Karl Schroeder - Sun of Suns

"Look who I just spotted." He nodded in the direction of a stiff-looking older gentleman who stood alone under one of the vast rose windows that dominated the ballroom's end walls. Colored lozenges of light from the stained glass dappled this man's dress uniform, and just now half his face was lit green. "General Harmond is here. I'll have to tell your husband—"

"Oh, I'll tell him myself," said Venera as she headed straight for the military man. Reiss made a surprised "Oh" sound as Venera outpaced him. Stopping in front of the general, she bowed. He instantly snapped to attention.

"General Harmond, isn't it?" she said, eyes wide. "I've heard so much about you."

"Oh?" He looked surprised and wiped his palms on his hips before extending a hand for her to shake. "You're with the Slipstream party. Sorry about locking down your ships like that, it's uh, protocol."

"Oh I'm sure it's necessary," she said, waving a hand to dismiss the whole affair. "Protocol isn't one of my strong points. But I do have my hobbies, General, and I was hoping to meet someone authoritative enough to be able to indulge one of them."

"Oh, indeed? And what hobby might you be talking about?" The poor man looked like he wanted to flirt, but had no idea how.

"Small arms," said Venera brightly. "I have a fascination with rifles, pistols—small bore weapons."

"Really?" He goggled at her.

"I'm also a bit of a history buff," she said. "Wars interest me, and I'm afraid I've not kept up with recent events in this part of the world. I was hoping that you might be able to enlighten me—and fill in some sad gaps in my knowledge of Candesce armaments."

The general preened. "I'd be delighted. Just as long as you don't ask me about any military secrets, you know."

"Oh, I wouldn't know it if I was," she said demurely. "I'll have to trust you to correct me if that happens."

"Hmmf. Well, men. Rifles, you say? Our armorers are unmatched in all of Candesce, if I do say so myself. Take the Matchley forty-five, for instance…"

Venera listened intently, while Chaison Fanning wove his way through a maze of courtiers and ingenues, now faintly worried.

THE ROUND WINDOW of the palace's reception hall flashed crescent rainbows for a moment as it rotated up and away. Hayden turned resolutely away from the government town; the Fannings were behind that intricate glass and for once, were not his problem. Now that the bike had been ejected from the wheel's small hangar it drifted under him as he took his bearings.

"The library's over there," said Aubri Mahallan, pointing.

"Yeah yeah."

She held up her hands, palms out. "Just trying to help," she said.

Aubri wore flame-red today, an outfit of silk with harem pants whose long slit sides showed off her legs. Fanning wouldn't allow her to wear anything like this on the Rook. Hayden was determined not to let her know he'd noticed.

She was his passenger reluctantly; the Gehellens refused to let any of the Rook's military bikes fly through Vogelsburg. In fact, they wouldn't let any of the crew off their ships. Once again, Hayden was benefiting from his ambiguous relationship to the expedition.

He had seen and learned a lot since he joined the Rook. It was time to send a report about his experiences back to the Resistance. Once he dropped off Mahallan he planned to find a local post office and draft some sort of letter. The problem lay in deciding what to write.

The bike's fan was whirring, so he leaned back and pumped on the ignition to send a spark into the bike's alcohol burner. It lit with a whoosh and the bike reared forward.

"Slow down!" Mahallan snatched at her handlebars.

"It always kicks like that when it starts. Don't worry, I'm not going to drop you."

"I'm more worried that you'll run into something. This place is dense."

"No denser than where I grew up."

There was a momentary silence as they wove their way into the slower traffic of foot-powered wings and propellers that streamed into the disordered jumble of the city. Then Aubri said, "You grew up in Aerie, didn't you?"

"Yes. And Aerie has its cities too. Or, it did—before Admiral Chaison Fanning and his fleet dispersed them and killed or drove out everyone I ever knew."

"He wasn't admiral when Slipstream invaded Aerie," said Mahallan. "I do know my history. He was promoted after the conflict ended."

"You've been reading," he sneered.

She held his gaze defiantly, then said, "Talking to the crew. Because you were right to criticize me for not knowing enough about the people I'm working for."

This simple statement knocked most of the wind out of Hayden's sails, but by now he wouldn't back down. "They only told you their side, though," he said, "and haven't told you some things at all. Things like the reason Fanning was promoted. It seems he found a secret Aerie sun we were building and destroyed it, killing all the workers in the process. Some hero!"

"You know about that?" She shook her head. "But you've got the facts wrong. After a few drinks one night the admiral told his officers—I was there—how his promotion came about. He's quite bitter about it. Fanning was against the attack on the Aerie sun—it was the pilot's idea. In fact the pilot insisted on leading the expedition himself and even took potshots with a rifle from the flagship! He treated the whole thing like a sporting event but afterward he realized his misstep; everyone involved was horrified at the outcome. So since Fanning had gotten in his face about it, he proclaimed to the upper house that the whole thing had been Fanning's idea. They promoted Fanning but the promotion came with a reputation as a butcher. It's hung like a weight around his neck ever since. He despises the pilot."

Hayden nearly ran them into a forty-foot-wide food net that was being towed across his path by a flock of tame, feathered barracuda. As he fumbled with the controls he stammered incoherent curses. "My mother," he heard himself saying. "He killed my mother. The pilot ordered my father executed, never saw him again. Killed them."

"What?" Mahallan leaned around the curve of the bike, unbalancing it so that Hayden nearly crashed them again. "Who killed your mother?"

He shut down the bike, turned, and glared at her. "Fanning. Fanning killed her. I was there, at the new sun, when he came out of the sky and killed everyone I knew."

She drew back. Angrily he spun up the engine again and opened up the throttle all the way, dodging them around startled people and cargo nets. "Don't tell me what happened because I know what happened," he said even though she wouldn't hear him over the rip of the wind. "I was there!"

The library, her destination, came up all too quickly. It would be petty of him to overshoot it, or circle it; reluctantly, Hayden cut the engine and deployed the bike's parachute.

"Hayden… of course I didn't know," she said. "This is the burden you carry everywhere, isn't it? If you'd only told me sooner—"

"It was years ago," he said, trying to pull back from the emotions she had stirred up. "There's nothing to be done—or said, really. Here's your stop."

For a few seconds he was absorbed with judging the final yards of their approach to the library. This was not so much a building as a concretion: perhaps it had originally been a box, or pyramid or sphere of wood with ordered rooms inside it. If that were true, there was no way to tell. Over the centuries, individual rooms had been screwed or nailed onto the original structure, jutting out like barnacles. Whole floors were canted onto it and makeshift galleries built to connect them to the whole. Shafts had been dug through existing levels while other municipal buildings that possessed their own logic of construction had been towed over and added to the assembly. The whole bizarre pile rotated by slow increments causing the light from Gehellen's sun to tangle in confusing ways in its interior. People drifted like flies in and out of this migraine-inducing architectural disaster, and smaller flecks drifted too in their thousands: loose books not yet snagged by the haggard and overwhelmed library staff who chased them down in ones and twos using nets on poles.