"He will be back," said Leal; but she abruptly felt very dizzy. Piero Harper was suddenly at her side, helping her sit on a strange blocky thing that sculpted itself to her shape as if it were alive. "It will be back." Tired and defeated, she stared around at the strange people, the extra bodies and odd machines. "Unless its purpose was to drive us into your arms. Are you like it?"
"They are not," said the junk-doll on her shoulder.
Leal shrugged irritably. "But why is that boy walking around in a cloud of bugs?" She glared at Maerta. "Why are there two of you?"
"We'll explain," she soothed. "Or your morphont companion can tell you. But for now, you must rest. You're at the end of your strength, and your physiology's not been augmented to support the restoratives we'd like to give you."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Just rest."
Leal leaned her chin on her hand, and closed her eyes. She could sense Eustace Loll moving about, though she could neither see nor hear him. Her suspicion was like Hayden Griffin's fabled radar, telling her that he must be speaking to Maerta and her kin, ingratiating, lulling. There were two sides to the story of how Leal and her people had come to be here, and Loll would never let her version go uncontested.
She should be defying his story with her own, but she hadn't the strength. When someone put a bowl in her hands, she ate, and then she lay back and the couch/chair accommodated her and was very comfortable; and she slept.
* * *
IT WAS TWO hours before Keir could convince Gallard that he'd finished all his work--that, indeed, he'd done it before ducking out earlier. Pleading exhaustion at the adventures of the afternoon, he swore that he would go straight to his room and not venture forth for the remainder of the day. Fuming a scry cloud of virtual sighs and annoyance glyphs, Gallard agreed, and Keir headed out.
He knew the way, of course, but walking these corridors would never become familiar. If the city of Brink had possessed an air of abandonment, he might have been able to imagine that he was investigating someplace lost and mysterious--disturbing the ghosts of people who might have once crisscrossed these bleak gothic corridors in previous lifetimes. But Brink had never been inhabited. It wasn't strictly a city at all, rather a variety of morphont called a metropoloid. Its ancestors had been true, inhabited cities, but Brink was part of an evolutionary offshoot that had lost some of the defining traits of a true urban space. Traits like plumbing, and lights, and elevators with doors.
The blank facades and grasping towers didn't sum to a place at all, but to a wilderness, one that he was desperate to escape from.
He hesitated in the doorway to his oddly angled room. This was definitely not where he wanted to be; but he didn't know where else to go. He sat at the desk.
He stood.
He walked to the sartorius, which proffered clothing, exoskeleton parts, and other extensions as he approached.
Turning away from that, he fell backward and let the bed catch him. For a few minutes he just lay there as his dragonflies zipped in a restless cloud from door to ceiling to floor and back.
The sounds of distant conversation filtered in through the chamber's narrow windows--echoes of voices from the Hall, including Maspeth's anxious tones. He sat up, wrapped his fingers around his skull, and bent his head over his knees.
A gentle knock came from the doorway. He wanted nothing more than to tell whoever it was to go away, but instead he heard himself say, "Come." Maerta stepped in, in her second body, and came to sit on the bed next to him. Her scry was muted, only a few faint glyphs twirling near her ears. She was carrying something heavy, and now she moved to set it on the floor by the bed.
It was the brick--the Mighty Brick, now stripped of its agencies and protective devices. "Ah," said Keir, gazing at it mournfully. "You killed it."
"We found it near a rather grouchy ornithopter. That one claimed you were starving it to death."
He shrugged, but he couldn't look her in the eye. He'd drawn his own scry all the way in, leaving him bare of context.
"Keir," she said softly, "what were you doing with these things?"
His restless fingers tangled together. "I--I don't know." Now he did look at her directly. "I mean that. I know I made this," he pointed at the brick, "but I don't know what it is."
"That I can answer," she said. "You and Gallard were studying embodiment a few weeks back. To have a body is, well, almost a sacred thing, no? --To us, I mean. It's what separates us, and our allies like the oaks and the morphonts, from things like the creature that was chasing Leal Maspeth and her friends." She nudged the brick with her toe. "Having a body, even if it's a block of dumb stone, anchors the mind and its values. We're fighting to keep our anchors, all of us, and none more so than the people who live in Virga. Even if they don't know it.
