Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

"You wish? You 'wish'?" Antaea shook her head with a cynical laugh. "You just admitted you're not even aware. How can you want anything? You're a robot," she said to the cat, "and you," she shouted at the oak, "you're nothing but a plant!"

She turned to the crowd. "They may be despicable people, but at least Ferance and her allies are like us."

"Oh, but they're not."

Antaea turned to look at Leal. The former history tutor had crossed her arms and had an annoyingly impatient look on her face.

"They're conscious beings like us," said Antaea. "They," she pointed at the emissaries, "are not."

Leal frowned at the path under her feet for a moment. Then she raised her head and said, "Consciousness is a passenger.

"--Or, at best, a crewman. Our values are the pilot.

"You and I are aware, Antaea, because that is what our bodies and our ways of life need from us. Sometimes we forget ourselves, and come to think that we are our minds--but that's a piece of foolishness. You must never forget what you really are."

"Which is?" Antaea felt light-headed. Her hands were shaking.

Leal smiled. "Love, and hunger, and aches and pains and family and all the things you want, and hate, and desire with your whole being. They are what you are, and your mind, too, in its own place.

"But even those creatures who don't have minds have values; they are their values, embodied in their form and function. So the oak," she nodded to the tree, "and so the multi-bodied morphont.

"Ask yourself," she said to Antaea, "what world does the oak want? The same that you want: a world of sunlight and clear air, rain, whispering branches and humming insects. The oaks want what we want. But what do Ferance's allies want? Not a garden. At best ... a palace, for them; a prison, for the rest of us."

"You're wrong!" Yet she couldn't think. Leal was a practiced speaker, and Antaea had never mastered rhetoric, nor ever relied on argument to save her. In her frustration she wanted to cut Leal down where she stood; she wanted to make these idiots see the madness in front of them.

"It's suicide!" she shouted, turning to appeal to the crowd surrounding them. "Can't you see? It wasn't the virtuals who tried to take Candesce. Not them who hollowed out my--my sister..." Horror began to well up in her, for they were staring at her as if she were insane. She pushed it down one last time and cried, "If you make a pact with these dead things, then you're making a pact with death itself!"

"Antaea," Leal said gently--and Antaea knew she had to run, because if she stayed for another second she would kill Leal.

She knocked the watchers aside, cursed and kicked, and wept wildly as she ran for the tall glass gates and fresh air.

* * *

IN TIME, THEcrowd began to relax again. The cat and oak talked of their homes and how their people lived. Leal told her own story again, and Chaison's officer, Travis, related his journeys with the emissaries as well.

Then Leal sat on one of the oak's iron-clad roots and watched Chaison Fanning relay the bad news about the existence of a vast armada, gathered from the many nations that had believed in Ferance's and Remoran's stories rather than the emissary's. This fleet, he told them, was mobilizing at that moment, on its way to Candesce with one clear objective in mind: to let Artificial Nature into Virga.

"But why?" demanded a senator from one of the principalities. "And how could they get into Candesce in the first place? There was only one key, and it was lost."

"Ah," said Chaison. "As to that..." Leal looked up in surprise, because she'd wondered about that very thing. The sun of suns was impregnable; the technology to batter down its defenses simply couldn't exist in its presence. What did Ferance think she could do?

Niels Lacerta, the Home Guard officer who'd been stranded in Aethyr with Griffin, came to stand next to Chaison. "The Guard recovered the key last year," he said. "It was given back to us by the precipice moth that had been keeping it. The moth had been holed up inside Candesce, but someone actually went there and told it that we needed the key. We don't know who that was, it wasn't a Guardsman, but they died bringing it the message."

Leal was stunned. "So the Guard can actually get into Candesce?" Lacerta nodded.

"Remoran's story makes more sense," protested the senator. "Why should they conquer us when they have the whole universe? And what's so bad about 'dialing down' Candesce's defense, like he said?"

"Antaea Argyre could explain," said Chaison, "if she were here. During the mutiny she was a part of, the outsiders they worked with claimed that Candesce's field is infinitely malleable: they said it could be dialed up, turned down, or adjusted to frame new physical laws. The Guard weren't willing to listen at the time--which is why Gonlin and his people went behind their backs. Clearly, Remoran's changed their minds."

"THIS 'DIALING' IS IMPOSSIBLE," bellowed the oak.

"Possible," countered the cat, "but only to someone who understood how Candesce works."

"Which Ferance and Holon do not," said Leal. "Any more than the Guard itself does. The best they can do is take a hammer to the mechanism."

This was her last contribution to the conversation. Exhausted, she sat on the root, watching Chaison Fanning, Hayden Griffin, and other legendary figures pace back and forth in the light of the tree, and debate and plan. She knew she should be here to witness and later record this night for history's sake; yet all she wanted to do was sleep.

And as the talk turned to the raising of a fleet to counter Ferance's, and while Chaison loudly refused to be its commander and was overruled by the majority--while all this and more went on, Leal scanned the crowd for one face. Keir was nowhere to be seen, and as it became clear that this clearing was the center of attention for everyone in the palace, her worry grew to fear.

Eventually she pushed herself up from the root and slipped away into the underbrush. For the next half-hour she walked all the garden paths and trailed under the branches of the groves on both sides of the palace. She called out his name. She asked servants and guardsmen if they'd seen him. She visited their chambers, which were tidy but empty. Finally she returned to the grove where the bizarre and historic meeting was happening, and went to stand over the now-shrouded body of Keir's tutor, Gallard.

"What happened?" she asked it, but no answer came back.

At that moment the light that had poured steadily from the meeting area went out. Cries of alarm went up from the delegations, and she ran back to the clearing, dodging the black silhouettes of gowned ladies and broad-shouldered officers. There was pandemonium under the oak, with lamps being brought in and everybody talking and running at once.

Leal walked up to the iron cat. The emissary had frozen in mid-gesture, one paw raised, palm out, in a curiously human stance. The lines of light on the branches of the oak had been extinguished, and its limbs no longer moved.

"Hold it together!" Chaison shouted, his voice cutting across the bedlam. "Whatever gave them speech is finished, but our work is not. We need paper, pens! We need to draft this alliance and then mobilize our people. Come on!"

After more shouting and cajoling, he got his wish. Palace workmen set up a table and chairs, and paper lanterns were strung over it. The whole thing looked bizarrely festive, but no one was smiling. As the details of an alliance began to take shape on paper, Leal wandered within the soft perimeter cast by the lanterns, watching, yet wishing she was anywhere else.

Something small glittered in the grass just in front of the oak. Leal blinked at it. This spot was right in the center of the area where the cat-shaped emissary had been able to prowl. During their conversation it had sometimes paced away to probe at the paths. She'd seen it stagger and jump back twice, as it apparently hit some invisible wall beyond which it couldn't go.