Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

"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! YOUcan'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--