Evening's Empires

by Paul McAuley

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

In the far future, a young man stands on a barren asteroid. His ship has been stolen, his family kidnapped or worse, and all he has on his side is a semi-intelligent spacesuit. The only member of the crew to escape, Hari has barely been off his ship before. It was his birthplace, his home and his future. He's going to get it back. McAuley's latest novel is set in the same far-flung future as his last few novels, but this time he takes on a much more personal story. This is a tale of revenge, of murder and morality, of growing up and discovering the world around you. Throughout the novel we follow Hari's viewpoint, and as he unravels the mysteries that led to his stranding, we discover them alongside him. But throughout his journeys, Hari must always bear one thing in mind. Nobody is to be trusted.

Release date: July 18, 2013

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 384

Sample

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was a remote and unremarkable C-type asteroid, a dark, dust-bound rock pile with a big dent smacked into its equator by some ancient impact. There were thousands like it in
the Belt. Hundreds of thousands. It was mostly known by its original name, 207061 Themba, the name it had been given when it had been discovered in the long ago. It lacked significant deposits of
metals or rare earths, and its eccentric orbit, skirting the outer edge of the Belt, didn’t bring it within easy reach of any centres of civilisation. Even so, it had been touched by human
history.

About a thousand years ago, for instance, towards the end of the Great Expansion, someone had seeded it with a dynamic ecology of vacuum organisms. Its undulating intercrater plains were mantled
with pavements of crustose species; briar patches of tangled wires spread across the floors of many of its craters; tall spindly things a little like sunflowers stood on wrinkle ridges and crater
walls. A cluster of sunflowers up on the rim of a large circular crater stirred now, the dishes of their solar collectors turning eastward as the horizon dropped away from the sun. Boulders
scattered across the upper slopes of the crater threw long shadows. Sunlight starred the needle-point caps of a cluster of silvery spires and gleaming streaks shot down their tapering flanks as
darkness drained away, shrank to overlapping pools cast around their footings.

One spire near the edge of the little crowd had been painted black. A small movement twinkled at its base. A door dilating, a circle of weak yellow light framing a human shadow. The only
inhabitant of these ruins, of this ordinary rock, stepping out into another day of silence and exile.

It was forty-two days after Gajananvihari Pilot had woken in a crippled lifepod on the cold hillside of the crater’s inner slope, one hundred and seventy-four days after he had escaped
from the hijack of Pabuji’s Gift. He’d been aimed at the first of a chain of waypoints that would help him reach Tannhauser Gate, had been sinking into the deep sleep of
hibernation, when the motor of his lifepod had suffered a near-catastrophic failure and lost most of its reaction mass. The lifepod’s little mind had recalculated its options, used the
waypoint to change course and establish a minimum-energy trajectory to Themba.

Repair mites had patched up the motor while the lifepod was in transit, but the asteroid was a long way from anywhere else. Hari was grievously short of reaction mass, and couldn’t call
for help because the outer belt lacked a general commons, and a distress signal might attract the attention of the hijackers or some other villainous crew. Besides, he’d been taught to
distrust everyone but his family. His father, his two brothers, Agrata. All most likely dead now. Murdered, as he would have been murdered if he hadn’t escaped.

He was nineteen years old, alone for the first time in his life.

He’d channelled his grief and anger into a single-minded determination to save himself. He’d synched his internal clock to Themba’s fourteen-hour day, established a strict
routine. Waking just before dawn, drinking a protein shake while examining the latest products of the maker and checking his comms (picking up only the ticking of distant beacons; no general
traffic, no threats or warnings from the hijackers). Hauling on his pressure suit and leaving his cosy little nest in the spire, climbing a friction track laid down by the spire builders, following
it over the crater’s rim and through sunflower thickets to the plains beyond.

That day, like every other day, Hari paused at the far side of the sunflowers and used his pressure suit’s radar and optical systems to survey each quarter of the visible sky. As usual,
the p-suit’s eidolon manifested beside him. A shadowy sketch of a slim young woman in a white one-piece bodysuit and an unlikely bubble helmet, her eyes smudged hollows in which faint stars
twinkled.

‘There appears to be nothing out there,’ she said.

‘Nothing but stars and planets and moons and rocks,’ Hari said. ‘Garden habitats. Various kinds of human civilisation. Pabuji’s Gift, if the hijackers
didn’t destroy her.’

