Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

13

"KEEP UP" WAS all Venera Fanning said. So they tried.

Five countries in five days: that had been Keir's first week with Venera. Her viciously thin yacht, the Judgment, would scream from destination to destination while Venera stood up from its hatch to hold out her hand to men on passing jet bikes, like a falconer waiting for her bird to alight on her wrist. What the passing hands exchanged with her was letters. Outbound, she sent announcements (or, perhaps, warnings) of her imminent arrival at this or that palace or pavilion; inbound, she received cautious, fawning, or stiffly cool acknowledgments.

A very public campaign was under way by ambassadors and senior public officials of both Slipstream and Aerie; they, too, were fanning out across the world, visiting capitals and city-states everywhere from the principalities to Virga's cold outer reaches. They brought reminders of the two incursions into Virga that had occurred within the past several years, and proposed that all concerned heads of state send delegates to a grand colloquy, to be held in Aerie's new capital city, Aurora. The Virga Home Guard were invited as well--though whether the semimythical organization would show up was anybody's guess--to give an accounting of their own actions to the people of Virga.

Venera's mission was not so public. Her extensive spy network had spent years researching vulnerabilities and finding the skeletons in everybody's closets. For those nations and cities which proved reluctant to attend the colloquy, she was acting as a discreet second strand of persuasion. It was a process that was fascinating to watch.

As they approached the mauve or peach or lime-colored airs of the next nation on their itinerary, Venera would order one of her men out to hang gay banners off the more wicked-looking of the yacht's fins. Twirling Slipstream's colors, they glided into port like some fabulously long-lived firework. Then, the fast-and-furious game would begin.

Keir usually watched that game from a distance.

"What is she telling them?" Leal Maspeth hissed now; she was craning her neck to see the head table at tonight's banquet. The nation was Unduvine, the city Greydrop. More than that, Keir didn't know, except that they built their town wheels of iron and asteroidal stone, and that this great hall whose corner he and Leal sat in was ancient.

He glanced over his shoulder. Venera Fanning had leaned forward, across the table, and was putting most of her weight on the dinner knife she'd plunged into the oak tabletop. The ambassadors, admirals, nobles, and members of parliament seated with her were to a man cringing back in their own chairs, for all the world as if Venera were radiating some force field.

Suddenly Venera put her hand next to her temple and splayed open her fingers, said something short, and brayed with laughter. The entire table broke into howls of mirth and, as she sat down again, they leaned forward, even more relaxed than they'd been before her tirade.

"I believe," Keir said somberly, "that Venera Fanning just told a joke."

"Well, at least they're having a good time," muttered Leal. She and Keir had been introduced as minor members of Venera's ambassadorial staff, which meant they had to sit in waiting rooms, or stand in the hall, or, as now, eat at what Leal insisted on calling "the kid's table" far to one side of the real action.

"I told you to bring your notebook," he said as he tucked into the dinner. "You could have been writing your book all this time."

"They'd think I was spying," she countered; then she frowned at his plate. "And what exactly are you doing?"

Keir looked down and realized he had, once again, dismembered and dissected his dinner in such a way as to lay out his main course's bone structure for examination. "Sorry," he said. "I've just never seen birds like these. I keep trying to figure out how they fly."

"Birds don't fly," she said with an air of great patience. "Flying is something you do under gravity. Virgan birds swim. Like fish. Or people."

"Ah. I suppose." He grinned at the little skeleton.

Leal eyed him. "You're having the time of your life, aren't you?"

He shrugged. "I really don't know, I haven't had a moment to think about it." It was true; he was starting to feel safe again here in Virga--if not feel at home--and Venera kept him too busy to brood about the past. "I just..." Now he did frown.

"What?"

"I hope I remember all of this later, that's all."

"And why wouldn't you?"

Because scry used to be my memory, and now it's gone. But he didn't say that, firstly because she wouldn't understand; and secondly because increasingly, he was realizing that he could remember things without using the neural implant system.

This whole whirlwind diplomatic mission, for instance: it seemed every instant was indelibly printed in his mind. The curling mists that enwrapped the frozen city of Seasory were as vivid to him now as when they had arrived there. Mostly what he remembered about Seasory was Leal--Leal emerging from her cabin to breathe deep the brisk air of one of her own country's major trading partners; her craning her neck at the city's sights--its tenements made of ice that loomed over cleated iron streets, the men and women like feathered pillars in their coats, gliding to and fro in the mist. Throughout their visit she had seemed under some spell caused by the permanent darkness and cold; once, Keir had seen her dance a few steps to an inaudible tune when she stood in shadow and thought no one could see her.

