Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

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