Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

22

TEN YEARS BEFORE, a single ship could have slipped into Candesce on any given night. An entire flotilla could have--and hundreds of ships did, every time the sun of suns shuttered its blazing eyes and retreated into sleep. The first visitors were always the scavengers: well-insulated, mirror-clad, and fast, they ventured in even before the last of Candesce's fusion engines had gone out. Braving incandescent air, they competed to find castoff and broken parts from Candesce's intimidating furnaces. The scavengers believed from firsthand experience that Candesce deliberately seeded its trash with intact machinery, for they often found vital components for the construction of suns among the flotsam. They snapped up this bounty, fought amongst themselves for it, and the winners retreated back to the principalities ahead of the dawn, to sell their prizes.

After them came the funeral ships. They were not here to pick up, but to drop off. Bodies from all over Virga made their final journey here, to be consigned to the dark, hot air by loved ones or the trusted funerary castes of a hundred nations. As Candesce began to rouse itself, these last ships departed, leaving roses and songbooks, the precious treasures of the beloved dead, and thousands of white-shrouded, silent figures hanging suspended in the air. Those who looked back as the sun of suns awoke might see light well past the throng, lighting the paper wings they wore. Dawn was an inferno of angels.

So it had been for centuries. But ever since the outage, the Last Line of the Virga Home Guard had tightened their defenses. They had long believed the last key to Candesce lost; so there was never any reason to board and inspect the funeral ships, nor to stop the scavengers from approaching the mysterious, closed blockhouses that nestled in Candesce's heart. Now that the key was loose again, everyone was suspect--even ships from other arms of the Guard.

Last Line ships were the first in at dusk, and the last out at dawn. They watched everyone, and their terrifying precipice moths clamped their talons onto ships at random, prying back their hulls to glare suspiciously at their cargoes. So when a small flotilla of First Line ships approached Candesce, they were stopped and boarded.

Since even before the grand colloquy, they'd all known this was going to happen. The First Line and Last Line had fallen out over what to do with Candesce. The First Line had the key, for it had been a First Line precipice moth that had taken it into Candesce to begin with, and when it burst forth again it had taken it to its masters at the rim of the world.

So those who boarded, and those who were boarded, had known for many months that their initially formal meeting would dissolve into gunfire and swordplay. They'd known, they'd even planned for it; but none of them really believed it until the bodies were in the air and blood was raining into the darkening skies. And the reaction that rippled back into both camps was shock, and outrage, and immediate mobilization.

* * *

SOMEBODY RAPPED ON the door to Leal's stateroom. She jerked and floated several feet away from the sleeping bag strapped to the wall. "Come in!"

The iron hatchway creaked open and Piero Harper stuck his head around it. "Ma'am, I'm sorry if I'm--"

"No, no, Piero, I was hoping to see you. And I can't sleep anyway." He glanced sympathetically at the little stateroom's porthole, where brilliant light was flooding in. It was nominally the night shift, but they were passing by some sun or other. "Oh, it's not that," Leal confessed. "It's the vibration." She put her hand to the wall, and felt an intensification of the throbbing from the ship's distant engines.

She didn't add that this stateroom reminded her too much of the cell she'd been stuck into aboard Eustace Loll's ship, back before they'd all crashed in Aethyr.

"But look at you!" she said. "You've fattened up nicely." Then, more seriously: "I can't believe your wife let you go again."

Piero grimaced. "She insisted. 'Those people'd be dead without you!' she said. 'You got to keep them safe!'" He grinned. "Truth to tell, I think she has her eye on the military pension I get for signing up."

"But you get to work with Hayden again?" He nodded.

"And you're a great lady now, as all knew you would be."

"Oh, I don't know about that. Nobody's telling me anything lately." No that she'd expected them to. She'd fulfilled her own mission by delivering the emissary's message, and now she was just so much dead weight. Leal didn't know why she'd insisted on coming along--the truth was, she would rather have been anywhere than here. But they were calling her the Herald these days; airmen got out of her way as she drifted down the corridors; and, apparently, even Admiral Chaison Fanning could not refuse her wishes.

A shadow crossed the porthole, and they both looked up. The sky outside Leal's porthole was full of ships; she'd never seen such an armada, and the thought that her message had launched it filled her with sorrow. "I just wish none of it had ever happened," she murmured.

"Ah, ma'am," said Piero. "This isn't your fault."

The light from the porthole shifted again; but this time, it brightened. Leal assumed one of the local suns had emerged from behind a cloud. Then it brightened again. And again.

