Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

They'd been married for six years at that point, and had known one another for ten.

Keir stood and walked a little ways away so that he could see himself sitting on the bench. You could do that in scry, since its records of an event didn't have to be limited to what you saw with your own eyes. From outside, the look on Keir's own face was eloquent, as it always was in the record. The version of Keir he was looking at had just come to realize that his wife was de-indexing, and that it was the emblems of her time with him that she was erasing.

A fateful conversation was about to start, but Keir didn't want to hear it. He kept on down the path, which stitched itself together from the infinite storage of his scry as he went. It could show him every instant he'd spent here, but it usually mashed them together into the emblem of an idealized, perfect day. Not for this day's events, though; he rarely accessed their emblems, but reviewed them in their entirety.

De-indexing had been a taboo for him before Sita started doing it. After, he'd drifted into temptation, year after year. But when something finally happened that made him annihilate vast tracts of his past, for some reason he'd remembered all those pieces he'd always planned to lose. Instead of erasing the pain and the disappointments--even Sita's betrayal--he'd kept it all, and lost something else.

Near the path, a cloud of pixies was fluttering around a meter-high revus bush that was threatening them with tiny cannons mounted on its metal leaves. "Don't you dare!" a pixie scolded as the guns swiveled toward it. "Keir Chen will dig you up if you shoot us!"

The plant began firing, in a cascade of little pops that would be inaudible from more than three meters away. The pixies ducked and swerved and, from a safe distance, began chanting "We're telling! We're telling!"

Keir rarely visited this part of the record, but somehow this time he remembered it--as he was remembering everything now in his dream, rather than accessing his scry. For some reason he'd stopped and frowned at the unfolding drama. Pixies, dryads, talking trees--they'd been a normal part of his life on Revelation. The world was an enchanted place and, even at the time of this memory, he'd taken that for granted.

Near the revus was a clutch of box tulips. The flowers were ordinary enough, but each one was contained in a crystal case scaled to its size and pose. Like the nanotech revus bush, each terrarium was festooned with miniature cannons, trembling stingers, and caterpillar-blinding lasers. Little doors in the boxes sported flashing bee-attractor signs.

Woe to the gardener who tried to dig up a box tulip. At the first cut of the trowel their planetary mesh network would go on high alert. Tulip sirens would go off all over the neighborhood. Brain-hacked wasps would converge on you. The tulip consortium's AIs would harass you by tagging your scry with insults and slanderous accusations. Their shell companies and corporations would hire lawyers and sue you.

If you made it indoors unscathed, the tulips would bomb the other flowers in your garden until you came out again and promised them reparations.

That sort of ruckus had never seemed remarkable to Keir when he was living here. At some point after he'd left Revelation, though, and before he'd de-indexed his own life, the tulips and the pixies had become the most urgent part of his memories of Revelation. He just wished he remembered why.

A shadow fell across the clutch of tulip terrariums. Keir looked up to see a black, faceless, hooded figure looming over the path. It raised a bony finger and pointed it at him accusingly.

This was no longer a memory of the day he'd discovered Sita's discontent; instead, he was remembering visiting that memory at some time after.

"You should not be here," said the nag.

He glared at it. "I'm not staying." The nags were a common feature of the scry, and he would regularly see them in the distance when he visited this, or any memory. They were there to kick you out of your recorded past if you spent too much time there. They were an annoying, but important, mental-health tool of the scry.

He'd always considered the nags a nuisance, though he'd rarely met one up close. When he'd laid down this particular memory, they'd still been common in Revelation's scry.

"You keep coming here," grated the nag now. "We don't like it." It bent over and began swatting box tulips. Each virtual terrarium fizzed and vanished as the nag touched it.

Keir remembered cursing. "How can you say that! You left Revelation! You abandoned us."

"You should go. Or do you want me to wipe this record clean?" The nag began reaching out, grabbing distant clouds, hills on the horizon, and floating city-spheres. Soon it had an armful of scene elements. "Do you want these memories crushed?"

"You dare threaten me with that?" Keir pointed a shaking finger at one of his Sitas. "When you gave up on her ?" The nag squeezed, and pieces of the memory popped like soap bubbles. Keir yelled in fury and fell out of the scene--and, on Venera's yacht, banged against the wall of his sleeping closet.

* * *

LEAL FOUND HIMoutside. Keir was sitting on the yacht's hull, letting the fresh breeze following the storm caress his brow. He opened his eyes when she appeared in the hatch, noticed the concern on her face and, as she made to go back inside, said, "No. I'd appreciate the company."

She clipped a line to her belt and climbed out next to him. Candesce was a yellow fire at infinity, just slightly too dim to make daylight for any nation that might covet this volume of air. It was still night by Slipstream's clock, and the ship had been quiet when he'd come out here.

Leal settled down next to him, but said nothing. Keir felt a growing compulsion to fill the silence; at last he said, "Do you know how old I am?"

She shook her head. "Seventeen? Nineteen? Or do your years differ from ours?"

"No, they don't." He met her gaze and said, "Leal, I am seventy-nine years old. Too young to have neotenized myself twice. Yet it seems I did."

She reared back in surprise, almost losing her grip on the hull. "Keir, what are you talking about?"

"Neotenizing. De-indexing. They're two ways to renew yourself when the weight of life and memory gets to be too much." He looked back at the flowerlike cloudscape ahead of them. "With de-indexing, you sever your ability to access certain records of your past. Then, your natural memories wither as well. It's a gentle way of turning your back on past events ... relationships ... that you want to forget.

"But neotenization ... it means 'to turn into a child.' That's a much more radical procedure." He held out his hands, which had once been larger and stronger. He'd had a scar on the back of the left one, though he no longer remembered where or when he'd gotten that. The scar was lost, and so was the memory.

"I've--I've been thinking a lot," murmured Leal, "about what you said--that death and immortality are equally bad choices. Your people learned this from experience with both."

"Of the two, death is the better choice," he said. "Death is forgetting, and there's plenty of reasons why you should want to do that.

"I was not born in the city of Brink. I come from a planet named Revelation, and I owned a house there. I was married." He looked at her, but now her expression was neutral. She was intent on his words, and not ready to judge them yet.

"My wife, Sita ... she de-indexed me . At the time, I was devastated; it was the end of a relationship I had built my life around. What I didn't know at the time was that what she'd done ... Well, millions of people on Revelation were undergoing similar transformations. The scry on Revelation had been compromised-- hacked , I think is the old word for it. Sita didn't just leave me ... she left humanity itself."