“But these are hardly the best Winter ships,” objected Flosk. “The new ones are off with the force that's heading to Mavery."
“Naturally. Mavery and Falcon will notice if our finest Winter ships don't show up for the border dispute. Your ships—and I hate to put this indelicately, gentlemen—are the inconspicuous ones. Not very powerful, not very important. Nonetheless, they are all rigged for operations in cold, darkness, and low-oxygen conditions. They will be sufficient."
He closed the cover on the projector and restored the light to the chart box. “This is the local constellation of nations,” he said. “We are here. Falcon is there.” The chart box contained dense clouds of colored sparks, each hue representing a different nation. The nations coiled around and pressed against one another in intricate contact, like the internal organs of some creature of light. “The chief nations of Meridian all follow the rise and fall of the Meridian Five Hadley cell that's powered by heat from the Sun of Suns, which is below the table in this view. Rush Asteroid is largely unaffected by the air currents and continues to follow its orbit around Candesce, at something less than walking speed. As you can see, Rush will soon leave Aerie and migrate into Mavery's territory. But after that...” He turned the box to show a mass of glittering green stars that took up much of one side of the box. “After that we will by force of celestial mechanics, have to pass through Falcon."
Three suns—diamonds among emeralds—gleamed within the broad dazzle of green.
“Now, here is the location of the secret shipyard we discovered.” He flipped a lever in the base of the map box. All the little pinpricks of light dimmed save for one amethyst that lit up deep inside Falcon territory.
The captains broke into a babble of complaint. Flosk burst out laughing. “How are we expected to get to that spot without fighting our way through the whole of Falcon?"
“Simple,” said Fanning. “The location of the shipyard is secret because it's in an underpopulated area—a volume filled with sargassos. It's really at the terminus of a long tongue of Winter that extends hundreds of miles into Falcon. The sargassos shade this volume and much of it is oxygen-poor. A wilderness. We're going to circle all the way around the Meridian constellation and sneak in through this alley of dead air."
“...And raid the shipyard,” said somebody. There were nods all around.
“Well, it's bold,” said Flosk grudgingly. “Still suicidal. But then we're not too many ships. Slipstream can afford to lose us."
“I have no intention of sacrificing us,” said Fanning.
“But how are we going to survive and get home again?"
“That's a part of the plan that has to remain secret for now,” said the admiral. “But what it means in the short term is that, before we circle around through Winter, we have to make a ... a detour."
It might have been two thousand miles away; it could have been twice that. They were never able to tell her for sure. But somewhere, and not too long ago, there had been a war.
Nobody knew whether the shot was fired by a lone sniper, or whether it was one of a salvo loosed in the midst of a confused melee involving thousands of men. But it was a military-grade weapon of some sort, that much was sure. The bullet had come out of its muzzle at a velocity of more than a mile per second. It outran its own sound.
She knew what had happened next. The bullet had gathered its experiences with it as it flew, remembering what it saw and where it went; and these memories came to Venera Fanning now and then, as dreams and nightmares. They must be from the bullet, there was no other possible source for them. She herself could never have imagined the vision of fantastically-prowed vessels ramming one another and tumbling in burning embraces into blood-red clouds. Nor could she have thought up the rope-connected freefall city the bullet had sailed through shortly after being fired. The city owned no wheeling towns. Its towers and houses were nodes in a seemingly infinite lattice of rope, and its scuttling citizens were long as spiders, their bones fragile as glass. The bullet passed through the city going hundreds of miles per hour, so the faces and rippling banners of the place were blurred and unidentifiable.
The bullet shot past farms and forests that hung in the air like green galaxies. In places the entire sky was alive with spring colors as distant suns lit the delicate leaves of billions of independently floating plants, each one clinging by its roots to a grain of dirt or drop of water. The air here was heady with oxygen and, for the humans who tended the farms, redolent with the perfume of growing things.
In contrast, the vast expanses of Winter that opened up ahead of the bullet were clear as crystal. Falling into them was like penetrating a sphere of purest rainwater, a deep fathomless blueness wherein the bullet cooled, and shrank in on itself just a little. It threaded through schools of heavily feathered, blind fish and past the nearly identical birds that fed off them. It entered a realm of sky-spanning ice arches, a froth of frozen water whose curving bubbles were tens of miles on a side. Black gaps pierced their sides. Snow nestled in the elbows of icicles longer than Rush's shadow. Here the air was dense, exhausted of oxygen as well as heat. The bullet slowed and nearly came to a halt as it reached the farther edge of this shattered cathedral of ice.
But as it began a slow tumble and return to the blue intricacies behind it, an errant beam of light from Candesce welled up from below. The glow heated the air behind the bullet just enough to make a sigh that welled out and pushed it away. Again it tumbled into dark emptiness.
Winter did not rule all the empty spaces of Virga. There were columns of warm air hundreds of miles long that rose up from the Sun of Suns. Before they cooled enough for their water to condense as clouds, they were transparent, and Candesce's light followed them up, sometimes penetrating all the way to Virga's skin. The bullet strayed into one such column and changed course, rising now and slowly circumnavigating the world.
