Sun of Suns v-1

by Karl Schroeder

  Chaison went to one of the portholes to look out. There had been nothing but relentless black out there for hours now as the Rook searched for landmarks in the open central cavity of the Choir. Once, two suns had lit this space, but it had shrunk until it was only fifteen miles across. Cities, farms, and palaces had soared through the luminous air. Now, any light you made was quickly eaten by the permanently drifting smoke.

  Impatiently, he bounced over to a speaking tube and said, "I want flares, in all six directions. Air-free white." He waited impatiently by the porthole until the lights stuttered on.

  And a ghostly image began to emerge from the frozen billows of smoke and killed air: the bone-white shape of a city, its arcs and curves embedded in shadows of perfect black.

  This was Carlindi, once the second-largest city of Leaf's Choir. As Chaison examined it he realized he was looking at one of the legendary architectural forms of the principalities of Candesce. Carlinth was a geared town.

  Six town wheels surrounded a seventh like the petals of a flower. Their rims touched and an elaborate scaffolding, shadowed behind them, indicated some fixed connection between them. When they turned, they would have turned in synchrony. You could step off one wheel and onto the rim of another—no cable cars for these people.

  Each town wheel was twice the size of any of Rush's. They were crowded with mansions and minarets, and many more free-floating buildings hung in the surrounding dark. But it all looked unreal, like an ivory child's toy, because there was no color at all to the scene. Every object and structure was the same shade of purest white.

  Gridde hissed as he squinted through his periscope. "It's ash, sir. Finer than smoke, it's like paint when it settles. The whole place is layered in it."

  A shroud, thought Chaison with a shudder.

  "But I can see the way," continued the chart master. He held up the long branchlike map Venera had taken from the tourist station. "1 can navigate us from here."

  The knot in Chaison's stomach began to unwind, just a bit.

  The Rook slid silently past the dead town wheels. Just as the flares began to gutter Chaison began to catch glimpses of discolored areas on the motionless structures, places where objects had been removed, doors forced, and windows broken. Someone had come here to strip the dead city, but whoever it was had not come in force and hadn't stayed long.

  Was it ghosts that had scared them away? Skittering sounds in the darkness, half-glimpsed movement down streets that had once thronged with people? Or was it just the silence, relentless and oppressive, that had made men begin by talking in whispers and end up not speaking at all?—Leaving, abandoning their ambitions of getting rich off the death here; shamed and uneasy, fleeing Leaf's Choir never to return?

  Carlindi perched on the tip of a four-mile-long out thrust of foliage. As the beam of the Rook's headlamp grazed this bleached tangle it became clear that the fires had not reached the city. Perhaps through some heroic effort, the citizens of Carlinth had fended off the flames; if so, they had only postponed their fate as the air turned foul and smoke invaded from all directions, sliding under doors and through cracks until eventually everyone succumbed. He could only imagine the tragic tableaux that must still be on display in bedrooms and plazas throughout the city.

  The unburnt forest was a porcelain filigree full of infinite detail; but Chaison was tired, and happy to leave the navigation to Gridde. He retired to his tiny cabin on the Rook's wheel to find Venera sprawled diagonally across the bed, snoring. When he tried to move her she awoke, grinned raffishly at him, and drew him down. Their lovemaking was passionate and fierce; all the words that stood between them during the day were erased by moments like this. They reaffirmed their loyalty to one another through caress and kiss, and said nothing.

  When he awoke it seemed as though no time had passed. Venera was asleep. At least, he assumed it was sleep, and checked her pulse just in case. You never knew, with the pernicious gases that were lurking about.

  The chart room stank of unwashed old man, and Gridde looked deathly ill, but he was still at his post. "Nearly there," he said hoarsely. His right hand clutched the end of a speaking tube and he alternated between sighting along the branchlike map and peering through the periscope. His eyes, when Chaison saw them, were hollow but burning with fierce intensity.

  "The map works?" Chaison couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice.

  Gridde laughed, a rattle like water through old pipes. "Get up to the bridge, boy. We can't be more than a half-hour away now."

