Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Read online

  They'd been married for six years at that point, and had known one another for ten.

  Keir stood and walked a little ways away so that he could see himself sitting on the bench. You could do that in scry, since its records of an event didn't have to be limited to what you saw with your own eyes. From outside, the look on Keir's own face was eloquent, as it always was in the record. The version of Keir he was looking at had just come to realize that his wife was de-indexing, and that it was the emblems of her time with him that she was erasing.

  A fateful conversation was about to start, but Keir didn't want to hear it. He kept on down the path, which stitched itself together from the infinite storage of his scry as he went. It could show him every instant he'd spent here, but it usually mashed them together into the emblem of an idealized, perfect day. Not for this day's events, though; he rarely accessed their emblems, but reviewed them in their entirety.

  De-indexing had been a taboo for him before Sita started doing it. After, he'd drifted into temptation, year after year. But when something finally happened that made him annihilate vast tracts of his past, for some reason he'd remembered all those pieces he'd always planned to lose. Instead of erasing the pain and the disappointments--even Sita's betrayal--he'd kept it all, and lost something else.

  Near the path, a cloud of pixies was fluttering around a meter-high revus bush that was threatening them with tiny cannons mounted on its metal leaves. "Don't you dare!" a pixie scolded as the guns swiveled toward it. "Keir Chen will dig you up if you shoot us!"

  The plant began firing, in a cascade of little pops that would be inaudible from more than three meters away. The pixies ducked and swerved and, from a safe distance, began chanting "We're telling! We're telling!"

  Keir rarely visited this part of the record, but somehow this time he remembered it--as he was remembering everything now in his dream, rather than accessing his scry. For some reason he'd stopped and frowned at the unfolding drama. Pixies, dryads, talking trees--they'd been a normal part of his life on Revelation. The world was an enchanted place and, even at the time of this memory, he'd taken that for granted.

  Near the revus was a clutch of box tulips. The flowers were ordinary enough, but each one was contained in a crystal case scaled to its size and pose. Like the nanotech revus bush, each terrarium was festooned with miniature cannons, trembling stingers, and caterpillar-blinding lasers. Little doors in the boxes sported flashing bee-attractor signs.

  Woe to the gardener who tried to dig up a box tulip. At the first cut of the trowel their planetary mesh network would go on high alert. Tulip sirens would go off all over the neighborhood. Brain-hacked wasps would converge on you. The tulip consortium's AIs would harass you by tagging your scry with insults and slanderous accusations. Their shell companies and corporations would hire lawyers and sue you.

  If you made it indoors unscathed, the tulips would bomb the other flowers in your garden until you came out again and promised them reparations.

  That sort of ruckus had never seemed remarkable to Keir when he was living here. At some point after he'd left Revelation, though, and before he'd de-indexed his own life, the tulips and the pixies had become the most urgent part of his memories of Revelation. He just wished he remembered why.

  A shadow fell across the clutch of tulip terrariums. Keir looked up to see a black, faceless, hooded figure looming over the path. It raised a bony finger and pointed it at him accusingly.

  This was no longer a memory of the day he'd discovered Sita's discontent; instead, he was remembering visiting that memory at some time after.

  "You should not be here," said the nag.

  He glared at it. "I'm not staying." The nags were a common feature of the scry, and he would regularly see them in the distance when he visited this, or any memory. They were there to kick you out of your recorded past if you spent too much time there. They were an annoying, but important, mental-health tool of the scry.

  He'd always considered the nags a nuisance, though he'd rarely met one up close. When he'd laid down this particular memory, they'd still been common in Revelation's scry.

  "You keep coming here," grated the nag now. "We don't like it." It bent over and began swatting box tulips. Each virtual terrarium fizzed and vanished as the nag touched it.

  Keir remembered cursing. "How can you say that! You left Revelation! You abandoned us."

  "You should go. Or do you want me to wipe this record clean?" The nag began reaching out, grabbing distant clouds, hills on the horizon, and floating city-spheres. Soon it had an armful of scene elements. "Do you want these memories crushed?"