He remembered the mechanical back-and-forth of Venera's hips as she stalked straight to the palace of Seasory's satrap to bow here, bow there, give gifts, kiss barons on the cheeks and baronesses on the hand, and then, swaying tick tick tick, leave just as quickly. "Next stop, Aeolia," was all she said as Keir and Leal (confusedly looking back at the bright palace where they'd only been for ten minutes) followed.

And he remembered Aeolia. In Aeolia, the skies sang. Rather than single big town wheels, the Aeolians spun thousands of small ones, each boasting a dozen or so buildings. They begrudged their ancient genes that required they spend some time in gravity, so everything of value that they built soared in the weightless spaces between their wheels. Most important of all these creations were the symphonicads: gigantic assemblages that filtered wind through thousands of pipes and horns and across the strings of countless harps and dulcimers. The symphonicads sang, but it was no random clitter-clatter such as a wind chime might make. Their design was so cunning that they improvised melodies and harmonies of entrancing beauty and complexity. The Aeolians staged plays and built brilliantly lit tableaux around them. They hooped wires to catch water, touching a single drop of oil to the stretched surfaces, and built vast intricate cities of quivering rainbow transparency, disguising their town wheels behind bouquets of silvered color.

They feted Venera on a single giant spinning hoop of golden silk. It undulated in the air, turning only as quickly as necessary to keep the tables and chairs in contact with its inner surface. Keir bounced, delighted on this pliant surface whose outer edges rippled in the wind; jugglers and tumblers rolled onto and off the ribbon, the symphonicads chorused like angels, and Venera earnestly declared Slipstream's eternal pledge to defend Aeolia.

The Aeolians laughed. No one attacked them. They were too beautiful.

"No one has ever yet attacked you," replied Venera. "But they will. And soon."

The Aeolians laughed again, but, when they left the next morning, Venera carried with her a sheaf of gilded documents bearing the Aeolian seal. Keir hadn't seen who had given them to her--but then, he'd not had the stamina to stay up half the night talking and drinking as she had.

"Next stop, Emperaza," Venera had said. And in the Judgment's lounge, she added a green dot to the giant chart that half-filled one wall.

"Memory..." Keir said now. Leal raised an eyebrow expectantly. "Where I come from, all our experiences are recorded by devices like my dragonflies. Stored in perfect faithful detail. We only use our biological memories to find those records and then we replay them, instead of remembering in full the natural way."

Leal thought about that. "I don't get it," she said after a minute. "How would you remember this dinner, then? Wouldn't you have to sit through the whole damn interminable hours-long grind of it again? Wouldn't it take longer to remember things that way?"

"Oh! No, you see, scry builds emblems for us." She looked puzzled. "An emblem is a collection of perceptual moments that registered as important to us at the time," he said. "Scry builds a little tableau or mini-scene, usually just a second or two long, out of those elements. But you can focus on any one of them and spin it out into as much detail as you want, right up to slowing down or stopping time so you can thoroughly explore any given second."

Leal leaned across the table and pushed at his forearm. "And you said you were human."

"I'm serious! I had that, and I've lost it."

Instead of concern, he saw a mischievous look bloom across her face. "You know, we have something like that, too--and so do you. It's called imagination.

"--Oh, wait," she said suddenly. "Someone's coming."

A diminutive page appeared at the tableside. He was not more than ten years old but crammed into a starched black uniform. "Lady requests your presence," he said solemnly to Keir.

"Mine? Oh." He glanced at Leal, who shrugged; so he wiped his lips on the napkin and followed the boy back to the head table.

"See?" said Venera, putting out her arms in a span to show Keir off to the others at the table. "This is one of them."

An elderly woman in fine silks frowned skeptically at Keir. "The boy is from Artificial Nature?"

Keir bowed, as Venera had coached him.

"Come on, then," prompted the man next to the frowning woman. "Prove it."

Keir looked at Venera.

"He's not a dancing raven," she snapped. "He doesn't do tricks."

"Well, then..."

"Excuse me," interrupted Keir. "Perhaps if I knew what it was you had been debating?"

"No, that's--" Venera began, but the frowning woman said, "What is Artificial Nature?"

