Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

14

LEAL WAS LOOKING out one of the yacht's portholes when the ship began braking heavily. She braced her hands on the bulkhead in front of her, as fore suddenly became down.

Her reverie was broken. Leal wasn't even sure what she'd been daydreaming about, but she knew her shattered ambitions had been in there somewhere. Her dream of being a university professor, of achieving tenure and spending her twilight years surrounded by ancient books ... it was all so far from here and now as to constitute a separate life. Once this was all over, could she return to those daydreams? It seemed so unlikely.

The braking eased up, and now she saw the running lights of some sort of way station up ahead. Several ships hulked in the twilight air. Stations and caravansaries weren't unusual in the zones where the light of different suns overlapped. It was too dim here for agriculture, but destinations were clearly visible. You could hang out a shingle and sell fuel and food, and make out pretty well. This particular station seemed even more prosperous than most.

It would be good to get out and stretch, even if there was no gravity to be had here. She climbed out of her narrow stateroom and nearly collided with Keir Chen, who was sailing down the yacht's spinal corridor. "Rest stop?" she said to him.

He shook his head. "Two of those ships are Slipstream cruisers, and I'm not the expert here, but they look pretty banged up."

She went back to her window to look. Sure enough, there were black scars and holes in the hulls of two of the vessels parked by the stop. Returning to the corridor she found Venera already undogging the main hatch. The admiral's wife wore functional leathers and a bandolier, with pistols at her belt. This must be serious.

"What's going on?"

Venera spared her a quick glance. "Those are two of the ships we sent to Serenity."

"Oh!" They all waited impatiently for the dockhands to catch their ropes and haul them in. Before they were even tied down, Venera had hopped off the ship and was pulling herself hand over hand along a rope that led to the station's main building. Leal and Keir followed as quickly as they could.

The station building was a wooden sphere about a hundred feet across, with various blocky buildings crowding its inside surface. There was an administrative shed, two stores, a hotel, a bar, and something that might actually be a brothel, based on the apparel of the women drifting in front of it. The center of the space held a bank of crude electrical lamps, whose flickering light was competing with a bright glow from the bar. Loud music and raucous voices could be heard coming from there.

Venera, Leal, and Keir looked at one another, then sailed in that direction.

Venera perched on the lip of the door and looked in; Keir did so opposite her. Windup lamps in colored paper balls were bouncing around the bar's main room, and all the wicker half-spheres where you could nestle with your drinks and friends were full. Men and women were leaping between the bar itself and various loud conversations; clearly, whatever was going on here was at its height.

One laugh wormed its way through the noise of all the others, and Leal found herself rearing back in confusion. "It can't be--"

She grabbed the doorframe and flipped herself into the room--and there he was, large as life and alive, in fact holding a helix glass of beer and cheering something. "Hayden!"

He glanced over, did a double take, and let go of the glass. "Leal!" Leaving his drink twirling in midair, Hayden Griffin launched himself across the bar, nearly colliding with another man who'd chosen the same moment to head for the toilets. Hayden opened his arms and docked with Leal, crushing her in his embrace. "There you are!"

She returned the hug, only now aware of how dangerously thin he was. Pushing him back, she gave him a once-over. He was dressed in an ill-fitting airman's uniform in Slipstream colors. His cheeks were hollow, his face and hands sunburnt. But he was alive, and he looked happy.

He looked past Leal and grew suddenly serious. "Lady Fanning."

"Griffin." Venera nodded coolly to him. They had a history, these two, Leal remembered, and not a romantic one. There was blood between them.

"Did all of your men make it?" Venera went on. She was looking around the room, taking in what was now clearly a strange mix of ill-sized Slipstream uniforms and ragged black ones that must belong to Home Guard members.

Hayden shook his head. "We lost ten. Four on the plains, six yesterday."

Venera looked startled. "What happened yesterday?"

"Your secret city was attacked!" The speaker was a lean Home Guard officer, his uniform stained and torn. He hopped over to perch by the door. "They looked like pirate ships, but there were eight of them and they were packed with men. They jumped us just as we were ferrying the last of our men out of Brink."

"Venera Fanning, Niels Lacerta of the Home Guard," said Hayden. "Without Niels and his men, we wouldn't have survived long in Aethyr."

"I remember you," said Leal. "You came to sit by our fire that first night after the crash. We talked about my message."