  "You dare threaten me with that?" Keir pointed a shaking finger at one of his Sitas. "When you gave up on her?" The nag squeezed, and pieces of the memory popped like soap bubbles. Keir yelled in fury and fell out of the scene--and, on Venera's yacht, banged against the wall of his sleeping closet.

  * * *

  LEAL FOUND HIM outside. Keir was sitting on the yacht's hull, letting the fresh breeze following the storm caress his brow. He opened his eyes when she appeared in the hatch, noticed the concern on her face and, as she made to go back inside, said, "No. I'd appreciate the company."

  She clipped a line to her belt and climbed out next to him. Candesce was a yellow fire at infinity, just slightly too dim to make daylight for any nation that might covet this volume of air. It was still night by Slipstream's clock, and the ship had been quiet when he'd come out here.

  Leal settled down next to him, but said nothing. Keir felt a growing compulsion to fill the silence; at last he said, "Do you know how old I am?"

  She shook her head. "Seventeen? Nineteen? Or do your years differ from ours?"

  "No, they don't." He met her gaze and said, "Leal, I am seventy-nine years old. Too young to have neotenized myself twice. Yet it seems I did."

  She reared back in surprise, almost losing her grip on the hull. "Keir, what are you talking about?"

  "Neotenizing. De-indexing. They're two ways to renew yourself when the weight of life and memory gets to be too much." He looked back at the flowerlike cloudscape ahead of them. "With de-indexing, you sever your ability to access certain records of your past. Then, your natural memories wither as well. It's a gentle way of turning your back on past events ... relationships ... that you want to forget.

  "But neotenization ... it means 'to turn into a child.' That's a much more radical procedure." He held out his hands, which had once been larger and stronger. He'd had a scar on the back of the left one, though he no longer remembered where or when he'd gotten that. The scar was lost, and so was the memory.

  "I've--I've been thinking a lot," murmured Leal, "about what you said--that death and immortality are equally bad choices. Your people learned this from experience with both."

  "Of the two, death is the better choice," he said. "Death is forgetting, and there's plenty of reasons why you should want to do that.

  "I was not born in the city of Brink. I come from a planet named Revelation, and I owned a house there. I was married." He looked at her, but now her expression was neutral. She was intent on his words, and not ready to judge them yet.

  "My wife, Sita ... she de-indexed me. At the time, I was devastated; it was the end of a relationship I had built my life around. What I didn't know at the time was that what she'd done ... Well, millions of people on Revelation were undergoing similar transformations. The scry on Revelation had been compromised--hacked, I think is the old word for it. Sita didn't just leave me ... she left humanity itself."

  Now that he knew where to look in his own mind, he remembered it--not all, but enough. Sita had forgotten him; but in the months after their marrage had dissolved, he'd still held out hope that they might have a second chance. They could, after all, start over from scratch as long as she didn't de-list him from her social reality.

  But then, during the gentle winter of the year, something had started killing nags.

  Revelation had always been a beautiful plane
t, and most of its beauty was real. The virtual overlays that accented it (like the cascades of pixie dust the fairies threw off) were subtle and added to the wonder of the natural world. Anyone who spent too long in a purely virtual world would get kicked out by the nags; keeping people anchored in reality was, after all, their function.

  "When the rumors about the nags started," he told Leal, "I was too sunk in my own misery to pay much attention. At first I didn't notice when the scry's overlays on my senses began to become more detailed, more interlinked into these strange and gorgeous, purely virtual realms. I guess I was sufficiently unhappy--and sufficiently stubborn not to take a cure for my misery--that I remained immune to this kind of a ... siren call ... of a nag-free, virtual paradise that had started to creep over Revelation."

  As he'd sat here on the hull of the Judgment, Keir had found himself thinking about one memory in particular--a memory that he couldn't believe he'd lost during these past months. It was of his last glimpse of Sita.

