Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) Read Online Free PDF

his brothers and his father. That everything that happened to him had already happened to them. That
there were no new stories.
    Agrata studied him. She was more than a century old, and because she lacked every trace of vanity, and because it gave her authority with the passengers, she let her age show. Her face was
creased and lined; her skin was freckled with pale spots where viral treatment had removed incipient carcinomas; her coarse grey hair was brushed back from her forehead and braided into a long rope
coiled at her back.
    She said, ‘You feel sorry for yourself. Hard done by.’
    ‘Rakesh didn’t have to deal with Aakash’s fantasies about the Bright Moment and the cults and all the rest.’
    ‘Now you sound like Nabhomani.’
    ‘Perhaps Nabhomani is right.’
    ‘You should talk to your father about your ideas. Argue with him. Start to take the initiative. The worst that can happen is that he won’t listen to you.’
    Hari tried his best. And at first Aakash seemed to take note of his comments. At least, he did not dismiss them immediately.
    ‘You’ve been taking advice from the old woman,’ he said.
    Hari admitted it.
    His father was amused. ‘We’ve been together a long time. She knows how I think; I know how she thinks. She believes that I can’t change. What about you?’
    They were sitting cross-legged on a slab of warm sandstone at the entrance to the cave, in the shadow of the cliffs.
    Hari said, ‘I think you want what you think is best for the ship.’
    ‘A diplomat’s answer. Maybe you’re learning something. I want what’s best for you, too. You may not think it, but I do. You’ll see how it all works out.’
    How it worked out, a little over a year after Hari started to push back against his father’s ideas, after he had for the first time left the ship to observe how Nabhomani negotiated with
officials on Sugar Mountain and had, not very seriously and for only a few hours, run away, Aakash announced that the family would suspend its salvage work for a while. They were going to try a new
direction, he said. They were going to help a very good friend of his complete his research into the nature of the Bright Moment.
    Some fifty days later,
Pabuji’s Gift
reached Ceres and the tick-tock philosopher Dr Gagarian came aboard, and everything changed.

 
     
     
     
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    The pressure suit’s eidolon possessed a childlike naivety. Usually, her unaffected optimism and innocence was charming. Playful. But sometimes, as when Hari tried to
explain the hijackers’ subterfuge, why he knew that Agrata wasn’t really Agrata, it seemed like wilful obstinacy, a capricious refusal to acknowledge unpalatable facts.
    He was working while he talked to her, inside the spire that the ascetic hermit, Kinson Ib Kana, had hollowed out and decorated with murals. Checking his traps, greasing pawls and ratchets,
making sure that lines were strung tight, bladders containing his special chemical mix hadn’t hardened off, and nets were packed just so. Working as steadily as he could, despite tremors in
his fingers and the soup of mercury and molten poison cooking in his bowels.
    ‘I’ve known her all my life,’ he told the eidolon. ‘We talked every day. And the person I talked to isn’t that person.’
    ‘Did she give the wrong answers to your questions?’
    The eidolon was perched on the intersection of two crossbeams. Her eyes gleaming in the shadows.
    ‘Not at all. She knew everything. They’d done their research. But Agrata – the real Agrata – wouldn’t have tried to answer those questions.’
    No, she would have told him to stop being so silly. She would have told him to be sensible. That was one of her favourite words. Sensible. Also trust, pride, loyalty, duty. Hari desperately
wanted it to be Agrata come to rescue him, to take him home, but he knew that it was his duty to keep Dr Gagarian’s head safe and reach Tannhauser Gate and begin negotiations with the