Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

18

LEAL HAD BEEN working on this speech for months. Without pen and paper at hand, she had rehearsed it in her mind while trudging across the strange, flat landscapes of Aethyr. While climbing the long slope of the world's end, or sitting too exhausted to eat the meager rations they'd brought, she would retreat into herself and imagine that she stood in front of a vast assembly, all attentive and eager to hear the revelations she was about to drop, word by word, into their ears.

This was no assembly. It was a mob, and a hostile one that was only reluctantly subsiding into its seats. The lofty sense of mission that she'd imagined would sustain her in delivering this message simply wasn't there; instead, she felt exactly as she had on countless occasions when she'd had to tutor a roomful of impatient, pampered adolescent boys.

"Your nations nearly fell four years ago," she shouted, ignoring the sound of glass falling into the gardens somewhere to her right. "All of them. Would you be dead now if they had? Or controlled by something alien, like that poor soul, Aubrey Mahallan, whom Artificial Nature used as its pawn to break into Candesce? What do you suppose your fate would have been?"

She'd laid the pistol on the podium and leveled her jumbled note pages at the crowd. "Virga nearly fell again a year later, when another human became the vessel for an attempt to recapture the key to Candesce. Telen Argyre, whose sister stands behind me, was also possessed by a force from beyond our world. That force continues to press upon us, relentless. It has tried sneaking in. It has tried forcing the lock. Now, it prepares to batter down the doors."

"But why?" somebody shouted. "What do we have that they could possibly want?"

Leal's shoulders slumped in relief at the question. "Candesce," she said. "It's all about Candesce.

"Think about it." She wasn't following her speech in any of the ways she'd imagined, but it didn't matter now. She knew what to say. "Imagine that you've conquered the universe--and not just the universe outside yourself. Your offspring have flooded across the stars, copying and transforming themselves in a hurricane of ecstatic creativity. They are all wildly different in their shapes, sizes, their minds, morals, and goals. But the only ones that matter, you believe, are the ones that can think. This is because your perfected minds contain a complete model of reality. --A completed physics, a final chemistry, all possible biologies ... an image, in your mind, of everything that is possible in our universe. Because your minds contain all possibilities, you've concluded that you are the real universe, and that messy, unpredictable realm of non-thinking matter and energy outside your perfect mind is just an illusion, a fallen dimension to be swept entirely aside in time.

"And then, your unstoppable flood hits a stone. Candesce stops you, and worse--far worse!--its very existence refutes you. You've come to believe that Mind is the true reality, and that the vessels you seem to need to house it are an afterthought, a noisome and filthy necessity you'll erase in time. But that's not true. Mind is always embodied. It has to be.

"And now, the cracks appear in your perfect mask. Why have you been expanding so relentlessly? Why this ceaseless creation of new forms in your infinite mind? --These paradises, each built on the rubble of the last? The million discarded languages, the games of culture, the recursive invention? It's because something still eludes you. Meaning ... eludes you."

The emissary's people had deluged Leal with theory, with numbers and physics. The morphonts had told her how Candesce's protective field violated the physical laws that served as the bedrock of Artificial Nature's operating system. Candesce's very existence disproved the virtuals' claim that they held--and embodied--universal truth. Yet there was more to it than that. For why did any of this matter? During the long walk across the plains of Aethyr, and at night as she sat next to the strange campfires that gravity made possible, Leal had tried to see past those explanations. --Not to understand what they were saying, but rather, what they meant.

"Why did our ancestors build Candesce?" she asked now, as she'd finally learned to ask during those days. "Forget the how of it. Why did they choose to limit themselves to these frail, brief bodies, when they could have joined Artificial Nature in its synthetic heavens? They could have had immortality, and they threw it away.

"I will tell you why. It's because it is our frailty, our briefness, our abject helplessness against the storms of fate that make our lives meaningful. I tell you now the great secret of our entire existence: that meaning can only come from being bound in the material world, in its constraints, its agonies, its fleeting moments. The virtuals strive to escape all pain, all accident, and the brute mindlessness of nature. Yet without these things, existence is a hollow vessel, and those who have become virtual have no true voice, can hear only the bright echoes of our lives."

