Sun of Suns v-1

by Karl Schroeder

  He looked askance at her. "But they left us our sabers."

  "As if that will help. Oh, mark my words, Chaison, I'm sure there's not going to be some sort of massacre. These people value their architecture far too much to risk chipping it with bullets. But somethings not right, I'm sure of it."

  "Well," said Chaison. "You keep an eye on things, then. Worry all you like. Meanwhile, I'm going to enjoy the afternoon. These people have done nothing to threaten us."

  "That's only because we have six fully armed warships sitting in their port," she whispered. At that point Reiss returned, a tall glass in his hand.

  "Look who I just spotted." He nodded in the direction of a stiff-looking older gentleman who stood alone under one of the vast rose windows that dominated the ballroom's end walls. Colored lozenges of light from the stained glass dappled this man's dress uniform, and just now half his face was lit green. "General Harmond is here. I'll have to tell your husband—"

  "Oh, I'll tell him myself," said Venera as she headed straight for the military man. Reiss made a surprised "Oh" sound as Venera outpaced him. Stopping in front of the general, she bowed. He instantly snapped to attention.

  "General Harmond, isn't it?" she said, eyes wide. "I've heard so much about you."

  "Oh?" He looked surprised and wiped his palms on his hips before extending a hand for her to shake. "You're with the Slipstream party. Sorry about locking down your ships like that, it's uh, protocol."

  "Oh I'm sure it's necessary," she said, waving a hand to dismiss the whole affair. "Protocol isn't one of my strong points. But I do have my hobbies, General, and I was hoping to meet someone authoritative enough to be able to indulge one of them."

  "Oh, indeed? And what hobby might you be talking about?" The poor man looked like he wanted to flirt, but had no idea how.

  "Small arms," said Venera brightly. "I have a fascination with rifles, pistols—small bore weapons."

  "Really?" He goggled at her.

  "I'm also a bit of a history buff," she said. "Wars interest me, and I'm afraid I've not kept up with recent events in this part of the world. I was hoping that you might be able to enlighten me—and fill in some sad gaps in my knowledge of Candesce armaments."

  The general preened. "I'd be delighted. Just as long as you don't ask me about any military secrets, you know."

  "Oh, I wouldn't know it if I was," she said demurely. "I'll have to trust you to correct me if that happens."

  "Hmmf. Well, men. Rifles, you say? Our armorers are unmatched in all of Candesce, if I do say so myself. Take the Matchley forty-five, for instance…"

  Venera listened intently, while Chaison Fanning wove his way through a maze of courtiers and ingenues, now faintly worried.

  * * * * *

  THE ROUND WINDOW of the palace's reception hall flashed crescent rainbows for a moment as it rotated up and away. Hayden turned resolutely away from the government town; the Fannings were behind that intricate glass and for once, were not his problem. Now that the bike had been ejected from the wheel's small hangar it drifted under him as he took his bearings.

  "The library's over there," said Aubri Mahallan, pointing.

  "Yeah yeah."

  She held up her hands, palms out. "Just trying to help," she said.

  Aubri wore flame-red today, an outfit of silk with harem pants whose long slit sides showed off her legs. Fanning wouldn't allow her to wear anything like this on the Rook. Hayden was determined not to let her know he'd noticed.

  She was his passenger reluctantly; the Gehellens refused to let any of the Rook's military bikes fly through Vogelsburg. In fact, they wouldn't let any of the crew off their ships. Once again, Hayden was benefiting from his ambiguous relationship to the expedition.

  He had seen and learned a lot since he joined the Rook. It was time to send a report about his experiences back to the Resistance. Once he dropped off Mahallan he planned to find a local post office and draft some sort of letter. The problem lay in deciding what to write.

  The bike's fan was whirring, so he leaned back and pumped on the ignition to send a spark into the bike's alcohol burner. It lit with a whoosh and the bike reared forward.

  "Slow down!" Mahallan snatched at her handlebars.

  "It always kicks like that when it starts. Don't worry, I'm not going to drop you."

  "I'm more worried that you'll run into something. This place is dense."

  "No denser than where I grew up."

