Analog SFF, November 2005 Read online

  “But not by the legal authorities,” said Miles as he ducked into another alley. This one was empty, and meandered in the general direction of one of the town spokes. The spoke jabbed into the heavens above all rooftops, a tessellation of wrought-iron girders barnacled here and there by shanty huts built by desperate homeless people. Some spokes had municipal elevators in them and were quite well-kept; this one was a rusty derelict unlit from any source.

  “It's just lucky we have a man in Fanning's network.” Miles had disappeared in the darkness ahead. Hayden followed his voice, idly wondering if he'd been lured in here to be mugged. “This time they weren't going to just hold your papers up to a light and check the birth registries. Friends, family, co-workers—I had to come up with them all at the last minute."

  “But how did you know about it?"

  “Ah, finally the lad asks a sensible question. Here, watch your step.” They had reached the gnarled fist of beam and cable that was the spoke's base. Someone had built a crude set of stairs by simply jamming boards into the diamond-shaped gaps in the ironwork. Miles plodded up this, wood bending and twanging under his feet.

  His voice drifted down from overhead. “I review intercepted dispatches about security checks. It's my job in the Resistance."

  Hayden raced up the steps after him. “Resistance? It still exists?"

  “Hell, Hayden, if you hadn't pulled a disappearing act after Gavin Town got hit, you'd still be in it. You were born into the Resistance—you were the first baby born of two members, did you know that? We searched for you for days after the attack..."

  “I didn't know. I fell into Winter.” He looked down, abstractly thinking how interesting the rooftops looked from just overhead, with their shingled peaks and streamlined eaves. From here you could see the whole circular geometry of the town, its mazes of close-packed buildings, streetlights glowing overhead and on two sides, while the permanent winds of Slipstream whistled from the dark open circles of night to left and right. A gust shook him and he realized that he'd fall hard enough to be killed if he got blown off this precarious vantage point, so Hayden clutched the stanchions more tightly and groped for the next ladder-like step with his free hand. He was starting to weigh less already; they must be a hundred meters in the air by now. “Miles, where are we going?"

  “There.” The former cook pointed straight up. The inside of the open-work spoke was blocked by a wood ceiling ten feet further up. The surface was white with strange, broad black bands painted across it. With a start Hayden realized they were intended to look like shadows; this box was supposed to be invisible if looked at from some particular perspective—probably from the direction of the Office of Public Infrastructure.

  Miles ascended the last distance by ladder and raising his fist, knocked it against wood. A square of light appeared above his head, and he clambered up. “Come on in, Hayden."

  He cautiously raised his head above the lip of the trapdoor, and then, for the first time in many years, he entered a cell of the Resistance.

  When Hayden was twelve, his parents had taken him on his first visit to Rush. He had complained, because lately he'd come to know that though Slipstream was a great nation, it was not his nation. His friends had jeered at him for visiting the camp of the enemy, though he didn't exactly know why Slipstreamers were bad, or what it meant to be a citizen of Aerie instead.

  “That's why we're going,” his father had said. “So that you can understand."

  “That, and to see what they're wearing in the principalities,” said Mother with a grin. Father had glowered at her, but she ignored him.

  “You'll love it,” she said. “We'll bring back stuff to make those pals of yours completely envious."

  He'd liked that thought; still, Father's words had stuck with him. He was going to Rush to understand.

  And he thought he did understand, the moment that their ship had broached the final wall of cloud and he glimpsed the city for the first time. As light welled up, Hayden flew to a stoutly-barred window with some other kids—there was no centrifuge in this little ship, so everybody was weightless—and shielded his eyes to look at their destination.

  The nearby air was full of travelers, some riding bikes, some on prop-driven contraptions powered by pedals, and some kicking their feet to flap huge white wings affixed to their backs. They carried parcels, towed cargos, and in the case of the fan-jets, left behind slowly-fading arcs and lines of white contrail to thatch the sky.

