The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (45 page)

For the first time in his life, Jessie could go anywhere in that mist of humanity. As he flew he took note of all the people in a way he never had before; he marked each person’s
role
. There was a baker. Could he be that? There were some soldiers. Could he go to war? He would try on this or that future, taste it for a while as he flew. Some seemed tantalizing, though infinitely far out of reach for a poor uneducated juggler like himself. But none were out of reach anymore.

When he stopped to refuel at the last town before the anthropause, he found they wouldn’t take the coins he’d gotten at his last stop. Jessie traded the last of his salt, knowing even as he did it that several slouching youths were watching from a nearby net. He’d shifted his body to try to hide the salt crystal, but the gas jockey had held it up to the light anyway, whistling in appreciation.

“Where’d you get
this
?”

Jessie tried to come up with some plausible story, but he’d never been very good at stuff like that. He got through the transaction, got his gas, and took the jet into the shadow of a three-hundred-foot-wide grove, to wait for dark. It was blazingly hot even here. The shimmering air tricked his eyes, and so he didn’t notice the gang of youths sneaking up on him until it was too late.

The arm around his throat was a shocking surprise – so much so that Jessie’s reflexes took over and he found himself and his attacker spinning into the air before the astonished eyes of the others. Jessie wormed his way out of the other’s grasp. The lad had a knife but now that they were in free air that wasn’t a problem. Jessie was an acrobat.

In a matter of seconds he’d flipped the boy around with his feet and kicked him at his friends, who were jumping out of the leaves in a hand-linked mass. The kick took Jessie backwards and he spun around a handy branch. He dove past them as they floundered in midair, got to his jet, and kick-started it. Jessie was off before they could regroup; he left only a rude gesture behind.

Under the hostile glare of Candesce, he paused to look back. His heart was pounding, he was panting, but he felt great. Jessie laughed and decided right there to go on with his quest, even if it was too early. He turned the jet and aimed it straight at the sun of suns.

It quickly became obvious that he couldn’t just fly in there. The jet could have gotten him to it in two hours at top speed, but he’d have burned to death long before arriving. He idled, advancing just enough to discourage anyone from following.

He looked back after twenty minutes of this, and swore. There were no clouds or constructions of any kind between him and the anthropause, so the little dot that was following him was clearly visible. He’d made at least one enemy, it was clear; who knew how many of them were hanging off that lone jet?

He opened the throttle a little, hunkering down behind the jet’s inadequate windscreen to cut the blazing light and heat as much as he could. After a few minutes he noticed that it was lessening of itself: Candesce was going out.

The light reddened as the minutes stretched. The giant fusion engines of the sun of suns were winking out one by one; Candesce was not one sun, but a flock of them. Each one was mighty enough to light a whole nation, and together they shaped the climate and airflow patterns of the entire world. Their light was scattered and absorbed over the leagues, of course, until it was no longer visible. But Candesce’s influence extended to the very skin of the world where icebergs cracked off Virga’s frost-painted wall. Something, invisible and not to be tasted or felt, blazed out of here as well with the light and the heat: the
field
, which scrambled the energies and thoughts of any device more complicated than a clock. Jessie’s jet was almost as complex as a machine could get in Virga. Since the world’s enemies depended entirely on their technologies, they could not enter here.

This was protection; but there had been a cost. Jessie understood that part of his rightful legacy was knowledge, but he’d never been given it. The people in Virga knew little about how the world worked, and nothing about how Candesce lived. They were utterly dependent on a device their ancestors had built but that most of them now regarded as a force of nature.

Light left the sky, but not the heat. That would take hours to dissipate, and Jessie didn’t have time to wait. He sucked some water from the wine flask hanging off his saddle, and approached the inner circle of Candesce. Though the last of its lamps were fading red embers, he could still see well enough by the light of the principalities. Their millionfold glitter swam and wavered in the heat haze, casting a shimmering light over the crystalline perfection of the sun of suns. He felt their furnace-heat on his face, but he had dared a capital bug’s howl; he could dare this.