  Chaison grinned. He did feel like a boy, responsible to no one but himself. He was hungry—better get a meal sent up. He resisted; the urge to laugh out loud. It's working!

  On the way out of the chart room he paused to glance out the porthole, and gasped.

  Color had returned to the world outside the Rook.

  Here, the forest had not burned. Stifled and enmeshed in darkness, the trees had died slowly. It could be that one of the little suns had continued to burn for a time after the fire, because the myriad leaves now swirling past the Rook were all autumnal, like those of forest that had strayed too far from its sun. They blazed red, shone gold, or were touched with delicate browns and tans. Little clouds of them danced in the vortex caused by the Rook's passage. The tunnel of foliage down which they were traveling was dappled in rich hues that burst into view as the headlight caught them, then fade to black as they slid past.

  It was a mesmerizing sight; but he couldn't dally.

  Chaison made sure he was well groomed and had a confident aim as he entered the bridge. The bridge crew looked up blearily, then snapped to attention. "Sound general quarters," he said as he strapped himself into the captain's chair. "I want the excursion teams suited up and ready to go." He thought of sending someone to wake his wife, but an unfamiliar but pleasurable spitefulness stopped him. Let her sleep through the discovery. It would serve her right.

  For a while he presided over the rousing of the ship. Ultimately he couldn't resist, though, and returned to a porthole to watch. And so he was one of the first to see it as they rounded a knee of forest that almost blocked the vast autumnal tunnel, and the fabled treasure of Anetene hove into view.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE ANCIENT SHIP hung in the center of a cave of leaves six hundred feet in diameter. In the dancing light of lanterns waved by the gang of red-suited sargasso specialists, Venera could see occasional flashes of the ropes that suspended the old corsair like a fly in a spider's web.

  "They're taking too long," she grated. "What's the holdup?"

  Her husband rested his hand lightly on her shoulder and peered out the porthole. "They're testing for booby traps, dear. On my orders."

  "And then we go over?"

  "I go over. To find the box."

  "We go. This expedition was my idea. The box was my discovery. You can't let me miss out on the final moment."

  He sighed. "Have you ever worn a sargasso suit?"

  "Have you?"

  One of the little figures out there was waving its lantern in a strange pattern. The others were clustered around a dark opening in me side of the ship. The craft was smaller than the Rook, and unornamented; but the lines seemed archaic, even to Venera's untrained eye. "What's he doing?" She pointed.

  "Signaling the all-clear. Apparently Anetene decided the sargasso was a big enough booby trap all by itself." The little figures began disappearing one by one into the dark hatch. little glints of light on the hull revealed portholes hidden in shadow around the curve of the ship.

  "It'll be there," she said confidently. Either that, or she'd have to find a new home. Rush would no longer be a suitable dwelling once Falcon Formation took over.

  Venera tried to pretend that this would be a there matter of convenience. But she kept imagining herself returning to her father's court with her exiled husband. They would eat him alive, those back-biting courtiers, the kohl-painted lathes with their poisoned hairpins, the gimlet-eyed men with their ready poniard
s. Chaison would be used as sport by the jaded or the marginalized, and he would have no one to defend him.

  It would surely be a personal humiliation for her, if he were killed.

  "Well, if it's safe, let's go men," she said, but a commotion from the chart room distracted Chaison. Venera scowled at him as he turned away.

  "It's Gridde!" Travis was waving frantically at the admiral. "He's collapsed."

  Chaison dove for the doorway. "Was it bad air?"

  "I don't think so. Exhaustion, more like."

  Venera followed the whole bridge staff back to the map room. This was a tiresome interruption, but she had to be supportive of her husband. She affected a look of concern as she entered the room. The air in here was close, stinking, but then so was the rest of the ship by now. Gridde hung limply in midair, tendrils of white hair haloing his head.

  "I got you there," he whispered as Chaison moved to hold him by the shoulders. The old man's face quirked into a half-smile, though his eyes were half-closed. "Rest now."

