* * *
LEAL FOUND HIM outside. Keir was sitting on the yacht's hull, letting the fresh breeze following the storm caress his brow. He opened his eyes when she appeared in the hatch, noticed the concern on her face and, as she made to go back inside, said, "No. I'd appreciate the company."
She clipped a line to her belt and climbed out next to him. Candesce was a yellow fire at infinity, just slightly too dim to make daylight for any nation that might covet this volume of air. It was still night by Slipstream's clock, and the ship had been quiet when he'd come out here.
Leal settled down next to him, but said nothing. Keir felt a growing compulsion to fill the silence; at last he said, "Do you know how old I am?"
She shook her head. "Seventeen? Nineteen? Or do your years differ from ours?"
"No, they don't." He met her gaze and said, "Leal, I am seventy-nine years old. Too young to have neotenized myself twice. Yet it seems I did."
She reared back in surprise, almost losing her grip on the hull. "Keir, what are you talking about?"
"Neotenizing. De-indexing. They're two ways to renew yourself when the weight of life and memory gets to be too much." He looked back at the flowerlike cloudscape ahead of them. "With de-indexing, you sever your ability to access certain records of your past. Then, your natural memories wither as well. It's a gentle way of turning your back on past events ... relationships ... that you want to forget.
"But neotenization ... it means 'to turn into a child.' That's a much more radical procedure." He held out his hands, which had once been larger and stronger. He'd had a scar on the back of the left one, though he no longer remembered where or when he'd gotten that. The scar was lost, and so was the memory.
"I've--I've been thinking a lot," murmured Leal, "about what you said--that death and immortality are equally bad choices. Your people learned this from experience with both."
"Of the two, death is the better choice," he said. "Death is forgetting, and there's plenty of reasons why you should want to do that.
"I was not born in the city of Brink. I come from a planet named Revelation, and I owned a house there. I was married." He looked at her, but now her expression was neutral. She was intent on his words, and not ready to judge them yet.
"My wife, Sita ... she de-indexed me. At the time, I was devastated; it was the end of a relationship I had built my life around. What I didn't know at the time was that what she'd done ... Well, millions of people on Revelation were undergoing similar transformations. The scry on Revelation had been compromised--hacked, I think is the old word for it. Sita didn't just leave me ... she left humanity itself."
Now that he knew where to look in his own mind, he remembered it--not all, but enough. Sita had forgotten him; but in the months after their marrage had dissolved, he'd still held out hope that they might have a second chance. They could, after all, start over from scratch as long as she didn't de-list him from her social reality.
But then, during the gentle winter of the year, something had started killing nags.
Revelation had always been a beautiful planet, and most of its beauty was real. The virtual overlays that accented it (like the cascades of pixie dust the fairies threw off) were subtle and added to the wonder of the natural world. Anyone who spent too long in a purely virtual world would get kicked out by the nags; keeping people anchored in reality was, after all, their function.
"When the rumors about the nags started," he told Leal, "I was too sunk in my own misery to pay much attention. At first I didn't notice when the scry's overlays on my senses began to become more detailed, more interlinked into these strange and gorgeous, purely virtual realms. I guess I was sufficiently unhappy--and sufficiently stubborn not to take a cure for my misery--that I remained immune to this kind of a ... siren call ... of a nag-free, virtual paradise that had started to creep over Revelation."
As he'd sat here on the hull of the Judgment, Keir had found himself thinking about one memory in particular--a memory that he couldn't believe he'd lost during these past months. It was of his last glimpse of Sita.
"I remember her," he said softly, "standing on marble steps that led up to a golden, glowing archway. A dozen of my other friends were there, too. It's like a dream, but I know it really happened: some of them walked without hesitation up and into the light and it ... swallowed them. Sita glanced around once, and there was recognition in her eyes. And then she, too, mounted the steps and consigned her mind to an online reality that would never again let her free."
In the real world, Sita's body and its double had fallen silent. That day they had left Atavus to join a vast throng of Revelation's population that was congregating at the edge of the seashore. Like ants, they were building a vast arcology--a hive--for the entity that had traded them its illusions for reality.
"A week after that, I sold my house to the tulips and I left Revelation for good." He had joined the Renaissance.
"Leal, I was one of the founders of the Brink expedition. But ... something happened. Sometime in the past two years, I was neotenized. That's not all bad; my body began to change, shedding its old cells and structures, replacing it all with new, strong tissue. But my brain began to lose the pathways it had built for decades. It began to rewire itself, and when that happens it's not just memory that you lose. Most of your personality goes as well.
"Whether I did this to myself or ... someone forced it on me, I don't know--"
"Forced it on you?" She looked horrified. "Who would do such a thing?"
He shrugged. "It's less than murder, but just as effective. And I would never have known, had I not come here to Virga. The process seems to have stopped, probably because of--" He nodded at distant Candesce.
She followed his gaze to the sun of suns. "Do you have any idea who it was? Someone at the Renaissance?"
"It could have been me." He slapped the cold hull. "I know I never got over what happened to Sita--but I'd also sworn never to do something like it to myself. And I remember resisting the feeling ... of things slipping away."
"Keir," Leal said soberly, "why did you come to Virga? You had a chance to go back after you rescued us--"
"No, I had to get out!" Even as he said this he realized how intense that need for escape had been; yet now, he had no idea what had caused it. Unless-- "If I didn't do this to myself ... if someone else did it to me and I knew, knew it was happening ... that would explain..."
Something welled up in him then, and to his astonishment Keir found he was crying. Part of him stood outside himself, watching in wonder, and his tears flicked away in the winds of Virga, and Leal wrapped him in her arms and murmured in his ear.
Eventually he stopped, but they stayed together, washed in the breeze and unspeaking.
Then the hatch flew open and Venera Fanning's head popped out. "There you are. Grab your things, I'm sending you back to Rush with the others."
Venera gave no sign of noticing that Leal and Keir were holding one another. Instead, she vigorously yanked at the tab on a signal flare, and when it lit, began waving it in broad strokes. She left a long spiral trail of smoke on the air.
Keir and Leal disengaged themselves. "Where are you going, Venera?" asked Leal.
"The city-state of Fracas," she announced with an air of satisfaction. "Currently something of a thorn in our side, no? And I'd like to know why." Keir had seen the red dots Venera had started adding to her chart of nations; and since their meeting with Princess Thavia, he'd certainly noticed how many cities and countries had begun turning the Judgment away. "If Sacrus and its outside allies are mustering their own alliance, we need to know the details. That could take a very long time if we were to rely on diplomacy and reportage. What we need is a way to make a very quick head count." She grinned rakishly, every inch the pirate queen in her leather trousers and flapping shirt, sizzling flare in one hand as the other clutched a guide rope hanging off the Judgment's nose.