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

Sora was a year older than Hari, languidly elegant, too old for the kind of games that Hari felt he was too old for now.
    He couldn’t tell Sora how he felt. He and his brothers were not allowed to have what Agrata called intimate relations with any of the passengers or specialists. Nabhoj was partnered to the
ship; Nabhomani told Hari outrageous stories about debauchery with women and men he met during his negotiations in cities and settlements, promised to let Hari have a taste of the good life when
Hari was at last allowed to go ashore. Hari could admire Sora Exodus Adel from a distance, engage in a little light banter, no more than that. Better to avoid her altogether, he thought. Find some
work he could vanish into until the ship docked at Trantor and Sora disembarked. Then one of the other passengers, Jyotirmoy Hala, came up with a plan to put on a dance performance based on one of
the stories about the parochial god from whom the ship had taken its name.
    Jyotirmoy was three years older than Hari, the only child of two philosophers who were studying the topology of the space-time distortions around the seraphs, and expected their son to take up
their work. Jyotirmoy did not argue with his parents. He simply refused to listen to them. He spent a dozen hours a day practising dance and the art of gesture. The only way to be good at
something, he told Hari, was to let it take over your life. To dedicate yourself to it. You had to practise an elevation or a gesture over and over until you had it right. Or at least, until you
stopped making obvious mistakes. And then you could get down to the serious work. Then you could think about making something new.
    Agrata approved of Jyotirmoy’s idea, and Hari found himself helping to put a troupe selected from the younger passengers, including Sora, through twenty days of rehearsals. Jyotirmoy
plotted the choreography, chose the music from the ship’s library, and supervised the design and manufacture of costumes and masks; Hari spent as much time as he could with Sora. He learned
that she and her brother had been born on Mars but for most of their lives had been travelling with their mother, a musician who played ancient symphonies using an orchestra thing controlled by the
play of her hands through columns of light. Sora maintained the orchestra thing; her brother organised events and arranged travel. She liked the gypsy life, she said, but she wouldn’t work
for her mother for ever: she’d settle down eventually, design gardens, and raise children. She and Hari talked about the places she had visited, the people who lived there. Admirers of her
mother’s work. Collaborators. Other artists. Hari was still young enough to believe that the world was sensitive to his emotions and moods, that everyone was a player in the drama of his
life. It gave him an odd, lonesome feeling to think of Sora leaving the ship, travelling on without him to places he’d never see, the precious time they had together dwindling to an anecdote,
a memory.
    Sora said that she found it odd that Hari had never gone ashore at any of the cities and settlements
Pabuji’s Gift
had visited, said that his life and his family were very
strange.
    ‘Really?’
    ‘You don’t see it because you don’t know anything else,’ Sora said. ‘But in all the cities and settlements I’ve visited, all the ships I’ve travelled
on, I’ve never before met someone like you.’
    ‘We’re just ordinary people, trying to get by.’
    ‘Don’t you think it’s the tiniest bit weird, being born after your parents died?’
    Hari loved Sora’s bold, straightforward manner. Her candid gaze. She had a way, while talking, of running a hand through the cloud of her hair and twisting a clump of it in her fingers and
turning it to and fro, as if trying to tune into stray thoughts. She had long, dexterous fingers. Her fingernails were tinted dark green, with mica flecks.
    Hari said, ‘My father passed over. He