Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

by Karl Schroeder

  Gray-haired men paired off with the young acrobats; matrons and ingenues stepped out with the officers; and suddenly it was a ball. Antaea blew out a breath and rolled her shoulders. Yet another reminder of a world that she would never feel a part of.

  She took a seat at an empty table. Hayden and his men, as well as Travis, Lacerta, and Sayrea Airsigh's Last Liners were all sitting nearby, but she had no desire to join them. The rest of the guests were milling in strategic ways, all very political; but no one came near Antaea.

  --That is, until Lady Inshiri strolled over and gathered her skirts to sit opposite her. "Ah, the author!" When Antaea didn't reply, the lady nodded to the Home Guard contingent and said, "They don't seem to like you," in a confiding tone.

  Antaea eyed her. "What's to like?"

  "Why, whatever do you mean? You're the one who saved their collective asses, if I've heard the story correctly. If not for you, Candesce would now be in the hands of--" Inshiri paused. "Whose hands, exactly?"

  "Your friends over there," Antaea nodded at the handsome outsiders, "would say it was the emissary's people. Or some such."

  "And I'll bet," said Inshiri ironically, "that this emissary would say it was these very people"--and here she waved brightly at them--"who tricked your leader Gonlin into going after the key to Candesce, thence to open the sun of suns, switch off Virga's defensive field, and hand them our whole world on a platter."

  "That is the argument," Antaea said neutrally.

  "A bit of a 'my fault/your fault' tiff, don't you think? Though why anyone should want this dreary little world I don't know. Yet, I do remain puzzled by one thing." When Antaea didn't prompt her, Inshiri went on. "You were there. You met the creature that they--whoever 'they' are--sent to penetrate Candesce. I understand it took the form of your sister. So you must have looked it in the eye--you must have seen what kind of being it was."

  Antaea turned away. She had seen. After she'd delivered Chaison Fanning to him, Gonlin had told Antaea that she was free to go, and that her sister was waiting for her in a nearby building. Antaea had put her hand on the door latch to that hut, then hesitated, and gone around the side to look in a grimy window. It had looked like Telen standing there--yet she didn't move, didn't even blink, just stood gazing at the door Antaea was supposed to come through. Her uncanny stillness had had the air of an automaton to it--of something without a mind.

  She couldn't deny to herself that Leal's description of the emissary had sounded a lot like what she'd seen in Telen. But she would never admit that to Inshiri, whom Jacoby Sarto had painted as the vilest of political criminals.

  "I've learned not to trust my own judgment in some things," she said finally, and turned a quick and formal smile on Inshiri. "It's not my place to judge who's lying unless I can catch them in the lie. That's why I brought Hayden Griffin here: because Eustace Loll, at least, is lying."

  "Let me put it another way," said Inshiri in a musing tone. "If you had to give something up--power, rights, or, say, secrets--who would you rather give them up to: a human being, however different in culture and morality they may be from you; or something that doesn't even think, but claims to have your best interests in mind?"

  "Is one of my options 'whichever side you're not on'?"

  Inshiri laughed lightly. "You have heard of me. Fair enough--but I think that most people would choose the worst possible human tyranny over any tyranny by the nonhuman, for the simple reason that we all want to believe that someone, somewhere, is free, even if that person is grinding our own freedom into the muck. Because the alternative is that no one, anywhere, is free--and do you really think you could live with that?" She looked up. "Ah! I happen to be good at this dance. Surely one of these handsome officers will take a turn with me."

  She left, and Antaea saw that Hayden had been watching them. She walked away herself, not seeing the gardens, the azure sky and dancers. Half-consciously, she reached up to unclip the locket that hung around her neck. She hefted its tiny weight in her hand.

  In it were two tiny photos of her sister, Telen. The first showed her in happy times. The second, hidden behind it, showed Telen tied to a chair, bruised and apparently terrified. Gonlin had given it to Antaea, as proof of the leverage he had over her.

  She couldn't hate Gonlin. He'd had the best of intentions. He'd felt he had to do what he did in order to save the world.

  So did Leal Maspeth.

