Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Read online

  He spread his arms to encompass the crowd. "Who here signed that pact? Who even knew of it?" Nobody said anything. "Our pact was made with your ancestors, hundreds of years ago. They chose--not you."

  Now he put his hand to his face, looking pained. It was, Leal thought, an extraordinary performance, because it was exactly not what she'd expected from this huge, intimidating man.

  "I have to make you understand," he said with apparent reluctance, "so I'm going to confess to you. This will be my legacy, I suspect--just this one story, and it's not a story I ever wanted anyone to know."

  He grimaced at the crowd. "I betrayed my wife. --You see, she had a cousin, and after ten years of marriage, I fell in love with that cousin. I'll spare you the details. The point is that, in the midst of all of that, I was called to the walls, and while I was away a plague hit our town.

  "My family lived in the principalities, the safest, most civilized, richest place in Virga--but days from the walls. Still vulnerable to disease, and war, and all the insanities of our backward world. Some miasma of air, a cloud whose water droplets contained a pathogen easily cured at the walls, had drifted through the principalities and left vomiting, diarrhea, and death in its wake. When I heard about the outbreak I took the fastest ship home, and when I got there discovered that my wife, Miranda, was ill--and so was my beloved Elize, her cousin.

  "Our rules were clear," he said heavily. "The immediate family of Guardsmen can be taken to the walls and cured--if there's time, because days can make a difference. I could certainly save my wife, but..." He fell silent, and when he began again, his voice cracked, "she wasn't the one I wanted to save."

  The chamber had fallen into hushed silence. Leal was astonished, and she could tell that everyone else was, too.

  Remoran pulled himself together. "I didn't know what to do. Could I be such a villain as to divorce my wife and marry Elize just so I could bring her to be healed instead? I did everything I could to treat them both, but the medicines I'd brought from the walls didn't work--didn't work--in Virga!

  "I dithered for days, and then, heartbroken, I made my decision. I gathered Miranda from her sickbed and we set out for the walls. But I'd waited too long. She died on the way." He closed his eyes.

  "I turned the ship around. I raced home. But again, I was too late. Elize died in her sleep just hours before I reached her side. I lost them both..."

  Again, he struggled to compose himself. Then he seemed to expand, shoulders no longer slumped, face clear and determined. "Who here wants their loved ones to die? Who here wants to die themselves? That is the pact our ancestors made. Leal Maspeth admits that they traded away immortality, in favor of pain, disease, and death, all for some illusion of meaning? Well, forget meaning. Give me love. Give me back my love ...

  "There is another way. Our brothers from beyond the walls have always been troubled by our tragic lives, and they've made us an offer. Let's dial down Candesce's suppressive field, and for God's sake, let some aid and respite into this suffering world. Miranda didn't have to die. Elize didn't have to die; neither do any of us, ever again.

  "Keep hiding in ignorance and misery, and condemn your own children to death--or open the doors and let choice into their lives. Decide which you want. May you decide ... more wisely than I did."

  He hung his head, turned, and left the stage.

  * * *

  IT TOOK A while for Fanning to regain control of the crowd and move the colloquy back onto its original program, but Keir didn't pay much attention; he was watching Leal. He was proud to see her recover quickly from having her passionate confession derailed by Remoran's dramatism. She was obviously upset, but it seemed that she had little sympathy for her own feelings. Fear, doubt, any sort of helplessness--they just made her angry at herself, and then she used the anger to prop up her indomitable sense of purpose. Soon, she was leading a breakout session on Virgan history, corralling and guiding a small mob of generals, high priests, and cabinet ministers as if they were recalcitrant schoolboys. Keir watched for a little while, but there was little he could do to help and he soon wandered away.

  His role would be to help describe what the world outside Virga was like, but Remoran had set up multiple roadblocks to doing that effectively. So, while Fanning's strategists talked about how to proceed, he had nothing to do. The funny thing was that for the first while it was like being back in Brink, a child wandering through an awesome forest of adults. But then, gradually, a quiet voice somewhere inside him began to comment on those adults--not as a child, but as one of them.

