Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

by Karl Schroeder

  "Thank you all for coming. And thanks to the government and people of Aerie for providing us with this glorious space in which to discuss the future of Virga." He ran through some more verbal salves, but was mercifully brief. His whole demeanor was that of a military commander at a briefing, and Leal supposed that was quite deliberate.

  "The plan was to have my wife address the opening ceremonies," said Fanning--and suddenly Leal forgot her anxiety as he continued, "but she has gone missing somewhere in the airs of Virga."

  There was a moment of shocked silence--not because those in the audience hadn't been hearing this rumor, but that this upstart admiral should admit it right now, right here. Fanning certainly had their undivided attention.

  "Whether she is merely delayed or whether something has ... happened to her," Fanning continued, "I want to make it plain that it changes nothing. Our goals for this conference remain the same as they were described in the briefs you all received before coming here. I will not use this venue to advance a personal agenda of rescue or revenge. However," he added as muttering broke out among the delegates, "in the interests of trust, I am prepared to step down as chair of these proceedings, if the consensus among you is that my objectivity has been compromised."

  The delegate from Tracoune stood up. "Is it true about the hostages?" The muttering became a boil of conversation.

  Fanning held up his hand. "We'll get to that shortly," he promised. "But I must insist on a vote on this matter. We can't proceed if you don't trust me to perform my duties dispassionately."

  "Dispassionately?" One of a small group in drab gray suits had stood up. "You ambushed and destroyed the People's Fleet of Falcon Formation while it was on maneuvers! Without provocation!"

  "You paid Mavery to stage a provocative raid on Slipstream in order to draw away their fleet!" roared a prince of Eidon. "Maneuvers? Your fleet was loaded with soldiers! I know, because half their bodies floated into our airspace afterwards, and you were too embarrassed to repatriate them. We had to pay to incinerate them in Candesce ourselves!"

  "And when the Gretels invaded Falcon, he defended one of your cities, even after you'd held him in prison for a hundred days!" This from the premier of Malagan himself.

  The few delegates of the ancient principalities of Candesce who'd bothered to come to the colloquy looked entertained. The promise of such provincial political theater was probably exactly why they'd showed up.

  The whole Falcon Formation delegation stood up and prepared to walk out.

  "Please," said Fanning, but they were no longer listening.

  Leal watched in horror as the audience began standing up, shouting at one another, heading for the paths, or just shaking their heads. Beside her, Antaea sat with her head in her hands, and even Keir, so normally unflappable these days, was sitting there with his mouth open.

  Admiral Fanning's aura of command had evaporated. He stood there, shoulders slumped, a man lacking the one person in the world he needed to lean on.

  Leal caught herself thinking that if she'd been here, Venera Fanning would have straightened this lot out in no time. What would she have done?

  Leal could picture it with perfect clarity.

  The pages of her speech slipped to the floor. As if from outside, she saw herself standing, walking to the leader of the ceremonial guardsmen at the side of the podium. "Give me your sidearm," she demanded, holding out her hand, palm up.

  He goggled at her. "I'm not going to hurt anyone," she said. "Do it!"

  She gave him the stare she'd learned worked best on undergrads. He glanced at the chaos in the audience, and a little smile appeared on his lips. "Do your best, ma'am," he said as he handed it to her.

  Leal stalked up to the podium, her eyes on the pistol as she worked out how to turn off its safety. She heard a sudden commotion behind her as the others on the stage saw what she was holding, but it was too late as she raised the pistol high over her head and pulled the trigger.

  Venera would have stood there after, with the gun smoking in her hand; so Leal did that. She glared out at the suddenly silent diplomats, military leaders, and heads of state, and then she put her mouth to the bullhorn affixed to the podium, and said, "My name is Leal Hieronyma Maspeth, and I have just returned from the universe beyond Virga with a message for you. A message and a warning, that you need to hear, because your very lives depend upon it.

  "Now if you would all be seated, I would like to begin."

