In the agricultural sphere, the sky shaded from deep blue behind the ship to bright yellow ahead; the predominant color was a kind of mauve. Here were the first wheeled towns he'd seen, and they were as pretty and delicate as he'd imagined they would be. They appeared first as faint circles drawn on the sky, then gradually resolved into wood-and-rope hoops, very thin and fragile, their narrow inside surfaces crowded with buildings. Like the tomato plants, they were surrounded by swarming life, in this case, ships, winged human figures, and drifting cargo nets. He saw flights of saddled dolphins, these not genetically engineered but wearing fin extenders.
Inside the thick shell of farming communities was another volume of sky, this one speckled with towns and private dwellings in all shapes and sizes. Here the air was blue, the clouds white and the sunlight yellow. The Page passed double-hulled, majestically spinning yacht-houses that defied definition as either building or vehicle.
Now that the agricultural clouds no longer occluded the view, Keir could see something strange about the sky ahead. Contrails pierced the vista like the threads of some gigantic spiderweb. Some converged on the sun whose light now felt hot on Keir's face--but the vast majority drew lines at right angles to it. Squinting, he saw that dozens--maybe hundreds--of giant ships were jetting in the direction of that other sun he'd spotted earlier. Alerted to the movement, he could now see that some of the town wheels were inching in that direction, too--rolling, as it were, through the sky. He squinted, holding up his hand to block the light, and thus caught his first glimpse of the city of Rush.
Rush's iron town wheels spun in quartets, each mile-wide circle bannered like a twirling paper lantern. The city hovered in the long shadow cast by a forested asteroid, in white, water-saturated air that trembled with heat. Here the ships and jets and flying contraptions flocked in the thousands, contrails and rope roads stitched the air, and the mansions of the wealthy and powerful flocked as thickly as the fish had earlier.
He heard a banging sound and turned to see a hatch opening on the Page's hull. Leal Maspeth's people started boiling out, laughing and turning their faces to the light with grins of relief and pleasure; and when one of them swore, pointed, and shouted something to the others, they suddenly began cheering as one.
Maspeth's head poked out after them. She appeared as puzzled as Keir by the vision of her men shrieking and howling. One of them bounced right off the hull in his excitement and only the quick reflexes of a friend kept him from sailing off into the sky.
Keir hand-walked toward them along the netting draped on the side of the ship. Maspeth's friend Piero Harper had appeared now, and he, too, was grinning like a fool.
Keir stopped next to Leal, who nodded coolly at him, as if this were their first meeting today. One of her eyebrows was cocked in bemusement. "They're happy to be home?" asked Keir.
"This isn't their home," she said. "These men are from Aerie; this country is Slipstream."
"It's today! It's today!" one of the airmen was shouting. Another was weeping openly, his tears flicking away like jewels in the ship's headwind. "We made it in time!"
Harper laughed. "Freedom Day!" he shouted. "We did it!"
Leal's eyes lit with understanding. "Oh! Look!" Keir followed her pointing finger.
Now he saw that there were two colors of banner and crest on the airships and town wheels. Those of Rush were gold and red. On the ships that were now arrowing toward that distant second sun, the crests were green.
"Slipstream invaded and conquered Aerie a decade ago," Leal said to Keir. "They destroyed Aerie's sun so that Aerie's people would become utterly dependent on them. It was the Pilot of Slipstream who gave the orders, and no one could oppose him at the time.
"These men," she gestured at Harper and the others, "built a new sun for Aerie; you can see it burning there." She pointed at the distant second point of light. "They gave Aerie a new sun, and with the Pilot dead, Slipstream has given the citizens of Aerie their freedom. But even though they lit the new sun two years ago, most people haven't moved into its light yet. It's been going through testing and safety trials."
"And now," shouted Harper, "they're done! Our sun's been proven stable. We can all go home!"
Freedom Day. Keir pictured two Virgan nations: each was defined by a vast sphere of light inside of which were all its agriculture, its towns, factories, and mansions. A country could be destroyed if its sun was snuffed out. Its people would become refugees, desperately fleeing to whatever lit airs they could find. Even worse, one nation could simply move into the space occupied by another, assimilating its sun and cities and people directly, like one amoeba swallowing another. Evidently Aerie had proven too tough a foe for this latter strategy, but with their sun gone, they'd been helpless. Slipstream had swallowed all their towns and farms, making them all dependent on Slipstream's own sun.
The great iron wheels of Rush surrounded the Page now. Keir could clearly make out the rooftops, chimneys, and streets that paved their inside surfaces. Also visible were clouds of people swarming around a wheel whose inner surface was one continuous building--a sumptuous place of gardens and balconies, towers and towering halls, all wrapped into a ring and spun like a giant's toy. The crowds--men and women and children flapping spring-loaded wings or pedaling saddled propeller-fans--were gathering at the central space around which this beautiful building turned.
Harper nodded at it. "The Pilot's palace," he said. "Hey, look!" he added, turning to his men. "Whose face is that?" He laughed.
Keir could see that some of the biggest banners had been printed with the image of a man's face. He seemed young, with angular features and pale eyes. Now Harper and the others began pumping their fists in the air and chanting, "Sun lighter! Sun lighter! Sun lighter!"
The crowd and the banners formed a rough arc around a crimson disk that hovered in the air next to the palace. Huge mirrors aimed sunlight at this, and as Keir watched, a small group of people (little more than dots at this distance) began drifting into the focus of the light.
"Who's that?" he wondered aloud.
Leal Maspeth crossed her arms on the edge of the hatch, and smiled in self-satisfaction. "I believe those are the very people we've come to talk to."
"Really? And what are we here to talk about?"
Now she laughed. "Why, we've come to tell them the whereabouts of the one man who's missing this party--the man responsible for building Aerie's new sun."
"And who would that be?"
She pointed at the image on the distant banners.
"Hayden Griffin. The sun lighter!"
* * *
TO EVERYONE'S SURPRISE, when they hove to at a mooring station high on the axle of one of the grand cylinders, Jacoby Sarto refused to dock the ship. "Belay that!" he'd shouted at the crewman who was about to toss a rope to a boy waiting at the metal lip of the docking cylinder. "We're unloading passengers only."
They'd all been gathered at the open door of the ship's little hold anyway, and now Antaea turned to Sarto. "Why?" she asked.
He laughed brusquely. "You ask me that? What do you think she'll do to you when she finds out you're here?" He shook his head. "Don't get me wrong, give her my best when you see her," he added to Leal. "But I intend to be over the border before she knows I've been here."
Nobody argued; they all knew who she was, either personally or by reputation. So, Leal found herself admiring Antaea's courage when, two hours later, they stood in an outer office of the Slipstream admiralty, and Argyre said calmly, "Oh, he'll know me," to the uniformed secretary.