"Ah." Venera glowered, and he imagined she had just spent a few minutes trying to explain that on her own. "Artificial Nature is technology that is employed by and for nonhuman ends, including the ends of plants, animals, and even other technologies."

"But why is it called Artificial Nature?" the lady pressed.

Keir eyed Venera, who nodded almost imperceptibly. "Well," he said, "what is technology?"

The lady looked confused. "Why, it's..." She frowned.

"This fork," said her companion.

"Suns," said someone else.

"Guns."

"Clocks."

Keir made sure to bow again, and Venera began to relax. "Those are all individual cases," he admitted. "But what is technology as such?"

There was silence. Keir nodded. "It is not so obvious. Technology is any natural phenomenon harnessed for human use. --Clothing, for instance, harnesses the phenomenon of insulating air layers to keep us warm; our suns harness the phenomenon of nuclear fusion to light our skies."

They all went ahh and smirked at one another as if it had been obvious all along.

"Outside of Virga," Keir continued, "we have a situation where natural phenomena are harnessed for nonhuman use. In fact, harnessed for nonliving, nonsentient uses ... Is such a thing still a technology?"

Venera was smiling at him now; encouraged, he said, "Out there is a world of natural phenomena employed by other natural phenomena. Some are employed for a purpose; others are controlled by systems that have no purpose--that are just technologies run amok. It's a wilderness. Chaos. A state of nature, built with and by and for what we would call technologies. Out there..." He suppressed a shudder at a flash of memory he'd not known he had. "Things look like they are designed, look like they have a function, look like they're being used by someone for some purpose ... when they're not. They appear to be technologies, but they are in fact just natural phenomena, distilled to their essences, and running wild."

Something in his tone had silenced the entire table. Their general expression was one of alarm--all save Venera, who appeared quite satisfied. "Thank you," she said, waving a hand brusquely. Keir bowed, and backed away as she'd taught him.

He was trying to catch that elusive memory as he sat down across from Leal. Something about a garden, and a house--and a woman who didn't remember Keir's name.

"--went all right?" Leal was asking. Keir shook his head.

"Yes, I think I gave them exactly the answer Venera was asking for."

"About what?"

He told her, and they talked on; but for the rest of the evening, Keir felt as though his mind were somehow divided in two. Part of him was at the table, basking in golden gaslight in the exotic palace of a Virgan kingdom. The other part was casting here and there, overturning the furniture of disused, natural memories in search of something elusive that suddenly seemed hugely important.

* * *

EVERY TEN SECONDS, the room flipped over. Antaea ignored the stomach-flipping effects of artificial gravity in such a small wheel as Airsigh indicated she should sit down opposite her. Along with them, the long and slightly curved conference table accommodated some other Last Line officers--but none of especially high rank. This, Antaea found especially interesting.

She looked from Airsigh to the other faces. "All right," she said, "what the hell is going on?"

They exchanged a few glances. "We're not sure ourselves," said a gray-haired captain. "We're told there's some new accommodation with the outsiders. A new alliance. But it's the First Line who're telling us this, dictating to us like we have no say in the matter. It's..."

"Disturbing," said Airsigh. "Look, Argyre, I'll be blunt. Our senior officers don't seem concerned, but those of us on the lines, we're hearing conflicting stories, and we want to know..."

"Who's right and who's lying?" She twined her fingers together on the tabletop. "I'm afraid I can't help you with that."

The older man shook his head impatiently. "Your friends in Slipstream think there's a threat to Virga."

Airsigh nodded. "And the First Line followed what it thought was that threat into Aethyr, where it crashed some of their ships. At least, that's the official story. But we know there's another side to it--this claim that somebody out there was trying to make contact with us and it all went wrong."

Antaea blinked in surprise. "You heard that?"

Airsigh tapped a sheaf of papers Antaea hadn't noticed before. "Something out there has continued to try to make contact. It calls itself a 'morphont' and claims that some history dean, Leal Hieronyma Maspeth, was its intermediary." She shot Antaea an intent look. "Do you know anything about these morphonts?"

"I know they're not sapient like we are," Antaea said. She'd made the same objection when Leal had told her about the emissary. "They wear consciousness like clothing--they don it and shed it as needed. How can the interests of creatures like that possibly align with ours?"

Airsigh gave that question some consideration. "They might if we faced another, bigger threat," she said finally. "'The enemy of my enemy' and all that. Maybe they don't think the way we do, but they can calculate odds just as well as us. Anyway, we don't know, and this is why we're trying to investigate further."

