Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

2

KEIR'S SCRY HAD begun lighting up even before they reached the Hall. Startled emoticons fluttered around his head, and colored glyphs appeared in his peripheral vision. The glyphs signaled an epic battle between the various agendas and schemes of his own subconscious mind, and those of his compatriots in the Renaissance. Maerta and his teachers kept telling him he should pay close attention to this sort of interface-fencing. Power and privilege were measured by how well one navigated the shoals of personality and ambition, after all.

Keir marched to his own personal soundtrack, even when it was bad for him; everybody knew that. The other kids could never tell what he was going to do next, and lately he'd realized that the grown-ups had a similar wariness of him--though where they might have learned that, he had no idea. Sure, he liked to play practical jokes; he invented strange devices in class and set them loose in the hallways at night. But that alone hardly explained their caution. Right now the glyphs showed wild speculation on the Renaissance's prediction market. He assumed it was because of the strangers, until he realized that the stock that was alternately crashing and soaring was his. The tone of the trading could almost be translated into words: words like, Keir's done it again!

Enveloped in this invisible storm of consternation, he pushed open the great iron doors and said to his guests, "Welcome to Complication Hall."

Tired as they were, he still saw Leal Maspeth and her friends react to the sight. He knew what was visible here, the fabs, Edisonians, lab benches, and work areas; but he couldn't be sure what they actually saw--and he knew the other members of the Renaissance were wondering the same thing.

Some of the objects scattered around the floor would be recognizable to anyone living in Artificial Nature. There were the usual microrefineries, ecosyms, Edisonians to imagine new designs, and fabs to build anything you might want. Most of these were in turn made out of black utility fog that had taken these forms only temporarily.

Standardization didn't exist outside Virga; it was a primitive thing, a signal of the inefficiencies of pre-Edisonian manufacturing. Keir had been learning lately that things were different inside Virga, though: There, they still had factories, and things called designs that told you how to duplicate a machine you'd already built. Designs could be read and understood by human beings--an extraordinary idea.

If Maspeth and her people looked around Complication Hall they could easily see dozens of identical devices and objects, many of them showing signs of having been put together by human hands. They might see these things, but would they recognize how unusual they were? To have more than one of something, and to be able to build more yourself ... in Keir's world, these were astonishing, even frightening anomalies.

But no--as Keir entered with his refugees, it was other details that caught their attention. People began popping out from behind partitions and curtains scattered around the place. He was disappointed to see that nearly all of them were second bodies; what kind of invasion did they think he was mounting?

Here came Maerta, conspicuously in her own stocky, dark-skinned body. Her clothing was shuffling, watching pupil dilation and other indicators in the visitors as his own had on the hillside. In short order it had adjusted itself into conservative garb that would seem neutral, if not familiar, to these people from Virga. Some of the other people were undergoing similar transformations, but those encased in glittering exoskeletons or half-visible under swirling dragonflies had no hope of looking familiar. Sure enough, the Virgans stumbled to a halt, closing ranks and muttering in alarm as they were surrounded by dozens of shambling, dancing, or plodding figures of various degrees of humanity.

"Don't be alarmed," said Maerta, striding forward with her hand outstretched and a welcoming smile on her face. "I'm afraid you've caught us in our work clothes today." She shook Maspeth's hand, and then, as the man stepped in between them, Eustace Loll's. "Keir warned us that you're tired and hungry. I've got a nice stew on the boil over here, why don't you come and sit down?"

They didn't take much persuading, especially when Maerta made shooing motions at the others and they mostly retreated back to their workstations. With Keir's reassurance that nothing dangerous was happening, the bigger exoskeletons retreated and those wearing them sent proxy bodies in their stead. Soon the floor was empty of all but human-appearing people. The Virgans slumped with relief onto some benches behind one of the material partitions, and Maerta began serving soup.

"It's lucky that Keir spotted you," she was saying; as she said this out loud, she glyphed a message at Keir's scry: Why weren't you in class?

"Just lucky, I guess," he said with a grin. "I'm often looking in the wrong direction at the right time."

Maerta's own smile faltered, and behind her he noticed a couple of the other grown-ups exchange glances. What did that mean? He'd just been making a joke.

