Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

And he remembered Aeolia. In Aeolia, the skies sang. Rather than single big town wheels, the Aeolians spun thousands of small ones, each boasting a dozen or so buildings. They begrudged their ancient genes that required they spend some time in gravity, so everything of value that they built soared in the weightless spaces between their wheels. Most important of all these creations were the symphonicads: gigantic assemblages that filtered wind through thousands of pipes and horns and across the strings of countless harps and dulcimers. The symphonicads sang, but it was no random clitter-clatter such as a wind chime might make. Their design was so cunning that they improvised melodies and harmonies of entrancing beauty and complexity. The Aeolians staged plays and built brilliantly lit tableaux around them. They hooped wires to catch water, touching a single drop of oil to the stretched surfaces, and built vast intricate cities of quivering rainbow transparency, disguising their town wheels behind bouquets of silvered color.

They feted Venera on a single giant spinning hoop of golden silk. It undulated in the air, turning only as quickly as necessary to keep the tables and chairs in contact with its inner surface. Keir bounced, delighted on this pliant surface whose outer edges rippled in the wind; jugglers and tumblers rolled onto and off the ribbon, the symphonicads chorused like angels, and Venera earnestly declared Slipstream's eternal pledge to defend Aeolia.

The Aeolians laughed. No one attacked them. They were too beautiful.

"No one has ever yet attacked you," replied Venera. "But they will. And soon."

The Aeolians laughed again, but, when they left the next morning, Venera carried with her a sheaf of gilded documents bearing the Aeolian seal. Keir hadn't seen who had given them to her--but then, he'd not had the stamina to stay up half the night talking and drinking as she had.

"Next stop, Emperaza," Venera had said. And in the Judgment 's lounge, she added a green dot to the giant chart that half-filled one wall.

"Memory..." Keir said now. Leal raised an eyebrow expectantly. "Where I come from, all our experiences are recorded by devices like my dragonflies. Stored in perfect faithful detail. We only use our biological memories to find those records and then we replay them, instead of remembering in full the natural way."

Leal thought about that. "I don't get it," she said after a minute. "How would you remember this dinner, then? Wouldn't you have to sit through the whole damn interminable hours-long grind of it again? Wouldn't it take longer to remember things that way?"

"Oh! No, you see, scry builds emblems for us." She looked puzzled. "An emblem is a collection of perceptual moments that registered as important to us at the time," he said. "Scry builds a little tableau or mini-scene, usually just a second or two long, out of those elements. But you can focus on any one of them and spin it out into as much detail as you want, right up to slowing down or stopping time so you can thoroughly explore any given second."

Leal leaned across the table and pushed at his forearm. "And you said you were human."

"I'm serious! I had that, and I've lost it."

Instead of concern, he saw a mischievous look bloom across her face. "You know, we have something like that, too--and so do you. It's called imagination .

"--Oh, wait," she said suddenly. "Someone's coming."

A diminutive page appeared at the tableside. He was not more than ten years old but crammed into a starched black uniform. "Lady requests your presence," he said solemnly to Keir.

"Mine? Oh." He glanced at Leal, who shrugged; so he wiped his lips on the napkin and followed the boy back to the head table.

"See?" said Venera, putting out her arms in a span to show Keir off to the others at the table. "This is one of them."

An elderly woman in fine silks frowned skeptically at Keir. "The boy is from Artificial Nature?"

Keir bowed, as Venera had coached him.

"Come on, then," prompted the man next to the frowning woman. "Prove it."

Keir looked at Venera.

"He's not a dancing raven," she snapped. "He doesn't do tricks."

"Well, then..."

"Excuse me," interrupted Keir. "Perhaps if I knew what it was you had been debating?"

"No, that's--" Venera began, but the frowning woman said, "What is Artificial Nature?"

"Ah." Venera glowered, and he imagined she had just spent a few minutes trying to explain that on her own. "Artificial Nature is technology that is employed by and for nonhuman ends, including the ends of plants, animals, and even other technologies."

"But why is it called Artificial Nature ?" the lady pressed.

Keir eyed Venera, who nodded almost imperceptibly. "Well," he said, "what is technology?"

The lady looked confused. "Why, it's..." She frowned.

"This fork," said her companion.

"Suns," said someone else.

"Guns."

"Clocks."

Keir made sure to bow again, and Venera began to relax. "Those are all individual cases," he admitted. "But what is technology as such?"

There was silence. Keir nodded. "It is not so obvious. Technology is any natural phenomenon harnessed for human use. --Clothing, for instance, harnesses the phenomenon of insulating air layers to keep us warm; our suns harness the phenomenon of nuclear fusion to light our skies."

They all went ahh and smirked at one another as if it had been obvious all along.

"Outside of Virga," Keir continued, "we have a situation where natural phenomena are harnessed for non human use. In fact, harnessed for nonliving, nonsentient uses ... Is such a thing still a technology?"

Venera was smiling at him now; encouraged, he said, "Out there is a world of natural phenomena employed by other natural phenomena. Some are employed for a purpose; others are controlled by systems that have no purpose--that are just technologies run amok. It's a wilderness. Chaos. A state of nature, built with and by and for what we would call technologies. Out there..." He suppressed a shudder at a flash of memory he'd not known he had. "Things look like they are designed, look like they have a function, look like they're being used by someone for some purpose ... when they're not. They appear to be technologies, but they are in fact just natural phenomena, distilled to their essences, and running wild."

Something in his tone had silenced the entire table. Their general expression was one of alarm--all save Venera, who appeared quite satisfied. "Thank you," she said, waving a hand brusquely. Keir bowed, and backed away as she'd taught him.

He was trying to catch that elusive memory as he sat down across from Leal. Something about a garden, and a house--and a woman who didn't remember Keir's name.

"--went all right?" Leal was asking. Keir shook his head.

"Yes, I think I gave them exactly the answer Venera was asking for."

"About what?"

He told her, and they talked on; but for the rest of the evening, Keir felt as though his mind were somehow divided in two. Part of him was at the table, basking in golden gaslight in the exotic palace of a Virgan kingdom. The other part was casting here and there, overturning the furniture of disused, natural memories in search of something elusive that suddenly seemed hugely important.

* * *

EVERY TEN SECONDS,the room flipped over. Antaea ignored the stomach-flipping effects of artificial gravity in such a small wheel as Airsigh indicated she should sit down opposite her. Along with them, the long and slightly curved conference table accommodated some other Last Line officers--but none of especially high rank. This, Antaea found especially interesting.

She looked from Airsigh to the other faces. "All right," she said, "what the hell is going on?"