and yet--
'And yet humanity already has allies in the greater universe,' Loll had said, nearly shouting, as he stood before her in the remote corridor where he'd found her. 'Our true allies! Human, like us! And more than that--immortal! I told you we should heed Tarvey's words the first time he came back to us, but you fled. Leal, you're still fleeing, but from what? The mere chance that you might be wrong?'
Just thinking of those words made her pick up her pace, and she would have been half-running now if the gravity in Brink were not so low. Each step she took lifted her off the floor for a couple of seconds, and the delay frustrated her attempt to act out her mood. After a few minutes she had to laugh at her own petulance, and she came to a stop in the intersection of several black-mouthed corridors.
This area was still within the precincts of Complication Hall. Tarvey's shade couldn't reach her here, if indeed it still prowled the city. By itself the darkness didn't frighten Leal; she had grown up in a sunless country, after all. So, after getting her bearings, she set off determinedly down one of the less-traveled ways.
'Where are we going?' asked the emissary mildly.
'Maerta told me there's a room where you can see stars.'
'Ah.' It said nothing more, and she quirked a smile in the dark. The junk-doll often said 'ah' when it encountered human behavior that it didn't understand. The less of its nanomaterial there was in one of the emissary's bodies, the stupider it was. At least the doll could speak, though, unlike many of its constructions.
It had taken Leal quite a while to realize that the buildings of this 'metropoloid,' Brink, weren't just anchored on the skin of Aethyr--many of them penetrated that skin, so that above they clawed at the sky, and below, airtight galleries and inverted towers hung like icicles in the actual vacuum of space. All she had to do was find the lowest level of the Hall and locate stairs that continued down ... search down some curving corridors, walk yet more stairs, and pace through some dark arches ... and there it was.
She took a deep breath and tentatively stepped out to stand on a glass floor, above a canyon of immeasurable depth, its walls the hulls of Virga and Aethyr. Far below her feet, tiny pinpricks glittered in their uncountable thousands.
She let the sight of them fill her eyes, and murmured, 'I may never get another chance to see stars, you know. How could I explain to my grandchildren that I missed my last chance?'
'Or they may become commonplace for you,' said the doll.
She sent it a sharp look. Would she ever leave Virga again, once she made it back? It was doubtful, but anything had become possible for her--which was the problem. Her future was a frightening blank, and the closer she got to delivering the emissary's message to her people, the larger that uncertainty loomed.
She plucked the doll from her shoulder and set it on the floor. 'I'd like to be alone for a while, if you don't mind.' She made a shooing motion, back in the direction of Complication Hall.
It looked around itself, then said, 'Are you not worried by what Minister Loll said? He threatened you.'
'Did he? I don't think so.' Loll's next-to-last words to her had been 'I'm giving you one last chance to see reason, Leal! Say you'll at least listen to what John Tarvey has to say. You can't deny that he's offering us a kind of hope that your 'emissary' never has!' He'd made to grab her arm, and Leal had pulled back; but she'd never felt physically threatened by him.
'Loll relies on others to do his violence. Himself, he wouldn't hurt a fly. No, I'll be all right, I just need some time to think. Tomorrow--tomorrow we return to Virga, and then things will get ... busy.' She made the shooing motion again, and with obvious reluctance, the doll walked away.
Leal knelt and gazed for a while at the quiet stars. She tried to fill her eyes and her mind with them, yet her thoughts kept circling around to that blank in her future. She could not picture a future where she was happy.
She hated the weight of responsibility that lay on her shoulders. Of all her people, only Leal had visited the emissary's realm. She'd spent several weeks there and learned much about the weird and chaotic reality that reigned beyond Virga's walls. Except for Loll, her human companions were ordinary airmen caught up in an adventure they'd never sought. Harper and the others had literally been cast without warning from the familiar airs of Virga onto the plains of Aethyr. None had even guessed that Virga--the five-thousand-mile-diameter bubble that they mostly just called 'the world'--had a Siamese sister, that the two worlds were joined like two soap bubbles floating through space. Leal had found a door in the wall between the two bubbles; alone, she had traveled from Virga to Aethyr and beyond. She had chosen to do so. She had seen stars. The others had not.
The emissary's people were eloquent, and their arguments convincing. The emissary itself ... was not so good with human language. When they returned to Virga, it would lose its mind, as it had when it first visited there. The responsibility for delivering its message to all the nations of Virga lay entirely on Leal's shoulders. And that was terribly unfair.
The silence here was so perfect that she heard the scuffing footsteps from a good hundred feet away. Suddenly certain that the emissary had been right and Loll was after her, Leal straightened and looked for shelter or escape. If she ran, the other would hear her footsteps, too, and anyway, running was impractical in this gravity. There were places to hide, though, so she hunkered down behind one of the room's buttresses. There were stars below her feet and at her back, but the buttress itself was of solid metal, so it should hide her.
Keir Chen entered the gallery. He was only really visible as a silhouette, but she didn't know anyone else who walked around in a swarm of glowing bugs. He didn't glance at the starscape or pause in stepping from white floor to glass. Then he disappeared through an exit in the glass wall that Leal hadn't spotted earlier.
He had been friendly toward her; he was no threat. The temptation to follow him was too great, so, she did.
Chen could somehow see through his dragonflies, so Leal hung well back. Everybody had assured her that the wild city was empty; Keir's people spent almost all their time in and around Complication Hall. So where was Chen going?
The reason she hadn't spotted the passage he was taking now was because it was a simple glass tube that arced out into the darkness for an indeterminate distance. Born as she'd been in a world of freefall, Leal had no trouble with the illusion that she was walking on air (or, she knew, in empty space). There was none of the sense of crushing cold that you felt at the walls of Virga or on the slopes of Aethyr; at least here, Brink had remembered to insulate its chambers. Keir Chen walked on darkness a few hundred feet ahead, and Leal padded steadily behind him.
Once she glanced back, and saw that they had left the icicle-like hanging towers of Brink far behind. This