He nodded. "We've talked about little else since you left us, ma'am. --Whether you were right; whether your 'emissary' is a devil or an angel."

"But..." Hayden looked from Leal to Venera and back. He ignored Keir, whom he'd after all never met. "What are you doing here?"

Venera shrugged. "A courier found us six hours ago, said there were damaged Slipstream ships at one of our designated rendezvous. Tell me more about this attack."

"They definitely knew where to find the city, and they knew we were there," said Hayden. "It was a coordinated assault. They meant to capture Serenity, I'm sure of it. We managed to beat them back, but they may return. The base commander sent two frigates to Rush for reinforcements."

"But who could it be?" Keir burst out. "Nobody knows about the city but us!"

"Us, and Jacoby Sarto," said Venera.

There was a momentary silence. Leal was confused. "I thought he was a friend of yours?"

Venera appeared to consider this concept for a time. Finally, she held one hand out, and waggled it from side to side. "Even odds," she said. "I'm going to say it was him."

"The commander had planned to send Niels and his men straight back to the Guard, and us directly to Rush," Hayden went on. "But we were attacked again on the way out of the city. One of the cruisers was holed; we've been leaving a trail of fuel all the way across winter. The captain pulled us in here to patch us up and buy enough fuel to get us home. We were just..." He glanced around, grinning. "... celebrating being back."

He shook his head impatiently. "But anyway, what I meant was--Leal, we met your friends in the city and they told us a little of what happened. Is it true about Tarvey?"

"Ah," she said, suddenly stabbed by deep sadness. Tarvey had been Hayden's loyal servant and friend. Loyalty had brought him to Aethyr, had led to him risking his life for Hayden more than once. Ultimately, it had cost him everything.

"Hayden, I don't know what to say."

"Say what happened," advised Venera. "And I suggest you be quick about it. The admiralty's not going to like this tab we're running up."

* * *

THEY REMAINED AT the way station for a day, while final repairs were completed on the cruiser. Venera spent much of that time as the queen of a buzzing hive of courier bikes, who zipped in from all six points of the compass to drop off and pick up dispatches. She was planning something, that was obvious, and it was equally obvious that she didn't want her husband to know about it until it was too late for him to veto her. At one point as Keir flew by the main room in her yacht, he heard her telling one of the cruiser's captains, "We're on the far side of the world from Slipstream. I have no time to send home for orders! No, we do this now, or the opportunity is lost."

Later, Hayden Griffin and the Home Guard commander Lacerta came by. After an intensive grilling from Venera, they stayed to sample her liquor cabinet and talk. Keir was finally introduced to the famous sun lighter, and after some initial caution, found that he quite liked Griffin. They had something in common, after all: they both loved machines.

Maybe that was the trigger--thinking about machinery--because late that night, Keir began to remember.

There was a storm that night, and even though the Judgment was lashed to the station's dock, the winds howled past and shook it like a child's toy. Slotted into his bunk like a wasp in its hive, Keir found himself in total darkness, and weightless except when a gust caught the ship. The close walls of the sleeping closet would tap him unexpectedly, and he'd jolt awake to the sounds of flight or the strange rumble of thunder in an echoless sky. He had no idea how long this went on; and while it did, his mind drifted from Hayden's description of sun-building to jumbled images of things he'd built in Brink--and then beyond.

At first, yes, it was just Brink, and Maerta and the others, though Leal appeared to him, too, more than once. Something about his changing feelings for her reminded him of other memories--but he couldn't find them, he couldn't find them. He kept groping for scry's emblems, but scry didn't work in Virga.

That was Candesce's fault. Right now he hated the sun of suns, and its dark influence on technologies it didn't approve of. He resented its secretive mystery; how it hid itself in wreaths of flame at the heart of Virga, while its vast invisible wings unfurled to the very walls of the world and beyond.

So good, then, that he'd plucked one of its feathers--turned, triumphant, to wave it to Maerta except, no, hadn't it been Sita? Sita all along?

--And suddenly there he was, perched on a bench in a garden whose hedge mazes and flower-dewed trellises draped like the skirts of a seated woman around a round-towered, coral-hued house. The white sun Vega blazed in the zenith, and heat haze and the buzzing of insects complicated the air around him.

The planet's name was Revelation; the continent's, Aegeas, and the city whose floating aerostats peppered the horizon was Atavus. He'd grown up here.