It was the passage of an iceberg that galvanized the bullet into motion again. An eddy of the passing monster put a sustained wind at its back and soon the bullet was cruising along at a respectable thirty miles an hour. On the crest of this wavefront it entered a dense forest that had supersaturated itself with oxygen. It narrowly missed a hundred or so of the long spiderweb filaments of trunk and branch whose weave made up the forest. But then it happened: the bullet rapped a solitary, tumbling stone a few miles in and a few sparks swirled after it. One spark touched a dry leaf that had been circulating in the shadowed interior of the forest for ten years. The leaf turned into a small sphere of flame; then the other leaves floating nearby lit, and then a few nearby trees.
An expanding sphere of fire pushed the bullet faster and faster. Mile after mile the storm of flame pushed through the supercharged air, in seconds consuming thread-like trees bigger than towns. The forest transformed itself into a fireball bright as any sun in Virga. When it burned out its dense core of ashes and smoke would contain a sargasso—a volume of space sheltered from the wind by leagues of charred branch and root, where no light nor oxygen could be found.
The bullet was indifferent to this fate. It rode the explosion all the way out of the forest. When it left the roaring universe of flame it was once again speeding at nearly a mile a second. Several minutes later it entered the precincts of Aerie. It flashed past the towns and outrider stations of Slipstream. It narrowed its focus to a quartet of towns in the formation known as Rush. It lined up on a single window in the glittering wheel of the admiralty.
It stopped dead in Venera Fanning's jaw. Some blood tried to continue on, but that only made it a few meters further. And while the doctors did dig it out of Venera's throat, it had remained in the admiralty ever since.
Until now. As Venera slept uneasily and dreamed her way back down the long trajectory of the projectile, it bumped slowly back and forth inside the lacquer box in her luggage where she kept it. Its journey was not over yet.
To be continued.
Copyright (c) Karl Schroeder
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* * *
Novella: The Diversification of Its Fancy by John Barnes
Humans crave both diversity and unity, and therein lie some of its most persistent problems and painful dilemmas....
"But above all, individualism, if it can be purged of its defects and its abuses, is the best safeguard of personal liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice. It is also the best safeguard of the variety of life, which emerges precisely from this extended field of personal choice, and the loss of which is the greatest of all losses of the homogeneous or totalitarian state. For this variety preserves the traditions which embody the most secure and successful choices of former generations; it colours the present with the diversification of its fancy; and being the handmaid of experiment as well as of tradition and of fancy, it is the most powerful element to better the future.”
—John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
* * * *
Laprada was fussing, lifting my tapi from each shoulder till it hung parallel to the floor, and tugging at the fastening. It made me nervous—as her instructor at hand-to-hand fighting, I knew how she loved chokeholds. “Oh, cheer up, you ancient monster of ego,” she said. “Something good could happen tonight. For example, maybe they'll finally send a competent sniper. Then we won't have to listen to you complain."
“Then you won't,” Raimbaut said. “I'd have him in my head. And after that, we'd both have to listen to him complain about being physically four years old."
“No one has any respect for the dignity of the artist.” I checked myself in the mirror again. People wear their actual ages in only about thirty of the Thousand Cultures, so my mostly-gray hair surrounding my mostly-bald crown was an oddity, and the wrinkles and crows'-feet odder still. But I looked good, for a freak.
Unfortunately, during my earlier years I had marketed myself as “authentically Occitan,” declaring, on record and often, that aging naturally was integral to my performing persona. Fans have long memories for those sorts of things; I was trapped until someone killed me. Which could well be tonight.
I returned my attention to smoothing my clothes. I could have substituted smart fabrics, but that too seemed like cheating. The clothes were real, and the body was real, and I sang, present in my real body, not lip-synched and not holo'd, at every concert.
Martial arts had kept me supple, fussy eating had held my paunch to a little roll under my navel, and important work had kept my glance sharp, focused, and interested. Giraut Leones, I thought, you are a good-looking fifty-year-old man.
Fully equivalent to being an orangutan with great hair.
Paxa Prytanis's hand lighted on my shoulder. “He's admiring himself in the mirror again."
“Caught,” I said. “I go to the mirror to see whether I look fit for my public, take one good look, and—deu sait, I don't mean to—but I am at once caught up in contemplating fifty stanyears of absolute perfection—"
“Don't hit him in the head,” Laprada said. “I just got his hair under control."
“Well, if you don't like my mirror-fascination now, think what I'll be like admiring a smooth teenaged face, if you people let me get killed."
“You'll be even worse—if that's possible—when you first get out of the psypyx,” an apparent eight-year-old boy said from the corner, where he had been annotating Ovid. “You were a very beautiful child and this time around you'd know it. Rebirth from the psypyx is a splendid experience but don't hurry."
“Dad,” I said, “I promise not to step in front of any bullets just to get a new body for free."
Dad, Paxa, Laprada, and Raimbaut comprised the Office of Special Projects team that I commanded. At least the OSP thought I commanded them. Actually I filled out the paperwork and did the apologizing after the team accomplished a mission. As for giving orders and having them followed, I'd have had better luck trying to organize an all-ferret marching band.