  There was a momentary silence as they wove their way into the slower traffic of foot-powered wings and propellers that streamed into the disordered jumble of the city. Then Aubri said, "You grew up in Aerie, didn't you?"

  "Yes. And Aerie has its cities too. Or, it did—before Admiral Chaison Fanning and his fleet dispersed them and killed or drove out everyone I ever knew."

  "He wasn't admiral when Slipstream invaded Aerie," said Mahallan. "I do know my history. He was promoted after the conflict ended."

  "You've been reading," he sneered.

  She held his gaze defiantly, then said, "Talking to the crew. Because you were right to criticize me for not knowing enough about the people I'm working for."

  This simple statement knocked most of the wind out of Hayden's sails, but by now he wouldn't back down. "They only told you their side, though," he said, "and haven't told you some things at all. Things like the reason Fanning was promoted. It seems he found a secret Aerie sun we were building and destroyed it, killing all the workers in the process. Some hero!"

  "You know about that?" She shook her head. "But you've got the facts wrong. After a few drinks one night the admiral told his officers—I was there—how his promotion came about. He's quite bitter about it. Fanning was against the attack on the Aerie sun—it was the pilot's idea. In fact the pilot insisted on leading the expedition himself and even took potshots with a rifle from the flagship! He treated the whole thing like a sporting event but afterward he realized his misstep; everyone involved was horrified at the outcome. So since Fanning had gotten in his face about it, he proclaimed to the upper house that the whole thing had been Fanning's idea. They promoted Fanning but the promotion came with a reputation as a butcher. It's hung like a weight around his neck ever since. He despises the pilot."

  Hayden nearly ran them into a forty-foot-wide food net that was being towed across his path by a flock of tame, feathered barracuda. As he fumbled with the controls he stammered incoherent curses. "My mother," he heard himself saying. "He killed my mother. The pilot ordered my father executed, never saw him again. Killed them."

  "What?" Mahallan leaned around the curve of the bike, unbalancing it so that Hayden nearly crashed them again. "Who killed your mother?"

  He shut down the bike, turned, and glared at her. "Fanning. Fanning killed her. I was there, at the new sun, when he came out of the sky and killed everyone I knew."

  She drew back. Angrily he spun up the engine again and opened up the throttle all the way, dodging them around startled people and cargo nets. "Don't tell me what happened because I know what happened," he said even though she wouldn't hear him over the rip of the wind. "I was there!"

  The library, her destination, came up all too quickly. It would be petty of him to overshoot it, or circle it; reluctantly, Hayden cut the engine and deployed the bike's parachute.

  "Hayden… of course I didn't know," she said. "This is the burden you carry everywhere, isn't it? If you'd only told me sooner—"

  "It was years ago," he said, trying to pull back from the emotions she had stirred up. "There's nothing to be done—or said, really. Here's your stop."

  For a few seconds he was absorbed with judging the final yards of their approach to the library. This was not so much a building as a concretion: perhaps it had originally been a box, or pyramid or sphere of wood with ordered rooms inside it. If that were true, there was no way to tell. Over the centuries, individual rooms had been screwed or nailed onto the original structure, jutting out like barnacles. Whole floors were canted
onto it and makeshift galleries built to connect them to the whole. Shafts had been dug through existing levels while other municipal buildings that possessed their own logic of construction had been towed over and added to the assembly. The whole bizarre pile rotated by slow increments causing the light from Gehellen's sun to tangle in confusing ways in its interior. People drifted like flies in and out of this migraine-inducing architectural disaster, and smaller flecks drifted too in their thousands: loose books not yet snagged by the haggard and overwhelmed library staff who chased them down in ones and twos using nets on poles.

  "So," he said awkwardly, "what do you hope to find here?"

  She gazed at him sadly as he grabbed a strand of the big rope cone that framed the library's entrance. "The admiral wants me to research the destination our map points to," she said quietly as she unwound herself from the embrace of the bike. "But all I was really after was distraction."

  "Well." He made to turn the bike around. "When would you like me to pick you up?"

