Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

Epilogue

ROWAN WHEEL CUTS into a cloud, and rain chutes along the copper streets of the city. Dark-coated pedestrians turn up their collars and hurry from doorway to doorway--each portico or glass-doored entrance a gaslit altar in the eternal night. At certain angles the streets gleam like beaten gold, runnels of water making them waver like a hallucination of treasure.

People gather under the eaves and canopies to wait out the storm. The warm orange windows are smudged and faded to sepia by the incoming mist. Conversations start, pause, punctuated by distant rumbles of thunder and the murmuring of the rain; start again.

There's a curfew checkpoint being dismantled about a block away. The soldiers keep working through the rain, faces impassive ovals on a velvet backdrop. Someone comments that it's such a relief the danger is over. No one looks up past the perches of the spokesmen, to where faintly gleam the running lights of new visitors from outside the world.

She will imagine that these streets still bear old impressions of her shoes, an added layer to the map-upon-map that is the history of Sere. Certainly, her ghosts will always walk here: her parents, Easley Fencher, Brun Mafin, old William. Somewhere, shrouded by darkness and rain, Seana also walks, dear sad Porril hurries into his house, and Uthor pauses to glance out the obsidian square of a window as he prepares a meal for his latest client.

She will write to Seana when she's ready. It will be so easy, now that communications systems can reach instantly across the world.

When she's ready--but not yet.

In the meantime, the foghorns of the city will invade her dreams--brooom, brauum, braaam--and when she's careless her footsteps will unconsciously revert to the gait she had under the gravity of Sere. She will talk in her mind to the people she left behind, and even the brightest of suns will never reach all the alleys and roofscapes that she sees behind closed eyes.

Leal will never entirely leave Sere. But she will never return.

* * *

KEIR FINALLY SPOTTED her, a dark-on-dark silhouette halfway around the curve of the sun. "Leal!"

She didn't answer, so he left Hayden Griffin's side and flew over to her. The tessellated panes of Aerie's sun fell away beneath his feet, dark pools that for now reflected the distant light of other nations' suns. The fusion generator was roughly spherical, but giant glass-and-steel spines six times its length gave it a starlike profile. Leal was holding on to one of these with two toes, her body straight as if standing. As Keir stopped himself against the spine, he saw that her eyes were closed.

"Leal?"

She blinked, and smiled down at him. "Sorry, I was just--remembering."

Where she was facing, the sky was completely dark. Keir guessed where her thoughts had been, and nodded sympathetically. She'd never talked about the country she'd come from, but, now that the war was over, she woke crying in the middle of the night, and often fell into these reveries.

He put his arm around her. "Hayden says the adjustment's complete. Dawn is in half an hour, so we'd better get going."

Leal nodded absently, then said, "Was it fun?"

He grinned. "Actually, yes, it was." Griffin had given Keir a tour of Aerie's sun during today's maintenance period. The two had discussed physics and engineering, and the minute differences in how this giant fusion lantern worked here, compared with how it should work outside Virga.

"You know," he said, "I find that having a single machine to focus on is relaxing. You learn its ... well, its character, I guess, by repairing and tuning it. --What it does easily, and where it has a mind of its own. You could spend a lifetime just maintaining this one sun ... There's worse things I could do."

Leal laughed. "Did you say that to Hayden?"

"Yes. He said I'd already built a million new suns, and shouldn't I just consider relaxing?"

He turned away from the darkness, and a moment later she followed. In this direction was a vast sweep of light, deep purple at its edges and fading, while brightening through red to orange and then gold at its center. That glow came from Slipstream's sun. Slipstream, Rush, and all the controversy and excitement of its pirate sun were moving away from Aerie, following the slow drift of the asteroid that both city and sun were tethered to. Between Aerie's sun and the retreating nation, the sky was speckled with detail: ball-shaped groves of trees, clouds of crops; lakes that shone like pearls; and spinning bolo-houses and town wheels. There was plenty of room around a new sun, and people from all over the world were moving here to take advantage of it. Aerie was coming into its own.

This flowering was mirrored, Keir knew, by events unfolding beyond Virga's walls. The oaks were scouring the arena clean of the virtuals, and who knew? --Maybe emigrants from Virga would end up settling on the plains of Aethyr, or the vast spaces of Crucible, a balloon world at least ten times the size of Virga that the Virgans now knew orbited nearby. It was the ability of embodied creatures to set limits on Artificial Nature's power that was making all of this possible. Candesce's suppressive technology was quickly spreading to every place where life-forms wanted to anchor their values in some sort of unchanging reality.