Maspeth said, "We owe him our lives," and the look she sent Keir wiped every other consideration out of his mind. "We were at the end of our strength," she went on, "and with the avalanches ... we wouldn't have made it to the city without his help."

Maerta looked pleased, and for a tiny moment Keir thought that things would end here. But--"There he is!"--he turned and here came Gallard, who was the kids' designated teacher, and as humorless and unforgiving as any adult he'd known.

Gallard's face had all the anonymous perfection of his people; he was from the inner reaches of Vega, where the virtuals ruled and body-swapping was common. As usual, he was surrounded by a cloud of glyphs and emoticons, so many of so many types that Keir could never tell what he was thinking. "Where did you get to?" he asked as he strode across the stone floor to glower down at Keir. "--I know, I know, you were on the slopes. But what conceivable reason could you have had for that?"

Keir's scry flashed all kinds of red warnings, but they didn't stop him from blurting, "Better company?"

Gallard's face didn't change, but his icon cloud scowled at Keir. He appealed to Maerta. "He's out of control. You see what I have to put up with?"

Keir found his ears becoming hot as he realized that Leal Maspeth was watching this exchange with interest. "I'm sorry," he said, trying to be adult about it all. "It won't happen again."

"You've said that before. Maerta--"

She held up a hand. "I'll talk to him, Gallard. Maybe some discipline is in order. For now, I'm grateful that he helped these travelers. It was something he didn't have to do, especially if he knew how you'd react."

Gallard glanced over at the Virgans with disinterest, then turned back to Keir. "Come on. You have a simulation to finish."

"Maerta--" But she shook her head at him.

"Go on, Keir. We'll discuss your absence later."

Even more acutely embarrassed, he snuck a glance at Maspeth, who was actually grinning! "It's good to see that some things never change," she said. Then she added in a sympathetic tone to Gallard, "I'm a teacher, too."

"Come, Keir." He strode away without acknowledging Maspeth's comment. Keir shrugged at her, ducked his head to Maerta while firing a cloud of apology glyphs at her scry, then hurried after his tutor.

* * *

"REST, PLEASE," INSISTED the woman Keir Chen had introduced as Maerta. "You're safe now." She was matronly, of apparent middle age, but Leal had learned lately to be wary of appearances in the world outside Virga. Maerta's twin sister was handing out bowls of broth to Leal's men, who sat or lay in various exhausted poses on a well-lit stone floor.

"Thank you, but I'm not sure we are safe," Leal said. She was aware that she was shifting from foot to foot, looking around herself nervously. They might well have gone from the frying pan into the fire; Keir Chen's people didn't all look human. Some were huge and hulking, with hydraulic lines and metal spars intertwining the flesh of their arms. Others were whiskered and coiffed with silvery antennae that turned and swerved as they looked about. Some were entirely metal, and multi-armed. And now that she was noticing things, she realized that Maerta and her sister were not the only twins in this huge room. She counted at least five other pairs in her first glance around.

Keir Chen had called this place Complication Hall. Apparently it was the only inhabited spot in the city. The Hall was a cathedral-sized space, built in a cross shape and complete with a vast, backlit rose window at its far end. Its pillared sides rose seventy meters into the architectural insanity that may have given the place its name: a frozen explosion of arches, cornices, footings, and crenellations all toppled over one another in a narrowing gyre whose ultimate ceiling was lost in mazey detail. At least the floor was level. Its polished surface hosted heaps of boxes, sleeping and living areas behind partitions, and many strange silvery forestlike growths of machinery. For Leal, only the brown stone floors, the pervasive shadows, and the smell of cooking food were familiar.

Maerta smiled knowingly now and nodded up at the strange ceiling. "Brink is immune to avalanches," she said. "In the five years we've been here, not one roof has broken."

"It's not avalanches I'm worried about." Leal bit her lip, unsure of what to say; then she blurted, "We were followed."

Maerta's eyes narrowed. "By what?"

That was telling: she had not asked by whom. "He was my ... one of our former companions," said Leal. She couldn't afford to describe John Tarvey any other way; it was too painful. "He was taken by one of those, I think the word is 'river,' and when he came back to us he'd ... changed." She looked at the floor.

Maerta stared at her in wonder. "You really are from Virga, aren't you?"

"Yes, and I promise to tell you all about how we got here, but first we have to make sure that the thing that's, that's wearing Tarvey like a coat can't get in!"

