Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

18

LEAL HAD BEENworking on this speech for months. Without pen and paper at hand, she had rehearsed it in her mind while trudging across the strange, flat landscapes of Aethyr. While climbing the long slope of the world's end, or sitting too exhausted to eat the meager rations they'd brought, she would retreat into herself and imagine that she stood in front of a vast assembly, all attentive and eager to hear the revelations she was about to drop, word by word, into their ears.

This was no assembly. It was a mob, and a hostile one that was only reluctantly subsiding into its seats. The lofty sense of mission that she'd imagined would sustain her in delivering this message simply wasn't there; instead, she felt exactly as she had on countless occasions when she'd had to tutor a roomful of impatient, pampered adolescent boys.

"Your nations nearly fell four years ago," she shouted, ignoring the sound of glass falling into the gardens somewhere to her right. "All of them. Would you be dead now if they had? Or controlled by something alien, like that poor soul, Aubrey Mahallan, whom Artificial Nature used as its pawn to break into Candesce? What do you suppose your fate would have been?"

She'd laid the pistol on the podium and leveled her jumbled note pages at the crowd. "Virga nearly fell again a year later, when another human became the vessel for an attempt to recapture the key to Candesce. Telen Argyre, whose sister stands behind me, was also possessed by a force from beyond our world. That force continues to press upon us, relentless. It has tried sneaking in. It has tried forcing the lock. Now, it prepares to batter down the doors."

"But why?" somebody shouted. "What do we have that they could possibly want?"

Leal's shoulders slumped in relief at the question. "Candesce," she said. "It's all about Candesce.

"Think about it." She wasn't following her speech in any of the ways she'd imagined, but it didn't matter now. She knew what to say. "Imagine that you've conquered the universe--and not just the universe outside yourself. Your offspring have flooded across the stars, copying and transforming themselves in a hurricane of ecstatic creativity. They are all wildly different in their shapes, sizes, their minds, morals, and goals. But the only ones that matter, you believe, are the ones that can think. This is because your perfected minds contain a complete model of reality. --A completed physics, a final chemistry, all possible biologies ... an image, in your mind, of everything that is possible in our universe. Because your minds contain all possibilities, you've concluded that you are the real universe, and that messy, unpredictable realm of non-thinking matter and energy outside your perfect mind is just an illusion, a fallen dimension to be swept entirely aside in time.

"And then, your unstoppable flood hits a stone. Candesce stops you, and worse--far worse!--its very existence refutes you. You've come to believe that Mind is the true reality, and that the vessels you seem to need to house it are an afterthought, a noisome and filthy necessity you'll erase in time. But that's not true. Mind is always embodied. It has to be.

"And now, the cracks appear in your perfect mask. Why have you been expanding so relentlessly? Why this ceaseless creation of new forms in your infinite mind? --These paradises, each built on the rubble of the last? The million discarded languages, the games of culture, the recursive invention? It's because something still eludes you. Meaning ... eludes you."

The emissary's people had deluged Leal with theory, with numbers and physics. The morphonts had told her how Candesce's protective field violated the physical laws that served as the bedrock of Artificial Nature's operating system. Candesce's very existence disproved the virtuals' claim that they held--and embodied--universal truth. Yet there was more to it than that. For why did any of this matter? During the long walk across the plains of Aethyr, and at night as she sat next to the strange campfires that gravity made possible, Leal had tried to see past those explanations. --Not to understand what they were saying, but rather, what they meant.

"Why did our ancestors build Candesce?" she asked now, as she'd finally learned to ask during those days. "Forget the how of it. Why did they choose to limit themselves to these frail, brief bodies, when they could have joined Artificial Nature in its synthetic heavens? They could have had immortality, and they threw it away.

"I will tell you why. It's because it is our frailty, our briefness, our abject helplessness against the storms of fate that make our lives meaningful. I tell you now the great secret of our entire existence: that meaning can only come from being bound in the material world, in its constraints, its agonies, its fleeting moments. The virtuals strive to escape all pain, all accident, and the brute mindlessness of nature. Yet without these things, existence is a hollow vessel, and those who have become virtual have no true voice, can hear only the bright echoes of our lives."

She'd seen it in John Tarvey's eyes. He'd moved past needing flesh, and so what need did he have of emotions, which existed to propel the body; no use for pain, certainly, but then no use for pleasure, either. Without the need for a single unitary body, why organize himself as a single mind at all? Why care, why think, why feel, why be?

"Meaning comes from the moment, the place, and the bodies struggling in it," she said--and then she smiled and laughed, as if at a sudden thought; but this part she'd rehearsed.

"All of which," and now she softened her voice and gave her audience a rare smile, "brings me to the question of why I, a simple history tutor from the city of Sere in the sunless country of Abyss, one day came to find myself hanging from the ledge of a library window, while soldiers ransacked its interior in search of me and my companions. For if you would look for meaning in what I've told you so far, you must start at that moment, in that place, and with those bodies in struggle."

And with that she was off, telling them now, in full confidence, how the emissary had come to Abyss as a great voice cloaked in darkness; how its message had panicked those who heard it, driving some mad; how they had destroyed their ships, their homes, and one another in their attempt to silence it. The fleet of Abyss was assembled, and it met the emissary and was scuttled by its own terror. Yet none of this chaos was the emissary's intent; it was simply that it was a creature born and bred in Artificial Nature. Within the influence of Candesce, it, too, had lost its mind. When Leal and her friend Easley Fencher found themselves crawling through the library window, it was because she had finally acquired the ancient, banned book that would give her clues about what the emissary was, and how to find it.

As concisely as she could, she told them the rest of it: how she'd found the emissary and gone with it into Aethyr and beyond; how, on her return, ships from Abyss and the Home Guard had pursued them; and how they'd all crashed on the surface of Aethyr.

Leal had lectured many times, but she had never told a story in such a way as she was now, and never a story so true, never one with her at its center. She spoke in a kind of ecstasy, and there was complete silence among her listeners.

--Until, as she was describing their harrowing flight through the lost city of Serenity, someone off to the left shouted, "Can't a man defend himself in this court of opinion?"

She blinked and looked over: Eustace Loll stood on the path beside the ranked chairs. He was in a formal suit and he wasn't alone.

Rustling murmurs sprang up again, and Leal heard the squeak of floorboards as people crisscrossed the podium behind her. Chaison Fanning had discreetly stepped aside during her speech, but now he appeared at her elbow. "Those men are from your country?" he asked her quietly. She nodded, suddenly ashen.