Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) Read Free Page A

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