Queen of Candesce

11

Muscles aching, Venera swung down from the saddle of her horse. It was two weeks since the confirmation and she had lost no time in establishing her rule over Buridan—which, she had decided, had to include becoming a master rider.

She’d knocked down two walls and walled up the ends of one of the high-ceilinged cellar corridors, forming one long narrow room where her steed could trot. There were stalls at one end of this, and two workmen were industriously scattering straw and sand over the plating. “Deeper,” Venera told them. “We need several inches of it everywhere.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The men seemed unusually enthusiastic and focused on their task. Maybe they had heard that the new foals were to arrive later today. Probably it was just being in proximity with the one horse now residing here. Venera hadn’t yet met anyone who didn’t share that strange, apparently ancient love for horses that seemed inbuilt to humans.

Venera herself wasn’t immune to it. She patted Domenico and walked down the length of the long room, trailing one hand along the low fence that bisected it lengthwise. Her horsemaster stood at the far end, a clipboard clutched in his hand; he was arguing quietly with someone. “Is everything all right, gentlemen?” Venera asked.

The other man turned, lamplight slanting across his gnomish features, and Venera said, “Oh!” before she could stop herself.

Samson Odess screwed his fishlike face up into a smile and practically lunged over to shake her hand.

“I’m honored to meet you, Lady Thrace-Guiles!” His eyes betrayed no recognition, and Venera realized that she was standing in heavy shadow. “Liris is honored to offer you some land to stable your horses. You see, we’re diversifying and—”

She grinned weakly. It was too soon for this! She had hoped that the men and women of Liris would be consumed by their own internal matters, at least long enough for her new identity to become fixed. If Odess recognized her the news would be bound to percolate through the Fair. She didn’t believe in its vaunted secrecy any more than she believed that good always triumphed.

She let go of Odess’s hand before he could get entirely into his sales pitch, and turned away. “Charmed, I’m sure. Flance! Can you deal with this?”

“Oh, but Master Flance was unable to resolve one little matter,” said the horse master, stepping around Odess.

“Deal with it!” she snarled. She glimpsed a startled look in Odess’s eye before she swept by the two men and into the outer hallway.

Well, that had been an unexpected surge of adrenalin! She laughed at herself as she strode quickly through the vaulted, whitewashed spaces. In the half-minute it took her to slow down to a stroll, Venera took several turns and ended up in an area of the cellars she didn’t know.

Someone cleared his or her throat. Venera turned to find a man in servant’s livery approaching. He looked only vaguely familiar but that was hardly surprising considering the number of people she’d hired recently.

“Ma’am, this area hasn’t been cleaned up yet. Are you looking for something in particular?”

“No. I’m lost. Where did you just come from?”

“This way.” The man walked back the way they had both come. He was right about the state of the cellars; this passage hadn’t been reconstructed and was only minimally cleaned. Black portraits still hung on the walls, here and there an eye glaring out from behind centuries of dust and soot. The lanterns were widely spaced and a few men visible down a side way were reduced to silhouettes, their backdrop some bright distant doors.

“Down this way.” Her guide indicated a black stairwell Venera hadn’t seen before. Narrow and unlit, it plummeted steeply down.

Venera stopped. “What the—” Then she saw the pistol in his hand.

“Move,” grated the man. “Now.”

She almost called his bluff. One of those quick sidesteps Chaison had taught her, then a foot sweep… he would be on the floor before he knew it. But she hesitated just long enough for him to step out of reach. Caught unprepared for once, Venera stumbled into the blackness with him behind her.

“You’re in a lot of trouble,” she said.

“We’re not afraid of the authorities,” said her kidnaper contemptuously.

“I’m not talking about the authorities, I’m talking about me.” The stairs had ended on a narrow shelf above an indistinct, dark body of water. It was dank and cold down here; looking left and right she saw that she was standing on the edge of large tank—a cistern, no doubt.