Antaea frowned at this unsatisfying answer.

"The problem," said the older Guardsman, "is that the First Line has declared the matter closed and refuses to talk to the morphonts. At the same time they're receiving all these new visitors of their own. It's as if some other faction has gone into high gear. We know there were already some ambassadors among the First Line."

"So you don't have any reliable information about what's going on out at the high command?"

Airsigh laughed. "Oh, we have plenty of information! It's just hard to make sense of it. Like, take the 'emissary' or 'monster,' for instance. We've seen reports from the lone survivor of its attack, and they corroborate the First Line's story."

"Who's this survivor?"

"He's a cabinet minister from the same sunless country as the professor. Name's Loll."

Leal had told Antaea all about Eustace Loll, of course, and had painted him as an untrustworthy mosquito of a man. There was no way Antaea could admit to these people that she knew anything about him. "What's his story?"

"That the white filaments making up the morphont's body had taken over the other survivors of the crash one by one, turning them all into horrible extensions of itself. He spun quite a tale--and he ended it by warning that anybody else who went down to the plains of Aethyr was likely to meet the same fate. Convenient. Our senior people believe it."

"Wait a minute!" Antaea looked from face to face. "There is no plan to look for other survivors?"

"None," said Airsigh tersely. Distractedly, she tapped the papers with one fingertip. "Then the First Line sent us him." She nodded at a closed door that led to another section of the tiny house wheel.

"Who is he?" Antaea asked.

"Why don't you meet him," suggested Airsigh, "and then maybe you can tell us?" She made to rise, causing the two men on her left to shuffle out from behind the table to make way for her. Suddenly apprehensive, Antaea followed her to the door, where she knocked discreetly. "Come in," someone said.

He was extraordinarily good-looking, and would have stood out in any Virgan crowd despite his attempt to wear nondescript, even slightly shabby clothing. He bowed, a little awkwardly, as Antaea entered the parlor where he'd been waiting. "I'm Holon," he said.

"Antaea Argyre."

"Ah, yes! The adventuress. I've heard so much about you."

His name was vaguely familiar, but she couldn't quite place it. Something Leal had said ... "They tell me you're an ambassador," she said cautiously.

He shook his head. "Not really--oh, I should explain. I was an observer sent from my people as part of an exchange with your Home Guard. When the incident at Aethyr happened, I was stranded with the Home Guard ships on the plains. I managed to return to my people, but I'm afraid the rest of that expedition was lost. --Except, I hear, for Minister Loll."

This Holon was as charming as he was handsome, but Antaea remembered where she'd heard the name before. She nearly said, "You tried to convince the Guard to kill Leal Maspeth," before remembering that if she admitted she knew that, she'd be giving away Leal's return, the existence of another door to Aethyr--essentially everything. "How is it you survived?"

"I walked away," he said with a shrug. "The Guardsmen and the other humans from Virga wouldn't have survived the journey. But I," he raised his perfect hands, "have augmentations that allowed me to survive until I could contact some of my people."

"But by then the rest of the survivors were dead?" He nodded. "Killed," pressed Antaea, "by ... what?"

Holon crossed his arms and frowned out the parlor's window. "We call them morphonts. They're creatures of Artificial Nature; they come in as many varieties as there are stars in the sky.

"Oh," he said suddenly. "You caught me as I was eating. You don't mind if I--?"

"By all means." She saw that a small buffet had been set up under the window.

He noticed her interest, and smiled. "Would you care to join me?"

Silent, she piled her plate high with cold cuts. Standing next to this foreigner, loading up on food--it was a very strange experience, but she barely noticed. She was thinking about Leal's conviction that the emissary was a friend, while at the same time, she'd insisted that it wasn't a conscious being like herself. The contradiction had been glaring the first time Antaea heard it. Over the weeks it hadn't become any less so.

Holon frowned at the fare, which was mostly meat. "It's difficult grazing for a vegetarian here."

"You're a vegetarian?" She watched as he picked through the food.

"Don't get me wrong, I love meat," he added as he piled up a plate. "Back home, I eat it all the time. But then, we've got other things besides meat and vegetable matter to eat--and whatever meat I eat is vat-grown."

She nodded, remembering the Home Guard fortress at the Gates of Virga. "I've had it. A perfect steak, every time."

"The mere thought of eating the flesh of something that once had a brain horrifies me," he continued. "I know you Virgans are a bit more ruthless that way. I suppose you have to be. But my conscience won't allow me to harm another sentient being."

