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

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 ship. It was a ring ship,
Pabuji’s Gift
, a broad ribbon caught
in a circle five hundred metres across, with a twist that turned it into the single continuous surface of a Möbius strip. The ship’s motor hung from a web of tethers and spars at the
centre of the ring; its hull was studded with the cubes and domes that contained workshops, utility bays, power units, an industrial maker, and the giant centrifuges, light chromatographs, and
cultures of half-life nematodes and tailored bacteria; its interior was partitioned into cargo holds, garages for gigs and the big machines used in salvage work, and the lifesystem. Much of this
space was unused. The ship could support more than a thousand people, but even when Hari’s father had been alive it had never carried more than a tenth of that number.
    Hari and the children of passengers and specialist crews had the run of the empty cargo holds, habitats and modules, the mazes of ducts and serviceways. A world parallel to the world of the
adults, with a social structure equally complicated, possessing its own traditions and myths, rivalries and challenges, fads and fashions. Endless games of tig on one voyage; hide-and-seek on
another. One year, Hari organised flyball matches inside a cylinder turfed with halflife grass; when interest in that began to wane, he divided the children into troops that fought each other for
possession of tagged locations scattered through the ship.
    He was fifteen then. Tall and slender, glossy black hair done up in corn rows woven with glass beads. Even though every adult – everyone over the age of twenty – still seemed
impossibly old, adulthood was no longer mysterious and unattainable, but a condition he was advancing towards day by day. He knew that he would soon have to give up childish games and shoulder his
share of the family’s work. He was beginning to understand the limits of his life, beginning to realise how small his world really was, how little it counted in the grand scheme of
things.
    And then he fell in love for the first time.
    Her name was Sora Exodus Adel. A passenger travelling with her brother and her mother between Tannhauser Gate (where
Pabuji’s Gift
had unloaded most of the salvage from her last
job) and Trantor (where she would unload the rest).