She'd seen it in John Tarvey's eyes. He'd moved past needing flesh, and so what need did he have of emotions, which existed to propel the body; no use for pain, certainly, but then no use for pleasure, either. Without the need for a single unitary body, why organize himself as a single mind at all? Why care, why think, why feel, why be?

"Meaning comes from the moment, the place, and the bodies struggling in it," she said--and then she smiled and laughed, as if at a sudden thought; but this part she'd rehearsed.

"All of which," and now she softened her voice and gave her audience a rare smile, "brings me to the question of why I, a simple history tutor from the city of Sere in the sunless country of Abyss, one day came to find myself hanging from the ledge of a library window, while soldiers ransacked its interior in search of me and my companions. For if you would look for meaning in what I've told you so far, you must start at that moment, in that place, and with those bodies in struggle."

And with that she was off, telling them now, in full confidence, how the emissary had come to Abyss as a great voice cloaked in darkness; how its message had panicked those who heard it, driving some mad; how they had destroyed their ships, their homes, and one another in their attempt to silence it. The fleet of Abyss was assembled, and it met the emissary and was scuttled by its own terror. Yet none of this chaos was the emissary's intent; it was simply that it was a creature born and bred in Artificial Nature. Within the influence of Candesce, it, too, had lost its mind. When Leal and her friend Easley Fencher found themselves crawling through the library window, it was because she had finally acquired the ancient, banned book that would give her clues about what the emissary was, and how to find it.

As concisely as she could, she told them the rest of it: how she'd found the emissary and gone with it into Aethyr and beyond; how, on her return, ships from Abyss and the Home Guard had pursued them; and how they'd all crashed on the surface of Aethyr.

Leal had lectured many times, but she had never told a story in such a way as she was now, and never a story so true, never one with her at its center. She spoke in a kind of ecstasy, and there was complete silence among her listeners.

--Until, as she was describing their harrowing flight through the lost city of Serenity, someone off to the left shouted, "Can't a man defend himself in this court of opinion?"

She blinked and looked over: Eustace Loll stood on the path beside the ranked chairs. He was in a formal suit and he wasn't alone.

Rustling murmurs sprang up again, and Leal heard the squeak of floorboards as people crisscrossed the podium behind her. Chaison Fanning had discreetly stepped aside during her speech, but now he appeared at her elbow. "Those men are from your country?" he asked her quietly. She nodded, suddenly ashen.

Loll fronted a delegation from Abyss--that much would have been disaster enough, for her. But beside them stood another group, newly arrived as well, and these men wore the severe black of the Home Guard. Considering the weight of the medals, braiding, and epaulets on their jackets, she assumed these were the Guard's very leaders.

And worse, much worse: next to the Guards stood fifteen unnaturally beautiful men and women, all tall and haughty, and dressed in beautiful, shimmering clothes. The virtuals had sent their own delegation to the colloquy.

The ecstasy of using her voice, of practically singing out her story, collapsed. Leal shrank back from the podium, but stopped as someone strolled to the front of this parade. Leal saw the dress first: black as space, adorned with random splashes of diamond, and cut very low. The lady's skin was pale, as were her wide eyes that were a gray so light as to nearly be white. Her mouth was a scarlet line, her hair a tumble of blond curls. She slunk along the line of alert Guardsmen, a sly smile on her face. "What?" she said. "Were you thinking we wouldn't show up? Not," she added with a pout, "that any of us received invitations."

Chaison Fanning was trotting down the steps of the stage, a broad smile on his face and his hand held out. "On the contrary," he said with all evidence of relief, "we'd announced to the world that this meeting was open to everyone, and we're very happy to see you."

"Are you?" She glided up to him, and he took her hand and bowed.

"Lady Inshiri Ferance, I take it?" he said, still in his bow. Leal heard some gasps from the crowd. "I am Admiral Chaison Fanning, and on behalf of our gracious hosts I would like to welcome you to the grand colloquy."

