Lady of Mazes

10

Aaron bumped against the ceiling. Something huge lunged at him in the sudden darkness. He shouted and flailed backwards. The china cabinet pushed gently against bis palm and came to a stop.

He peered past the cabinet. Everything was still falling — that was the sensation — but nothing was landing. He'd known it would be this way, but his heart pounded anyway. After a moment of indecisive paralysis he shoved the cabinet aside. Across the living room Livia was curled into a fetal position, and the Raven warrior had braced himself in the archway to the front entrance. All around them floated various pieces of furniture. As he watched, the painting over the mantelpiece gently lifted itself up off its hook and drifted to the ceiling.

This panic was a waste of time. He tried to get purchase on the wall but simply flew away from it After a bit of bumping and thudding he managed to get to the front window. There was nothing visible outside at all, just a faint pearly glow that rotated around the window frame every minute or so.

"Qiingi, could you get the lights?" he said. His voice sounded properly calm now. "Livia, are you all right?"

She mumbled something from nearby. Aaron put out his hand to reassure her, but somehow couldn't complete the gesture of touching her.

Qiingi sounded apologetic: "I don't know how to light your rooms."

"That's just perfect." Aaron gauged his jump more carefully this time, and sailed over to touch the traditional switch plate next to the archway. The room was flooded with light — and looked ten times as surreal in the steady illumination as all its contents sailed majestically around, like a parade of household gods.

"If you're not going to help, could you at least get out of the way?" The warrior reluctantly let go of the door-jamb and Aaron slipped past him and back to the kitchen. Aside from the table and some floating plates, it was clear in here but dark. He went to the window and looked out Aaron gave a gasp of wonder. Here were stars such as he had never seen. The darkness was crowded with them, and he'd swear he could make out different colors. The constellations were drowned in detail.

As the house slowly turned, he saw the source of the pearly glow that had been visible from the living room. The arching inside surface of the coronal formed a sliver of light far above. The rest of the giant structure was invisible in the blackness, but they must still be falling past the sidewall. It was probably a good thing that they couldn't see that endless surface speeding by.

He went to the control boxes he'd clamped to the kitchen counter and cautiously ordered a small burst from the rockets he and Qiingi had attached to the house. For a moment nothing seemed to happen; then he had to grab the counter as the whole room moved to the left.

Five minutes later he re-entered the living room — walking in great slow bounding steps. Livia looked up from where she perched on her toes on the floor. "What's happening?" she asked, fear in her voice.

"I spun us up a bit," he said. "I've given us enough momentum for a twentieth of a gee. I didn't want to do more yet, to let the furniture settle. After everything's back in position we can spin back up to a good weight — say, half a gravity. It's the best way to lose weight," he added with a grin. They didn't laugh.

Nobody spoke, in fact, as they went through the house fetching chairs and beds down from the bizarre piles and configurations they had made. Then Aaron spun them up and real weight gradually returned.

As Aaron adjusted the position of the painting over the mantel he heard Livia drop onto the couch behind him. "Now what?" she asked.

"Well," he said, stepping back and eyeing his handiwork, "most of the work was in timing when to throw us off the wall. There's nothing to do now but wait."

Silence. He turned; both Livia and Qiingi sat bolt upright in their chairs. They were waiting. Aaron began to laugh, all of the tension finally ebbing away as he did. "Weeks!" he said. "The next coronal is weeks away. The house is self-healing, the oxygen and heat plants are the best pseudolife we had ... there's really nothing we have to do. This is what space travel is like."

They stared at him, uncomprehending. Finally he just shrugged and went to fetch the house's broombug to clean up a spill in the kitchen.

Later, Aaron and Livia came together in the kitchen. For the first time since her arrival at the aerie, neither was busy with something. They hugged and he gazed intently into her face. "Have I said how proud I am of you?"

She raised an eyebrow. "No, but go ahead. Oh, by the way — about what?"

He laughed. "The others thought we'd lost you after the Oceanus thing. You disappeared at the same time as the rest of the peers. But I kept saying, 'if anybody can make it out it's Livia. She's done it before.'"

Uneasy, Livia broke away. "I'm not special. I was just lucky enough not to be there when they attacked."

"But you led them."

She shrugged irritably. "What does that matter?"

He waved a hand. "It doesn't. It doesn't. As long as you're okay ... And this Qiingi fellow? He helped you?"

She nodded. "Qiingi's a ... very special person. Strong. He doesn't seem to know what the word uncertainty means."

"Huh." He busied himself with the house controls he'd clamped to the kitchen counter.

"Aaron." He looked over, smiling. "Why didn't you tell me you were going away? I mean, I understand if the founders didn't want you to talk about the specifics of the project you were working on. But you could have said it was secret, and left it at that."

He looked blank for a moment. "I didn't want to keep secrets from you. And I didn't want to lie to you."

Livia gave him a puzzled frown. "So vanishing out of my Society was somehow better?"

"Look, I'm sorry. I was ... consumed with the project. It's all I've thought about for weeks. Besides," he said with a grin, "I'm a big boy now. You don't really need me to tell you all my comings and goings, do you?"

That stung, both because Livia knew she shouldn't have to rely on his presence so much anymore — and because once upon a time, she had been able to rely on it without hesitation.

Does that mean we're no longer inseparable? she wanted to ask. But she kept silent They continued chatting, catching up as if nothing had happened. But so much had happened lately; she couldn't sustain the casual tone of the conversation.

Eventually, talk dried up, and they drifted their separate ways.

They gathered over breakfast to discuss their plans. So far the details had been sketchy: all Livia had cared about was escaping Teven. All it took was an eloquent look on her part for Aaron to understand.

"What do we do next? Well, this was the easy part," he began. "The coronals take care of travel between them. Normally we wouldn't have launched from the top of the wall but from one of the cities under the coronal's skin. The skin's only two meters thick at any point and there're lots of doorways and shafts opening into the undersurface."

Livia paused with her fork halfway to her mouth. "I've never heard of anything like that," she said. Qiingi also looked puzzled.

"I've explored some of them," said Aaron. "There's whole cities hanging like chandeliers underneath our feet. But they're in different manifolds. I thought that some of them might know how to use the coronals' transport systems, but it seems that the founders excluded use of the docking systems from the tech locks. They made travel as impossible as long-range radio and laser-com."

"But why?" asked Livia. "Oh," she answered herself. "Because they didn't want us to be found. They wanted to isolate the manifolds here."

"Yes. Which is a shame because from what I've been able to learn, all you'd have to do to travel between the coronals is walk down a flight of stairs and enter a moving stateroom. At the appropriate moment it gets dropped, and you're away. At the far end, grapples pick you up as you fly by the destination coronal on a close tangent. I found pieces of old cargo boxes in some of the underways, and figured out the basics of their labels. We tried various destination labels on the barrels we dropped, and ones with a particular label were picked up and held at the next coronal. So we know the label, or I guess the name, of that coronal: it's called Rosinius in OldWorldLing.

"The system seems fully automatic; there'd be way too much traffic for a human to oversee. But you see, nobody claimed the barrels at the far end. I don't know if anybody noticed them at all. When they weren't claimed after two days, the system returned them. It's that automation that we're going to rely on to get us to Rosinius."

"And if we don't find help there?" asked Qiingi. "Do we travel to the next one? And the next? Then what? Will we be stranded?"

Aaron hesitated. "I don't know. I didn't want to do this in the first place. Of course, we know the Teven label, so we can always come back ... "

"If we're not captured by someone or killed," Livia pointed out. Aaron shrugged.

"Same chance we were taking at home."

Qiingi smiled; it was the first time in days he'd done that Livia smiled back at him. "What next, then? Who is it we seek?"

She hesitated. "The one name I've got to go on is the anecliptics."

"What do we know about them?" Qiingi asked. "Are they founders, like Raven or your Ellis? Or qqatxhana?"

"Well, the name is a clue," said Aaron. "If you squint, you might be able to see what I mean." He waved a piece of bread at the window; weak but direct sunlight slanted in. Livia did squint at the sun, but it looked the way it always did: tiny and fierce, with minute thornlike spikes of intense light hanging just above and below it. The spikes made it look a bit like a sideways eye.

Aaron rose and went to the window. He pointed to one side. "Have you ever wondered where that comes from?"

Livia craned her neck. He was pointing at the faintly drawn, rainbow-colored clouds that hung across one half of the sky. "It's just the Lethe Nebula," she said. "It's always been there."

"Actually, no," said Aaron. "It was never there during ancient times, or the Modern period. I checked old astronomical records. There's nothing about a seventy-million-kilometer-thick cloud orbiting near Jupiter." He pointed again, this time to the brightest star. Livia knew it was Jupiter; that pinprick of light was the only celestial object other than the cloud and the sun that never moved with the seasons. "And did you know," continued Aaron, "that there's another cloud like this one on the opposite side of the sun?"

Livia shrugged. "It's all one thing," he said. "The sun has two jets rising off its poles. So that's your clue: those jets rise at right angles to something called the plane of the ecliptic."

He dipped his finger in his water glass and drew a wide circle on the tabletop. "All the planets orbit the sun like trains on rails, all the rails on die same flat plane. That imaginary flat surface is called the ecliptic." He smoothed his palm over the wood surface. "The jets we see coming off the sun rise and fall at an angle to that plane."

Livia looked at the circle, then out the window at the sky-spanning iridescent cloud. "That cloud is fed from the sun," she said.

" ... From off the ecliptic," said Aaron and nodded. "So whatever these anecliptics are, they surely have something to do with that process."

Visible on any night in Teven were dozens of starlettes inside the Lethe, and countless infinitesimal sparkles of light — each one a congealed comet of gases from those clouds. "Without Teven blocking out half the sky, you can see big engines working near the starlettes," said Aaron. "They're building coronals and other things even larger. They're all radio silent, but they might communicate by laser. The Lethe blocks any transmissions that might come from beyond it. But those places might be where your anecliptics live."

She shuddered. "They're not mine," she said. She looked up to see Aaron eyeing her; there was something unspoken between them. It was, she knew, the memory of the horrible destruction of the crash that had killed his parents. Lady Ellis had casually said that a mad aneclip-tic had caused it.

"Rosinius Coronal is two million kilometers away," he said. "That's exactly a week's journey at three point three kilometers per second, which is the rotational speed of Teven, hence our traveling speed. If we're lucky, we'll find allies at Rosinius. If not ... then we collect supplies if we can, and keep going."

They looked at each other. No one had anything to add. For the moment, all they could do was wait.

And there was nothing more to space travel than waiting. In a sense, Livia had been traveling in space aboard Teven all her life, and this was no different. She ate, she slept, she stared at the walls. Occasionally before sleeping she would tease back the drapes in her bedroom and gaze outside. Then the stars and the intricate constructions of the anecliptics would be fully visible to her. Yet there was no ground below the house, no horizon and no clouds above. It was only when she saw this that she really understood that their known world lay behind them.

So they padded to and fro like ghosts, murmuring polite greetings to one another in the hall; cooking, tidying, inventorying their supplies, and sitting. Endless sitting in perfect silence and stillness. The house had inscape projectors, but with nothing to project, they might as well not have existed.

One evening she was sitting in her room, reading one of the archaic paper books that had been left in the library by the previous tenant. Someone tapped on the door; she looked up to find Qiingi peering around it. "May I come in?' he asked.

She glared at him but he didn't go away. "Surely," she said after an awkward moment. She tuned her shift to the formal black she was wearing these days and slipped off the bed to sit in one of the armchairs. He hesitated over the other chair, then sat cross-legged on the floor.

"Livia, if I have done something to offend you, I would like to apologize — once you tell me what it was."

She stared at him. "Offend — ? No, Qiingi, no you haven't done anything. Quite the ... opposite. You've been very patient, both you and Aaron."

"Ah." He gazed at the wall for a moment. "In that case, I would like you to apologize to me."

"Ap — " She opened her mouth and closed it. "What for?"

"You are behaving in an accusatory and abusive manner," he said calmly. "You snap at myself and Aaron if we so much as smile at you. But ten minutes later you are cheerful and start a conversation. It is ... wearing us down."

"Oh." She shifted uncomfortably. "Really? I ... " She tried to remember some such incident, and couldn't. "Things have been hard on all of us," she said at last.

"Hmm." He sat there for a while, picking at the carpet. "There is another thing."

"What?"

"I have not seen you speaking to your Society since we left. It ... concerns me."

She sighed painfully and said, "I don't believe in Societies anymore."

He rubbed his chin. "I don't understand."

"Qiingi ... " She tamped down on her anger. "How do we know what's true in inscape, and what's a lie created by these 3340 fanatics? They may have infected inscape — it could be that our animas have been working for them for years. Don't you see? If I bring up my Society, who am I really talking to? The spirits of my family and friends? Or some puppet master?"

He scowled at the carpet, then nodded. "I understand. But that must be terrible for you. To be so cut off from everything ... "

She hunched, fists clenched. "What do you want me to say? Yes, yes, it is terrible and I don't know how to deal with it. I don't know how. You come in here accusing me of stuff and trying to find out where I hurt — of course I hurt! Of course, but what can I do about it? What do you want from me?"

He didn't turn away from her intensity. 'To hear you say it, as you're doing now."

"Well," she said frostily, "thank you, but I'm not sure how you can replace an entire Society, Qiingi." She felt the need to say more — words tumbled over one another but she held back — and finally she turned away from him.

"You're not the only one who has lost their loved ones," he said quietly.

She leapt to her feet and as he stood she made to push him out the door. "Damn you, what do you want!" She put her hands on his chest and shoved but it was like pushing a wall. Instead his arms went around her.

Then she was in tears, cursing herself for a weakling. He just held on to her and let her cry.

In her need she found herself kissing him, then pulling him to her bed.

Later, she lay perfectly calm and stared at the ceiling. He breathed deep and slow next to her. The night felt unreal — things had changed, but how could anything really be different while they were exiles? Love was impossible in this time, she was sure.

Memories came to her of the ruins and overturned trees of Teven after the accident. Her recollection of that time was fragmentary, but she knew there had been times when she walked amid the devastation with much the same detachment as now. She had coldly wondered whether she would live or die. That was how you survived, she told herself now: you went past fear and anger and despair and just extinguished your emotions entirely. You lost sympathy for yourself, you stopped dreaming about rescue — you treated dreams with contempt.

Unless there was another way ... She turned and gazed at Qiingi's sleeping face. He seemed to sense her, and opened one eye. "What?" he mumbled.

"Qiingi, how is it you were able to travel with us all the way to the aerie? The others all dropped away as they found places they couldn't believe in enough to enter. But you walked through every world with us. How did you do that?"

"I believed," he murmured.

"In what?" she said, allowing herself a moment of hope.

"You," he said. "I believed in you." Then he turned over and went back to sleep.

Shocked and confused, Livia lay for a long time staring at the dark curve of his shoulder. Was he just another believer in the stories about her? The thought hurt; disappointed, she finally turned away from him.

Her eyes were dry; quietly, in the dark, she withdrew her sympathy from herself. She let it go, and let go too of her parents, her friends, of Barrastea and her rooms and all the things she had done or wanted to do. They drained out of her leaving her cold and empty. Then she curled under the warm wall of Qiingi's back and went to sleep.

The week passed in boredom and increasing tension. Qiingi came to Livia's bed as often as not, but they continued to spend much of their daytime apart She supposed they were brooding on their separate losses. He and she were such different people that their intimacy seemed forced anyway.

Aaron was barely polite to either of them. He hid in his room much of the time, building a radio using components he hoped were not contaminated with the nanotech-nology of the tech locks. He smelled of copper and oil when they passed in the hall.

Qiingi had fashioned a spear out of scavenged household materials, and spent much of his time casting it in an upstairs hallway. Livia found out about it one day when she awoke to the sound of a furious argument between the two men. Arriving at the scene, she found a wooden pole sticking out of a wall that was peppered with diamond-shaped holes from previous throws. " — Know what could happen if you hit a circuit that can't repair itself?" Aaron had been shouting.

Livia walked away without intervening.

There was a time when she had considered Aaron her closest friend; had he wanted more than that? Did he love her now? He had never expressed such desires to her before. Livia resented his silence but didn't feel that it was her place to bring up this subject. They all began avoiding one another's eyes, and skulking about.

Meanwhile anything could have happened back home — manifolds conquered, people killed or made into quislings of 3340. There was no way to know. Outside the windows the towers of cloud that made up the Lethe turned slowly, revealing deep cavities and slopes within themselves. And beyond the Lethe, something else was becoming visible, day by day. Coronals and starlettes glowed out there, as well as brilliant pinpricks that moved almost perceptibly fast Aaron had brought a telescope with him from the aerie, and he spent a lot of time peering at the newly revealed wonders. Once, as they were all sitting in the living room, he turned and said to Qiingi, "Come here."

The warrior looked over at him warily. "Come on. I want to show you something," said Aaron. Reluctantly Qiingi went over and looked through the eyepiece.

Livia had no interest in telescopes, and Qiingi said nothing at the time about what he saw. That night, though, as they lay together, he told her.