‘No ships. No immediate danger.’

‘No hope of rescue, either.’

It was more or less the same exchange they had every day. Like most QIs, the eidolon wasn’t fully conscious. Her conversations were shaped by decision trees and phatic responses.

She said, as she’d said many times before, ‘You will survive this, Gajananvihari. I have great faith in your resourcefulness and resolve.’

‘Don’t forget anger, suit.’

‘Anger has no utility, Gajananvihari.’

‘Anger is an energy. Anger feeds my resolve. Anger keeps me going.’

Hari was staring at a faint, fuzzy star above the western horizon. Jackson’s Reef, where Pabuji’s Gift had been hijacked. More than seventy million kilometres distant. He
studied it every day, to renew his determination to escape and have his revenge on the criminals who’d murdered his family and stolen their ship and destroyed his life, and to search for the
spark of a fusion motor. Pabuji’s Gift or some other ship, come looking for him.

But that day, like every other day, there was no spark, no ship.

The floor, the surface of the asteroid, sloped away in every direction to the irregular circle of the horizon, still and quiet under the black sky. Vacuum-organism pavements stretched
everywhere, patchwork blankets of big, irregular polygons in various shades of red or brown or black, outlined by pale necrotic borders where neighbouring species strove to overgrow each other,
punctuated by the slumped bowls of small craters, spatters of debris, scattered boulders. Everything untagged, unaugmented, unadorned by overlays or indices. Naked. Unmapped. Hari had learned to
read the contours and patterns of the landscape, but still felt a faint hum of caution when he set out across the surface. He was an intruder in this vast emptiness. A ghost in the desert of the
real.

He moved with a sliding shuffle in the negligible gravity, using ski sticks to keep his balance while tethers whipped from his waist, gecko-pads at their tips slapping against the rock-hard
surface of the vacuum-organism pavement, retracting, whipping out again. The eidolon drifted beside him. Hari had been born and raised in microgravity – Pabuji’s Gift was
thrifty with reaction mass and spent most of its time coasting in free fall – but he wasn’t used to unbounded spaces and found it hard to keep a sense of orientation in the rolling
landscape. Everything was either too far away or too close. Sometimes he seemed to be climbing a wall; sometimes he seemed to be descending a near-vertical ramp, moving faster and faster, feeling
that he was about to fall away into the sky. Fall, and keep falling for ever. Then he’d stop and catch his breath before setting off again.

Jupiter’s brilliant star rose in the east, chasing the sun towards zenith. Themba was small, with an average diameter of just six kilometres. Even at Hari’s cautious pace, it was
easy to outwalk the day.

His bright yellow p-suit was tanned to the hips with inground dust, and dust had worked into its joints, stiffening the left knee, limiting the rotation of the right shoulder. It had already
reached the limits of self-repair. Hari hadn’t been able to print new parts or adapt spares scavenged from the antique p-suits of Themba’s dead, but he was determined to keep working
until he had finished refuelling the lifepod.

That day, like every day, he prospected for beads of water-ice, amino acids, and polycylic aromatics extruded by the lobes and ruffles of the vacuum-organism pavements. He swept up the beads
with an extension tool and dumped them into a bag hung from his waist; when the bag was full, he sealed it and headed towards a patch of vacuum organism he’d infected with a virus from the
lifepod’s library. This was a dark red crustose species with pillowy lobes at its margins which, after the virus had reprogrammed its metabolism, had begun to accumulate organic precursors
and elements that the lifepod’s hybrid motor could use to synthesise reaction mass. Clusters of flaky crystals glittered with green sparks in the beam of the p-suit’s black-light lamp;
Hari swept them up into a fresh bag. It was his second harvest from this patch, one of the first he’d turned. Synthesis was slow in the freezing vacuum, but he had over six hectares in
production now. Pretty soon he’d have enough reaction mass to reach the nearest settlement, a trip of three hundred days or so. A long stretch in hibernation, but not impossible . . .

It was his only real hope of escaping Themba. Any ships the spire builders might have possessed were long gone, taken as trophies of war or claimed by scavengers, and the rock’s most
recent inhabitant, an ascetic hermit who had died long before Hari’s arrival, must have hitched a ride to it with someone who’d traded the favour for good karma. Hari had searched long
and hard in and around the spires and the crater, had probed permanent shadows in scores of crevasses and pits, but had found no trace of a lifepod or gig.