Antaea put down her plate. "But you're happy to kill the morphonts." He shrugged. He sat at the parlor's little table, arraying his food around him.

"Tell me more about the morphonts," she said. "They're not aware like you and me, you say. How then are they a threat to anyone? Wouldn't they just be like plants, if they have no minds?"

"It's hardly a secret who they are or how they work--"

"Oh, but it is. Your people never told us about them," she interjected. "I was in the Guard for many years. I even traveled outside Virga--"

"I'm sure we told you," he said with sudden irritation. "Maybe you didn't understand us."

"Fair enough." She held up a placating hand. "And forgive me if you've been asked this twenty times already. Indulge me--what do you believe the morphonts are?"

"A mistake," Holon said curtly. "One that's taken over much of the universe, at the expense of conscious beings like you and me.

"Imagine that your tools could think--even anticipate your needs. Back in the early days of our expansion into space, we humans created machines like that. At first, we had to tell them what to do. They obeyed our orders--did what we said, but not always what we wanted. They didn't understand us the way we understood each other. So some wise idiots decided to give them the capacity to understand our needs, as well as our commands. So they could anticipate what we would want, rather than having to be told."

Antaea frowned. "And this was a mistake?"

He snorted. "Well, it's not as if there hadn't been countless stories written by then about what would happen if you let your machines understand you that well. --Problem is, they were all wrong. They all assumed the machines would take over--remove our free choice, disobey our orders in order to give us what we needed instead of what we wanted. Ridiculous, of course. They never ceased to follow orders."

"Then what went wrong?"

"We'd given them the ability to perceive purpose. Many of our researchers thought that purpose--or values, intentionality--was an illusion of our human perspective. Turns out it's not; it's an emergent feature of the universe, as real as water and rock. And it's not just humans that have it."

"Purpose ... You're talking about meaning?"

Holon nodded. "The Moderns who built the first artificial intelligences didn't really believe our minds were a part of this universe. They were still saddled with ancient religious beliefs, but they didn't know it. They thought meaning was some kind of local human illusion, or the gift of a god. But everything that lives, wants, and to want is to give meaning to things. --To say yes, or no, even if it's just about whether some speck is food.

"Once our machines could see that, they could no longer see the distinction between us and any other living thing. Of course, we didn't realize it at first. By the time our ancestors figured it out, some of our machines had started taking orders from nonhuman--and nonthinking--kinds of life."

"You're saying they started working for ... what?" She laughed. "Trees?"

But Holon wasn't laughing. "We recognize each other. We see the spark of life, of awareness, in one another. It's so easy for us that we never even considered that it might not be easy for an artificial intelligence. But they are not us. They cannot recognize that spark in us, the way we see each other. Other than its shape, and the fact that one can give verbal orders and the other can't, what's the real difference between a human and a tree? Or a dog. Or a lion?"

She didn't know what those last two things were, but the implication was clear--and unbelievably strange--to Antaea. But she remembered some of the weird things she'd seen when she'd visited the realms of Artificial Nature. There had been odd machines--giant crystal spheres encapsulating little miniature ecosystems, surrounded by a retinue of guard bots and helper machines. She'd seen one plow down the center of a street, humans and virtual life-forms hopping out of its way, but none protesting or trying to stop it. She'd asked what they were at the time, but had not understood the answer. "You're saying we gave away our technology to ... nature itself?"

Holon nodded. "Exactly. One way to put it would be to say that we accidentally created a universal interface for our entire industrial and intellectual legacy--an interface that anything that can want, can use."

"But why not simply go back to the way it was? Make machines that only obey orders from something that looks like a human?"

"Oh, we do. Now. But the machines that chained their own purposes to those of nonhuman life-forms proliferated; they took their own will to survive and reproduce from the species they allied with. Some became fierce beyond all human control."

Antaea was shaking her head. Holon said, "Look at it this way, then: an artificial intelligence doesn't come with its own will to live. That's something separate from the ability to think, it has to be added on. You don't notice this until you start to build tools that can act on their own--when you stop using them directly. The greater the distance between your guiding hand and the actions of the machine, the more it has to develop its own sense of who 'you' and 'it' are. The best way to get such an autonomous machine to work for you is to design it in such a way that it thinks it is you. It studies your desires and needs the way your brain studies the needs of your body; it identifies with you entirely, and has no desires of its own. It isn't even aware of itself. But a machine that can do that can just as easily identify itself as a flower, or a crow, or any other creature. It could identify itself as a rock, I suppose, but rocks have no needs. A machine that did that would just stop. But imagine one that, for one reason or another, has no human to imprint on. It searches for things like humans--and let's say it finds a crow. Once it understands some particular crow, it comes to think of itself as the crow--and has access to the entire history of human ingenuity and industry, to aid in obtaining what that crow wants ...

