He explained that there were still many philosophers in the Belt. Their influence was greatly diminished, he said, and they were
scattered amongst the cities and settlements, but they exchanged ideas and argued and collaborated, as Dr Gagarian and his colleagues had collaborated. Hari’s family had been part of that
network. Carrying philosophers from rock to rock, garden to garden. Giving them a place to work, a place where they could discuss their work. He told the weird sisters that they could join this
network. And because they were the daughters of Sri Hong-Owen, one of the greatest philosophers in the history of the human species, they would be an important voice. With his help, they could
promote their mother’s ideas and discoveries.

‘You know things other people don’t know. We can use that knowledge to make things right. To move forward from the mistakes of the past. You don’t have to give me an answer
now. I want you to think about it. I want you to discuss it. But even if you decide against helping me,’ Hari said, ‘you’ll have to let me go.’

‘We have others plans,’ the weird sisters said.

‘I didn’t come here to surrender. I came to tell you what I did, and to make you an offer. And because we can’t yet trust each other, I took precautions. Keep watching my ship.
You’ll soon see what I mean.’

‘The ship is not yours to command. The Saints have control of it now.’

‘Think it through,’ Hari said. ‘I knew that the Saints were chasing me. I knew that they would try to take my ship, after I left it. Do you really think I’d let them? If
they try to start the motor, it will uncouple from the ship. If they don’t, it will uncouple anyway. And when it does, it will fire up and aim itself at the weakest spot in the roof of your
little sea. And only I will be able to stop it.’

Hari sweated out a short silence. He’d made his pitch; Nabhomani couldn’t have done better. What happened next was up to the clients.

‘When we return, we will wake your father,’ the weird sisters said at last. ‘He will live again, and we will force him to help us. You, unfortunately, will not survive the
process. We will have to strip your brain neuron by neuron, your neural net link by link. But be comforted that your death will help us find a way of undoing the harm you have done.’

‘You can’t unshatter a cup. You can’t unring a bell.’

‘You underestimate us. As Aakash Pilot will discover, when he wakes.’

‘I’m your prisoner, but you are prisoners too. Sri Hong-Owen quit the Solar System more than fifteen hundred years ago. She reached Fomalhaut, and then she went somewhere else. And
you’re still here. Trapped in this little pocket sea under the surface of this small moon. Trapped in a fantasy that you can police or suppress investigations of the Bright Moment. I’ve
shown you that you can’t. Everything you’ve done since the hijack of my family’s ship shows that you can’t. Think about that, but don’t take too long. If the Saints
don’t trigger it first, the motor will fire itself up in a little over an hour.’

‘We will return,’ the weird sisters said, and the window blanked.

‘Sooner than you think,’ Hari said.

The wait was much worse, the second time. Hari told himself that everything had gone as expected. That this was just a stage in the process. The weird sisters wanted to see if
he had been telling the truth; they’d come back as soon as they saw the motor fire up. And if they didn’t, well, he would die a good death. He’d have the revenge he’d
dreamed about, back on Themba. At least he’d have that.

He talked to the insane cleaning bot, tried to persuade it that its work was done, that it could rest. It wouldn’t listen.