  She stopped, holding the locket, and searched the dancers until she spotted Maspeth. The former history tutor was dancing with Chaison; seeing that, Antaea's mouth thinned, and she turned and took a shadowed and empty path away from the light and music, and everyone she knew.

  * * *

  CHAISON FANNING WAS being very polite to Leal, and she couldn't fault his dancing; but she knew he was angry. As they stepped across the floor he kept glancing at one edge of the crowd, where Inshiri Ferance posed with a glass in her hand. She was laughing gaily with a bevy of courtiers.

  The admiral stumbled, and stopped for a moment. Leal hesitated, lifting her hand from his shoulder, but then he scowled and took up the dance again.

  "Admiral..." she ventured.

  "A talking tree?" He glared at her. "A four-pawed statue? Travis said they walked and talked outside of Virga, but if they're not going to do that here, what good are they?"

  She ducked her head. "They want us to meet them at the walls--"

  "That's not going to happen!" He tripped again but recovered and spun her around, rather roughly. "Maspeth, I've risked everything on your say-so. Not just my career, but the reputation of my people, my country's relationship not just with Aerie but all these states--and my..." His fingers tightened around her hand.

  The day had swung one way and another like an off-balance town wheel. It was a miracle that so many nations had sent delegates at all, but their overall level of skepticism had been high, and hadn't come down by nightfall. Many of the delegates had to get over centuries of myth-based prejudice about what the greater universe was like, and, despite the best efforts of Hayden and Lacerta, many still refused to believe Leal's story. Nicolas Remoran's tale and his appeal for a simple change to Candesce had irrevocably won over half the crowd; and Inshiri Ferance was openly mocking the whole affair.

  "You promised that your allies would back us up," said Fanning. "Instead, they've delivered us a practical joke. It's a disaster, Maspeth, and I don't see how we're going to recover from it."

  "Travis brought documents, too, didn't he? They wrote us books..." In fact, it was Gallard, Keir's old friend from Brink, who'd brought the books. He and Keir had sat together and talked intensely for an hour; afterward, Keir had told Leal that Gallard and Maerta were worried about him. "It's the neotenization process," he'd told her. "Apparently they ran some sims, and they think ... well, they say if I stay in Virga, it's going to kill me."

  After Loll's arrival and the stresses of the day, that news had just been too much for Leal; Keir had become an anchor for her. Without him she felt adrift, nationless. So, she didn't protest now when Fanning said, "Books? Those books are so technical it'll take us years to decipher them. And anyway, a book proves nothing."

  Was Keir going to leave? Virga had seemed to amaze and delight him at every turn; would he be the same person if he left, or would he revert to the child he'd been when she'd met him?

  Immersed in these thoughts, she barely heard the admiral going on about how the whole emissary visit could be just some sort of elaborate hoax--until his voice trailed off. She snapped back to attention. He was staring at something over her shoulder.

  As they spun, Leal followed his gaze. A man in a naval uniform was speaking urgently into Inshiri Ferance's ear. For the first time all day, she wore a frown. Then, as the officer continued to speak, she glanced at the dance floor. --At Chaison Fanning and Leal.

  Then she was gone in a swirl of silks, and up and down the crowd, her whole entourage could be seen breaking off their conversations and fading into the crowd. />
  Leal and Chaison stopped dancing. Without a glance at Leal Chaison walked quickly to where a knot of Slipstream uniforms was working its way through the crowd. Leal followed, her heart suddenly pounding.

  "What's going on?" he demanded of his men. A panting airman in flying leathers leaned on one of the tables; as Fanning strode up he straightened and saluted.

  "Two of our ships docking at the axis, sir. They're the Mercy and the Renown."

  Leal put her hand to her mouth. Those were the escorts for Venera's yacht. But where was ...

  "The Judgment's with them?" demanded Fanning. The airman shook his head.

  "Apparently they've been trying to shake pursuit and spent the past few days hiding in a sargasso. They just managed to shake whoever it was and get here--"

  "Ferance!" snapped Fanning. "She's trying to sneak away, damn it, stop her and her people from leaving." Two men took off at a run. "And locate the Abyssals as well," he added to another officer. "I'm just about ready to imprison the whole damn lot of them."