  18

  LEAL HAD BEEN working on this speech for months. Without pen and paper at hand, she had rehearsed it in her mind while trudging across the strange, flat landscapes of Aethyr. While climbing the long slope of the world's end, or sitting too exhausted to eat the meager rations they'd brought, she would retreat into herself and imagine that she stood in front of a vast assembly, all attentive and eager to hear the revelations she was about to drop, word by word, into their ears.

  This was no assembly. It was a mob, and a hostile one that was only reluctantly subsiding into its seats. The lofty sense of mission that she'd imagined would sustain her in delivering this message simply wasn't there; instead, she felt exactly as she had on countless occasions when she'd had to tutor a roomful of impatient, pampered adolescent boys.

  "Your nations nearly fell four years ago," she shouted, ignoring the sound of glass falling into the gardens somewhere to her right. "All of them. Would you be dead now if they had? Or controlled by something alien, like that poor soul, Aubrey Mahallan, whom Artificial Nature used as its pawn to break into Candesce? What do you suppose your fate would have been?"

  She'd laid the pistol on the podium and leveled her jumbled note pages at the crowd. "Virga nearly fell again a year later, when another human became the vessel for an attempt to recapture the key to Candesce. Telen Argyre, whose sister stands behind me, was also possessed by a force from beyond our world. That force continues to press upon us, relentless. It has tried sneaking in. It has tried forcing the lock. Now, it prepares to batter down the doors."

  "But why?" somebody shouted. "What do we have that they could possibly want?"

  Leal's shoulders slumped in relief at the question. "Candesce," she said. "It's all about Candesce.

  "Think about it." She wasn't following her speech in any of the ways she'd imagined, but it didn't matter now. She knew what to say. "Imagine that you've conquered the universe--and not just the universe outside yourself. Your offspring have flooded across the stars, copying and transforming themselves in a hurricane of ecstatic creativity. They are all wildly different in their shapes, sizes, their minds, morals, and goals. But the only ones that matter, you believe, are the ones that can think. This is because your perfected minds contain a complete model of reality. --A completed physics, a final chemistry, all possible biologies ... an image, in your mind, of everything that is possible in our universe. Because your minds contain all possibilities, you've concluded that you are the real universe, and that messy, unpredictable realm of non-thinking matter and energy outside your perfect mind is just an illusion, a fallen dimension to be swept entirely aside in time.

  "And then, your unstoppable flood hits a stone. Candesce stops you, and worse--far worse!--its very existence refutes you. You've come to believe that Mind is the true reality, and that the vessels you seem to need to house it are an afterthought, a noisome and filthy necessity you'll erase in time. But that's not true. Mind is always embodied. It has to be.

  "And now, the cracks appear in your perfect mask. Why have you been expanding so relentlessly? Why this ceaseless creation of new forms in your infinite mind? --These paradises, each built on the rubble of the last? The million discarded languages, the games of culture, the recursive invention? It's because something still eludes you. Meaning ... eludes you."

  The emissary's people had deluged Leal with theory, with numbers and physics. The morphonts had told her how Candesce's protective field violated the physical laws that served as the bedrock of Artificial Nature's operating system. Cand
esce's very existence disproved the virtuals' claim that they held--and embodied--universal truth. Yet there was more to it than that. For why did any of this matter? During the long walk across the plains of Aethyr, and at night as she sat next to the strange campfires that gravity made possible, Leal had tried to see past those explanations. --Not to understand what they were saying, but rather, what they meant.

  "Why did our ancestors build Candesce?" she asked now, as she'd finally learned to ask during those days. "Forget the how of it. Why did they choose to limit themselves to these frail, brief bodies, when they could have joined Artificial Nature in its synthetic heavens? They could have had immortality, and they threw it away.

  "I will tell you why. It's because it is our frailty, our briefness, our abject helplessness against the storms of fate that make our lives meaningful. I tell you now the great secret of our entire existence: that meaning can only come from being bound in the material world, in its constraints, its agonies, its fleeting moments. The virtuals strive to escape all pain, all accident, and the brute mindlessness of nature. Yet without these things, existence is a hollow vessel, and those who have become virtual have no true voice, can hear only the bright echoes of our lives."

