Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

"So ... how are you?"

His question sounded utterly inane to his own ears, and it must have to her as well, because she simply smiled and said, "Antaea said this was yours."

She handed him the gun he'd given Argyre. As he took it from Leal she gripped the spar between her feet and casually, gracefully back-flipped through the ship's open hatch and out of sight.

"Oh, but I--" Don't need it . He sat there dumbly holding the weapon for a few seconds. There was no helpful advice from his scry about what she'd really wanted, or what he should do. After an awkward pause he clipped the gun onto his belt and turned back to the view.

Had he not been half-blind already, he surely would have retreated inside soon after, because as the light welled up the terrifying scale of this ocean of air became visible. Keir couldn't remember much about his life before Brink, but he knew he'd grown up on a planet. He was used to skies that had, if not a visible boundary, at least some end to their cloudscapes. He was used to sky being framed by ground. In Virga there was only an infinity of cloudscapes spreading to all directions--tolerable, when it was dark, but a staggering assault on the imagination when its vast depths were sketched by light. It was exhilarating, magnificent, and far too big to take in no matter how much he stared.

The ship wove its way between mountain-sized clouds, making a steady sixty or eighty kilometers per hour. As it did the light from ahead brightened, becoming a broad region of canary-yellow sky cupping an intense red dot at its center. Though it must be hundreds of kilometers away, that red dot was the visible radiance of a man-made sun, a nuclear-fusion reactor of mightily primitive but practical design. This eternally falling drop of air, this world of Virga, was clouded with such suns--hundreds of them. Keir had never seen one with his own eyes, for bright as they were, the devices could only carve small spheres of day out of the dark. --With one exception, of course. Candesce, the sun of suns, immolated the whole middle space of Virga, and dozens of civilizations orbited it like birds wheeling around a lighthouse.

Far to the right was another crimson dot, this one smaller--another nation, remote, half-eclipsed by its neighbor.

Long minutes passed and Leal didn't return. Keir watched the dawn open like a flower, a sun not rising but emerging . And with it, at last, came details.

First to become clear were this nation's heavy industries. They skimmed the shell of the spherical domain carved by the light: factories, complicated snarls of metal like vast seashells gouting smoke and grit and poisonous clouds into the dark. Any farther out, and these places stood to lose sight of their sun altogether--and could thus be doomed to wander the blackness unless by luck they found another country. Any further in, and they would pollute the agricultural spheres.

These came next as the Page sailed on--as the light became brighter, Keir saw that some of the clouds around him were not white, but green. On an individual basis those specks were potato and corn, rice and millet and oats; gathered together in wave upon wave of ever-greater scale, they became cirrus and cumulus, nimbus and stratus--entire clouds of life.

The Page passed a streamer of tomatoes. Keir watched a small knot of them sail by, five plants with their roots tangled around a common clod of dirt. Aphids and midges swarmed around the little world, and some sort of songbird trilled from inside the foliage.

They passed schools of giant, fire-colored fish that showed obvious signs of being genetically engineered: their fins were huge, like diaphanous wings, and they had eyelids; one flew next to Keir for a long minute, blinking at him dumbly, before turning back to its fellows.

He'd heard that many of the people who lived in Virga were unaware their world was artificial. He found this hard to believe.

In the agricultural sphere, the sky shaded from deep blue behind the ship to bright yellow ahead; the predominant color was a kind of mauve. Here were the first wheeled towns he'd seen, and they were as pretty and delicate as he'd imagined they would be. They appeared first as faint circles drawn on the sky, then gradually resolved into wood-and-rope hoops, very thin and fragile, their narrow inside surfaces crowded with buildings. Like the tomato plants, they were surrounded by swarming life, in this case, ships, winged human figures, and drifting cargo nets. He saw flights of saddled dolphins, these not genetically engineered but wearing fin extenders.

Inside the thick shell of farming communities was another volume of sky, this one speckled with towns and private dwellings in all shapes and sizes. Here the air was blue, the clouds white and the sunlight yellow. The Page passed double-hulled, majestically spinning yacht-houses that defied definition as either building or vehicle.

Now that the agricultural clouds no longer occluded the view, Keir could see something strange about the sky ahead. Contrails pierced the vista like the threads of some gigantic spiderweb. Some converged on the sun whose light now felt hot on Keir's face--but the vast majority drew lines at right angles to it. Squinting, he saw that dozens--maybe hundreds--of giant ships were jetting in the direction of that other sun he'd spotted earlier. Alerted to the movement, he could now see that some of the town wheels were inching in that direction, too--rolling, as it were, through the sky. He squinted, holding up his hand to block the light, and thus caught his first glimpse of the city of Rush.

Rush's iron town wheels spun in quartets, each mile-wide circle bannered like a twirling paper lantern. The city hovered in the long shadow cast by a forested asteroid, in white, water-saturated air that trembled with heat. Here the ships and jets and flying contraptions flocked in the thousands, contrails and rope roads stitched the air, and the mansions of the wealthy and powerful flocked as thickly as the fish had earlier.

He heard a banging sound and turned to see a hatch opening on the Page 's hull. Leal Maspeth's people started boiling out, laughing and turning their faces to the light with grins of relief and pleasure; and when one of them swore, pointed, and shouted something to the others, they suddenly began cheering as one.

Maspeth's head poked out after them. She appeared as puzzled as Keir by the vision of her men shrieking and howling. One of them bounced right off the hull in his excitement and only the quick reflexes of a friend kept him from sailing off into the sky.

Keir hand-walked toward them along the netting draped on the side of the ship. Maspeth's friend Piero Harper had appeared now, and he, too, was grinning like a fool.

Keir stopped next to Leal, who nodded coolly at him, as if this were their first meeting today. One of her eyebrows was cocked in bemusement. "They're happy to be home?" asked Keir.

"This isn't their home," she said. "These men are from Aerie; this country is Slipstream."

"It's today! It's today!" one of the airmen was shouting. Another was weeping openly, his tears flicking away like jewels in the ship's headwind. "We made it in time!"

Harper laughed. "Freedom Day!" he shouted. "We did it!"

Leal's eyes lit with understanding. "Oh! Look!" Keir followed her pointing finger.

Now he saw that there were two colors of banner and crest on the airships and town wheels. Those of Rush were gold and red. On the ships that were now arrowing toward that distant second sun, the crests were green.

"Slipstream invaded and conquered Aerie a decade ago," Leal said to Keir. "They destroyed Aerie's sun so that Aerie's people would become utterly dependent on them. It was the Pilot of Slipstream who gave the orders, and no one could oppose him at the time.