She'd said that too loudly; her men were all staring at her. Eustace Loll limped over. His lips pursed into an expression that might have been concern, or might have been disapproval. "You've been through a lot, Leal. You should rest." He bowed to Maerta. "On behalf of the government and people of Abyss, I'd like to thank you for rescuing us."

Leal wanted to tell him to shut up, but in this place, surrounded by so many people, she no longer had the power. Loll had been waiting for such a moment, she realized: for a time when he no longer had to defer to her.

"You're welcome," said Maerta. "We'll send some bodies down to patrol the city's lower entrances."

Loll raised his eyebrow. "Thank you. However--though I appreciate Leal's anxieties--I don't think that will be necessary. The man was swept away by the avalanche. He won't be back."

"He will be back," said Leal; but she abruptly felt very dizzy. Piero Harper was suddenly at her side, helping her sit on a strange blocky thing that sculpted itself to her shape as if it were alive. "It will be back." Tired and defeated, she stared around at the strange people, the extra bodies and odd machines. "Unless its purpose was to drive us into your arms. Are you like it?"

"They are not," said the junk-doll on her shoulder.

Leal shrugged irritably. "But why is that boy walking around in a cloud of bugs?" She glared at Maerta. "Why are there two of you?"

"We'll explain," she soothed. "Or your morphont companion can tell you. But for now, you must rest. You're at the end of your strength, and your physiology's not been augmented to support the restoratives we'd like to give you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just rest."

Leal leaned her chin on her hand, and closed her eyes. She could sense Eustace Loll moving about, though she could neither see nor hear him. Her suspicion was like Hayden Griffin's fabled radar, telling her that he must be speaking to Maerta and her kin, ingratiating, lulling. There were two sides to the story of how Leal and her people had come to be here, and Loll would never let her version go uncontested.

She should be defying his story with her own, but she hadn't the strength. When someone put a bowl in her hands, she ate, and then she lay back and the couch/chair accommodated her and was very comfortable; and she slept.

* * *

IT WAS TWO hours before Keir could convince Gallard that he'd finished all his work--that, indeed, he'd done it before ducking out earlier. Pleading exhaustion at the adventures of the afternoon, he swore that he would go straight to his room and not venture forth for the remainder of the day. Fuming a scry cloud of virtual sighs and annoyance glyphs, Gallard agreed, and Keir headed out.

He knew the way, of course, but walking these corridors would never become familiar. If the city of Brink had possessed an air of abandonment, he might have been able to imagine that he was investigating someplace lost and mysterious--disturbing the ghosts of people who might have once crisscrossed these bleak gothic corridors in previous lifetimes. But Brink had never been inhabited. It wasn't strictly a city at all, rather a variety of morphont called a metropoloid. Its ancestors had been true, inhabited cities, but Brink was part of an evolutionary offshoot that had lost some of the defining traits of a true urban space. Traits like plumbing, and lights, and elevators with doors.

The blank facades and grasping towers didn't sum to a place at all, but to a wilderness, one that he was desperate to escape from.

He hesitated in the doorway to his oddly angled room. This was definitely not where he wanted to be; but he didn't know where else to go. He sat at the desk.

He stood.

He walked to the sartorius, which proffered clothing, exoskeleton parts, and other extensions as he approached.

Turning away from that, he fell backward and let the bed catch him. For a few minutes he just lay there as his dragonflies zipped in a restless cloud from door to ceiling to floor and back.

The sounds of distant conversation filtered in through the chamber's narrow windows--echoes of voices from the Hall, including Maspeth's anxious tones. He sat up, wrapped his fingers around his skull, and bent his head over his knees.

A gentle knock came from the doorway. He wanted nothing more than to tell whoever it was to go away, but instead he heard himself say, "Come." Maerta stepped in, in her second body, and came to sit on the bed next to him. Her scry was muted, only a few faint glyphs twirling near her ears. She was carrying something heavy, and now she moved to set it on the floor by the bed.

It was the brick--the Mighty Brick, now stripped of its agencies and protective devices. "Ah," said Keir, gazing at it mournfully. "You killed it."

"We found it near a rather grouchy ornithopter. That one claimed you were starving it to death."

He shrugged, but he couldn't look her in the eye. He'd drawn his own scry all the way in, leaving him bare of context.

