Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

Then Venera turned her attention to Leal. "You. What are you doing?"

"I'm ... writing my memoirs."

Venera narrowed her eyes. "Smacks of procrastination to me." Then she nodded sharply. "Both of you. The naval dockyard, pier fifteen, tomorrow morning. Nine sharp, don't be late."

She stalked to the door, then noticing their astonished expressions, scowled at them both. "Well," she said as if it were obvious, "you might as make yourselves useful."

She turned on her heel and left.

* * *

"THEY DO NOTwant me to talk about this. But why not? The truth belongs to all of us."

The sky here was glorious. Fully six suns were cradled by the weightless air, at varying distances that filtered their light from bright blue-white (for the closest one) to bloodred (for the most distant). The spaces around them were shaded every possible hue and, like a faint mist, uncountable cities and towns, farms, lakes and clouds receded through and past them, seemingly to infinity.

It was Candesce that most strongly lit the few pages of notes that Antaea had brought with her. The sun of suns hung directly over her head, and it outshone the lesser lights of the principalities by orders of magnitude.

She cleared her throat, nervously shuffling the pages. About a thousand people had come out to listen to her story; the numbers were growing with every stop she made. People loved to hear the tale of her betrayal, her kidnapping of an admiral and the incursion of a precipice moth into the palace of that infamous pirate nation, Slipstream. She'd spent an hour on it tonight--but it was just the teaser, the bait to bring them here. Her real message would be harder for them to swallow--was not, in fact, meant for these people at all.

In the front rank of the cloud of people, her agent gave her an encouraging thumbs-up. She smiled gamely back, and continued.

"Our societies are only as just as our technologies allow them to be," she said. "In Virga, our governments have to use bureaucracies to manage all the information needed to run a nation. That's important to remember, because when we are oppressed it is not by monarchy, capitalism, absolutism, or whatever 'ism' might cling to the top of a given society's pyramid. Tyranny is shaped by the command-and-control mechanisms that are available--and not by the specific class that tries to use those means. So, in Virga, we are doomed to live lives straitjacketed by bureaucratic governance."

She took a deep breath and proclaimed, "Their individual character doesn't matter! They may be churches, armies, democracies, or 'people's republics'; whatever they are, they all use the same tools, and it is the limitation of those tools that keep our societies in primitive and unjust paralysis.

"The Virga Home Guard knows this. Yet they refuse to act."

Whenever she reached this part of the talk, she half-expected a bullet to strike at her from some unwatched direction. For two weeks now now her talks had been drawing crowds up and down the principalities of Candesce--the most thickly populated volume of Virga. It was part of Chaison Fanning's plan that she be seen, very publicly, to be rebelling against centuries of secretive tradition by revealing the inner workings of the Guard, by speaking of its foibles and its failures. "It will draw them out," he'd said. "You'll see."

Well, it might--but what form would their reaction take? She was risking her life with these words; she hoped he appreciated it.

"The Guard protects us from what lies outside our world," she said, swinging an arm to indicate the indigo depths opposite the bright suns. The citizens of the principalities had an almost unreasoning fear of the darkness that lay outside Candesce's sphere of radiance. The very fact that Antaea was a winter wraith--born and raised in the sunless countries thousands of miles beyond the principalities--helped her draw crowds. Her presence was titillating to the decadents of these inward-turned civilizations, but some of them also heard and responded to her real message. There were rumors now of some secret meeting that was to take place in the pirate nation of Slipstream. Some alarming thing to do with the fabled Guard.

Her next words had not been written by Chaison's ghostwriters. They were her own thoughts, committed to paper in long evening reveries, as she'd thought about Leal's message, and what they'd come to call the Offer. "The Guard protects us, because what lurks outside Virga is another kind of tyranny. There, Artificial Nature makes new kinds of society possible--of course it does, and that's what makes it attractive. But its miraculous technologies also make some ways of life impossible. Some of those ways are the very ones we prize most highly.

"So what are we to do? Accept the tyranny of the system we've got, or bring in a new, different kind of tyranny on the theory that any change will be an improvement? The Guard has always refused to make that choice for us--and this is because they recognize that they do not have the right.

"The Guard's correct not to make the decision for us," she shouted out to anyone who would hear. "For it is our decision to make. It is time for us to take collective responsibility for our situation, and decide: do we accept that we will only ever be able to use those few primitive technologies that Candesce permits us to use? Will we command the Guard to throw open the Gates of Virga and let Artificial Nature into our world, thus changing it irreversibly? Or is there some middle way? Maybe we can send our youth to study in the outside universe, let them return wiser and more knowledgeable than we can be. Maybe we should stop isolating ourselves, and begin asking for news of that wider universe. Allow immigration, emigration, and the transit of ideas even while we use Candesce's power to maintain Virga's technologies as they are.

"Maybe," she said, and now her smile was genuine and confident, "maybe we have other choices."

The talk wound down but now it was all theatrics and calls for action, and when it was done Antaea bowed to the usual applause. The message had been sent, her gauntlet thrown down. Now all she had to do was wait.

She signed books and chatted with people for a while as the crowd slowly dispersed. One of the suns was going out for local night, and in a formerly dark quadrant of the sky, another was coming alight. Antaea yawned as the last autograph-seeker flapped away, and eyed Candesce, which was the sun she set her watch by these days. It blazed as brightly as ever, but she knew it wouldn't be long until it shut down for the evening as well. Then, this unbelievable sky would reveal a sight even more beautiful than the fine colors that reigned now, as millions of windows and running lights lit up across hundreds of miles of clear air. She could go to sleep in the embrace of a measureless galaxy of home and city light. When she closed her eyes, some nights that light remained in her dreams.

"Time to retire, my lady," said Richard Reiss, her agent. She turned and smiled at him.

"What did I say?"

"Nothing." She shrugged. "How was our take tonight?"

"Respectable." He held a thick satchel. "Best get to the drop-off before someone tries to mug us for it."

They shared a smile. There were few people alive who could best Antaea in a fair fight. The money wasn't the bait for their trap, anyway. She'd already laid that out.

Now, as the purple light of Candesce's evening began to wash across the principality skies, she climbed into their twin-engined aircar and took the satchel from Richard's hand. Slipstream's former ambassador to Gehellen was proud to turn his wine-stain birthmark to the light these days; notoriety, he'd discovered, suited him as well as respectability once had. His knowledge of principality fashions and customs was invaluable to Antaea during this junket--as he'd known it would be.