Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

He stopped a bare-chested navvy who was carrying a large steel cylinder. "What's that?" Keir pointed to the window.

"It's the Enemy, in't," said the airman. "Battle to end all battles going on, or so they say. They tryin' to get here, our boys holdin' em off."

Not lightning, then. Nukes, or laser fire, and probably hundreds of kilometers away. Keir frowned and hurried on.

He took the last set of stairs down to the Hall two steps at a time. In his imagination were all the ways that the virtuals could obliterate Aethyr, or Virga. They could accelerate an asteroid from the far side of the solar system, shoot it through both worlds at a thousand kilometers a second, and let the shock waves transform them into expanding spheres of gas ... then simply move in and harvest Candesce like the seed in a smashed fruit. They could stand off and peel off the world's skin with terawatt lasers, then aim them through the holes at every sun and city inside. They need not be polite.

He could guess what stopped them. They had no idea how Candesce worked. They did not know what it was capable of. And so far, they had done everything in their power to avoid waking it up . But how long would that caution continue?

The tall doors to the Hall were guarded by a detachment of men in Slipstream uniforms. One put out his hand as Keir made to enter. "You're not on our list."

"I live here."

The man looked Keir up and down, and he realized he was still wearing his now-rumpled dress attire from the colloquy. "Try another one," said the doorman.

"But--" He caught himself as he felt an odd but familiar feeling. It was scry, the whole cloud of relationships and nonverbal political fencing that had once been as intimate to him as his own breath. He couldn't help but smile as the network lit up with glyphs and emoticons of astonishment: they'd felt him log in.

There was something else, though, another familiar presence even more intimate than scry. And now his smile widened, alarming the doorman. "One second," said Keir; and he held up his arms, palms out.

A hundred dragonflies rustled out of the shadows, rising like the hood of a cobra to hover above him like some strange halo. The guards stepped back, swearing and fingering their unfamiliar new weapons. Suddenly Keir could see, in a way he hadn't been able to in months. He closed his own eyes in bliss.

"Let him in." He'd brought his second body over from where it had been languishing in a closet in the Hall's foyer. The guards were even more startled by its appearance, for of course it looked like a younger version of Keir. It was waving to him from the Hall behind them, so they fell back and Keir walked past them with a confident nod--and into the arms of friends and comrades he hadn't properly spoken to or even recognized since his de-indexing.

Maerta came running. "Keir, oh, Keir!" She flung her arms around him and he hugged her fiercely. "You're--are you--"

"I'm whole," he said as he squeezed her tightly. "I remember everything. Everything."

She broke away, troubled. "Even why you did it?" He nodded. "We sent Gallard to find you," she said. "Is he--?" But it would be obvious to all of them that he wasn't here. There was no sign of him in scry.

Keir shook his head. "You didn't send him," he said. "He manipulated you into choosing him. It was his mission to find me."

"Mission?" She shook her head, uncomprehending.

"I'll tell you everything," he said, "but not here." The Hall was a chaos of steaming, stinking manufactories and running soldiers. "Let's find somewhere quiet ... with a window."

* * *

MAERTA AND Afew others sat with him in a once-familiar boardroom now flooded with sunlight. The rest were listening in through scry. Keir sat in the sun, remembering the skies of Revelation, then sighed and told them the story. He began with his adventures inside Virga, meeting Antaea Argyre and Jacoby Sarto in that other lost city, and their flight from the knife-balls.

He told them about the glory of Virgan skies, of how Slipstream had welled into view over days as they approached it, like the opening eye of some god of the dawn. How its vast sphere of sunlit air had reached out to encompass their ship, bringing with it the visions of farms and towns, flying people and flocking birds. He described the astonishing ring-shaped city of Rush, and the mad Fannings and their baroque admiralty.

He described it all--the travels with Venera, the grand colloquy, and his deepening relationship with Leal Maspeth. And then he came to the garden, the tree, and the iron cheetah. And Gallard.

"He would have buried his sword in my back if my dragonfly hadn't seen him," he said--and instantly, up and down Brink, in the Hall and the storerooms and laboratories, every member of the Renaissance stopped what they were doing.

Maerta stood up, almost knocking over her chair. "Gallard attacked you? But that's--"

"--What he would have done long before, had I not de-indexed myself," Keir said calmly. They were staring at him as if he were mad. He swiveled to look out the window pensively. The sky trembled with distant bursts of light. "It was when the oaks visited that time last year," he went on quietly. "They're very secretive, and their support of our research was secret. But they were worried. Somehow, the enemy had found out about us."

He turned back to Maerta. "That was the real reason the oak came to see us. It knew A.N. had put a spy in our midst, but it didn't know who it was. All it knew was that it wasn't me. So it found an opportunity to speak to me alone, and it warned me that we'd been compromised."

Maerta had laid both hands palm-down on the table, and was staring at him intently. "A week before you de-indexed, you told me you'd made a breakthrough. We thought--well, we didn't know what to think. You suddenly panicked, said you'd gone too far, learned something nobody was supposed to know. It was ridiculous, but all the more frightening because you seemed sincere."

Keir nodded, half-smiling. "I was part of a preindustrial-style drama society, oh, many decades ago. I'm glad my acting is still believable."

"But wiping your own mind ... neotenizing yourself. Neither of those were an act."

He shook his head, saying, "They couldn't be. I didn't know who the traitor was, either. Whoever they were, the oak warned me they had tapped scry. I couldn't tell anyone what I'd found--not in the necessary detail--except through scry. He or she would learn it all; and if I kept it to myself, it was only a matter of time before the spy moved against me."

Maerta took a deep breath and said to the others, "And that was when he came to me and told me he was going to de-index himself." Glyphs of surprise exploded through scry; she shrugged. "He said it would be temporary, but he wouldn't tell me why he was doing it."

"But--" Thoun, one of the founders of the Renaissance, shook his head. "You could have come to us. To any of us--"

"Come to you? Come to you ?" His voice was rising. "You were completely ignorant of the situation, all of you!" He stood up. "You thought we were safe here, or, oh, even worse! You never really believed in the danger. You never thought they would come after us. You never looked over your shoulders. And I was too distracted, I was so close for so long I couldn't raise my head out of the problem ... It's just a good thing the oaks were watching out for us."

"But Gallard..." Maerta glanced around the table. "What happened that night in Virga?"

Keir closed his eyes, and heard the others gasp--for they were there now, seeing the tree and the shadowed pathways through the eyes of the dragonfly he'd carried with him into Virga. The perspective swooped and dove, and Keir smiled as he seemed to spiral with it, dizzyingly, above the treetops. The gardens of the palace at Aurora emerged, and again he felt the others react. Emoticons flooded scry as all of Renaissance saw the wonders of a Virgan city for the first time.