Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

by Karl Schroeder

  She blinked. "Don't you see?" he said. "It's working."

  Hayden had drifted over, his hands on his head in deference to the guns pointed at him. "We're generating an analogue of Candesce's suppression field," he said.

  "How big is it, Keir?"

  "Probably not more than four hundred miles in radius," he said. "But that's big enough to have stopped the attack."

  Leal shook her head. "Here, maybe. But at the edge of the world..."

  "Get us clear," the engineers' commander was saying. "We'll detonate this one from a safe distance like we did the others."

  "Wait!" "No!" Hayden and Keir leaped up together, only to be forced back by armed jittery men. "You can't destroy it!" Keir continued. "It's what won the battle!"

  The commander looked at them sympathetically. "They're all going to take a long time to recover from this." He sighed. "Ready the two-inch gun. We'll pick it off from a half-mile out."

  * * *

  "--NOT COMFORTABLE LEAVING him like that," Venera was saying. "Didn't he say that body was designed to live in the suppressive field? Then why...?"

  Antaea blinked at her. "Wha--?"

  "It doesn't matter, the field's obviously back on somehow. He's frozen. Shoot his limbs off and throw the pieces out the door," said Jacoby.

  "Where--" Pain lanced through her side, and the sudden sound of gunfire woke Antaea further. She remembered it all suddenly: the fight, the monsters, her fighting back. And Holon.

  She pulled against Venera, who was hauling pieces of Holon toward the blockhouse's exit. "Wait, you don't understand."

  "You're fine, Antaea. We're going to get you out of here." Antaea drifted for a minute, and when she awoke again Venera was back, this time encircling her waist with one arm. Jacoby had appeared on her other side.

  "No, no, wait." She was finding it hard to frame her thoughts. And what about that tone in Venera's voice? It was the sort of soothing cadence you used with someone who was dying.

  Antaea tried to pull away. "Day's not going to come."

  They both let go of her. "What?" said Venera.

  "Holon ... turned off the dawn. Candesce..." She was finding it hard to breathe. "Candesce won't come on again unless we tell it to."

  They'd kept drifting through the maze as she spoke, and the exit was approaching. "Shall I, or do you think you can do it?" Venera said to Jacoby.

  "Let's get her to the sloop first," he said. "Then we'll both go." He pressed the switch that opened the door, and it slid silently aside, letting in hot, smoky air.

  "Ouch," said Antaea. She flexed her fingers; at least her left hand was working. "And where's the key?" she demanded.

  Venera held it up. "I picked it off Remoran. He--" Praying she had the strength, Antaea made a grab for it. Venera was so surprised she let Antaea take it--and kick her in the stomach.

  Antaea had been holding on to the edge of the door as she'd done it, so as Venera sailed out into the night, she reoriented herself and grabbed Jacoby by his bad shoulder.

  "Ah!" He doubled up around the pain and she hauled with all her might. He, too, went through the door.

  "Somebody has to turn on the sun again!" she cried at the two receding figures. "And how are you going to lock this door? It needs the key to do it!"

  Venera swore as she reached impotently to any kind of purchase on the empty air. "We'll lock it from out here!"

  "And I'm to trust you?" Antaea shook her head. "This has to end here. The key can never be used again. And the only place in the world where it can never be recovered is right here."

  They were shouting at her to stop, to reconsider, but the redness was starting to overwhelm her sight again, and a roaring like thunder was in her ears, so she shut the door.

  Then she raised the key to Candesce, and locked herself in.

  * * *

  IT TOOK FOUR shots before the engineers hit something vital. Then, instead of exploding, Hayden's generator simply sparked spectacularly, and went black.

  "Aw, no," said Hayden. "That was good work."

  Keir waited for scry to reappear. The seconds dragged on. No new lights came on from the region of Candesce, and while the thud and fire of battle still continued on the other side of the sky, the gauzy blue of lasers was still missing.

  When that light still hadn't reappeared after two minutes, he let out a ragged breath.

  "I think it's over," he said.

  * * *

  "YOU'RE A TERRIBLE pilot," Jacoby muttered as yet another body thudded into the sloop's windshield. Venera didn't smile, and he instantly regretted his gallows humor. Hunched at the controls, Venera guided the sloop into the wreckage of the greatest battle Virga had ever seen.

  "She'll be all right," he said. "That blockhouse has the best medical facilities in the world. All automated. She'd have to go to Brink to find better."

  A bullet or something starred the windshield. Venera jerked, then fingered her jaw, and returned her attention to the controls. "... Can't see a damned thing," she said.

  "Just point us at any sun," he said. "Like that one." He nodded at an orange smear behind a bank of indigo clouds, but Venera shook her head.

  "We have to find the Surgeon," she said.

  For a moment he thought she was still talking about Antaea, and then he realized she meant her husband's flagship.

  "He'll be fine, Venera. For God's sake, he's inside a battleship. If he's not safe there, what are we going to do for him?"

  She'd grabbed a new pistol from the armory as they'd entered the sloop. She pointed it at him. "The Surgeon," she said levelly. "We'll not be separated again."

  He raised his good hand. "The Surgeon it is."

  While she piloted, he went back and found the tarpaulin that had been used to cover the water tanks. The tank where he'd hidden the knife-ball egg was gone; Antaea must have tried to dispose of it. He dragged the tarp to the sloop's main hatch and draped it outside. It wasn't much as white flags went, but it would have to do.

