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

trace of habitation. No structures, no roads or paths or tracks. The Free People of Fei Shen, Vesta’s self-appointed guardians,
did not allow any permanent settlements on the surface. They’d once been Martians, the Free People. A gypsy race of environmental engineers and gene wizards living off the land, travelling in
caravans of construction machinery, mobile soil factories and greenhouses. Descendants of a Gaian cult, they believed that the mother goddess of Earth was merely one aspect of a deity who had
quickened and spread life into every possible niche: every living thing, from archaebacteria to human beings, was part of that divine presence. When Trues had gone to war against Mars, some of the
Free People had gone underground, preserving their genome libraries, while the rest had gone up and out. Riding ships in slow, low-energy paths, spreading through the forgotten places of the Belt,
colonising and repairing abandoned gardens, settling on uninhabited rocks and seeding their surfaces with vacuum organisms, burrowing into them and creating gardens in tunnels and voids. A great
and holy work that would end only when every rock in the Belt, every moon of the outer planets, every kobold in the Kuiper belt, had been quickened with some kind of life.
    Vesta was their holiest shrine. Their great cathedral, their omphalos. An alliance of baseliners from Earth and Jupiter’s moons had begun to terraform it a thousand years ago. A
superstring injected into its core had deepened its gravity well; sun lamps and fusion engines had raised its surface temperature and pumped heat into its frozen regolith; engineers had mined and
released carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon. Boreal forests and bogs planted inside craters, and dense blooms of cyanobacteria in meltwater lakes, had fixed most of the carbon dioxide and raised
the partial pressure of oxygen. The atmospheric pressure had stabilised at a little over two hundred millibars at zero elevation point. Tweaked animals had been introduced. Once, the little world
had been the hunting grounds of True suzerains; now, it was a curated wilderness. No one was supposed to land there without permission. Hari hoped to be arrested for trespass, so that he could
escape his pursuers and explain his predicament.
    Vesta’s deepened gravity, 0.2
g
, was twice the maximum acceleration of
Pabuji’s Gift
. Even with the help of the p-suit’s pseudomusculature, Hari found it hard
going. He walked and rested, walked and rested. His legs grew heavy, his feet slow and uncertain. His perspective narrowed to the ground ahead. To the next step, and the next. The hiss of air in
his helmet. The thump of blood in his head.
    Vesta’s rotation period was short, less than six hours. The lamps and the moon chased each other to the western horizon and the sky brightened above a crescent of hills directly ahead. As
the sun rose, Hari climbed a long slope that ended in a crest of shattered stone. The bowl of the crater stretched away below, filled edge to edge with a dense forest, obscured here and there by
streamers of mist. A far-off gleam of water.
    The eidolon glimmered beside Hari. ‘You could walk around it,’ she said.
    Hari checked the map. The shelter was two klicks beyond the far side of the crater. If he circumnavigated the crater’s rim it would more than triple the distance, and the terrain was cut
by blocky upthrusts and crevasses that would be difficult to negotiate.
    ‘Best to keep going forward,’ he said, and crabbed down a run-out slope that pushed a long ridge into the forest. Trees closed in on either side; their canopy closed up overhead.
There seemed to be just two species. Tall dark green pines forming long rows in every direction, punctuated by stands of even taller vacuum-organism trees, their slim black columns topped with
filmy parasols supported by delicate arching ribs. The parasols meshed like the clockwork of vast and unfathomable mechanisms, and the tips