  She'd seen it in John Tarvey's eyes. He'd moved past needing flesh, and so what need did he have of emotions, which existed to propel the body; no use for pain, certainly, but then no use for pleasure, either. Without the need for a single unitary body, why organize himself as a single mind at all? Why care, why think, why feel, why be?

  "Meaning comes from the moment, the place, and the bodies struggling in it," she said--and then she smiled and laughed, as if at a sudden thought; but this part she'd rehearsed.

  "All of which," and now she softened her voice and gave her audience a rare smile, "brings me to the question of why I, a simple history tutor from the city of Sere in the sunless country of Abyss, one day came to find myself hanging from the ledge of a library window, while soldiers ransacked its interior in search of me and my companions. For if you would look for meaning in what I've told you so far, you must start at that moment, in that place, and with those bodies in struggle."

  And with that she was off, telling them now, in full confidence, how the emissary had come to Abyss as a great voice cloaked in darkness; how its message had panicked those who heard it, driving some mad; how they had destroyed their ships, their homes, and one another in their attempt to silence it. The fleet of Abyss was assembled, and it met the emissary and was scuttled by its own terror. Yet none of this chaos was the emissary's intent; it was simply that it was a creature born and bred in Artificial Nature. Within the influence of Candesce, it, too, had lost its mind. When Leal and her friend Easley Fencher found themselves crawling through the library window, it was because she had finally acquired the ancient, banned book that would give her clues about what the emissary was, and how to find it.

  As concisely as she could, she told them the rest of it: how she'd found the emissary and gone with it into Aethyr and beyond; how, on her return, ships from Abyss and the Home Guard had pursued them; and how they'd all crashed on the surface of Aethyr.

  Leal had lectured many times, but she had never told a story in such a way as she was now, and never a story so true, never one with her at its center. She spoke in a kind of ecstasy, and there was complete silence among her listeners.

  --Until, as she was describing their harrowing flight through the lost city of Serenity, someone off to the left shouted, "Can't a man defend himself in this court of opinion?"

  She blinked and looked over: Eustace Loll stood on the path beside the ranked chairs. He was in a formal suit and he wasn't alone.

  Rustling murmurs sprang up again, and Leal heard the squeak of floorboards as people crisscrossed the podium behind her. Chaison Fanning had discreetly stepped aside during her speech, but now he appeared at her elbow. "Those men are from your country?" he asked her quietly. She nodded, suddenly ashen.

  Loll fronted a delegation from Abyss--that much would have been disaster enough, for her. But beside them stood another group, newly arrived as well, and these men wore the severe black of the Home Guard. Considering the weight of the medals, braiding, and epaulets on their jackets, she assumed these were the Guard's very leaders.

  And worse, much worse: next to the Guards stood fifteen unnaturally beautiful men and women, all tall and haughty, and dressed in beautiful, shimmering clothes. The virtuals had sent their own delegation to the colloquy.

  The ecstasy of using her voice, of practically singing out her story, collapsed. Leal shrank back from the podium, but stopped as someone strolled to the front of this parade. Leal saw the dress first: black as space, adorned with random splashes of diamond, and cut very low. The lady's skin was pale, as were her wide eyes that were a gray so light as to nearly be white. Her mouth was a scarlet line, her hair a tumble of blond curls. She slunk along the line of alert Guardsmen, a sly smile on her face. "What?" she said. "Were you thinking we wouldn't show up? Not," she added with a pout, "that any of us received invitations."

  Chaison Fanning was trotting down the steps of the stage, a broad smile on his face and his hand held out. "On the contrary," he said with all evidence of relief, "we'd announced to the world that this meeting was open to everyone, and we're very happy to see you."

  "Are you?" She glided up to him, and he took her hand and bowed.

  "Lady Inshiri Ferance, I take it?" he said, still in his bow. Leal heard some gasps from the crowd. "I am Admiral Chaison Fanning, and on behalf of our gracious hosts I would like to welcome you to the grand colloquy."

