Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

After Loll's arrival and the stresses of the day, that news had just been too much for Leal; Keir had become an anchor for her. Without him she felt adrift, nationless. So, she didn't protest now when Fanning said, "Books? Those books are so technical it'll take us years to decipher them. And anyway, a book proves nothing."

Was Keir going to leave? Virga had seemed to amaze and delight him at every turn; would he be the same person if he left, or would he revert to the child he'd been when she'd met him?

Immersed in these thoughts, she barely heard the admiral going on about how the whole emissary visit could be just some sort of elaborate hoax--until his voice trailed off. She snapped back to attention. He was staring at something over her shoulder.

As they spun, Leal followed his gaze. A man in a naval uniform was speaking urgently into Inshiri Ferance's ear. For the first time all day, she wore a frown. Then, as the officer continued to speak, she glanced at the dance floor. --At Chaison Fanning and Leal.

Then she was gone in a swirl of silks, and up and down the crowd, her whole entourage could be seen breaking off their conversations and fading into the crowd.

Leal and Chaison stopped dancing. Without a glance at Leal Chaison walked quickly to where a knot of Slipstream uniforms was working its way through the crowd. Leal followed, her heart suddenly pounding.

"What's going on?" he demanded of his men. A panting airman in flying leathers leaned on one of the tables; as Fanning strode up he straightened and saluted.

"Two of our ships docking at the axis, sir. They're the Mercy and the Renown ."

Leal put her hand to her mouth. Those were the escorts for Venera's yacht. But where was ...

"The Judgment 's with them?" demanded Fanning. The airman shook his head.

"Apparently they've been trying to shake pursuit and spent the past few days hiding in a sargasso. They just managed to shake whoever it was and get here--"

"Ferance!" snapped Fanning. "She's trying to sneak away, damn it, stop her and her people from leaving." Two men took off at a run. "And locate the Abyssals as well," he added to another officer. "I'm just about ready to imprison the whole damn lot of them."

"Sir, our territorial agreement--"

"Then get me the prime minister! Damn it, man, it's my wife!"

News was spreading that something was up. Some people were still dancing, but more were leaving the dance floor to rejoin their parties. Pages were zipping back and forth, trying to answer people's questions.

The admiral had forgotten Leal. She stood on the periphery of his impromptu command center for a while, arms crossed, biting her lip. But there was nothing she could say or do to help. She turned, and saw soldiers from Abyss watching her alertly a few steps away.

And where the hell was Keir?

* * *

KEIR WAS WALKINGin the far corners of the garden. Gallard's message was ringing in his head, as was something else that so far he had avoided thinking about.

Strange how life came to be divided, into the time before and the time after. His marriage to Sita had been like that; during those years, Keir's life before meeting her had seemed like a faded picture. Then, when it ended--and Revelation's human civilization began to fall shortly thereafter--the same cleaving had occurred again. During his time in Brink, Keir had immersed himself in the painfully recovered principles of science and physics, and all the ups and downs of normal human life had seemed far away.

Brink, and Revelation, and everything he'd ever done seemed now like a prelude to Virga. This world was alive for Keir in a way no other place had ever been. He was intoxicated by its fantastical, pastel-shaded skies, its tenacious, makeshift civilizations, and most of all its passionate people. Every single one of them burned brighter than any human he'd met outside. Brightest of all, for all her quiet, was Leal.

To think that he might have to leave Virga ... He would almost rather die. The thought frightened him; not the idea of death, but the thought that any passion could have such a hold on him as to make the threat of dying irrelevant.

If he returned to Brink, would he continue to be the person he'd become here? Or would he lose his memories again and revert? He hadn't asked Gallard, because some residue of caution had prevented Keir from revealing just how much he remembered. It was galling now to recall being treated like a child by Gallard these past few months. In reality, Keir was the elder of the two, and prior to his de-indexing, Keir had been the dominant one.

He knew he still looked young, too. While they talked Keir had tried to act like his earlier self, while at the same time asking probing questions about the neotenization. And all the while, a slow, familiar pulse had sounded in the back of his head: his inexplicably awakened scry.

He paused under a young willow tree and looked back at the lighted heart of the garden. The vaulting wrought-iron and glass walls and arching ceiling gave the place a cathedral-like look. To the left were the flower beds, dinner tables, and tents and podiums where the presentations had been held. They surrounded the dance floor, and beyond it great tall glass doors opened out onto the upward-curving city streets. To the right, the glass walls wrapped halfway around the government palace before anchoring themselves in its stone facade. On the far side of the palace another wing of the greenhouse did the same. Both of these side-ways were thickly planted with trees.

A couple of security men were patrolling the entrance to the nearer grove, but as he walked up they waved him through. Keir was one of the few people they would let near the oak and its four-footed companion.

He ducked into the blackness under the trees. Keir wasn't sure why he had come in here. He had some dim notion of communing with something familiar, for in their own mad way, a cyborg tree and morphont cheetah seemed more ordinary to him right now than this handmade palace on its wheel of knotted-together forest. Maybe they could soothe his anxiety, make him more willing to leave Virga if he had to.

Pulse. He stopped in dappled darkness, because for just a moment, he'd thought he could see something. --Not with his own ordinary eyes, but through the second sight of scry.

It shouldn't be possible. The physics that underlay scry simply didn't exist here. He'd heard the stories today of the recent incursions into Virga by creatures of Artificial Nature: Aubrey Mahallan and Telen Argyre had both been possessed by it. Their alien riders must have been biological, however, bred in secret near Virga's walls by A.N.'s Edisonians. They'd been little more than mental parasites, although Argyre had apparently had some additional technology. Hard-won and fragile, Keir assumed, else they'd have flooded Virga with similarly equipped soldiers.

He was sure they had no idea how Candesce's suppression field actually worked. As he moved forward through the foliage, feeling his way with his arms outstretched, Keir caught himself feeling smug about that. The emotion surprised him; why should he be smug?

But, oh, of course, it was because of the ... He strained to recover the rest of the memory, but it wasn't there. All he could picture in his mind was an oak visiting Brink, some months ago, before he de-indexed himself. It had come on some ordinary business, but now he remembered that it had also wanted to speak to him alone. It was there to warn Keir specifically, about ...

Once again, the memory was just tantalizingly beyond his reach.

Pulse.

He had another momentary flash of vision, clearer but somehow more confusing. For a second he'd been looking at a curtain of some kind--a dark wall of cloth. The feeling, though, of the image--not the image itself--was strangely familiar.