The question was, where in a cloud of dozens of suns would a precipice moth nest? The dying moth had told Jessie that it was here, and it made perfect sense: Where was the one place from which the key could not be stolen? Clearly in the one place that you’d need that key to enter.

This answer seemed simple until you saw Candesce. Jessie faced a sky full of vast crystal splinters, miles long, that floated freely in a formation around the suns themselves. Those were smaller, wizened metal-and-crystal balls, like chandeliers that had shrunk in on themselves. And surrounding them, unfolding from mirrored canopies like flowers at dawn, other vast engines stirred.

He flew a circuit through the miles-long airspace of the sun of suns; then he made another. He was looking for something familiar, a town wheel for giants or some sort of blockhouse that might survive the heat here. He saw nothing but machinery, and the night drew on towards a dawn he could not afford to be here to see.

The precipice moth he’d spoken to had been partly alive – at least, it had looked like that leathery skin covered muscles as well as body internal machinery. But what living thing could survive here? Even if those mirrored metal flowers shielded their cores from the worst of the radiation, they couldn’t keep out the heat. He could see plainly how their interiors smoked as they spilled into sight.

Even the tips of those great diamond splinters were just cooling below the melting point of lead. Nothing biological could exist here.

Then, if the moth was here, it might as well be in the heart of the inferno as on the edge. With no more logic to guide him than that, Jessie aimed his jet for the very centre of Candesce.

Six suns crowded together here. Each was like a glass diatom two hundred feet in diameter, with long spines that jutted every which way in imitation of the gigantic ones framing the entire realm. Thorns from all the suns had pinioned a seventh body between them – a black oval, whose skin looked like old cast iron. Its pebbled surface was patterned with raised squares of brighter metal, and inset squares of crystal. Jessie half-expected to faint from the heat as he approached it, and he would die here if that happened; but instead, it grew noticeably cooler as he closed the last few yards.

He hesitated, then reached out to touch the dark surface. He snatched his hand back: it was
cold
.

This must be the generator that made Candesce’s protective field. It was this thing that kept the world’s enemies at bay.

Gunning the jet, he made a circuit of the oval. It looked the same from all angles and there was no obvious door. But, when he was almost back to his starting point, Jessie saw distant city-light gleam off something behind one of the crystal panels. He flew closer to see.

The chrome skeleton of a precipice moth huddled on the other side of the window. It was too dark for Jessie to make out what sort of space it was sitting in, but from the way its knees were up by its steel ears, it must not be large.

There wasn’t a scrap of flesh on this moth, yet when Jessie reached impulsively to rap on the crystal, it moved.

Its head turned and it lowered a jagged hand from its face. He couldn’t see eyes, but it must be looking at him.

“Let me in!” Jessie shouted. “I have to talk to you!”

The moth leaned its head against the window and its mouth opened. Jessie felt a kind of pulse – a deep vibration. He put his ear to the cold crystal and the moth spoke again.

“WAIT.”

“You’re the one, aren’t you? The moth with the key?”

“WAIT.”

“But I have to . . .” He couldn’t hear properly over the whine of the jet, so Jessie shut it down. The sound died – then, a second later, died again. An echo? No, that other note had been pitched very differently.

He cursed and spun around, losing his grip on the inset edge of the window. As he flailed and tried to right himself, a second jet appeared around the curve of the giant machine. There was one rider in its saddle. The dark silhouette held a rifle.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“I want what you want,” said a familiar voice. “Nothing less than the greatest treasure in the world.”

“Chirk, what are you doing here? How did – did you follow me?”

She hove closer and now her canary-yellow jacket was visible in the glow of distant cities. “I had to,” she said. “The wreck was empty, Jess! All that hard work and risking our lives, and there was nothing there. Emmen took it under tow – had to make the best of the situation, I guess – but for our team, there was nothing. All of us were so mad, murderous mad. Not safe for me.

“Then I remembered you. I went looking for you and what should I find? You, juggling for a monster!”

