Karl Schroeder - Ashes of Candesce - Book Five of Virga

She will write to Seana when she's ready. It will be so easy, now that communications systems can reach instantly across the world.

When she's ready--but not yet.

In the meantime, the foghorns of the city will invade her dreams --brooom, brauum, braaam-- and when she's careless her footsteps will unconsciously revert to the gait she had under the gravity of Sere. She will talk in her mind to the people she left behind, and even the brightest of suns will never reach all the alleys and roofscapes that she sees behind closed eyes.

Leal will never entirely leave Sere. But she will never return.

* * *

KEIR FINALLY SPOTTEDher, a dark-on-dark silhouette halfway around the curve of the sun. "Leal!"

She didn't answer, so he left Hayden Griffin's side and flew over to her. The tessellated panes of Aerie's sun fell away beneath his feet, dark pools that for now reflected the distant light of other nations' suns. The fusion generator was roughly spherical, but giant glass-and-steel spines six times its length gave it a starlike profile. Leal was holding on to one of these with two toes, her body straight as if standing. As Keir stopped himself against the spine, he saw that her eyes were closed.

"Leal?"

She blinked, and smiled down at him. "Sorry, I was just--remembering."

Where she was facing, the sky was completely dark. Keir guessed where her thoughts had been, and nodded sympathetically. She'd never talked about the country she'd come from, but, now that the war was over, she woke crying in the middle of the night, and often fell into these reveries.

He put his arm around her. "Hayden says the adjustment's complete. Dawn is in half an hour, so we'd better get going."

Leal nodded absently, then said, "Was it fun?"

He grinned. "Actually, yes, it was." Griffin had given Keir a tour of Aerie's sun during today's maintenance period. The two had discussed physics and engineering, and the minute differences in how this giant fusion lantern worked here, compared with how it should work outside Virga.

"You know," he said, "I find that having a single machine to focus on is relaxing. You learn its ... well, its character, I guess, by repairing and tuning it. --What it does easily, and where it has a mind of its own. You could spend a lifetime just maintaining this one sun ... There's worse things I could do."

Leal laughed. "Did you say that to Hayden?"

"Yes. He said I'd already built a million new suns, and shouldn't I just consider relaxing?"

He turned away from the darkness, and a moment later she followed. In this direction was a vast sweep of light, deep purple at its edges and fading, while brightening through red to orange and then gold at its center. That glow came from Slipstream's sun. Slipstream, Rush, and all the controversy and excitement of its pirate sun were moving away from Aerie, following the slow drift of the asteroid that both city and sun were tethered to. Between Aerie's sun and the retreating nation, the sky was speckled with detail: ball-shaped groves of trees, clouds of crops; lakes that shone like pearls; and spinning bolo-houses and town wheels. There was plenty of room around a new sun, and people from all over the world were moving here to take advantage of it. Aerie was coming into its own.

This flowering was mirrored, Keir knew, by events unfolding beyond Virga's walls. The oaks were scouring the arena clean of the virtuals, and who knew? --Maybe emigrants from Virga would end up settling on the plains of Aethyr, or the vast spaces of Crucible, a balloon world at least ten times the size of Virga that the Virgans now knew orbited nearby. It was the ability of embodied creatures to set limits on Artificial Nature's power that was making all of this possible. Candesce's suppressive technology was quickly spreading to every place where life-forms wanted to anchor their values in some sort of unchanging reality.

"I am the Mighty Brick," he murmured. "Tremble before me." And he had to smile.

"What are you talking about?" Leal was sending him a look that said she feared for his sanity.

He was trying to figure out how to explain it to her when a sudden blossoming of virtual light enfolded them. Icons burst into view, glyphs and tags exploded onto the sky. With aggressive buzzes, dragonflies shot from the bag at Keir's belt, showing him what was under, behind, and above him.

With practiced nonchalance, a golden doll flipped back the flap of Leal's purse, and climbed up her arm to perch on her shoulder.

Somewhere below them, Hayden Griffin gave a whoop. "And not a moment too soon!" he shouted. "Thank you, Antaea!"

The glyphs from Leal's own (newly installed) scry made her reaction to that comment plain. Nobody knew whether the outages were of Antaea's design or not; nobody knew if she was still alive, and Leal disapproved of superstition. All up and down Virga, however, people would be pausing now in their daily routines and nodding to, or raising glasses to, or even praying to the sun of suns, and the new queen who, according to the stories, sat on a diamond throne behind its light.

Antaea must have lived long enough to restart Candesce's day/night cycle. Beyond that, what had happened to her was anybody's guess.

"I just worry," said Leal, "that we're seeing the birth of a new religion, that's all."

He shrugged. "There could be worse things."

"We've got three hours," Hayden was telling one of the technicians. "Make those diagnostics count."

Three hours every two days or so was as long as any of these outages ever lasted. It was long enough for the newly imported surgery bots to wake up, for a patient to be prepped, and for their heart to be replaced. Three hours was enough time to commune with loved ones or send calls for help through scry or by simple radio; it was long enough for suns to be tuned, reporters to gather news, and computers to wake up and analyze crop yields or the genetics of new pathogens. Much good could be done in those three hours, and yet, the timing of this window was just a bit too random to plan an invasion or bank robbery or terrorist attack to coincide with it--and that, or so people said, was clear evidence that the outages were part of a plan.

Whether Candesce's new flicker was due to the intercession of the queen of Candesce, or just a stutter in the sun of suns' control mechanisms, the result was the same. You dropped whatever else you were doing to deal with a sudden flood of scry mail, news, weather, and entertainment. Keir and Leal stood in the air for long moments, absorbing the sudden intake.

She laughed. "Piero's bought a farm! Can you believe it? He says there's not enough room in the city for all his kids to run wild."

When Keir didn't respond, she looked over in sudden concern. "What is it?"

He blinked and turned his eyes away from a virtual world to her. "They've identified the last of the remains from Brink," he said. "It's Maerta."

"Oh, Keir, I'm so sorry."

He'd seen the photos before, but couldn't help calling up again the incinerated towers and jumbled walls skating in random lines down the slopes of Aethyr. You needed your imagination to picture what had been here once; the metropoloid was no longer easily distinguished from the scree that surrounded it. Brink had fallen in the first hours of the battle, before Keir had even reached Fanning's flagship. He'd given the fabs there the plans for his generator, but all their efforts had gone into finishing his in time; they hadn't been able to build their own before the bombs had fallen. His only consolation was that the invaders had poised themselves eagerly above the vast hammerlike cloud of the city's destruction, and burst as one into Virga when Candesce's field fell only to become frozen, as if in amber, when Candesce reawakened. They had been easy pickings for the Guard's precipice moths and none were left by the time Candesce began its stuttering.