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

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