  They were so flawed, so obvious in their obsessions and willful blindness. Worst of all, they lacked scry, which could have so easily coordinated this fractious, chaotic tumble of disputes and paranoia. It was a miracle they were here at all, a miracle they were getting anything done. Keir began watching for patterns of interaction. Half-consciously, he was building a model of the meeting's social dynamics in his head.

  "Keir Chen?" A page bowed to him. The boy was little older than Keir had recently thought he himself was. "Yes?"

  "You're wanted in the grove." The boy pointed to the little stand of trees that spread out to embrace the left side of the government building within the curving sweep of its glass shell. Some kind of commotion was happening over there, with the paths blocked by security people and something tall and broad being trundled through the foliage.

  "Hmm." He strolled in that direction. Various small crowds were clustered around speakers in the gardens; all were being very careful to avoid trampling on the flower beds, knowing as they did how rare gardens under gravity were in Virga. Other knots of people were arguing or conspiring in various corners.

  The page led him past the grim security guards and under the trees. A number of people were talking up ahead; he heard shouted orders, the sound of creaking ropes. Rounding a bend in the path, they came upon a sight that made the page stop dead and swear under his breath. Keir grunted, but not because the bizarre vision was unfamiliar to him. Quite the opposite.

  "Chen, can you explain this madness?" It was Admiral Fanning. He was standing with his arms crossed, tapping one foot impatiently on the gravel path. Next to him was a young, handsome officer in resplendent dress uniform who looked agitated and tired.

  "We sent Travis here to the emissary's country and now he's back--with this!" Fanning nodded past his officer to where a work gang was just finishing their moving operation.

  Keir whistled appreciatively. Forgetting to answer Fanning, he walked up to the base of the vast oak tree the work gang had trundled into this intersection. It towered over the young trees around it, its twisted branches and thick sheets of leaves dark and wild-appearing next to their manicured perfection.

  The oak's extensive root system was contained in a tangled metal structure that sprouted six thick metal legs. These in turn rested on several wheeled, wooden carts that were bowing under the strain.

  Coils of metal and brightly colored plastics wound up the trunk of the tree. Thousands of intricate glittering shapes perched motionless among its branches. Its base sported many arms and sensing devices, all unmoving.

  A grimy man in coveralls with a set of shears in his hand was staring up at the immense, unruly thing. "It needs a trim," he said.

  "Touch it and you die," Keir said quickly. When the man glared at him, he added, "I'm not threatening you. I won't kill you. It will."

  Something else was being wheeled out now. It was a statue of some kind, much smaller than the oak, smaller than a man, in fact. "What about that one?" the gardener asked. "Can we touch it?"

  Keir glanced at it. "Yes." It was clearly a morphont, nothing at all like the creature towering over him.

  Fanning and Travis had come up behind him. Keir spared the officer a sympathetic look. "Traveling with these two must have been a nightmare," he said. "I'm glad I wasn't with you."

  "You know what these things are?" asked the admiral.

  "Yes. It seems your man Travis gained us a very
powerful ally while he was away." When Fanning continued to look puzzled, Keir pointed to the tree. "This."

  He walked up and reached out, but didn't quite have the courage to touch one of its massive legs. "It's an oak."

  "I can see that." Now Fanning was just annoyed.

  "No, I don't think you can. The oaks are one of the most powerful species in the arena. They're aggressive, relentless, generally hostile to animalia..." He saw Fanning's look, and smiled. "Look at the legs. Look at the sensing nets, the power units. This oak is a tree wedded to an artificial intelligence with mobility, weapons, dexterous arms, and an internal Edisonian engine for designing whatever it may need."

  The admiral was still shaking his head. "But all a tree needs is--"

  "Air, soil, sunlight, and peace and quiet, yes. And if you deprive this fellow of any of those things, he'll hunt you down and obliterate you."

  "But ... but why? I mean, why should the artificial mind care? I can see what it has to offer the tree. But what does the tree offer it?"

