They drifted into a long cylindrical space with branching entrances leading off to all sides. The entrances were marked by subject matter. Ropes with handhold loops crisscrossed the space and bright lanterns lit the walls, their windup fans gently whirring. Whatever the chaos of its facade, inside at least the library seemed remarkably well organized.
Aubri was watching him sidelong. "Slipstreamers are your mortal enemies, aren't they?" He nodded.
"And all this time you believed it was Admiral Fanning who led the attack on your sun? I can't imagine what it must have been like to be trapped on the Rook with him."
"It was intolerable," he admitted. At that moment Hayden was near having some internal dam burst and he knew it; one more sympathetic word from her and he would blurt out his whole life story like some maudlin teenager. He cast about for a way to change the subject. "Things haven't exactly been easy for you either."
She half-smiled. "Are you referring to the pirates? It was… bad, I admit. But that whole incident's over with, isn't it?" Her smile held sadness. "You should be grateful for traumas that have a definite ending to them. Some don't, you know."
"Believe me," he said, "I know." Then he narrowed his eyes. "You did this to me before."
"What?"
"Danced around the subject of why you're unhappy."
"Ah."
He grabbed a rope, and her hand, and stopped them above a square shaft that had the words municipal engineering carved around it. For a long moment he felt her warm fingers wrapped around his their eyes met. Then she drew her hand away.
He had to say something; what came out was, "I came aboard th Rook planning to kill Admiral Fanning, but you see I never expected to survive doing it. That's what I meant before, when I said I had no future. But when I said that, you suggested you didn't have one either. What did you mean?"
Aubri's expressive face twisted in eloquent distress. "I can't explain. Not in a way that you'd understand."
He crossed his arms and let himself hang in the air before her. "Is it because I'm an 'ignorant savage'? I believe you used that phrase to describe Martor a few days back."
She bit her lip. "It's not that… I don't know how to explain it to you." She looked around, spotted something, and said, "I think we need to go that way."
Hayden thought she was changing the subject again, but as the] flew down the hexagonal wood-paneled corridor to the library' history department, Aubri said, "I didn't come to Virga willingly. Not entirely willingly; I wasn't lying when I told you I had studied science and admired your people for their knowledge."
They entered a vast circular room that would not have seemed out of place under gravity—if one ignored the usual crisscross of ropes that various readers were using as perches. Light was provided by bright lanterns which lit the endless ranks of books lining the walls.
"It was my love of ancient arts like manufacturing that got me into trouble," continued Aubri. In this light she looked very beautiful to Hayden, a troubled doll drifting in lamplight. "Along with some others, I tried to overthrow Artificial Nature—locally, at least. We wanted to go back to noble pursuits like industry and construction! Work with our minds and hands again. I confess that… entities died. Not humans, you wouldn't understand them, they were surfers, standing waves in the stuff of A.N. Taking down A.N. killed them. As punishment, I was exiled here."
"I understand something about being an exile," said Hayden. Aubri smiled.
"Before I can return I have to fulfill a mission for Artificial Nature," she added with a sudden frown. "It hangs over my head like a sword. If I don't do it… I'll the."
"What? They'll send an assassin or something?" She shook her head. "The assassin is already here, inside my body. It waits and watches. If I don't play my role to its end, it will strike me down."
This revelation was the last thing Hayden had expected from Aubri. He tried to imagine some alien machine coiled in her throat, watching him through the veil of her skin. The thought made his scalp prickle. "So what's this mission?" he asked after a long silence. "I can't tell you," she said simply. "It might activate." Confused and upset, he followed her to a cage mounted on one wall. There perched a bored-looking woman with arms like birds' legs, her prehensile foot crooked around a strap while she filed books in various slots in the cage. "Can I help you?" she asked, looking down her nose at Aubri.
"Hello, I'm not from around here. I'm looking for information about Leaf's Choir."
The woman's face brightened. "My, what an interesting accent! Well, welcome to Gehellen. And welcome to the library. Did you know we've been continuously open now for two hundred forty-seven years?"
"That doesn't surprise me at all," said Hayden.
"What about Leaf's Choir?" Aubri asked.
The librarian yawned. "The novels start over there, and wrap halfway around. Children's stories over there. Opera and plays, there."
"What about aereography?"
"Maps? That would be that section there." She pointed to the opposite side of the room. "But you won't find much, comparatively speaking. Leaf's Choir is much more interesting as a story than as a place."
"Why's that?"
"It's just a burnt-out shell now. Nobody can go in very far because of lack of oxygen, and occasional flare-ups. And whatever was in the outer layers was stripped decades ago. Leaf's Choir is a sargasso."
Suddenly Hayden understood. The extra fittings on the Rook weren't just for winter travel; they included air tanks and sealant for the portholes. The ship had a furnace but it also had a rock-salt battery for storing heat.
We're going in there, he thought, in sudden wonder.
"It must have quite a history to be the subject of all those novels," said Aubri as she gazed at the stacks. The librarian nodded.
"The original story's as fabulous as the novels," she said. "Once upon a time, two suns burned in the heart of Leaf's Choir. The suns were invisible from outside the nation because they were surrounded by a single, vast forest: millions of weightless trees connecting and reconnecting like the threads of a spiderweb through an intricate network of lakes and rock bits. The forest made a sphere over fifty miles across and within it were dozens of towns and hundreds of villages built out of the living branches of the trees." The librarian shaped the forms with her hands, long shadows cast by the lamps interpreting her gestures on the bookshelves behind her. "The impenetrable barrier of foliage provided protection as well as wealth to the citizens of Leaf's Choir, and they prospered.
"After centuries of peace, rumor began to circulate of the beauty of an heiress from Leaf's Choir, and that rumor attracted the attention of a warlord who determined to have her for himself. He laid siege to Leaf's Choir and was finally able to seize the giant air-pumping stations that kept the forest from supersaturating itself with oxygen. He threatened to blow up the stations unless the young lady was turned over to him. The government refused but the heiress secretly fled the capital and made her way to the warlord's encampment, and there gave herself up.
"To punish the nation, the warlord ordered the pumping stations blown up. Then he left—and behind him, the millions of trees of the forest continued to bask and produce oxygen. Leaf's Choir had cultivated them for centuries, to the point where it needed the artificial circulatory system of the pumps to ensure that oxygen did not build up to dangerous levels within the nation. Without the pumps, the least spark might set off an impossible conflagration—and so it happened, weeks after the warlord left. The fire raged out from the heart of Leaf's Choir and consumed everything, town, tree, and sun. All that was left when it was over was a sphere of charred wood and ash thirty miles across. That sphere is now tethered at the edge of Gehellen's territory; we've been mining it for its charcoal for centuries. It's very slow work because the heat of combustion is still trapped in airless pockets deep inside the sargasso. If oxygen reaches them, they break into flame again; so Leaf's Choir remains choked with stagnant, dead air. We have special ships that can go in, but navigation is a nightmare; it's all just black twisted wreckage that goes on forever. Leaf's Choir is ugly now—like a scar on the sky. Nobody goes there, unless it's for mining."