Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

"So, our first tool will be outrage and excitement."

Keir saw little of that today as he strolled the iron pavement of Rush, Slipstream's capital city. He did see a lot of rushing about in Quartet Two, Wheel One--but that was because the merchants were still making out like bandits from the Freedom Day tourists, many of whom had stayed to enjoy a rare heat wave cooked up by Slipstream's sun controllers. There were plenty of stalls in alley mouths, a few street performers on the odd corner, lots of traffic on foot and in man-powered jitneys, and many smiling faces. The headlines in the newspapers were in small type these days. In more than one sense, a new summer had settled on Slipstream.

"There's the shop," Leal said. "You go on--I'll see you back at the palace."

He grinned at her. "'Back at the palace.' I like that."

They'd just been clothes-shopping, since he couldn't wear his Brink-made apparel without attracting attention, and the boy's clothing he'd borrowed from a mate on the Torn Page of Fate had apparently shrunk. That was today's excuse, anyway; Leal had been dragging him out into the streets every day since they'd arrived. He had to admit it was helping him gain his bearings.

She sent him a luminous smile and turned away. He paused at the beveled-glass door to the bookstore and glanced back, in time to see her raise her face to a beam of hot sunlight from the nearby sun. Of course, Slipstream was as exotic to her as it was to him. He smiled and hauled on the heavy door.

Doors that didn't open for you automatically; gaslight in the evenings; no screens, no scry--it was all bewildering and wonderful, but there was a kind of beauty to life here that he was starting to appreciate. Beauty like these books! He stood by the door, breathing in the scent of the paper for a moment and gazing around in wonder. The walls were lined with leather-bound folios, and most of the floor space was taken up with shelves. The amount of actual information here was infinitesimal--his scry implants could have carried a billion bookstores' worth--but that hardly mattered. Each book was a thing, the care and material going into making it announcing to the world that this knowledge or this story, however small, was a treasure. He flipped through a few of them in delight as the bemused shopkeeper watched.

"Anything I can help you with?"

"Well, maybe." He let his accent shine through. The paper bag containing his clothing would help with this role, but Leal had told him severely, "No pretending. Be what you are: a foreigner." So he didn't hide his hesitation at finding a spot to put down the bag; and he looked around carefully to make sure they were alone before saying, "I hear there's a book I can't buy from you."

The shopkeeper's open expression became veiled. "Don't know what you mean. We have a free press in Slipstream, since the Pilot's death."

"Well, it's not officially banned, but I heard the admiral bought up the whole print run."

"I really don't know--"

"Oh, come on! Do I look like a spy?" --Which was the worst kind of thing to say if you really were a spy, of course, but he was going to obey Leal's instructions to the letter. "You're my last chance; I'm leaving for home tomorrow."

The shopkeeper sighed heavily. "Listen, son, if a book's been banned--officially or not--do you really think you'd be likely to find a copy here ?"

"Well, exactly. So..."

The man leaned over the counter. "Where's the last place you'd expect to be buying books?"

"Oh, I don't know. The docks? The butcher's?"

"There's a cheese shop two blocks spinward," said the shopkeeper innocently. "That's pretty much the last place I'd look."

"Huh. Thanks, I'll bear that in mind." Keir left the shop, and five minutes later he walked out of the cheese shop with a brand-new copy of Antaea Argyre's controversial new autobiography. It was, of course, buried in the bag under his new clothing.

The book had been produced in record time. Keir had stopped by while Antaea was still dictating it to the bank of ghostwriters Admiral Fanning had attached to her. Dangling one leg over the velvet arm of the chair she was slumped in, idly swirling a wineglass in her hand, she had been answering yet another question about her mad dash across the airs of the world. The writers were typing madly at their baroque cast-iron "type writers"; torn and crumpled pages forested the floor of the admiralty office where this secret activity was taking place. Keir had shaken his head at her, and she'd rolled her eyes in reply.

Fanning had driven his authors like pack animals, and so the book had hit the printers in a little over a week. Announced in a flurry of press releases and newspaper articles, it was immediately suppressed (though all the copies reputedly destroyed by the admiral were actually winging their way to neighboring countries, to there be sold as rare surviving editions).

All copies were supposed to be going to the public, since Keir and all the others already knew the story. Still, the admiral had started giving him an allowance, and it was up to him how to spend it. This copy of Antaea's book was his.

For a while he strolled the boulevards, enjoying the mad energy of a Virgan city. Without scry and all the other distractions of the outside world, the people here maintained a fantastic focus on their immediate lives. They were passionate in a way that nobody in the Renaissance could ever be. They reminded him of another place ... when he'd ...

He stopped, scowling. He'd almost caught that one. The memories were there, but without the order imposed on them by scry, he had to recover them manually, as it were. This was what de-indexing meant, he'd concluded: erasing, not memories themselves, but one's artificial aids to retrieving them. Maerta had acted like de-indexing was some sort of death sentence, and he supposed that in a way, it was--to someone born outside Virga.

These people, though, had never used artificial augmentations to their natural memories, and they were hardly suffering. In fact, they seemed happier than any people he'd ever met.

Was this his home now? He supposed it could be, and the thought made him shake his head in wonder at himself, for having had no plan beyond leaving Brink. Had that recklessness been courage, or youthful folly? He'd literally had no idea where he would go, but it hadn't mattered. He might not be done wandering yet, but for the moment, he didn't care.

So much for worrying about the future. Leal Maspeth had been shocked and appalled at John Tarvey's offer--but what was his sort of immortality, after all, but a photograph of life, preserved but not living. By contrast, the embodied people of Virga--who lived entirely in their flesh, and died there, too--had the better deal.

The rumble of a trolley sounded behind him. He glanced up to watch it go past, loving its crude mechanical beauty. A machine, designed and built to plan . Wonderful!

The machines of the city charmed him. Maybe he could become an engineer, and design and build the way people had thousands of years ago. To create something like that streetcar from nothing but your imagination and knowledge of the world! That one trolley made the evolved wonders of the Edisonians seem cheap.

Except that one woman didn't seem to see the thing coming. She was waving at a friend and stepping across the tracks as the trolley bore down on her. Keir felt a funny knot in his stomach--was this normal?--and the huge vehicle eclipsed her and he heard screams.

He just stood there, bag dangling from one hand, as people began running from all sides. Where were the medical remotes? The morphonts? First-aid nano? Why should all these strangers be converging on the screeching, braking streetcar whose passengers were toppling and grabbing one another now as the driver swore and swore?