"I remember trying to catch mist in my hand when I was a boy. I had thought that the Lethe would be the same, that it was a kind of fog too insubstantial to see." Instead, when he pointed the telescope at the Lethe he saw, not mist, but a broad distribution of starlike points that only merged to form the cloud at a seemingly infinite distance. Aaron had showed Qiingi how to zoom in on one of the points; up close, it looked something like a dismembered aircar leg was coalescing out of the fog. It hung alone in space, distant sunlight picking out fine detail on one half of it, the other half an unformed smudge. He focused the scope on another pinprick of light; this looked like it would become a bundle of girders, given time. And over there was a curved diamond-glass window, visible only as arcs and lozenges of reflection. Each of the objects was separated by many kilometers from its nearest neighbor — but there were billions, trillions of such pieces. Between them, Aaron had explained, an unguessable amount of virtual matter floated. Its components seemed to drift together over time and spontaneously morph into objects and devices of any sort.

Livia lay there a long time thinking about it, aware that Qiingi was doing the same beside her. The Lethe Nebula was nothing more or less than several civilizations' worth of parts and supplies, drifting slowly in currents and eddies of their own diffuse gravity. According to Aaron, countless fusion-powered ships grazed up and down the vast outer surface of the cloud. Qiingi suggested that this might be the solar system's watering hole: a gathering place for whatever it was that lived beyond all manifolds, beyond the tech locks. Here they — whatever they were — fed off the bounty provided by the anecliptics.

And somewhere within that abyss of drifting machines and parts, the anecliptics themselves might lurk — watchful, alert for anyone who tried to take too much or enter too deeply into what Lucius had called the "Fallow Lands."

Or, perhaps, alert for anyone who tried to leave.

11

Their experiences at Rosinius Coronal remained vivid in Livia's memory later; the coronals that followed tended to blur together. Maybe it was because they spent more time at this first stop, or maybe it was that in those first days Livia wondered whether its desolate jungle was to be their home for the rest of their lives.

When the coronal first loomed ahead of them, they talked in anticipation about what they might find there: a culture of manifolds like their own, perhaps — or perhaps a fallen civilization, captured and conquered like their own by 3340. They spent time getting their stories straight, depending on what the people were like and how they were received.

No one received them.

Invisible grapples delicately plucked the flying house's tether and drew them through the skin of the coronal, depositing the house in what Aaron said was an airlock chamber similar to those underneath Teven. The room was big enough to accommodate a dozen houses; giant letters on one wall spelled out rosinius. After an hour of tense waiting, during which hissing and popping sounds indicated an atmosphere being pumped into the chamber, they finally ventured out their front door. Qiingi brought his spear. But there was no welcoming committee in the dusty corridors that opened off the airlock — only soil-clogged stairs that led upward into steaming air and the buzz of unfamiliar insects.

They looked at one another uncertainly, then Aaron grimaced and said, "Might as well see what's up there."

At the top of the half-blocked stairs they emerged in a clearing where some forest giant had fallen long ago, taking many of its neighbors with it. The tumbled logs were overgrown with moss and ferns and up-thrusting darts of new forest. It was bright under the hazy suns — three starlettes — but beneath the encroaching forest nothing was visible but gloom. They walked slowly into this cathedral of trees and stopped, daunted right at the start of their exploration.

There were no landmarks that would make it easy for them to find their way back here. Still, nobody raised the issue; they all needed to know what had happened here. Unspoken was the thought that perhaps this was what Teven would look like once 3340 was done with it Then Qiingi pointed. "There is a deer track there," he said. "A track for something, at least; these plants are unlike any I've ever seen."

Indeed, all the vegetation in sight seemed bloated, about to burst with water or sap. There was an unhealthy, fetid stench under the trees. Insectlike birds flitted under the high forest canopy. The ground here was clear of underbrush, but rows of huge fungi crisscrossed the loam like fences.

"If we follow that track, we return the same way," said Qiingi confidently.

"And what if we get lost?" said Aaron.

Qiingi stood up straighten "I will not become lost."

"Oh, like that's reassuring. I — "

"Hey!" shouted Livia. "Are we going or not?"

Aaron shrugged breezily. "All right. But I don't see what you hope to find."

They walked in silence. After the first hundred meters livia was drenched in sweat; she found it hard to breathe this thick air, but she wasn't about to complain. She felt like they were finally doing something. Qiingi took the lead, and for the first time in weeks he looked alert, even happy.

Asteroidal rocks, weathered with time, poked up here and there along the trail, which meandered back and forth but always maintained its general direction. They saw no animal life other than the distant avians. The creatures always stayed high above where stout branches reached out and vines drooled from the forest climax. The air was full of midges, but nothing bit them.

The land became swampy, and the path wound its way in between dark pools. These were fringed with gouts of green vegetation that seemed frozen in some complex fight for space above the water; those stalks and branches that won were turned downward, leaves pointing at the black water. The gargantuan trunks of trees reared up in between the pools, and sometimes the path followed the backs of twisting exposed roots that formed bridges across the still, leaf-paved surfaces. There was no sign of the creatures that had created the path, but as they were crossing one of the pools Livia happened to glance down, and stopped.

"That's odd." She pointed at a distant glow of pastel light that glimmered deep in the water. It seemed like frozen clouds of radiance were trapped down there. There was something familiar about the glow, but it was unlike anything she had ever seen in the forests and pools of Westerhaven. As she watched, the glowing roils moved slowly to one side, as though some great river were flowing beneath her feet.

Then the first stars came into view.

Aaron breathed an inarticulate sound of wonder. A glittering starscape appeared beneath the bridge, delicately shimmering as if trapped in the depths of the pool. "It's a window," said Livia. Qiingi frowned in confusion. "Don't you see?" She pointed. "The skin of the coronal is transparent here."

He shook his head, uncomprehending — then gasped as a starlette appeared below, and bright dawn came to the shadowed pillars of the forest.

The sunlight appeared first in the far distance; it looked as though some giant were lifting the trees away in patches here and there, leaving bright spring-green and yellow shining in shafts of sunlight. A crimson and gold glow welled up in the pool — and the little sun appeared there, too bright to look at. The wreaths of foliage around them were now bathed in full daylight, and the underside of the forest canopy far above was painted bright green.

"This window could be kilometers in size," said Aaron. "Maybe once it was all clear, like a shallow lake. You could have canoed over the stars. But the soil's invaded it ... "

The strange ground-lit day only lasted five minutes. But its glitter revealed vast distances under the forest canopy, and it was plain that there were no buildings here, no clearings — no sign of humanity.

So, though they made several more forays out to the jungle, they never traveled farther than that very spot There seemed little point. They gathered large armfuls of various plants to feed into the food processors in the house; they came up at night and scanned the visible ring of the coronal for any signs of a living civilization, and they debated endlessly about what might have happened here. And finally, after four days, they trooped back to the house and Aaron replaced the rosinius sign on its side with the next name on the list of coronals he'd compiled while exploring Teven's underside. Sure enough, after another day of tense waiting, a creaking and popping signaled the withdrawal of atmosphere from the giant airlock — and then suddenly the house was falling, everybody shouting as the furniture flew every which way. Rosinius had released them.

So began weeks of travel and disappointment, as each coronal turned out to be empty — whether jungle like Rosinius, waving grassland like Makhtar, or ice and mountains like some others. Barren as they were, though, with each coronal they visited they came closer to the outer boundary of the Lethe Nebula.

When they emerged from the stairwell in the last coronal for which Aaron had a name, it was to find themselves standing on an island no more than five meters on a side, in an endless ocean choked with ice floes. The sky was full of low, brooding clouds and the wind cut like daggers.

They had talked about what they would do when they ran out of destinations. Aaron had proposed a bold solution, one that might not work. If it didn't, there would be no disastrous fallout They simply wouldn't go any farther, and would have to retrace their steps back to Teven. But if it did work ...

He and Qiingi changed the sign on the house to read JUPITER.

A day later, as usual without warning, they fell into blackness. This time, they had no idea what their destination would be. All they knew was that the Lethe Nebula had begun to recede. The glittering complexity of the greater solar system lay ahead, its threats and promises unknown.

By the second day of this new journey, something changed. Aaron's crude radio had begun to pick up faint voices.

There were thousands of them, overlapping on all frequencies. It was difficult to pick out and follow any one for more than a few seconds. Some of the complex noises they heard might or might not be human, but many spoke an understandable dialect of WorldLing. Understanding the language didn't help; very little that Livia heard made any sense. She listened for an hour, and the impression that built up was of a vast and vibrant civilization completely concerned with its own affairs, either ignorant or uncaring of the discarded worlds right next to it.

The view out the windows reinforced this impression. They kept the lights off in the living room much of the time now. All took turns sitting in the darkness and watching, as something like a giant scintillating galaxy emerged hour by hour from behind the Lethe Nebula. Countless storiettes of all sizes lit the sides of the nebula from within that tangle of detail. There were hundreds of worlds for every miniature sun: ring-shaped coronals, long oval cylinders, round balls of metal just a few kilometers in diameter, and crystal rods, cubes, and spheres like teeming one-celled organisms. All of space beyond the Lethe seemed to be filled with light and structure, starlettes and mists of worlds receding in layers and sheets, runnels of light raveling and overlapping into an infinity of detail.

Aaron fussed over the radio and finally announced that the transmitter part was working. He actually joined Livia and Qiingi for dinner that night. "We can send voice, but nothing so sophisticated as inscape or even video," he announced. "The question is, what do we say?"

They looked at one another. Qiingi nodded slowly. "We know that our elders' stories about this place are largely true," he said. "The elders speak of a single Song of Ometeotl mat encompasses all the gardens of the sun. All the planets and coronals, you would say. For some reason, our world of Teven is not part of this Song. These radio voices do not give any clues as to why."

"Except one," said Livia, waving a fork at Qiingi. "We've heard ships signaling one another and their ports. None of them mentioned Teven, or Rosinius, or any of the coronals we've visited. It's as if diose places don't exist to them."

Aaron shrugged. "Beyond their horizon. Nothing unusual there."

"But, the elders have always been adamant about one thing," said Qiingi. "The rest of the solar system does not have horizons. It is all one place. So how could we be beyond its horizon?"

They debated as the evening wore on. Raven's histories were very different than Westerhaven's; each manifold saw the past through a different lens. It was no surprise that they could find few common denominators in the stories.

In particular, the history leading up to and immediately following the self-imposed exile of the founders to Teven varied wildly from place to place. Qiingi claimed mat this was natural, because that period constituted the origin, or dreamtime, of all the manifolds. "We each make it our source myth," he explained.

Aaron opened his mouth to make some snide comment, but was interrupted by a squawk from the radio.

Qiingi raised an eyebrow. "Did it just say 'house'?"

They crowded into me bedroom. Sure enough, the radio was saying, "Attention the house, attention the house. You have no identification beacon. This is a violation of — " bzzzzt. The last noise sounded tike machine-language.

Aaron grabbed the crude microphone he had built. "Well, what do I say?"

"Say we need help," Iivia said. "What's the Old Worldling word ... Mayday?"

"Mayday, mayday," Aaron said into the mic. "We are unpowered and unarmed. Can you hear us?"

Rich laughter poured out of the speaker. If this isn't the craziest stunt I've ever seen!" The voice faded a bit. "Hey, guys, take a look at this thing. Some damn fools built themselves a flying house."

Iivia and Aaron looked at each other. "I doubt we're dealing with officials here," he said.

Qiingi was staring out the bedroom window. "What do you think mat is?" he said, pointing.

It looked tike a tittle metal star, seven-pointed and twirling sedately. Livia went to the window and shielded her eyes with her hands. In the second or two it took to do that the distant vision had expanded from an intricate speck to button-sized. Then all of a sudden it was on top of them: kilometers-long, sides of white metal, with chandelier cities on the ends of long netted cables slung from its central body.

A shudder went through the house. "We've been caught," shouted Aaron. For a second Livia's inner ear told her she was felling, men things leveled out with a bounce.

She was about to comment on the smoothness of then-capture when the bedroom was suddenly filled with vertical yellow bars, spaced about one per meter. These flickered, faded, and were replaced by a set of nested blue spheres. The black outside the window turned to static, and then landscapes appeared out there: a plain of wheat fields, turned sideways; a glittering cityscape; a vista of mountains.

Livia grabbed Qiingi for support. "Inscape failure!" she shouted. She had seen this before, as had Aaron.

And then the house was full of people.

A young man in an outfit of canary yellow and blue appeared in the bedroom doorway. "Fantastic!" he laughed in heavily accented WorldLing. "This is a great stunt, you really had us going there for a while."

Livia could hear a crowd of men and women in the living room pointing at the furniture and laughing. More were arguing hi the kitchen. She forced her shoulders out of their defensive hunch. Obviously these people were projections of that large ship's inscape system; this young man wasn't physically here. Not yet, anyway — the house was doubtless being drawn up into one of those chandelier cities even now. She glanced out the window. Space was gone, replaced by an endless landscape of forest, trees, and lakes.

"But how did you do all this?" said the young man. "I mean, the inscape is so strange. Look at this!" He gestured, and suddenly Livia's mother stood before him.

"What can I do for you, sir?" she inquired politely. He laughed, and as Livia watched in horror, Father appeared, then Esther, and Jachman and Rene — her whole Society, summoned for the first time in her life by a stranger.

"Stop it!" She gave the command to dismiss the Society, and she saw the confirmation icon blaze briefly in her lower visual field; but the animas of her friends and family remained visible. "What are you doing? Stop!"

The youth cocked his head, examining her as if she were some unusual butterfly he'd just collected. He opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by shouts from the living room. It was a female voice, saying, "Out, out! Shoo!"

The young man turned and said, "Wait — " then vanished. Suddenly the house was quiet.

"What just happened?" asked Qiingi. Livia shook her head, then froze as she heard something move in the living room. Together they slipped out into the hall and peered around the edge of the archway.

Bright sunlight streamed into the living room. Curtains thrown back, the big picture window showed a close-clipped lawn outside and, in the distance, the fairy towers of a city.

Contemplating this view, chin on hand, a young woman stood by the coffee table. She wore baggy overalls and her brown hair swept back in a disordered pageboy cut. Livia stepped into view, and she turned, smiling.

"Welcome to the Archipelago," she said, livia shook the virtual hand she offered.

"Pleased to meet you, ah, miss ... ?"

The young woman smiled brightly. "I have many names. But most people around here just call me the Government."

12

"Sorry for the riot," said the inscape agent that called itself the Government "This is nominally an Archipel-agic warship you've docked with — but the boys are a bit ... " she waggled her fingers, "undisciplined. It didn't help that your inscape implants are decidedly nonstan-dard." She cocked her head as though she were looking into Livia's skull.

"This Archipelago," said Livia. "It is the nation that controls the solar system?"

The Government looked at her archly. "You don't know? But then, you did come from the anecliptics' storage depot."

"Storage depot?"

The being gestured out the window. "The Fallow Lands. You know: a few trillion cubic kilometers of volume that is off-limits to everyone but them."

"These anecliptics," said Aaron eagerly. "What can you tell us about them?"

The Government strode toward the front door, saying, "You have questions, I have questions. Let's cooperate. Firstly: what are you doing here?"

Livia hardly knew where to begin; she looked at Aaron, who appeared similarly nonplused. Qiingi stepped forward and said, "We are fleeing people who've conquered our coronal. We need help to recapture our lands and free our people."

"Your coronal is ... " The Government nodded at a point somewhere behind them. "In the Fallow Lands?" Qiingi nodded.

"Then I can't help you."

"Wait — "

"Why not — "

Again it held up its hand. "Not my jurisdiction. And technically, you're not my concern." Its expression soured a bit "But since you are refugees, I'll cut you some slack. Come on." It opened the front door, and sunlight poured in. Outside, birds twittered on a green lawn that now surrounded the house. Farther away were more houses and beyond some hills, the towers of a city. It was all an inscape view, but highly convincing. "The first thing you should know," said the Government as she stepped outdoors, "is that your inscape is insecure as it stands. Until you get it fixed, other people can steal your records and histories. The guys started plundering yours as soon as they found you," she said, glancing back at Livia. "So don't be surprised if your agents turn up under other people's control."

Livia had been looking around herself, but now stopped in shock. Her Society stolen? "But ... you say you're some sort of government agent. Couldn't you prevent that sort of thing?"

The young woman stopped and turned. Her eyes blazed with some powerful emotion, and she seemed to grow a few centimeters as her voice deepened. "I am the Government," she said. "I am a force of omniscience and unparalleled power within the human part of the Archipelago. I am a public-domain distributed artificial intelligence. I have made all human institutions redundant, for I am the personal and intimate friend of each and every one of the trillion humans under my domain. I am the selfless advocate of each of them, from the lowliest to the

"The only problem is ... Well, nobody listens to me much anymore." She shrugged apologetically. "We all have our problems. I have little control these days. You're lucky the guys who picked up your ship don't believe you really came from the Fallow Lands, because if they did, what just happened would look like a polite tap on the shoulder compared to what they'd do. You must keep your origins to yourselves."

They stood silently, but none of the three spoke. After a moment the Government sighed, its aura evaporating. "What I mean," it said, "is there is no law here other than your will, enacted through me or the other agencies of the Archipelago. All may do as they may attempt I will not let anyone kill or abuse you; but I can't be responsible for your property. Look to it yourselves.

"You'll need to use inscape, of course; in fact you won't be able to get along without it." She indicated the parkland and city. "This is one of the typical views of the Archipelago. You'll find this landscape goes on for millions of kilometers in every direction — it's a virtual aggregate of all the colonies, coronals, ships, and starlettes in the solar system. Most people here don't like to be reminded that they're living on artificial worlds. Many have forgotten or don't believe it anymore.

"The other thing you need to know is that I'm going to have to impound your house." The woman-shaped agent put its hands on its hips and glared at the building. "It's full of dangerous nanotech — so are your clothes, in fact It'll all have to go. I'll compensate you for the mass and energy you've lost You can use that to set yourselves up here."

