Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga Read online

Keir hid his surprise and sudden curiosity behind a noncommittal "Hmm.

  "It's a morphont, though," he added, "so it could hide any sort of mind in its bodies. You can't judge them by how they look, so I guess I can't tell you what to expect, either. If you're asking us to help you in any way regarding it, I'm not sure what we can do."

  Loll gestured impatiently at the half-grown aircraft. "You have power! It seems to me that the people of this world can do anything you want." He rubbed his forehead. "Sorry. It's just the strain of this march we've been forced to undertake. --Make no mistake, we all want to get home, and as quickly as possible. We don't even mind the emissary delivering its message. But our people need to be warned in advance. They need to be prepared. And all this time, as we've walked and walked in its company, it seemed impossible that we could send anyone on ahead. Until now."

  Keir glanced at a scry summary. "The airship will be ready in a couple of days--"

  "And when it is, it'll carry all of us," insisted Loll. "All of us--including the, the morphont. We need someone to go ahead of it."

  Keir finally realized what the man was asking. "You want to take my ornithopter!"

  Loll looked chagrined. "If there were any way to return it ... And maybe there will be. We have many friends and allies in Abyss--in my nation. If you could see it in your heart to lend it to us--this is our chance to break away from the emissary's watchful eye..."

  First Maerta impounded it, and now this outsider wanted to borrow it! And Keir himself was never going to get to use the thing. "No, you can't," he said quickly--and a little loudly. "I made it, I should get to use it!"

  "I understand," said Loll in a soothing tone. "But ... will they let you?"

  What had he heard? Maerta must have told others about Keir's plans to leave. Suddenly she didn't seem so wise, or nearly as caring as she pretended. Keir pictured her laughing with her friends while she told them about Keir's folly.

  He decided. "I get to use it first. But once I'm done, I can send it back here. It's smart enough to find its way."

  The Virgan minister nodded. "And where are you going with it, if I may ask?"

  Keir shrugged. "It's a ... private matter. But I do intend to start as soon as I can." He thought about the timetable for completing the new airship, and suddenly realized what he was agreeing to. "Maybe even tonight..."

  Loll nodded.

  Suddenly not at all sure about this, Keir stepped away, looking around at who might be in earshot or scry distance. "You know," he mumbled, "once I go, the others will, um, kick up something of a fuss. About my being gone. It's important that you stay out of their way and say nothing. I can't guarantee that they won't catch and confiscate the 'thopter when it returns, so you'll have to set a watch for it and be ready to jump in the moment it lands."

  "I understand," said Loll. "It's the best we can do under the circumstances. Thank you very much for indulging me in this, Keir Chen. If there were any way we could pay you back..."

  He shook his head. "Just keep this secret."

  Loll laughed. "Since you've told me nothing about your destination, that should be easy."

  After the Virgan walked away Keir stood for a long time staring at the ornithopter. It seemed uncomfortable under his gaze, finally shuffling around to face the other way as it stretched out its wings and landing gear. Keir barely noticed.

  He was thinking about the black air beyond the city, and about what it would really mean to launch himself into it. It should have helped that he knew now of two destinations up there: the exit to the arena, at the far end of Aethyr, and, much closer by, the corresponding door to Virga. Before he'd known about that second door, the arena had been his only hope. Now he could picture himself flying to Virga instead, and yet, from what Loll had said, that door was guarded, too. When he landed there, they would ask where he came from. They would investigate, and probably send him back here.

  He clenched his fists and glared at the pavement. "But you're getting shorter," he whispered.

  The ornithopter angled its sensors as though pondering how to reply, and Keir turned and began walking away--only realizing, midstep, that he was doing it because of subtle hints from his scry.

  No--not his scry. One of Maerta's annoying overrides had just kicked in, shoving his own emoticons and hints into the background, making him think he should head to his room.

  Why would they want him there? He raised his hands and his dragonflies fountained up and away in every direction. And now he saw it--

  --Human figures running up to Leal Maspeth and her people; lumbering mechs shouldering their way out of stone niches where they'd slept ever since the Renaissance arrived here; Maerta herself, pacing down the stairs along with her double, both equally grim-faced.

  The usual scry map of Complication Hall and its environs had been edited down to a small set of corridors and rooms--the kids' spaces. A cold prickling feeling washed over Keir as he realized that Gallard had called everyone together and he was using scry to herd them somewhere safe--somewhere high up.

