Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

'Oh, come on! Do I look like a spy?' --Which was the worst kind of thing to say if you really were a spy, of course, but he was going to obey Leal's instructions to the letter. 'You're my last chance; I'm leaving for home tomorrow.'

The shopkeeper sighed heavily. 'Listen, son, if a book's been banned--officially or not--do you really think you'd be likely to find a copy here?'

'Well, exactly. So...'

The man leaned over the counter. 'Where's the last place you'd expect to be buying books?'

'Oh, I don't know. The docks? The butcher's?'

'There's a cheese shop two blocks spinward,' said the shopkeeper innocently. 'That's pretty much the last place I'd look.'

'Huh. Thanks, I'll bear that in mind.' Keir left the shop, and five minutes later he walked out of the cheese shop with a brand-new copy of Antaea Argyre's controversial new autobiography. It was, of course, buried in the bag under his new clothing.

The book had been produced in record time. Keir had stopped by while Antaea was still dictating it to the bank of ghostwriters Admiral Fanning had attached to her. Dangling one leg over the velvet arm of the chair she was slumped in, idly swirling a wineglass in her hand, she had been answering yet another question about her mad dash across the airs of the world. The writers were typing madly at their baroque cast-iron 'type writers'; torn and crumpled pages forested the floor of the admiralty office where this secret activity was taking place. Keir had shaken his head at her, and she'd rolled her eyes in reply.

Fanning had driven his authors like pack animals, and so the book had hit the printers in a little over a week. Announced in a flurry of press releases and newspaper articles, it was immediately suppressed (though all the copies reputedly destroyed by the admiral were actually winging their way to neighboring countries, to there be sold as rare surviving editions).

All copies were supposed to be going to the public, since Keir and all the others already knew the story. Still, the admiral had started giving him an allowance, and it was up to him how to spend it. This copy of Antaea's book was his.

For a while he strolled the boulevards, enjoying the mad energy of a Virgan city. Without scry and all the other distractions of the outside world, the people here maintained a fantastic focus on their immediate lives. They were passionate in a way that nobody in the Renaissance could ever be. They reminded him of another place ... when he'd ...

He stopped, scowling. He'd almost caught that one. The memories were there, but without the order imposed on them by scry, he had to recover them manually, as it were. This was what de-indexing meant, he'd concluded: erasing, not memories themselves, but one's artificial aids to retrieving them. Maerta had acted like de-indexing was some sort of death sentence, and he supposed that in a way, it was--to someone born outside Virga.

These people, though, had never used artificial augmentations to their natural memories, and they were hardly suffering. In fact, they seemed happier than any people he'd ever met.

Was this his home now? He supposed it could be, and the thought made him shake his head in wonder at himself, for having had no plan beyond leaving Brink. Had that recklessness been courage, or youthful folly? He'd literally had no idea where he would go, but it hadn't mattered. He might not be done wandering yet, but for the moment, he didn't care.

So much for worrying about the future. Leal Maspeth had been shocked and appalled at John Tarvey's offer--but what was his sort of immortality, after all, but a photograph of life, preserved but not living. By contrast, the embodied people of Virga--who lived entirely in their flesh, and died there, too--had the better deal.

The rumble of a trolley sounded behind him. He glanced up to watch it go past, loving its crude mechanical beauty. A machine, designed and built to plan. Wonderful!

The machines of the city charmed him. Maybe he could become an engineer, and design and build the way people had thousands of years ago. To create something like that streetcar from nothing but your imagination and knowledge of the world! That one trolley made the evolved wonders of the Edisonians seem cheap.

Except that one woman didn't seem to see the thing coming. She was waving at a friend and stepping across the tracks as the trolley bore down on her. Keir felt a funny knot in his stomach--was this normal?--and the huge vehicle eclipsed her and he heard screams.

He just stood there, bag dangling from one hand, as people began running from all sides. Where were the medical remotes? The morphonts? First-aid nano? Why should all these strangers be converging on the screeching, braking streetcar whose passengers were toppling and grabbing one another now as the driver swore and swore?

Horror nearly drove him to his knees as he realized that there was no help coming.

Dropping the bag, he ran to the front of the trolley where what had been a woman in a green coat was now half-mashed under its prow. There was blood everywhere. The woman's friend was kneeling next to her and her screams were unlike anything Keir had ever heard.

He found himself reaching out--issuing commands to scry to summon help, to launch first-aid programs--but his hands grasped empty air. There were verbal commands to scry and to the Edisonians and fabs and he choked them out, but everyone ignored him as the driver staggered out of the trolley crying and shouting words in no language. The crying, shouting, and screaming echoed off the buildings and it must be climbing the canyon of the city like a pyre, a smoke of words and regrets rising to vanish in the light of the suns.

The crowd pushed Keir aside and he put one foot in front of the other, and again, feet ticking step by unsteady step up the curb, down the street, but going nowhere now.

* * *

THE LIGHT FROM Rush's sun made a circuit around the room, once every fifty seconds. Leal had timed it. The town wheel turned over, silent and perfect as a clock, and the parallelogram of yellow-white slid slowly down the wall, across the floor, up the farther wall, and back along the ceiling. You could keep time by it--if its cycle lasted a full minute, which it didn't. Somewhere, fluttering deep inside her, was resentment that the