Stunned, she froze, and for a long minute neither of them spoke. Then: "Sita," he said, "was my wife."
"Was..." Leal tried to think past her confusion. "Before you came to the Renaissance?"
"I don't know. But I do know that she lost her life. I also know that she didn't die. Not the way that woman today died."
They sat there for another long time, while Leal hunted for something to say that would make sense. "Our world's not evil," she said finally. "Just different. Brun--if you'd seen what he saw in the dark, you'd have laughed it off. To him, meeting the emissary was like ... what you saw today is to you. Not that I would ever laugh off a death, I don't mean that."
He shut his eyes tightly and grimaced. "I was just starting to think that I'd found paradise--like I'd been living in some shadow world my whole life and only just now woke up. And then..."
She nodded against his thick hair. "There's this ancient story that I came across while I was researching the emissary--back when the rumors were that it was a worldwasp, one of the builders of Virga. The story's about a prince who builds a machine to travel outside of Virga. He's been maddened, see, by grief at the death of his wife, and has decided to visit the country of the dead to bring her back. The country of the dead is what lies outside Virga. The story goes that he builds a vast black orb, bigger than a town and sealed with tar and bound in iron. Somehow, he pierces the outer skin of the world and then he sails his mad vessel into the blackness there."
Keir leaned away from her. He still looked haggard, but that awful stare had gone, at least for now. "And then what?" he said.
"Well," she said, crossing her legs and clasping one knee. "That's where the legend ends for most versions of the story; but over the centuries some authors were unsatisfied with this cliffhanger, and here this one added a dramatic return, that one a cryptic message in a bottle, and another, a great voice shouting from the dark..." She smiled at him. "But it's as the story says--the walls of Virga separate the land of the living from the land of the dead. Only now I see, which I never did before, that whichever side you come from is the land of the living, and whichever side you end up in, is..." Suddenly realizing how awful this notion must sound, she stopped; but he was nodding.
"There's a choice to be made," he said. "Immortality or death. Sita is still alive--in some sense. But what happened to her--what I think happened--well, immortality and death are equally terrible."
"There's a third choice, though," she said. He nodded, and then to her surprise, sent her a rueful, and very old-looking smile.
"How neatly symmetrical." His words were dry, even cynical.
He shook away her hands and stood up. "I'm fine," he said. "I'll be fine." Then he looked around his feet. "I lost the bag."
"Don't worry about that. Let's just get out of here." He walked out of the infirmary with her hand on his arm, and, twenty minutes ago, Leal would have imagined no better ending to the episode. Yet his face was a mask and she now knew that it had been from the start--that she had a long way to go before she met the real Keir Chen.
* * *
WHEN VENERA FANNING learned what had happened, she frowned, thought for a minute, then strode into the guest quarters and said, "Where is he?"
She came to stand over him as he sat ashen-faced in a lounge by the window. For a while she sized him up, noting the length of his arms, the muscles in his thighs. He looked back at her mildly; across the room, Leal watched the strange assessment with alarm.
Then Venera turned her attention to Leal. "You. What are you doing?"
"I'm ... writing my memoirs."
Venera narrowed her eyes. "Smacks of procrastination to me." Then she nodded sharply. "Both of you. The naval dockyard, pier fifteen, tomorrow morning. Nine sharp, don't be late."
She stalked to the door, then noticing their astonished expressions, scowled at them both. "Well," she said as if it were obvious, "you might as make yourselves useful."
She turned on her heel and left.
* * *
"THEY DO NOT want me to talk about this. But why not? The truth belongs to all of us."
The sky here was glorious. Fully six suns were cradled by the weightless air, at varying distances that filtered their light from bright blue-white (for the closest one) to bloodred (for the most distant). The spaces around them were shaded every possible hue and, like a faint mist, uncountable cities and towns, farms, lakes and clouds receded through and past them, seemingly to infinity.
It was Candesce that most strongly lit the few pages of notes that Antaea had brought with her. The sun of suns hung directly over her head, and it outshone the lesser lights of the principalities by orders of magnitude.
She cleared her throat, nervously shuffling the pages. About a thousand people had come out to listen to her story; the numbers were growing with every stop she made. People loved to hear the tale of her betrayal, her kidnapping of an admiral and the incursion of a precipice moth into the palace of that infamous pirate nation, Slipstream. She'd spent an hour on it tonight--but it was just the teaser, the bait to bring them here. Her real message would be harder for them to swallow--was not, in fact, meant for these people at all.
In the front rank of the cloud of people, her agent gave her an encouraging thumbs-up. She smiled gamely back, and continued.
"Our societies are only as just as our technologies allow them to be," she said. "In Virga, our governments have to use bureaucracies to manage all the information needed to run a nation. That's important to remember, because when we are oppressed it is not by monarchy, capitalism, absolutism, or whatever 'ism' might cling to the top of a given society's pyramid. Tyranny is shaped by the command-and-control mechanisms that are available--and not by the specific class that tries to use those means. So, in Virga, we are doomed to live lives straitjacketed by bureaucratic governance."
She took a deep breath and proclaimed, "Their individual character doesn't matter! They may be churches, armies, democracies, or 'people's republics'; whatever they are, they all use the same tools, and it is the limitation of those tools that keep our societies in primitive and unjust paralysis.
"The Virga Home Guard knows this. Yet they refuse to act."
Whenever she reached this part of the talk, she half-expected a bullet to strike at her from some unwatched direction. For two weeks now now her talks had been drawing crowds up and down the principalities of Candesce--the most thickly populated volume of Virga. It was part of Chaison Fanning's plan that she be seen, very publicly, to be rebelling against centuries of secretive tradition by revealing the inner workings of the Guard, by speaking of its foibles and its failures. "It will draw them out," he'd said. "You'll see."
Well, it might--but what form would their reaction take? She was risking her life with these words; she hoped he appreciated it.
"The Guard protects us from what lies outside our world," she said, swinging an arm to indicate the indigo depths opposite the bright suns. The citizens of the principalities had an almost unreasoning fear of the darkness that lay outside Candesce's sphere of radiance. The very fact that Antaea was a winter wraith--born and raised in the sunless countries thousands of miles beyond the principalities--helped her draw crowds. Her presence was titillating to the decadents of these inward-turned civilizations, but some of them also heard and responded to her real message. There were rumors now of some secret meeting that was to take place in the pirate nation of Slipstream. Some alarming thing to do with the fabled Guard.
Her next words had not been written by Chaison's ghostwriters. They were her own thoughts, committed to paper in long evening reveries, as she'd thought about Leal's message, and what they'd come to call the Offer. "The Guard protects us, because what lurks outside Virga is another kind of tyranny. There, Artificial Nature makes new kinds of society possible--of course it does, and that's what makes it attractive. But its miraculous technologies also make some ways of life impossible. Some of those ways are the very ones we prize most highly.