  "Something no AI has by itself," said Keir. "A four-billion-year-old will to live."

  He could see that the admiral still didn't understand. And if he didn't, then explaining the awesome reality of the oak to the rest of the delegations was going to be a problem. Even AIs that controlled tremendous resources never lived very long, because their will to live was an add-on; it wasn't ingrained into every cell, into their most fundamental design parameters, the way it was with evolved life-forms. This oak gave the AI attached to it an anchor, an endpoint for any why it might ask about itself. The oak had no possible purpose beyond its own duration, and that was exactly what made it valuable.

  "Admiral, you're looking at the great secret that divides the morphonts and the virtual. The virtual take everything as raw material for their creativity--even their own memories and identities. They have no root. They have no attachment to the physical world or any piece of that world. This oak does. It is its embodiment that makes it like us. That is what makes it our ally..."

  He trailed off, hand still raised to nearly touch the oak. Being in the presence of the oak was bringing back memories. He remembered an oak visiting Brink, shortly before he'd de-indexed himself. Something about a warning ...

  "Chen?"

  He blinked and looked to where Admiral Fanning was frowning down at the other visitor. It sat on its little wooden cart, glittering tail coiled around its front paws, staring enigmatically into the distance. He could see the faint white strands of nanofiber that tied together its sculpted iron muscles and limbs.

  "It's a cheetah," he said, walking up to it and looking into its gigantic green eyes. "A beautiful piece." He glanced at Travis. "You've seen it in motion."

  The officer nodded. "Admiral, it talked. It's a new emissary from the ... the people who contacted Maspeth. This one is empowered to negotiate and its word will be binding."

  "But it's not moving."

  "Candesce," said Keir. "We're too close. To wake these two up, we'll have to bring them back near the skin of the world. You should have held this meeting there to begin with."

  Fanning ran a hand through his hair. "They wouldn't have come. They'd have thought it was a trap. And they won't go now. This is a disaster."

  Keir straightened. "No, it's a beginning." He stepped close to the admiral. "Sir, I lost my own wife to the virtuals. I will not see any hesitation or doubt among those who stand with me against it."

  Fanning's eyes widened. Keir finally knew who he'd been before the de-indexing and his neotenization. Right now he saw in Fanning a young man, still inexperienced in many things--a technological and philosophical primitive who was preparing to hurl spears at starships.

  "Guard these two, but do not touch them," he told the assembled soldiers. "Let no one know they're here as yet. Not one word," he emphasized, looming over the gardener who'd had the temerity to wave his shears at the oak. "All our lives depend on them."

  He walked away, aware that Fanning was staring after him. He'd thought Keir was a boy; well, so had Keir himself. It was time to lay that illusion aside.

  Yes, he remembered the oak's visit now. It might even have been this one. It had come to warn the Renaissance of some imminent danger, but what that was remained tantalizingly out of reach.

  Keir did remember, though, how he'd been feeling just before it arrived. He'd been excited--no, far more than that: triumphant. He recalled savage satisfaction, an aesthetic sense of rightness, and how he'd used his scry to banish sleep for night after night as he'd worked out the final details of what he was going to present to the others. And then, when the oak came, fear ...

  To de-index himself, he'd wandered far into the labyrinth of Brink, into empty quarters no one had yet explored. His second body had plodded behind him, towing something massive and unwieldy ... a manufacturing fab, that was it. But why just the fab? They were always attached to an Edisonian; there was no other source for the designs they used.

  In darkness lit only by the eyes of his second body, he had built something. And then he'd given instructions to that other body, and as he'd laid down and fallen asleep, it had raised surgical hands that held a gleaming something ...

  Pulse.

  Now, on the edge of the grove in Aurora's great gardens, he stopped. Something had changed the moment he'd seen the oak, but it was so quiet, so unexpected, that he hadn't even registered it consciously.

  Pulse. There it was again. He closed his eyes and waited.

  Pulse.

  His scry was awake.

  "There you are!"