"I'm pretty sure you made the Mighty Brick to remind yourself of these things."
"Then why did I forget?"
She shook her head. "I don't--"
"Stop lying to me! You do know."
She was silent for a moment, and he felt a small sense of triumph at having scored a point in their ongoing argument--because, before today, he hadn't even been sure himself that something was wrong. Now he had proof, in the form of those lines scratched next to the door a kilometer below the Hall.
"Keir," she said slowly, "why did you grow that aircraft?" He looked away, but she put a hand on his shoulder. "Where were you going to go?"
"I don't know."
"You didn't have someone in specific you were going to look for?"
That was an odd question; he looked at her for the first time. "No. Who would I have to look for?"
"Sita?"
He didn't recognize the name, and shook his head, confused. Scry gave no hint as to who this Sita might be, either. Somehow his incomprehension satisfied Maerta, who took away her hand and sighed.
"I'm not a real boy, am I?" he asked her. "The other kids are growing up, but I'm growing down. Getting shorter, stupider. Forgetting things--like, like this Sita whoever. Why? What's happening to me?"
She looked him in the eye. "Keir, you have to trust me when I say I can't tell you."
"Can't tell me? Or won't?"
"Can't. Because I made a promise that I wouldn't."
"To who? You're the leader here, aren't you? Who could you possibly have to make a promise to that you'd have to keep?"
Maerta stood up, clasped her hands, and walked to the door. Then she turned and said, "I can't betray my promise, Keir; and I'm sorry, but for now, that's how it has to be."
He just stared at her, tears starting in the corners of his eyes. Maerta came back, her hands hovering over him. "Oh, no, no, I'm sorry, Keir. It's for the best. You'll understand when it's all over and it'll be fine, fine. You'll see. We would never do this to hurt you, we love you."
"Do what?" He was crying as much from frustration as disappointment or fear. "What did you do?"
"You'll see in time, and it'll be all right, I promise." Briskly, she went on: "Now I have to ask you something, and it's very important. Can you be honest with me? Did you tell the Virgans anything about what we're doing here? --In Brink? Anything about who the Renaissance are?"
He shook his head bitterly. Now he wished he had.
"Good. Good. We don't know them, Keir. They might be spies. They might be dangerous, do you understand?"
He nodded sullenly.
"And Keir, the flying machine..." She was silent so long that finally he was forced to look at her.
"When the time comes," she said, "you'll be able to leave Brink, and go anywhere in the universe that you want to go. But just hang on a little longer. Your time's not yet, Keir.
"Not yet."
* * *
"MA'AM?"
Leal turned to find Piero Harper at the doorway; there was concern written on his wind- and labor-aged features. She smiled warmly at Hayden Griffin's loyal crewman, and raised her hands to show off the room. "Isn't this nice? It has a roof! I'd forgotten what those were like."
Piero smiled and ducked his head. "It's no fun, ma'am, camping out under gravity."
"The things you learn." This chamber they'd given her was huge--but then, there was no lack of space in this city-that-wasn't-a-city. Before letting herself be walked here last night, she'd had to wait while her bed was constructed--extruded, actually, from one of the odd half-animal, half-machine things they called a fab. The things had squatted and huffed and beeped and squelched out chairs, tables, and cupboards, each one to order and each one slightly different. Maerta and her people had demonstrated what they called exoskeletons, which hoisted the finished goods on their backs and hauled them--a roomful of furniture per person--up stairs and ramps to these chambers. It would all have been wonderful to someone who wasn't half-dead with exhaustion. As it was Leal had slept like a stone for what must have been twelve hours; in this permanent gloom, it could have been six or two days. Now she felt like she could barely lift a limb. The lethargy was good; her mind had been gloriously blank for much of the day.
"Are they actually doing it?" she asked.