  "Sir, our territorial agreement--"

  "Then get me the prime minister! Damn it, man, it's my wife!"

  News was spreading that something was up. Some people were still dancing, but more were leaving the dance floor to rejoin their parties. Pages were zipping back and forth, trying to answer people's questions.

  The admiral had forgotten Leal. She stood on the periphery of his impromptu command center for a while, arms crossed, biting her lip. But there was nothing she could say or do to help. She turned, and saw soldiers from Abyss watching her alertly a few steps away.

  And where the hell was Keir?

  * * *

  KEIR WAS WALKING in the far corners of the garden. Gallard's message was ringing in his head, as was something else that so far he had avoided thinking about.

  Strange how life came to be divided, into the time before and the time after. His marriage to Sita had been like that; during those years, Keir's life before meeting her had seemed like a faded picture. Then, when it ended--and Revelation's human civilization began to fall shortly thereafter--the same cleaving had occurred again. During his time in Brink, Keir had immersed himself in the painfully recovered principles of science and physics, and all the ups and downs of normal human life had seemed far away.

  Brink, and Revelation, and everything he'd ever done seemed now like a prelude to Virga. This world was alive for Keir in a way no other place had ever been. He was intoxicated by its fantastical, pastel-shaded skies, its tenacious, makeshift civilizations, and most of all its passionate people. Every single one of them burned brighter than any human he'd met outside. Brightest of all, for all her quiet, was Leal.

  To think that he might have to leave Virga ... He would almost rather die. The thought frightened him; not the idea of death, but the thought that any passion could have such a hold on him as to make the threat of dying irrelevant.

  If he returned to Brink, would he continue to be the person he'd become here? Or would he lose his memories again and revert? He hadn't asked Gallard, because some residue of caution had prevented Keir from revealing just how much he remembered. It was galling now to recall being treated like a child by Gallard these past few months. In reality, Keir was the elder of the two, and prior to his de-indexing, Keir had been the dominant one.

  He knew he still looked young, too. While they talked Keir had tried to act like his earlier self, while at the same time asking probing questions about the neotenization. And all the while, a slow, familiar pulse had sounded in the back of his head: his inexplicably awakened scry.

  He paused under a young willow tree and looked back at the lighted heart of the garden. The vaulting wrought-iron and glass walls and arching ceiling gave the place a cathedral-like look. To the left were the flower beds, dinner tables, and tents and podiums where the presentations had been held. They surrounded the dance floor, and beyond it great tall glass doors opened out onto the upward-curving city streets. To the right, the glass walls wrapped halfway around the government palace before anchoring themselves in its stone facade. On the far side of the palace another wing of the greenhouse did the same. Both of these side-ways were thickly planted with trees.

  A couple of security men were patrolling the entrance to the nearer grove, but as he walked up they waved him through. Keir was one of the few people they would let near the oak and its four-footed companion.

  He ducked into the blackness under the trees. Keir wasn't sure why he had come in here. He had some dim notion of communing with something familiar, for in their own mad way, a cyborg tree and morphont cheetah seemed more ordinary to him right now than this handmade palace on its wheel of knotted-together forest. Maybe they could soothe his anxiety, make him more willing to leave Virga if he had to.

  Pulse. He stopped in dappled darkness, because for just a moment, he'd thought he could see something. --Not with his own ordinary eyes, but through the second sight of scry.

  It shouldn't be possible. The physics that underlay scry simply didn't exist here. He'd heard the stories today of the recent incursions into Virga by creatures of Artificial Nature: Aubrey Mahallan and Telen Argyre had both been possessed by it. Their alien riders must have been biological, however, bred in secret near Virga's walls by A.N.'s Edisonians. They'd been little more than mental parasites, although Argyre had apparently had some additional technology. Hard-won and fragile, Keir assumed, else they'd have flooded Virga with similarly equipped soldiers.

  He was sure they had no idea how Candesce's suppression field actually worked. As he moved forward through the foliage, feeling his way with his arms outstretched, Keir caught himself feeling smug about that. The emotion surprised him; why should he be smug?

