Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

again and promised them reparations.

That sort of ruckus had never seemed remarkable to Keir when he was living here. At some point after he'd left Revelation, though, and before he'd de-indexed his own life, the tulips and the pixies had become the most urgent part of his memories of Revelation. He just wished he remembered why.

A shadow fell across the clutch of tulip terrariums. Keir looked up to see a black, faceless, hooded figure looming over the path. It raised a bony finger and pointed it at him accusingly.

This was no longer a memory of the day he'd discovered Sita's discontent; instead, he was remembering visiting that memory at some time after.

'You should not be here,' said the nag.

He glared at it. 'I'm not staying.' The nags were a common feature of the scry, and he would regularly see them in the distance when he visited this, or any memory. They were there to kick you out of your recorded past if you spent too much time there. They were an annoying, but important, mental-health tool of the scry.

He'd always considered the nags a nuisance, though he'd rarely met one up close. When he'd laid down this particular memory, they'd still been common in Revelation's scry.

'You keep coming here,' grated the nag now. 'We don't like it.' It bent over and began swatting box tulips. Each virtual terrarium fizzed and vanished as the nag touched it.

Keir remembered cursing. 'How can you say that! You left Revelation! You abandoned us.'

'You should go. Or do you want me to wipe this record clean?' The nag began reaching out, grabbing distant clouds, hills on the horizon, and floating city-spheres. Soon it had an armful of scene elements. 'Do you want these memories crushed?'

'You dare threaten me with that?' Keir pointed a shaking finger at one of his Sitas. 'When you gave up on her?' The nag squeezed, and pieces of the memory popped like soap bubbles. Keir yelled in fury and fell out of the scene--and, on Venera's yacht, banged against the wall of his sleeping closet.

* * *

LEAL FOUND HIM outside. Keir was sitting on the yacht's hull, letting the fresh breeze following the storm caress his brow. He opened his eyes when she appeared in the hatch, noticed the concern on her face and, as she made to go back inside, said, 'No. I'd appreciate the company.'

She clipped a line to her belt and climbed out next to him. Candesce was a yellow fire at infinity, just slightly too dim to make daylight for any nation that might covet this volume of air. It was still night by Slipstream's clock, and the ship had been quiet when he'd come out here.

Leal settled down next to him, but said nothing. Keir felt a growing compulsion to fill the silence; at last he said, 'Do you know how old I am?'

She shook her head. 'Seventeen? Nineteen? Or do your years differ from ours?'

'No, they don't.' He met her gaze and said, 'Leal, I am seventy-nine years old. Too young to have neotenized myself twice. Yet it seems I did.'

She reared back in surprise, almost losing her grip on the hull. 'Keir, what are you talking about?'

'Neotenizing. De-indexing. They're two ways to renew yourself when the weight of life and memory gets to be too much.' He looked back at the flowerlike cloudscape ahead of them. 'With de-indexing, you sever your ability to access certain records of your past. Then, your natural memories wither as well. It's a gentle way of turning your back on past events ... relationships ... that you want to forget.

'But neotenization ... it means 'to turn into a child.' That's a much more radical procedure.' He held out his hands, which had once been larger and stronger. He'd had a scar on the back of the left one, though he no longer remembered where or when he'd gotten that. The scar was lost, and so was the memory.

'I've--I've been thinking a lot,' murmured Leal, 'about what you said--that death and immortality are equally bad choices. Your people learned this from experience with both.'

'Of the two, death is the better choice,' he said. 'Death is forgetting, and there's plenty of reasons why you should want to do that.

'I was not born in the city of Brink. I come from a planet named Revelation, and I owned a house there. I was married.' He looked at her, but now her expression was neutral. She was intent on his words, and not ready to judge them yet.

'My wife, Sita ... she de-indexed me. At the time, I was devastated; it was the end of a relationship I had built my life around. What I didn't know at the time was that what she'd done ... Well, millions of people on Revelation were undergoing similar transformations. The scry on Revelation had been compromised--hacked, I think is the old word for it. Sita didn't just leave me ... she left humanity itself.'

Now that he knew where to look in his own mind, he remembered it--not all, but enough. Sita had forgotten him; but in the months after their marrage had dissolved, he'd still held out hope that they might have a second chance. They could, after all, start over from scratch as long as she didn't de-list him from her social reality.

But then, during the gentle winter of the year, something had started killing nags.

Revelation had always been a beautiful planet, and most of its beauty was real. The virtual overlays that accented it (like the cascades of pixie dust the fairies threw off) were subtle and added to the wonder of the natural world. Anyone who spent too long in a purely virtual world would get kicked out by the nags; keeping people anchored in reality was, after all, their function.

'When the rumors about the nags started,' he told Leal, 'I was too sunk in my own misery to pay much attention. At first I didn't notice when the scry's overlays on my senses began to become more detailed, more interlinked into these strange and gorgeous, purely virtual realms. I guess I was sufficiently unhappy--and sufficiently stubborn not to take a cure for my misery--that I remained immune to this kind of a ... siren call ... of a nag-free, virtual paradise that had started to creep over Revelation.'

As he'd sat here on the hull of the Judgment, Keir had found himself thinking about