  "I remember her," he said softly, "standing on marble steps that led up to a golden, glowing archway. A dozen of my other friends were there, too. It's like a dream, but I know it really happened: some of them walked without hesitation up and into the light and it ... swallowed them. Sita glanced around once, and there was recognition in her eyes. And then she, too, mounted the steps and consigned her mind to an online reality that would never again let her free."

  In the real world, Sita's body and its double had fallen silent. That day they had left Atavus to join a vast throng of Revelation's population that was congregating at the edge of the seashore. Like ants, they were building a vast arcology--a hive--for the entity that had traded them its illusions for reality.

  "A week after that, I sold my house to the tulips and I left Revelation for good." He had joined the Renaissance.

  "Leal, I was one of the founders of the Brink expedition. But ... something happened. Sometime in the past two years, I was neotenized. That's not all bad; my body began to change, shedding its old cells and structures, replacing it all with new, strong tissue. But my brain began to lose the pathways it had built for decades. It began to rewire itself, and when that happens it's not just memory that you lose. Most of your personality goes as well.

  "Whether I did this to myself or ... someone forced it on me, I don't know--"

  "Forced it on you?" She looked horrified. "Who would do such a thing?"

  He shrugged. "It's less than murder, but just as effective. And I would never have known, had I not come here to Virga. The process seems to have stopped, probably because of--" He nodded at distant Candesce.

  She followed his gaze to the sun of suns. "Do you have any idea who it was? Someone at the Renaissance?"

  "It could have been me." He slapped the cold hull. "I know I never got over what happened to Sita--but I'd also sworn never to do something like it to myself. And I remember resisting the feeling ... of things slipping away."

  "Keir," Leal said soberly, "why did you come to Virga? You had a chance to go back after you rescued us--"

  "No, I had to get out!" Even as he said this he realized how intense that need for escape had been; yet now, he had no idea what had caused it. Unless-- "If I didn't do this to myself ... if someone else did it to me and I knew, knew it was happening ... that would explain..."

  Something welled up in him then, and to his astonishment Keir found he was crying. Part of him stood outside himself, watching in wonder, and his tears flicked away in the winds of Virga, and Leal wrapped him in her arms and murmured in his ear.

  Eventually he stopped, but they stayed together, washed in the breeze and unspeaking.

  Then the hatch flew open and Venera Fanning's head popped out. "There you are. Grab your things, I'm sending you back to Rush with the others."

  Venera gave no sign of noticing that Leal and Keir were holding one another. Instead, she vigorously yanked at the tab on a signal flare, and when it lit, began waving it in broad strokes. She left a long spiral trail of smoke on the air.

  Keir and Leal disengaged themselves. "Where are you going, Venera?" asked Leal.

  "The city-state of Fracas," she announced with an air of satisfaction. "Currently something of a thorn in our side, no? And I'd like to know why." Keir had seen the red dots Venera had started adding to her chart of nations; and since their meeting with Princess Thavia, he'd certainly noticed how many cities and countries had begun turning the Judgment away. "If Sacrus and its outside allies are mustering their own alliance, we need to know the details. That could take a very long time if we were to rely on diplomacy and reportage. What we need is a way to make a very quick head count." She grinned rakishly, every inch the pirate queen in her leather trousers and flapping shirt, sizzling flare in one hand as the other clutched a guide rope hanging off the Judgment's nose.

  Keir laughed in surprise. His melancholy mood was evaporating in the face of the sheer strangeness that was Venera Fanning.

  The flare died and Venera let it go. "It's funny--I've come full circle," she mused. "Fracas is right next to where Spyre used to be. The city's always sheltered under Spyre's battlements. It's under no one's jurisdiction. It would be the perfect base for people who claim no country of their own, don't you think? I've no doubt that if the hostages are still in Virga, this is where they're being kept.

  "Ah!" she added brightly. "There they are."

  A glitter of ship lights had appeared in the depths beyond the way station. There must be four or five vessels there--all quite large by Leal's reckoning.