"I am the Mighty Brick," he murmured. "Tremble before me." And he had to smile.

"What are you talking about?" Leal was sending him a look that said she feared for his sanity.

He was trying to figure out how to explain it to her when a sudden blossoming of virtual light enfolded them. Icons burst into view, glyphs and tags exploded onto the sky. With aggressive buzzes, dragonflies shot from the bag at Keir's belt, showing him what was under, behind, and above him.

With practiced nonchalance, a golden doll flipped back the flap of Leal's purse, and climbed up her arm to perch on her shoulder.

Somewhere below them, Hayden Griffin gave a whoop. "And not a moment too soon!" he shouted. "Thank you, Antaea!"

The glyphs from Leal's own (newly installed) scry made her reaction to that comment plain. Nobody knew whether the outages were of Antaea's design or not; nobody knew if she was still alive, and Leal disapproved of superstition. All up and down Virga, however, people would be pausing now in their daily routines and nodding to, or raising glasses to, or even praying to the sun of suns, and the new queen who, according to the stories, sat on a diamond throne behind its light.

Antaea must have lived long enough to restart Candesce's day/night cycle. Beyond that, what had happened to her was anybody's guess.

"I just worry," said Leal, "that we're seeing the birth of a new religion, that's all."

He shrugged. "There could be worse things."

"We've got three hours," Hayden was telling one of the technicians. "Make those diagnostics count."

Three hours every two days or so was as long as any of these outages ever lasted. It was long enough for the newly imported surgery bots to wake up, for a patient to be prepped, and for their heart to be replaced. Three hours was enough time to commune with loved ones or send calls for help through scry or by simple radio; it was long enough for suns to be tuned, reporters to gather news, and computers to wake up and analyze crop yields or the genetics of new pathogens. Much good could be done in those three hours, and yet, the timing of this window was just a bit too random to plan an invasion or bank robbery or terrorist attack to coincide with it--and that, or so people said, was clear evidence that the outages were part of a plan.

Whether Candesce's new flicker was due to the intercession of the queen of Candesce, or just a stutter in the sun of suns' control mechanisms, the result was the same. You dropped whatever else you were doing to deal with a sudden flood of scry mail, news, weather, and entertainment. Keir and Leal stood in the air for long moments, absorbing the sudden intake.

She laughed. "Piero's bought a farm! Can you believe it? He says there's not enough room in the city for all his kids to run wild."

When Keir didn't respond, she looked over in sudden concern. "What is it?"

He blinked and turned his eyes away from a virtual world to her. "They've identified the last of the remains from Brink," he said. "It's Maerta."

"Oh, Keir, I'm so sorry."

He'd seen the photos before, but couldn't help calling up again the incinerated towers and jumbled walls skating in random lines down the slopes of Aethyr. You needed your imagination to picture what had been here once; the metropoloid was no longer easily distinguished from the scree that surrounded it. Brink had fallen in the first hours of the battle, before Keir had even reached Fanning's flagship. He'd given the fabs there the plans for his generator, but all their efforts had gone into finishing his in time; they hadn't been able to build their own before the bombs had fallen. His only consolation was that the invaders had poised themselves eagerly above the vast hammerlike cloud of the city's destruction, and burst as one into Virga when Candesce's field fell only to become frozen, as if in amber, when Candesce reawakened. They had been easy pickings for the Guard's precipice moths and none were left by the time Candesce began its stuttering.

He swept the pictures away, and found that another set had been mailed to him by some anonymous fan of his work. These new images were from the planet Revelation, where he'd grown up. That entire world was now surrounded by a Candesce-like field, and photos from the ground showed plains of shattered and crumbling structures stretching all the way to the horizon. The virtuals had spent the last few years papering over Revelation's biosphere with computronium in an attempt to turn the whole planet into a giant simulator for their virtual paradise. It had all collapsed, and grass and new trees now poked between the crystalline spines of the virtuals' machineries. Somewhere in there, Sita's bones would finally be returning to the ecosystem that had first given them life.

In a hundred years, maybe, his old home would begin to look the way it once had. That was a sad thought; but if there was any lesson to be learned from Virga's fight with Artificial Nature, it was that you must let some things unfold in their own way, and in their own time.

Bangs and thumps came from below as Hayden and his men slammed the sun's maintenance hatches. "Clear out!" he shouted, waving a wrench over his head in the faint light from Slipstream. "Daybreak in ten minutes!"

"Come, love," said Leal, taking his hand. "You need a rest, and I've got a lecture at nine."

He dismissed the photos, and the memories and regrets, and with his wife stepped into the unbounded air of the new day.