He moved on to another patch of modified vacuum organism, and another. Spiralling outward, skirting a huge boulder socketed in a fat collar of vacuum-organism growth, climbing a wrinkle ridge,
passing the slim black rectangle of the monolith set on top. A sect of philosopher-monks had planted them on asteroids across the Belt during the Great Expansion. They were different sizes, but all
possessed the same proportions – 1:4:9 – and anyone who touched the black mirrors of their faces elicited a radio squeal aimed at the core of the galaxy. Some thought that it brought
good luck, to touch a monolith. Others believed that their stuttering pulses might one day alert some vast, cool, implacably hostile intelligence, which was why only a few survived intact, usually
on remote and untenanted rocks.

Themba’s monolith was four times Hari’s height. Jupiter’s bright star hung above it. As usual, he gave it a wide berth. If he set it off, the hijackers or some wandering dacoit
ship might detect the signal, would know at once that Themba was inhabited.

Sometimes, though, he was tempted to step up to the monolith and set his gloved hand against its black face and trigger its here-I-am squeal. Sometimes he hoped the hijackers would track him
down. He had no defence against them except for a few simple traps and tricks, they’d almost certainly capture or kill him, but one way or another it would put an end to the torment and
uncertainty of his exile. And perhaps he’d be able to take some of them with him before he was overwhelmed. He pictured them jerking in nets. Impaled by spikes. He pictured himself slashing
at a horde of faceless figures with an incandescent energy beam. He pictured himself attacking them with fists and feet. He hadn’t been able to take part in the fight to save the ship. He
swore that he wouldn’t miss his chance next time.

Early in his exile, still raw with grief and fear, he’d told the eidolon about these fantasies. ‘Agrata should have given me weapons,’ he’d said. ‘Drones. Bomblets.
A gauss rifle or a reaction pistol.’

‘Agrata didn’t want you to fight,’ the eidolon had said. ‘She wanted you to survive.’

She sometimes said something unexpected. Something that made Hari think. He’d thought about that remark for a long time, and it had strengthened his resolve to escape from Themba and reach
Tannhauser Gate. But in spite of trying to fill his hours and days with routine and work and meticulous planning, he was sometimes overcome by a tremendous raging despair at the cosmic injustice of
what had happened to him, to his family. At how their future had been smashed, how he’d been left dazed, stranded in the wreckage. The awful details of the hijack lurked at the edge of his
mind like one of the insanity memes that the True Empire had deployed against its enemies. A monstrous presence haunting the service levels of his mind, an ancient and insane bot raving against the
limits of its protocols.

Anger was an energy, all right. If he wasn’t careful, it would consume him.

At last he had collected his daily quota of beads, and headed home. Scooting in a straight line towards the crater, sunflowers suddenly bristling at the top of a long crest. Their black dishes
were aimed west now, where the sun hung a handspan above the crater’s floor. Hari found the friction track and followed it towards the cluster of spires at the bottom of the slope.

Once, the spire builders had spread across more than a third of the main belt, with outposts in the outer belt and the Hildas and Trojan groups, but like most clades it had overreached itself,
splintering into sects that had fought bitter battles over minor differences in doctrine. The spire builders on Themba had been wiped out when their home had been struck by drones that shredded
into expanding clouds of needles seconds before impact, perforating the spires and their unfortunate inhabitants. Centuries later, the ascetic hermit had settled there. He had removed the bodies of
the spire builders and buried them in a common grave, carved a pocket habitat from the maze of little rooms in the base of one spire, pressurised it, and lit and warmed it using power drawn from
the black paint he’d sprayed on its riddled skin. And then he’d stripped out another spire, and begun to decorate the interior of its shell with intricate murals that combined scenes
and incidents from obscure poems, songs and stories with visions of a marriage between the physical world and the human mind.

The hermit had been working on one of these murals when he had returned to the Wheel. Although, being an ascetic, he would not have thought of his death in that way. There were no heavens or
hells, according to them, no cycles of reincarnation. Hari had found him on a net strung between two I-beams, a shrivelled mummy kneeling in his pressure suit, his paint wand still clutched in his
gloved hand.