Sirens went off all over the ship. She exchanged a wide-eyed look with Piero; then they both jumped to the porthole and looked out, ears touching.

All across the sky, suns were coming on. She knew the fleet was approaching the principalities, and in this spherical region around the sun of suns, some countries perversely lit their lamps in a rotation opposite to Candesce's. They had banished night entirely and grew crops and ran their industries twenty-four hours a day. Most of the principalities didn't even have their own suns; because of their proximity to Candesce, they didn't need their own lights. So Leal had been told. Yet incandescent pinpricks of light were appearing above, below, and to all sides--everywhere, even in those nations that were not supposed to have them.

She pushed open the bulletproof circle of glass, and a chaos of horns, sirens, and bells filled the stateroom. Warm, moist air puffed in and lifted her hair. She could feel the heat of all those suns on her face, and the feeling was so unfamiliar and hostile that she retreated into the shade of the room.

"Lady Fanning's list," said Piero. She shook her head at him, not comprehending.

"Couriers were sent to every country," he said, "all carrying the list, and the words of our treaty. People know which of their neighbors have sided with the invaders, and who's with us. They're choosing sides. They're moving!"

The drone of the ship's engines changed, increasing in pitch. "Is the whole world at war?" Leal asked, as the aft wall drifted up and became a tentative floor.

Piero didn't answer, but she knew the truth. Neighbor was turning against neighbor everywhere, all at once. Treaties a thousand years old were breaking, former friends were shooting one another in the airways between their ancestral homes. The majestic, intricate, and ancient systems of the principalities were being undone in minutes.

She covered her eyes against the glorious light--and it came to her that one man might understand the unraveling going on. Wherever Chaison Fanning was, he held in his mind a tactical map of the world. He knew where the fleets were, who had what ships and how fast they were. Even now his semaphore men must be sending orders to dozens of receivers, turning chaos and random movement into the coordinated flocking of a thousand ships. But had he anticipated this terrible light, the banishing of night in the unveiling of secret suns?

Piero came to stand with her, and she held on to his arm for comfort. But dear as he was, he wasn't Keir, and his presence wasn't enough to keep at bay a growing sense of despair.

* * *

DISTANT SHEETS OF rain trailed like coy veils over the towers and bridges of the city of Brink, uncovering and hiding its vistas and architectural surprises, now here, now there. Where they had passed, the balconies and rearing walls gleamed like oil on water, presenting myriad pastel colors to the eye. The scents of rain and wet stone hung in the warm air, hinting at the possibility of life.

Despite his haste, the sight stopped Keir in his tracks. He had never seen Brink like this--never even guessed that its black minarets might hide such delicate hues. He couldn't even tell which of those distant pillared cathedrals was Complication Hall, because he had always found it in the past by the light from its windows. Now he saw that there was not one, nor two or even a dozen, but many such halls, some within hailing distance of the Renaissance's home.

He could also see bomb damage--lots of it. After enduring brutal avalanches for centuries, Brink was not easily erased; nonetheless, whole precincts of the city were flattened rubble-slopes now.

As he shaded his eyes against the blazing sun to try to make out details, somebody bumped Keir's shoulder from behind. "You're blocking the way!"

"Sorry." People, and stranger things, were pouring out of the wide doorway behind him. Twenty minutes ago, he had been packed into the tiny transfer room with them, enduring the sudden shift from Virga's now-familiar weightlessness to the gravity of Brink. No one had spoken during that short trip, and many of the humans, freshly recruited from Chaison Fanning's navy, had cowered in awe and fear of the morphonts. Now they were bursting into the glowing air of a new world, and everybody was talking at once.

He had to smile as he strolled after them. Brink was new to him, too, though in retrospect it was unsurprising that the Renaissance's allies would tow one of Aethyr's hovering suns up the long slopes to light the city. Those sheets of rain must come from melting glaciers high above, which meant that the avalance problem must be far worse these days. Sure enough, when he looked for it, he could see chunks of ice and snow piled around the bases of nearly every tower.

Better get inside, then. He hurried across the long span of bridge and into the lofting corridors of the metropoloid. Here was military order, of a sort: work gangs hauling strange devices up from the Hall and their various strange births in the Edisonians; soldiers hefting unfamiliar weapons; lines of men being debriefed by pacing officers.

Fanning had wasted no time in establishing a beachhead in Brink; in fact, he had clearly sent a sizable armada there after the abortive attack on Serenity. Keir had known a little about this activity, which was how he'd been able to get himself on board one of the fast courier sloops that Fanning had moored above the palace during the grand colloquy. Keir had talked to some of the pilots about what they might expect to find in Serenity and Brink. But he'd had no idea the operation was being conducted on this scale.