"So nature rebelled, first on Earth, then all her colonies. Except in one place, where our technology couldn't reach."

"Virga." She thought about it. "So who are you, in this new world?"

He looked ruefully at his plate. "We're mice in the walls. You know, all things being equal, human beings aren't that competitive--I mean, as a species. But things haven't been equal for the past hundred thousand years. We've had technology, society, and the ability to plan. Other life-forms haven't. Artificial Nature gives all those things to anything that wants them. All things are equal now."

"Look, Argyre, there's no 'us versus them' thing happening here. They don't really exist. The morphonts are just mindless forces that have been given an industrial base. Something we made got away from us, and we're starting to get it back. The only question that's of any relevance is whether you're on your own side here, or on the side of blind forces that are against you. Your choice."

Antaea looked down, her arms crossed, then said, "Thanks. Enjoy your meal."

She made to leave, and he said, "Talk to me any time. I'm not just here for the food."

* * *

"I WISH I could tell you who to trust," she told Airsigh, "but I'm as confused as everybody."

The Last Line captain seemed to accept this. As she flew Antaea back to her hotel, however, she said, "What about Slipstream?"

Antaea pretended to think about the possibility. "I have ties there. I know they're deeply concerned about the same issues ... If you'd like, I can set up a meeting between some of your people and the admiralty."

"That would be good. I'll give the address of our drop box."

As she climbed out of Airsigh's little jet and watched it soar off into the flocking traffic of the city, Antaea knew she should be feeling a sense of triumph at how things had turned out. She'd made exactly the contact Chaison had hoped. Why, then, was she so troubled?

And, of course, she knew why: Holon. He'd not been what she'd expected. She remembered the blank thing her sister had become after being possessed by something from outside of Virga. Holon wasn't like that.

If anything was like the monster her sister had become, it was this emissary Leal claimed as her friend.

Deeply disturbed, she flew to her hotel to tell Richard that she'd been successful.

* * *

ANOTHER COUNTRY, ANOTHER palace, and another dinner party. They had long since blurred together in Keir's mind, yet he found himself smiling tonight as he, Leal, and Venera made their way back to this city's dockyards. Their military escort saluted and left them on the inner curve of the cylindrical dock. Leal waved to the soldiers, but Venera dismissed them with a sniff and, in the microgravity, bounded in long slow steps in the direction of their ship.

A cowled figure waited in the shadow of the yacht. Leal saw it only when Venera suddenly stopped and put her arm across Leal's chest. As Keir bumped into Leal, Venera reached for an absent sidearm; they'd been required to leave their weapons on the yacht.

"Please, I'm a friend," said a woman's voice. The gray-cloaked shape bobbed through the dock's minuscule gravity to perch before them, and as Venera said "Who--" it threw back its hood.

Leal recognized the face; this young woman had been at the banquet. She'd been seated at the first table to the right of the main table, which meant she was a person of high standing. Leal carefully bowed, and didn't quite have to kick Keir in the shins before he did, too. Venera held her head high--but of course, Venera bowed to no one.

They all stood in half-shadow, but the young woman clearly thought that this wasn't discreet enough; she windmilled her arms and sailed a few feet back, into the darkness. "Please, I can't be seen here," she called softly.

Venera glanced up at the well-lit main hatch of the yacht. "There's another way in," she said curtly. "This way." She led them under the belly of the yacht. To the left were the lights, gantries, and piled crates of the docking ring that rode at the central axle of the town wheel; to the right was a sheer drop-off, and night skies.

Venera fished a key out of her belt, then reached up into blackness. "Keir, give me a boost," she said. He knitted his fingers together and she stepped up to push an unseen door aside. She clambered in, and a moment later let down a rope ladder.

When they were all inside--in the yacht's cramped storage locker, as it turned out--Venera turned to the stranger and said, "You can speak freely in front of my companions. What is this about?"