According to a book that Hari had found in the shelter, the hermit’s name had been Kinson Ib Kana, and he had died twenty-eight years ago. Or at least, that was the last time he had opened
the book. Hari had learned little else. Kinson Ib Kana’s p-suit was as dead as its owner, and like all followers of his faith he lacked a bios. Hari didn’t know why he’d settled
on Themba, where he had come from, whether he had any family, or how old he’d been when he’d died.

He had wrapped Kinson Ib Kana’s leathery corpse in its particoloured robe and laid it on the ground beyond the spires and covered it with rocks taken from the margins of the big cairn that
marked the common grave of the spire builders. He stopped there now, and with the eidolon standing shadowlike at his back paid his respects to the dead man and told him about his day, then shuffled
across the dusty slope to the blunt cone of his lifepod. He tipped the reaction-mass makings into the maw of its motor, skimmed down the slope to the spires, and cycled through the airlock into the
pocket habitat. He stripped off his p-suit, tumbled his harvest of water-ice, amino acids and aromatics into the hopper of the hermit’s maker. Shat, scrubbed himself clean, ate the ration of
paste and pellets extruded by the maker, worked for a while on a dart thrower, read a story in the ascetic’s book, and at last wrapped himself in the narrow hammock strung between two struts
and told the lights to fade.

Another day gone. As always, he fell asleep while thinking about what he would do once he reached civilisation. He was supposed to make his way to Tannhauser Gate and, with the help of his
family’s broker, contact the hijackers and offer to trade Dr Gagarian’s head for the release of any hostages, and the ship. But he was late, so very late, and it was highly probable
that only he had survived. Agrata had said as much. His father’s viron had been erased; she had lost contact with his brothers and their bioses had fallen silent. It was possible that the
hijackers had taken her alive, but when he’d left her, when he’d been shot out of the ship in the lifepod, she had been getting ready to fight them to the death. He’d get to
Tannhauser Gate, he’d try to negotiate with the hijackers, but if there were no survivors, if they didn’t want to give up the ship, he’d crack open the files cached in Dr
Gagarian’s head and sell them. He’d mine old databases, locate a trove of ancient treasures in the outer dark, and convince some freebooter to enter into a partnership and make his
fortune. He’d pull off a coup in a city bourse, become the bodyguard of some rich trader and save her life, work ten or twenty years in the docks, do everything and anything he could to raise
enough funds to hire a gang of reivers and track down the people who had murdered his family and wrecked his life. And then, oh then, he would have his revenge . . .

Another day passed, and another. Early one morning, he woke to find the eidolon bending over him, the twin stars of her eyes gleaming above the sketch of her smile.

‘I have news, Gajananvihari! I have good news! It is Agrata! It is Agrata Konwas! She is alive! And I have a message from her!’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the long ago, in their motherland on Earth, Gajananvihari Pilot’s family would have been called kabadiwallahs. Junk peddlers. They located derelict gardens and
settlements, salvaged machines that could be refurbished or repurposed, isolated and cultured novel vacuum organisms and biologics, concentrated and refined rare earths and metals. They burrowed
through the remains of grand schemes abandoned in place or wrecked by war. They ransacked homes and public spaces. They were not sentimental about their work. They were grateful to the dead, but
did not try to appease them. The dead no longer had any claim over what they’d left behind, no longer needed it.

There were thousands of derelict settlements, gardens and habitats in the Belt, tens of thousands of abandoned way stations, refuges, supply dumps, observatories, quarries, strip mines, and
refineries, but salvage was not an easy way of making a living. Most of the ruins whose orbits brought them close to the remaining cities and settlements had been stripped out long ago; those so
far untouched traced distant or eccentric paths, and were often laced with lethal traps and unexpected dangers.

Forty years before Hari had been quickened, his mother, Mullai, had succumbed to a rogue prion that had infected her while she had been cataloguing the feral biosphere of an ancient garden, and
converted her brain to tangles of pseudo-organic fibrils. His father, Aakash, after surviving radiation poisoning, six different cancers, and injuries caused by two serious accidents, had passed
over fifteen years later, and migrated into a viron. And then Mullai and Aakash’s first son, Rakesh, had been killed when he was caught up in riots sparked by one of the end-time cults.