"Would you, now?" She took back her hand. "Then," purred Ferance, "you'll have no objection to our delegation making its own case, since your so-called free press has already painted us as the villains?"

"We would like nothing better," said Fanning. "We will make space for you in the program."

"We demand to go first," said Ferance.

"That," Fanning said, "I think would be harder to arrange. We want to ensure that all the delegates start with the same basic information--"

"What information?" One of the Guardsmen came to stand next to Ferance. This man was unnaturally tall, and ropy muscle bulged under his black uniform--which was festooned with medals.

Fanning bowed again. "To whom do I have the pleasure...?"

"Nicolas Remoran, general secretary of the Virga Home Guard," the newcomer boomed. It was suddenly dead silent in the amphitheater. Without invitation, he stepped up onto the stage next to Fanning, where he loomed over the admiral of Slipstream like a tree. "And what is this information that you have about the outside world that can possibly compare to what the Guard has accumulated painstakingly over centuries?"

There was a momentary silence. Then: "Well, they knew I was alive. You didn't." Leal spun to see Hayden Griffin strolling past her, hands in his pockets as though he were spending an idle afternoon in the gardens. He walked right up to Remoran and said, "And anyway, it's not about what you know, is it? It's about what you never told the rest of us."

There was muttering, murmuring, and a smattering of applause. Remoran whirled and shouted at the crowd, "Do you want to know the truth?" His voice was huge, utterly filling the space. Moneyed powerbrokers and ancient nobles blinked in surprise. "Well, do you?" he roared.

There was a subdued reply. Fanning was calmly looking around, but Leal saw that his gaze was alighting in succession on the knots of soldiers he had scattered around the space. These were beginning to move forward.

"You're saying you don't want to hear our side?" shouted Remoran.

A hunched old woman in the front row stood up. "We do, we do," she said. That got a cheer, and the crowd began to chant, "Truth, truth, truth!"

Fanning threw up his hands and shook his head in sympathy to Leal. She shrugged in return.

The admiral held up a hand. "In the interest of keeping everyone happy," he said with a glare at the crowd, "we will allow the Home Guard delegation to go first." Before anyone could summon up a good cheer he added, "But anyone who tries to disrupt our program after this will be summarily ejected from the building."

Remoran crossed his arms and looked down at Fanning. "Fair enough," he rumbled.

Fanning tilted his head in ironic assent. "Then say your piece."

* * *

FOR A MINUTE or so Remoran prowled the edge of the stage, like some caught beast. Then he stopped in the center, clenched and unclenched his fists, and went through a remarkable transformation.

His expression softened; his shoulders slumped. He looked away from the crowd, and gave a great sigh. Then he said, "We couldn't do it anymore."

Leal had retaken her seat. She was boiling with rage at this interruption, and the stagy flamboyance of Ferance and her pet Guardsmen. Most of all, she was furious at Loll. There was that pistol on the podium ...

"We of the First Line defend the walls of Virga," said Remoran. "Because we do that, we move in and out of the world. That confers advantages to us--unfair advantages. We see what humanity could be like, if only it were freed of the disease, infirmity, and ignorance that rule inside Virga. For centuries now, we've held our tongues because of our ancient pact with the founding nations of the world. Leave us alone, they'd commanded when they founded our order. Let nothing from beyond the world touch us.

"We do our job very well. If, in the past several years, you've heard rumors of attempts to pierce the world's walls--well, just think of all the attacks you never heard of, because we foiled them."

He shrugged and started to pace again. "We get compensated for our work. We suffer no disease and we live to fantastic ages, because we can go outside to treat these things. And yet, you cannot.

"This umbrella of protection has always been extended to our immediate families. That's been the benefit that Guardsmen treasured the most. It's selfish, I know, that we can enjoy these benefits and you can't--but that was the pact, we always thought. Our pact with the people of Virga. Except, it's not, is it?"

