Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

But something had moved below. The dragonfly plummeted, returning to Keir, who stood with a hand held half-out at the base of a machine-augmented oak.

Someone was running up behind him, revealed and hidden in flashes of shadow and city light. It was Gallard, and he had a sword in his hand.

He raised it, his face twisted into a grimace, and Keir saw himself react. Every time he'd reviewed this recording, he'd felt a sympathetic prickle between his shoulder blades and half-consciously hunched, and he did so this time, too. The Keir in the dragonfly's video dove to one side, and Gallard's strike missed.

He rolled to his feet and for a second Keir saw himself smile. The others wouldn't understand that, but he remembered: for just an instant, he'd reveled in having the reflexes and power of a young body. Despite his shock at the attack, he'd felt powerful.

The dragonfly lowered to head-height. Gallard hadn't noticed it. He advanced on Keir with his blade raised.

"You're not surprised," Gallard accused; his words appeared as subtitles in the recording, thanks to the dragonfly's lip-reading program.

Keir had laughed, half from adrenaline, half from contempt. "I'm only surprised at how badly you handled all of this. How long have you been working for them?"

"There's no 'them,'" said his former teacher. "There never was. This collective fantasy that somehow you could band together and defeat the final evolutionary stage of life is ridiculous. The Renaissance is pathetic."

Keir was backing away. "Then why pay attention to us at all? If we weren't a threat--"

Gallard lunged and Keir twisted away. "Because you're a rallying point for every lunatic species that wants to advance its own cause. Don't you know why the arena exists? It's here as a place where we can all learn to get along. Artificial Reality is the glue that keeps us together. The species that rise to the top should be at the top, and the ones at the bottom should be at the bottom. They shouldn't try to game the system to their own advantage. They shouldn't conspire ... They shouldn't cheat --" He lunged again and this time his blade ripped through Keir's sleeve.

Keir jumped backward again, but this time he'd tripped. He fell. Before he could rise Gallard was kneeling on him, one knee across his chest. Gallard raised his sword.

Keir had made a last desperate plea, but not to Gallard's humanity. Whenever he watched this he thought, Why didn't I appeal to our friendship? To all we'd been through together? But something in Gallard's eyes had warned him that they were beyond that. So, he'd flinched back, hitting his head on the ground, and said, "Is Candesce a cheat?"

Gallard hesitated, and in that moment something black had snaked out of the air to wrap itself around his chest. Gallard tried to shout in surprise but it turned into a whuff! sound as all the air was driven out of his body. It wasn't visible from the dragonfly's perspective, but Keir saw the astonishment in his eyes as the silver-threaded tree branch plucked him into the air. It rose in a smooth motion and suddenly Gallard was flying, limbs flailing, into the city-starred sky.

The dragonfly moved, swerving around to hover next to Keir's head as he sat up. Something crashed through branches elsewhere in the grove, but all Keir had noticed at the time were the two gigantic, glowing green eyes that had appeared, winking, in front of him.

"Are you all right?" asked the emissary. Behind it, the oak writhed as lines of light began shooting along its trunk. The light became blinding and with it came an overwhelming roar of noise. Keir crouched, shielding his face with one hand, but the metal cheetah curled its own head around to put its nose an inch from his.

"Where are we?" it said.

Keir began to laugh hysterically. "I remember," he said. "They could never figure it out. They built scientists--made their own Renaissance to reinvent physics like we did. But they couldn't figure it out."

The cheetah blinked. "And you did?"

"Quantum gravity," he babbled. "The final theory. It's a formal system. Every time they tried to rediscover the science, they were led right back to it. Of course. It's what all obvious experiments lead to. But it's a formal system !" He'd begun to laugh uncontrollably. Then he stood and staggered away from the cheetah and the tree.

"Where are you going?" asked the cat.

Keir turned once and grinned. He was walking away from the dragonfly; he'd commanded it to stay where it was. "I can't do what I need to here," he said. "And there's no time. Talk to them." He waved at the other paths, where a babble of voices and running feet could now be heard. "Make a treaty. You've only got a few hours; waste no time." Then he'd turned and disappeared into the darkness.

The dragonfly settled onto the loam and watched as Antaea Argyre peered fearfully out from behind the trunk of a tree.

Keir ended the recording and, back now in the sunlit conference room, watched as Maerta and the others sat for a while in stunned silence.

At last Maerta looked up. "What did you mean? That our physics is a formal system?"

He shrugged. "Every formal language, like say, mathematics, has a fatal flaw: It's always possible to write self-contradictory statements in it. Like 'X equals not-X.' About a year ago I realized that if you could do that in math, you could do it in quantum gravity. But here's the thing: Every statement in QG corresponds to a real phenomenon. So what would happen if I found a self-contradictory formulation in QG, and then made it ?"

Maerta blinked at him. "Made it?"

"Built a machine to create the phenomenon described in that statement. A particle that simultaneously existed and didn't exist, for instance. Negative and positive charge in one, gravity and nongravity."

"You did it."

He nodded. "In secret. I'd planned it out, as the sort of mad-scientist experiment from an ancient movie; but I was afraid to actually do it, until the oak came to me. The night it told me there was a spy among us, I packed up a fab unit and a small Edisonian and went into the city alone, and I did the experiment. And then I knew how Candesce's field works, and I built a tiny version of it."

"And you put it inside one of your dragonflies."

He nodded. "And then I planned my own de-indexing, because the oak had showed me that scry was compromised. Something was on to us, and whatever it was could move at any moment." He looked down at the table. "I was afraid we were all about to be netted like fish and our minds taken apart. I was afraid to run, or say anything, because we were being watched. So I had to make sure we weren't seen as a threat."

No one said anything. After a while, Keir became aware of a distant rumbling. He knew the sound that avalanches made, had lived with them for many months. This was different.

He stood up and went to the window. The sky was full of pops and brief sheets of light. The battle was getting closer.

"What now?" asked Maerta.

With his dragonflies and his own eyes, he could see them and himself looking at them, could see his cheekbones revealed and shaded by the patter of dozens of faraway nuclear blasts.

"I need our biggest fab and our best Edisonian," he said. "And I need something else, too, that might be harder to retrieve."

He put his forehead to the window so he could see down the dizzying slope of Aethyr's skin, to where coiling cloud and the mottled green of landforms lay half-veiled by distance. "I need to retrieve a machine," he said, "from the plain where Leal Maspeth and the Home Guard crashed."

23

EVERYBODY KNEW, INan abstract sort of way, that if the legendary Virga Home Guard did exist, they must have ships. Yet even Antaea, who knew the Guard intimately, found herself silent in the face of the truth.