  He opened his eyes, blinking at another incongruity--a voice that he shouldn't be hearing inside Virga at all. Disoriented, Keir looked around at the crowd of haughty nobles, prime ministers and presidents, diplomats and retainers. One figure was walking straight through them all, hand extended, a broad smile on his face.

  It was Gallard, his tutor from Brink.

  19

  AS THE LIGHT from his sun faded toward dusk, Hayden Griffin could be seen climbing the broad steps to the gallery overlooking the gardens. He turned to face the sun, as he had that morning, and then stood stock-still, a statue of himself.

  A few minutes later, Leal walked up, carrying two wineglasses. "Are you doing that on purpose?" she asked as she came to stand next to him.

  He blinked and looked down at her. "Doing what?"

  "Looking heroic."

  He seemed to notice the crowd below for the first time. Many faces were turned to look at him, and some people were leaning together to talk, clearly telling stories about the sun lighter. "Ah," he said, embarrassed suddenly. "No, it's just this spot has a decent eyeline. I was checking the twilight calibration."

  "Of course you were," she said smoothly, handing him one of the glasses. "But you wouldn't be so intimidating to all those fine, eligible young women down there if you did it with this in your hand."

  Now his eyes widened in surprise. "I mean," she said, "you're not actually trying to scare them away, are you?"

  Uncomfortable, he sipped at the wine. "I don't know how to play this game," he admitted finally. "Damnit, now I've forgotten the flicker rate."

  "That's a good first step." Her gaze drifted across the people below, then stopped. Her smile faded.

  Hayden noticed. "We ran rings around them once before," he said, nodding to the Abyssal soldiers waiting at the foot of the steps. "And if worse comes to worst, there's a hundred noblemen down there who would happily shoot them for a chance to talk to you." Now it was her turn to look startled, and his to grin. "... Or hadn't you noticed that?"

  Behind where the stage had stood this morning, workmen had finished dismantling a brand-new fountain in the center of the diamond-shaped plaza that served as the foyer to the gardens. They were levering slabs of paving stone in to replace it, and a small orchestra had begun tuning up in one corner of the diamond.

  "I do believe we're having a ball," said Hayden dryly. "I hate these things."

  "Yo
u just haven't attended one with the right partner," she countered.

  "Speaking of which, where's your young man? Keir?"

  "He's not as young as he looks. And I don't know. I haven't seen him since this afternoon." She frowned. "He's probably inspecting the wheel's buttresses or something. He's as much an engineer as you are."

  "You say that as if it were a bad thing." He cocked his arm for her to hold and they began to stroll down the steps.

  "You're both boys when you do that. Be a man for the evening."

  His brows wrinkled with worry. "Is that going to involve dancing?"

  "I fear it may." She smiled at Eustace Loll's goons as they passed them.

  "I'll dance if you'll wear a gown."

  "Cheeky! --Oh, all right."

  They entered the swirl of color and waistcoats and jewelery as, unnoticed, Hayden's sun faded into nightly slumber overhead.

  * * *

  DINNER HAD BEEN served. Jugglers and acrobats had flown and tossed one another across the dance floor. As they pranced away Antaea saw the delegates looking askance at one another. Despite the best efforts of their hosts, they had not come to form any sort of community during the day. They were here because they agreed there might be a threat to Virga that the Home Guard couldn't deal with alone. Beyond that, they were suspicious.

  The orchestra had begun to play, but nobody ventured onto the dance floor.

  Antaea was neither dressed nor inclined to dance, but nonetheless she cursed under her breath and glanced around for a partner. Somebody would have to start things--but there stood Chaison, forlorn without his wife by his side. Should she...? No, no, that would be disastrous in so many ways.

  Suddenly the crowd parted and two lines of people filed onto the floor: the female acrobats, smiling, perfumed and dressed in sparkles and crinoline; and a column of extremely tall, extremely handsome Aerie naval officers. The lines dissolved in the center of the floor and the acrobats and officers walked up to hesitant men and women in the crowd, and curtsied and bowed.