"All right, but if you can't help us, who can?" asked Qiingi.

The Government hesitated. "Granted where you come from ... Well, just talk to people. Maybe you can generate an adhocracy to help you out. Or appeal to the Good Book or the votes."

"What about the anecliptics?" asked Livia.

The Government shook its head. "You'll get no help there." Then it winked out of existence, leaving two trim footprints in the grass.

They gathered their few things, and left the house at a walk. There were some people in die distance but otherwise the brightly lit parkland seemed very empty. If in-scape, it was particularly convincing. Livia plucked an orange from the low-hanging branch of a tree as they passed by. It seemed real; she peeled it, and felt the sharp flavor as she popped a piece in her mouth. "It tastes real," she said. "How is that possible?"

"Are you addressing me?" asked the orange. She almost dropped it in surprise.

"Well ... I suppose so."

"Just switch views a few times, and you'll see where I came from."

Livia obliged, calling up an inscape reticle around the tree. She tracked down die translucent menu with her eyes, and the parkland vanished, replaced by a towering cityscape. Where the tree had been was some sort of dispensing machine.

She tried another view. They now stood in a public market crowded with people. The tree had become a fruit-vendor's stall. The vendor himself waved from behind his counter. "Come back any time!" he said.

"What are you doing?" asked Qiingi.

"Aren't you seeing this?" she asked. He shook his head.

"There's no tracking on inscape in this manifold," said Aaron wonderingly. "Everybody can see whatever they want, however they want even if it contradicts what the person next to them sees."

Livia shuddered. "But that's madness. Where's the common view?"

"That's what I'm saying. There is no common view."

"No common view ... and just one tech set?"

"I'm in a technical view right now," said Aaron. Some inscape address icons glowed faintly around bis reticle like an aura; they were different from her own, she realized. "It's beautiful," said Aaron, gazing around himself. "I'm querying ... did you hear that? It says it doesn't know what I mean by tech locks."

"Who are you talking to?" asked Qiingi. "A qqatx-hana?"

"Uh, yeah. An inscape agent. You can't see him?" Qiingi shook his head.

They wandered on, experimenting. Livia found that after a few queries and after flipping through a few views to try to find something, her local view was beginning to anticipate her. The parkland mutated spontaneously, showing paths, buildings, labels, and reticles indicating rest stops and fountains; and people began appearing. The first few were serlings: inscape agents designed to help search for information. She asked one of them who the other people in her view were.

"People who share your interests or activities," said the man-shaped agent. "Or who just like the same places. When you use inscape you accumulate a profile based on what you've done and where you've gone. Inscape locates people with similar or complementary profiles and brings you close." It moved its open palms together.

"Not physically close."

Now it looked puzzled. "What do you mean, physically?"

"They're not really here, all of them, are they?"

It frowned for a moment. "If you mean, would you see them if you fell out of inscape, no. But don't worry, you can't do that."

Within an hour Livia, Qiingi, and Aaron were sitting in a restaurant surrounded by a crowd of affable strangers. Food came; people told jokes and let the three newcomers pester them with questions. Feeling cautious, they took the Government's advice and told no one that they had come from the Fallow Lands. But after the fourth time that someone asked just where they had come from, they went into a huddle to get their story straight Once again, a serling appeared to assist in the discussion.

When Qiingi asked it to name a plausible place of origin far enough away that no one here could have visited it, it said, "How about the planet Ventus? Nobody knows much about it, but it's a real place."

From then on they told people that they came from Ventus.

By the time their chosen view slid toward nightfall, they had a better understanding of this place — enough to know that a real understanding might not be easy to get. This Archipelago customized itself to your every thought and action. There was no base reality here, at least not for anybody inside inscape — and that was everybody. The irony was that now that Qiingi and Aaron could tune one another out, they seemed to be getting along at last Livia faded out their new acquaintances as well as the restaurant; the other two followed suit. For a while they wandered along a broad boulevard, their few salvaged possessions bobbing in virtual matter fogs behind them. Finally Aaron asked inscape where they could find a place to sleep, but he was a bit behind Livia, who had started yawning a few minutes before. As far as she was concerned, all three of them now stood in a luxurious apartment with deep beds and full amenities. Of course, the place must be, in part or whole, an illusion — but the plumbing and beds were real enough. A serling told Livia that the amenities were built up of programmable matter and certain pieces flown in by microbots as soon as the apartment was requested. This technology was like that which made up her angels back home, only taken to an almost absurd degree.

The whole place was also moving somewhere, though you couldn't tell unless you queried. But wherever they were, it was out of the way of heavy traffic.

Lying in tonight's bed — the first, she thought, of many — Livia listened to the silence, imagining she could hear the two men through the walls. The idea that they were there was reassuring, but even the walls could stroll away in the night if they chose to.

What world would be waiting for her in the morning? And would Aaron and Qiingi still be in it?

Livia stuck her head out the aircar's window, letting the rush of air whip back her hair. She was so happy to finally be free of that stale house, and to at last be doing something — even if the issue of their urgent mission still hung over their heads. Maybe today's meeting would hold the answer.

She had good reason to be hopeful. In the several days they had been here, none of the three had found any overt evidence of 3340. Inscape had adapted to their needs by bringing close anyone and anything that knew something about invading or aggressive forces throughout the Archipelago. No one they'd spoken to had heard of a numbered movement to subvert inscape. And if so, if it were not the godlike power of the Archipelago itself that had attacked Teven ... then maybe they could find help here.

"Livia," said Cicada, startling her out of her windblown reverie. The little faerie hovered in the air outside the car.

"Is our inscape repaired?" she asked him. He nodded.

"Almost. We put together a repair adhocracy with some of the house resources. But inscape still can't steer your bodies; give it a few hours. By the way, we checked into the theft of your archives. We think we succeeded in encrypting a bunch of them in the microseconds before they were stolen. The thieves only got some memories from before the attack on Barrastea."

Which was enough of a violation in itself, Livia felt.

Peaseblossom appeared, nodding vigorously. "But you don't have enough processing power in your implants for us to run sims of this place." He crossed his arms petulantly. "How are we expected to do anything really useful?"

"Look through my eyes, and learn," she said.

"Hmmf. Okay." He brightened. "Hey, do you think that's our host?" Peaseblossom pointed.

Walking across the sky toward them was a striking woman dressed in flames and white vapor. Her face was silhouetted in a golden glow, and behind her spread a vista of dazzling white clouds, like a tunnel, with light pouring from its far end. She walked easily on the air, one hand held out before her in greeting.

"You must be my new guests," she said. "My name is Sophia Eckhardt. Welcome to my narrative." Livia stood up — the view of the aircar dissolving — and reached to take her hand.

"Alison Haver," said Livia. They had decided that until they knew for sure 3340's agents weren't from here, they would use false identities. The Government didn't seem to care.

As light welled up around Sophia's face, Livia saw that her dark; aquiline features were crisscrossed with black tattoos, apparently physical. A fan of them swept back from each eye like feathers. Livia wondered what significance they might have; but inscape here was not so convenient as to let her query it discreetly while letting an anima talk for her.

"We're delighted to meet you." Livia introduced her companions to Sophia. "Georges Milan," said Aaron; "Skyy," said Qiingi — as unique a name as Qiingi, but, Livia supposed, there was really no hiding his differences here.

"But tell me," said Sophia, "why this traveling view?" She gestured at the aircar. "It's terribly crippleview of you. You're not versos, are you?"

Livia tried to look embarrassed. I'm afraid I don't know what that is. We might have chosen not to experience the flight," she added, "but our inscape implants are slightly incompatible with yours. We don't seem able to completely separate our consciousness from our bodies yet." She didn't add that, as a matter of principle, Qiingi would never do such a thing. "Anyway, we didn't know if it would be considered rude to arrive virtually at the ... narrative ... before our bodies caught up."

Sophia frowned for a moment, obviously considering something. "You really are aliens, then. How wonderful, you'll be a big hit. Sit down for now, and we'll put you into my narrative in your seats. Just remember not to stand up and try to walk about or you'll find yourselves back in the aircar."

Livia nodded; they sat; and then she found herself reclining on a divan in a sumptuous, marble-pillared garden. The place was jammed with people — tall, short, human-normal and stylized, half-animal, elemental, ethereal. They crowded together, talking and laughing, waving drinks, musical instruments, neural stimulators, and other unidentifiable things. Clouds of bots and inscape agents flitted to and fro. Pulsing music shuddered through the floor; a slowly rotating inscape reticle near Livia's right hand showed dozens of iconic buttons indicating other possible views of the party. "My humble narrative," said Sophia as she sat on a moss-covered ottoman nearby. "Now, where were we? Ah, yes: it would be considered rude not to leap ahead of yourselves. We don't much tolerate old views here — like 'objective reality' and physical bodies and such. Those are just relics of ice-age programming. Why take the crippleview when you don't have to?"

They all nodded as if this made sense to them.

"As to the versos," Sophia continued, "I'm amazed you haven't heard of them. Tell me, where are you three from?"

"Ventus," said Livia. "We're from Ventus."

"I'll have to visit a sim some time," said Sophia. "Did you bring any personal locations with you?"

"Unfortunately, no."

"Well, anyway, versos are people who don't want inscape to weave a coherent narrative of their lives for them." said Sophia. "They disable inscape's narrative function and do horrid things like allowing accidental events to happen to them. Some of them even try to live in a single consistent view their whole lives." She shook her head in disgust

"Oh, I see," said Livia. "Well, we're not versos. Just foreigners." She remembered how her surroundings had slowly begun to look like Barrastea yesterday, until she intervened and deliberately switched views. In all likelihood, Livia decided, she was a verso.

"What brings you to the Archipelago?" Sophia leaned forward, looking indulgent.

Qiingi smiled at her; he had lost the shell-shocked look he'd had for the past days, and now looked completely self-assured. Livia felt a swell of pride at seeing him rally.

"We are looking for your ... authorities," he said. "We would call them founders where we come from: people with responsibility, decision makers. Those granted power by the majority."

"Leaders?" said Sophia helpfully.

"Yes. But other than a brief and confusing encounter with something that called itself the Government, we've met none of this Archipelago's leaders. I suppose you're our first."

"Me!" Sophia leaned back, affecting alarm. "A leader? But of course your questions didn't turn up anything. We don't have a government here, after all. Only the Government. And the votes. And nobody pays much attention to them anymore."

Livia was about to ask more about that, when she heard the aircar's voice say, "We have arrived."

"Just a moment," she said to Sophia. "We're here — I mean, our view is still stuck in the aircar. Awkward, really. We'll just exit the car and meet you in person, if that's all right?"

Sophia looked amused. "If you want."

The garden vanished, and they stood up out of the air-car, which sat on a broad platform hundreds of meters above the guttering lights of the city — virtual or real, she wasn't sure — known as Brand New York. A fantastical tower like spun sugar spiraled above them; outthnists of glass or more likely diamond cradled long oval residences. The nearest one was full of light and sound and the movement and laughter of people. "That would be the place," said Aaron as he set off toward it. "Work the crowd?" he said, glancing at Livia with a raised eyebrow.

"You take the technical questions," she said. "I'll do our host"

He nodded. "Some of the people here looked like AIs, or at least animas of a sort. I'll try to learn more about how they use inscape. And why it looks like there's no tech locks here."

Livia turned to Qiingi, who was watching this exchange intently. "The other essential is how we're going to live here," she said. "That and ... who can we trust? You're good at assessing people. Can you find out about Sophia for us? Discreetly, of course."

"I will be charming," he said, "but discreet."

The process that had led to their invitation here was somewhat mysterious. The invitation had arrived the first evening; Livia had initially assumed that the Government itself had contacted Eckardt. When she summoned it to thank it for the service, it denied having done so. "Nobody issued the invitation," it had said, "it just emerged." Livia had been too tired to pursue the matter. After that conversation, though, she'd begun to notice new things about this place. Life seemed tightly organized yet nobody consistently kept roles — customers became shopkeepers to other customers; people in restaurant views cooked, served, or ate as the whim took them. She'd put it down to the fluidity of inscape eliminating the need for stable identities. But that didn't explain apparent strangers — who were not encompassed by the shared reticle that indicated they were in the same view — exchanging items without consultation. She saw people tap one another on the shoulder and issue cryptic statements that were then passed on, like in a child's game. There was something going on outside of the Archipelago's consensual realities, it seemed.

As they entered the submanifold that Sophia Eckhardt called her narrative, they split up. Livia made her way in the direction of Sophia, who stood chatting with a striking, slender woman dressed in mirror-bright metal. As Livia walked she listened to the swirling conversations in the submanifold. The names were different, but the topics were mostly the same as at home: art, gossip, relationships, sports. She didn't overhear any political discussions, though, unless the excited talk about something called "Omega Point" counted.

Several small groups of people were huddled around what looked like copies of an actual paper book. One man was showing another a page, and as Livia passed he said, "You see? You were Phoenix up until we met, but since I'm currently Priestess, you become Charioteer." The other man nodded grudgingly.

As she was rounding a small pool Livia heard sounds of heated argument off to the left It was unfamiliar enough — the sort of thing that animas would have smoothed over at home — mat she stopped and looked over.

He was a total contrast to the rest of the narrative. Where they were dressed in light and impossible garments such as the butterfly-swarm flitting strategically around the woman next to her, this man was garbed in stolid gray cloth. His sandy hair was not augmented by light or motion; the lines in his face appeared real. He held an ordinary looking glass with some amber liquid in it. Just now he was glaring at a tall, miiltilimbed thing that might once have been human.

"Don't you think it's wrong, if not downright creepy," he said loudly, "that inscape can take over your auto-nomic nervous system, make someone who's standing right in front of you invisible and then steer your body around them? Don't you think we're being violated in such moments?"

The many-armed thing dismissed this line of reasoning with a laugh. "More than nine-tenths of all our thought and action is unconscious, Respected Morss. Why should such petty issues as avoiding tripping over somebody be allowed to take up that last fraction in which we are aware? And why should I make any distinction between the unconscious processes going on in here," it pointed to its head with two arms, "and those going on out there on my behalf ?"

Livia entirely agreed, but this Morss grunted derisively. "Because I am this," he said, pointing toward his body, "not this." He gestured at the swirling party. "This is just a fantasy-land for people who've forgotten about reality. You can keep it I prefer to live in the real world." As he spoke his eyes drifted away from the being he was speaking to. His gaze alighted on Livia, and she saw his eyes widen slightly.

Of course: she was not dressed in any illusions, was in fact only in her shift which had been scoured clean of tech lock nano and most of its programming. She had not yet found out how to interface with other people's inscape to craft the kind of fabulous confectionary costume that the rest of the submanifold wore. So, she and the other refugees were the only ones in the place who looked as plain as this Respected Morss.

She smiled at him politely and walked on by. She spotted Sophia again and waved; her host energetically gestured for her to come over.

"This is Lady Filament," said Sophia. The woman in rippling silver smiled and held out her hand. She appeared human except for one feature: her eyes glowed with inner light, a subtle and entrancing gold. "She is a vote"

"Oh." Livia shook her hand. "Tell me, what exactly is a vote?"

Filament's eyes widened in surprise. She looked at Sophia as if to confirm the joke, then laughed. "You are from far away. I'm the aggregate personality of a particular constituency within the Archipelago. Just an average person, in the most literal sense." She grinned and Livia smiled, a bit uncertainly.

"You're an AI?"

"An old term, and crude ... call me an emergent property of inscape itself."

"You were asking how we ran things here," Sophia said at Iivia's obviously puzzled smile. "So I thought I'd introduce you to Filament. She's one of the ways. In the modern and ancient ages they used to vote in humans to run their institutions, but you could never guarantee that the person you voted for really had the same agenda as you. Aggregate personalities like Filament solve that problem. They really are the constituency, in a sense. So when they get together, you know your interests are being looked after."

"Thank you," said Filament, "that sounds very flattering. But it's not really a top-down thing. Inscape is designed so that like-minded people doing similar things form stable nodes of activity. When such a node becomes large enough, a vote spontaneously appears as a high-level behavior of the network. There's one of us for each interest group in the Archipelago. And the entity that emerges out of our interactions is called the Government."

She smiled at Sophia. "But I'm really just a relic of the past, aren't I? Sophia here represents the new way: an emergent government that doesn't use the inscape network at all."

"The Good Book," said Sophia.

"The invitation for you to visit Sophia emerged from a self-organizing system," said Filament, "but not one that lives in inscape. For more than a hundred years there's been no way for the human citizens of the Archipelago to govern themselves except through people like me — "

"Until the Book," Sophia nodded.

" — Which is exactly that: a bound, old-style book. Its pages contain simple rules of interaction. If enough people follow these rules most of the time, a network intelligence emerges from the social connections between them. It's independent of inscape, see? So the Book operates outside the control of the Government."

Livia's head was spinning. "But you're a vote. Doesn't that make you an enemy of this Book?"

Livia's host simpered. "But the votes don't have an agenda of their own — only our agendas. If I choose the Book, my votes choose it, too."

Gamely, Livia tried to keep up. "So you use the Good Book — is that the significance of your tattoos?"

Sophia's eyes widened. "You mean you don't know — " Now it was her turn to look shocked, while Filament grinned. Sophia quickly composed herself. "I've never had that question before."

"I apologize if I've offended you — "

"No, no, I'm just surprised. I thought the soundtracks were known everywhere."

"You're ... a musician?"

