Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

4

"IT'S UNDENIABLE! YOU can't deny it!" He wasn't going to stop or listen to what she had to say; so for what felt like the hundredth time since she'd met Eustace Loll, Leal found herself shaking her head and walking away from him.

The promised airship would be ready tomorrow. She had to hold on to that fact. Soon, very soon, they would be free of this world of oppressive gravity and strange threats. The free airs of Virga were close; but the closer they became, the more strident Loll became in his preaching.

"Someone told him of your encounter with John Tarvey," said the emissary, which rode her shoulder today in the form of the little junk-doll. "Yet you told none of your own people."

She waved a hand irritably. "He makes friends. It's what he does. Maybe he talked to one of the mechs, I don't know."

Loll had opinions about yesterday's encounter, and today he had cornered Leal to demand that she listen to them. It was the same old stuff, though: how could she trust the emissary, this shape-shifting, clearly nonhuman entity that built bodies for itself from nano-stuff and whatever trash might be lying about? It had threatened their home, the city of Sere--had built monstrous forms to gibber and scream at the citizens, and had then fled into the dark, pursued by the fabled sun lighter, Hayden Griffin. Somehow, it had convinced Leal Maspeth that it was benign, and yet--

"And yet humanity already has allies in the greater universe," Loll had said, nearly shouting, as he stood before her in the remote corridor where he'd found her. "Our true allies! Human, like us! And more than that--immortal! I told you we should heed Tarvey's words the first time he came back to us, but you fled. Leal, you're still fleeing, but from what? The mere chance that you might be wrong?"

Just thinking of those words made her pick up her pace, and she would have been half-running now if the gravity in Brink were not so low. Each step she took lifted her off the floor for a couple of seconds, and the delay frustrated her attempt to act out her mood. After a few minutes she had to laugh at her own petulance, and she came to a stop in the intersection of several black-mouthed corridors.

This area was still within the precincts of Complication Hall. Tarvey's shade couldn't reach her here, if indeed it still prowled the city. By itself the darkness didn't frighten Leal; she had grown up in a sunless country, after all. So, after getting her bearings, she set off determinedly down one of the less-traveled ways.

"Where are we going?" asked the emissary mildly.

"Maerta told me there's a room where you can see stars."

"Ah." It said nothing more, and she quirked a smile in the dark. The junk-doll often said "ah" when it encountered human behavior that it didn't understand. The less of its nanomaterial there was in one of the emissary's bodies, the stupider it was. At least the doll could speak, though, unlike many of its constructions.

It had taken Leal quite a while to realize that the buildings of this "metropoloid," Brink, weren't just anchored on the skin of Aethyr--many of them penetrated that skin, so that above they clawed at the sky, and below, airtight galleries and inverted towers hung like icicles in the actual vacuum of space. All she had to do was find the lowest level of the Hall and locate stairs that continued down ... search down some curving corridors, walk yet more stairs, and pace through some dark arches ... and there it was.

She took a deep breath and tentatively stepped out to stand on a glass floor, above a canyon of immeasurable depth, its walls the hulls of Virga and Aethyr. Far below her feet, tiny pinpricks glittered in their uncountable thousands.

She let the sight of them fill her eyes, and murmured, "I may never get another chance to see stars, you know. How could I explain to my grandchildren that I missed my last chance?"

"Or they may become commonplace for you," said the doll.

She sent it a sharp look. Would she ever leave Virga again, once she made it back? It was doubtful, but anything had become possible for her--which was the problem. Her future was a frightening blank, and the closer she got to delivering the emissary's message to her people, the larger that uncertainty loomed.

She plucked the doll from her shoulder and set it on the floor. "I'd like to be alone for a while, if you don't mind." She made a shooing motion, back in the direction of Complication Hall.

It looked around itself, then said, "Are you not worried by what Minister Loll said? He threatened you."

"Did he? I don't think so." Loll's next-to-last words to her had been "I'm giving you one last chance to see reason, Leal! Say you'll at least listen to what John Tarvey has to say. You can't deny that he's offering us a kind of hope that your 'emissary' never has!" He'd made to grab her arm, and Leal had pulled back; but she'd never felt physically threatened by him.

"Loll relies on others to do his violence. Himself, he wouldn't hurt a fly. No, I'll be all right, I just need some time to think. Tomorrow--tomorrow we return to Virga, and then things will get ... busy." She made the shooing motion again, and with obvious reluctance, the doll walked away.