  Venera made to reenter the yacht, but looked back to say, "I'm leaving in a half-hour, so you'd best be gone by then."

  "And a fond good-bye to you, too," Leal said after she vanished. She and Keir climbed over to the hatch. "Well, as usual, Venera seems to have a plan," she said as he opened it. "But what about you, Keir? --Now that you know ... something ... of yourself? What are you going to do?"

  He took one more look at Candesce, half-wrapped now in veils of cloud. "My memory's a puzzle," he said. "But I think enough of the pieces remain ... and one thing I do remember is that I'm good at puzzles.

  "I'm going to put this one together."

  15

  "THIS ONE'S NOT on the list."

  Jacoby Sarto frowned like a thunderhead at the dockmaster. The open-ended, cylindrical docking structure of the town of Fracas was crowded with ships, a jumble of national flags and royal seals. They'd all landed as scheduled over the past days, disgorging one or two key persons who would look around in apprehension or disdain, then take to the stairs that led down to the city--and never return.

  The yacht that was settling onto the decking now was different from the others. It was a kind of assassin's dagger, long, sharp, and bristling with prickles for any unwary hand that tried to grasp it. Closer up, the thorns became fins, some adorned with jet engines. Jacoby's military experience told him that the yacht's cockpit was at its center of gravity, and those engines would let the craft spin around itself, for what Jacoby assumed was uncanny--and clearly military--maneuverability.

  The yacht radiated personality, and it was a familiar personality. He rubbed at the itching bandage on his maimed hand, trying not to think of just how urgent this part of the plan had become, after the disaster of the last few days.

  Yes, this must be the right ship: it looked like its owners had done their best to disguise the deadly nature of the vessel, but it hadn't done much good; the ominous name painted on its prow--Judgment--gave its purpose away.

  Could she be so stupid as to have come here herself?

  Jacoby assembled his honor guard at the infinite drop that ran around the edge of the circular docks. The yacht perched there, along with other ships, right on the rim of the hundred-foot-wide mouth of the dock structure. "Atten ... shun!" he snapped as the yacht's main hatch opened.

  The woman who stepped out was young, beautiful, and regal in her poise. She was dressed in a black bodysuit with a black lace poncho over it; Jacoby co
uld see the crisscross of a gun belt at her hips. She looked like some sort of pirate queen, but he'd never seen her before--clearly she was a late addition to the list that Inshiri had not had time to tell him about.

  He bowed, not too lowly, and said, "Welcome to Fracas. Who do I have the honor of addressing?"

  She scowled down at him, no sign of recognition in her eyes, either. "Tell your bosses that Princess Thavia of Greydrop is here, and I demand to know what the hell they're up to."

  If the gravity hadn't been trivial up here Jacoby might have fallen over. No, this was not the real Thavia, whom he knew well and whose loyalty he could always count on. What was hysterically funny was that this woman wasn't imitating the real Thavia at all, but rather another spoiled princess Jacoby knew--and she was doing a damned fine job of it.

  "Princess Thavia?" She nodded impatiently. "Well, this is an honor, then." In the microgravity she merely had to undulate slightly and her body drifted forward and down to where she could perch on tiptoe in front of him.

  "My name is Jacoby Sarto," he said, slightly emphasizing his name while looking her in the eye. Not a hint that she knew him. "I'll be your liaison during your stay here," he continued, then saw that she wasn't even looking at him, but was peering in apparent puzzlement through the iron grating to their left. Thousands of feet below it, the city began.

  So, clearly Venera wasn't that stupid. She'd sent a proxy--but she was still taking his bait. If he knew her--and he liked to think he did--that meant that she was not far away.

  "I take it you've never been to Fracas before?"

  "Never," she said slowly; her eyes were on the interior of the dock cylinder behind him, which in any normal city would have been empty space where ships could hang weightless. "What is that godawful mess?"

  "Fracas is special. You'll see."

  Behind her, two other people emerged from the yacht, a man and a woman. Both wore drab servants' clothes, but they moved like soldiers.