Sophia nodded. "I'm a soundtrack. A soprano."

"Not just any soundtrack," interjected Filament She proceeded to describe what Sophia did, only about half of which Livia understood. The tattoos were apparently proudly-born marks of an ordeal Sophia had undergone years ago. In a carefully constructed virtual world (basically a submanifold, although they didn't call them that here) she had allowed herself to be starved, tortured, and terrorized for weeks. She had emerged with a psyche ringing with anxiety and rage, her days full of bad memories and flinch-reactions. With the use of drug and neu-roimplant therapies she could easily partition off that side of herself and so live a placid life. But when she performed at assigned times in other people's narratives she let it all out, and her rawness and pain lent emotional power to whatever key event was occurring in that person's life. It was all orchestrated by inscape, of course.

"Passion is a rare commodity these days," said Filament. "When everyone can have all pain, mental or physical, treated and removed instantly. And when everybody can have their vocal tract altered to give them an ideal singing voice, how do you stand out? Here," she pointed to an inscape panel, "you can find a sample of Sophia's lovely work."

Livia toned in for a moment. The voice she heard shuddered and begged, raged and commanded, all in a language she had never heard before.

"Is there much work for, uh, soundtracks, here?" she asked without thinking.

"Do you sing? Almost nobody does," said Sophia, "simply because, as Filament said, everybody could."

Livia thought of the many songs of the Fictional History that she had learned as a child. They wouldn't know anything of that cycle here. "I might ... have a unique contribution," she said.

"Go ahead then," said Sophia. "Let's hear you."

Livia hesitated; but she was actually in pretty good voice lately, from singing to Aaron and Qiingi during the long days of their journey here. She decided on a particularly difficult run from the Opera of Chances that she'd been practicing lately. She began to sing, feeling her confidence soar as the words poured from her mouth. Of course, the language was Teven's language, Joyspric, but even so she could see she was drawing a crowd. She closed her eyes as she came to the chorus —

— and was interrupted by a loud splash from nearby. Everybody looked over, to see the strange spectacle of a multiarmed man flailing about in the reflecting pool.

Gray-clad Respected Morss stood on the edge of the pool, looking down at the wet guest. "Oops," he said with heavy irony. "Lucky thing that's not real water. Oh, and I suppose you're not really sitting about on your ass in it, either."

"Excuse me," said Sophia. She scowled and edited Morss out of their view. Before he vanished he grinned unashamedly at Livia.

Things were getting just too strange. "If you'll excuse me," Livia said to Sophia and Filament. "I should find my people." She bowed to them both and hurried off to find the others.

The three refugees summoned up a quiet apartment of their own in a corner of Sophia's narrative. Then they sat down together to decide what to do next.

Livia described her conversation with Sophia, and her introduction to Filament. "There are no founders here," she said. "And apparently, no stable institutions as we'd understand them. Everything's an adhocracy, even the government. Sophia was picked to meet us and introduce us to Archipelagic society, but nobody chose her, her name just emerged from the process. And yet there's the Government AI, and these votes. I'm not sure they'll help us. But it seems like all we have to do is want help, and it'll appear from somewhere, because the inscape here tries to make a narratives — a story — out of whatever we do. I think that's how it works, anyway."

"If it worked that way," commented Qiingi drily, "we would be on our way home with a fleet of ships already."

"Hmm." She wouldn't let him puncture her good mood. "What about Sophia? Did you learn anything about her?"

"She is apparently a singer of old songs, which is probably why inscape brought you to her attention — you share a common interest. Also, she is a passionate believer in something called "The Good Book.' I do know that the Book is not part of the narrative process you just described, Livia. Beyond that I learned little, except that the people here find us exotic and fascinating. But they have not guessed where we come from."

She frowned, thinking. "We may have to decide whether to ignore what the Government said, and reveal ourselves." She looked at the odier two; Aaron was remaining strangely silent. Livia frowned at him. "What about you, Aaron? Did you find out anything?"

"Well," he said reluctantly. "I started out with some discreet inquiries about the anecliptics. The guests were just confusing on the subject, but I had a couple of good conversations with serlings about it. It seems," he took a breath and let it out heavily, "this whole area of inhabited space is near the boundary of the Lethe Nebula. Nobody crosses that boundary into the Fallow Lands. The Lands are off-limits to everybody except the anecliptics."

"The Government said that," said Livia impatiently.

Aaron shook his head. "But I don't think you understand the implications. Nobody gets in or out of the Fallow Lands. Nobody ever has. These people hate those restrictions — so it's a good thing only the Government seems to know we came from there."

The armies, as the anecliptics were called, were apparently AIs of transcendent power. They seemed to have taken over much of the function of blind nature in the Archipelago. They had complete control over the Feeds, those two twisting bands of precious matter radiating out from the sun. They doled out matter and energy to the various human and nonhuman civilizations that encircled the sun. But the annies themselves were answerable to no one. They existed outside of all human law and influence.

Qiingi seemed unsurprised at this. "They are like thun-derbirds," he said. "Mediators between Man and the Great Spirit."

"Well. I wouldn't put it that way," said Aaron. "They're more like the local equivalent of the tech locks. Apparently they were created to prevent any one group from taking over the Archipelago — in particular, post-humans. They ruthlessly limit the technology and resources available to anybody in the Archipelago ... Which is not to say there aren't beings of great power out there, and more being created every day. One serling kept talking about 'gods.' It took me a while to realize he wasn't being metaphorical. If not for the annies, humanity probably wouldn't exist anymore. We would all have been replaced by post-humans.

"Anyway, the Fallow Lands belong to the annies," he continued. "They're rumored to be experimenting with new life forms there. But nobody gets in or out, not even the Government." He looked at Livia somberly. "And that's very bad news. Nobody's going to believe we're from the Fallow Lands — and nobody's in any position to help us go back. No human power exists that can safely return us to Teven."

Livia shifted in her seat. "No, there must be someone. And anyway, we got out, didn't we? So you must be able to get in."

Aaron just looked at her.

"Aaron," she laughed, a little nervously, "we've only been here a few days. We need to know a lot more before we jump to this sort of conclusion."

"Maybe." He summoned a reluctant grin. "I guess."

That ended the conversation. They sat silently, surrounded by sumptuous, virtual luxury. Livia felt her hopes slipping in the face of her companions' gloom. It can't be true, she thought. Thirty-three forty's people came from somewhere — but she refused to believe they were employed by one of the anecliptics. Maybe they were from elsewhere inside the Fallow Lands — but no, it would do no good to believe that, either.

"Actually, our next course of action is obvious," she said after a while. "The followers of this 3340 got into the Fallow Lands somehow. Find out who they are and where they came from, and we find out how to go home."

The men looked at one another. Aaron nodded, and seemed about to reply when inscape chimed. "Yes?" said Livia quickly.

Sophia Eckhardt appeared, seated on the air next to Qi-ingi. Livia could hear the continuation of the party behind her. "Alison, dear," she said, "I'm so sorry about the interruption earlier. Your song was lovely — you have a wonderful voice. Everybody's saying so."

"Well, that's very nice — " she began. Sophia cut her off.

"In particular, one of the most powerful and influential humans in the Archipelago said so." She smirked. "You had no idea I had guests like that at my little bash, did you?"

"Well, no, we — "

"Anyway, dear, you've received an invitation! Well, we both have. To sing for some special guests of Doran's on board his worldship. It'll be an important gig for me, but for you, I can hardly believe it! Not that I'm jealous, I'm proud of being the one to discover you. Will you do it?"

"Um." She glanced at Aaron and Qiingi. Both were smiling at her; Aaron nodded. "What does it get us — me?"

"Access to what they used to call 'the corridors of power.' Influence. Resource. Oh, and a certain amount of fame, I suppose."

"All right," she said hesitantly. "Who — who's this Do-ran person, again?"

"Oh, you saw him in the narrative. Doran Morss. He's the one who so rudely interrupted your little audition."

13

Clouds drifted away from the sun and shafts of white burst out to illuminate Doran Morss's private world.

Having never been able to travel to Earth, for all his wealth, Morss had recreated part of it in his worldship: the exact topography and foliage of Scotland drifted by beneath Livia's window. Sophia still insisted on seeing it laid out flat within the consensus space of the Archipelago, like the original, but Doran Morss apparently preferred to see his lands through crippleview and so to be polite, Livia did, too. This view showed the lands to be rolled up into a tube that was capped on the ends to keep out the implacable vacuum of space. Huge diamond windows in the caps let in sunlight that reflected down from conical mirrors floating at the axis of the cylinder. The east and west shores of Doran's Scotland nearly met where the North Sea and Atlantic combined into a thick band of treacherous water on the far side of the world. He had so designed the place that it was full of cloud and mist most of the time; even without inscape's intervention, you could only tell you were in an artificial world on the sunniest days.

High above the rugged landscape of Morss's Scotland swung a chandelier city in bolo configuration, its two tethered halves separated by kilometers of cable. At the bottom of one glittering tangle of buildings hung a vast domed ballroom, its walls patterned like lace in opaque white and transparent diamond. After performing her songs, Livia had drifted over to one of the transparent panels, seeking a vantage point from which to watch the proceedings.

Doran Morss's party was both a surprise and a relief to Livia: it wasn't a swirl of half-real inscapes, like nearly every other event she'd seen so far in the Archipelago. Indeed, everything here was refreshingly solid, as were the people, who were all physically present. Sophia was deep in conversation with one of the visiting post-humans. She seemed uncomfortable around the rest of the guests. For the moment, all Livia wanted to do was stay out of the way, however much her Westerhaven training told her she should be shmoozing and picking up gossip.

Almost all of the guests looked like human beings, with notable exceptions such as the nonsentient brody that squatted like a living tank near the drinks table. These weren't humans standing about with drinks in their hands, however. The ballroom was crowded with votes, and Livia was witnessing a meeting of the government in the Archipelago.

Each vote was the embodiment of some value that had once had its own institutions, buildings, cadres, and followers. Some churches stood over there, chatting and munching canapes; here sporting fraternities and paramilitaries swapped anecdotes; and farther away, the arts were bickering. Apparently, while their personalities were the average of the values of millions of humans, these beings were required to conduct their business with one another on the humanly accessible levels of conversation, innuendo, back-room dealing, and treachery. It was part of something the locals called "open-source government"

The votes didn't intimidate Livia; nonetheless, her performance had been difficult Not technically — she was in voice and well-rehearsed. No, it was a fight with Aaron and Qiingi this morning that had her distraught and distracted, fumbling through her song. Luckily no one had seemed to notice.

"I know you're upset, but stay, please," Sophia had told her. "You can't help your friends until all of you calm down a bit" So Livia stood by the wall, arms crossed, waiting out the rest of the entertainments.

Finally they were done, and Doran Morss stepped to a podium at one end of the dome. A cylindrical cloudscape wheeled behind him as he said, "Welcome to my humble abode," to general laughter. "You particular constituencies have been summoned here by the Government to discuss the Omega Point crisis. I hope that while you're here you'll see some of the sights in my little world and hopefully drop by to see me as well."

The crowd made polite noises. Morss accepted them with a nod, then simply stood there and waited, his arms crossed. The crowd quieted. Morss stayed still, gazing out at them.

What's he doing? Livia felt the tension in the room grow as the seconds stretched on, and Morss didn't move.

"So it's come to this," he said at last. The words were spoken very quietly, but by now the ballroom was utterly silent All faces were turned toward Morss.

"Not so long ago," he continued, "there could have been no Omega Point crisis. If a trans-humanist movement sprang up during the rule of the monoculture, it would have been quashed before it encompassed a hundred people. But of course, the monoculture ultimately failed, didn't it? And you were born in its place. Some of you are old enough to remember the first years of the Government" He nodded to the small crowd of churches. "You remember a time when you would have channeled the people's energies back into some more useful pursuit. Inscape would have changed their narratives' plotlines and led them back to sanity. But that didn't happen this time."

"Hello again," said someone next to Livia. She turned to find the Government standing next to her. It wore its guise as a young woman, this time dressed as a waitress. "How are you?"

"I'm fine," Livia said curtly.

The Government was carrying a tray of canapes. "Then try the calamari," it said with a smile. "It's fine, too."

"This worldship is on course to the Omega Point Coronal," continued Morss. "The cultists have expelled or killed the remaining human population and have barricaded themselves inside the coronal. We're supposed to be meeting to decide how to deal with their creation as a newborn post-human entity — you, as votes, me and other outsiders as representatives of anecliptic interest."

He waved a hand negligently, half turning away. "Sure. Let's spend a few hours trying them for crimes against viability. Fat lot of good that'll do, now that they've killed everybody around them.

"I'd much rather talk about when this is going to happen again!" he shouted. "And what are we going to do to prevent the next outbreak? Before you were born, the monoculture tried to stem the tide of post-human transformations — and failed. Are you here today to say that the Government has failed, too? Is that die real message we're going to send the human race?"

"I was hoping he'd do this," whispered the Government. "Doran's a reliable ally."

"Ally? You speak as though he's your equal. Isn't he just another citizen?"

The Government shook her head. "He's an independent nation. As such, he is my equal."

Livia nodded, not quite comprehending. "What does he have to do with the Omega Point thing?"

Sophia had talked about the Omega Point crisis on the way here. To Livia, the thought of an entire coronal uploading their minds into a machine was outrageous. "Sophia thinks Omega Point are heroes," she added, nodding in the singer's direction. What had disturbed Livia most was Aaron's reaction. He also seemed excited at the prospect of people doing such a thing.

"Doran has authority as a traditional human," said the Government. "Many people supported Omega Point, including many of the votes here. People see embodied humanity as a dead end, and post-humanism as the only way out from under the anecliptics. Doran's wrong about one thing, though; we're not here to debate the right or wrong of it The question is, is Omega Point's creation viable!"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Can it survive and find a place in the Archipelago?" said the Government. "That's all it means. It's the ultimate question for any entity — bacteria or god."

"You're victims of your own success," Morss was saying. "Government happens so seamlessly now that most people have abandoned public life entirely. They're drowning in inscape — we see it every day. Every day there are more outbreaks of post-human expansionism from within our own ranks. As a human who is outside the jurisdiction of the Government — hence independent — I'm one of the few individual humans able to talk to you all on an equal footing. And I have a simple message, from humanity to you: forget about Omega Point. Don't shoot the messenger. Look to yourselves for the problem and the solution."

"Now I didn't expect him to say that," mused the Government.

The Government hurried off to speak to a knot of votes. As Morss wound up his speech the votes were arguing and chatting, like any conference or colloquium. Livia had intended to stay so that she could petition the votes for help; but right now she just wanted the day to be over.

This morning's argument had begun almost as soon as Livia sat down. Qiingi had said, "Why are you not physically present, Aaron? These meetings are important."

"Of course they are," Aaron had snapped back. "That's why I'm making the best of my resources. I've got sixteen animas out there right now, tracking down leads. But I don't see you copying yourself at all." He wasn't just present as an anima, Iivia saw; Aaron registered as a veritable tornado of information-density in her reticle. His view of the Archipelago was intense and multichanneled.

"It is not our way to divide ourselves," Qiingi replied awkwardly. Aaron had laughed at him.

"Whose way? Who is this 'we' you're talking about? Are you part of this expedition or not, Qiingi? Are you going to pull your weight?"

Qiingi winced. "But this ... this is not my teotl — my technology — "

"Maybe it wasn't when you were back on Teven, but it is now." Aaron appealed to Livia. 'Tell him, Liv. He's got to get with the way the world works here. Otherwise he'll just hold us back."

"Get with the way the world works?" Livia stared at Aaron. "You mean abandon your own technological mix for somebody else's? Since when has anyone of Teven Coronal done that willingly?"

"Oh, stop defending him, Liv."

"I do know what you mean, Aaron — but please," she had said, "this isn't the time. Why don't you tell us if you've found out anything since yesterday?"

"Me?" He glared at her. "What about you? What have you found since yesterday? Or have you spent yet another day doing nothing but chatting with your new friends?"

Before she could respond he'd said, "I'll tell you what I found. Nothing. Nothing at all. A thousand adhocracies willing to build armies to help us — until they hear the words 'Fallow Lands.' And not a whisper anywhere of anything called 3340."

Livia chewed a nail now, staring at the vast concentration of political power before her. She had to do something, so at last she sighed and walked through the mass of votes, wondering who best to talk to. She finally decided on one of the churches.

"Excuse me, can I ask you something?"

She approached the subject obliquely, using a cover story they'd agreed upon: that a group of people from Alison Haver's supposed homeworld of Ventus had vanished into the Fallow Lands. She needed to rescue them.

As soon as she said this the vote held up a hand. "Your people are outside of our realm of influence. We're not an absolute power within the Archipelago, you know."

"But the Government — "

"Its job is to balance influence between individuals and groups; we weigh a single voice as equal to a million voices in our decision making. But that power counts for nothing in the Fallow Lands, or anywhere that the anecliptics control. It doesn't seem to count for much anywhere, lately, since people have largely stopped paying attention to us."

"But how can that ber The church, which looked like a kindly old man, patted her arm sympathetically. "Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time, human beings were mere equals of all the other life forms on Earth; they fit into their niche in the ecology. Then they discovered machines, and began to think of themselves as separate from nature. They genetically engineered new sentient species, and AI came to pervade everything mechanical.

"Now picture the result: a world where every species has become conscious and fully technological — and so have all their technological creations. The lamb wars against the lion, and their machines rebel against both. We've come full circle: humanity is again just one of many species competing in an ecology out of its control.