Leal knelt and gazed for a while at the quiet stars. She tried to fill her eyes and her mind with them, yet her thoughts kept circling around to that blank in her future. She could not picture a future where she was happy.

She hated the weight of responsibility that lay on her shoulders. Of all her people, only Leal had visited the emissary's realm. She'd spent several weeks there and learned much about the weird and chaotic reality that reigned beyond Virga's walls. Except for Loll, her human companions were ordinary airmen caught up in an adventure they'd never sought. Harper and the others had literally been cast without warning from the familiar airs of Virga onto the plains of Aethyr. None had even guessed that Virga--the five-thousand-mile-diameter bubble that they mostly just called "the world"--had a Siamese sister, that the two worlds were joined like two soap bubbles floating through space. Leal had found a door in the wall between the two bubbles; alone, she had traveled from Virga to Aethyr and beyond. She had chosen to do so. She had seen stars. The others had not.

The emissary's people were eloquent, and their arguments convincing. The emissary itself ... was not so good with human language. When they returned to Virga, it would lose its mind, as it had when it first visited there. The responsibility for delivering its message to all the nations of Virga lay entirely on Leal's shoulders. And that was terribly unfair.

The silence here was so perfect that she heard the scuffing footsteps from a good hundred feet away. Suddenly certain that the emissary had been right and Loll was after her, Leal straightened and looked for shelter or escape. If she ran, the other would hear her footsteps, too, and anyway, running was impractical in this gravity. There were places to hide, though, so she hunkered down behind one of the room's buttresses. There were stars below her feet and at her back, but the buttress itself was of solid metal, so it should hide her.

Keir Chen entered the gallery. He was only really visible as a silhouette, but she didn't know anyone else who walked around in a swarm of glowing bugs. He didn't glance at the starscape or pause in stepping from white floor to glass. Then he disappeared through an exit in the glass wall that Leal hadn't spotted earlier.

He had been friendly toward her; he was no threat. The temptation to follow him was too great, so, she did.

Chen could somehow see through his dragonflies, so Leal hung well back. Everybody had assured her that the wild city was empty; Keir's people spent almost all their time in and around Complication Hall. So where was Chen going?

The reason she hadn't spotted the passage he was taking now was because it was a simple glass tube that arced out into the darkness for an indeterminate distance. Born as she'd been in a world of freefall, Leal had no trouble with the illusion that she was walking on air (or, she knew, in empty space). There was none of the sense of crushing cold that you felt at the walls of Virga or on the slopes of Aethyr; at least here, Brink had remembered to insulate its chambers. Keir Chen walked on darkness a few hundred feet ahead, and Leal padded steadily behind him.

Once she glanced back, and saw that they had left the icicle-like hanging towers of Brink far behind. This corridor was some kind of road connecting the metropoloid to another location, one that lay well outside Aethyr's walls. The road crossed a kind of cavity between the curving shells of Aethyr and Virga--and though she'd never thought about it, she realized she'd assumed that the space between the two worlds would be empty. Yet in the distance, starlight gave ghostly outlines to complicated silvery shapes, some of which must be miles long. Dozens of widely separated objects, like pieces of a shattered city, seemed to be swooping down and under her with grand, almost imperceptible slowness. This was an illusion: It was Aethyr, and of course her corridor and Leal herself, that was turning. Those glittering mountains were fixed perfectly still in space, apparently attached to neither world and so sovereign in some way.

The glass tube Chen was leading her through hung from almost invisible cables that were suspended from somewhere overhead. Leal could see other mechanisms way up there, where the worlds converged to finally touch.

She was so distracted by these sights that it took her a few seconds to notice the dragonfly that was buzzing a foot from her nose.

Should she run? She didn't think Chen or his people were any threat--but if he were dangerous, there was no way she could have evaded his dragonflies here. His physical body stood fifty feet away, a black-on-black figure now turned toward her.

"I was curious," she said. The dragonfly didn't reply, and Chen didn't move, so Leal swept her arm to indicate the wonders encircling them. "It's so strange. There's all this stuff out here! And we were taught that the space beyond Virga's walls was just empty. What are all these things?"

The dragonfly began drifting away in the direction of Chen. That was an obvious invitation, so Leal followed it. "No idea what they are," said Chen. "An armada, I suspect, awaiting its orders to invade Virga."

"Oh!" After everything she'd recently seen, Leal should have come to that conclusion herself. She knew there were things outside her world struggling to get in. But to actually see them was suddenly, profoundly upsetting. "Do they know we're here?"

