Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

"Really?" His scry had finished handshaking with the goats' and subtitles were starting to appear under Maspeth's chin when she spoke. A sizable cloud of tags hovered over her party now, so Keir no longer needed to pester her with questions, which would be rude. He'd review their records as they walked.

The men who'd gone to look outside returned, shaking their heads grimly. They could all return the way Keir had come, but there might be straggler avalanches; better to take this tunnel back to one of the central stairwells.

Keir commanded his dragonflies to explore the tunnel. They'd been clinging for dear life to his jacket and now wafted off of him in a little cloud. The Virgans looked startled at this sudden motion. After a short sortie the dragonflies reported that the tunnel was clear, and so Keir began walking up it.

"Um..." said Maspeth. After a few moments he heard her and the others following him, whispering among themselves.

According to the scry, Leal Hieronyma Maspeth was from a country called Abyss. These people really were from Virga! Maybe they knew a way back there, and now that he'd saved their lives, maybe ...

"Uh," Maspeth said again, hurrying to catch up to Keir. "What's this place called?"

"Brink," said a pipsqueak voice issuing from somewhere around her shoulder. She craned her neck to look at a little doll-shaped figure sitting on the ragged felt of her coat. Keir hadn't spotted the little man-thing before, but its presence didn't surprise him; it was obviously a bodily extension like his own dragonflies.

"How do you know what it's called?" she asked it in irritated surprise.

"Keir Chen has given us guest citizenship in his scry," said the golden doll. "I'm reading his records now."

Belatedly, Keir realized that since she herself couldn't read his scry, his silence might not seem polite to her. "Brink," he said, spreading his arms to encompass everything above the tunnel's ceiling. "Looks like a city, but it's not. We're the only people living here. Only people who ever lived here."

She looked puzzled. "How many of you?"

"About a hundred."

"What do you do here?"

He might have intended to run away today, but even if he had, Keir wouldn't have told the truth at this point. "We're trying to find new patterns of meaning in the metropoloid's architecture," he said smoothly as his scry supplied him with a plausible story. "They could be the genes for a new urbanoid."

She gave him a look so eloquently uncomprehending that he almost regretted having lied to her. "We're city breeders," he clarified. Maspeth blinked, then shook her head.

She batted distractedly at the air. "Damn bugs," she said. "Never seen any until now."

She was actually trying to swat his eyes! Keir ordered the dragonflies to stay away from the Virgans from now on.

"We were following a road," said Maspeth urgently. "Does it continue up past the city?"

Keir shook his head. "I've looked, believe me. The slope's too steep to keep the rock on it up there. It's bare carbon-nanotube weave, smooth as silk. It's impossible to climb beyond this point."

She gave a stifled wail and stopped walking. Keir blinked at her in surprise; she looked for all the world just like he often felt . "Then--" She fought to say or not say something. "Then where does this damned road go ?!"

"It goes no farther ... but it does come here," he said gently.

"Yes ... yes, it's not a total loss maybe." She had fallen in beside him. "You took a huge risk coming down to warn us," she said suddenly. "I want to thank you on behalf of all of us."

Suddenly shy, he looked away.

Why had he done it? The whole episode was so totally out of character for him, and yet while he had been racing down here, no other course of action had been conceivable. It was as though some side of himself that had always been in darkness had suddenly lit up; and, in fact, he felt somehow that he'd acted this way before--selflessly, and foolishly.

"Yes, thank you!" Somebody was pushing his way up from the back of the group. He was stumping along using a stick like a third leg. He was lank-haired, with a chin that seemed to have been designed for a larger person, and small darting eyes. The guardrail introduced him as Eustace Loll, a "cabinet minister" in the archaic control system Abyss called its "government."

Still faintly embarrassed, Keir said, "Think nothing of it, Minister Loll," and at the sound of his name Loll nearly fell over. Leal Maspeth steadied him, and Keir now saw that one of Loll's ankles was bundled and bound with pieces of wood and cloth. Keir looked for a tag cloud in his scry but of course he had none--and that was when Keir realized with horror that the man was nursing an untreated injury .

"Tell me, how is it that you spotted us?" asked Loll in an innocent tone. Keir was too shocked at his obvious pain to organize his thoughts; luckily his scry was popping up plausible explanations. After a few awkward seconds he said, "I accidentally dropped something on that path yesterday. I'd finally gotten a chance to come down and look for it when I spotted you."

They seemed to accept this explanation, so he led them on, to a round chamber from which a spiral stairway led up. As their lights supplemented his dragonflies' vision, Keir saw that the wall behind the steps was covered with carvings of eyeless goats.

Before he could stop himself he burst out laughing; even to himself, the sound had a slightly hysterical tinge to it. Maspeth looked at him with wide eyes, which just made him laugh more. "Sorry, sorry," he gasped. "Sometimes I can't tell whether the city's just recording what it sees, or whether it has a sense of humor." He shook his head, embarrassed again, and added, "I'm a little out of myself ... after what just happened. I didn't mean to laugh."

To his surprise she nodded. "Nobody's going to fault you," she said. "We've all endured some big shocks lately, and people react ... well, however they react. So--do we go up now?"

He nodded. "Yes, up ...

"To Complication Hall."

2

KEIR'S SCRY HADbegun lighting up even before they reached the Hall. Startled emoticons fluttered around his head, and colored glyphs appeared in his peripheral vision. The glyphs signaled an epic battle between the various agendas and schemes of his own subconscious mind, and those of his compatriots in the Renaissance. Maerta and his teachers kept telling him he should pay close attention to this sort of interface-fencing. Power and privilege were measured by how well one navigated the shoals of personality and ambition, after all.

Keir marched to his own personal soundtrack, even when it was bad for him; everybody knew that. The other kids could never tell what he was going to do next, and lately he'd realized that the grown-ups had a similar wariness of him--though where they might have learned that, he had no idea. Sure, he liked to play practical jokes; he invented strange devices in class and set them loose in the hallways at night. But that alone hardly explained their caution. Right now the glyphs showed wild speculation on the Renaissance's prediction market. He assumed it was because of the strangers, until he realized that the stock that was alternately crashing and soaring was his. The tone of the trading could almost be translated into words: words like, Keir's done it again!

Enveloped in this invisible storm of consternation, he pushed open the great iron doors and said to his guests, "Welcome to Complication Hall."

Tired as they were, he still saw Leal Maspeth and her friends react to the sight. He knew what was visible here, the fabs, Edisonians, lab benches, and work areas; but he couldn't be sure what they actually saw --and he knew the other members of the Renaissance were wondering the same thing.