  The searchlight of Maerta's attention landed on Keir for an instant, and he gulped and started walking again. He couldn't defy her, or any of the adults. He was going to his room. That didn't mean he couldn't find out what was going on, though.

  On the way to the stairs he passed one of the blocky Edisonians. The kids learned early how to make queries to these devices--to ask for things. Along with your earliest lessons in dealing with an Edisonian, the Renaissance grown-ups taught you ancient stories about mythical beings who could grant wishes. Beware what you asked for, these stories cautioned. If your request was not worded exactly right, calamity might emerge from triumph. In one such story, King Midas wished that everything he touched turn to gold, and so his food, his dog, and finally his own wife and children all became statues and sculptures.

  On more than one occasion, Keir had asked an Edisonian to extend the communications range of his dragonflies, but Maerta or Gallard or someone had anticipated this, and the Edisonians invariably replied that it was forbidden.

  Keir had lately discovered that he had a bit of a talent for thinking around such problems. Actually, it was kind of a big talent for asking the right question. Everybody in the Renaissance had it to one degree or another, but for Keir it seemed to come easily. So, a few weeks ago he'd done something most of his people wouldn't think to do: he'd designed a solution to the range problem.

  "Form a chain," he told his dragonflies as he took the steps two at a time. "One end by me, the other end by ... by Maerta."

  The dragonflies formed a whirling cloud, which suddenly unreeled in the direction the grown-ups had gone.

  Now he issued a second command he'd designed. "Lip-read," he told the lead dragonfly just before it disappeared through a distant archway. Then he had to turn his attention back to his main body, because as he went up one flight of stairs, Maerta and Leal Maspeth were going down another. The confusion of directions caused him to nearly fall flat on his face when he reached the top of his own flight.

  He rubbed his shin; but the pain didn't dampen his enjoyment of the moment. He'd never really had cause to use the signal-chain idea before, but it worked perfectly. It was amazing the things you could do if you chose not to use the Edisonians to solve all your problems.

  Maerta and Leal Maspeth were talking, and Keir's dragonflies relayed their words back along the chain, along with full visuals.

  "--showed up about ten minutes ago," said Maerta.

  Maspeth was shaking her head, twisting her hands together as she half-ran down the steps. "But how did he survive? I saw him get washed away by, by a thousand tons of ice!"

  "That body probably didn't survive," said Maerta. They burst into one of the chambers just below Complication Hall. This place was normally dark, being just beyond the last storage rooms the Renaissance used. Keir had only ever seen it through the night vision of his dragonflies, which was probably just as well: the place was one of the city's follies, a chamber w
hose walls and ceiling looked like they were in the process of toppling in on you. Its menacing stone stalactites and leaning walls were lit bright as day by hovering light globes.

  The globes, and the smoldering, lightly vibrating mechs, and a few of the older members of the Renaissance, formed a half-circle around a single figure who stood in the center of the room.

  Keir didn't know this lean, bald man's face, but he guessed that he'd seen his silhouette before, in the mouth of the tunnel under Brink. He'd reached out one hand and asked them to let him in, and Piero Harper had shot him, driving him into the teeth of the avalanche. Now, once again, he had one hand out in an appeal.

  "Leal." A smile of pure joy lit up his face as he saw her. He took a step forward, and one of the mechs moved to block him. The smile faltered.

  Maspeth had stopped at the room's entrance, seemingly unsure of what to pay attention to--the looming catastrophe of the ceiling, the hulking metal warriors on either side of her, or the man standing alone on the flat stone floor. Her right hand had gone up to her throat, and she steadied herself momentarily against the doorjamb. Then her expression hardened, and with no more hesitation, she stepped into the room.

  "Why have you come here?" she snapped.

  The man bowed, a sad half-smile on his face. "Leal, it's me, John."

  "John Tarvey drowned. I saw it happen."

  He nodded. "And, if this were Virga, that would have been the end of it. Surely the emissary explained it to you?"

  The doll riding on Maspeth's shoulder must have said something, because she tilted her head toward it and there was a pause; but Keir's dragonflies couldn't read its lips, because it had none. He was sitting on his bed by now and smacked the mattress in frustration.

  "Your enemies, yes, yes," she said to it. "I still don't understand." To Tarvey she said, "They raised you from the dead, or so you say. But this one says no." She curled one hand up to touch the junk-doll's tiny shoulder.