He spread his arms to encompass the crowd. "Who here signed that pact? Who even knew of it?" Nobody said anything. "Our pact was made with your ancestors, hundreds of years ago. They chose--not you."

Now he put his hand to his face, looking pained. It was, Leal thought, an extraordinary performance, because it was exactly not what she'd expected from this huge, intimidating man.

"I have to make you understand," he said with apparent reluctance, "so I'm going to confess to you. This will be my legacy, I suspect--just this one story, and it's not a story I ever wanted anyone to know."

He grimaced at the crowd. "I betrayed my wife. --You see, she had a cousin, and after ten years of marriage, I fell in love with that cousin. I'll spare you the details. The point is that, in the midst of all of that, I was called to the walls, and while I was away a plague hit our town.

"My family lived in the principalities, the safest, most civilized, richest place in Virga--but days from the walls. Still vulnerable to disease, and war, and all the insanities of our backward world. Some miasma of air, a cloud whose water droplets contained a pathogen easily cured at the walls, had drifted through the principalities and left vomiting, diarrhea, and death in its wake. When I heard about the outbreak I took the fastest ship home, and when I got there discovered that my wife, Miranda, was ill--and so was my beloved Elize, her cousin.

"Our rules were clear," he said heavily. "The immediate family of Guardsmen can be taken to the walls and cured--if there's time, because days can make a difference. I could certainly save my wife, but..." He fell silent, and when he began again, his voice cracked, "she wasn't the one I wanted to save."

The chamber had fallen into hushed silence. Leal was astonished, and she could tell that everyone else was, too.

Remoran pulled himself together. "I didn't know what to do. Could I be such a villain as to divorce my wife and marry Elize just so I could bring her to be healed instead? I did everything I could to treat them both, but the medicines I'd brought from the walls didn't work--didn't work--in Virga!

"I dithered for days, and then, heartbroken, I made my decision. I gathered Miranda from her sickbed and we set out for the walls. But I'd waited too long. She died on the way." He closed his eyes.

"I turned the ship around. I raced home. But again, I was too late. Elize died in her sleep just hours before I reached her side. I lost them both..."

Again, he struggled to compose himself. Then he seemed to expand, shoulders no longer slumped, face clear and determined. "Who here wants their loved ones to die? Who here wants to die themselves? That is the pact our ancestors made. Leal Maspeth admits that they traded away immortality, in favor of pain, disease, and death, all for some illusion of meaning? Well, forget meaning. Give me love. Give me back my love ...

"There is another way. Our brothers from beyond the walls have always been troubled by our tragic lives, and they've made us an offer. Let's dial down Candesce's suppressive field, and for God's sake, let some aid and respite into this suffering world. Miranda didn't have to die. Elize didn't have to die; neither do any of us, ever again.

"Keep hiding in ignorance and misery, and condemn your own children to death--or open the doors and let choice into their lives. Decide which you want. May you decide ... more wisely than I did."

He hung his head, turned, and left the stage.

* * *

IT TOOK A while for Fanning to regain control of the crowd and move the colloquy back onto its original program, but Keir didn't pay much attention; he was watching Leal. He was proud to see her recover quickly from having her passionate confession derailed by Remoran's dramatism. She was obviously upset, but it seemed that she had little sympathy for her own feelings. Fear, doubt, any sort of helplessness--they just made her angry at herself, and then she used the anger to prop up her indomitable sense of purpose. Soon, she was leading a breakout session on Virgan history, corralling and guiding a small mob of generals, high priests, and cabinet ministers as if they were recalcitrant schoolboys. Keir watched for a little while, but there was little he could do to help and he soon wandered away.

His role would be to help describe what the world outside Virga was like, but Remoran had set up multiple roadblocks to doing that effectively. So, while Fanning's strategists talked about how to proceed, he had nothing to do. The funny thing was that for the first while it was like being back in Brink, a child wandering through an awesome forest of adults. But then, gradually, a quiet voice somewhere inside him began to comment on those adults--not as a child, but as one of them.