  "Slipstream will survive, because of you," said Chaison.

  Gridde's head rose and his eyes focused on the admiral. He managed a weak laugh. "Don't give me platitudes, boy. Just make sure those damn fools in the academy hear about this. I proved it." He began to gasp. "Old ways—better than—gel charts…"

  "Get the surgeon!" cried Chaison, but it was too late. Gridde shook and sighed, and then went still.

  Some of the bridge staff began to weep. Venera crossed her arms impatiently, but there was nothing she could do but wait. The brief agony of military grief would burn itself out in a few minutes and then everyone would get back to work.

  They had come too far to let one more death stop them now.

  * * * * *

  HER BREATH AND the suit pumps roared in Venera's ears. Every few minutes a loud bell sounded and she had to reach down to wind the clockwork mechanism drat ran the pumps. She could barely see out the brass helmet's little window. The unfamiliar oilcloth sack of the suit felt like prison walls against her skin, its chafing creating a subliminal anxiety that fed back with weightlessness and the dark to make her jaw throb.

  She didn't care. Venera was in a state of rapture, gazing into the most wondrous place she had ever seen.

  The others' bull's-eye lanterns sent visible shafts of blue light up and down, nicking from side to side—each darting motion lifting a cascade of sparkling reflections and refractions from the contents of Anetene's treasure trove.

  Venera had seen clouds rub past one another and throw up a cyclone; at either end these looked like tubes full of turbulent snatches of vapor. The interior of the treasure ship was like that—except that here, it wasn't clouds that formed the spiral down which she gazed. It was jewelry, gold coin, faience, and ivory figurines by the thousand.

  The nets that had once held the treasure to the walls had decayed over the centuries, and so every week or two a gem or coin would disengage from its neighbors and drift into the ship's central space. Once there, it would be caught up in the almost imperceptible rotation in which everything inside Virga participated. Something to do with orbits and tides, that was all she knew of mat. But the vortex had grown and remained stable for centuries, the drift of its objects slower man a minute hand but inexorable. The spiral pattern, so delicate, was now being erased by the blundering passage of treasure seekers.

  For the moment, though, garnets, emeralds, and rubies made in the fires of Candesce trailed in lines and arcs through the air. Here and there gleamed dry-amber from sargassos on the other side of the world; chains of diamond like runnels of light flashed in her lantern's beam. The currency of two dozen nations sat fixed in air as though in solid glass (the stamped profiles of pilots and kings layered into shadow like a history lesson) among clouds of platinum and buttons of silver. Beneath the ragged netting the hull was still plated with paintings, skyscapes half-covering formal portraits whose eyes awoke like a sleeping ghost's when her light touched them. One painting, only one, had broken free, and so it was that at the center of the cyclone stood a tall stern man in dark dress, his black eyes those of a contemptuous father gazing accusingly at the looters. Only the gilt frame surrounding him spoiled the illusion of reality. There was a fresh bullet hole in his chest, put there by the first man of Slipstream to enter the ship.

  They'd be joking about that startled shot for weeks, she was sure.

  Chaison had swam indifferently through the shining constellations and disappeared into the ship's bridge. Venera followed, not without plucking a few choice items from the air on the way.

  Chaison's hand-light floated free in the air, slowly turning to illuminate the fixtures of the old-style, cramped bridge. Venera kept expecting to see skeletons, but there was no evidence of violence here; apparently Anetene had been compulsively neat. In the center of the room was a chart pedestal, and clipped to the top of this was an ivory box, its sides inlaid with fantastical scenes out of mythology: men and women under gravity, riding beasts she remembered were called horses. Chaison's hand hovered over the lid of the box.

  "Oh, just open it!" Of course he couldn't hear her; even to herself, Venera's voice sounded muffled in the suit. She bounced over to grab the box just as Chaison reached down and flipped back the lid. both of their lanterns lit the contents through the blue air.

  The object was simple, a white cylinder a little longer than her hand with a single black band around its center, and a loop for grasping at one end. It was made of some translucent crystal that made it gather the light mistily. Chaison hesitated again, then grasped the handle and pulled it out.