"Keir," she said softly, "what were you doing with these things?"

His restless fingers tangled together. "I--I don't know." Now he did look at her directly. "I mean that. I know I made this," he pointed at the brick, "but I don't know what it is."

"That I can answer," she said. "You and Gallard were studying embodiment a few weeks back. To have a body is, well, almost a sacred thing, no? --To us, I mean. It's what separates us, and our allies like the oaks and the morphonts, from things like the creature that was chasing Leal Maspeth and her friends." She nudged the brick with her toe. "Having a body, even if it's a block of dumb stone, anchors the mind and its values. We're fighting to keep our anchors, all of us, and none more so than the people who live in Virga. Even if they don't know it.

"I'm pretty sure you made the Mighty Brick to remind yourself of these things."

"Then why did I forget?"

She shook her head. "I don't--"

"Stop lying to me! You do know."

She was silent for a moment, and he felt a small sense of triumph at having scored a point in their ongoing argument--because, before today, he hadn't even been sure himself that something was wrong. Now he had proof, in the form of those lines scratched next to the door a kilometer below the Hall.

"Keir," she said slowly, "why did you grow that aircraft?" He looked away, but she put a hand on his shoulder. "Where were you going to go?"

"I don't know."

"You didn't have someone in specific you were going to look for?"

That was an odd question; he looked at her for the first time. "No. Who would I have to look for?"

"Sita?"

He didn't recognize the name, and shook his head, confused. Scry gave no hint as to who this Sita might be, either. Somehow his incomprehension satisfied Maerta, who took away her hand and sighed.

"I'm not a real boy, am I?" he asked her. "The other kids are growing up, but I'm growing down. Getting shorter, stupider. Forgetting things--like, like this Sita whoever. Why? What's happening to me?"

She looked him in the eye. "Keir, you have to trust me when I say I can't tell you."

"Can't tell me? Or won't?"

"Can't. Because I made a promise that I wouldn't."

"To who? You're the leader here, aren't you? Who could you possibly have to make a promise to that you'd have to keep?"

Maerta stood up, clasped her hands, and walked to the door. Then she turned and said, "I can't betray my promise, Keir; and I'm sorry, but for now, that's how it has to be."

He just stared at her, tears starting in the corners of his eyes. Maerta came back, her hands hovering over him. "Oh, no, no, I'm sorry, Keir. It's for the best. You'll understand when it's all over and it'll be fine, fine. You'll see. We would never do this to hurt you, we love you."

"Do what?" He was crying as much from frustration as disappointment or fear. "What did you do?"

"You'll see in time, and it'll be all right, I promise." Briskly, she went on: "Now I have to ask you something, and it's very important. Can you be honest with me? Did you tell the Virgans anything about what we're doing here? --In Brink? Anything about who the Renaissance are?"

He shook his head bitterly. Now he wished he had.

"Good. Good. We don't know them, Keir. They might be spies. They might be dangerous, do you understand?"

He nodded sullenly.

"And Keir, the flying machine..." She was silent so long that finally he was forced to look at her.

"When the time comes," she said, "you'll be able to leave Brink, and go anywhere in the universe that you want to go. But just hang on a little longer. Your time's not yet, Keir.

"Not yet."

* * *

"MA'AM?"

Leal turned to find Piero Harper at the doorway; there was concern written on his wind- and labor-aged features. She smiled warmly at Hayden Griffin's loyal crewman, and raised her hands to show off the room. "Isn't this nice? It has a roof! I'd forgotten what those were like."

Piero smiled and ducked his head. "It's no fun, ma'am, camping out under gravity."

"The things you learn." This chamber they'd given her was huge--but then, there was no lack of space in this city-that-wasn't-a-city. Before letting herself be walked here last night, she'd had to wait while her bed was constructed--extruded, actually, from one of the odd half-animal, half-machine things they called a fab. The things had squatted and huffed and beeped and squelched out chairs, tables, and cupboards, each one to order and each one slightly different. Maerta and her people had demonstrated what they called exoskeletons, which hoisted the finished goods on their backs and hauled them--a roomful of furniture per person--up stairs and ramps to these chambers. It would all have been wonderful to someone who wasn't half-dead with exhaustion. As it was Leal had slept like a stone for what must have been twelve hours; in this permanent gloom, it could have been six or two days. Now she felt like she could barely lift a limb. The lethargy was good; her mind had been gloriously blank for much of the day.