  They sailed on through darkness and smoke, but everywhere signs of life and humanity were beginning to reassert themselves. Cruisers and cutters from a hundred navies were nosing through the wreckage, netting injured men from the air and tossing ropes to disabled ships to allow their crews on board. He saw one giant vessel that was so festooned with men they hung from every surface and clustered on its hull like flies. This was all the more amazing since the ship had a terrible wound in its flank that had nearly cut it in two.

  It rotated into faint amber light and Jacoby saw the colors of Slipstream and the lettering on its prow: Surgeon.

  With a smile he turned to tell Venera--then paused. Nearly all the fires of the battle were out, smothered in their own exhaust. Most of the principalities' suns were obscured by clouds. How had he been able to read the lettering on that ship's prow?

  He climbed around the Thistle's hull to look back at the sun of suns. Deep red lights glowed there, and they were brightening. As he watched, something like a metal flower began to open behind the vast crystalline spikes that marked Candesce's perimeter. Instead of a stamen and pistil, this flower cradled fire in its heart, and that fire, too, began to brighten.

  He swung into the sloop. "Dawn! Dawn's coming! We have to get out of here!"

  Venera turned. Her hands were white on the controls, and the expression on her face was terrible.

  To his own surprise, Jacoby heard himself say, "The Surgeon's right over there." He pointed to starboard.

  She simply said, "Thank you," and banked the Thistle.

  The air was choppy now, and they could feel the heat rising through the glass. Outside, the growing radiance illuminated clouds of bodies and shattered ships, and the contorted forms of strange, crablike machines, each one a hundred feet long or more. These had frozen in midgesture and now cast nightmarish shadows across the receding vistas of smoke and the intricate details of aerial carnage.

  All the ships that had power were turning away now, racing to escape the exclusi
on zone before full daylight. Many pilots were having to make agonizing decisions not to try to reach airmen who were waving frantically at them from stranded ships. Chaison Fanning's battleship was powering up its engines, too, but it would take it a while to get up to speed. The Thistle caught up to it easily.

  Venera threw a line to some airmen standing in the wreckage of the Surgeon's hangar, and climbed across to join a growing mob of refugees who were all scrambling to get inside before the sun came on.

  The heat was becoming intense. Jacoby shaded his eyes and looked back to behold the funeral rites of the principalities writ large: ship by ship, body by body, the radiance of the sun of suns was reaching out to engulf all that remained behind. Whatever was closest to Candesce was already aflame, though the fires were barely visible against the greater light behind them. Thousands upon thousands of silhouetted human figures patterned this sky, and one by one the light reached out to them, and they vanished.

  Venera grabbed the arm of a Slipstream officer. "I have to get to the bridge."

  He shook his head. "Crew only, ma'am. Besides, it's not safe crossing that." He indicated the twisted girders and shorn bulkheads of the Surgeon's giant wound.

  Venera looked him in the eye. "My name is Venera Fanning, and I have to get to the bridge."

  "Oh!" He waved at another man. "We need an escort! And semaphore the admiral! Tell him we found his wife."

  "Don't," she said; and then she smiled impishly. "I'd prefer to surprise him."

  Escorted by four tough airmen, she began climbing up the rigging that stretched across the wreckage. After a moment she paused, and squinted back at Jacoby. "Coming?"

  He shook his head. "This is your moment. Besides, if I show my face I'll just be arrested."

  "Oh, pfft." But she smiled again. "See you, then, Jacoby."

  He watched her climb out of sight. Then he braced his feet under the edge of the buckled hull to watch new upwelling clouds rise from the inferno of Candesce: clouds of ash from a pyre big as the sky. His shoulder throbbed; his left hand pulsed back. He'd come to the end of his strength, and there was no going back from here. In the end, all his guile and violence had been insufficient to prevent a holocaust, and now, he finally felt his age, and knew how little his own epitaph would say.

  Jacoby put his head in his hands, and wept.

  Epilogue

  ROWAN WHEEL CUTS into a cloud, and rain chutes along the copper streets of the city. Dark-coated pedestrians turn up their collars and hurry from doorway to doorway--each portico or glass-doored entrance a gaslit altar in the eternal night. At certain angles the streets gleam like beaten gold, runnels of water making them waver like a hallucination of treasure.

  People gather under the eaves and canopies to wait out the storm. The warm orange windows are smudged and faded to sepia by the incoming mist. Conversations start, pause, punctuated by distant rumbles of thunder and the murmuring of the rain; start again.

  There's a curfew checkpoint being dismantled about a block away. The soldiers keep working through the rain, faces impassive ovals on a velvet backdrop. Someone comments that it's such a relief the danger is over. No one looks up past the perches of the spokesmen, to where faintly gleam the running lights of new visitors from outside the world.

  She will imagine that these streets still bear old impressions of her shoes, an added layer to the map-upon-map that is the history of Sere. Certainly, her ghosts will always walk here: her parents, Easley Fencher, Brun Mafin, old William. Somewhere, shrouded by darkness and rain, Seana also walks, dear sad Porril hurries into his house, and Uthor pauses to glance out the obsidian square of a window as he prepares a meal for his latest client.

  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 SPOTTED her, 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."