  But, oh, of course, it was because of the ... He strained to recover the rest of the memory, but it wasn't there. All he could picture in his mind was an oak visiting Brink, some months ago, before he de-indexed himself. It had come on some ordinary business, but now he remembered that it had also wanted to speak to him alone. It was there to warn Keir specifically, about ...

  Once again, the memory was just tantalizingly beyond his reach.

  Pulse.

  He had another momentary flash of vision, clearer but somehow more confusing. For a second he'd been looking at a curtain of some kind--a dark wall of cloth. The feeling, though, of the image--not the image itself--was strangely familiar.

  He parted some low-hanging branches and emerged onto the path where the oak and the cheetah sat still as statues. City light from high overhead bathed them in a pale lunar glow. No one was here, and the voices and music had faded to a distant murmur.

  Kneeling, he gazed into the giant green glass eyes of the cheetah. They cupped refractions of city light, so it almost seemed they were glowing. "What did I have to hide?" he asked it. And from whom?

  There was that other memory he'd been trying to catch all day. He'd taken his second body deep into Brink's unexplored reaches, and it had brought a fab unit. Together they had made something, he was sure of it; and yet he clearly remembered walking back to Complication Hall afterward, and he'd been carrying nothing. Nor had his second body brought anything back.

  "You can't tell me, can you?" he asked the cheetah, and when it didn't answer, he straightened up.

  At that moment vision flashed upon him again, and at the same time he felt a buzzing vibration in--no, on, his chest. Startled, he slapped at his jacket, thinking one of Virga's strange insects had flown into him. His secondary view staggered and suddenly he realized where it was coming from as a silvery dragonfly launched itself from his jacket pocket.

  He gaped at it. This was impossible. He could clearly picture the final equations he'd solved to prove how Candesce's field worked and no, they would never allow a device like his dragonflies to operate here. Unless--

  Breath caught in astonishment, it all unfolded in his mind while his inner vision soared with the dragonfly up through the trees, darting between branches, ducking and swerving
along the path and past the legs of the shadowed man who was running up behind Keir with a raised sword in his hand.

  20

  LEAL HAD GONE looking for Keir. She found Antaea instead. The wraith was walking slowly through the twilit flower beds behind the tables, her head down, her arms crossed. She looked up when Leal approached, but did not smile.

  "Have you seen Keir?"

  Antaea shook her head in a distracted way. Leal hesitated, but she was acutely aware of the Abyssal soldiers discreetly trailing her. She decided to leave Antaea alone. As she turned away, though, Antaea suddenly said, "What if it was a mistake?"

  "What?" Leal took another look at her. Antaea's eyes were red and she stood now in a crestfallen posture. "What mistake?"

  "The emissary. Did you ever think ... it might be lying?"

  Impatience flared in Leal. "Antaea, I saw the urgency, the way it was trying to communicate. I went to its home world--"

  "I've seen other worlds, too!" Antaea stepped closer in sudden, unexpected anger. "Lots of us have! The Guard travel outside Virga all the time and we never met your 'emissary.' Were we lied to so well, all of us, century after century? Tell me, Leal, which is harder to believe? That we were lied to? Or that you, who'd never even left that little provincial city before, might be duped by the same enemy that fooled...?" She closed her lips tightly and looked down.

  "I know this is important to you--" Leal began, but Antaea shook her head violently.

  "No, you don't. You think this is about Telen. It was never about Telen. It's about the reason she and I joined the Guard to begin with." Antaea's hand rose to clutch a locket around her neck as she turned to look at the city, an arch of sparkling lights cupping green foliage, that swept above them. "It's because we knew how vulnerable all this really is; and we were willing to give our lives to keep it safe. Telen did. So would I, in a second."

  She stopped, having finally noticed the commotion swirling around Chaison Fanning. The admiral was now at the podium, giving orders to an assembled body of officers while pages and couriers ran in and out the greenhouse's giant doorway. A puzzled look crossed Antaea's face and she began to walk that way. Leal fell into step beside her.