  "Wait!" Aubri stretched out to put a hand on his arm. "Stay, please. I'd appreciate the company—and the help."

  On the way here Hayden had been telling himself that he would leave her here for a few hours while he tried again to contact the Aerie Resistance. He would report the important information that Slipstream was threatened by Falcon Formation. What, though, was the Resistance going to do with that information? Hayden had run through various scenarios in his head as he lay on his bunk listening to the snores of Slew the carpenter. His thoughts had not been reassuring. The Resistance was likely to take the information and try to cut a deal with Falcon; they wouldn't have any faith in this mad venture of the Fannings. Maybe, if Hayden were some sort of hero, he could steal whatever it was that Fanning was after, and bring a radar set or two home with him. Then what? Give them to Falcon? He couldn't see any deal with the Formation that wouldn't seal the fate of Aerie once and for all.

  Aubri had seen Hayden's hesitation, and frowning she turned away. "Wait!" He hand-walked up the netting of the entrance funnel to join her.

  They drifted into a long cylindrical space with branching entrances leading off to all sides. The entrances were marked by subject matter. Ropes with handhold loops crisscrossed the space and bright lanterns lit the walls, their windup fans gently whirring. Whatever the chaos of its facade, inside at least the library seemed remarkably well organized.

  Aubri was watching him sidelong. "Slipstreamers are your mortal enemies, aren't they?" He nodded.

  "And all this time you believed it was Admiral Fanning who led the attack on your sun? I can't imagine what it must have been like to be trapped on the Rook with him."

  "It was intolerable," he admitted. At that moment Hayden was near having some internal dam burst and he knew it; one more sympathetic word from her and he would blurt out his whole life story like some maudlin teenager. He cast about for a way to change the subject. "Things haven't exactly been easy for you either."

  She half-smiled. "Are you referring to the pirates? It was… bad, I admit. But that whole incident's over with, isn't it?" Her smile held sadness. "You should be grateful for traumas that have a definite ending to them. Some don't, you know."

  "Believe me," he said, "I know." Then he narrowed his eyes. "You did this to me before."

  "What?"

  "Danced around the subject of why you're unhappy."

  "Ah."

  He grabbed a rope, and her hand, and stopped them above a square shaft that had the words municipal engineering carved around it. For a long moment he felt her warm fingers wrapped around his their eyes met. Then she drew her hand away.

  He had to say something; what came out was, "I came aboard th Rook planning to kill Admiral Fanning, but you see I never expected to survive doing it. That's what I meant before, when I said I had no future. But when I said that, you suggested you didn't have one either. What did you mean?"

  Aubri's expressive face twisted in eloquent distress. "I can't explain. Not in a way that you'd understand."

  He crossed his arms and let himself hang in the air before her. "Is it because I'm an 'ignorant savage'? I believe you used that phrase to describe Martor a few days back."

  She bit her lip. "It's not that… I don't know how to explain it to you." She looked around, spotted something, and said, "I think we need to go that way."

  Hayden thought she was changing the subject again, but as the] flew down the hexagonal wood-paneled corridor to the library' history department, Aubri said, "I didn't come to Virga willingly. Not entirely willingly; I wasn't lying when I told you I had studied science and admired your people for their knowledge."

  They entered a vast circular room that would not have seemed out of place under gravity—if one ignored the usual crisscross of ropes that various readers were using as perches. Light was provided by bright lanterns which lit the endless ranks of books lining the walls.

  "It was my love of ancient arts like manufacturing that got me into trouble," continued Aubri. In this light she looked very beautiful to Hayden, a troubled doll drifting in lamplight. "Along with some others, I tried to overthrow Artificial Nature—locally, at least. We wanted to go back to noble pursuits like industry and construction! Work with our minds and hands again. I confess that… entities died. Not humans, you wouldn't understand them, they were surfers, standing waves in the stuff of A.N. Taking down A.N. killed them. As punishment, I was exiled here."

  "I understand something about being an exile," said Hayden. Aubri smiled.

  "Before I can return I have to fulfill a mission for Artificial Nature," she added with a sudden frown. "It hangs over my head like a sword. If I don't do it… I'll the."

