worse these days. Sure enough, when he looked for it, he could see chunks of ice and snow piled around the bases of nearly every tower.
Better get inside, then. He hurried across the long span of bridge and into the lofting corridors of the metropoloid. Here was military order, of a sort: work gangs hauling strange devices up from the Hall and their various strange births in the Edisonians; soldiers hefting unfamiliar weapons; lines of men being debriefed by pacing officers.
Fanning had wasted no time in establishing a beachhead in Brink; in fact, he had clearly sent a sizable armada there after the abortive attack on Serenity. Keir had known a little about this activity, which was how he'd been able to get himself on board one of the fast courier sloops that Fanning had moored above the palace during the grand colloquy. Keir had talked to some of the pilots about what they might expect to find in Serenity and Brink. But he'd had no idea the operation was being conducted on this scale.
Lightning flickered through the windows and heads turned. 'They're at it again,' someone muttered. As he walked Keir counted half-consciously, waiting for the thunder to follow the lightning, but it didn't come. Just more insistent flashes.
He stopped a bare-chested navvy who was carrying a large steel cylinder. 'What's that?' Keir pointed to the window.
'It's the Enemy, in't,' said the airman. 'Battle to end all battles going on, or so they say. They tryin' to get here, our boys holdin' em off.'
Not lightning, then. Nukes, or laser fire, and probably hundreds of kilometers away. Keir frowned and hurried on.
He took the last set of stairs down to the Hall two steps at a time. In his imagination were all the ways that the virtuals could obliterate Aethyr, or Virga. They could accelerate an asteroid from the far side of the solar system, shoot it through both worlds at a thousand kilometers a second, and let the shock waves transform them into expanding spheres of gas ... then simply move in and harvest Candesce like the seed in a smashed fruit. They could stand off and peel off the world's skin with terawatt lasers, then aim them through the holes at every sun and city inside. They need not be polite.
He could guess what stopped them. They had no idea how Candesce worked. They did not know what it was capable of. And so far, they had done everything in their power to avoid
The tall doors to the Hall were guarded by a detachment of men in Slipstream uniforms. One put out his hand as Keir made to enter. 'You're not on our list.'
'I live here.'
The man looked Keir up and down, and he realized he was still wearing his now-rumpled dress attire from the colloquy. 'Try another one,' said the doorman.
'But--' He caught himself as he felt an odd but familiar feeling. It was scry, the whole cloud of relationships and nonverbal political fencing that had once been as intimate to him as his own breath. He couldn't help but smile as the network lit up with glyphs and emoticons of astonishment: they'd felt him log in.
There was something else, though, another familiar presence even more intimate than scry. And now his smile widened, alarming the doorman. 'One second,' said Keir; and he held up his arms, palms out.
A hundred dragonflies rustled out of the shadows, rising like the hood of a cobra to hover above him like some strange halo. The guards stepped back, swearing and fingering their unfamiliar new weapons. Suddenly Keir could see, in a way he hadn't been able to in months. He closed his own eyes in bliss.
'Let him in.' He'd brought his second body over from where it had been languishing in a closet in the Hall's foyer. The guards were even more startled by its appearance, for of course it looked like a younger version of Keir. It was waving to him from the Hall behind them, so they fell back and Keir walked past them with a confident nod--and into the arms of friends and comrades he hadn't properly spoken to or even recognized since his de- indexing.
Maerta came running. 'Keir, oh, Keir!' She flung her arms around him and he hugged her fiercely. 'You're--are you--'
'I'm whole,' he said as he squeezed her tightly. 'I remember everything. Everything.'
She broke away, troubled. 'Even why you did it?' He nodded. 'We sent Gallard to find you,' she said. 'Is he--?' But it would be obvious to all of them that he wasn't here. There was no sign of him in scry.
Keir shook his head. 'You didn't send him,' he said. 'He manipulated you into choosing him. It was his mission to find me.'
'Mission?' She shook her head, uncomprehending.
'I'll tell you everything,' he said, 'but not here.' The Hall was a chaos of steaming, stinking manufactories and running soldiers. 'Let's find somewhere quiet ... with a window.'
* * *
MAERTA AND A few others sat with him in a once-familiar boardroom now flooded with sunlight. The rest were listening in through scry. Keir sat in the sun, remembering the skies of Revelation, then sighed and told them the story. He began with his adventures inside Virga, meeting Antaea Argyre and Jacoby Sarto in that other lost city, and their flight from the knife-balls.
He told them about the glory of Virgan skies, of how Slipstream had welled into view over days as they approached it, like the opening eye of some god of the dawn. How its vast sphere of sunlit air had reached out to encompass their ship, bringing with it the visions of farms and towns, flying people and flocking birds. He described the astonishing ring-shaped city of Rush, and the mad Fannings and their baroque admiralty.
He described it all--the travels with Venera, the grand colloquy, and his deepening relationship with Leal Maspeth. And then he came to the garden, the tree, and the iron cheetah. And Gallard.
'He would have buried his sword in my back if my dragonfly hadn't seen him,' he said--and instantly, up and down Brink, in the Hall and the storerooms and laboratories, every member of the Renaissance stopped what they were doing.
Maerta stood up, almost knocking over her chair. 'Gallard