  He leaned his helmet against hers. "The key to Candesce," she heard, the distorted words barely audible through the metal. "Just as the old books described."

  "Let's hope it works," she said.

  "Candesce still works. Why shouldn't this?" He put it back in the case and closed it. Then he hung there in the air for a while, head down, as if praying.

  Puzzled, Venera touched her helmet to his again. "What's wrong?"

  Did she imagine the sigh or was it real? "I'm just trying to figure out what to do next," he said. "The Gehellens will be circling Leaf's Choir waiting for us to come out. How are we going to get to Candesce?"

  "You're not one to live in the moment, are you?" she said. It was true she hadn't thought that far ahead, herself. Maybe she should have—-for he was right, this was a problem.

  A wide moat of empty air lay between the principalities of Candesce and the Sun of Suns itself. Venera knew they would have to cross two or three hundred miles of open space to reach the ancient sun. Candesce was so hot that no clouds could persist in this zone, and no living thing nor habitation within a hundred miles. As the battered ships of the expeditionary force crossed this span they would be easy targets for the Gehellen navy.

  "If we send the others out as decoys again, and just take the Rook…"

  His helmet grated against hers as he shook his head. "We'll be seen. Not even a bike could get to Candesce right now."

  "We'll have to hide, then. Wait them out."

  "But there's another problem," he said. "We're almost out of time."

  "What?"

  "That dreadnought… Based on the progress your photos showed, it'll be ready to fly by now. And in a few days the Slipstream fleet is going to be thoroughly entangled in the fight with Mavery. If Falcon Formation intends to invade Slipstream, they will be amassing their forces as we speak."

  Venera scowled at the little box. Their original plan had been to visit Candesce during its night cycle and let Aubri Mahallan work the magic she swore she could perform with the Sun of Suns. Then they would take the most direct possible course at full speed to Falcon Formation, and the secret shipyard there. Mahallan claimed that she could set a timer on the mechanisms of Candesce that would trigger the correct action after a predetermined number of days and hours.

  "Someone's going to have to stay behind," she said. "Wait until after our ships have left and the Gehe
llens have given chase. Then go into the sun."

  "That's what I'm thinking," he said. "Mahallan, of course. And someone to keep her in line. Your man Carrier is the natural choice there."

  "Me," she said quickly.

  "No, dear, I absolutely—"

  "Why? You think I'm going to be safer on board the Rook when you go into battle against Falcon? Besides, love, this is our plan, yours and mine. Who are we to trust to see it through, if not one another? When you go up against that dreadnought, you need to focus on the task at hand and not worry about whether Mahallan's done her job, or whether Lyle Carrier really is loyal. You need someone you can trust."

  "And I can trust you."

  "Why Chaison, that almost sounded like a question." She laughed and punched him in the arm. "It's the best plan, admit it."

  He admitted it and they turned to go. As Chaison pulled the ivory box away from its moorings, something small tumbled out. He didn't notice. Venera waved her lamp around until the thing flashed; there it was, twirling away toward a forward porthole. She reached out and snatched it out of the air, then held it up between two fingers.

  It was a ring, a signet made for a man's hand. The stone was opaque bloodred and the design was of a horse standing on its back legs. The horse had wings.

  She slipped the ring over the bulky glove of her suit and followed her husband out of the bridge.

  * * * * *

  HOWLS OF DELIGHT echoed through the Rook as a spew of gold and jewelry flew from the wooden airlock door. Moments later a man in a red sargasso suit squeezed out waving his hands over his head. A muffled "unh, unh" sounded from inside his round brass helmet, but nobody was paying any attention to him. Crewmen and officers, the press-ganged and the volunteers, all abandoned civility and leaped on the ricocheting treasure. The man in the suit finally levered off his helmet and yelled, "This is just the dregs, boys! There's tons of it there! Tons!"

  A light hand descended on Hayden's shoulder. "Hey," said Aubri in his ear. Hayden felt himself flushing, and his heart beat a bit faster.