“We’ve been watching you,” said the shadowy figure behind her. “I assure you we know what you’re capable of.” The pistol was in her back again and he was pushing her hard enough that she had trouble keeping her feet. Angrily she hurried ahead and emerged onto the iron plating next to the water. “I didn’t know I had this,” she commented as she turned right, toward the source of the light.

“It’s not yours, this is part of the municipal water supply,” said a half-familiar voice up ahead.

She eyed the black depths. Jump in? There might be a culvert she could swim through, the way heroes did in romance novels. Those heroes never drowned in the dark, though, and besides even if she made it out of here her appearance, soaking wet, in the streets of the city was bound to cause a scandal. She did not need that right now.

There was an open area at the far end of the tank. The same tables and crates she’d seen in the wine cellar were set up here, and the same young revolutionaries were sitting on them. Standing next to a lantern-lit desk was the youth with straight black hair and oval eyes. He was dressed in the long coat and tails she’d seen fashionable men wearing on the streets of the wheel; with his arms crossed the coat belled out enough for her to see the two pistols holstered at his waist. She was suddenly reminded of Garth’s apparel, which was like a down-at-heel version of the same costume.

“What’s the meaning of this?” she snapped, even as she counted people and exits (there was one of the latter, a closed iron door). “You’re not being very neighborly,” she added more softly.

“Sit her down and tie her up,” said the black-haired youth. He had a high tenor voice, not unmanly but refined, his words very precise. His eyes were gray and cold.

“Yes, Bryce.” The man who’d led her here sat her down on a stout wooden chair next to the table, and pulling her arms back proceeded to tie a clumsy knot around her wrists.

Venera craned her neck to look back. “You obviously don’t do this much,” she said. Then, spearing this Bryce fellow with a sharp eye, she added, “Kidnapping is precision work. You people don’t strike me as being organized enough to pull it off.”

Bryce’s eyebrows shot up, that same look of surprise he’d shown in the cellar. “If you’d been following our escapades you’d know what we’re capable of.”

“Bombing innocent crowds, yes,” she said acidly. “Hero’s work, that.”

He shrugged, but looked uncomfortable. “That one was meant for the council members,” he admitted. “It fell back and killed the man who threw it. That was a soldier’s death.”

She nodded. “Like most soldiers’ deaths, painfully unnecessary. What do you want?”

Bryce spun another chair around and sat down in it, folding his arms over its back. “We intend to bring down the great nations,” he said simply.

Venera considered how to reply. After a moment she said, “How can kidnapping me get you any closer to doing that? I’m an outsider, I’m sure nobody cares much whether I live or die. And nobody will ransom me.”

“True,” he agreed with a shrug. “But if you go missing, you’ll soon be declared a fraud and the title to Buridan will go up for grabs. It’ll be a free-for-all, and we intend to make sure that it starts a civil war.”

As plans went, it struck Venera as eminently practical—but this was not a good time to be smiling and nodding.

She thought for a while. All she could hear was the slow drip drip of water from rusted ceiling pipes; doubtless no one would hear any cries for help. “I suppose you’ve been following my story,” she said eventually. “Do you believe that I’m Amandera Thrace-Guiles, heir of Buridan?”

He waved a hand negligently. “Couldn’t care less. Actually, I think you are an imposter, but why does it matter? You’ll soon be out of the picture.”

“But what if I am an imposter?” She watched his face closely as she spoke. “Where do you suppose I came from?”

Now he looked puzzled. “Here… but your accent is foreign. Are you from outside Spyre?”

She nodded. “Outside Spyre, and consequently I have no loyalty for any of the factions here. But I do have one thing—I’ve come into a great deal of money and influence, using my own wits.”

He leaned back, laughing. “So what are you saying?” he asked. “That you’re a sympathizer? More like an opportunist; so why should I have anything but contempt for that?”

“Because this power… is only a means to an end,” she said. “I’m not interested in who governs or even who ends up with the money I’ve gained. I have my own agenda.”