His wife, Sita, was humming as she aerated the roots of some little yellow flowers with her long fingers, lovingly tending the little lives. She was also standing on a ladder and frowning at the gutters of the house, where stalks of grass were poking up. One of her was a proxy, but it would never have occurred to Keir to wonder which one. Sita inhabited both bodies simultaneously and with equal ease.

"Sandrine introduced me to this man the other day," her Self in the garden was saying. The glyphs around her head indicated she was talking to Fethe, one of her oldest friends, who was a thousand kilometers south of them today. "She said you know him a little?"

Keir watched her closely, as if he could learn something this time that he hadn't been able to perceive the last hundred times he'd visited this record within his scry.

"Yes, she said you thought I should meet him." Sita laughed. "His name is Keir Chen..." Her expression grew troubled, and she looked around herself, and spotted him.

They'd been married for six years at that point, and had known one another for ten.

Keir stood and walked a little ways away so that he could see himself sitting on the bench. You could do that in scry, since its records of an event didn't have to be limited to what you saw with your own eyes. From outside, the look on Keir's own face was eloquent, as it always was in the record. The version of Keir he was looking at had just come to realize that his wife was de-indexing, and that it was the emblems of her time with him that she was erasing.

A fateful conversation was about to start, but Keir didn't want to hear it. He kept on down the path, which stitched itself together from the infinite storage of his scry as he went. It could show him every instant he'd spent here, but it usually mashed them together into the emblem of an idealized, perfect day. Not for this day's events, though; he rarely accessed their emblems, but reviewed them in their entirety.

De-indexing had been a taboo for him before Sita started doing it. After, he'd drifted into temptation, year after year. But when something finally happened that made him annihilate vast tracts of his past, for some reason he'd remembered all those pieces he'd always planned to lose. Instead of erasing the pain and the disappointments--even Sita's betrayal--he'd kept it all, and lost something else.

Near the path, a cloud of pixies was fluttering around a meter-high revus bush that was threatening them with tiny cannons mounted on its metal leaves. "Don't you dare!" a pixie scolded as the guns swiveled toward it. "Keir Chen will dig you up if you shoot us!"

The plant began firing, in a cascade of little pops that would be inaudible from more than three meters away. The pixies ducked and swerved and, from a safe distance, began chanting "We're telling! We're telling!"

Keir rarely visited this part of the record, but somehow this time he remembered it--as he was remembering everything now in his dream, rather than accessing his scry. For some reason he'd stopped and frowned at the unfolding drama. Pixies, dryads, talking trees--they'd been a normal part of his life on Revelation. The world was an enchanted place and, even at the time of this memory, he'd taken that for granted.

Near the revus was a clutch of box tulips. The flowers were ordinary enough, but each one was contained in a crystal case scaled to its size and pose. Like the nanotech revus bush, each terrarium was festooned with miniature cannons, trembling stingers, and caterpillar-blinding lasers. Little doors in the boxes sported flashing bee-attractor signs.

Woe to the gardener who tried to dig up a box tulip. At the first cut of the trowel their planetary mesh network would go on high alert. Tulip sirens would go off all over the neighborhood. Brain-hacked wasps would converge on you. The tulip consortium's AIs would harass you by tagging your scry with insults and slanderous accusations. Their shell companies and corporations would hire lawyers and sue you.

If you made it indoors unscathed, the tulips would bomb the other flowers in your garden until you came out again and promised them reparations.

That sort of ruckus had never seemed remarkable to Keir when he was living here. At some point after he'd left Revelation, though, and before he'd de-indexed his own life, the tulips and the pixies had become the most urgent part of his memories of Revelation. He just wished he remembered why.

A shadow fell across the clutch of tulip terrariums. Keir looked up to see a black, faceless, hooded figure looming over the path. It raised a bony finger and pointed it at him accusingly.

This was no longer a memory of the day he'd discovered Sita's discontent; instead, he was remembering visiting that memory at some time after.

"You should not be here," said the nag.

He glared at it. "I'm not staying." The nags were a common feature of the scry, and he would regularly see them in the distance when he visited this, or any memory. They were there to kick you out of your recorded past if you spent too much time there. They were an annoying, but important, mental-health tool of the scry.

He'd always considered the nags a nuisance, though he'd rarely met one up close. When he'd laid down this particular memory, they'd still been common in Revelation's scry.