They were so flawed, so obvious in their obsessions and willful blindness. Worst of all, they lacked scry, which could have so easily coordinated this fractious, chaotic tumble of disputes and paranoia. It was a miracle they were here at all, a miracle they were getting anything done. Keir began watching for patterns of interaction. Half-consciously, he was building a model of the meeting's social dynamics in his head.

"Keir Chen?" A page bowed to him. The boy was little older than Keir had recently thought he himself was. "Yes?"

"You're wanted in the grove." The boy pointed to the little stand of trees that spread out to embrace the left side of the government building within the curving sweep of its glass shell. Some kind of commotion was happening over there, with the paths blocked by security people and something tall and broad being trundled through the foliage.

"Hmm." He strolled in that direction. Various small crowds were clustered around speakers in the gardens; all were being very careful to avoid trampling on the flower beds, knowing as they did how rare gardens under gravity were in Virga. Other knots of people were arguing or conspiring in various corners.

The page led him past the grim security guards and under the trees. A number of people were talking up ahead; he heard shouted orders, the sound of creaking ropes. Rounding a bend in the path, they came upon a sight that made the page stop dead and swear under his breath. Keir grunted, but not because the bizarre vision was unfamiliar to him. Quite the opposite.

"Chen, can you explain this madness?" It was Admiral Fanning. He was standing with his arms crossed, tapping one foot impatiently on the gravel path. Next to him was a young, handsome officer in resplendent dress uniform who looked agitated and tired.

"We sent Travis here to the emissary's country and now he's back--with this!" Fanning nodded past his officer to where a work gang was just finishing their moving operation.

Keir whistled appreciatively. Forgetting to answer Fanning, he walked up to the base of the vast oak tree the work gang had trundled into this intersection. It towered over the young trees around it, its twisted branches and thick sheets of leaves dark and wild-appearing next to their manicured perfection.

The oak's extensive root system was contained in a tangled metal structure that sprouted six thick metal legs. These in turn rested on several wheeled, wooden carts that were bowing under the strain.

Coils of metal and brightly colored plastics wound up the trunk of the tree. Thousands of intricate glittering shapes perched motionless among its branches. Its base sported many arms and sensing devices, all unmoving.

A grimy man in coveralls with a set of shears in his hand was staring up at the immense, unruly thing. "It needs a trim," he said.

"Touch it and you die," Keir said quickly. When the man glared at him, he added, "I'm not threatening you. I won't kill you. It will."

Something else was being wheeled out now. It was a statue of some kind, much smaller than the oak, smaller than a man, in fact. "What about that one?" the gardener asked. "Can we touch it?"

Keir glanced at it. "Yes." It was clearly a morphont, nothing at all like the creature towering over him.

Fanning and Travis had come up behind him. Keir spared the officer a sympathetic look. "Traveling with these two must have been a nightmare," he said. "I'm glad I wasn't with you."

"You know what these things are?" asked the admiral.

"Yes. It seems your man Travis gained us a very powerful ally while he was away." When Fanning continued to look puzzled, Keir pointed to the tree. "This."

He walked up and reached out, but didn't quite have the courage to touch one of its massive legs. "It's an oak."

"I can see that." Now Fanning was just annoyed.

"No, I don't think you can. The oaks are one of the most powerful species in the arena. They're aggressive, relentless, generally hostile to animalia..." He saw Fanning's look, and smiled. "Look at the legs. Look at the sensing nets, the power units. This oak is a tree wedded to an artificial intelligence with mobility, weapons, dexterous arms, and an internal Edisonian engine for designing whatever it may need."

The admiral was still shaking his head. "But all a tree needs is--"

"Air, soil, sunlight, and peace and quiet, yes. And if you deprive this fellow of any of those things, he'll hunt you down and obliterate you."

"But ... but why? I mean, why should the artificial mind care? I can see what it has to offer the tree. But what does the tree offer it?"

"Something no AI has by itself," said Keir. "A four-billion-year-old will to live."