"My name is Thavia. I'm the satrap's niece." She eyed Leal and Keir suspiciously, but then found a perch on some boxes and without further hesitation said, "You are not the first to come to us with talk of an invasion from the outside universe. The viziers made a big show tonight of sending a delegation to your grand colloquy, but according to my father, our government has already committed our loyalty to a different faction."

Venera scowled. "Who were they?"

Thavia described two foreigners who had visited court. She had been pale-skinned, pale-haired, her lips a red slash across her beautiful face. Her name was Inshiri Ferance, and though Thavia had never heard of her, the mere mention of her was enough to make the satrap and his viziers turn as pale as her. Thavia had always feared the viziers, who were known to be capricious and judgmental, and she had never seen them afraid. They were afraid of Inshiri.

She offered the satrap power and new riches if he would ally with her against that upstart pirate sun, Slipstream. The Slipstreamers would arrive soon, spreading their lies, and Inshiri advised the satrap to imprison them at once. Her friends would be grateful if that were to happen. But as she spoke, she kept her head turned, ever so slightly, in the direction of the silent, bronze-skinned man who had accompanied her here. He was never introduced, but merely stood in the background with his arms crossed and watched Inshiri's performance. No one in the room, Thavia swore, had doubted who was really in charge here.

"They made a deal," Thavia told Venera. "I wasn't party to it, but whatever it was, my parents were supremely uncomfortable with it. After they left, I was told I was being sent to some city named Fracas, as a 'special ambassador' of some sort. I don't want to go..."

Venera stroked the scar on her chin. "Fracas? Would any of the people there recognize you?"

"Surely not."

Venera smiled. "In that case, I have a plan."

* * *

JACOBY SARTO CLOSED the door to his hotel room, and then had to lean on it heavily as a wave of pain and nausea overtook him. He looked up and down the hall, but there was no one to see his weakness. With a muted curse he walked carefully to the stairs, keeping his head high despite the almost overwhelming urge to simply lie down and curl around his maimed hand.

She had left his hotel room half an hour before. Theirs had not been a romantic rendezvous. The least of it had been the interrogation she'd subjected him to. He'd expected that, of course; how could she know he could be trusted, since she didn't even know where he'd been and what he'd been up to since they had parted ways.

That had been humiliating, but nothing compared with what had happened next. Inshiri still didn't trust him; she needed a guarantee of his loyalty.

"Fool," he muttered to himself as he leaned on the doorjamb to the stairwell. As Sacrus's representative on Spyre's grand council, he'd had a legitimate claim to all of Sacrus's remaining assets after the destruction of Spyre. He could have fought Inshiri for them--should have taken it down to a contest of loyalties and cunning then, when she was vulnerable. He had all of Sacrus's foreign operations in his hand, since he'd been able to act days before any of the surviving members of the ruling families thought to try it themselves.

But with the reins of true power in his hands at last, Jacoby Sarto had lost his nerve. Now he looked at the blood-soaked bandages wrapped around his left hand and said, "You've got no one to blame but yourself, Jacoby."

Unused to wielding power for his own sake, he'd found he had no idea what to do with the resources he'd acquired. He would never admit it to anyone else, but he'd been terrified to be saddled with the responsibility it all came with.

Inshiri Ferance hadn't had to threaten him. At the first opportunity he'd turned the foreign services back over to her, and he'd flown away from his chance at real power with haste and a terribly unmanning relief.

Inshiri knew he'd blinked, and though she'd allowed him back into her inner circle, she treated him with contempt. The guarantee she'd taken from him tonight was minor for her, but calculated to make him aware, every day for the rest of his life, that he was and would always remain a servant.

He put his good hand on the railing and stared down the stairwell, which seemed to be tipping slowly over--whether due to this wheel's rotation, or the delirium of pain he was in, he couldn't have said.

"Sane people put their docks up top," he said, then laughed at himself. He was talking to no one! Anyway, it was true; at the axis of a wheel there was no gravity and you could moor or unmoor at leisure. The engineers at Kaleidogig were stupid barbarians, though, and they liked to live dangerously. He slowly descended the steps, leaning on the wall to guarantee that he knew up from down.