Lightning flickered through the windows and heads turned. "They're at it again," someone muttered. As he walked Keir counted half-consciously, waiting for the thunder to follow the lightning, but it didn't come. Just more insistent flashes.

He stopped a bare-chested navvy who was carrying a large steel cylinder. "What's that?" Keir pointed to the window.

"It's the Enemy, in't," said the airman. "Battle to end all battles going on, or so they say. They tryin' to get here, our boys holdin' em off."

Not lightning, then. Nukes, or laser fire, and probably hundreds of kilometers away. Keir frowned and hurried on.

He took the last set of stairs down to the Hall two steps at a time. In his imagination were all the ways that the virtuals could obliterate Aethyr, or Virga. They could accelerate an asteroid from the far side of the solar system, shoot it through both worlds at a thousand kilometers a second, and let the shock waves transform them into expanding spheres of gas ... then simply move in and harvest Candesce like the seed in a smashed fruit. They could stand off and peel off the world's skin with terawatt lasers, then aim them through the holes at every sun and city inside. They need not be polite.

He could guess what stopped them. They had no idea how Candesce worked. They did not know what it was capable of. And so far, they had done everything in their power to avoid waking it up. But how long would that caution continue?

The tall doors to the Hall were guarded by a detachment of men in Slipstream uniforms. One put out his hand as Keir made to enter. "You're not on our list."

"I live here."

The man looked Keir up and down, and he realized he was still wearing his now-rumpled dress attire from the colloquy. "Try another one," said the doorman.

"But--" He caught himself as he felt an odd but familiar feeling. It was scry, the whole cloud of relationships and nonverbal political fencing that had once been as intimate to him as his own breath. He couldn't help but smile as the network lit up with glyphs and emoticons of astonishment: they'd felt him log in.

There was something else, though, another familiar presence even more intimate than scry. And now his smile widened, alarming the doorman. "One second," said Keir; and he held up his arms, palms out.

A hundred dragonflies rustled out of the shadows, rising like the hood of a cobra to hover above him like some strange halo. The guards stepped back, swearing and fingering their unfamiliar new weapons. Suddenly Keir could see, in a way he hadn't been able to in months. He closed his own eyes in bliss.

"Let him in." He'd brought his second body over from where it had been languishing in a closet in the Hall's foyer. The guards were even more startled by its appearance, for of course it looked like a younger version of Keir. It was waving to him from the Hall behind them, so they fell back and Keir walked past them with a confident nod--and into the arms of friends and comrades he hadn't properly spoken to or even recognized since his de-indexing.

Maerta came running. "Keir, oh, Keir!" She flung her arms around him and he hugged her fiercely. "You're--are you--"

"I'm whole," he said as he squeezed her tightly. "I remember everything. Everything."

She broke away, troubled. "Even why you did it?" He nodded. "We sent Gallard to find you," she said. "Is he--?" But it would be obvious to all of them that he wasn't here. There was no sign of him in scry.

Keir shook his head. "You didn't send him," he said. "He manipulated you into choosing him. It was his mission to find me."

"Mission?" She shook her head, uncomprehending.

"I'll tell you everything," he said, "but not here." The Hall was a chaos of steaming, stinking manufactories and running soldiers. "Let's find somewhere quiet ... with a window."

* * *

MAERTA AND A few others sat with him in a once-familiar boardroom now flooded with sunlight. The rest were listening in through scry. Keir sat in the sun, remembering the skies of Revelation, then sighed and told them the story. He began with his adventures inside Virga, meeting Antaea Argyre and Jacoby Sarto in that other lost city, and their flight from the knife-balls.

He told them about the glory of Virgan skies, of how Slipstream had welled into view over days as they approached it, like the opening eye of some god of the dawn. How its vast sphere of sunlit air had reached out to encompass their ship, bringing with it the visions of farms and towns, flying people and flocking birds. He described the astonishing ring-shaped city of Rush, and the mad Fannings and their baroque admiralty.

He described it all--the travels with Venera, the grand colloquy, and his deepening relationship with Leal Maspeth. And then he came to the garden, the tree, and the iron cheetah. And Gallard.

"He would have buried his sword in my back if my dragonfly hadn't seen him," he said--and instantly, up and down Brink, in the Hall and the storerooms and laboratories, every member of the Renaissance stopped what they were doing.