"I hope not."

"And this road..." He hadn't resumed walking, now that she was standing beside him. She looked ahead to where the glass angles of floor and wall converged, miles away. Something was there, a vague hulk hinted at by starlight.

Keir said, "What if I told you that it runs to Virga?"

"What?" She stared at him. He appeared completely serious.

"I'd say you're lying," she said after a moment's thought. "This world rotates. Virga doesn't. The only place you could make a door between the two would be, well, where the door we're trying to get to is--at the axle, where the two worlds are attached."

Even as she said this she realized it wasn't necessarily true. Her city, Sere, was composed of a dozen giant iron-and-brass wheels, each one a mile or more across. You could board a flea car on the rim of one and be tossed to the rim of the next in line--handed off by the giants, one by one, until you reached the farthest wheel. Maybe some similar mechanism joined Virga and Aethyr.

"But then why didn't you tell us?" She was raising her voice. "Why let us languish here while you build us an airship to reach the axle door, when we could have just walked home?"

He looked away. "If leaving were that easy, I wouldn't be here now."

This was no answer, so she waited. After a moment he shrugged and said, "Yes, this way does lead to Virga. No, you can't take it. The way is blocked."

"By what?"

"By them." He nodded at the indistinct shapes he'd called an armada. "Or their cousins, at any rate. Things live in the walls of Virga. They would eat you or incorporate you before you got ten meters."

"Then why were you going there?"

He looked up the long glass hall, appearing to weigh what he should tell her. "I come here sometimes," he said, still not looking at her, "and think about leaving Brink."

"For Virga?" She was careful not to sound too surprised; she wanted to encourage him to say more.

"Virga would be safer than ... back there." He nodded the other way, past Brink, at the many worlds of the arena and beyond. Well, that made sense, she thought; the emissary had told her much about the strange alien worlds of the arena--that volume of space that included Aethyr and Virga and, apparently, many other artificial worlds--and she wouldn't have wanted to visit them alone.

Here, though, was an apparent door to home, tantalizingly within reach. "The Edisonians build anything for you," she pointed out. "Couldn't they make something to get you past that door?"

"Maerta has forbidden them to make me anything more complicated than my experiments."

"Experiments?"

He shrugged. "Toys, I guess. I ask questions about the world. I make things to find out the answers."

Now he began walking, but back the way they'd come. Leal stared ahead at the hint of escape in the distance, and fell into step with Keir Chen. "So you're a prisoner here? Or do you just feel like you are?" She indicated the dragonflies hovering around him. "Are those your jailers?"

He laughed. "No, they're just eyes." He raised his hand and one of the little bugs came to land on his fingertip. "I evolved them and I guess I ... grew used to them. I'd feel blind without them now."

Then he frowned at her. "No, Maerta and the others aren't keeping me prisoner. They're just watching over me."

"Why do you need watching over?"

He seemed to struggle for an answer, then shrugged. "Because I'm a kid."

"You look like you'd be a man where I come from."

Keir didn't reply and she realized she might have embarrassed him. Eventually, as they came to the gallery again, she said, "Isn't there another world somewhere that you used to call home?"

"Oh, yes. I'm from Revelation." She raised her eyebrows encouragingly, and after a moment he said, "Ah. It's a planet in the inner system."

"I don't know anything about Vega's planets," she said. Leal had known there was a wider universe outside Virga, but like most people she'd been raised to think of it as an empty place, of no relevance to civilized human life. She'd learned differently when she met the emissary, but even it knew little about worlds other than its own.

Chen smiled slyly. "I'll tell you about Revelation, if you tell me about Virga."

Leal did an imitation of the scoffing sound her father used to make. "And I'll tell you about Virga if you tell me what you people are really doing in this godforsaken place. How's that for a deal?"

He laughed, sounding genuinely delighted. "I like that! And why not? I have nothing to hide." His face suddenly fell. "Less and less as the days pass, it seems."

Leal thought about her confrontation yesterday, and about Loll's reaction when he'd heard. "I've asked everyone I know from this world--your Maerta, the emissary, I even spoke to one of your Edisonians--but I still can't get a straight answer about something."

He looked amused. "That doesn't surprise me at all. What was the question?"

"What's so bad about immortality?"

He stopped, cocked his head, and said, "It assumes that there's some part of you that is, or could be, impervious to change. There isn't." He started walking again.