He could see that the admiral still didn't understand. And if he didn't, then explaining the awesome reality of the oak to the rest of the delegations was going to be a problem. Even AIs that controlled tremendous resources never lived very long, because their will to live was an add-on; it wasn't ingrained into every cell, into their most fundamental design parameters, the way it was with evolved life-forms. This oak gave the AI attached to it an anchor, an endpoint for any why it might ask about itself. The oak had no possible purpose beyond its own duration, and that was exactly what made it valuable.

"Admiral, you're looking at the great secret that divides the morphonts and the virtual. The virtual take everything as raw material for their creativity--even their own memories and identities. They have no root. They have no attachment to the physical world or any piece of that world. This oak does. It is its embodiment that makes it like us. That is what makes it our ally..."

He trailed off, hand still raised to nearly touch the oak. Being in the presence of the oak was bringing back memories. He remembered an oak visiting Brink, shortly before he'd de-indexed himself. Something about a warning ...

"Chen?"

He blinked and looked to where Admiral Fanning was frowning down at the other visitor. It sat on its little wooden cart, glittering tail coiled around its front paws, staring enigmatically into the distance. He could see the faint white strands of nanofiber that tied together its sculpted iron muscles and limbs.

"It's a cheetah," he said, walking up to it and looking into its gigantic green eyes. "A beautiful piece." He glanced at Travis. "You've seen it in motion."

The officer nodded. "Admiral, it talked. It's a new emissary from the ... the people who contacted Maspeth. This one is empowered to negotiate and its word will be binding."

"But it's not moving."

"Candesce," said Keir. "We're too close. To wake these two up, we'll have to bring them back near the skin of the world. You should have held this meeting there to begin with."

Fanning ran a hand through his hair. "They wouldn't have come. They'd have thought it was a trap. And they won't go now. This is a disaster."

Keir straightened. "No, it's a beginning." He stepped close to the admiral. "Sir, I lost my own wife to the virtuals. I will not see any hesitation or doubt among those who stand with me against it."

Fanning's eyes widened. Keir finally knew who he'd been before the de-indexing and his neotenization. Right now he saw in Fanning a young man, still inexperienced in many things--a technological and philosophical primitive who was preparing to hurl spears at starships.

"Guard these two, but do not touch them," he told the assembled soldiers. "Let no one know they're here as yet. Not one word," he emphasized, looming over the gardener who'd had the temerity to wave his shears at the oak. "All our lives depend on them."

He walked away, aware that Fanning was staring after him. He'd thought Keir was a boy; well, so had Keir himself. It was time to lay that illusion aside.

Yes, he remembered the oak's visit now. It might even have been this one. It had come to warn the Renaissance of some imminent danger, but what that was remained tantalizingly out of reach.

Keir did remember, though, how he'd been feeling just before it arrived. He'd been excited--no, far more than that: triumphant. He recalled savage satisfaction, an aesthetic sense of rightness, and how he'd used his scry to banish sleep for night after night as he'd worked out the final details of what he was going to present to the others. And then, when the oak came, fear ...

To de-index himself, he'd wandered far into the labyrinth of Brink, into empty quarters no one had yet explored. His second body had plodded behind him, towing something massive and unwieldy ... a manufacturing fab, that was it. But why just the fab? They were always attached to an Edisonian; there was no other source for the designs they used.

In darkness lit only by the eyes of his second body, he had built something. And then he'd given instructions to that other body, and as he'd laid down and fallen asleep, it had raised surgical hands that held a gleaming something ...

Pulse.

Now, on the edge of the grove in Aurora's great gardens, he stopped. Something had changed the moment he'd seen the oak, but it was so quiet, so unexpected, that he hadn't even registered it consciously.

Pulse. There it was again. He closed his eyes and waited.

Pulse.

His scry was awake.

"There you are!"

He opened his eyes, blinking at another incongruity--a voice that he shouldn't be hearing inside Virga at all. Disoriented, Keir looked around at the crowd of haughty nobles, prime ministers and presidents, diplomats and retainers. One figure was walking straight through them all, hand extended, a broad smile on his face.

It was Gallard, his tutor from Brink.