Maerta stood up, almost knocking over her chair. "Gallard attacked you? But that's--"

"--What he would have done long before, had I not de-indexed myself," Keir said calmly. They were staring at him as if he were mad. He swiveled to look out the window pensively. The sky trembled with distant bursts of light. "It was when the oaks visited that time last year," he went on quietly. "They're very secretive, and their support of our research was secret. But they were worried. Somehow, the enemy had found out about us."

He turned back to Maerta. "That was the real reason the oak came to see us. It knew A.N. had put a spy in our midst, but it didn't know who it was. All it knew was that it wasn't me. So it found an opportunity to speak to me alone, and it warned me that we'd been compromised."

Maerta had laid both hands palm-down on the table, and was staring at him intently. "A week before you de-indexed, you told me you'd made a breakthrough. We thought--well, we didn't know what to think. You suddenly panicked, said you'd gone too far, learned something nobody was supposed to know. It was ridiculous, but all the more frightening because you seemed sincere."

Keir nodded, half-smiling. "I was part of a preindustrial-style drama society, oh, many decades ago. I'm glad my acting is still believable."

"But wiping your own mind ... neotenizing yourself. Neither of those were an act."

He shook his head, saying, "They couldn't be. I didn't know who the traitor was, either. Whoever they were, the oak warned me they had tapped scry. I couldn't tell anyone what I'd found--not in the necessary detail--except through scry. He or she would learn it all; and if I kept it to myself, it was only a matter of time before the spy moved against me."

Maerta took a deep breath and said to the others, "And that was when he came to me and told me he was going to de-index himself." Glyphs of surprise exploded through scry; she shrugged. "He said it would be temporary, but he wouldn't tell me why he was doing it."

"But--" Thoun, one of the founders of the Renaissance, shook his head. "You could have come to us. To any of us--"

"Come to you? Come to you?" His voice was rising. "You were completely ignorant of the situation, all of you!" He stood up. "You thought we were safe here, or, oh, even worse! You never really believed in the danger. You never thought they would come after us. You never looked over your shoulders. And I was too distracted, I was so close for so long I couldn't raise my head out of the problem ... It's just a good thing the oaks were watching out for us."

"But Gallard..." Maerta glanced around the table. "What happened that night in Virga?"

Keir closed his eyes, and heard the others gasp--for they were there now, seeing the tree and the shadowed pathways through the eyes of the dragonfly he'd carried with him into Virga. The perspective swooped and dove, and Keir smiled as he seemed to spiral with it, dizzyingly, above the treetops. The gardens of the palace at Aurora emerged, and again he felt the others react. Emoticons flooded scry as all of Renaissance saw the wonders of a Virgan city for the first time.

But something had moved below. The dragonfly plummeted, returning to Keir, who stood with a hand held half-out at the base of a machine-augmented oak.

Someone was running up behind him, revealed and hidden in flashes of shadow and city light. It was Gallard, and he had a sword in his hand.

He raised it, his face twisted into a grimace, and Keir saw himself react. Every time he'd reviewed this recording, he'd felt a sympathetic prickle between his shoulder blades and half-consciously hunched, and he did so this time, too. The Keir in the dragonfly's video dove to one side, and Gallard's strike missed.

He rolled to his feet and for a second Keir saw himself smile. The others wouldn't understand that, but he remembered: for just an instant, he'd reveled in having the reflexes and power of a young body. Despite his shock at the attack, he'd felt powerful.

The dragonfly lowered to head-height. Gallard hadn't noticed it. He advanced on Keir with his blade raised.

"You're not surprised," Gallard accused; his words appeared as subtitles in the recording, thanks to the dragonfly's lip-reading program.

Keir had laughed, half from adrenaline, half from contempt. "I'm only surprised at how badly you handled all of this. How long have you been working for them?"

"There's no 'them,'" said his former teacher. "There never was. This collective fantasy that somehow you could band together and defeat the final evolutionary stage of life is ridiculous. The Renaissance is pathetic."

Keir was backing away. "Then why pay attention to us at all? If we weren't a threat--"

Gallard lunged and Keir twisted away. "Because you're a rallying point for every lunatic species that wants to advance its own cause. Don't you know why the arena exists? It's here as a place where we can all learn to get along. Artificial Reality is the glue that keeps us together. The species that rise to the top should be at the top, and the ones at the bottom should be at the bottom. They shouldn't try to game the system to their own advantage. They shouldn't conspire ... They shouldn't cheat--" He lunged again and this time his blade ripped through Keir's sleeve.

Keir jumped backward again, but this time he'd tripped. He fell. Before he could rise Gallard was kneeling on him, one knee across his chest. Gallard raised his sword.