"Are they actually doing it?" she asked.

Piero nodded, and she shook her head with a wondering smile. Keir Chen's people were being outrageously generous. Leal, Piero, and some of his more trusted crewmates had spent part of the morning sitting around another strange device, the one Maerta called an Edisonian, discussing how they might rescue Piero's master Hayden Griffin and the rest of the airmen trapped on the lower plains. While they talked, the Edisonian listened; and then it thought a little bit; and then it began showing glowing images on its side, of the complete design for a flying machine of a type Leal had never seen before. The thing had big ungainly bags attached to it, and stiff wings, presumably to catch the wind. Neither of those were features of Virgan airships, but they made sense in the context of the pervasive gravity in Aethyr. "How long will it take to construct these?" Leal had asked Maerta.

The woman had shrugged. "A couple of days."

"They are being generous," Piero said now. She waved him in and he shut the door (also new, also made last night while they watched), but didn't advance any further into the room. "Ma'am, it's not that I'm ungrateful ... but I can't help getting the feeling they want to get rid of us."

"Y-yesss," she admitted. "But not in a hostile way. You know the old saying, 'Fish and visitors stink after two days.'"

He grinned. "They're like monks, aren't they? Very serious and studious. But I can't for the life of me figure out what they're studying."

"Keir said they're studying the city."

"The boy. You believe him?"

She shrugged. "No. Look, what does it matter, if we get our airships in two days? We can go home, Piero."

He stood there uncertainly until she shook her head and said, "Oh, do sit down!" He lowered himself into one of the armchairs--becoming, she realized, the very first and maybe the last human to use it--and clutched its arms uncomfortably.

"Beggin' your pardon, ma'am, but if it don't matter, then why were you standing in the window when I came in, just starin' at nothing and sighing?"

She scratched the side of her head. "Mm, well..."

"Somethin' about this place is bothering you, ma'am. What is it?"

"It's not these people." She looked down, summoning her thoughts and her courage to express them. "Piero ... how old were you, when your country was conquered?"

This was obviously not the question he'd expected. "Wha--Well, about fifteen. Old enough to know what I was losing."

"And what is that like?"

"Ah." Crow's-feet gathered around his eyes as he smiled. "You think you've lost Abyss forever?"

"Haven't I? Piero, I've been branded a traitor! Bringing Loll with us was a mistake, I know that now. We'll never win him over, and when we get home and he's among his old cronies and the power-brokers of Abyss, he'll turn on us. I know it, no matter what he says. He'll have me arrested if I return."

He nodded, but then said, "You suppose that his word is all that matters there now? Ma'am, Slipstream took over my beloved Aerie, and I lost my home. It's a terrible thing, being lost like that. But I got it back. Aerie's a nation again, thanks to Mr. Hayden Griffin and the sun he made. And you'll see, when all this is over, Abyss will take you back with open arms. All'll be forgiven when they realize you saved them all."

She looked away. After a moment she murmured, "Maybe it's not enough for them to forgive me; after all, I've done nothing wrong. What I keep asking myself, after what's happened, is whether I'll ever be able to forgive them."

Piero frowned.

"And if not," she continued, "where will I ever find a new home?"

Piero stood and came to lightly touch her hand--reticent, always-polite Piero, who had always treated her like some upper-class client, like the professor she'd wanted to be. She clasped her own hand over his and blinked up at him. "Ma'am, you'd be queen of Aerie if I had any say in it," he said fiercely. "And a citizen, surely, there or in Slipstream or any nation that learns the treasure you're bringing and what you had to sacrifice to get it."

Tears blurred her view of him. She hadn't cried since the night her friend Easley had died, because in order to survive, she'd had to choke the old, emotionally fluttery version of herself. These tears were different than the old Leal's would have been, though--more hard-won, and with vaster depths of feeling behind them.

"Thank you, Piero," she said. "Still, I feel like a bird lost in an ocean of air. Where can I set my feet, Piero? And when can I fold my wings, and sleep?" She closed her eyes. "Sleep like I used to sleep."

"Tell the people back home what you learned out here, ma'am," Piero asserted. "And then you may be surprised what becomes possible."