  Their cylindrical frigate had emerged from the clouds near Slipstream's sun, which made an inferno of half the sky. Seconds out of the mist and the temperature was already rising in the normally-chilly ship's lounge. The other boys were pointing at something and shouting excitedly; Hayden peered in that direction, trying to make out what was casting a seemingly impossible shadow across an entire half of the view. The vast shape was irregular like any of the rocks they had passed on their way here. Where those rocks were usually house-sized and sprouted spidery trees in all directions, this shape was blued with distance and covered with an even carpet of green. It took Hayden a few seconds to realize that it really was a rock, but one that was several miles in diameter.

  He gaped at it. Father laughed from the dining basket, woven of wicker, where he perched with Mother. “That's the biggest thing you've ever seen, Hayden. But listen, there's much bigger places. Slipstream is not a major state. Remember that."

  “Is that Rush?” Hayden pointed.

  Father pulled himself out of the basket and came over. He bulked much bigger than the kids, who made a place for him next to Hayden. “The asteroid? That's not Rush. It's the source of Slipstream's wealth, though—it and their sun.” He leaned on the rail and pointed. “No. That is Rush."

  Maybe it was because he'd never seen anything like it before, but the city simply hadn't registered in Hayden's mind until that moment. After all, the wheels of Aerie were seldom more than two hundred yards across, and were simply wheels made of wooden planks lashed together and spoked with rope. You spun up the whole assembly and built houses on the inside surface of the wheel. Simple. And never had he seen more than five or six such wheels in one place.

  The dozens of towns that made up Rush gleamed of highly polished metal. They were more cylindrical than ring-shaped, and none was less than five hundred yards in diameter. The most amazing thing was that they were tethered to the forested asteroid in quartets like mobiles; and radiating from each cylinder's outer rim were bright sails of gold and red that transformed them from mere towns into gorgeous pinwheels.

  “The asteroid's too big to be affected by the wind,” said Father. “The towns are not. They use the sails to keep the wheels spun up.” This made sense to Hayden, because wind was the result of your moving at a different speed than whatever airmass you were in. Most of the time, objects migrated outward and inward in Virga to the rhythm of slowly circulating rivers of air. You normally only experienced wind at the walls of a town or while flying. Many times, he had folded little propellers of paper and let them out of a braveway on strings. They'd twirled in the rushing air. So did the towns of Rush, only much more slowly.

  Hayden frowned. “If that big rock isn't moving with the air, won't it drift away from the rest of Slipstream?"

  “You've hit on the very problem,” said Father with a smile. “Slipstream's more migratory than most countries. The Slipstreamers have to follow their asteroid's orbit within Virga. You can't see from here, but their sun is also tethered to the asteroid. Ten years ago, Slipstream drifted right into Aerie. Before that, we were a smaller and less wealthy nation, being far from the major suns. But we were proud. We controlled our own destiny. Now what are we? Nothing but vassals of Rush."

  Hayden barely heard him. He was eagerly staring at the cities.

  Their ship arrived at mid-day to find a traffic jam at the axis of one of the biggest cylinders. It took an hour to disembark, but Hayden didn't care. He spent the time watching the heavily built-up inner surface of the town revo
lve past. He was looking for places to visit. From the axis of the cylinder, where the docks sat like a jumble of big wooden dice, cable-ways radiated away to the other towns that made up the city. One wheel in particular caught his eye—a huge cylinder whose inside seemed to be one single building with balconies, coigns, and glittering glass-paneled windows festooning it. This cylinder was surrounded by warships, which Hayden had seen in photos but never been close to before. The massive wooden vessels bristled with cannon ports, and they trailed smoke and ropes and masts like the spines of fish. They were majestic and fascinating.

  “You'll never get there,” said Father drily. “That's the Pilot's palace."

  After ages, they were finally able to descend the long, curving, covered stairway to the street. Here Hayden had to endure another interminable wait while a man in a uniform examined Father's papers. Hayden was too distracted at the time to really notice his father's falsely jovial manner, or the way his shoulders had slumped with relief when they were finally accepted into the city. But after some walking he turned to Mother and kissed her, saying quietly, “I'll be back soon. Check us into the hotel, but don't wait for me. Go and do some shopping, it'll take your mind off it."

  “Where's he going?” Hayden watched as Father disappeared into the crowd.

