Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

Horror nearly drove him to his knees as he realized that there was no help coming.

Dropping the bag, he ran to the front of the trolley where what had been a woman in a green coat was now half-mashed under its prow. There was blood everywhere. The woman's friend was kneeling next to her and her screams were unlike anything Keir had ever heard.

He found himself reaching out--issuing commands to scry to summon help, to launch first-aid programs--but his hands grasped empty air. There were verbal commands to scry and to the Edisonians and fabs and he choked them out, but everyone ignored him as the driver staggered out of the trolley crying and shouting words in no language. The crying, shouting, and screaming echoed off the buildings and it must be climbing the canyon of the city like a pyre, a smoke of words and regrets rising to vanish in the light of the suns.

The crowd pushed Keir aside and he put one foot in front of the other, and again, feet ticking step by unsteady step up the curb, down the street, but going nowhere now.

* * *

THE LIGHT FROMRush's sun made a circuit around the room, once every fifty seconds. Leal had timed it. The town wheel turned over, silent and perfect as a clock, and the parallelogram of yellow-white slid slowly down the wall, across the floor, up the farther wall, and back along the ceiling. You could keep time by it--if its cycle lasted a full minute, which it didn't. Somewhere, fluttering deep inside her, was resentment that the wheel's builders couldn't have given it a one-minute rotation. At least then she would have known how long she'd been sitting here with her hands clutched in her lap.

There was a commotion in the admiralty's foyer, then a junior officer stepped into the room. "They've found him," he said.

Leal jumped to his feet. "Is he--"

"He's fine. Doctor says he suffered some sort of shock, but physically, he's fine."

"Ah. I--can I see him? Please?"

The officer stepped out and conferred with someone, then returned. "This way."

Chaison Fanning's admiralty building was huge--so big that its floors curved with the town wheel itself. She shouldn't have been surprised to discover that it contained an entire hospital, apparently for veterans. The officer handed Leal off to a nurse, who led her through a succession of pea-green rooms to a curtained nook where Keir sat. He was staring past the curtain when she got there. Leal looked where he was looking, and saw an old soldier basking in the same sunlight she'd been watching a minute ago. The man was missing a leg and a hand, but otherwise seemed perfectly normal.

The nurse frowned and twitched the curtain closed. Keir blinked and looked up, noticing Leal for the first time.

He said nothing. Heart in her throat, Leal sat down next to him and took his hand.

What to do? She bit her lip, then, impulsively, said, "I've seen that look before."

He cocked his head just slightly. Encouraged, she went on. "My friend Brun went looking for the emissary and found it. He and his men had no idea what they were getting themselves in for. We found him half-dead from exposure, alone in the weightless darkness. He was trapped in a drop of water; the stuff kept condensing onto him, and though he'd push it away it kept coming back. Once he slept, it was going to cover his mouth and nose and suffocate him."

Why was she telling him this? The last thing Keir needed to hear right now was one of the horrors she'd seen. Yet, she heard herself continue. "We got him back, revived him, but something in him ... was broken. He wasn't the same after that. Keir, please tell me that something inside you didn't break today. Whatever it was, it was nothing. Nothing!"

"A woman died," he mumbled. "I saw a woman die."

"Oh." She supposed, coming from where he had, that he'd never had such an experience before. "Oh, Keir, I'm so sorry you had to learn it like that. People die, they die." She sat next to him, pulling his head into the curve of her neck.

"Not where I come from," he said. She tensed, remembering Tarvey, but then he said, "We de-index, and we neotenize. I'd forgotten what those things were, but now I remember. They're an alternative to death. We live immensely long lives, Leal, and when we weary of the world, we ... forget our lives. Start over. We grow down, so we can grow up again and discover everything anew."

Stunned, she froze, and for a long minute neither of them spoke. Then: "Sita," he said, "was my wife."

"Was..." Leal tried to think past her confusion. "Before you came to the Renaissance?"

"I don't know. But I do know that she lost her life. I also know that she didn't die. Not the way that woman today died."

They sat there for another long time, while Leal hunted for something to say that would make sense. "Our world's not evil," she said finally. "Just different. Brun--if you'd seen what he saw in the dark, you'd have laughed it off. To him, meeting the emissary was like ... what you saw today is to you. Not that I would ever laugh off a death, I don't mean that."

He shut his eyes tightly and grimaced. "I was just starting to think that I'd found paradise--like I'd been living in some shadow world my whole life and only just now woke up. And then..."

She nodded against his thick hair. "There's this ancient story that I came across while I was researching the emissary--back when the rumors were that it was a worldwasp, one of the builders of Virga. The story's about a prince who builds a machine to travel outside of Virga. He's been maddened, see, by grief at the death of his wife, and has decided to visit the country of the dead to bring her back. The country of the dead is what lies outside Virga. The story goes that he builds a vast black orb, bigger than a town and sealed with tar and bound in iron. Somehow, he pierces the outer skin of the world and then he sails his mad vessel into the blackness there."

Keir leaned away from her. He still looked haggard, but that awful stare had gone, at least for now. "And then what?" he said.

"Well," she said, crossing her legs and clasping one knee. "That's where the legend ends for most versions of the story; but over the centuries some authors were unsatisfied with this cliffhanger, and here this one added a dramatic return, that one a cryptic message in a bottle, and another, a great voice shouting from the dark..." She smiled at him. "But it's as the story says--the walls of Virga separate the land of the living from the land of the dead. Only now I see, which I never did before, that whichever side you come from is the land of the living, and whichever side you end up in, is..." Suddenly realizing how awful this notion must sound, she stopped; but he was nodding.

"There's a choice to be made," he said. "Immortality or death. Sita is still alive--in some sense. But what happened to her--what I think happened--well, immortality and death are equally terrible."

"There's a third choice, though," she said. He nodded, and then to her surprise, sent her a rueful, and very old-looking smile.

"How neatly symmetrical." His words were dry, even cynical.

He shook away her hands and stood up. "I'm fine," he said. "I'll be fine." Then he looked around his feet. "I lost the bag."

"Don't worry about that. Let's just get out of here." He walked out of the infirmary with her hand on his arm, and, twenty minutes ago, Leal would have imagined no better ending to the episode. Yet his face was a mask and she now knew that it had been from the start--that she had a long way to go before she met the real Keir Chen.

* * *

WHEN VENERA FANNINGlearned what had happened, she frowned, thought for a minute, then strode into the guest quarters and said, "Where is he?"

She came to stand over him as he sat ashen-faced in a lounge by the window. For a while she sized him up, noting the length of his arms, the muscles in his thighs. He looked back at her mildly; across the room, Leal watched the strange assessment with alarm.