She'd seen this reaction in Hayden Griffin's airmen: both stared at her for a moment in shock, then simultaneously opened their mouths to argue or question. Leal held up her hand and turned her head away. "No," she said. "I'm tired of explaining myself to gatekeepers. The Guard are swarming around the door to Aethyr because of me and my message. A thousand ships are mustered because all they know is that Virga is threatened. I alone have the answer to their panic."
She'd allowed some of her impatience to creep into her voice and stance, and she could see they were both taken aback by that sudden hint of ferocity.
Jacoby Sarto raised an eyebrow. "So what would you have of us?" he asked with heavy irony. "That we deliver you to the Guard? The legends say they're based at the Gates of Virga." Antaea nodded as if this were common knowledge.
"That was my original plan," Leal admitted. "But on our way here I thought about it, and I don't believe they'll listen to me now. My intention was to confront them with the witnesses who accompanied me up from the plains of Aethyr, but Eustace Loll was one of those men, and he's had plenty of time now to poison them with lies. If we go to the Gates, I'll just be arrested again and my message will never reach the ears of those who need to hear it."
Sarto's ironic look slipped as he saw that she was dead serious. "You say that you alone have the answer to their panic. But," he pointed out, "I can't see that you've brought any proof with you. Or have you?"
Bitterly, she shook her head. "The Guard knows much of what happened, and with my witnesses I might have convinced them--if Eustace Loll hadn't gotten to them first. No, I have no direct proof of my claims."
"Then why should any of us believe you?"
"Oh, you don't have to," she said with a grim smile. "Nobody has to, at this point. But I do have a way of getting all the proof I need, if you'll drop me and my men at a particular port."
"And where would that be?" asked Sarto.
Leal looked at Antaea. "I need to talk to a man I think you know," she said. "Bring me to the city of Rush, in the nation of Slipstream, that I may speak to Admiral Chaison Fanning."
After Antaea flinched back and swore, Leal said again, "Take me to him.
"And then things will start to happen."
Part Two | THE CHEETAH AND THE TREE
10
"WHAT ARE YOU doing?"
Keir had to turn his head to see who'd spoken. It was Leal Maspeth, but she seemed somehow transformed--younger. Part of that was freefall, he knew, which took years off you. But she seemed radiant from some other cause as well. A glance around was all it took to know what that was.
He shifted his position slightly, allowing her to climb onto the mast beside him. "I feel less blind out here," he said in answer to her question. He'd been riding on the outside of the ship for the past hour, as light slowly emerged from the dark sky ahead of them.
He opened his hands to show her what he'd been cupping in the ship's headwind. "A dragonfly?" she asked.
He nodded.
Inside the ship he was constantly reminded of the vision he now lacked. He kept hitting his head on unexpected obstacles, and rapping his knuckles on invisible objects in the dimness. It was upsetting. So he'd come out here.
He pointed past the gray prow of the ship, to where a triangle of mauve and peach-colored sky beckoned past flocks of black cloud. "What is that?"
"That," she said, obviously savoring the sight, "is a country."
"Your country?"
She shook her head. "My country has no sun. No--that should be Slipstream, in the Hadley cell called Meridian."
Keir realized he'd been waiting for something to happen--waiting for his scry to update him on her recent activities; her alliances and distances within the group. But the intricate small-group politics of the Renaissance didn't exist in Virga. Some other kind of complexity did, and he couldn't figure out how it worked.
"So ... how are you?"
His question sounded utterly inane to his own ears, and it must have to her as well, because she simply smiled and said, "Antaea said this was yours."
She handed him the gun he'd given Argyre. As he took it from Leal she gripped the spar between her feet and casually, gracefully back-flipped through the ship's open hatch and out of sight.
"Oh, but I--" Don't need it. He sat there dumbly holding the weapon for a few seconds. There was no helpful advice from his scry about what she'd really wanted, or what he should do. After an awkward pause he clipped the gun onto his belt and turned back to the view.
Had he not been half-blind already, he surely would have retreated inside soon after, because as the light welled up the terrifying scale of this ocean of air became visible. Keir couldn't remember much about his life before Brink, but he knew he'd grown up on a planet. He was used to skies that had, if not a visible boundary, at least some end to their cloudscapes. He was used to sky being framed by ground. In Virga there was only an infinity of cloudscapes spreading to all directions--tolerable, when it was dark, but a staggering assault on the imagination when its vast depths were sketched by light. It was exhilarating, magnificent, and far too big to take in no matter how much he stared.
The ship wove its way between mountain-sized clouds, making a steady sixty or eighty kilometers per hour. As it did the light from ahead brightened, becoming a broad region of canary-yellow sky cupping an intense red dot at its center. Though it must be hundreds of kilometers away, that red dot was the visible radiance of a man-made sun, a nuclear-fusion reactor of mightily primitive but practical design. This eternally falling drop of air, this world of Virga, was clouded with such suns--hundreds of them. Keir had never seen one with his own eyes, for bright as they were, the devices could only carve small spheres of day out of the dark. --With one exception, of course. Candesce, the sun of suns, immolated the whole middle space of Virga, and dozens of civilizations orbited it like birds wheeling around a lighthouse.
Far to the right was another crimson dot, this one smaller--another nation, remote, half-eclipsed by its neighbor.
Long minutes passed and Leal didn't return. Keir watched the dawn open like a flower, a sun not rising but emerging. And with it, at last, came details.
First to become clear were this nation's heavy industries. They skimmed the shell of the spherical domain carved by the light: factories, complicated snarls of metal like vast seashells gouting smoke and grit and poisonous clouds into the dark. Any farther out, and these places stood to lose sight of their sun altogether--and could thus be doomed to wander the blackness unless by luck they found another country. Any further in, and they would pollute the agricultural spheres.
These came next as the Page sailed on--as the light became brighter, Keir saw that some of the clouds around him were not white, but green. On an individual basis those specks were potato and corn, rice and millet and oats; gathered together in wave upon wave of ever-greater scale, they became cirrus and cumulus, nimbus and stratus--entire clouds of life.
The Page passed a streamer of tomatoes. Keir watched a small knot of them sail by, five plants with their roots tangled around a common clod of dirt. Aphids and midges swarmed around the little world, and some sort of songbird trilled from inside the foliage.
They passed schools of giant, fire-colored fish that showed obvious signs of being genetically engineered: their fins were huge, like diaphanous wings, and they had eyelids; one flew next to Keir for a long minute, blinking at him dumbly, before turning back to its fellows.
He'd heard that many of the people who lived in Virga were unaware their world was artificial. He found this hard to believe.