  John Tarvey scowled at the little morphont. "It should know better than anybody how expendable bodies are! It wears them like gloves, you've seen that. Leal, I don't understand you. I might almost say you were being, well, hypocritical." He wouldn't meet her eye as he said this. "You keep that thing as your companion knowing full well that it's not what it looks like, that it has no body of its own. It doesn't bother you when it loses one, like it did in the river or in the landslides. It just builds another one or consolidates itself into what's left. But when I do it, you treat me like a monster."

  Maspeth shook her head in confusion. "It was meant to be what it is! You weren't. Maybe the emissary's people can come back from the dead because they don't really die to begin with. But people die. You died! I saw you die."

  "I didn't die, I became post-physical." He shook his head angrily. "Look, the only reason the people of Virga die is because we don't have allies to rebuild our bodies. I didn't know that before, none of us did. It was dumb luck that I drowned in an area where post-physical scouts were working. They revived me and made me an offer." His half-smile was back.

  Maspeth looked very pale and small now, standing half in shadow by the door as though ready to bolt up the stairs at any moment. "What offer is that?"

  Tarvey held out his hand. "The same one I'm making to you now. The offer of immortality."

  Maspeth shook her head rapidly and sat down on the bottom step. "What does he mean?" She stared up at Maerta, who had stood with her arms crossed through the whole exchange. "Are you like him?"

  "No," said Maerta. "We're not." She put herself in between Maspeth and the shade of John Tarvey. "I think you should leave now. She's not ready for your offer. None of them are."

  "That's not for you to say, is it?" He walked up to her, looking her up and down. "What exactly are you, anyway? Why are you here, hiding in the darkness next to Virga's wall? Such an odd place to live. I'm sure my friends can tell me what you are; I'll know soon enough. What I wonder, though, is whether you've told her." He nodded at Maspeth.

  --Who stood up and stepped past Maerta to glare into his face. "You are not who you say you are; that's all I need to know. Now leave!" She pointed to the black archway opposite the stairs.

  He slouched for a moment, his mouth a moue of disagreement; then he turned on one heel and strode away. "The offer stands," he tossed back. "For all your people." He disappeared through the archway.

  Maspeth put her face in her hands for a moment, and Maerta stepped forward, maybe to console her--but Maspeth looked up quickly at her, and Keir could see she was furious.

  "Explain this!" she bellowed. Keir's lip-reading software rendered the words in as flat a tone as it had everything else so far; he dearly wished he'd heard her own voice at that moment. Clearly, her tone was electric; even the mechs shifted in some analogue of unease.

  Then the doll on her shoulder said something. It spoke at length, while she held her head tilted to listen. Finally she shook her head and stalked to the stairs.

  Keir called his dragonflies back, and images and words from the confrontation whirled through his head as he let himself fall back on the bed. He understood it on one level: certainly the virtuals could bring someone back from the dead, it probably happened all the time in areas where they held full sway. It was just that ... why was Leal Maspeth so upset by it? And why the strange dynamic between her and Tarvey--why this "offer" that Tarvey talked about?

  Something was going on there, some adult political game he couldn't fathom. Yet he felt he should be able to understand it.

  He thought furiously for a while, and then startled himself with a new idea. Maspeth and her people came from a place where transformations and extensions and metamorphoses just didn't happen. In Virga, people were born people and kept their one body all their lives. If part of it broke, like Eustace Loll's leg, that was it--it was broken. Nobody had second bodies or morphont extensions like his dragonflies. So, for Maspeth, a resurrected John Tarvey must have seemed impossible, even an abomination.

  He barked a laugh at the ceiling. Yes, that was it ... or part of it. The apparent urgency of Tarvey's "offer" was still a mystery, but ...

  Keir flipped over and raised his head to glare at the silent door. He'd never given much thought to what it was actually like in Virga. The important thing about the place was the technological bubble that sheltered it from Artificial Nature; beyond that, he'd just thought of it as a realm of boring backwardness, where primitive humans scrabbled for survival in a state of ignorance and helplessness. Yet, if Virga was also a place where transformations and metamorphoses were impossible ...

  He sat up, examining his hands--hands that were smaller, weaker, and smoother than they should be.

  Eustace Loll had asked Keir where he would go, if he left Brink. At the time, he'd had no idea; he just needed to get away. Now, though, the answer was obvious.

  Somehow, he needed to convince Leal Maspeth that, when she returned to Virga, she must take him with her.

  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.