Free Evening's Empires (Quiet War 3) by Paul McAuley Page A

attempt to contact him directly, either, but soon after they matched his new course the eidolon reported persistent attempts to locate and
utilise open ports in
Little Helper
’s comms, and Hari was forced to shut everything down. The gig running dark and silent as it crossed the Kirkwood gap, falling towards the
waypoint.
    The prominent gap, one of several swept clean by orbital resonance with Jupiter, divided the Belt into two unequal halves: the populous main belt, close to Mars, and the more diffuse outer belt
and its outlying clusters. More than ten thousand gardens and habitats constructed from materials mined from rocks and comets orbited within the main belt; there were more than a million and a half
rocks with a diameter of more than a kilometre. A few, like Vesta and Pallas and Hygiea, had diameters of several hundred kilometres; Ceres was almost a thousand kilometres across. There were
cratered rubble-piles blanketed in deep layers of dust and debris. There were mountains of nickel-iron, stony mountains of pyroxene, olivine and feldspar. There were rocks rich in tarry
carbonaceous tars, clays, and water ice. Some orbited in loose groups, or in more closely associated families of fragments created by catastrophic shatterings of parent bodies, but most traced
solitary paths, separated by an average distance twice that between the Earth and the Moon, everything moving, everything constantly changing its position relative to everything else.
    Little Helper
closed on the waypoint and swung through its steep gravity well, changing course and gaining velocity, racing towards Vesta and its artificial moon, Fei Shen. It was an
old trading city, Fei Shen.
Pabuji’s Gift
had visited it several times after Hari had been born. There would be people who knew his family and their ship, people who might help
him.
    Easy Does It
swung past the waypoint, too.
    Hari made his plans, unmade them, remade them. He read in Kinson Ib Kana’s book. It was a slim black slab that woke when he tapped its surface three times. There was no index, no method of
making any kind of input or connection to whatever spark of intelligence it possessed. Each time he woke it, it displayed a random sample of unadorned, unaugmented text, usually an aphorism or a
brief verse or a praise song:
     
    I shall not coil my tangled hair
    But let it hang free
    And when I bathe
    I shall splash water all around
    But never wet my hair.
     
    And:
     
    Secrets are safest in the mind of a wise man.
     
    And:
     
    On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.
     
    They lingered for ten minutes or for an hour or more before they faded and were replaced by another random sample. Hari supposed that he was meant to study them and unpack and contemplate every
possible meaning; instead, he short-circuited the process by switching off the book with three quick taps and switching it on again. Tap tap tap, tap tap tap. On/off, on/off, on/off. Skipping
through poems and songs and sayings until the book presented him with something more substantial. Stories about the long ago, before human beings had quit the shelter of Earth’s skies;
stories about the Age of Expansion or the True Empire; stories about dream worlds, or worlds of other stars.
    Some were as long and intricate as any saga. The story of a Martian paladin’s quest during the rise of the True Empire, for instance. The Trues had conquered Ceres, the Koronis Emirates,
and half a hundred lesser kingdoms and republics, and as they began to probe the defences of Mars the Czarina dispatched twenty of her paladins to search for the armill of one of her ancestors,
which was believed to augment the wisdom of its wearer and control secret caches of powerful weapons and squads of shellback troopers from the long ago.
    After adventures in the deserts and mountains of the red planet, fighting bandits, dust ghouls, and rogue gene wizards and their monstrous offspring, the paladin was