Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Page 4

  "Um..." said Maspeth. After a few moments he heard her and the others following him, whispering among themselves.

  According to the scry, Leal Hieronyma Maspeth was from a country called Abyss. These people really were from Virga! Maybe they knew a way back there, and now that he'd saved their lives, maybe ...

  "Uh," Maspeth said again, hurrying to catch up to Keir. "What's this place called?"

  "Brink," said a pipsqueak voice issuing from somewhere around her shoulder. She craned her neck to look at a little doll-shaped figure sitting on the ragged felt of her coat. Keir hadn't spotted the little man-thing before, but its presence didn't surprise him; it was obviously a bodily extension like his own dragonflies.

  "How do you know what it's called?" she asked it in irritated surprise.

  "Keir Chen has given us guest citizenship in his scry," said the golden doll. "I'm reading his records now."

  Belatedly, Keir realized that since she herself couldn't read his scry, his silence might not seem polite to her. "Brink," he said, spreading his arms to encompass everything above the tunnel's ceiling. "Looks like a city, but it's not. We're the only people living here. Only people who ever lived here."

  She looked puzzled. "How many of you?"

  "About a hundred."

  "What do you do here?"

  He might have intended to run away today, but even if he had, Keir wouldn't have told the truth at this point. "We're trying to find new patterns of meaning in the metropoloid's architecture," he said smoothly as his scry supplied him with a plausible story. "They could be the genes for a new urbanoid."

  She gave him a look so eloquently uncomprehending that he almost regretted having lied to her. "We're city breeders," he clarified. Maspeth blinked, then shook her head.

  She batted distractedly at the air. "Damn bugs," she said. "Never seen any until now."

  She was actually trying to swat his eyes! Keir ordered the dragonflies to stay away from the Virgans from now on.

  "We were following a road," said Maspeth urgently. "Does it continue up past the city?"

  Keir shook his head. "I've looked, believe me. The slope's too steep to keep the rock on it up there. It's bare carbon-nanotube weave, smooth as silk. It's impossible to climb beyond this point."

  She gave a stifled wail and stopped walking. Keir blinked at her in surprise; she looked for all the world just like he often felt. "Then--" She fought to say or not say something. "Then where does this damned road go?!"

  "It goes no farther ... but it does come here," he said gently.

  "Yes ... yes, it's not a total loss maybe." She had fallen in beside him. "You took a huge risk coming down to warn us," she said suddenly. "I want to thank you on behalf of all of us."

  Suddenly shy, he looked away.

  Why had he done it? The whole episode was so totally out of character for him, and yet while he had been racing down here, no other course of action had been conceivable. It was as though some side of himself that had always been in darkness had suddenly lit up; and, in fact, he felt somehow that he'd acted this way before--selflessly, and foolishly.

  "Yes, thank you!" Somebody was pushing his way up from the back of the group. He was stumping along using a stick like a third leg. He was lank-haired, with a chin that seemed to have been designed for a larger person, and small darting eyes. The guardrail introduced him as Eustace Loll, a "cabinet minister" in the archaic control system Abyss called its "government."

  Still faintly embarrassed, Keir said, "Think nothing of it, Minister Loll," and at the sound of his name Loll nearly fell over. Leal Maspeth steadied him, and Keir now saw that one of Loll's ankles was bundled and bound with pieces of wood and cloth. Keir looked for a tag cloud in his scry but of course he had none--and that was when Keir realized with horror that the man was nursing an untreated injury.

  "Tell me, how is it that you spotted us?" asked Loll in an innocent tone. Keir was too shocked at his obvious pain to organize his thoughts; luckily his scry was popping up plausible explanations. After a few awkward seconds he said, "I accidentally dropped something on that path yesterday. I'd finally gotten a chance to come down and look for it when I spotted you."

  They seemed to accept this explanation, so he led them on, to a round chamber from which a spiral stairway led up. As their lights supplemented his dragonflies' vision, Keir saw that the wall behind the steps was covered with carvings of eyeless goats.

  Before he could stop himself he burst out laughing; even to himself, the sound had a slightly hysterical tinge to it. Maspeth looked at him with wide eyes, which just made him laugh more. "Sorry, sorry," he gasped. "Sometimes I can't tell whether the city's just recording what it sees, or whether it has a sense of humor." He shook his head, embarrassed again, and added, "I'm a little out of myself ... after what just happened. I didn't mean to laugh."

  To his surprise she nodded. "Nobody's going to fault you," she said. "We've all endured some big shocks lately, and people react ... well, however they react. So--do we go up now?"

  He nodded. "Yes, up ...

  "To Complication Hall."

  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 plac
e. 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.