Karl Schroeder - Ventus

When he didn't answer immediately she said, "We've been riding for days. We've barely even spoken. I confess for a time I was content just to be escaping—escaping anything, and everything. But the truth is, I'm sore, stiff and weary beyond belief. If you gave me no good answer as to where we're going or why, I'd just as soon lie down and wait for those things to find me."

He smiled slightly and briefly. "I find it hard to talk about it. Not because of any emotional thing... no, it's because 3340, who gave me the impulse to begin with, made me to be reluctant. Do you understand the concept of conditioning?"

She smiled ironically. "You ask Queen Galas that?"

"All right, then. I've been conditioned not to talk about it. But I no longer work for 3340..." He glanced over at her quickly, as if startled by something—or afraid.

Interesting , she thought. "Who do you work for now, Armiger?" she asked quietly.

"One question at a time. You asked why we were here. Look." With a sweep of his arm he indicated the fang-tooths of the Titans' Gates. "Even before I met Jordan Mason I thought this place might hold the key. It is the nexus of physical power for the western end of the continent. Here the desals have their power plants and desalination stacks. This is their interface with the Winds of the ocean, who are incredibly strong as well. This is the transfer point for hundreds of underground highways, and there are giant data stores and genetic stockpiles buried deep within the mountains. You probably never got a hint of that when you were here—it's all well hidden."

She shook her head. "One time a local priest took me on a tour around the lip of a vast pit. He said it was bottomless. A hot wind comes up out of it, and you can hear a sound like constant thunder coming out of the depths. I found it disturbing. I never went back."

"Yet it was the desals who spoke to you. They reached out to do so. According to Mason, they wish to serve, and they are the enemy of those." He gestured to the vagabond moons. "We will make them our allies. The Titans' Gates are a fortress, and you and I are about to experience our second siege, my queen."

She hugged herself against a sudden chill. "Don't call me that. I brought my people low." Angry and grief-stricken, she turned and started to walk back to their camp. The horses were visible in the firelight; both were looking in her direction. "And what are you going to do with the world once you've got it?" she shouted back to Armiger. "How will you succeed where I failed?"

"I can do what you could not," she heard him say. "I can conquer the Winds. The ones Mason calls Mediation will be our fist converts." He followed her and when she sat down by the fire, he sat too.

"I am no longer Mad Queen Galas—just Mad Galas, I suppose," she said. "But my madness is nothing compared to yours if you expect to lay your hands on each and every Wind in order to turn them to your cause. That is what you intend to do, is it not?"

"In a sense."

"Then why haven't you done it? Where is your army? You've said that Jordan had the last piece of the puzzle you needed. So now that you know all you need to, why are you not commanding the heavens to part and the seas to recede?"

He looked down. "It's not that simple."

"Ah! That phrase is Male for `I'm afraid to'."

"There is some key piece missing," he admitted. "I have yet to figure it out. But when I do..."

"Yes? When you do, what? You've been coy about that all along, Armiger. What, exactly, are you going to do?"

He stared pensively at the stars. "The Winds are sur-biological, nanotechnological entities. Each component mechanum is infinitesimal, the size of a human cell. Each carries in it a tiny computer—a thinking machine—and communications devices. The mecha communicate with their brethren using a very large number of codes. These codes are certified each by the next higher layer of the organization, from the tiniest particle all the way up to the desals and the Diadem swans. The Winds recognize one another by comparing the digital signatures on the transmission codes. If the code is not signed by the next higher authority, it is not valid. But that next higher authority cannot issue codes without the authorization of the layer above it, and so on up the ladder. Most of the communication between the Winds consists of trading new authorizations. They do it on an unconscious level.

"To command the Winds, you must speak their language. To speak their language, you must have a valid signature on your messages. Ever since arriving here I have been looking for a way to either fake the signatures, or acquire the highest-level signing authority.

"Somehow, Jordan Mason has gotten a high-level authority in the eyes of the Winds. —Not the highest, but very high. I suspect ordinary humans can't get to the highest level. I copied his implants exactly, which should make my messages indistinguishable from his. But they're not—somehow the Winds recognize his but not mine. That is what I'm trying to figure out now."

"That is dazzling," said Galas. "But it's not the answer I asked for. What will you do when you have this 'signing authority'?"

He hesitated. "What would you do?"

"Can you remake the world? —Turn night into day, heavy into light, black into white? What can you do?"

"I can't change gravity," he said with faint smile. "But I can change the atmosphere, or strip it away entirely. I can drain the seas, if I want. I can change the surface of this world into practically anything."

"Can you free my people from poverty and grief?"

He shrugged. "That would be among the easiest things I can do."

"Will you?"

Armiger hesitated again. He put down his soup bowl. "Should I?" he asked. "Be careful how you answer."

"I'm tired of political answers to questions like that," she said. "And tired of philosophical ones. All I know is I'm tired and hungry and afraid, and in that I am finally one with the majority of my countrymen. There is not a single person out there," she gestured at the dark countryside, "who would not say, 'save me from the cold, and the dark, and the beasts outside and in'."

"Is that all you want for them?"

She turned to look at him. He sat now with his hands dangling between his knees, his face expressionless. She was suddenly acutely aware that she was the only human being seated at this fire.

"You could do it," she whispered.

He didn't answer.

"But then... the real question is, what do you want to do?"

Armiger didn't answer for a long time. Finally he said, "I guess that depends on who I am."

"This god 3340 you've spoken of—what did he want you to do with Ventus?"

"He saw Ventus as a resource waiting to be tapped. But not an efficient one, as it stands. Most the Winds' energy is being put into maintaining the artificial ecology—a complete waste as far as 3340 was concerned. The first thing it would have had me do was abandon the terraforming system."

"Abandon...? What would that mean, for us I mean?"

"The air would become poisonous with time... rivers would dry up, the oceans become toxically metallic. Some kinds of life, like fungi and bacteria, would run rampant, others would die. Everything would eventually be choked out, if it even lasted that long, because 3340 wanted to use the mecha to make the entire surface of the planet into one giant machine—a god device."

"For what purpose?"

"Ventus was to have been a staging area for an assault on the human Archipelago. If 3340 had conquered even a tenth of the Archipelago, it would have become unstoppable. Eventually it might have consumed the entire galaxy."

"But 3340 is dead," she said.

"Yes."

"So you won't do that my world."

He looked her in the eye, expressionless. "I will not," he said, a bit too vehemently.