This was several years after the Bright Moment, when everyone everywhere, awake or asleep, baseliner or posthuman, had been struck by the same brief vision: a man on a bicycle turning to look at
the viewer as he glided away into a flare of light. It was generally agreed that this vision had been caused or created by an ancient gene wizard, Sri Hong-Owen. At the beginning of the Great
Expansion she had left the Solar System in a ship fashioned from a fragment of one of Saturn’s moons, and after a troubled voyage of more than fifteen hundred years had arrived in the middle
of a war between colonists over control of Fomalhaut’s gas-giant planet Cthuga, whose core was rumoured to be inhabited by a vast and ancient intelligence. Sri Hong-Owen’s ship had
plunged into Cthuga, and twenty years later something strange and wonderful had happened in the depths of the gas giant. Something that had kindled the Bright Moment.

Hundreds of sects, cults, and circles of magicians, hieratics, teleothetics, psychomancers and idiolaters had sprung up in its wake, like crystals condensing out of a shocked supersaturated
solution. They believed that human history had been abruptly and utterly transformed, that the Bright Moment was the harbinger of a final reckoning in which only the elect would be saved, that it
was a magical solution to the problems that oppressed their worlds: the static hierarchies that governed them; the centuries-long, belt-wide economic recession; reliance on ancient, half-understood
machines and technologies; the lack of new political and philosophical ideas. Some broke away from established religions; others were founded by charismatic self-styled prophets or revelators. Some
were violently aggressive; others manifested an ethereal spirituality. Some believed that the Bright Moment commemorated the vastening of an ascended god created by the fusion of Sri
Hong-Owen’s mind with Cthuga’s alien intelligence, foreshadowing an age in which all of humanity would enter a new state of being; others preached that it was a sign that something
inhuman and inimical had intruded into the universe, the beginning of a final war between good and evil. They squabbled over minor and major points of doctrine and interpretation, accused each
other of heresy and apostasy, and fissioned into a bewildering variety of squabbling schismatic sects.

Only a few survived the first decade after the Bright Moment. Most were short-lived: brief, bright candles consumed by the fever-frenzy of their faith. Some imploded when their leaders were
assassinated or arrested; some destroyed themselves in mass suicides, believing that death at an auspicious hour would allow them to ascend into the new heaven created by Sri Hong-Owen, or to
create new heavens of their own; some were overthrown when they went to war against the governments and polis of their cities and settlements.

Rakesh was caught up in one of these insurrections. He was negotiating the sale of salvaged machinery in New Shetland when a radical cult, the Exaltation of the Free Mind, began to attack
posthumans, accusing them of using memes implanted during the Bright Moment to control the thoughts and actions of baseliners. Riots broke out across the city; Rakesh was killed while trying to
reach the elevators to the docks.

Hari was quickened soon afterwards, cloned from Rakesh’s gene library. His childhood was tinted by the death of his predecessor and his father’s forthright hatred of the Exaltation
of the Free Mind and the rest of the end-time cults. According to him, they threatened to create an age of superstition and unreason worse than the tyranny of the True Empire. He was particularly
exercised by claims that the Bright Moment was a miracle that circumvented or violated natural laws: an intervention by a supernatural deity that stood outside the ordinary flow of events and could
not be parsed by the ordinary human mind. The Bright Moment’s challenge to our world-picture should stimulate our curiosity, Aakash said, not close it down. It was a question of epistemology,
not eschatology.

Hari loved talking with his father, loved stepping through the translation frame into the viron where Aakash had made his home after he had passed over. It mirrored the desert homeland of one of
the Pilot family’s ancestors, on Earth. The blue and starless sky, dominated by the platinum coin of the sun. Red rocks and red sand studded with vegetation, stretching towards a flat
horizon. Rugged cliffs rooted in talus slopes, a narrow path winding through boulder fields to the tall cave mouth where Aakash met his visitors. A magical place where even time was different.
Sometimes Hari would emerge from the viron and discover that hours or days had flown by, out in the real world.

Sometimes he and his father would sit on slabs of warm sandstone outside the cave while they talked; sometimes they wandered through the desert. The old man bare-chested in a crisp white dhoti,
stocky, broad-shouldered, a head shorter than Hari. His searching gaze and gentle voice. One hand combing the snowy flood of his beard while he anatomised some arcane nugget of philosophy or
history.

