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

isn’t exactly dead.’
    ‘What’s the difference?’
    ‘You could ask him.’
    ‘He is like a ghost. A haunt who manifests himself in the drones and manikins. Can he really operate several of them at once?’
    ‘Of course. He assigns their addresses to temporary sub-selves, and reintegrates when he has finished.’
    ‘You think that is ordinary?’
    He loved the little uptick in the corner of her smile. A sly little warp, a playful complicity. There were five different shades of gold in her eyes.
    He said, ‘It’s just what he does.’
    Sora said, ‘Many of the passengers are scared of him.’
    ‘Are you scared?’
    ‘Of course not. Well, just a tiny bit. Actually, Agrata scares me more. I don’t think she likes me.’
    ‘Agrata can be . . . abrupt, I suppose. It’s hard to know what she likes and doesn’t like, but I bet she’d like you, once she got to know you.’
    ‘That’s sweet of you, Hari.’
    Hari loved Sora’s small kindnesses, her unaffected sophistication, was jealous when she paid attention to anyone else, envious of the easy way Jyotirmoy talked with her about details of
the performance, of the way the two of them hung close together, studying sketches for costumes, watching recordings of rehearsals, discussing staging and the movements of performers, where they
should start and where they should come to rest, and half a hundred other things whose significance Hari barely understood. For the first time, he saw himself as others might see him. An outsider.
An awkward, peculiar kid who knew everything about his ship and his family’s trade, and almost nothing about anything that really mattered.
    But when Jyotirmoy at last led his crew into the hollow sphere of the stage, with the adult passengers hung all around its perimeter, Hari dissolved into his role and the gestalt of the
performance. Costumed in fluttering silks, faces painted white, lips tinted black, eyes emphasised by red and gold make-up, he and the other players flitted through the web of ratlines and perches,
through washes of light and music, like the little birds in Aakash’s viron. Breaking into freefall dances, freezing in tableaux when one of the principals performed a solo part. Jyotirmoy
played Pabuji; Hari played Pabuji’s friend, the snake god Gogaji; Sora played Gogaji’s bride and Pabuji’s niece, Kelam; Sora’s brother, Jubilee, played Ravana the Demon
King, from whom Pabuji stole the she-camels he gave as a wedding present to Gogaji and Kelam; the other children doubled as wedding guests and the camels.
    Hari inhabited the intricate sequence of his role with a kind of exalted serenity. Every move, every pose, sprang from memories laid down in his bios and muscles during the painstaking
rehearsals, a single thread in the weave of the whole. Coming together, spinning apart. His concentration broke only once. Moving out of the dance in which he and Sora mirrored each other’s
gestures and poses in an expression of joyful fidelity, he overshot the perch where he would rest in shadow while Pabuji, with comically elaborate caution, stalked the she-camels. Jyotirmoy caught
his arm and halted and turned him, and their gazes met. A strange moment of doubling, seeing Jyotirmoy’s concern flash in Pabuji’s mask. And then Hari was in the correct position, and
Pabuji soared away into a cone of light, and Hari was caught up again in the flow of the dance and the unfolding dream logic of the story, waking at the end of it, dazed and happy and exhausted, to
the audience’s applause.
    At the party after the performance, still wearing Gagaji’s green tunic and trousers, Hari dared to ask Sora if she wanted to see his favourite place on the ship, a diamond composite
blister where you could switch off all the lights and lose yourself in the rapture of the starry dark. And was amazed, even though he’d so often imagined floating in the small intimate space
with her, her warmth, her touch, when she smiled and