"Oh, but--" She caught up. "But this, this offer. You probably don't know, but yesterday something happened--" He held up a hand.

"I was kind of listening in," he said. He shrugged at her shocked expression. "Sorry."

"Then you know what happened. To my friend."

"He died and was revived by one of the factions of Artificial Nature. It happens."

"The virtuals, yes? But what are they? What is he now? And what is this offer he's talking about?"

Keir frowned. "He's become a part of the system that we're here to oppose. The virtuals want to dissolve the boundaries between everything physical. They want every physical object in the universe to be a potential host to Mind. They didn't so much revive your friend John as upgrade him. They loaded his consciousness into a network where it can live virtually, without reference to the physical world. There's trillions of consciousnesses in Artificial Nature, and more and more of them are leaving reality behind for these fantasy-realms."

"Oh. But--but that isn't how the emissary works, is it? The emissary claims it's also an enemy of these virtuals."

"Yes, your friend is different. It's a shape-shifter, yeah, but it's always embodied in one way or another. Have you noticed that its personality changes depending on what body it's built?"

"Yeessss ... It's rather annoying, actually."

"The morphonts--your emissary's people--allow themselves to be changed by their bodies. They don't pretend to be disembodied, pure software agents, like the things that upgraded your friend. Those--well, they're a nightmare."

"But why?"

"The virtual use physical bodies like puppets, but the problem is, either they were once physical beings like your friend John, or they never were. If they were, their whole consciousness is designed to fit a certain kind of physical being. Without that to anchor them, they go mad. I'm sorry to say this, but your friend either already has, or soon will. The only way to prevent it is to give him a virtual body or download him into a new physical one.

"The ones that never did have bodies never had any anchor to the physical world. They hate and despise it as a realm of dumb matter that shouldn't exist. Freedom for them means the ability to change not just their bodies, but their emotions, their minds, their memories ... they have no stable identity. They're a kind of force, one that's steadily aligned itself against the embodied--the real--throughout history."

"And they hate Virga..."

"Because Virga," and here he turned to gesture at the vast wall of darkness behind them, "is the last refuge of the fully embodied. The very last place where reality is not just what you say it is."

Very gradually, without really realizing it, they had come to a halt in the middle of the glass passageway. Now Leal rubbed her chin musingly, and nodded at Keir. "That's why your people are here, isn't it? You're trying to figure out how Candesce defends Virga against A.N."

He looked startled, then nodded sheepishly. "We're doing something humans used to do thousands of years ago. It's called science. You've probably never heard of it."

She laughed. "Of course I've heard of it. What kind of science?"

"Um. Experimental physics?" He looked at her as if he was expecting some outburst from her: laughter? Awe?

"Of course," she said.

Thoroughly deflated, he merely nodded. "That's no surprise," she told him mildly. "It sounds like everyone outside of Virga wants to know how the sun of suns works. How it is that it's able to keep Artificial Nature at bay. We kind of figured you were doing something like that. The question is, who are you doing it for?"

"For the embodied, because the virtuals are trying to absorb all of us. Most of the time they just move in and take over. Some of us, they makes their 'offer' to." He opened his mouth to continue speaking, but suddenly stopped dead.

At first Leal thought her words had stung him overmuch--though she fully intended them to sting. But Chen's head was tilted, his eyes focused on nothing as though listening intently to something.

"Don't panic," he said--not to her, she judged. "No, no, I mean I'm pretty sure I know what that was. Oh, stop it! I'll explain when we get there."

He began walking, then stopped again. "Yes, we." He turned to Leal, his mouth twisted in annoyance. "It seems I've offended my brethren again. They beg me to stay, then get angry when I do."

Chen hurried ahead, his fireflies practicing formation flying over his head. "Um," she said as she followed. "What did you do?"

"The ornithopter I built--my flying machine--it's missing."

"Missing? But who could have--?"

Even as she spoke, Leal realized who it must be. They'd reached a T intersection; without another word to each other, Leal turned right while Chen went left.

When he was out of sight she began to bound along as quickly as the low gravity would let her. Rounding a final corner, she entered the chambers the Renaissance had given her party. For a moment, everything looked fine: Piero was playing cards with two of the airmen, while two more were trying on new shoes that the Edisonians had customized for their feet. They all looked up in surprise as she bounced to a halt in the doorway.

"Ma'am?" said Piero. Leal counted heads, and her suspicion was confirmed.

"Where," she shouted, "is Eustace Loll?"