He snorted. “How vague and intriguing. Well, I’m sure I can’t help you with this ill-defined ‘agenda.’ We’re only interested in people who believe. People who know that there’s another way to govern than the tyrannies we have here. I’m talking about emergent government, which you as a barbarian have probably never even heard of.”

“Emergent?” Now it was Venera’s turn to be startled. “That’s just a myth. Government emerging spontaneously as a property of people’s interactions… it doesn’t work.”

“Oh, but it does.” He fished inside his jacket and came out with a small, heavily worn black book. “This is the proof. And the key to bringing it back.” He held the book up for her to see; with her limited mobility, Venera could just make out the title: Rights Currencies, 29th Edition.

“It’s the manual,” he said. “The original manual, taken from the secret libraries of one of the great nations. This book explains how currency-based emergent government works, and provides an example.” He opened the book and withdrew several tightly folded bills. These he unfolded on the table where she could see them. “People have always had codes of conduct,” said Bryce as he stared lovingly at the money, “but they were originally put together hit or miss, with anecdotal evidence to back them up, and using armies and policemen to enforce them. This is a system based on the human habit of buying and selling—only you can’t use this money to buy things. Each bill stands for a particular right.”

She leaned over to see. One pink rectangle had the word JUDGEMENT printed on it above two columns of tiny words. “The text shows which other bills you can trade this one for,” said Bryce helpfully. “On the flip side is a description of what you can do if you’ve got it. This one lets you try court cases if you’ve also got some other types of bill, but you have to trade this one to judge a trial. The idea is you can only sell it to someone who doesn’t have the correct combination to judge and hopefully whoever they sell it to sells it back to you. So the system’s not static, it has to be sustained through continual transactions.”

She looked at another bill. It said GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. The book Bryce was holding, if it was genuine, was priceless. People had been looking for these lost principles for longer than they’d been trying to find the last key to Candesce. Venera had never believed they really existed.

Pointedly, she shrugged. “So?”

The young revolutionary snatched up the bills. “Currencies like this can’t just be made,” he proclaimed, exhibiting a certain youthful zeal that she would have found endearing in other circumstances. “The rights, the classifications, number of denominations, who you can trade to—all of those details have to be calculated with the use of massive simulations of whole human societies. Simulate the society in a computing machine, and test different interactions… then compile a list of ratios and relations between the bills. Put them in circulation, and an ordered society emerges from the transactions—without institutions getting in the way. Simple.”

“Right,” said Venera, “And I’m betting that this book wasn’t designed for a world like Virga, was it? Isn’t this a set of rules for people who live on a flat-world—a ‘planet’? The legend says that’s why the emergent systems were lost—because their rules didn’t apply here.”

“Not the old ratios, it’s true,” he admitted. “But the core bills… they’re sound. You can at least use them to minimize your institutions even if you can’t eliminate them completely. We intend to prove it, starting here.”

“Well, that’s very ambitious.” Venera suddenly noticed the way he was looking at her. She was tied with her arms back and her breasts thrust at this young man and he was obviously enjoying her predicament. For the first time since being brought down here, she found herself genuinely off balance.

She struggled to regain her line of thought. “Anyway, this is all beside the point. Which is, that I am in a greater position to help you as a free woman than as a social pariah—or dead. After all, this civil war of yours probably won’t happen. As you say, the great nations have too big a stake in stability. And if it doesn’t happen, then what? It’s back to the drawing board, minus one hideout for you. Back to bombing and other ineffectual terrorist tactics.”

Bryce closed the book and restored it to his jacket. “What of it? We’ve already lost this place. If the war doesn’t happen there’s no downside.”

“But consider what you could do if you had an ally—a patroness—with wealth and resources, and more experience than you in covert activities?” She looked him straight in the eye. “I’ve killed a number of men in my time. I’ve built and run my own spy organization—no, I’m not Amandera Thrace-Guiles. I’m someone infinitely more capable than a mere heir to a backwards nation on this backwards little wheel. And with power, and wealth, and influence… I can help you.”

“No deal.” He stood up and gestured to the others to follow him as he walked to the metal door.