"Today, you have the anecliptics on the one hand, and the realm of sentients and blind powers they cultivate on the other. You can picture the anecliptics as the solar system's equivalent of the carbon cycle — the bedrock of predictability that is necessary for an actual ecology to flourish. They mete out resources to all the viables in the solar system according to a rigorous plan. Without mis artificial nature, therc'd be a destructive collapse of the ecology."

"But surely someone deals with them — someone has access to (he Fallow Lands — "

The church shook its head. "The anecliptics maintain their power by remaining utterly aloof from all our power struggles. In practice that means they don't even talk to us votes, much less individuals like yourself. All they care about is the ecology they maintain."

Livia crossed her arms. "I don't understand why you keep talking about ecologies. This is just politics."

The vote sighed. "No, it's not. Humanity is just a species with a particular ecological niche, as it was a hundred thousand years ago. In the Archipelago of the anecliptics, real power is no longer possible — or meaningful — for individual human beings. Many of them blame us, although we're in the same position with respect to the armies. So people have starting finding creative ways to work around us, like the Good Book and its imitators. They think they're defying the anecliptics this way, but the armies don't care. As long as the ecology functions, they don't care what we do or how we do it."

"So what you're really saying," said Livia, "is that you're unwilling or unable to defy the anecliptics. You'll never help us."

The vote shook its head sadly. "I'm sorry. But no human power can help your friends."

Feeling helpless and frustrated, Livia drifted through the crowd, ending up near another of the filigreed windows of the ballroom. For a while she stared out at the clouds. This was a beautiful place, but it wasn't home. She longed for the ancient trees and sweeping sails of Barrastea with an almost physical ache. The pain had been tolerable when she led her people out of Wester-haven, and even while sitting idle in the flying house it had not overwhelmed her. At least there had been a purpose to that waiting.

But to never return to Teven; and if there were no leads to this 3340 in the Archipelago, to never learn what had befallen her friends and family, or why ... She turned and leaned on the transparent wall, staring down at the bleak moors below. She didn't weep. Tears wouldn't express what she felt.

"Ms. Haver?"

It took her a second to remember that this was the name she was going by here. Livia took a deep breath and turned.

Doran Morss stood there, for the moment without hangers-on or votes near him. "Are you all right?" he asked. "Did you have friends or family at Atchity?" That was the coronal that Omega Point had ruined, she recalled.

"No — no connection there. I'm fine. Just ... a little tired after my performance." She summoned a smile, wishing for an anima in its place. "But I'm afraid I missed the end of your speech."

"That's okay," he said, turning to scowl at the crowd. "They didn't buy it anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"They've decided to send a punitive expedition to wipe out Omega Point. They want me to go along."

"Oh. What does that mean for you?"

He raised an eyebrow. "You really don't know who I am, do you?"

"I'm not from the Archipelago," she said, just in time to be overheard by a small group of votes who had wandered over.

"How lucky for us!" one of them said. "Just when we were trying to locate a baseline to round out the expedition."

"Not a chance," snarled Morss.

"What?" said Livia.

The vote cocked his head, amused at Morss's reaction. "Have you asked her? Or have you just been chatting her up?"

"I came over to compliment you on your singing," said Morss, now looking a bit desperate.

The vote bowed to Livia. "I hope you don't think me rude, dear, but have you taken the cliff test?"

"The what?"

"She's a performer and a guest," Morss snapped. "I don't think it's our place to press her into any kind of service."

"It is when there doesn't seem to be a human other than yourself within twenty million kilometers who can pass the test," said the vote.

"Of course there isn't," said Morss. "So why should you expect this one to — "

"You said you're not from the Archipelago," the vote said to Livia. "Where are you from?"

Wary, she said, "What is this cliff test? And why should I be afraid to take it?"

"Oh, it's nothing to be afraid of," said the vote. "In fact, it'll only take a second. May I?"

Morss stepped between the vote and Livia. "Now wait a minute — "

Livia thought about their lack of progress on any front. A stray thought came to her: what would Lucius Xavier do in this situation? "Go ahead," Livia said past Morss's shoulder.

"We're much obliged," said the vote. He waved his hand even as Morss said "No!"

Livia stumbled. She looked around; somehow in the press of people she'd ended up with her back to the diamond-glass wall. She put out her hand to brace herself against the impenetrable substance —

— And it shattered.

Reflexively she grabbed for the edge as she fell, and swung out and then back, slamming against the side of me wall below the level of the ballroom's floor. Above her was a gabble of concerned voices and several arms reached down, waving futilely just out of reach. She slid down a centimeter, then another, and made the mistake of looking down.

Clouds wavered past, kilometers away. Below them, nothing but cold ocean.

She screamed, feeling the jagged edge of broken window cut through her fingers, then she had to let go and she fell —

— And was standing again in the ballroom. She stumbled and this time when she leaned against the unbroken diamond wall, it held. She looked at her hands; there were no cuts.

The votes were staring at her with a creepy intensity. Doran Morss looked angry.

"Told you she'd pass," said the vote Morss had been arguing with. He swore at it and walked away. The vote turned back to Livia.

"My apologies for the ... unexpected nature of the test. It's to see whether you still have normal human responses to threat situations. Most Archipelagics who suddenly found themselves hanging from a cliff would assume it was just another inscape experience, and would not struggle. They'd have had no adrenalin reaction; yours on the other hand was strong."

"What does that mean?" Her heart was still pounding in her chest, and she was angry, but unsure at who or what

"It means you might be useful to us," said the vote. "Ms. Haver, would you like a job?"

Aaron had accused her of being idle. It was hard not to be when every avenue that might lead home brought you in circles. If only for her own sanity, she had to do something that produced results.

"Yes," she said to the vote, "I'll take your job." Whatever it is.

The solar system pinwheeled around Aaron. For hours he had swept like an angel through inscape visions of the Archipelago, trying to learn everything about everything. He loved it, loved this place and the ocean of information. But his back was starting to ache and there was a persistent pain behind his eyes. Worse, he was feeling guilty. He should have spent his time searching for ways back into the Fallow Lands, instead of catching up on two centuries of history. But he couldn't help himself.

For a while he had hovered over the sun, amazed at the detail of the boiling Hadley cells like rice grains on its surface. Even down in that incandescent chaos, Archipel-agic machines grazed. Vast tethers swung down and up, harvesting material from the inner orbits of the sun in an intricate dance. Farther out, the heavy-metal asteroids known as the vulcanoids had been taken apart and made into giant arching machines that focused the outpouring solar wind into discrete streams. These hurricanes of energy were directed with pinpoint accuracy throughout the solar system, where they acted like trade winds to push cargoes, and even whole coronals, from port to port.

The closer he looked the more detail there was. Each of the thousands of coronals had its own history and local flavor, all open and visible in a way the manifolds had never been. True, everyone could live everywhere at once through inscape so there were few real cultural distinctions. Automatic translation hid any language differences; and since any coronal could have its own mile-high waterfalls or any other wonder imaginable, natural beauty was kind of redundant here. Qiingi and Livia kept complaining that this place lacked the overwhelming abundance of Teven's manifolds.

There was more here than could be learned hi a lifetime, though. Couldn't they see that? With a heavy sigh he wiped away the inscape view. Now he stood in a sumptuous apartment somewhere in Doran Morss's chandelier city. Outside the French doors to his left was a wide balcony that currently looked out over a view of the drifting sands of Mars. Once or twice he'd tuned it to see the blasted heaths and hills of Morss's Scotland. That was his physical location, after all. It made no difference; when he stepped out of this apartment he could just as easily view the streets of Brand New York or an aerostat city on Venus. He could be anywhere — except Teven Coronal.

He stalked into the kitchen to find an analgesic patch for his neck. While there he saw that one of his discussion boards had filled up with comments. He had generated dozens of agents to comb the Archipelago for any clues to the identity or location of 3340. While doing this he had often succumbed to the temptation to spin off queries about his various passions in science and technology. One agent had led him to this board, where amateur AI designers compared tricks and techniques, and speculated on topics that he'd wondered about his whole life.

Why such a horror of trans-humanism? he had asked in a recent posting. People who try to improve themselves in the Archipelago seem to be persecuted for it. Before they came here, he had sometimes daydreamed about the wider world beyond Teven. Without the deliberate tamping-down of the tech locks, he assumed, people would remake themselves however they wanted. And why not? Why not grow wings to fly, or new senses to see microwaves and hear the hiss of radio? Imperishable bodies, networked minds — these had been his fantasies for years, because such things were banned in Teven. Yet they were banned here, too.

One person had posted several replies, he noticed. They were signed Veronique. Many of us feel as you do, Veronique had written. But it is difficult to speak out right now, because of the Omega Point crisis. It makes us all look bad.

"But why?" he asked the board. "What did they do?"

They tried to become gods.

He stared at the reply. He'd always known it was possible; there were entities within the Archipelago that had such power — and not just the armies. But as he reread the words, he remembered the devastation of the farside accident; remembered the corpses. One gray and awful day he had come upon the body of a woman dressed in some fabulous costume from a manifold he didn't recognize. Her face had been like porcelain, perfectly clean and composed. It had hit him then: she could still be alive. The technology existed, the angels were a small example.

People didn't have to die at all, anymore. Or if they did, they could be resurrected. But he was cursed with living in a place where such mercy wasn't permitted.

There had been nothing he could do about it then. He suppressed the rage and grief. He'd kept it locked away ever since.

"The votes are talking about Omega Point right now," he said to the board. "My ... friend ... says that they're going to wipe it out."

A reply came instantly this time. How do you know that? Isn't that meeting happening off-line?

Aaron frowned. Was he interacting with an agent, or was this the real Veronique now? "I'm there now," he said. "In Doran Morss's Scotland. We, I, were invited."

And do you agree with them? Should Omega Point be destroyed?

Aaron frowned, gazing out the window for a while at drifting dust devils. "I don't know," he said honestly. "Somebody on this message board said that's why the an-nies were originally created. To fight an outbreak of trans-humanism that ended the monoculture."

That's the official story.

He stared at the words in surprise. In a civilization without government, where anyone could say or do anything they wanted, how could there be any such thing as an "official story"? The annies were supposed to be unconcerned with the daily affairs of humans; so at least he'd come to understand in the days he'd spent exploring the place.

He hesitated, then said, "And what's the real story?"

There was a long pause, which often meant that an an-ima was being taken off-line while its owner prepared a personal response. Then: Do you want to meet?

This time the signature was Veronique's, unmediated by any agent All thoughts of the search for 3340 were forgotten; so was his tiredness and sore muscles.

"Where?" said Aaron. "And when?"

14

"I thought I was supposed to be working for the Government?" said livia. She settled herself into the acceleration couch next to Doran Morss.

"It hired both of us," he said with a touch of annoyance. "It was in your briefing." He reached up to slam the hatch of the small aircarlike vessel.

In the several days since she had been "hired" — a quaint term whose implications she had yet to explore — Livia had encountered Morss several times. One thing she had noticed was that even a slight hint of irritation on his part was enough to make most of his hangers-on cower. These hangers-on were referred to as "servants" — another old term she'd never heard used in reference to human beings. The man was a tyrant, she had decided; she did not like him. This morning he had shown up unexpectedly at her door and announced that the Government wanted them both to visit the devastated Atchity Coronal, where Omega Point's forces had just been routed.

She was thinking about how to answer Morss's comment — she'd read the briefing, but hadn't understood much of it — when the floor fell out from under the little spaceship. They were leaving the Scotland via a hatch in its outer skin, just as Aaron's house had exited and entered Rosinius and the other coronals. So it was a familiar enough experience; still, Livia hissed involuntarily and grabbed at the arms of her chair as they fell into black space.

"See, that's why they hired you," said Morss, unperturbed by the sudden fall. "Sophia Eckhardt wouldn't have reacted like that To her, it would be just another shift of realities in inscape. Her kind doesn't understand that mere's a real world underlying all the fantasy visions they cram into their senses." He sounded contemptuous, almost bitter as he said this. Out the windshield, livia watched the black underside of the worldship rising away like an iron cloud. Stars specked into view around them as the dark hulk dwindled. She shook her head.

He half turned in his seat, gazing at her as if she were a suspicious fruit in the Barrastea market "You really are a foreigner. I get that. You obviously have no idea how bad things have gotten in the Archipelago. Haver, Sophia's quite tolerant for her kind, which I suppose is why the Good Book put her on to you. But the rest of humanity's turning into a race of fucking sleepwalkers. Those of us who believe in the existence of a real world are in a shrinking minority. Most people think inscape is all there is. They're more and more out of touch with reality; whole coronals have started failing the cliff test"

Their little ship — which consisted of the cockpit they were in, and a large fusion engine behind it — leveled out and the power kicked in. Livia felt some weight return; the experience was no more dramatic than lying on her back and looking up at the stars.

"But mat still doesn't answer my question," she said. "Why did they hire mer

"You're what we like to call a baseline," said Morss with a shrug. "Your nervous system encodes the sorts of behavior patterns that we evolved for — what they dismiss here as the 'cripple' view. Hence the cliff test If you fell in a virtual river you'd hold your breath and try to swim. Natural human reactions for somebody from Ventus, maybe — but you have to understand, many people here get their inscape implants while still in the womb. Generations have grown up now completely inside inscape. When they fall off a cliff, they laugh and flap their arms. When they fall in a river they just keep on breathing — because they don't have the experience of a stable and dangerous reality to ground them. They lack the baseline human reactions you still have. You've got an almost pure set, by our readings. You and your two friends form a kind of behavioral standard that's getting increasingly rare. We can use that standard to judge how viable a person or inscape is."

Oddly enough, that made sense: Morss wanted her to judge manifolds, something she'd gotten quite adept at just before leaving Teven. At least, that's what it sounded like he wanted.

In the distance Livia saw a thin arc of light emerging from the endless sky: a coronal. "Is that AtehityT she asked. Morss didn't answer. He was talking quietly to a blurred inscape figure in front of him.

She tamped down on her annoyance, and watched out the windshield for a while. The coronal was beautiful: a fat ring or short can with open ends, its interior surface brilliantly lit in swirling cloud and blue by a round mirror angled in its central space. But as the ship's trajectory took it toward the sunward side of the coronal, the light shifted to reveal something else — something that took up so much of the sky that Livia hadn't even seen it The two-mousand-kilometer-wide ring of the coronal was half cupped in the arcing metal claws of something that dwarfed it — something planet-sized. So this was an anecliptic dreadnought: a vast nightmare of machinery, its outstretched arms the size of continents. It looked like nothing so much as a mailed fist ready to crush the delicate ring-shaped world.

The sight was extremely unnerving. Livia needed to look at something else, so she pulled out the copy of the Good Book that Sophia had given her as a gift.

The Book was a physical object, a rarity for Sophia.

Bound in vat-grown leather, it held a pleasing odor. Its hundred or so chapters used parables, stories, and poetry to describe particular "roles" such as Phoenix, Priestess, or Pack-Carrier. "Pick a role, any role to start with," Sophia had said. "That's you — for now." While you were acting in a particular role, you were supposed to try to emulate its qualities as closely as possible. At the end of each chapter were a few pages of rules about what each role should do when encountering people playing other roles. You might take charge of that person for a time; your own role might change to something else; so might theirs.

There were over a thousand pages in the book, and it was heavily cross-referenced and indexed. She flipped to the back and looked for any index entries that might say Annoying People, dealing with. She couldn't find one.

"The Good Book's not a religion." Sophia had laughed. "The Book started replacing local adhocracies about seven years ago. It's just a bunch of simple rules: if this happens, do that. People have had systems like it for thousands of years — you know, the Ten Commandments and the Categorical Imperative, that sort of thing. But those systems weren't based on systematic testing. The Good Book is the result of massive simulations of whole societies — what happens when billions of individual people follow various codes of conduct It's simple: if most people use the rules in the Book most of the time, a pretty much Utopian society emerges spontaneously on the macro level."

The Book was like magic. Sophia had wanted Livia to try it out, so she did to be polite. Using it was like playacting; Livia found she could sup easily into some roles but had more difficulty with others. One day she was the Courier, and people came to her with packages for her to deliver until she met someone whose role changed hers. The next day she was designated the Tourist, and she did nothing but explore Brand New York until she met a Visitor, at which point her role changed to Tour Guide. That was all very simple, she thought; any idiot could have designed a system like this. But every now and men she caught glimpses of something more — something extraordinary. Yesterday she had run through a chain of roles and ended up as Secretary. Reviewing the Secretary's role in the Book, she found that she should poll inscape for anyone nearby who had one of the roles of Boss, Lawyer, Researcher, or about five other alternates. She did, and went to meet a woman who had the odd, unfamiliar role of Auditor.

Livia met the Auditor in a restaurant. Five other people were there, too; all had been summoned to this meeting by their roles, but nobody had any idea why, so they compared notes. One man said he'd been given the role of Messenger three days before, and couldn't shake it He was being followed by a small constellation of inscape windows he'd accumulated from other roles. When he distributed these, they turned out to all relate to an issue of power allotment in Brand New York that the votes were dragging their heels on. Suddenly the Auditor had a task. As Secretary, Livia began annotating her memory of the meeting. In under an hour they had a policy package with key suggestions, and suddenly their roles changed. A man who'd been the Critic suddenly became the Administrator. According to the rules of the Book, he could enact policy provided conversion to Administrator was duly witnessed by enough other users.

This was amazing. After a while, though, Livia had realized that far larger and more intricate interactions were occurring via the Book all the time. It was simply that few or none of the people involved could see more than the smallest part of them.