"You keep coming here," grated the nag now. "We don't like it." It bent over and began swatting box tulips. Each virtual terrarium fizzed and vanished as the nag touched it.

Keir remembered cursing. "How can you say that! You left Revelation! You abandoned us."

"You should go. Or do you want me to wipe this record clean?" The nag began reaching out, grabbing distant clouds, hills on the horizon, and floating city-spheres. Soon it had an armful of scene elements. "Do you want these memories crushed?"

"You dare threaten me with that?" Keir pointed a shaking finger at one of his Sitas. "When you gave up on her?" The nag squeezed, and pieces of the memory popped like soap bubbles. Keir yelled in fury and fell out of the scene--and, on Venera's yacht, banged against the wall of his sleeping closet.

* * *

LEAL FOUND HIM outside. Keir was sitting on the yacht's hull, letting the fresh breeze following the storm caress his brow. He opened his eyes when she appeared in the hatch, noticed the concern on her face and, as she made to go back inside, said, "No. I'd appreciate the company."

She clipped a line to her belt and climbed out next to him. Candesce was a yellow fire at infinity, just slightly too dim to make daylight for any nation that might covet this volume of air. It was still night by Slipstream's clock, and the ship had been quiet when he'd come out here.

Leal settled down next to him, but said nothing. Keir felt a growing compulsion to fill the silence; at last he said, "Do you know how old I am?"

She shook her head. "Seventeen? Nineteen? Or do your years differ from ours?"

"No, they don't." He met her gaze and said, "Leal, I am seventy-nine years old. Too young to have neotenized myself twice. Yet it seems I did."

She reared back in surprise, almost losing her grip on the hull. "Keir, what are you talking about?"

"Neotenizing. De-indexing. They're two ways to renew yourself when the weight of life and memory gets to be too much." He looked back at the flowerlike cloudscape ahead of them. "With de-indexing, you sever your ability to access certain records of your past. Then, your natural memories wither as well. It's a gentle way of turning your back on past events ... relationships ... that you want to forget.

"But neotenization ... it means 'to turn into a child.' That's a much more radical procedure." He held out his hands, which had once been larger and stronger. He'd had a scar on the back of the left one, though he no longer remembered where or when he'd gotten that. The scar was lost, and so was the memory.

"I've--I've been thinking a lot," murmured Leal, "about what you said--that death and immortality are equally bad choices. Your people learned this from experience with both."

"Of the two, death is the better choice," he said. "Death is forgetting, and there's plenty of reasons why you should want to do that.

"I was not born in the city of Brink. I come from a planet named Revelation, and I owned a house there. I was married." He looked at her, but now her expression was neutral. She was intent on his words, and not ready to judge them yet.

"My wife, Sita ... she de-indexed me. At the time, I was devastated; it was the end of a relationship I had built my life around. What I didn't know at the time was that what she'd done ... Well, millions of people on Revelation were undergoing similar transformations. The scry on Revelation had been compromised--hacked, I think is the old word for it. Sita didn't just leave me ... she left humanity itself."

Now that he knew where to look in his own mind, he remembered it--not all, but enough. Sita had forgotten him; but in the months after their marrage had dissolved, he'd still held out hope that they might have a second chance. They could, after all, start over from scratch as long as she didn't de-list him from her social reality.

But then, during the gentle winter of the year, something had started killing nags.

Revelation had always been a beautiful planet, and most of its beauty was real. The virtual overlays that accented it (like the cascades of pixie dust the fairies threw off) were subtle and added to the wonder of the natural world. Anyone who spent too long in a purely virtual world would get kicked out by the nags; keeping people anchored in reality was, after all, their function.

"When the rumors about the nags started," he told Leal, "I was too sunk in my own misery to pay much attention. At first I didn't notice when the scry's overlays on my senses began to become more detailed, more interlinked into these strange and gorgeous, purely virtual realms. I guess I was sufficiently unhappy--and sufficiently stubborn not to take a cure for my misery--that I remained immune to this kind of a ... siren call ... of a nag-free, virtual paradise that had started to creep over Revelation."

As he'd sat here on the hull of the Judgment, Keir had found himself thinking about one memory in particular--a memory that he couldn't believe he'd lost during these past months. It was of his last glimpse of Sita.