Because Aakash believed that everything was connected to everything else, that every detail in the world’s vast tapestry was significant, his conversations tended to veer in sudden and
unexpected directions or lose themselves in digressions about the culture of ancient universities, the chemistry and manufacture of the oil paints used by Renaissance masters, the intractable
problem of qualia, or some other topic suggested by what appeared to be random association. He’d always been like this, Agrata said, but his tendency to ramble far from his starting point had
become more pronounced after he’d passed. He was no longer anchored to common clock time in his viron, and could extemporise for hours on any subject that caught and held his interest.

As Hari and his father followed long meandering paths through the desert, windows would pop open to illustrate a point Aakash was making, diagrams would scribble across the sand, equations would
ink themselves across the screen of the sky. The pocket universe of the viron was contiguous with Aakash’s thoughts, an extension of his mind, but its detailed, self-consistent landscape was
also interesting in its own right. An expression of an ancient, alien logic. Ripples of sand formed ridged cells like those Hari’s tongue could parse on the roof of his mouth. Little crescent
dunes were patched here and there, none higher than his knees. Scatterings of stones. Gravel pans. Interlocking circles of thorny bushes. Palisades of spiny paddles. Lizards darting across bare
rock like small green lightnings. Small birds flicking between clumps of vegetation or hovering on a blur of wings as they inserted their hypodermic beaks into flowers. Larger birds tracing patient
circles high above. All of this generated from rules that mimicked a place long ago lost under ice, on Earth.

As Hari grew older, his conversations with his father increasingly turned to the influence of cults on the politics of the surviving cities and settlements of the Belt and Mars and the moons of
the outer planets, the personalities and backgrounds of key players, how various scenarios might be gamed, whether attempts to begin a dialogue with certain powers on Earth were useful or foolish,
rumours about the suppression of philosophical explorations and research into the cause and nature of the Bright Moment, and so on, and so forth.

Nabhomani, who after Rakesh’s death had taken charge of negotiations with politicians and officials in the cities and settlements visited by the ship, said that the old man had retreated
into a fantasy world of conspiracies and hypotheses because he no longer had any traction or influence outside the little world of his ship. That was why he wouldn’t allow Hari to explore any
of Pabuji’s Gift’s ports of call, Nabhomani said. Not because Hari wasn’t old enough to take care of himself, but because Aakash didn’t want him exposed to
inconvenient truths.

Agrata, as usual, took Aakash’s side. The last of the original crew, tirelessly loyal, she had been on the ship ever since it had been refurbished and relaunched. She said that everything
had been thrown into hazard by the shock of the Bright Moment. Old certainties were crumbling, political alliances were shifting, the influence of the end-time cults was spreading in strange and
unpredictable ways.

‘We must do our best to understand these changes if we are to survive,’ she said.

‘And this obsession with the Bright Moment?’ Nabhomani said. ‘How will that help us survive?’

‘Aakash hopes to keep a little light of reason alive in a growing sea of darkness. I see no harm in it.’

‘You can’t reason with people whose beliefs are based on unreason,’ Nabhomani said. ‘I should know. I must deal with them at every port.’

Nabhoj, as usual, wouldn’t be drawn into these arguments. He had a ship to run.

Nabhomani and Nabhoj were clones of Aakash, physically identical but with very different personalities. Nabhomani was affable, convivial, rakish, dressed in a vivid motley of fashions picked up
from the cities and settlements he visited, loved gossip, and possessed a sharp eye for the affectations and foolishness of others. Nabhoj was a phlegmatic technician who rarely socialised with the
passengers, and could sulk for days if he lost an argument about how best to solve a problem encountered during salvage work. Once, when Hari had been helping him try to free a recalcitrant
pressure-hose coupling, he’d fetched a diamond knife and methodically hacked the coupling to a cloud of splinters. And then the fit had passed, and he’d given Hari one of his rare
smiles and told him that although it wasn’t a standard procedure it had solved the problem quite neatly.

Hari was schooled in every aspect of the family trade by Agrata and his two brothers, received a patchwork education in philosophical truths and methods from his father and various travelling
scholars, and played with the children of passengers and specialists in the many disused volumes of his family’s s