When he entered the Kaleidogig docking galleries he shook his head in fury: how was he going to make it across this jumble of half-built jet bikes, stolen taxis, and decommissioned military catamarans, all of them swinging off hooks like fresh-caught game? The floor under them was a minefield of big hatches that could be thrown open by the pull of a lever--and might fall out from under you if you stepped on them. Even as he leaned there trying to pick out a safe route, the lamps in the long, upward-curving room flickered as one of the hatches banged down and a puff of wind rushed through the place. A courier who sat astride his bike above this hatch reached up, casually unclipped the chain suspending him, and he and the bike fell through the opening and into the hundred-mile-per-hour headwind made by the town wheel's spin.

A dockhand approached, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. "Yer all right, sar?"

"Fine. I'm fine." He hid his left hand behind himself, and wiped away the sweat on his forehead with his palm. "I'm expecting someone," he added curtly.

"If yer say so. Just don't go near the cats." The hand nodded at the bigger military craft, which hung nodding behind a yellow rope.

Jacoby pulled himself into a more dignified posture and forced himself to walk steadily over to the entrance hatches. These looked similar to the exits, but he knew that below, on the outside of the town's hull, each was partially sheltered by a ramp-shaped windbreak. There were lookouts down there waiting to open the hatches for incoming craft. That must be cold and lonely shift work, he thought, and he felt a momentary kinship with the men down there.

A hatch thirty feet away fell open without warning, and a small tornado of air blasted Jacoby, making him stagger. Like a strange jack-in-the-box, an airman on a bike popped up out of the hatch. He was standing up in his stirrups, holding up a hook, and at the top of his bounce into the hangar, he clanged the hook over one of the overhead rods. Then he sat down heavily as the bike swung, engine roaring, in the vortex of air that was howling through the hatch below him.

He cut the engine as the doors to the hatch laboriously inched shut. When the last crack had been sealed, leaving only the ominous whistle that all the closed hatches made, he pulled off his leather flyer's helmet and dismounted the bike.

Jacoby recognized him. They met just in front of the bike, whose round maw showed a still-spinning maze of teeth. "Sarto," said the man with a barely respectful duck of the head.

Jacoby took a shuddering breath and said, "Were you seen? Did anyone question you?"

"Naw, it's black air out there, I took the last fifty miles at a hundred 'n fifty miles an hour. Have to be crazy to follow me." He grinned, obviously still exhilarated at his daredevil stunt.

"Good, but you'll have to leave the same way." Jacoby couldn't help but glance around to see if there was anyone but the dockhand working here. If he were Inshiri, he'd put a watch on Jacoby Sarto--and maybe she was about to do that very thing. He had to put his plan in motion before it became impossible for him to contact his own men without her noticing.

He fumbled one-handed in his jacket, then held out a thick envelope. "Here's the orders. Are the ships ready? Fueled and armed?"

His man nodded as he took the package and shoved it into his jacket. He clearly hadn't noticed Jacoby's distress; good. "What's the target?" he asked with a grin. "I might go myself, if it's somewhere nice."

"It's not." Jacoby looked him in the eye. "It's Hell, actually."

"Oh, you've been there?"

"I have. Now on your way before somebody comes." He turned away as the airman hopped back into his saddle; but he was careful to watch and make sure that the jet roared to life, and that the courier rose and unclipped his line and fell into the night.

It was all in the hands of fate now, but he felt a little better at having finally done something decisive.

On the way back upstairs he became dizzy and nearly fell down. He sat in a broad windowsill and leaned his head against the rippled glass. A mile away, the giant can shape of Inshiri's observatory spun slowly in the black air. The structure was turned now so that Jacoby could see down its length. At its core glowed a tiny, human-shaped spark of crimson.

He smiled in angry satisfaction. Inshiri thought she was punishing him by giving him the Fracas operation. It was menial, after all; but she didn't know everything that was going on, nor did she suspect he might have a minor, but effective, fleet of his own.

Once it did what he'd just commanded it to do, he'd have one very big playing piece in his hands. With Fracas, he already had another; and if the bait he'd hung out worked (and he thought he knew the psychology of the person it was aimed at well enough) he would soon have the third.

There was only one more piece in play that mattered, and he didn't yet know how he would get possession of that.

He glared at the tiny figure playing goddess at the focus of her telescope. She thought the little sacrifice he'd given her tonight would make him a falcon on her glove. She was in for a surprise.

But not just yet. He levered himself back to his feet and grimly plodded up the last steps to his floor. In a few moments he could collapse on his room's tattered little bed, and tomorrow he'd send one of his men to locate a good source of painkillers.

Inshiri knew the game board, but he knew which pieces owned the game. With luck, in a few days he would have them all, and then Inshiri would become his pawn.