* * *

"WHERE IS HE? Where is he?" Venera Fanning was practically running down the corridors of the ambassadorial mansion in Aurora. Hayden Griffin had been musing at some virtual windows that showed the current performance of his sun, but now he turned to watch her go by.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

She didn't reply, just snarled and kept quick-marching along. That was a difficult thing to do, given the sheath dress she had evidently decided to wear for today's ceremony. He'd rarely seen Venera so upset, though, so after a glance at his displays, Hayden strolled after her. His windows drifted after him, keeping a discreet distance.

"Disaster!" Venera veered toward a drinks table on her way through the ballroom, and grabbed a champagne glass. "A complete catastrophe!" She downed the glass in one gulp, set it to teeter on the edge of the table, and hurried on, feet tick-ticking in the very short steps allowed by the dress.

Since nobody had asked him to give a speech, Hayden had not bothered to remember what today's ceremony was for--he only knew that it was the last time he'd be seeing the Fannings in Aurora. They were bound for Rush tomorrow, doubtless to plan some sort of grief for the next cloud of countries Slipstream was drifting into. Hayden would be sad to see them go, though he knew the entire city was holding its collective breath. The final departure of the Fannings was, to many, the ultimate sign that Aerie was now in the hands of its own people.

"Where is the bastard?" Venera roared at a footman. He pointed down a covered walkway that connected two of the residence's buildings. "He's going to pay for this one," she told the man before continuing on. The footman watched her go, then turned to see Hayden lumbering up behind her. He and Hayden exchanged a glance and a shrug.

Though she kept walking at top speed, Hayden slowed to a stop about halfway down the gallery. Warm sunlight was streaming in through its leaded-glass walls; several ventilation panes were angled open, and a slight breeze teased the gauzy white curtains that had been pulled back to let the light in. The light shone across the polished stone floor, reflected in pale squares along the ceiling, and surrounded and embraced everything in the space.

"There you are!" sounded faintly from somewhere ahead.

"Venera, what's wrong?"

A pair of wood-framed glass doors led to a little sitting area outside the gallery. Hayden dismissed his virtual windows and laid his hand on the latch.

"What's wrong?" she roared. "What's wrong?

"I'm pregnant!"

Hayden paused, looked to where two figures stood silhouetted in the next parlor--one, hands on hips, curved up as if to take off into the air, the other, ramrod straight, looking down at her.

"Chaison, I don't know how to do this..." As he put his arms out to encircle her, Hayden turned back to the doors. Smiling, he turned the latch and opened them.

Warm air, laden with the scent of flowers and grass, coiled around him. He stepped outside, and at that moment the icons of scry that had surrounded him blinked out. Today's outage was over.

It was quiet here, save for the buzzing of insects and intermittent birdsong. The gallery doors opened onto a little semicircular patio, not more than ten feet across, bounded by a low stone wall. Two white benches made angles on either side of the doors; over the little wall, luxurious gardens began.

There had been a time when Hayden couldn't still the churn of thoughts in his head. He'd spent his days thinking, scheming, worrying, and rationalizing. When he first lit this sun, he'd been too focused on its spectrum and modulations to take in the fact that this was the project his parents had given their lives for. When that realization finally caught up to him, it had come in the form of sorrow and grief, and at the height of his success, he'd found himself running away from the very sun he'd worked so hard to build.

Since that time he'd been so wrapped up in the miseries of his own past that he barely noticed the world around him. He'd given up caring about the suns he designed; but things had changed the day he met that indomitable history tutor, Leal Hieronyma Maspeth. His reemergence hadn't been sudden--more like slowly waking from a dream. Finally, today, and maybe for the first time, he was entirely back.

If he mentioned this to Leal, she would of course lay the cause at the feet of the countess of Greendeep, who managed to appear everywhere Hayden went lately. There was something between them, no doubt of that. But there was more to this feeling than that--more, too, than simply laying his past to rest.

Hayden stepped up to the stone wall and laid his fingertips on it. The stone was warm, almost as though it were alive. He felt the long slow breaths coursing in and out of his own body, and faintly, the presence of his pulse.

He leaned back and tilted his face up to the sun. He'd spent so much time thinking about its calibration, its dynamics and tolerances--it was long past time he should do this.

The heat of its fire sank into him in slow waves, penetrating under his skin, washing down his throat and shoulders, settling into his entire body. He closed his eyes, and the air teased his hair. Birdsong and his breath; the heat of a sun; he had all he needed.

He emptied his mind of thought, and let it fill with a vast and comforting radiance.