  “It's just business,” she said, but she sounded unhappy.

  Hayden quickly forgot any misgivings this exchange might have raised. The town was huge and fascinating. Even the gravity felt different—a slower turn-over of the inner ear—and there were points where you couldn't see the edges of the place at all. He followed his mother around to various outlets and while she haggled over wholesale paper prices for the newspaper she helped run, Hayden was happy to stare out the shop's windows at the passing crowds.

  Gradually, though, he did begin to notice something. The people here dressed differently than people back home. They also had a distinct accent. And though the shop-keepers weren't actually hostile to Mother, they weren't very friendly either. Neither were the other kids he saw in the street. He smiled at one or two, but they just turned away.

  He could have forgotten these details if not for what happened next. As they approached the hotel late that afternoon—Hayden laden with packages, his mother humming happily—he spotted Father at the hotel entrance, standing with his hands behind his back. Hayden felt his mother clutch his shoulder even as he waved and shouted a hello. It was only then that he noticed the men standing with his father, men in uniform who turned as one at the sound of Hayden's voice.

  “Shit,” whispered Mother as the policemen converged on her and a very confused Hayden.

  The rest of the trip mostly consisted of waiting in various pale-green, bare rooms with his mother, who mostly sat white-faced and silent, not answering any of Hayden's increasingly petulant questions. They didn't go back to the hotel to sleep, but were given a couple of rough cots in a small room in the back of the police station. “Not a cell,” said the sergeant who showed them to it. “A courtesy apartment for relatives."

  Father had reappeared the next day. He was disheveled, subdued, and had a bruise on his cheek. Mother wept in his arms while Hayden stood nearby, hugging his own chest in confused anger. Later that day they boarded a passenger ship considerably less posh than the one they had arrived on, and Hayden watched the bright pinwheels of Rush recede in the distance, unexplored.

  Later Father had explained about the Resistance and the importance of assembling the talent and resources Aerie needed to strike out on its own. Hayden thought he understood, but what mattered was not the politics of it; it was the memory of walking through Rush's crowded streets next to his father, whose hands were bound behind his back.

  “No, it's not our headquarters,” said Miles as Hayden looked around the little room. “Just a watching-post. We're at a rare spot that lets us look down the window of the semaphore-room in the admiralty. But we also store sensitive materials here—like guns.” He gestured to a stack of long boxes on the floor.

  The place was little more than ten feet on a side, though a ladder led up to what was presumably a second level. Blackout curtains covered three walls. A little chair in the out-of-fashion Lace style perched in front of a desk where a man with thick glasses and a halo of white hair sat muttering over a pile of paper. In the opposite corner crouched a lanky man dressed entirely in black. He was walking his fingers over a map of Rush, evidently trying to gauge distances in one of the cylinders.

  “Lads, meet Hayden Griffin. He's the son of the original sunlighters."

  The man in black just grunted; but the balding fellow at the table sat up straight and cranked his glasses down to get a look at Hayden. “Grace! So it is! You probably wouldn't remember me, Hayden, but I baby-sat for you when you were four."

  “Martin Shambles,” said Miles. “And this one, he's V.I.P. Billy. Our assassin."

  Hayden nodded to them both, trying not to sneak another look at Billy. Shambles stood up and held out his hand. “Well met, Hayden! Looks like we saved your ass today."

  “I wasn't aware it needed saving,” said Hayden. But he shook the offered hand.

  “'Course, it would have been easier if we'd known you were still alive.” Shambles sat back down, chuckling. “And working in the Fanning house, no less! That caused a stir. Some of our boys went so far as to claim you'd turned, gone over to their side—"

  “But we know you wouldn't do that, would you?” asked V.I.P. Billy, who was now standing. Hayden suddenly realized that he was unfavorably placed with his back to a corner, with Miles and Billy on either side of him.

  “Of course, there's the question of where you've actually been the past several years,” continued Shambles, who was unconcernedly peering at his papers again. “We had a back story ready for somebody else, papers, friends—it's the sort of in-depth investigation Venera Fanning goes in for. She's much more thorough than the admiralty that way. I mean, we traced you as far as we could, but that wasn't far. Not far at all, in fact."