  "Would you, now?" She took back her hand. "Then," purred Ferance, "you'll have no objection to our delegation making its own case, since your so-called free press has already painted us as the villains?"

  "We would like nothing better," said Fanning. "We will make space for you in the program."

  "We demand to go first," said Ferance.

  "That," Fanning said, "I think would be harder to arrange. We want to ensure that all the delegates start with the same basic information--"

  "What information?" One of the Guardsmen came to stand next to Ferance. This man was unnaturally tall, and ropy muscle bulged under his black uniform--which was festooned with medals.

  Fanning bowed again. "To whom do I have the pleasure...?"

  "Nicolas Remoran, general secretary of the Virga Home Guard," the newcomer boomed. It was suddenly dead silent in the amphitheater. Without invitation, he stepped up onto the stage next to Fanning, where he loomed over the admiral of Slipstream like a tree. "And what is this information that you have about the outside world that can possibly compare to what the Guard has accumulated painstakingly over centuries?"

  There was a momentary silence. Then: "Well, they knew I was alive. You didn't." Leal spun to see Hayden Griffin strolling past her, hands in his pockets as though he were spending an idle afternoon in the gardens. He walked right up to Remoran and said, "And anyway, it's not about what you know, is it? It's about what you never told the rest of us."

  There was muttering, murmuring, and a smattering of applause. Remoran whirled and shouted at the crowd, "Do you want to know the truth?" His voice was huge, utterly filling the space. Moneyed powerbrokers and ancient nobles blinked in surprise. "Well, do you?" he roared.

  There was a subdued reply. Fanning was calmly looking around, but Leal saw that his gaze was alighting in succession on the knots of soldiers he had scattered around the space. These were beginning to move forward.

  "You're saying you don't want to hear our side?" shouted Remoran.

  A hunched old woman in the front row stood up. "We do, we do," she said. That got a cheer, and the crowd began to chant, "Truth, truth, truth!"

  Fanning threw up his hands and shook his head in sympathy to Leal. She shrugged in return.

  The admiral held up a hand. "In the interest of keeping everyone happy," he said with a glare at the crowd, "we will allow the Home Guard delegation t
o go first." Before anyone could summon up a good cheer he added, "But anyone who tries to disrupt our program after this will be summarily ejected from the building."

  Remoran crossed his arms and looked down at Fanning. "Fair enough," he rumbled.

  Fanning tilted his head in ironic assent. "Then say your piece."

  * * *

  FOR A MINUTE or so Remoran prowled the edge of the stage, like some caught beast. Then he stopped in the center, clenched and unclenched his fists, and went through a remarkable transformation.

  His expression softened; his shoulders slumped. He looked away from the crowd, and gave a great sigh. Then he said, "We couldn't do it anymore."

  Leal had retaken her seat. She was boiling with rage at this interruption, and the stagy flamboyance of Ferance and her pet Guardsmen. Most of all, she was furious at Loll. There was that pistol on the podium ...

  "We of the First Line defend the walls of Virga," said Remoran. "Because we do that, we move in and out of the world. That confers advantages to us--unfair advantages. We see what humanity could be like, if only it were freed of the disease, infirmity, and ignorance that rule inside Virga. For centuries now, we've held our tongues because of our ancient pact with the founding nations of the world. Leave us alone, they'd commanded when they founded our order. Let nothing from beyond the world touch us.

  "We do our job very well. If, in the past several years, you've heard rumors of attempts to pierce the world's walls--well, just think of all the attacks you never heard of, because we foiled them."

  He shrugged and started to pace again. "We get compensated for our work. We suffer no disease and we live to fantastic ages, because we can go outside to treat these things. And yet, you cannot.

  "This umbrella of protection has always been extended to our immediate families. That's been the benefit that Guardsmen treasured the most. It's selfish, I know, that we can enjoy these benefits and you can't--but that was the pact, we always thought. Our pact with the people of Virga. Except, it's not, is it?"