Keir had made a last desperate plea, but not to Gallard's humanity. Whenever he watched this he thought, Why didn't I appeal to our friendship? To all we'd been through together? But something in Gallard's eyes had warned him that they were beyond that. So, he'd flinched back, hitting his head on the ground, and said, "Is Candesce a cheat?"

Gallard hesitated, and in that moment something black had snaked out of the air to wrap itself around his chest. Gallard tried to shout in surprise but it turned into a whuff! sound as all the air was driven out of his body. It wasn't visible from the dragonfly's perspective, but Keir saw the astonishment in his eyes as the silver-threaded tree branch plucked him into the air. It rose in a smooth motion and suddenly Gallard was flying, limbs flailing, into the city-starred sky.

The dragonfly moved, swerving around to hover next to Keir's head as he sat up. Something crashed through branches elsewhere in the grove, but all Keir had noticed at the time were the two gigantic, glowing green eyes that had appeared, winking, in front of him.

"Are you all right?" asked the emissary. Behind it, the oak writhed as lines of light began shooting along its trunk. The light became blinding and with it came an overwhelming roar of noise. Keir crouched, shielding his face with one hand, but the metal cheetah curled its own head around to put its nose an inch from his.

"Where are we?" it said.

Keir began to laugh hysterically. "I remember," he said. "They could never figure it out. They built scientists--made their own Renaissance to reinvent physics like we did. But they couldn't figure it out."

The cheetah blinked. "And you did?"

"Quantum gravity," he babbled. "The final theory. It's a formal system. Every time they tried to rediscover the science, they were led right back to it. Of course. It's what all obvious experiments lead to. But it's a formal system!" He'd begun to laugh uncontrollably. Then he stood and staggered away from the cheetah and the tree.

"Where are you going?" asked the cat.

Keir turned once and grinned. He was walking away from the dragonfly; he'd commanded it to stay where it was. "I can't do what I need to here," he said. "And there's no time. Talk to them." He waved at the other paths, where a babble of voices and running feet could now be heard. "Make a treaty. You've only got a few hours; waste no time." Then he'd turned and disappeared into the darkness.

The dragonfly settled onto the loam and watched as Antaea Argyre peered fearfully out from behind the trunk of a tree.

Keir ended the recording and, back now in the sunlit conference room, watched as Maerta and the others sat for a while in stunned silence.

At last Maerta looked up. "What did you mean? That our physics is a formal system?"

He shrugged. "Every formal language, like say, mathematics, has a fatal flaw: It's always possible to write self-contradictory statements in it. Like 'X equals not-X.' About a year ago I realized that if you could do that in math, you could do it in quantum gravity. But here's the thing: Every statement in QG corresponds to a real phenomenon. So what would happen if I found a self-contradictory formulation in QG, and then made it?"

Maerta blinked at him. "Made it?"

"Built a machine to create the phenomenon described in that statement. A particle that simultaneously existed and didn't exist, for instance. Negative and positive charge in one, gravity and nongravity."

"You did it."

He nodded. "In secret. I'd planned it out, as the sort of mad-scientist experiment from an ancient movie; but I was afraid to actually do it, until the oak came to me. The night it told me there was a spy among us, I packed up a fab unit and a small Edisonian and went into the city alone, and I did the experiment. And then I knew how Candesce's field works, and I built a tiny version of it."

"And you put it inside one of your dragonflies."

He nodded. "And then I planned my own de-indexing, because the oak had showed me that scry was compromised. Something was on to us, and whatever it was could move at any moment." He looked down at the table. "I was afraid we were all about to be netted like fish and our minds taken apart. I was afraid to run, or say anything, because we were being watched. So I had to make sure we weren't seen as a threat."

No one said anything. After a while, Keir became aware of a distant rumbling. He knew the sound that avalanches made, had lived with them for many months. This was different.

He stood up and went to the window. The sky was full of pops and brief sheets of light. The battle was getting closer.

"What now?" asked Maerta.

With his dragonflies and his own eyes, he could see them and himself looking at them, could see his cheekbones revealed and shaded by the patter of dozens of faraway nuclear blasts.

"I need our biggest fab and our best Edisonian," he said. "And I need something else, too, that might be harder to retrieve."

He put his forehead to the window so he could see down the dizzying slope of Aethyr's skin, to where coiling cloud and the mottled green of landforms lay half-veiled by distance. "I need to retrieve a machine," he said, "from the plain where Leal Maspeth and the Home Guard crashed."