Yet the quiet comforts of the Glorious Dawn annoyed her. Venera went right up to the main window of the lounge and peered out. Tell me where we are, she commanded the maid.
There was distraction to be found in this view. Candesce lay directly ahead, its brilliance too intense to be looked at directly. Venera well knew that light, it had burned her as shed fled from its embrace. She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked past it.
She saw the principalities of Candesce. Although she had spent a week in a charcoal-harvesters cabin perched on a burnt arm of the sargasso of Leafs Choir, that place had been too close to Candesce; the white air cradling the sun of suns washed out any details that lay past it. Here, for the first time, she had a clear view of the nations that surrounded that biggest of Virgas artificial lights. And the sight was breathtaking.
Candesce lay at the center of the world, a beacon and a heart to Virga. Anything within a hundred miles of the sun of suns simply vanished in flame, a fact that the principalities exploited to dispose of trash, industrial wastes, and the bodies of their dead. This forbidden zone was completely empty, so Venera could see the whole inner surface of the two-hundred-mile-diameter bubble formed by it. On the far side of Candesce that surface was just a smooth speckled blue-green; in the middle distances Venera could make out dots and glitter, and individual beads of leaf color. As she turned to follow the curve of the material toward her the dots became buildings and the glints became the mirrored surfaces of house-sized spheres of water. The beads of green grew filigreed detail and became forestsdozens or hundreds of trees at a time, with their roots intertwined around some buried ball of dirt and rocks.
Candesce presided at the center of a cloud of city whose inner extent was two hundred miles in diameterand whose outer reaches could only be guessed at. The fog of habitations and farms receded into blue dimness, behind lattices of white cloud. Back in the darkening airs a hundred or two hundred miles away, smaller suns glowed.
These are the principalities, said Brydda, sweeping her arm to take in the sight. Sixty-four nations, countless millions of people moving at the mercy of Candesces heat.
Venera glanced at her. What do you mean by that? At the mercy of?
The maid looked chagrined. Well, they cant keep station
where they please, the way Spyre does. Spyre is fixed in the air, madam, always has been. But these she dismissed the principalities with a wavethey go where the breezes send them. All that keeps them together as nations is the stability of the circulation patterns.
Venera nodded. The cluster of nations shed grown up in, Meridian, worked the same way. Candesces prodigious heat had to go somewhere, and beyond the exclusion zone it must form the air into Hadley cells: semi-stable up- and down-drafts. You could enter such a cell at the bottom, near Candesce, and be lofted a hundred miles up, then swept horizontally for another hundred miles, then down again until you reached your starting point. The Meridian Hadley cell was hugea thousand miles across and twice that in depthand nearly permanent. Down here in the principalities the heat would make the cells less stable, but quicker and stronger.
So theres one nation per Hadley cell? she asked. That seems altogether too well organized.
The maid laughed. Its not that simple. The cells break up and merge, but it takes time. Every time Candesce goes into its night cycle the heat stops going out, and the cells falter. Candesce always comes back on in time to start them up again but not without consequence.
Venera understood what she meant by consequence . Without predictable airflow, whole nations could break apart, their provinces drifting away from one another, mixing with neighbors and enemies. It had happened often enough in Meridian, where the population was light and obstacles few. Down here, such an event would be catastrophic.
Brydda continued her monologue, pointing out border beacons and other sights of interest. Venera half listened, musing at something shed known intellectually but not grasped until this moment. She had been insidehad for one night been in control of the most powerful device in the world. Whole cities rose and fell in a slow majestic dance driven by Candesceas did forests, mists of green food-crops, and isolated buildings, clouds and ships and factories, supply nets a mile across, whale and bird paddocks. Ships and dolphins and ropeways and flapping, foot-finned humans threaded through it all.
Shed had ultimate power in her hands, and had let it go without a thought. Strange.
Venera turned her attention back to Brydda. As the Glorious Dawn turned, however, she saw that Spyre lay in a kind of dimple in the surface of the bubble. The giant cylinder disrupted the smooth winds of the cells that surrounded it. Wrapped in its own weather, Spyre was an irritant, a mote in the gargantuan orb of the principalities.