Eventually she slipped the Book back into its carrying case and looked up. The coronal loomed huge in front of them. Morss had ended his private conversation, so Livia turned to him, opening her mouth and closing it several times as she tried to think of a way to broach the subject of 3340. She was still unsure of how much to reveal about herself; but she remembered a conversation she'd had the other day. She had discreetly asked one of Morss's servants how it was that Morss could be so rich in a place where each citizen's potential for wealth was controlled by inaccessible, outside forces. "Somebody told me that you're not a citizen of the Archipelago," she said now.

"That's right. How do you think I'm able to keep that?" He jerked a thumb at the now-tiny worldship behind them. "My Scotland was built with cometary materials I scavenged myself from outside the solar system. Took me many years to bring it in; you can do that, you know, but you have to get the stuff personally and ride it home yourself for your claim to be valid. Took years ... Anyway, I came back with a few quadrillion tons of raw materials that the annies didn't own. There's only a few humans in the Archipelago sitting on that much resource — everything else comes from the annies. Of course, they disapproved; they wouldn't let the Government work for me anymore. Said I would be putting too much resource into the 'human niche,' I might upset their precious ecology. They designated me a 'distinct entity.'" He laughed. "I'm on a par with the human race as a whole in terms of my rights. But there are precious few places where I can spend what I've got."

"The annies again?" ventured Livia.

"That's right. I'm a little speck of chaos in their deterministic machine. So they load me down with obligations to keep me busy — though they haven't taken my wealth away from me."

Livia had the distinct feeling that there was a much bigger story here, and was about to ask for more details when their ship flipped over in a stomach-lurching way. "We're on final approach," said Morss. And then he busied himself with his virtual conversations and left no an-ima to continue speaking with her. She sat back, crossed her arms, and watched the sharp curves of the coronal slide slowly past beneath them. Moments later they were whipping past the knife-thin edge of its south sidewall and without warning, plowed into atmosphere as thick as water. Red flame burst outside the windshield as they were jolted back and forth in their seats by deceleration.

After some tense minutes of this they had shed the differential of their velocity with die coronal; as the diamond windshield cleared of flame, retaining only a wavering heat-distortion, Livia gazed down on a landscape unlike anything she had ever seen before.

The whole surface of the coronal looked like a circus that had been drowned in a mud slide. Bizarre buildings and towers of jewel poked up everywhere out of long runnels and sluices of pale beige. The beige substance had a kind of texture to it — almost familiar ... "What is that stuff?" she asked.

"Paper, mostly," said Morss. "Books of the old physical kind. I'm told they're chiefly novels, every one of them unique. There's also film scripts and symphonies. Billions and billions of them." He waved a hand at the strange buildings. "As well as oil paintings, sculptures, architectural forms, new fashion styles, shoes, quilts, tiling patterns, and furniture and cutlery designs. Blown across the whole damn coronal like dust. All part of the propaganda blast."

"Propaganda blast?"

"We wouldn't have been able to get this close a week ago," said Morss. 'This whole area was contested — mines and lasers, disassembler fogs and so on, on the side of the last few humans defending their homes — and art bombs on the side of Omega Point. Throw a missile at 'em, they convert its mass and energy into a thousand new operas and throw 'em back at you. All of them with Omega Point's people as heroes, of course. Hell, they've rewritten the history of the world a million or so different ways to make themselves look like the culmination of everything. It's disgusting. Luckily the anecliptics came — along with Choronzon himself — and cleared it all out of the way for us."

"Who's Choronzon?" she asked.

"You'll meet him," was all Morss said.

Morss brought the ship around and they settled toward a particularly devastated part of what might have once been a city. They stepped off the ship's landing leg onto a surface composed entirely of paper sheets. Livia knelt and looked at several. They were neatly printed, and seemed to be pages of some rather tawdry adventure novels. The phrase mad anecliptic came unbidden to her mind, and she hid her hands, which had begun to shake.

According to what she'd read prior to embarking with Morss, this coronal had once housed a billion people. Its citizens had always been a bit extreme in their use of technology. By the time of the post-human efflorescence, most of the moderates had fled. Lucky thing, judging from the psychotic overflow of creativity that had ruined the land.

"There it is," said Morss, pointing past the aft end of the ship. Livia walked under the hot pinging metal and looked.

A thing like a metal tree sat entirely alone in a fire-blackened plaza a hundred meters away. Instead of branches, the tree thrust blades into the air at all angles; some were visibly red-hot. Several human figures stood about the tree, along with the tanklike shape of a semi-sentient brody. Morss headed in their direction.

Morss shook hands, then Livia stepped up to do likewise. These people were mostly votes, but the Government was here, too, in the guise of a young man with calloused hands. In addition, there was a thing like a swirling cloud of virtual matter, which introduced itself as a Zara — whatever that was — and a pair of otterlike biological beings that might be true aliens.

" ... And here comes Choronzon," said Morss, nodding in the direction of a nearby, half-built colosseum. A tall man was sauntering toward them, dusting off his hands and smiling. As he got closer she found herself staring; he had intense eyes and black hair, and he moved like a panther. His beauty was almost mesmerizing, in fact. Some inscape trick, she told herself, with a twinge of resentment. But she didn't look away.

"Alison Haver, the god Choronzon."

Choronzon grinned at Morss, clapped more dust off his hands and held one out for her to shake. "Nice to meet you," he said in a deep, resonant voice.

Sophia had talked about the gods, but in the manner of distant beings she never hoped to meet. Here was a viable post-human in the flesh — or pseudo-flesh — and he looked like nothing so much as a sim actor.

"So you're our baseline," he said. "I trust Doran's briefed you on what we're doing here?"

"No — yes," she said, and found herself inexplicably blushing. "I'm a bit out of my depth," she admitted.

"That's okay," he said quietly. "So am I."

There was an awkward pause.

"Has it said anything?" Morss asked the Government. They were standing near the metal tree, looking it up and down.

The Government nodded. "It's radiating news stories on all frequencies — thousands of self-serving docudra-mas per second. But that's all reflex action. There's been no communications from the thing's core at all. See for yourself: you can enter its inscape by walking under the, uh, branches there."

Livia regarded the smoking tangle nervously. Six days ago, a Government agent had overflown me coronal to find out what had happened to the people who had won the post-humanist civil war. He had flown in on a stealth-craft and cruised up and down the coronal for days before spotting the tree. By that time he was thoroughly rattled by what he'd seen: cities eaten and regurgitated by architect-dreamer machines; inscape hallucinating entire new civilizations; everywhere the stink of dead plants and animals. The lakes had been drained out and stored as ice on the underside of the coronal, and even the soil replaced by some unknown industrial process. Omega Point couldn't tolerate the idea of any nonconvert coming within a thousand kilometers of this strange metal tree.

"Now that we're all here," said the Government, sounding for all the world as if it were chairing a meeting, "let's go in and see if anybody's home." He turned to Iivia. "Your task lies there." He pointed to the building Choronzon had come from.

"What's there?" She peered nervously in that direction.

"I am," said the Government with a smile, "so don't worry. No, it's just some of the humans who survived the recent war. They wandered into this zone after Choronzon wiped out the Omegans' defenses. They need someone to talk to."

"Talk to?" But the Government and the others, including Morss, had turned and were walking toward the bizarre metal tree. Livia shook her head and walked toward the building.

Doran Morss found himself hovering in an endless sky: the inscape representation of the metal tree's core. Avatars of the other Archipelagics floated nearby. Sourceless illumination lit them a soft, sunset rose color. Choronzon was scratching his head, looking unimpressed.

"Listen to that," said the god. Morss heard nothing. He said as much.

"That's what I mean," said Choronzon. "We're interfaced with a system that's supposed to contain the downloaded minds of millions of people. We've attacked them and knocked out all their defenses, leaving them totally vulnerable to us in the real world. Shouldn't there at least be somebody manning the door?"

They looked around uneasily, but the blue sky went on forever in all directions, empty of promise. Finally the Government said, "All right, nobody's meeting us. Choronzon, you and I will crack the system." The god nodded. Nothing more happened — the two simply stood there on the air, staring at nothing, while presumably their agents made an all-out assault on the information processing systems of the metal tree.

Their distraction gave Doran the chance he'd been waiting for. He quickly muttered a number of commands under his breath — commands that had been given to him by an Omega Point evangelist he'd sheltered, in secret, on board his Scotland. The commands were supposed to unlock a set of interfaces to the core of the tree. If all went well, he should be able to access the genetic code for Omega Point's eschatus machine.

Omega Point had explored many options for self-deification. The eschatus machine was a single-person device, so they had never built it, but had instead elected to implement a collective approach that they claimed would allow all of their members to achieve a state of absolute consciousness. The evangelist had assured Doran that the plans for the eschatus machine were complete, however. Doran had paid the nonhuman brodys to build it and Omega Point had promised to give him the machine's genes if he appealed to the votes on their behalf.

With the eschatus machine, Doran Morss could in one second transform himself into a being like Choronzon — a god.

He had given the passwords. There was nothing to do but wait. If Omega Point believed in his honesty — frankly, if they cared at all at this point — the eschatus machine genes should automatically download into the capacious data store he'd hidden under his shirt. Meanwhile the Government and Choronzon had lost their distracted looks and were frowning at each other.

"What's the matter?" Doran asked innocently. "Can't get through?"

"Oh, we got through all right," said Choronzon. "It was just what I said would happen," he said to the Government. "There was never any other possibility."

"What's going on?" asked a vote.

The Government shrugged. "It was pretty much a foregone conclusion. The fact is, there's no such thing as an ultimate state of consciousness. It's a myth; sentience has meaning only insofar as it's connected into the physical world. We always knew the Omegans were going to be disappointed."

"All a cosmic wank," said Choronzon.

"We have full access to their systems," said the Goveminent. "If you'd like to see it, here's a view of the Omega Point." It gestured to open a large inscape window in the sky. Instantly Doran's head was filled with an un-differentiated roar: white noise matched in the window by endless video snow.

Choronzon laughed. "The more information there is in a signal, the more it resembles noise. You're looking at infinite information density, gentlemen, a signal so packed with information that it has become noise. These idiots pushed so far in one direction that they ended up at the opposite pole. It's not like I didn't warn them."

"Then they're gone?"

The Government nodded. "All gone. Dead."

"You could call it the most elaborate act of serf-entombment in human history," said Choronzon with another laugh. "Come on, let's get out of here so I can dismantle this thing." He vanished from the inscape view. After conferring for a while the votes followed. Doran hung for a while longer in front of the big square of gray snow, listening to the roar of infinite information density. He almost thought he could hear voices in that monstrous basso hiss, but then he'd heard the same in the sighing of the night breeze. Perhaps the fanatics of Omega Point had gotten their wish, but if so they had been mistaken in thinking that the Absolute was something that hadn't been there all along. Absolute meaning, it seemed, was no different from no meaning at all.

He shuddered, and left them to their hypertechnologi-cal tomb.

"They refused to leave," the Government was saying. Livia knelt next to one of the human refugees who huddled inside the ruins. Ovals of light like spotlights from holes far overhead picked out one or two of the young-looking people. They sat listlessly, not apparently in distress, but not speaking either.

There were about thirty of them. Sixteen had gray patches where skin had been replaced by some substitute; one had an all-gray arm. Choronzon had healed their physical wounds with this stuff, according to the Government. Their psychic state was another matter.

"What am I supposed to do?" Livia asked. "I'm a stranger here, I don't know these people or what they've gone through ... " She heard the rising note in her voice and stopped herself. She shook her head and looked down.

"It's all right," said the Government gently. "You're already doing what we brought you here to do. Look."

She looked up. The refugees were staring at her — not angrily, or with hope, but intently, almost with fascination. "What is it?" she murmured. "What do they see?"

The Government sighed. "They see something they may never have seen before: a normal human reacting normally to a traumatic situation. Livia, these people have been insulated within inscape their whole lives. They have lived in a world where their merest whim could be granted with a thought. Reality has always conformed to their desires — never the other way around. Now they find themselves in a world that obstinately refuses to change itself to fit their imaginations. They literally have no idea how to respond."

Livia remembered her conversation with Lady Ellis — it seemed like years ago now. Livia was special, the founder said, because she had gone through the crash, seen people die, and learned that nothing good came of it. For that very reason she was stronger.

Of course these ruins resonated with memory. Livia could remember huddling under broken eaves with Aaron, watching rain she could do nothing to dispel. After inscape crashed here, these poor people must have undergone just what she had.

She shook her head. "But I come from a world very like this one," she said. "With inscape ... and all." Even as she said it she knew it wasn't quite true. On Teven, the tech locks anchored the reality of each manifold. Inscape was not a means to wish-fulfilment there.

"There's something different about your home," confirmed the Government. "I'd love to know what it is. Meanwhile, you have a useful role to play here. As an example to these people of how to feel." "Surely there's other, uh, baseline people around." "Oh, millions," said the Government. "Whole coronals of people who'd qualify, in fact. But I've had to disable long-range inscape, and none of those people are within a week's journey of mis place. We need you now, Livia." "All right," she said. "But I still don't understand." "Just do what you do," said the Government Livia thought for a while. Then she began to walk among the refugees, and she sang for them an ancient song she'd learned as a girl, but never understood: "The Dark Night of the Soul."

As always, she came to feel the emotions of the song as she sang it The words were uplifting, a benediction that had weathered the test of centuries. By the time she left, there were tears on the cheeks of several of the Omegans, though they neither smiled nor spoke; but the Government smiled.

Exhausted, Livia let her feet guide her in the direction of Morss's ship. She had talked to a number of the refugees. Jn different ways, she had asked them all the same question: Did the evangelists of Omega Point come to you? Did they promise you the things you'd always dreamed of?

They had not answered the way she'd expected. The cultists only had one name for themselves and they never promised anything other than a merging of all identities in the Omega Point. Unlike 3340's agents, who adapted themselves to every person's vulnerabilities, Omega Point were charmlessly direct.

She couldn't prove it, but it seemed that Omega Point had not been 3340.

Evening had fallen, but as she walked she could hear no crickets or night birds, just the slow exhalation of a breeze through the gap-toothed buildings. As she neared the ship, though, Livia could make out voices.

"Do you know how an eschatus machine works, Do-ran?" It was the self-made god, Choronzon. He and Morss stood on the opposite side of the ship; she could see their feet underneath it. Livia paused to listen.

"It's basically a hydrogen bomb," continued the god, his voice silky and calming. "But a bomb so finely made that every atom in it has been carefully placed. When it explodes and the pulse of energy comes from its heart, the energy is filtered and modulated down to an angstrom's-width as it surges outward. It's a controlled burn, you might say, turning what would normally be chaotic and destructive energy into creative power. In a millisecond you go from having a bomb to having ... well, what, do you suppose?"

"I have no idea," said Morss. He sounded irritated — nothing unusual in that.

"Well, a newborn god is one possibility. A coronal might be another. But I think I can guess which might interest you more."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Of course not. Certainly I wouldn't be talking about the fact that you fought us every step of the way on whether we should shut down Omega Point. You — the most vocally anti-god human in the Archipelago, defending them? Strange.

"Of course, strange behavior might be explained if one knew about the eschatus machine that the Omegans designed before their hasty departure from this mortal coil — the machine whose plans you downloaded earlier today."

There was a brief silence. Then Morss said, very quietly, "What do you want?"

"Nothing. I'm just intrigued by your change of heart, that's all.

"You know I was once a human being, too, Doran. I remember how hard it was to marshal all the resources I needed to cure myself of the affliction. I also remember, quite clearly, how I always told people I had no interest in self-deification. It was a useful and sometimes necessary shield against interference."

"Blow off," said Doran. "Unless you have some specific threat you want to use on me."

Choronzon laughed. "Not a threat. Just curiosity as to why someone so violently opposed to improving on the human model should decide to go against all his principles."

"Sometimes," said Doran icily, "mature people do things they don't want to do. It's called following higher principles. But someone without mortal concerns, say, like yourself, wouldn't understand that."

"I know you blame me for not doing enough — " began Choronzon. Morss cut him off.

"I do. These people needed a champion. I didn't have the power to stop them destroying themselves. So yes, I took their side, because I saw a chance to get that power — too late for them, but maybe not the next Omega Point."

There was a brief silence. Then Choronzon said, "You'll make a fine god, then — you already have the necessary urge to meddle."

Livia heard the god's footsteps crackling away over the paper landscape.

Livia made sure her own footfalls were audible as she walked around the ship. Doran stood there, staring off into the evening gloom with an unreadable expression on his face. As she approached he snapped, "Where've you been?"

"Working," she said. "What have you been doing?"

He just grunted. Suddenly he looked very tired. Over his shoulder Livia could see the flicker of orange flames: the remnants of the Omega Point tree were collapsing in on themselves. As she watched, Choronzon stepped forward to reinsert a heavy piece that had fallen out of the fire.

"Let's go" said Doran. "There's nothing more for us here."

15

Weeks passed while Livia, Aaron, and Qiingi settled into life in the Archipelago. Livia still felt urgently driven to seek help for her home, but whole days went by now when she did nothing about it She was distracted in her new role as baseline.

It was a simple enough job: guide lost people out of the sometimes baroque realities they had walled themselves into. Doing this involved, as Doran put it, "mostly just showing up." She had to tune her view to that of the people in question. The Government advertised her coming and those who were interested could, with her help, tune their realities back toward the human baseline — though no one ever came all the way back to "crippleview."

