Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

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THEY REMAINED AT the way station for a day, while final repairs were completed on the cruiser. Venera spent much of that time as the queen of a buzzing hive of courier bikes, who zipped in from all six points of the compass to drop off and pick up dispatches. She was planning something, that was obvious, and it was equally obvious that she didn't want her husband to know about it until it was too late for him to veto her. At one point as Keir flew by the main room in her yacht, he heard her telling one of the cruiser's captains, 'We're on the far side of the world from Slipstream. I have no time to send home for orders! No, we do this now, or the opportunity is lost.'

Later, Hayden Griffin and the Home Guard commander Lacerta came by. After an intensive grilling from Venera, they stayed to sample her liquor cabinet and talk. Keir was finally introduced to the famous sun lighter, and after some initial caution, found that he quite liked Griffin. They had something in common, after all: they both loved machines.

Maybe that was the trigger--thinking about machinery--because late that night, Keir began to remember.

There was a storm that night, and even though the Judgment was lashed to the station's dock, the winds howled past and shook it like a child's toy. Slotted into his bunk like a wasp in its hive, Keir found himself in total darkness, and weightless except when a gust caught the ship. The close walls of the sleeping closet would tap him unexpectedly, and he'd jolt awake to the sounds of flight or the strange rumble of thunder in an echoless sky. He had no idea how long this went on; and while it did, his mind drifted from Hayden's description of sun-building to jumbled images of things he'd built in Brink--and then beyond.

At first, yes, it was just Brink, and Maerta and the others, though Leal appeared to him, too, more than once. Something about his changing feelings for her reminded him of other memories--but he couldn't find them, he couldn't find them. He kept groping for scry's emblems, but scry didn't work in Virga.

That was Candesce's fault. Right now he hated the sun of suns, and its dark influence on technologies it didn't approve of. He resented its secretive mystery; how it hid itself in wreaths of flame at the heart of Virga, while its vast invisible wings unfurled to the very walls of the world and beyond.

So good, then, that he'd plucked one of its feathers--turned, triumphant, to wave it to Maerta except, no, hadn't it been Sita? Sita all along?

--And suddenly there he was, perched on a bench in a garden whose hedge mazes and flower-dewed trellises draped like the skirts of a seated woman around a round-towered, coral-hued house. The white sun Vega blazed in the zenith, and heat haze and the buzzing of insects complicated the air around him.

The planet's name was Revelation; the continent's, Aegeas, and the city whose floating aerostats peppered the horizon was Atavus. He'd grown up here.

His wife, Sita, was humming as she aerated the roots of some little yellow flowers with her long fingers, lovingly tending the little lives. She was also standing on a ladder and frowning at the gutters of the house, where stalks of grass were poking up. One of her was a proxy, but it would never have occurred to Keir to wonder which one. Sita inhabited both bodies simultaneously and with equal ease.

'Sandrine introduced me to this man the other day,' her Self in the garden was saying. The glyphs around her head indicated she was talking to Fethe, one of her oldest friends, who was a thousand kilometers south of them today. 'She said you know him a little?'

Keir watched her closely, as if he could learn something this time that he hadn't been able to perceive the last hundred times he'd visited this record within his scry.

'Yes, she said you thought I should meet him.' Sita laughed. 'His name is Keir Chen...' Her expression grew troubled, and she looked around herself, and spotted him.

They'd been married for six years at that point, and had known one another for ten.

Keir stood and walked a little ways away so that he could see himself sitting on the bench. You could do that in scry, since its records of an event didn't have to be limited to what you saw with your own eyes. From outside, the look on Keir's own face was eloquent, as it always was in the record. The version of Keir he was looking at had just come to realize that his wife was de-indexing, and that it was the emblems of her time with him that she was erasing.

A fateful conversation was about to start, but Keir didn't want to hear it. He kept on down the path, which stitched itself together from the infinite storage of his scry as he went. It could show him every instant he'd spent here, but it usually mashed them together into the emblem of an idealized, perfect day. Not for this day's events, though; he rarely accessed their emblems, but reviewed them in their entirety.

De-indexing had been a taboo for him before Sita started doing it. After, he'd drifted into temptation, year after year. But when something finally happened that made him annihilate vast tracts of his past, for some reason he'd remembered all those pieces he'd always planned to lose. Instead of erasing the pain and the disappointments-- even Sita's betrayal--he'd kept it all, and lost something else.

Near the path, a cloud of pixies was fluttering around a meter-high revus bush that was threatening them with tiny cannons mounted on its metal leaves. 'Don't you dare!' a pixie scolded as the guns swiveled toward it. 'Keir Chen will dig you up if you shoot us!'

The plant began firing, in a cascade of little pops that would be inaudible from more than three meters away. The pixies ducked and swerved and, from a safe distance, began chanting 'We're telling! We're telling!'

Keir rarely visited this part of the record, but somehow this time he remembered it--as he was remembering everything now in his dream, rather than accessing his scry. For some reason he'd stopped and frowned at the unfolding drama. Pixies, dryads, talking trees--they'd been a normal part of his life on Revelation. The world was an enchanted place and, even at the time of this memory, he'd taken that for granted.

Near the revus was a clutch of box tulips. The flowers were ordinary enough, but each one was contained in a crystal case scaled to its size and pose. Like the nanotech revus bush, each terrarium was festooned with miniature cannons, trembling stingers, and caterpillar-blinding lasers. Little doors in the boxes sported flashing bee-attractor signs.

Woe to the gardener who tried to dig up a box tulip. At the first cut of the trowel their planetary mesh network would go on high alert. Tulip sirens would go off all over the neighborhood. Brain-hacked wasps would converge on you. The tulip consortium's AIs would harass you by tagging your scry with insults and slanderous accusations. Their shell companies and corporations would hire lawyers and sue you.

If you made it indoors unscathed, the tulips would bomb the other flowers in your garden until you came out