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.'
When Keir didn't respond, she looked over in sudden concern. 'What is it?'
He blinked and turned his eyes away from a virtual world to her. 'They've identified the last of the remains from Brink,' he said. 'It's Maerta.'
'Oh, Keir, I'm so sorry.'
He'd seen the photos before, but couldn't help calling up again the incinerated towers and jumbled walls skating in random lines down the slopes of Aethyr. You needed your imagination to picture what had been here once; the metropoloid was no longer easily distinguished from the scree that surrounded it. Brink had fallen in the first hours of the battle, before Keir had even reached Fanning's flagship. He'd given the fabs there the plans for his generator, but all their efforts had gone into finishing his in time; they hadn't been able to build their own before the bombs had fallen. His only consolation was that the invaders had poised themselves eagerly above the vast hammerlike cloud of the city's destruction, and burst as one into Virga when Candesce's field fell only to become frozen, as if in amber, when Candesce reawakened. They had been easy pickings for the Guard's precipice moths and none were left by the time Candesce began its stuttering.
He swept the pictures away, and found that another set had been mailed to him by some anonymous fan of his work. These new images were from the planet Revelation, where he'd grown up. That entire world was now surrounded by a Candesce-like field, and photos from the ground showed plains of shattered and crumbling structures stretching all the way to the horizon. The virtuals had spent the last few years papering over Revelation's biosphere with computronium in an attempt to turn the whole planet into a giant simulator for their virtual paradise. It had all collapsed, and grass and new trees now poked between the crystalline spines of the virtuals' machineries. Somewhere in there, Sita's bones would finally be returning to the ecosystem that had first given them life.
In a hundred years, maybe, his old home would begin to look the way it once had. That was a sad thought; but if there was any lesson to be learned from Virga's fight with Artificial Nature, it was that you must let some things unfold in their own way, and in their own time.
Bangs and thumps came from below as Hayden and his men slammed the sun's maintenance hatches. 'Clear out!' he shouted, waving a wrench over his head in the faint light from Slipstream. 'Daybreak in ten minutes!'
'Come, love,' said Leal, taking his hand. 'You need a rest, and I've got a lecture at nine.'
He dismissed the photos, and the memories and regrets, and with his wife stepped into the unbounded air of the new day.
* * *
'WHERE IS HE? Where is he?' Venera Fanning was practically running down the corridors of the ambassadorial mansion in Aurora. Hayden Griffin had been musing at some virtual windows that showed the current performance of his sun, but now he turned to watch her go by.
'What's wrong?' he asked.
She didn't reply, just snarled and kept quick-marching along. That was a difficult thing to do, given the sheath dress she had evidently decided to wear for today's ceremony. He'd rarely seen Venera so upset, though, so after a glance at his displays, Hayden strolled after her. His windows drifted after him, keeping a discreet distance.
'Disaster!' Venera veered toward a drinks table on her way through the ballroom, and grabbed a champagne glass. 'A complete catastrophe!' She downed the glass in one gulp, set it to teeter on the edge of the table, and hurried on, feet tick-ticking in the very short steps allowed by the dress.
Since nobody had asked him to give a speech, Hayden had not bothered to remember what today's ceremony was for--he only knew that it was the last time he'd be seeing the Fannings in Aurora. They were bound for Rush tomorrow, doubtless to plan some sort of grief for the next cloud of countries Slipstream was drifting into. Hayden