  Despite the cold air, Hayden was starting to sweat. “But—but I could ask you the same thing,” he said. “Where were you? When the sun blew up and I fell into Winter, where were you? It wasn't the Resistance who found me and nursed me back from frostbite. Hell, I fell four hundred miles before I finally hit a mushroom farm run by this weird old couple ... Nobody came after me. Did you even look?"

  Miles nodded gravely. “We looked. Your falling into Winter was one possibility. Being captured by one of Fanning's ships was another. It was fifty-fifty which had happened."

  “These people...” Hayden had trouble thinking of what to say. He knew his life was on the line here. “They were exiles. A man and woman named Katcheran. Said Aerie had kicked them out twenty years ago. They had no gravity, they were as fragile as birds. They grew mushrooms on this little rock they'd found in the emptiness, and occasionally they'd jet over to the outskirts of Aerie to drop some off for supplies. But it took them ages to ferment enough alcohol for fuel ... he tended to drink it away."

  Miles looked skeptical, but Shambles perked up. “Did you say Katcheran?” Hayden nodded. Shambles pursed his lips. “Haven't heard that name in years.” He tilted his head to one side and looked at Hayden shrewdly. “Go on."

  Hayden did his best to describe his stay in the dark regions outside civilization. The volumes of air there were vast, and not all of it was cold, or dark. The little mushroom farm was just a cave to live in hollowed out of a clay ball no more than fifty feet in diameter. Katcheran and his wife bickered in a constant, monotonous murmur. Hayden had spent most of his time outside, watching the skies for any sign of a passing ship.

  The distant beacons of Aerie teased him whenever he looked in its direction. But every now and then dawn would come as clouds parted around some distant sun. Then he could see just how far away from home he'd come. Hazy depths of emptiness opened out to all sides, not even a stray boulder or water ball visible for miles upon miles. He was stranded in a desert of air, and a
few times he'd curled into a ball, hovering above the stinking fungus, and wept.

  On two or three occasions, though, he saw more. The shells of cloud that enveloped the center of Virga sometimes parted, revealing the Sun of Suns, Candesce. Daylight would suddenly flash out to fill the entire volume of Winter. Each time, Hayden had stood on the air, amazed at the brilliance of it—at the sheer size of an ancient, untended fusion engine that put all other suns in Virga to shame. Dozens of civilizations depended on that single central light, he'd heard. It was the greatest source of heat in the world; it drove the circulation cells in which Aerie and the other nations migrated slowly inwards and outwards.

  The core components of his parents’ sun had come from Candesce; the sun of suns was the wellspring for all of Virga's lesser lights.

  “It was a year before Katcheran had enough fuel for us to fly back, and then he followed the beacons he knew, which brought us in a hundred miles away from Gavin Town. Of course, the town was a legend by then, but nobody knew much about it. Any pieces that were left after Slipstream attacked had been dismantled or drifted away. I didn't have anybody to go to ... any way to get in touch with the Resistance, unless I came to Rush, and I didn't have any money to travel. I got a job in a kitchen in Port Freeley and saved until I could get passage here. But I never heard anyone talk about the Resistance, much less tell me how to find it again."

  Miles nodded, but Billy looked unconvinced. “But why are you working for the Fannings? It took you a lot of effort to do it—you even forged your Slipstream citizenship yourself, by the looks of it."

  Hayden stared at him. “Well, why do you think I came here? I came to kill Admiral Fanning."

  There was a brief silence while the other three looked at one another. Then Billy cracked a slight smile. “You expect us to believe that?"

  “He killed my family!” Hayden didn't care that the man in black was a killer. The indignity of having his motives suspected was too just too much. “They blew up our sun! I care about that! Don't you care? What have you been doing here, all these years? What kind of a Resistance is this? You're supposed to be an assassin, why haven't you killed him?” He stepped over to Shambles’ table and tossed some of the papers in the air. “What, are you gonna plan them all to death? Is that the idea? Well, while you've been squatting on your asses in your little box, I've been doing something with my time. I was ten feet away from him today; tomorrow I'll be right there, and then he'll be dead."