"I remember her," he said softly, "standing on marble steps that led up to a golden, glowing archway. A dozen of my other friends were there, too. It's like a dream, but I know it really happened: some of them walked without hesitation up and into the light and it ... swallowed them. Sita glanced around once, and there was recognition in her eyes. And then she, too, mounted the steps and consigned her mind to an online reality that would never again let her free."

In the real world, Sita's body and its double had fallen silent. That day they had left Atavus to join a vast throng of Revelation's population that was congregating at the edge of the seashore. Like ants, they were building a vast arcology--a hive--for the entity that had traded them its illusions for reality.

"A week after that, I sold my house to the tulips and I left Revelation for good." He had joined the Renaissance.

"Leal, I was one of the founders of the Brink expedition. But ... something happened. Sometime in the past two years, I was neotenized. That's not all bad; my body began to change, shedding its old cells and structures, replacing it all with new, strong tissue. But my brain began to lose the pathways it had built for decades. It began to rewire itself, and when that happens it's not just memory that you lose. Most of your personality goes as well.

"Whether I did this to myself or ... someone forced it on me, I don't know--"

"Forced it on you?" She looked horrified. "Who would do such a thing?"

He shrugged. "It's less than murder, but just as effective. And I would never have known, had I not come here to Virga. The process seems to have stopped, probably because of--" He nodded at distant Candesce.

She followed his gaze to the sun of suns. "Do you have any idea who it was? Someone at the Renaissance?"

"It could have been me." He slapped the cold hull. "I know I never got over what happened to Sita--but I'd also sworn never to do something like it to myself. And I remember resisting the feeling ... of things slipping away."

"Keir," Leal said soberly, "why did you come to Virga? You had a chance to go back after you rescued us--"

"No, I had to get out!" Even as he said this he realized how intense that need for escape had been; yet now, he had no idea what had caused it. Unless-- "If I didn't do this to myself ... if someone else did it to me and I knew, knew it was happening ... that would explain..."

Something welled up in him then, and to his astonishment Keir found he was crying. Part of him stood outside himself, watching in wonder, and his tears flicked away in the winds of Virga, and Leal wrapped him in her arms and murmured in his ear.

Eventually he stopped, but they stayed together, washed in the breeze and unspeaking.

Then the hatch flew open and Venera Fanning's head popped out. "There you are. Grab your things, I'm sending you back to Rush with the others."

Venera gave no sign of noticing that Leal and Keir were holding one another. Instead, she vigorously yanked at the tab on a signal flare, and when it lit, began waving it in broad strokes. She left a long spiral trail of smoke on the air.

Keir and Leal disengaged themselves. "Where are you going, Venera?" asked Leal.

"The city-state of Fracas," she announced with an air of satisfaction. "Currently something of a thorn in our side, no? And I'd like to know why." Keir had seen the red dots Venera had started adding to her chart of nations; and since their meeting with Princess Thavia, he'd certainly noticed how many cities and countries had begun turning the Judgment away. "If Sacrus and its outside allies are mustering their own alliance, we need to know the details. That could take a very long time if we were to rely on diplomacy and reportage. What we need is a way to make a very quick head count." She grinned rakishly, every inch the pirate queen in her leather trousers and flapping shirt, sizzling flare in one hand as the other clutched a guide rope hanging off the Judgment's nose.

Keir laughed in surprise. His melancholy mood was evaporating in the face of the sheer strangeness that was Venera Fanning.

The flare died and Venera let it go. "It's funny--I've come full circle," she mused. "Fracas is right next to where Spyre used to be. The city's always sheltered under Spyre's battlements. It's under no one's jurisdiction. It would be the perfect base for people who claim no country of their own, don't you think? I've no doubt that if the hostages are still in Virga, this is where they're being kept.

"Ah!" she added brightly. "There they are."

A glitter of ship lights had appeared in the depths beyond the way station. There must be four or five vessels there--all quite large by Leal's reckoning.

Venera made to reenter the yacht, but looked back to say, "I'm leaving in a half-hour, so you'd best be gone by then."

"And a fond good-bye to you, too," Leal said after she vanished. She and Keir climbed over to the hatch. "Well, as usual, Venera seems to have a plan," she said as he opened it. "But what about you, Keir? --Now that you know ... something ... of yourself? What are you going to do?"

He took one more look at Candesce, half-wrapped now in veils of cloud. "My memory's a puzzle," he said. "But I think enough of the pieces remain ... and one thing I do remember is that I'm good at puzzles.

"I'm going to put this one together."