“I think he liked it,” said Jessie. He hoped he could trust Chirk, but then, why did she have that rifle in her hands?

“You said you were going to give it a message. When you left I trailed after you. I was trying to think what to do. Talk to you? Ask to join you? Maybe there was a prize for relaying the message. But then you set a course straight for the sun of suns, and I realized what had happened.

“Give me the key, Jessie.” She levelled the rifle at him.

He gaped at her, outraged and appalled. “I haven’t got it,” he said.

She hissed angrily. “Don’t lie to me! Why else would you be here?”

“Because
he’s
got it,” said Jessie. He jabbed a thumb at the window. He saw Chirk’s eyes widen as she saw what was behind it. She swore.

“If you thought I had it, why didn’t you try to take it from me earlier?”

She looked aside. “Well, I didn’t know exactly where you were going. If it gave you the key, then it told you where the door was, right? I had to find out.”

“But why didn’t you just ask to come along?”

She bit her lip. “’Cause you wouldn’t have had me. Why should you? You’d have known I was only in it for the key. Even if I was . . . nice to you.”

Though it was dark, in the half-visible flight of emotions across her face Jessie could see a person he hadn’t known was there. Chirk had hid her insecurities as thoroughly as he’d hoped to hide his bloody cough.

“You could have come to me,” he said. “You should have.”

“And you could have told me you were planning to die alone,” she said. “But you didn’t.”

He couldn’t answer that. Chirk waved the rifle at the door. “Get it to open up, then. Let’s get the key and get out of here.”

“If I can get the key from it, ordering it to kill you will be easy,” he told her. A little of the wild mood that had made him willing to dive into a capital bug had returned. He was feeling obstinate enough to dare her to kill him.

Chirk sighed, and to his surprise said, “You’re right.” She threw away the rifle. They both watched it tumble away into the dark.

“I’m not a good person, and I went about this all wrong,” she said. “But I really did like you, Jessie.” She looked around uneasily. “I just . . . I can’t let it go. I won’t
take
it from you, but I need to be a part of this, Jess. I need a share, just a little share. I’m not going anywhere. If you want to sic your monster on me, I guess you’ll just have to kill me.” She crossed her arms, lowered her head, and made to stare him down.

He just had to laugh. “You make a terrible villain, Chirk.” As she sputtered indignantly, he turned to the window again. The moth had been impassively watching his conversation with Chirk. “Open up!” he shouted at it again, and levering himself close with what little purchase he could make on the window’s edge, he put his ear to the crystal again.

“WAIT.”

Jessie let go and drifted back, frowning. Wait? For what?

“What did it say?”

“The other moth told me this one wouldn’t let me in unless I proved I was committed. I had to prove I wouldn’t try to take the key.”

“But how are you going to do that?”

“Oh.”

Wait.

Candesce’s night cycle was nearly over. The metal flowers were starting to close, the bright little flying things they’d released hurrying back to the safety of their tungsten petals. All around them, the rumbling furnaces in the suns would be readying themselves. They would brighten soon, and light would wash away everything material here that was not a part of the sun of suns. Everything, perhaps, except the moth, who might be as ancient as Candesce itself.

“The other moth told me I wouldn’t deliver the message,” said Jessie. “It said I would
decide
not to.”

She frowned. “Why would it say that?”

“Because . . .’cause it cured me, that’s why. And because the only way to deliver the message is to wait until dawn. That’s when this moth here will open the door for us.”

“But then – we’d never get out in time . . .”

He nodded.

“Tell it – yell through the door, like it’s doing to you! Jessie, we can’t stay here, that’s just insane! You said the other moth cured you? Then you can escape, you can live – like me. Maybe not with me, and you’re right not to trust me, but we can take the first steps together . . .” But he was shaking his head.

“I don’t think it can hear me,” he said. “I can barely hear it, and its voice is loud enough to topple buildings. I have to wait, or not deliver the message.”

“Go to the home guard, then. Tell them, and they’ll send someone here. They’ll —”