We were five people of around ten ages. Raimbaut and I had been born in the same stanyear, so like me he was fifty on the clock, but he had spent thirteen stanyears in storage in the psypyx, so was only thirty-seven in experience, and since he had been grafted onto a new body only fourteen stanyears ago, physically he was about seventeen. Laprada, restarted from her psypyx at the same time, was forty in chronology and experience, seventeen in appearance. Dad was eighty-one in experience, eighty-three by the clock (he was Q-4, a rare mind-brain type, and so it had taken two stanyears for the placement agency to find a host), but physically an eight-year-old boy. Paxa was forty-three on the clock and in experience, but as a Hedon who believed in getting anti-aging treatments and keeping them up to date, she was physically about thirty.
At fifty—clock, experience, and body—today, I was thoroughly fifty, which was fitting because I was here for my birthday concert in Trois-Orléans, home of my most loyal and passionate audience.
“Two minutes till places,” Laprada said.
Paxa plucked her computer from her jacket pocket, shook it out, smoothed it onto a makeup counter, and re-re-checked every operative, movement of active known enemies, and weapons diagnostic—a lethal version of “did I leave the oven on?” Of course everything was fine. She folded her computer in a napkin-tuck and slipped it back into her right front pocket, one corner protruding.
Laprada and Raimbaut stretched together, pulling each other's arms, stroking each other's necks, rubbing backs and muscles, preparing for jobs that could quickly become athletic. Besides, they enjoyed rubbing each other.
Since unknown people had started trying to kill me three stanyears before, all the attempts had happened at heavily publicized concerts. Hoping to get some useful clue, the OSP had kept me out on tour and watched me as a cat watches a mouse hole. I just hoped the mouse wouldn't come out right after the cat got bored and wandered off for a nap.
Even if my would-be assassins stood me up, this could be the night that the Lost Legion, who had been sending delicate little feelers for more than a stanyear, would finally make real contact. (Assuming they were not the people who were trying to kill me; they were the prime suspects, going by the DNA of four brain-smashed corpses.)
Or maybe tonight the Ixists would do something other than attend in great numbers, listening intently and breathing quietly in meditative unison, as if they were in a worship service (something their faith didn't officially have).
Or then again, in my line of work, it was always possible that something might come out of nowhere.
So here I was: bait for the malevolent, magnet for the odd, connection to the poorly understood, the only physically aged man most of the younger people had ever seen.
The door opened behind me. “Happy birthday, you overgrown teenager,” Margaret said.
Careless of my costume, laughing, I embraced my ex-wife. Into my shoulder, she said, “My god, you're still beautiful, in a grandfatherly sort of way."
I had met Margaret and fallen in love with her on my first mission, almost thirty stanyears before. We had been married just over twelve stanyears, and divorced just before the fates had entertained themselves by promoting her to my boss. (She said that I was a lousy husband and a good spy, so she would no more let me transfer out of her section than she would keep me in her house.)
At my expectant look, she laughed. “No, there's no last-minute special mission, my desperately romantic tostemz-toszet. I bought a ticket. I'm going to be out in the seats, enjoying the show. So, happy birthday, Giraut, and I'll see you after. Be brilliant.” Then she looked around the rest of the room and said, “You can all be brilliant too."
How fine a team did I have? Even while busy preparing to guard my life, they still remembered to laugh at my boss's jokes.
Laprada placed her hand between my shoulder blades and firmly shoved me into the light. The traditional disembodied voice said, “Ladies and gentlemen” (Terstad, nearly everyone's first language)
; “Mesdames et messieurs—” (French, the culture language for Trois-Orléans)
“Donzhelas e donzi e midons—” (Occitan, my own culture language)
“We are pleased to present, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, Giraut Leones!"
I loathe that first long walk from the wings to my stool. The lights are so bright (did they change something after light check?), the stool is farther away than I thought (did they move it?), and I can't feel the songs in my fingers, the way I could just a moment ago (changes? did I make them?).
The lute feels as if it is not my lute. How did we all forget I don't play the lute? Where is my banjo?
Why am I not laughing internally at my own jokes, as I normally do?
Can people tell I do that?
Does it spoil the show for them?
Do they all hate me?
I always take each step toward that too-distant stool with an awkward heavy thud. Deu here comes the stool—how do people get their buttocks onto these things? I don't remember! Deu deu deu please don't let me fall down in front of all these people! Is my tapi straight? Oh, gratz'deu, I'm here.
Solid applause from the sold-out house. I bowed, sat, brought my lute into position, and played my way into the joyous void, letting the energy of the eager listener flow toward the great songs, and the energy of the song back into the listener, back and forth through me.
At a concert like this one, everyone wants nostalgia. My first set was traditional Occitan material from my first recording, Cansos de Trobadors. Three of the songs from that collection had been unexpected hits, launching my performing career simultaneously with my espionage career (the large pile of money had been a pleasant surprise on my first leave from the OSP Manila Training Facility).
The first song from Cansos de Trobadors was “The Wild Robbers of Serras Verz.” I boasted of the sharpness of my steel and my pitiless vengeance on the lackeys of the brutal king.
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