Her experience traveling between the manifolds of Teven suited her well to this role; so she felt useful.

Though Doran Morss had few permanent residents in the Scotland, he allowed Livia to stay, and so was obliged to let Aaron and Qiingi remain as well. It was a small imposition, since they had thousands of square kilometers of open land to roam aboard the ship and could come and go as they pleased.

During mis time Qiingi came less and less to Livia's bed. She thought she understood: they had been cooped up together for so long, first fleeing through Teven's cultures, then within the house. He needed to establish himself in this place as much as she did. So she didn't think much of it when she didn't see him for days at a time.

Later, Livia would realize that her own distraction had prevented her from seeing the effect that the Archipelago was having on him, and on Aaron.

Of course, by then it was too late.

"So you've come," said Aaron. He stared glumly at Livia and Qiingi. He looked like he hadn't slept in days.

"Are you going to invite us in?" asked Livia. Aaron started, and stepped back to let them into his apartment The view was of some outer planet's moon. Livia seemed to be stepping onto a powdery white landscape with a close horizon, a black sky and stars blazing overhead. It was bleak, and empty; typical of the places Aaron loved.

As Qiingi moved past Livia she smelled wood smoke. The scent gave her an aching memory of home.

"We haven't met in over a week," Aaron was saying as he nervously summoned up a couch and some chairs. "I just thought ... we should."

"I'm sorry," she said, touching his arm. "I know you've been working hard, Aaron. I've been sidetracked, but it's for a good cause, believe me: I'm worming my way into the corridors of power. Doran Morss seems to have a relationship with the annies. If I can convince him to let us talk to them ... "

"Yes, yes, I understand," said Aaron. Livia had sat down; Qiingi stood with his arms crossed. Aaron chose to pace. "I'm still looking for 3340," he said.

"Have you had any success?" asked Qiingi.

"Have I had success? What about you? What have you been doing?"

"I have been sitting by my fire, and thinking," said Qiingi. He had recently moved out of the chandelier city, settling on the moors in a sod hut he'd built himself.

Aaron snorted contemptuously. "You've given up, haven't you?"

"We could destroy our souls attempting to do the impossible," said Qiingi quietly, "or we can choose the possible."

"What are you talking about?" Aaron shook his head. "We have to find a way to help our people. Don't you care about your friends and family? Or that we care about ours?"

"There may be no way to help them."

Qiingi's words hung in the air like a death sentence. They had all been thinking this, Livia realized; it had run like an undercurrent under all her recent choices. But she didn't want to admit that Not to these two men after all they had done and seen together.

"There might still be a solution," she said. "We have to keep hunting — "

"For what? We don't know what we're looking for." Qiingi shook his head. "Don't you see the increasing desperation of our search? Very soon now it will cease to be a rational thing, and become an obsession. We will fixate on trivial hints, pursue them in denial of their falseness. Maybe we have already begun to do this," he said, gazing levelly at Aaron.

Aaron went white. "How dare you," he whispered. "You, who do nothing but sit like a fat parasite in your — "

"Hut," said Qiingi with a half smile. "This is a fine apartment you have, Aaron Varese." livia jumped to her feet. "Stop it! You're both behaving like children." She rounded on Qiingi. "And you! What are you doing, deliberately provoking him?"

"I am doing nothing, apparently," said Qiingi.

"Well you just admitted that — " started Aaron. Qiingi shook his head.

"Like you, I came here to find a way to save my people. But I no longer believe we can find those who attacked our homes. And we cannot go home. If we cannot save the bodies and minds of our people, we are left with preserving their spirit I am determining how to do that You," and now he pinioned both of them with an accusatory gaze, "are the ones who are doing nothing."

Livia shrank back. She'd been happy, the last few days. Traveling with Doran Morss, singing to the confused and lost, she'd finally felt like she was doing something useful. Qiingi was telling her that she'd been lying to herself.

"Qiingi, that's not fair. What do you expect us to do? I'm sorry, but it really does sound like you've given up."

"Your hand must let go of one thing so that you can grasp another — "

"Not another proverb!" Aaron laughed derisively. "Spare us! You're useless, Qiingi. So what the hell are you doing here?"

Raven's warrior stood stiffly. "Nothing, other than telling the truth." Again, the words hung there, but now both Aaron and livia were glaring at him. Qiingi sighed heavily.

"I will leave, then," he said. "When you have taken your search to its logical conclusions, you know where you can find me." He walked to the door with great dignity.

"Qiingi," said Livia, "who are you walking out on?"

He didn't reply. It was only when he closed the door that she realized how far apart they'd drifted. Instantly she wanted to take back everything she'd done in the past while, but all she could do was sit there, paralyzed. There was no anima to mask the past.

Behind her, Aaron was stalking up and down, cursing furiously. Bereft, she turned to look at him; his anger was astonishing. It had been building for months, she realized — or more likely years.

Swallowing her own fury, Livia stood and went to him. She held out her arms and he folded himself into her embrace, hugging her fiercely.

"What is it?" she whispered. 'Tell me."

"It's ... " He hesitated. "Livia, have you considered that maybe you're working for the enemy?"

"What?"

He grimaced. "That came out wrong. I don't mean

3340; but you know it's the annies who are keeping us ftom ever going home. They're the ones who've kept us — all of Teven's people — locked away like zoo animals for two hundred years! And the whole human race is under their thumb, too. And you're working for them."

"I'm working for the Government," she said, her face hot.

"Which works for the annies."

"Aaron, I'm helping people. I'm not doing it for any outside agency, I'm doing it for those individual people."

He shook his head sadly. "Sometimes you're the most cunning of players, and sometimes you're frighteningly naive. Can't you see what you're doing? You're part of the Government's program to convince people that the status quo is working. You're hiding the bodies, Liv. Sweeping the contradictions of the place under the rug, so that the greater society doesn't notice them. Is that good?"

"Why are you saying this?"

"I know you have the best of intentions. But we should be encouraging people to push the limits of human nature — we shouldn't be holding them back! Of course some will crash — that's natural selection. But if we don't try to improve on our design, how is humanity ever going to match the annies? And if nobody confronts them, how are you and I ever going to get home again?"

She gaped at him. "Confront them? But that's ... "

"Impossible? So was leaving Teven, if you'll recall. I don't think it's impossible. In fact — " He hesitated, then shrugged and looked down. "I just want to know which side you're on here."

She looked down at the powdery grit inscape was telling her lay under her feet "I should have thought that was clear," she murmured.

After a moment she realized Aaron was standing over her. Livia looked up. He had the oddest expression on his face.

"Liv ... " He bit his lip. "Stay here tonight," he blurted.

"What?"

"Stay. With me. Tonight"

"Oh ... Sure. I can just summon a bed for myself, and — "

"That's not what I meant." He looked terrified at what he'd just said. Realizing what he did mean, Livia felt supremely uncomfortable.

"Oh! Aaron, I ... I can't."

"You're not still with him? After what he — "

"No!" She stood up, twining her hands in distress. "At least, I don't know. I'm not not with him. Aaron, mis ... this just isn't the right time for us to have this conversation."

Something changed in his face — a shuttered look as though he'd replaced himself with an anima. "I see," he said coldly. "It seems it never was the right time, was it?"

"Aaron." She went to him, but he shied away from her touch. "You know me better than anyone else. You've been my best friend ever since ... well, you know. And we've never in all that time had this conversation. Maybe we should have — "

"It's okay, I understand." He turned away, his shoulders hunched. "I'll see you later, then. Don't worry; I'll be all right"

"Well no, wait a second. This is serious, Aaron. How long have you been thinking this?" Wanting me?

Still not looking at her, he plodded toward a distant cloud of inscape windows. "We both have work to do ... To save our people. It's no time to let our emotions run away with us."

"But you brought this up, Aaron. We have to deal with it."

"Not now." He vanished into some view inaccessible to her. Stunned, Livia stared at the spot where he'd just been standing.

She didn't know what to do. After several long minutes, she turned and left the now-empty apartment Summoning up Qiingi's footprints, she stared at them for a long while. Then she walked the other way.

Doran Morss watched his newest employee from under the shadow of some trees. He had come here to confront Alison Haver about some irregularities in her work for him. From the size of the crowd here in her narrative, she was obviously thriving in her dual roles of soundtrack and baseline. So now he felt foolish at walking over there and confronting her. He fidgeted, trying to think how to justify his presence here.

Haver's narrative was set in an open-air parkland. The buildings all had a 1950s rocket-ship chic that she seemed to have fallen in love with. In inscape, her estate was currently docked next to one of Doran's trouble-spots: a coronal whose population had just revolted against the anecliptics. They'd been put down, and now boiling resentment was pushing a lot of people toward post-human experimentation. Doran had sent her there to work as a soundtrack; her real job was to act as a Government baseline.

Doran had insisted that her narrative be stable. On his way by the drinks table he saw that she had taken his advice. The drinks were served on a table by a human-shaped agent; the liquids came from bottles; the bottles came from crates at the agent's feet. Any link in this chain could have been interrupted — customized into something inconsistent, such as having the bottles snorted out of an elephant's trunk. Most people's personal narratives had many such breaks because they had never lived in an environment where all objects had consistent relationships. Haver seemed to know intuitively what a seamless view would look like; thus, the very act of visiting her narrative should be healing for many people exhausted by the arbitrary dreamworlds of their own inscape.

He'd had few opportunities to speak with this highly capable young woman since the Omega Point incident. When they did speak, he found her disarmingly direct, apparently unafraid of his power. Whether it was this or something else about her that put him off balance, he didn't know. But around her, he always seemed to forget whatever he was about to say. He wasn't used to that kind of weakness, and he inevitably ended up saying the wrong tiling.

It would definitely not help matters if he revealed mat he had been investigating her use of his inscape agents. Haver was sending them on errands all over the Archipelago. She and her two friends seemed to be searching for something, but they were being damnably secretive about it They wouldn't even tell the agents — his agents — what they were after. Their cavalier use of his resources was galling.

But every time he spoke to her, it ended badly. And he didn't like that fact, either.

He cursed and walked toward Haver. As he did, Sophia Eckhardt converged on her from the other direction. Eck-hardt got there first and Haver, not yet noticing Doran, greeted her warmly.

"Welcome to my narrative," she said to the soundtrack. "I'm currently the Sage — though I don't feel very smart today."

Sophia smiled at her, pursed her lips in thought, then said, "Well, Sage and Minstrel cancel. I believe that makes us both the Student What's wrong?"

Haver looked down disconsolately. "I may have just broken my oldest and most precious friendship."

Doran had been wracking his brains for some clever opening line and was thrown by the realization that Haver might be pursuing a romantic life he knew nothing about Consequently his mind was now a blank as he walked up to the two women. "You'll have better luck if you stop playing dress-up with that damnable book," he heard himself say.

They both turned to glare at him. Doran mentally kicked himself for being a clod, which made him even angrier. He glowered at Sophia, acutely aware of Haver's gaze on him. He desperately tried to recover. "And how's the other you today? The ... non-book side?"

Haver's smile was coldly polite. "Well, Respected Morss, publically, I'm very well, thank you. If you have no interest in other sides of me, then we can leave it at that."

Doran knew he should stop, retreat, that this whole conversation was a slow-motion crash. What he said was, "That's a laugh. There is no public life anymore. Only private life, ridiculously intensified. Isn't that what we're fighting against?"

"Well," she said seriously, "that would certainly explain the sense of claustrophobia I've been feeling ever since we got here."

Was she humoring him? He was used to people doing that — ignoring or absorbing his anger. But he hadn't expected Haver to do it, and somehow that just added to his sense of humiliation. "It's like there's no wider world outside my own garden," she said. "I've been trying to get a handle on the big picture here in the Archipelago. But every time I think I get it, it turns out to be just another view." She looked up at him expectantly. She's throwing me a line to save myself, he suddenly realized. Not because she was afraid of his anger, but because she was more adroitly diplomatic than he'd ever imagined.

He nodded gratefully. "Yeah, you can't see the big picture because there is no big picture. There's just individual people — and the armies. The Government, the votes, the narratives — they're all personal. There's no public life."

"Except in the Book," said Sophia coolly.

"Ah, yes. Of course," he said with an awkward smile. "Well, anyway, I just thought I'd drop by and say hello. I'll see you later, ladies."

He walked away quickly, face burning. What kind of a lout had he turned into? He couldn't even have a simple conversation with an attractive young lady anymore. Too many years of loneliness and political paranoia had disabled what grace he'd once had.

Or maybe he'd just been thrown by the fact that Haver treated him like any ordinary man — and not like the larger-than-life, richer-than-gods figure he'd turned himself into. He swapped out Haver's pleasant narrative for a noisy and crowded cityscape, and just walked for a while letting the bustle and detail wash over him. Anonymity, however, just made him even more lonely.

That evening Doran paced his small suite of rooms, fighting with himself. Finally he sighed, summoned an inscape menu, and said to it, "Show me a list of popular sims."

If anybody knew he did this he'd blow his credibility in the narratives that needed most to trust him. Doran Morss was dedicated to reality; he had vocally and dramatically condemned escapist sims many times over the years. And yet, on nights like this he risked the presence of spybots and, for a few hours, left his own complicated life behind.

He had never told anyone that he did this.

After making his selection he found himself in a pleasant parkland; it was late evening here, and the arch of a coronal swept across the sky, very crippleview and reassuring.

A black-haired young woman stood hipshot near a tall hedgerow. She saw him and smiled. "Doran! How are you? I haven't seen you in ages."

With a sim, he could be himself. He needn't second-guess its motives, needn't be on constant guard against plots and conspiracies. Sims weren't intimidated by him, nor were they judgmental. He felt the knot of tension between his shoulders relax as he shook the young lady's hand. And he hated himself for it.

"It's good to see you, Livia," he said sadly. "I seem to remember that the last time we met, you promised me you'd give me a tour of your city."

The sim looked pleased. "Let's go, then. Night's the best time to see Barrastea."

The hours of the night seemed to last forever. Aaron lay in his bed, staring up at the ceiling. He couldn't help endlessly replaying his argument with Livia and its disastrous end. How was he ever going to show his face to her again?

Nothing had gone as planned; not just now, but ever since the day that the airbus crashed. Seeing his father's dead face had nearly unhinged Aaron at the time. Never learning what had happened to his mother proved to be worse in the long run. He felt like he'd been knocked off balance and ever since had run forward full-tilt, always on the verge of toppling.

And fall he would have, if his self-humiliation before Livia had been the only thing he could think about. It was intolerable and he needed oblivion to cure him of the pain. There were amnesiac drugs he could take, sedatives ... but none could take back what had actually happened. He couldn't undo his life.

Yet he had one last straw to grasp — if he could just make it to morning. He thrashed and tossed and turned, and sat up cursing, but promised himself he would hold on, just that little bit more. In a few hours a visitor would be arriving. Things would have to change then; they would have to get better.

At five a.m. he abandoned sleep and padded out to the balcony to stare down at the mist-shrouded highlands. The gigantic louvers on the worldship's end cap were starting to peek open, letting wan beams of sunlight in. Aaron sipped a coffee and thought about the scale of the world he now lived in: trillions of people, all under the thumb of the same implacable power. It made the problems of Teven look petty by comparison.

At nine o'clock an iris opened in the worldship's end cap, way up at the airless axis. A tiny bright dot glided in and some time later docked at the chandelier city. Aaron was tidied up and waiting when the elevator doors opened and Veronique stepped out.

There were six of her. All greeted Aaron warmly, in minutely different ways. He'd been warned about this aspect of his new friend: she maintained numerous artificial bodies, and flipped her sensorium between them at will. Those bodies not currently inhabited by her were run by the Archipelagic equivalent of animas.

She had confided in him a few days before that she sometimes lost track of which body was hers because her five senses were all transferred. Only internal states of distress still anchored her to her own flesh. "I have indigestion to thank for keeping me human," she'd said with some embarrassment.

It was an instant party. Veronique's selves talked and joked not only with Aaron, but with each other and even with random passersby. The experience reminded him of animas, so he felt quite at home; and having her attention from so many different points at once filled the void of loneliness he had been lost in all night.

"But why did you come in person?" he asked, when they were finally ensconced in his apartment.

Veronique's selves gathered around, one sitting on either side of him, another perched on the arm of the couch, the other three seated opposite. They adopted a serious look.

"I don't trust inscape," said the one on his right. "I use quantum encrypted channels between my selves," added me one on his left, "but I rarely get access to long-range links. And my creations can't travel at all."

"Don't trust inscape?" He looked around at her skeptically. "But isn't inscape fundamentally secure? It has to be, or all sorts of things could happen — "

"Inscape is not something that serves us," said the one on the arm of the couch. "I believe we serve it; and that it serves the Government and the annies."

He frowned. "Can you prove this?"

She looked uncomfortable in six different ways. "Do I have to prove it to you?"

He thought about it. "I can't believe that having the annies lurking in the background of everything hasn't twisted things up somehow. But what can be done about it?"

Now some of her smiled. "Let me tell you a story. Ever since I can remember, I've been fascinated by inscape agents. When I was a girl I generated simple agents and set them puzzles in artificial worlds I made for them. By the time I was eighteen my narrative had grown to include some of the best architects in the solar system. By that time I was so good at designing minds that I could create sentient entities that mutated and divided and struggled with their various versions, like bubbling cell lines in my synthetic realities.

"They were too primitive to have any sense of self, or feel pain or anything. One of them ... It could converse so well you couldn't tell it wasn't human — but it couldn't manipulate the simplest object in inscape. It had no sense of physical reality.