Piero nodded, and she shook her head with a wondering smile. Keir Chen's people were being outrageously generous. Leal, Piero, and some of his more trusted crewmates had spent part of the morning sitting around another strange device, the one Maerta called an Edisonian, discussing how they might rescue Piero's master Hayden Griffin and the rest of the airmen trapped on the lower plains. While they talked, the Edisonian listened; and then it thought a little bit; and then it began showing glowing images on its side, of the complete design for a flying machine of a type Leal had never seen before. The thing had big ungainly bags attached to it, and stiff wings, presumably to catch the wind. Neither of those were features of Virgan airships, but they made sense in the context of the pervasive gravity in Aethyr. "How long will it take to construct these?" Leal had asked Maerta.
The woman had shrugged. "A couple of days."
"They are being generous," Piero said now. She waved him in and he shut the door (also new, also made last night while they watched), but didn't advance any further into the room. "Ma'am, it's not that I'm ungrateful ... but I can't help getting the feeling they want to get rid of us."
"Y-yesss," she admitted. "But not in a hostile way. You know the old saying, 'Fish and visitors stink after two days.'"
He grinned. "They're like monks, aren't they? Very serious and studious. But I can't for the life of me figure out what they're studying."
"Keir said they're studying the city."
"The boy. You believe him?"
She shrugged. "No. Look, what does it matter, if we get our airships in two days? We can go home, Piero."
He stood there uncertainly until she shook her head and said, "Oh, do sit down!" He lowered himself into one of the armchairs--becoming, she realized, the very first and maybe the last human to use it--and clutched its arms uncomfortably.
"Beggin' your pardon, ma'am, but if it don't matter, then why were you standing in the window when I came in, just starin' at nothing and sighing?"
She scratched the side of her head. "Mm, well..."
"Somethin' about this place is bothering you, ma'am. What is it?"
"It's not these people." She looked down, summoning her thoughts and her courage to express them. "Piero ... how old were you, when your country was conquered?"
This was obviously not the question he'd expected. "Wha--Well, about fifteen. Old enough to know what I was losing."
"And what is that like?"
"Ah." Crow's-feet gathered around his eyes as he smiled. "You think you've lost Abyss forever?"
"Haven't I? Piero, I've been branded a traitor! Bringing Loll with us was a mistake, I know that now. We'll never win him over, and when we get home and he's among his old cronies and the power-brokers of Abyss, he'll turn on us. I know it, no matter what he says. He'll have me arrested if I return."
He nodded, but then said, "You suppose that his word is all that matters there now? Ma'am, Slipstream took over my beloved Aerie, and I lost my home. It's a terrible thing, being lost like that. But I got it back. Aerie's a nation again, thanks to Mr. Hayden Griffin and the sun he made. And you'll see, when all this is over, Abyss will take you back with open arms. All'll be forgiven when they realize you saved them all."
She looked away. After a moment she murmured, "Maybe it's not enough for them to forgive me; after all, I've done nothing wrong. What I keep asking myself, after what's happened, is whether I'll ever be able to forgive them."
Piero frowned.
"And if not," she continued, "where will I ever find a new home?"
Piero stood and came to lightly touch her hand--reticent, always-polite Piero, who had always treated her like some upper-class client, like the professor she'd wanted to be. She clasped her own hand over his and blinked up at him. "Ma'am, you'd be queen of Aerie if I had any say in it," he said fiercely. "And a citizen, surely, there or in Slipstream or any nation that learns the treasure you're bringing and what you had to sacrifice to get it."
Tears blurred her view of him. She hadn't cried since the night her friend Easley had died, because in order to survive, she'd had to choke the old, emotionally fluttery version of herself. These tears were different than the old Leal's would have been, though--more hard-won, and with vaster depths of feeling behind them.
"Thank you, Piero," she said. "Still, I feel like a bird lost in an ocean of air. Where can I set my feet, Piero? And when can I fold my wings, and sleep?" She closed her eyes. "Sleep like I used to sleep."
"Tell the people back home what you learned out here, ma'am," Piero asserted. "And then you may be surprised what becomes possible."