Karl Schroeder - Sun of Suns

He nodded, still thinking about it. Suddenly Aubri grabbed his arm. "Look!"

Buzzing in the doorway was one of those odd little chrome insects that one saw sometimes. Tankers, Aubri had called them. Hayden reached out a hand. "Should I catch it?"

She shook her head. "I don't have my instruments with me, I couldn't study it now."The little tanker spun around and zipped off. A sudden cloud of similar bugs flicked past the window.

"You were right," Hayden said. "They're headed for Candesce."

"Carrying fuel," she said with a nod. "For the Farnsworth Fusors."

THEY FLOATED TOGETHER inside the hut, exhausted after making love, and were silent together. He was acutely aware drat much had gone unspoken between him and Aubri.

At last he turned and laid his hand, gently, on her breastbone. "Does it listen?" he asked her. He had no need to say what it was.

She shrugged. "I need to be careful. But… it doesn't care. Not really. It's just a dumb mechanism."

He thought about that. Then he nodded to the window. "Was this your mission?To visit Candesce?"

She looked him in the eye and said, "No. In fact… it's the opposite. If there's anywhere in Virga where I might find a way to free myself from this…" She tapped her throat. "Then it would be there."

Hayden shook his head in confusion. "You don't need to be careful about telling me that?"

"No. The assassin-bug only cares whether I tell people what my real mission is. It's not able to care about anything else."

"Not even its own life?"

"It's not alive. So, no." She quirked a smile. "Look at it this way: some things trigger it, some don't. That's all."

"So…" He mused. "You think we might find a way to kill it in Candesce?"

"It's why I pushed the Fannings to do this. A selfish reason, maybe." She shrugged, grinning. "But it worked."

He laughed. "Can I help?"

She kissed him. "Just keep guard. I'll do the rest."

"You can help me too," he said seriously. Aubri cocked one eyebrow. "both of us, really," he added. "Aubri… have you actually thought about what you'd do if you got free of that thing? Would you stay, or would you go?"

She hesitated. "Stay," she said finally. "I would stay."

Hayden sighed. He took a moment to compose his thoughts. "I have a reason for going into Candesce too," he told her. He felt his heart lifting as he described his plan to locate sun components in Candesce and return them to Aerie. "I want to finish my parents' work. Light a new sun on the edge of winter, that the people of Aerie can gather around. Let them leave Slipstream and the rest of Merithan behind. Save my people."

It would have sounded like an arrogant, impossible dream to Hayden—had not his mother and father confidently pursued that same dream.

"I'll need an engineer," he said. "You could be invaluable."

"Oh." She looked away. "Is that all you want me for? My engineering skills?"

"No!" He laughed and pulled her to him. "More. I want much more. We could found a new nation together, Aubri. Is that something you could want?"

She wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder.

"More than anything," she murmured, "I would want that."

THEY BOTH AWOKE with a start. It was the middle of the night, and absolutely black inside the hut. Somewhere, far in the distance, something had screamed.

"Did you hear that?" Hayden asked. He felt rather than saw Aubri's nod. They both listened in perfect stillness for a while; then she relaxed against him.

"Maybe Venera's cohabitation with Carrier is not so chaste as we'd been led to think," she said.

"Ugh," he said. "Don't say that. I—" He stopped, as a long, ululating sound crept through the night to enwrap the hut.

They were both at the window a second later, peering out into the gloom. "That wasn't any person," said Aubri needlessly. There was nothing to see outside the hut, however—nothing at all, an extravagant blackness Hayden couldn't remember encountering even in winter. For a moment he wondered if the hut had somehow slid backward into the depths of Leaf's Choir. How would they know, before they suffocated?

The cry came again, and this time it was accompanied by the sound of branches shattering. The roar built—it seemed that entire trees were being thrown aside by something huge that approached through the darkness. The hut began to shake.

Then as quickly as it began, the roaring ended.

They stayed at the window for a long time, but nothing further happened. After an hour or so, a bobbing flashlight beam meandered up the trunk of the tree, and Carrier and Venera appeared. Both looked grim.

"Any ideas?" Carrier asked without preamble. Hayden shook his head.

"Maybe we should stick together tonight," he said. Then, with sudden urgency: "Where's the bike?"

Carrier waved a length of twine Hayden hadn't seen he was holding. It stretched off into the blackness. "I towed it over," he said. "Thought it best." Hayden nodded.

They all crowded into the little hut and sat there looking at one another for a while. "This is ridiculous," Venera said after the uncomfortable interlude had stretched on for fifteen minutes. "We have to do something. Talk, at least."

"I agree," said Aubri.

There was another long silence.

"Let's tell stories," said Venera brightly.

They all stared at her in the feeble glow of the flashlight. "Ghost stories," amended Venera; then she laughed. "Oh, come on. Can you think of a better time to do it?"

Everyone laughed, and a minute later, Hayden found himself relating the story of the black pirate suns, and of me strange monsters reputed to live in winter.

After his turn Venera spoke, and somehow Hayden wasn't surprised when it turned out that she knew lots of such stories, and relished telling them.

In one of Venera's stories, Candesce itself had gone roving one night; the sun had been hungry after shining for so many centuries, and it ate several of the neighboring principalities before being talked out of a further meal by a brash young farm boy. Venera tailored her description to the night's events: the unseen sun passing in majestic noise, a skyscape of sounds, no sign of what had caused its devastation after it returned to its station and lit again.

Aubri clapped her hands when the story ended. "You have hidden talents, Venera!"

The admiral's wife preened, examining her nails with ostentatious care. "I do, don't I?"

"I hope you don't mind my asking, but I've been wondering all along how you managed to convince Chaison to bring you on the expedition." Aubri looked genuinely puzzled. "During our planning sessions he seemed adamant about leaving you behind."

"Ah," said Venera with a smile, "but that was before I blackmailed him."

"Ah—what?" Aubri and Hayden both laughed nervously. Venera waved a hand dismissively.

"Back when he was a student, my Chaison wrote a few seditious pamphlets denouncing the pilot. Nobody knows that, of course—no one who would talk about it." She eyed Carrier, whose face was as wooden as always. "I found out about it from an old drinking companion of his, and I held it over his head to get him to take me along. That's all." She said this in a modest sort of way.

Hayden couldn't resist a grin. "Chaison Fanning… denounced the pilot?"

Carrier, however, was glaring at Venera. "You never told me about this," he said.

She shrugged: "Why should I?"Venera looked at him archly. "In any case, it's your turn, Lyle. Don't you have any ghost stories to share?"

Carrier stammered something, then looked down. After a moment, he met Venera's eye and said, "Ghost stories are for kids. Things that really happened are far more harrowing than any story."