  "What? They'll send an assassin or something?" She shook her head. "The assassin is already here, inside my body. It waits and watches. If I don't play my role to its end, it will strike me down."

  This revelation was the last thing Hayden had expected from Aubri. He tried to imagine some alien machine coiled in her throat, watching him through the veil of her skin. The thought made his scalp prickle. "So what's this mission?" he asked after a long silence. "I can't tell you," she said simply. "It might activate." Confused and upset, he followed her to a cage mounted on one wall. There perched a bored-looking woman with arms like birds' legs, her prehensile foot crooked around a strap while she filed books in various slots in the cage. "Can I help you?" she asked, looking down her nose at Aubri.

  "Hello, I'm not from around here. I'm looking for information about Leaf's Choir."

  The woman's face brightened. "My, what an interesting accent! Well, welcome to Gehellen. And welcome to the library. Did you know we've been continuously open now for two hundred forty-seven years?"

  "That doesn't surprise me at all," said Hayden.

  "What about Leaf's Choir?" Aubri asked.

  The librarian yawned. "The novels start over there, and wrap halfway around. Children's stories over there. Opera and plays, there."

  "What about aereography?"

  "Maps? That would be that section there." She pointed to the opposite side of the room. "But you won't find much, comparatively speaking. Leaf's Choir is much more interesting as a story than as a place."

  "Why's that?"

  "It's just a burnt-out shell now. Nobody can go in very far because of lack of oxygen, and occasional flare-ups. And whatever was in the outer layers was stripped decades ago. Leaf's Choir is a sargasso."

  Suddenly Hayden understood. The extra fittings on the Rook weren't just for winter travel; they included air tanks and sealant for the portholes. The ship had a furnace but it also had a rock-salt battery for storing heat.

  We're going in there, he thought, in sudden wonder.

  "It must have quite a history to be the subject of all those novels," said Aubri as she gazed at the stacks. The librarian nodded.

  "The original story's as fabulous as the novels," she said. "Once upon a time, two suns burned in the heart of Leaf's Choir. The suns were invisible f
rom outside the nation because they were surrounded by a single, vast forest: millions of weightless trees connecting and reconnecting like the threads of a spiderweb through an intricate network of lakes and rock bits. The forest made a sphere over fifty miles across and within it were dozens of towns and hundreds of villages built out of the living branches of the trees." The librarian shaped the forms with her hands, long shadows cast by the lamps interpreting her gestures on the bookshelves behind her. "The impenetrable barrier of foliage provided protection as well as wealth to the citizens of Leaf's Choir, and they prospered.

  "After centuries of peace, rumor began to circulate of the beauty of an heiress from Leaf's Choir, and that rumor attracted the attention of a warlord who determined to have her for himself. He laid siege to Leaf's Choir and was finally able to seize the giant air-pumping stations that kept the forest from supersaturating itself with oxygen. He threatened to blow up the stations unless the young lady was turned over to him. The government refused but the heiress secretly fled the capital and made her way to the warlord's encampment, and there gave herself up.

  "To punish the nation, the warlord ordered the pumping stations blown up. Then he left—and behind him, the millions of trees of the forest continued to bask and produce oxygen. Leaf's Choir had cultivated them for centuries, to the point where it needed the artificial circulatory system of the pumps to ensure that oxygen did not build up to dangerous levels within the nation. Without the pumps, the least spark might set off an impossible conflagration—and so it happened, weeks after the warlord left. The fire raged out from the heart of Leaf's Choir and consumed everything, town, tree, and sun. All that was left when it was over was a sphere of charred wood and ash thirty miles across. That sphere is now tethered at the edge of Gehellen's territory; we've been mining it for its charcoal for centuries. It's very slow work because the heat of combustion is still trapped in airless pockets deep inside the sargasso. If oxygen reaches them, they break into flame again; so Leaf's Choir remains choked with stagnant, dead air. We have special ships that can go in, but navigation is a nightmare; it's all just black twisted wreckage that goes on forever. Leaf's Choir is ugly now—like a scar on the sky. Nobody goes there, unless it's for mining."