Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

The glass tube Chen was leading her through hung from almost invisible cables that were suspended from somewhere overhead. Leal could see other mechanisms way up there, where the worlds converged to finally touch.

She was so distracted by these sights that it took her a few seconds to notice the dragonfly that was buzzing a foot from her nose.

Should she run? She didn't think Chen or his people were any threat--but if he were dangerous, there was no way she could have evaded his dragonflies here. His physical body stood fifty feet away, a black-on-black figure now turned toward her.

"I was curious," she said. The dragonfly didn't reply, and Chen didn't move, so Leal swept her arm to indicate the wonders encircling them. "It's so strange. There's all this stuff out here! And we were taught that the space beyond Virga's walls was just empty. What are all these things?"

The dragonfly began drifting away in the direction of Chen. That was an obvious invitation, so Leal followed it. "No idea what they are," said Chen. "An armada, I suspect, awaiting its orders to invade Virga."

"Oh!" After everything she'd recently seen, Leal should have come to that conclusion herself. She knew there were things outside her world struggling to get in. But to actually see them was suddenly, profoundly upsetting. "Do they know we're here?"

"I hope not."

"And this road..." He hadn't resumed walking, now that she was standing beside him. She looked ahead to where the glass angles of floor and wall converged, miles away. Something was there, a vague hulk hinted at by starlight.

Keir said, "What if I told you that it runs to Virga?"

" What? " She stared at him. He appeared completely serious.

"I'd say you're lying," she said after a moment's thought. "This world rotates. Virga doesn't. The only place you could make a door between the two would be, well, where the door we're trying to get to is --at the axle, where the two worlds are attached."

Even as she said this she realized it wasn't necessarily true. Her city, Sere, was composed of a dozen giant iron-and-brass wheels, each one a mile or more across. You could board a flea car on the rim of one and be tossed to the rim of the next in line--handed off by the giants, one by one, until you reached the farthest wheel. Maybe some similar mechanism joined Virga and Aethyr.

"But then why didn't you tell us?" She was raising her voice. "Why let us languish here while you build us an airship to reach the axle door, when we could have just walked home?"

He looked away. "If leaving were that easy, I wouldn't be here now."

This was no answer, so she waited. After a moment he shrugged and said, "Yes, this way does lead to Virga. No, you can't take it. The way is blocked."

"By what?"

"By them." He nodded at the indistinct shapes he'd called an armada. "Or their cousins, at any rate. Things live in the walls of Virga. They would eat you or incorporate you before you got ten meters."

"Then why were you going there?"

He looked up the long glass hall, appearing to weigh what he should tell her. "I come here sometimes," he said, still not looking at her, "and think about leaving Brink."

"For Virga?" She was careful not to sound too surprised; she wanted to encourage him to say more.

"Virga would be safer than ... back there." He nodded the other way, past Brink, at the many worlds of the arena and beyond. Well, that made sense, she thought; the emissary had told her much about the strange alien worlds of the arena--that volume of space that included Aethyr and Virga and, apparently, many other artificial worlds--and she wouldn't have wanted to visit them alone.

Here, though, was an apparent door to home, tantalizingly within reach. "The Edisonians build anything for you," she pointed out. "Couldn't they make something to get you past that door?"

"Maerta has forbidden them to make me anything more complicated than my experiments."

"Experiments?"

He shrugged. "Toys, I guess. I ask questions about the world. I make things to find out the answers."

Now he began walking, but back the way they'd come. Leal stared ahead at the hint of escape in the distance, and fell into step with Keir Chen. "So you're a prisoner here? Or do you just feel like you are?" She indicated the dragonflies hovering around him. "Are those your jailers?"

He laughed. "No, they're just eyes." He raised his hand and one of the little bugs came to land on his fingertip. "I evolved them and I guess I ... grew used to them. I'd feel blind without them now."

Then he frowned at her. "No, Maerta and the others aren't keeping me prisoner. They're just watching over me."

"Why do you need watching over?"

He seemed to struggle for an answer, then shrugged. "Because I'm a kid."

"You look like you'd be a man where I come from."

Keir didn't reply and she realized she might have embarrassed him. Eventually, as they came to the gallery again, she said, "Isn't there another world somewhere that you used to call home?"

"Oh, yes. I'm from Revelation." She raised her eyebrows encouragingly, and after a moment he said, "Ah. It's a planet in the inner system."

"I don't know anything about Vega's planets," she said. Leal had known there was a wider universe outside Virga, but like most people she'd been raised to think of it as an empty place, of no relevance to civilized human life. She'd learned differently when she met the emissary, but even it knew little about worlds other than its own.

Chen smiled slyly. "I'll tell you about Revelation, if you tell me about Virga."

Leal did an imitation of the scoffing sound her father used to make. "And I'll tell you about Virga if you tell me what you people are really doing in this godforsaken place. How's that for a deal?"

He laughed, sounding genuinely delighted. "I like that! And why not? I have nothing to hide." His face suddenly fell. "Less and less as the days pass, it seems."

Leal thought about her confrontation yesterday, and about Loll's reaction when he'd heard. "I've asked everyone I know from this world--your Maerta, the emissary, I even spoke to one of your Edisonians--but I still can't get a straight answer about something."

He looked amused. "That doesn't surprise me at all. What was the question?"

"What's so bad about immortality?"

He stopped, cocked his head, and said, "It assumes that there's some part of you that is, or could be, impervious to change. There isn't." He started walking again.

"Oh, but--" She caught up. "But this, this offer. You probably don't know, but yesterday something happened--" He held up a hand.

"I was kind of listening in," he said. He shrugged at her shocked expression. "Sorry."

"Then you know what happened. To my friend."

"He died and was revived by one of the factions of Artificial Nature. It happens."

"The virtuals, yes? But what are they? What is he now? And what is this offer he's talking about?"

Keir frowned. "He's become a part of the system that we're here to oppose. The virtuals want to dissolve the boundaries between everything physical. They want every physical object in the universe to be a potential host to Mind. They didn't so much revive your friend John as upgrade him. They loaded his consciousness into a network where it can live virtually, without reference to the physical world. There's trillions of consciousnesses in Artificial Nature, and more and more of them are leaving reality behind for these fantasy-realms."

"Oh. But--but that isn't how the emissary works, is it? The emissary claims it's also an enemy of these virtuals."

"Yes, your friend is different. It's a shape-shifter, yeah, but it's always embodied in one way or another. Have you noticed that its personality changes depending on what body it's built?"