"But then why didn't you tell us?" She was raising her voice. "Why let us languish here while you build us an airship to reach the axle door, when we could have just walked home?"
He looked away. "If leaving were that easy, I wouldn't be here now."
This was no answer, so she waited. After a moment he shrugged and said, "Yes, this way does lead to Virga. No, you can't take it. The way is blocked."
"By what?"
"By them." He nodded at the indistinct shapes he'd called an armada. "Or their cousins, at any rate. Things live in the walls of Virga. They would eat you or incorporate you before you got ten meters."
"Then why were you going there?"
He looked up the long glass hall, appearing to weigh what he should tell her. "I come here sometimes," he said, still not looking at her, "and think about leaving Brink."
"For Virga?" She was careful not to sound too surprised; she wanted to encourage him to say more.
"Virga would be safer than ... back there." He nodded the other way, past Brink, at the many worlds of the arena and beyond. Well, that made sense, she thought; the emissary had told her much about the strange alien worlds of the arena--that volume of space that included Aethyr and Virga and, apparently, many other artificial worlds--and she wouldn't have wanted to visit them alone.
Here, though, was an apparent door to home, tantalizingly within reach. "The Edisonians build anything for you," she pointed out. "Couldn't they make something to get you past that door?"
"Maerta has forbidden them to make me anything more complicated than my experiments."
"Experiments?"
He shrugged. "Toys, I guess. I ask questions about the world. I make things to find out the answers."
Now he began walking, but back the way they'd come. Leal stared ahead at the hint of escape in the distance, and fell into step with Keir Chen. "So you're a prisoner here? Or do you just feel like you are?" She indicated the dragonflies hovering around him. "Are those your jailers?"
He laughed. "No, they're just eyes." He raised his hand and one of the little bugs came to land on his fingertip. "I evolved them and I guess I ... grew used to them. I'd feel blind without them now."
Then he frowned at her. "No, Maerta and the others aren't keeping me prisoner. They're just watching over me."
"Why do you need watching over?"
He seemed to struggle for an answer, then shrugged. "Because I'm a kid."
"You look like you'd be a man where I come from."
Keir didn't reply and she realized she might have embarrassed him. Eventually, as they came to the gallery again, she said, "Isn't there another world somewhere that you used to call home?"
"Oh, yes. I'm from Revelation." She raised her eyebrows encouragingly, and after a moment he said, "Ah. It's a planet in the inner system."
"I don't know anything about Vega's planets," she said. Leal had known there was a wider universe outside Virga, but like most people she'd been raised to think of it as an empty place, of no relevance to civilized human life. She'd learned differently when she met the emissary, but even it knew little about worlds other than its own.
Chen smiled slyly. "I'll tell you about Revelation, if you tell me about Virga."
Leal did an imitation of the scoffing sound her father used to make. "And I'll tell you about Virga if you tell me what you people are really doing in this godforsaken place. How's that for a deal?"
He laughed, sounding genuinely delighted. "I like that! And why not? I have nothing to hide." His face suddenly fell. "Less and less as the days pass, it seems."
Leal thought about her confrontation yesterday, and about Loll's reaction when he'd heard. "I've asked everyone I know from this world--your Maerta, the emissary, I even spoke to one of your Edisonians--but I still can't get a straight answer about something."
He looked amused. "That doesn't surprise me at all. What was the question?"
"What's so bad about immortality?"
He stopped, cocked his head, and said, "It assumes that there's some part of you that is, or could be, impervious to change. There isn't." He started walking again.
"Oh, but--" She caught up. "But this, this offer. You probably don't know, but yesterday something happened--" He held up a hand.
"I was kind of listening in," he said. He shrugged at her shocked expression. "Sorry."
"Then you know what happened. To my friend."
"He died and was revived by one of the factions of Artificial Nature. It happens."
"The virtuals, yes? But what are they? What is he now? And what is this offer he's talking about?"
Keir frowned. "He's become a part of the system that we're here to oppose. The virtuals want to dissolve the boundaries between everything physical. They want every physical object in the universe to be a potential host to Mind. They didn't so much revive your friend John as upgrade him. They loaded his consciousness into a network where it can live virtually, without reference to the physical world. There's trillions of consciousnesses in Artificial Nature, and more and more of them are leaving reality behind for these fantasy-realms."
"Oh. But--but that isn't how the emissary works, is it? The emissary claims it's also an enemy of these virtuals."
"Yes, your friend is different. It's a shape-shifter, yeah, but it's always embodied in one way or another. Have you noticed that its personality changes depending on what body it's built?"
"Yeessss ... It's rather annoying, actually."
"The morphonts--your emissary's people--allow themselves to be changed by their bodies. They don't pretend to be disembodied, pure software agents, like the things that upgraded your friend. Those--well, they're a nightmare."
"But why?"
"The virtual use physical bodies like puppets, but the problem is, either they were once physical beings like your friend John, or they never were. If they were, their whole consciousness is designed to fit a certain kind of physical being. Without that to anchor them, they go mad. I'm sorry to say this, but your friend either already has, or soon will. The only way to prevent it is to give him a virtual body or download him into a new physical one.
"The ones that never did have bodies never had any anchor to the physical world. They hate and despise it as a realm of dumb matter that shouldn't exist. Freedom for them means the ability to change not just their bodies, but their emotions, their minds, their memories ... they have no stable identity. They're a kind of force, one that's steadily aligned itself against the embodied--the real--throughout history."
"And they hate Virga..."
"Because Virga," and here he turned to gesture at the vast wall of darkness behind them, "is the last refuge of the fully embodied. The very last place where reality is not just what you say it is."
Very gradually, without really realizing it, they had come to a halt in the middle of the glass passageway. Now Leal rubbed her chin musingly, and nodded at Keir. "That's why your people are here, isn't it? You're trying to figure out how Candesce defends Virga against A.N."
He looked startled, then nodded sheepishly. "We're doing something humans used to do thousands of years ago. It's called science. You've probably never heard of it."
She laughed. "Of course I've heard of it. What kind of science?"
"Um. Experimental physics?" He looked at her as if he was expecting some outburst from her: laughter? Awe?
"Of course," she said.
Thoroughly deflated, he merely nodded. "That's no surprise," she told him mildly. "It sounds like everyone outside of Virga wants to know how the sun of suns works. How it is that it's able to keep Artificial Nature at bay. We kind of figured you were doing something like that. The question is, who are you doing it for?"