Sun of Suns

Dangerous as it was, some men found themselves obsessively watching out the portholes. Hayden was one. He had no duties since the bikes were useless without oxygen. Though he hungered to be with her, Aubri was busy with the charts. The only way he could feel he was contributing was by maintaining some sense of where they were.

Of course he'd heard of sargassos. They happened whenever a forest became too large and caught fire. Normally, though, a sargasso didn't last long. Air moved through it chasing the smoke away. The charred raft of branches broke up or was taken apart and everything went back to normal. It was terrifying to mink that a forest could become so large that its sargasso could never be healed. As he watched he thought about the fact that an entire civilization was entombed here in the dark: the Rook hummed past chalk-white stone house cubes and blackened town wheels where only ghosts now dwelt.

There were hints in the lines and buttresses of the forest that Leaf's Choir had once been a realm of grand sculptured bubbles made up of smaller bubbles, a fractal palace with living walls. At times the perspectives became dizzying. Miles-wide chambers and arches had walls made up of buildings—houses as bricks, towers as pillars, the city as building material. It was almost reassuring that their full extent was no longer visible; the grandeur and the feeling of loss that must go with seeing it would be unbearable.

At times it seemed as though the Rook had entered some other plane of existence. Home, friends, ordinary cares no longer existed. There was only the breathing of the pumps and the distant roar of the engines. Faces were side-lit or merely imagined on silhouetted figures passing between the active workstations of the ship. And maybe this otherworldliness was what caused the crew of the Tormentor to let down their guard.

Hayden didn't see the missile itself. The Tormentor was somewhere out of view on the other side of the Rook. He did see a row of distant house windows, previously black, light up in lurid reds one after another—a quick whipcrack motion from right to left—and then the ghostly network of dead branches was thrown into stark relief by a burst of white light.

The roll of thunder followed moments later.

The illusion of peace was shattered by shouts, warning horns, and furious activity. The porthole suddenly moved away from Hayden as the Rook began to roll over. "Ru

"What are we doing?" demanded the airman from the Unseen Hand who Hayden had spoken to earlier. "Aren't we going to stand and fight?"

The boatswain shook his head. "Admiral's orders. The others are going to draw them away while we make a run for the treasure. Don't worry. He pla

"He plays fast and loose with our lives," muttered the crewman.

"Right here, right now," replied the boatswain, "caution'll get you killed."

Roars and rumbles could be heard through the hull for many minutes, but the light of battle faded behind quickly, and eventually the relentless silence of Leaf's Choir settled back over the ship— worse than before, if that were possible, because the Rook was barely moving now. The navigator and pilot sat with their noses to the bridge portholes, staring into the darkness until their eyes watered. Occasional thumps on the hull and the sharp snap of breaking branches signaled their mistakes. The ship would shudder at such times and slow, and the fire crew would rush around looking for broken seams, cracks, or punctures—anything that might let in the toxic mix that passed for air in this place. It was fully two hours before the admiral allowed the Rook's headlight to be lit again.

By that time, Hayden was certain they were lost.

CHAISON FANNING HAD begun to feel unpleasantly familiar with the back of Gridde's head. The old man had his eye glued to the periscope in the chart room and hadn't moved in ten minutes; Chaison suspected he was asleep. Would that Chaison could be.

He was hiding here, he had to admit. It was just too nerve-wracking to be on the bridge right now. After all, the entire mission-—and possibly the future of Slipstream itself—was riding on the events of the next day. Or rather, no, it wasn't the direness of the situation that was keeping his nerves on edge. He'd already fought several battles to get here, and none had affected him like this interminable waiting. No, it was the prospect of being proven a fool that bothered him. In all likelihood there was no pirate treasure; the very phrase was an oxymoron, for pirates were outcasts, the poorest of the poor.

If it turned out that he had betrayed his men's trust by luring them halfway across the world on a bootless quest, Chaison would willingly step out of the Rook's aft hatch without a gas helmet and make Leaf's Choir his tomb. Or give himself up to his men's wrath. It wouldn't matter which at that point.

"There it is!" Gridde had been awake after all. He said nothing else, until Chaison put a hand on his shoulder and said, "What, man? What do you see?"

"It's the city," the old man whispered. "Dead as a forgotten legend. "Your wife's map starts here. From here, I can find our way."

Chaison went to one of the portholes to look out. There had been nothing but relentless black out there for hours now as the Rook searched for landmarks in the open central cavity of the Choir. Once, two suns had lit this space, but it had shrunk until it was only fifteen miles across. Cities, farms, and palaces had soared through the luminous air. Now, any light you made was quickly eaten by the permanently drifting smoke.

Impatiently, he bounced over to a speaking tube and said, "I want flares, in all six directions. Air-free white." He waited impatiently by the porthole until the lights stuttered on.

And a ghostly image began to emerge from the frozen billows of smoke and killed air: the bone-white shape of a city, its arcs and curves embedded in shadows of perfect black.

This was Carlindi, once the second-largest city of Leaf's Choir. As Chaison examined it he realized he was looking at one of the legendary architectural forms of the principalities of Candesce. Carlinth was a geared town.

Six town wheels surrounded a seventh like the petals of a flower. Their rims touched and an elaborate scaffolding, shadowed behind them, indicated some fixed co

Each town wheel was twice the size of any of Rush's. They were crowded with mansions and minarets, and many more free-floating buildings hung in the surrounding dark. But it all looked unreal, like an ivory child's toy, because there was no color at all to the scene. Every object and structure was the same shade of purest white.

Gridde hissed as he squinted through his periscope. "It's ash, sir. Finer than smoke, it's like paint when it settles. The whole place is layered in it."

A shroud, thought Chaison with a shudder.

"But I can see the way," continued the chart master. He held up the long branchlike map Venera had taken from the tourist station. "1 can navigate us from here."

The knot in Chaison's stomach began to unwind, just a bit.

The Rook slid silently past the dead town wheels. Just as the flares began to gutter Chaison began to catch glimpses of discolored areas on the motionless structures, places where objects had been removed, doors forced, and windows broken. Someone had come here to strip the dead city, but whoever it was had not come in force and hadn't stayed long.

Was it ghosts that had scared them away? Skittering sounds in the darkness, half-glimpsed movement down streets that had once thronged with people? Or was it just the silence, relentless and oppressive, that had made men begin by talking in whispers and end up not speaking at all?—Leaving, abandoning their ambitions of getting rich off the death here; shamed and uneasy, fleeing Leaf's Choir never to return?