“A printing press!” she called after him. He looked back, puzzled. “In order for that money to work,” she continued, “don’t you need to mint thousands of copies of the bills and put them into circulation? It has to be used by everybody to work, right? So where’s your printing press?”

He glanced at his people. “It’ll happen.”

“Oh? What if I offered you your own mint—delivery of the presses in a month—as well as a solid budget to print your money?”

Bryce appeared to think about it, then reached for the door handle.

“And what if you had an impregnable place to house the press?” she called, frantically reaching for the only other thing she could think to offer. “What if Buridan tower was yours?”

One of his lieutenants put a hand on Bryce’s arm. He glared at the man, then made a sour face and turned. “Why on Spyre would we trust you to keep your end of the bargain?”

“The tower contains proof that I’m an imposter,” she said quickly. “The council is going to want to visit it, I’m sure of it—but how can I clean it up and make it presentable? None of my new servants could be trusted with the secret. But you could—and you could take photographs, do what you need to do to assemble proof that I’m not the heir. So you’ll have that to hold over me. You’ll have the tower, you’ll have money, and as much influence as I can spare for you.”

He was thinking about it, she could tell—and the others were impressed as well. “Best of all,” she added before he could change his mind, “if my deception is ultimately revealed, you may get your civil war anyway. What could be better?”

Bryce walked slowly back to her. “Again I say, why should we trust you? If there’s proof as you say in Buridan tower… if you’d even let us get there before the police descended on us… Too many ifs, Ms. Thrace-Guiles.”

“I’ll draft you a note right now,” she said. “Made out to the night watch at the elevators, to let your people ride the elevator down to Buridan Tower. You can do it right now, and release me after you’re sure I’m right.”

“And be trapped there when your charade is exposed?”

That was just too much for Venera. “Then forget it, you bastard!” she yelled at him. “Go on, get out! I’m sure you’re far too busy playing the romantic revolutionary leader. Go and sacrifice the lives of a few more of your friends to convince the rest of them that you’re actually doing something. Oh, and blow up a few women and babies for good measure, I’m sure that’ll make you feel better—or start your damned war and kill ten thousand innocents, I don’t care! Just get out of my sight!”

Bryce’s face darkened with anger, but he didn’t move. Finally he stalked over and scowled at her. Venera glared back.

“Bring this woman some paper,” he said. “You’ll write that note,” he said in a low voice, “and we’ll see what we can find in Buridan Tower.”

The streets had not changed since his childhood. Garth Diamandis strode familiar ways, but after such a long absence it was as if he saw them with new eyes. His town-wheel, officially known as Wheel 3, had been called Hammerlong for centuries. Its riveted iron diameter spanned nearly a mile, and the inside surface on which the buildings were set was nearly half that wide. It had spun for five hundred years. In that time, the layout of Hammerlong’s gargoyled buildings had been rearranged—or not where they accommodated stubborn holdouts—dozens of times. New edifices had hiked their buttresses over the shoulders of older ones as the population grew, then shrank, then grew again. The wheel had been fixed, reinforced, rejigged, and thrown out of whack by weight imbalances so often that its constant creaking and groaning was like background music to the citizens who lived there. The smell of rust permeated everything.

With finite space, the citizens of the wheel had jammed new buildings in between existing ones; corkscrewed them inward and outward from the rim; overgrown what was original with the new. Streamlined towers hung like knife blades below the rim, their bottom-most floors straining under nearly two gravities while the stacked apartments overhead converged to shadow the streets and a second layer of avenues, then a third, were built up where weight diminished. Yin-yang stairs, elevator cables, ancient rust-dribbling spokes, and leaking pipes all knotted together at the smoke-wreathed axis. Ships and shuttles clustered there like grazing flies.

Hammerlong seemed designed for skulking and the population did just that. Most were citizens of nations based on Greater Spyre, after all, so they brought the paranoia of that realm with them to the city. Those born and raised in Hammerlong and the other wheels were more open, but they formed a separate class and had fewer rights in their own towns. Left to their own devices, they cultivated a second economy and culture in the alleys, air-shafts and crawlspaces of the layered city.

