They toasted one another, and Spyre, and eventually the whole world before the night became a happy blur.
She kicked off from the ship’s netting, almost colliding with one of the crew, and began hauling her way up the corridor to the bow of the ship. One of her new maids fell into formation next to her.
“Is there something wrong, lady?” The maid, Brydda, wrung her hands. Her normally sour face looked even more prudish as she frowned. “Is it leaving Spyre that’s upset you so?”
Venera barked a laugh. “It couldn’t happen soon enough. No.” She kept hand-walking up the rope that led to the bow.
“Can I do anything for you?”
She shot Brydda an appraising look. “You’ve traveled before, haven’t you? You were put onto my staff by the council, I’ll bet. To watch me.”
“Madam!”
“Oh, don’t deny it. Just come with. I need a… distraction. You can point out the sights as we go.”
“Yes, madam.”
They arrived at a forward observation lounge in time for the ship to exit the cloud banks. The Glorious Dawn was a typical passenger vesseclass="underline" a spindle-shaped wooden shell one hundred fifty feet long and forty wide, its surface punctuated with rows of windows and open wicker-work galleries. Big jet nacelles were mounted on short arms at the stern, their whine subdued right now as the ship made a scant fifteen miles per hour through the thinning clouds. The ship’s interior was subdivided into staterooms and common areas and contained two big exercise centrifuges. With the engine sound a constant undertone, Venera could easily hear the clink of glassware in the kitchens, muted conversations, and somewhere, a string quartet tuning up. The lounge smelled of coffee and fresh air.
Such a contrast to the Rook, the last ship she had flown on. When she’d left it the Slipstream cruiser had stunk of unwashed men, stale air, and rocket exhaust. Its hull had been peppered with bullet holes and scorched by explosions. The engines’ roar would pierce your dreams as you slept and the only voices were those of arguing, cursing airmen.
The Glorious Dawn was just like every vessel she had ever traveled on prior to the Rook. Its luxuries and details were appropriate to one of Venera’s station in life; she should be able to put the ship on like a favorite glove. In the normal course of affairs she would never have set foot on a ship like the Rook, much less would she have seen it through battle and boarding, pursuit and silent running.
Yet the quiet comforts of the Glorious Dawn annoyed her. Venera went right up to the main window of the lounge and peered out. “Tell me where we are,” she commanded the maid.
There was distraction to be found in this view. Candesce lay directly ahead, its brilliance too intense to be looked at directly. Venera well knew that light, it had burned her as she’d fled from its embrace. She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked past it.
She saw the principalities of Candesce. Although she had spent a week in a charcoal-harvester’s cabin perched on a burnt arm of the sargasso of Leaf’s Choir, that place had been too close to Candesce; the white air cradling the sun of suns washed out any details that lay past it. Here, for the first time, she had a clear view of the nations that surrounded that biggest of Virga’s artificial lights. And the sight was breathtaking.
Candesce lay at the center of the world, a beacon and a heart to Virga. Anything within a hundred miles of the sun of suns simply vanished in flame, a fact that the principalities exploited to dispose of trash, industrial wastes, and the bodies of their dead. This forbidden zone was completely empty, so Venera could see the whole inner surface of the two-hundred-mile-diameter bubble formed by it. On the far side of Candesce that surface was just a smooth speckled blue-green; in the middle distances Venera could make out dots and glitter, and individual beads of leaf color. As she turned to follow the curve of the material toward her the dots became buildings and the glints became the mirrored surfaces of house-sized spheres of water. The beads of green grew filigreed detail and became forests—dozens or hundreds of trees at a time, with their roots intertwined around some buried ball of dirt and rocks.
Candesce presided at the center of a cloud of city whose inner extent was two hundred miles in diameter—and whose outer reaches could only be guessed at. The fog of habitations and farms receded into blue dimness, behind lattices of white cloud. Back in the darkening airs a hundred or two hundred miles away, smaller suns glowed.
“These are the principalities,” said Brydda, sweeping her arm to take in the sight. “Sixty-four nations, countless millions of people moving at the mercy of Candesce’s heat.”
Venera glanced at her. “What do you mean by that? ‘At the mercy of?’”
The maid looked chagrined. “Well, they can’t keep station where they please, the way Spyre does. Spyre is fixed in the air, madam, always has been. But these—” she dismissed the principalities with a wave—”they go where the breezes send them. All that keeps them together as nations is the stability of the circulation patterns.”
Venera nodded. The cluster of nations she’d grown up in, Meridian, worked the same way. Candesce’s prodigious heat had to go somewhere, and beyond the exclusion zone it must form the air into Hadley cells: semi-stable up- and down-drafts. You could enter such a cell at the bottom, near Candesce, and be lofted a hundred miles up, then swept horizontally for another hundred miles, then down again until you reached your starting point. The Meridian Hadley cell was huge—a thousand miles across and twice that in depth—and nearly permanent. Down here in the principalities the heat would make the cells less stable, but quicker and stronger.
“So there’s one nation per Hadley cell?” she asked. “That seems altogether too well organized.”
The maid laughed. “It’s not that simple. The cells break up and merge, but it takes time. Every time Candesce goes into its night cycle the heat stops going out, and the cells falter. Candesce always comes back on in time to start them up again but not without consequence.”
Venera understood what she meant by consequence. Without predictable airflow, whole nations could break apart, their provinces drifting away from one another, mixing with neighbors and enemies. It had happened often enough in Meridian, where the population was light and obstacles few. Down here, such an event would be catastrophic.
Brydda continued her monologue, pointing out border beacons and other sights of interest. Venera half listened, musing at something she’d known intellectually but not grasped until this moment. She had been inside—had for one night been in control of—the most powerful device in the world. Whole cities rose and fell in a slow majestic dance driven by Candesce—as did forests, mists of green food-crops, and isolated buildings, clouds and ships and factories, supply nets a mile across, whale and bird paddocks. Ships and dolphins and ropeways and flapping, foot-finned humans threaded through it all.
She’d had ultimate power in her hands, and had let it go without a thought. Strange.
Venera turned her attention back to Brydda. As the Glorious Dawn turned, however, she saw that Spyre lay in a kind of dimple in the surface of the bubble. The giant cylinder disrupted the smooth winds of the cells that surrounded it. Wrapped in its own weather, Spyre was an irritant, a mote in the gargantuan orb of the principalities.
“How they must hate you,” she murmured.
Slipstream had an ambassador at the Fitzmann States, an old and respected principality near Spyre. So it was that Buridan’s trade delegation made its first stop there.