Garth was on a third-level street when the full force of nostalgia hit him. He had to stop, his imagination filling in gaps in the crowds that scurried to and fro like so many black-clad ants. He saw the young dandies of his youth, swaggering and hipshot to display their pistols; the ingenues leaning on their balconies high above, their attention apparently elsewhere. He had walked or run or fled down these ways dozens of times.

Some of his old compatriots were dead, he knew, some had moved on to build prosperous families and deny their youths. Others… the prisons were still full, one of Venera Fanning’s new carpenters had told him this morning. And, if one knew where to look, and how to read… there, yes he saw a thin scrawl of graffiti on a wall ten feet beyond the parapet. Made with chalk, it was barely visible unless you knew to look for it. Repeal Edict 1, said the spiky letters.

Garth smiled. Ah, the naivete of youth! Edict 1 had been passed so long ago that most citizens of Spyre didn’t even know it existed, nor would they have understood its significance if it were described to them. The hotheaded youth of Spyre were still political, it seemed, and still as incompetent at promoting their politics as in his day. Witness that appalling bomb attack yesterday.

The memory chased all sentimentality out of Garth’s mind. His mouth set in a stoic frown, he continued on down the street, digging his hands deep in his coat pockets and avoiding the glances of the few women who frequented the walkway. His aching feet carried him to stairs and more stairs, and his knees and hips began to protest at the labor. The last time he’d gone this way he’d been able to run all the way up.

Hundreds of feet above the official street level of Hammerlong, a bridge had been thrown between two buildings back in the carefree Reconstructionist period. Culture and art had flourished here before the time of the preservationists, even before the insular paranoia that had swallowed all the great nations.

The bridge was two stories tall and faced with leaded glass windows that caught the light of Candesce. It wasn’t used by occupants of either tower; the forges of one had little use for the paper-making enterprise in the other. For decades, the lofting, sunlit spaces of the bridge had been used by bohemian artists—and the agitators and revolutionaries who loved them.

Garth’s heart was pounding as he took the last few steps up a wrought-iron fire escape at the center of the span. He paused to catch his breath next to the wrought-iron curlicues of the door, and listened to the scratchy gramophone music that emanated from it. Then he rapped on the door.

The gramophone stopped. He heard scrambling noises, muffled voices. Then the door cracked open an inch. “Yes?” a man said belligerently.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Garth said with a broad smile. “I’m looking for someone.”

“Well, they’re not here.” The door started to close.

Garth laughed richly. “I’m not with the secret police, young pup. I used to live here.”

The door hesitated. “I painted this iron about… oh, twenty years ago,” Garth said, tracing his finger along the curves of metal. “It was rusting out, just like the one in the back bathroom. Do the pipes still knock when you run the water?”

“What do you want?” The voice held a little less harshness.

Garth withdrew his hand from the remembered metal. With difficulty he brought his attention back to the present. “I know she doesn’t live here now,” he said. “Too much time has passed. But I had to start somewhere and this was the last place we were together. I don’t suppose you know… any of the former occupants of the place?”

“Just a minute.” The door closed, then opened again, widely this time. “Come in.” Garth stepped into the sunlit space and was overwhelmed by memory.

The factory planks paving the floor had proven perfect for dancing. He remembered stepping into and out of that parallelogram of sunlight—though there had been a table next to it and he’d banged his hip—while she sang along with the gramophone. That same gramophone sat on a windowsill now, guarded by twin potted orange trees. A mobile of candles and wire turned slowly in the dusty sunlight, entangling his view of the loft behind it. Where he’d slept, and made love, and played his dulcimer for years…

“Who are you after?” A young woman with cropped black hair stood before him. She wore a man’s clothing and held a tattoo needle loosely in one hand. Another woman sat at the table behind her, shoulder bared and bleeding.

Garth took a deep breath and committed the name to speech for the first time in twenty years. “Her name is Selene. Selene Diamandis…”