"More fundamentally, I learned that I couldn't trade my creations with the other designers. Anything we sent across inscape became garbled in transit, to the point of uselessness. At first this was just annoying. Then it became frustrating. I couldn't trade my mind genes with anybody — it was as if we were being held back deliberately. The older people in the narrative shrugged and said I was being paranoid. Inscape is designed this way: they call it a whisper network. No message can be relayed across the Archipelagic data nets without the semantics of the message being reinterpreted by countless stations along the way. If you try to create direct, clear-data routes, you're apt to find the anecliptics coming down on you with both feet."

Aaron shrugged. "The armies are threatened by anything that might become like them."

Several Veroniques nodded. "Yes. But listen to this. About a year ago I began catching hints that others were as frustrated as me. It was nothing overt — that was the point A real movement to fight back against the network restrictions would have generated a narrative, or a vote — or both."

Aaron chuckled. "And since it's always easier to use the services of the vote than to continue struggling without it, even the most anti-Government group would find their movement absorbed into the Government itself."

She all nodded vigorously. "It's like if you and your friends struggled to build a road, and then inscape hands you wings. Pretty soon the road just seems pointless ...

"I eventually figured out that there are other people out there trying to find a way around the network's semantic transforms. The problem is, they can't collaborate overtly without having the network organize itself to help them: they walk a fine line between independence, and the generation of a vote."

Veronique couldn't even investigate whether she was right about the existence of the others. She just had to have faith that they were there, and send out hints about her own work. People who were savvy enough could figure it out and help without having to talk to her directly.

"For nine months now I've been laboring on the components of a new kind of inscape-virus." One of her stood up and began pacing. "The thing has frightening power. It's designed to take complete control of inscape. Yet, I don't even know whether the whole thing exists. I've been eaten up by doubt — do the other conspirators even exist? Maybe this is all just a particularly paranoid narrative playing out. It's so hard to know what's real ... "

Aaron started. Real was not a term he'd heard much lately.

"I'm not sure," admitted another Veronique, "because the pieces are distributed among so many people. But I think the virus is ready. All we needed was an entry point from which to inject it into the Archipelago. The big problem was, it had to gestate outside the Government-controlled part of the network."

Aaron laughed, only slightly disappointed. "Doran Morss isn't an Archipelagic citizen. So the Scotland is outside the Government's inscape."

"Yes. You see now why I had to come ... why I leaped at the chance to meet you. Morss allows very few guests. But his guests can have their own guests, within limits." Some of her looked down contritely. "I wanted to meet you anyway, because you're an exotic, I mean I've never met anybody from outside the solar system. I hope you're not angry to learn I had an ulterior motive."

He laughed again. "I assumed you had one. But it's one I like."

She grinned at herselves. "Then you're not angry with me?"

"On the contrary." He leaned forward, clasping his hands on his knees. "When were you planning on taking down the Government?"

16

Qiingi tried to avoid staring as he sat down in the verso house. He could see that the roof was about to slide off, and the wall had been patched but the stones were still crumbling here and there. The stove was improperly placed and most of its heat would leak out before it reached the cots. Politeness kept him from saying anything about these matters, but perhaps he could volunteer to help around the place. Then he could discreetly fix some things.

Qiingi had been sitting cross-legged on the shore of Doran Morss's ocean, weaving twine from grass, when she'd come walking up out of the fog: a young woman of Archipelagic perfection, dressed in uneasily patched cotton. She'd stared hungrily at his hands as he continued to work. "Show me how you do that," she had said, even before introducing herself with the unlikely name of Ishani Chaterjee.

"There are doubtless inscape tutorials that will teach you better than I could," he had said mildly.

"But I want to know how you do it," she'd insisted.

" ... And this is my housemate, Lindsey," Ishani was saying now. Housemate Lindsey wiped hands covered in chicken grease on her apron. "Would you like some stew, Qiingi? It's my own attempt at a highland recipe."

He was skeptical at the smell coming from the pot, but he smiled widely anyway. "That would be very welcome."

Ishani had talked a great deal about her new friends during the several craft sessions he'd had with her. She had tried for years to come to Doran's Scotland, but he could sense the unhappiness in her voice at finally being here. Qiingi had been amazed to hear it — among Raven's people, such discontent would not have arisen. Ishani would either have come to love this new home, or Ome-teotl would have provided a world for her more in keeping with her spirit As it was, Ishani could summon any view she wanted through inscape — but she seemed unable to commit to any of them.

The two women sat with him and Qiingi choked down some of the flavorless food. "Ishani says you're new here," said Lindsey after a silence that Qiingi had felt comfortable, but which he sensed she thought of as awkward.

"I apologize if I am encroaching on your land," he said. She laughed.

"This whole world is owned by Doran Morss. It's not our land, is it? Besides, we're happy to have a neighbor. What brought you here? You're a verso, obviously ... "

He shook his head. "I am unfamiliar with many of your terms. Worldling is not my first language."

"Verso," she said uncertainly. "Someone who does ... well, this." She gestured around at the stone walls. "Someone who's turned away from the insanity of the narratives. Returned to the old ways — pure ways of living."

Again, he shook his head. "My people did not turn away from anything. We turned to something." Her face eloquently expressed her incomprehension. "I am not from the Archipelago," he said reluctantly.

"Oh! An alien," said Lindsey. "Or a colonist? That explains ... " She gestured at bis recently-made doming. "But this is fascinating! Ishani, the things you find."

"So what are you doing here?" asked Ishani. "Are you working for Morss?"

"No." He frowned at the black hulking stove, an abomination of heat-pump technology where a fire should be. "I am doing nothing," he said at last. "Because I do not know what I could do to help my people. They have been destroyed. Many of my kinsmen and friends are dead. The rest are enslaved to a power I do not even understand." He had no reason to tell these people any of this. But Qiingi found he couldn't stop talking now that he had started. "I came to this place to be alone, away from your Archipelago of illusions. To mourn."

Lindsey sat back, clearly unsure whether to act appalled or admit to being in on the joke. "Your people ... They're dead?"

"Many of them, I'm sure."

Her look of skepticism was infuriating; Qiingi knew she could have no idea what he'd been through. Suddenly spiteful, he said, "Those that are not dead will be slaves now. And our cities and canoes, our longhouses and our great Song of Ometeotl are gone. Our animals speak for the invaders." Lindsey glanced uncertainly at Ishani, who was gazing at Qiingi with wide eyes.

Qiingi grimaced. "We came to your worlds to find help for our people, but no one will help us. We cannot find anyone to defy your anecliptics."

"The annies?" Ishani looked puzzled. "The annies attacked your coronal?"

Qiingi didn't answer; he felt tears welling up in his eyes. He glared at the tabletop, feeling a surge of deep helplessness. It was a familiar feeling, one that had come upon him daily ever since he had left the Song. These people could never understand what he was going through.

Surely he was being unkind. Yet, everyone he had met in this forsaken place seemed to lack some essential spark that he had known at home. He glanced miserably around the room, wondering why this hut, so similar in many ways to those in Skaalitch, felt like a parody of a reality only his people had known.

"Qiingi ... that name is familiar," said Lindsey. "Oh, where have I heard that, it's on the tip of my tongue, I'm tempted to do a query." She laughed at Ishani's expression. "I won't, of course. But Qiingi, you said we just now. Ishani said you were living alone."

"True. My friends have ... lost their way. One is mesmerized by the wonders of your science and technology, and the other has thrown herself into the service of Doran Morss. They neglect our search for allies. Every day they seem to remember less why we came here." He tried to express the depth of his feelings of betrayal and pain at Livia's absence, but all he could say in the end was, "I do not understand."

Ishani shook her head sympathetically. "It's the narratives. They're making sense of your friends' lives; that's what they do. It's insidious, you don't even know it's happening. I'll bet they've both found causes they can believe in. They've even met people, haven't they? ... Beautiful men or women who hold out some hope of completing them, of being their match ... " She sighed ruefully at his expression. "It's true. Narratives will do that. And what they find for you is genuine, and emotionally fulfilling. It's just that it's been given to you, you haven't made it yourself."

He looked around the cabin, suddenly frightened. "And have the narratives given me this?"

"No. If you're here on the ground of the Scotland you're outside the narratives' influence. This is Doran Morss's ship, and he's not part of the human Archipelago. That's why we," she gestured at Lindsey and herself, "can be ourselves here."

"I came here to respect the loss of my people through isolation and genuine sadness," he said after a while. "Why did you come here?"

Lindsey brooded for a moment. "Because," she said, "everybody's looking for a way out. Out of the smothering comfort of the narratives, away from the impossibility of change. Since the anecliptics took over the Archipelago, things are safer — there's been no billion-casualty wars in a long time. But people are starting to realize that the price is too high. They can't change the world around them, so they try to change themselves — like Omega Point. But that's no answer. We have to look to the past for models of how to live."

"That's very interesting," he said politely. "But what I asked was, why are you living like this? I don't understand how anyone lives in this Archipelago, it is a strange place where people do not follow their ... spirits. I merely wondered if that was what you were doing. Following your spirits."

Ishani frowned. "I don't know how to answer that."

He swallowed more of the horrible stew, then said, "In my country, we did not have sims or books or other entertainments. But on cold nights we would sit around the fire, and tell each other our stories ... I see from your expressions that you do not know that tradition. I'm sorry I assumed too much."

"No, wait," said Lindsey, reaching to catch Ishani's arm. "I think that's a great idea, don't you? Ishani, why don't you tell us your story. How you came to be here."

Ishani sat back, looking shocked. "You mean, not by rewinding a memory, but by talking?" She started to grin, then laughed. "Like Charon did ... All right, but I haven't organized my life as a narrative, you know. I'm not sure you'll understand."

"As listeners, we are not required to understand," said Qiingi. "Only to care."

"Ah. Well, then here goes."

My parents came from an average background, six generations all living together in an extended estate on an ordinary coronal. My first memories are of running and laughing on gigantic lawns among miles of parkland. The parks were full of fabulous animatronic creatures who staged tableaux and intricate dramas for us kids. The whole coronal was like this — paved with the grand estates of dynasties that had their roots in fabulous distant places like Mars and Mercury.

As I grew older and received my inscape implants I discovered other worlds that overlaid this one. There was a city, a marvelous place of whirring aircars and towering skyscrapers full of light — but it was entirely virtual, not a single brick of it physically existing. Yet everybody who was anybody had an apartment there. As a young teenager I would spend whole nights out with my friends in the crowded thick air of the city's alleys. Then to bug out and find myself sitting quietly in my room, where in fact I'd been all along.

It was at a party in this virtual city that I met the Wild Boy.

His name was Charon and he came from far away in the outer solar system. He'd grown up in an aerostat city in the frozen skies of Uranus, where the air's perfectly still for centuries at a time and the young people entertain themselves by rappelling up and down the vast curving sides of their cities above an endless abyss of air. He'd seen comrades fall to their deaths during such adventures — had spoken to one ten minutes into her descent, as she calmly related the sensation of the black tightening around her like an invisible serpent a thousand kilometers below him.

Charon was so gray and serious, like Death at a dinner party; but his stories held us fascinated, and not only because he told them to us verbally — like this — rather than just rewinding a memory for us to walk through. We loved his melancholy darkness — but we never let him know it. When we discovered that he refused to edit his inscape feeds, we took to pestering and teasing him mercilessly, playing tricks on his view, that sort of thing. I was very much attracted to him, so I'm afraid I was the worst.

He came to see me in my studio one day — I was a pretentious little girl and fancied myself a painter. I'd had a real studio built for me by the house bots, high up in one attic of the main building. I wore an old-style Parisian painter's cap and a white smock while I worked, even though I would never in a million years have touched real paint. I was working in airblocks when Charon came in, moving sculpted shapes of opacity and colored translu-cence around to create a light sculpture. I remember I'd called up a shaft of sun to spotlight myself and my work on the blond wood floor — totally artificial light, it was cloudy outside, but you get the idea. Charon took one look at me, and burst out laughing.

"I came here to yell at you for that last trick you played," he said; I can still remember the nasal tone of his accent. "But I can see now that it isn't necessary."

As clearly as I remember that, I can also remember my stunningly clever reply:

"What?"

"You're not much more real than that stuff you're playing with, are you?" he said. He was angry, but I wasn't sure why. Sure, I'd done something to his inscape again, but it was just inscape — and if he'd been hurt, well, hurts could be healed with a little pill or a few minutes with a sympathy agent.

I said something inane, I think it was about his interrupting important work. He walked slowly up to me, looking the sculpture up and down, and a sly expression came over his face. "I've noticed," he said, "that you and your friends are so used to inscape that you ignore most of it. You stick to the little parts that are fashionable and you never poke your head outside them."

It was true, but so what? In those first days after you get your inscape implants, the whole universe seems to be waving and trying to get your attention. You learn to tune it out; and I said so.

"Well, I've been exploring," he said. "Let me show you something." And right next to my light sculpture, he opened a window.

Visions unfolded in that window like flowers opening in the sun — first dozens, then as Charon's query raced through the worlds of the Archipelago, hundreds, thousands of subwindows floated in an infinite space next to my sculpture. They rotated in and out of focus at the front of the field. And, in each one of them, a young woman stood in front of a half-finished light sculpture.

"This is what's happening right this second, all across the Archipelago," said Charon. "I simply asked inscape to show me all the publically accessible feeds from girls who are working with airblocks."

The particulars were different — some of the girls stood outside, some inside, some in virtual spaces; some had white faces, some black, some blue and with any variety of genetically varied combinations of features. But out of trillions of people, it was inevitable that some large number of girls, basically human, all basically my age, would right now all be doing precisely what I was doing. I had never really understood that before.

"It gets better," said Charon. "Let's do a query on how many of diose sculptures are just like yours."

"Stop," I said, but he went ahead with it, opening a second window — and there they were, dozens of girls making my sculpture.

"And even better," he continued, enjoying the look of horror that must have stolen across my face then, "let's see how many of those girls are being mocked by a friend who's doing queries next to their work — "

"Stop it!" I tried to hit him, though of course the etiquette fields of the house prevented the blow from landing.

"Don't you get it?" he shouted as he retreated to the door. "You're wallpaper, Ishani. You can't have a thought that a million other people aren't having, you can't do anything tfiat a million other people aren't also doing. It doesn't matter what you say or whether you live or die because a million other you's are there to take your place. So why should I care what you do to me? You're wallpaper. Wallpaper!" And so he fled.

Of course he did care, but I was too young to see that. But he had opened a pit at my feet. I stopped working on the sculpture and stared aghast at the windows. I never painted again.

"That's terrible," said Qiingi. "I can see why you turned away from your world."

Oh, no, that's not the horrible part. It's what came after that made me realize what kind of place the Archipelago really is. You see, I got over it.

Several months later, the whole incident had receded and become trivial. I didn't even remember the shock and dismay I'd felt; it was like a dream. And then I met Charon again, who slyly asked me about that day. I proudly told him that I didn't care about what he'd shown me. And he laughed.

"Of course you don't care," he said. "Your narrative steered you away from the edge of that cliff. That's what it does. I bet you had some nice heart-to-heart talks, got gifts, a nod of approval here and there, new interests and people flooded into your life ... It's been an eventful time, hasn't it?"

I hesitated. Yes, it had been an eventful season. I hadn't even had time to think, really.

"The great commandment of the narratives is Oast your life must be meaningful," said Charon. "If knowing the truth strips the meaning away, then the truth must be suppressed. Do you even remember what it was I showed you, that day?"

I opened my mouth to put him down, and at that moment I realized what was happening. Since the day that Charon showed me the truth, my view had been manipulated to soften the blow. Who I talked to, what was said; where I went, what was there ... all were filtered and revised on the fly by inscape. All to restore my mental health.

The engines of my narrative had caught and begun laboring, making sense for me. Because they assumed that in the world of the Archipelago, no human could do that for herself.

And so, as understanding dawns, heaven slowly turns into hell. I began to realize that I was living in a labyrinth without exits. My parents had very carefully kept themselves ignorant of the true mechanisms behind the Archipelago. The ignorance is necessary or you'll go mad, you see? You realize that you have a choice: either exist as wallpaper, and accept that there's nothing you can do that hasn't been done before, nothing you can say that hasn't been said, nothing you can think that a million others aren't thinking right this second ... or else, allow inscape to craft some unique, fulfilling, and utterly unreal fantasy world for you to live in. Any attempt to fight the system becomes part of the system. There is no escape.

I became a verso that very moment, though it was years later that I discovered others of my own kind. We're trying to live without narratives, and the only way we know is by going back to the way things once were. When everything you did had real meaning. I thought that by coming to Doran Morss's Scotland I would find the perfect place to find that meaning.

Funny thing, though. I may have escaped the narratives, but the Archipelago's pursued me here. I can't seem to escape it, not even by leaving Archipelagic soil. Maybe there really is nowhere to escape to.

Ishani stopped speaking, looking bleak. Lindsey seemed a bit shocked at the way the story had ended.

The two women rose to clear the table. Qiingi offered to help, but they protested that he was a guest; so he sat back to contemplate Ishani's story. As he was thinking, Ishani went to the stove, and cranked a dial on it. Warmth flooded off the squat metal thing.

"In my homeland," he said slowly, "we have something you do not have in the Archipelago. We call it tech locks"

"Yes?" said Ishani. Her back was turned as she scrubbed the plate; she seemed embarrassed for some reason.

"The wisdom of the tech locks is simple," he continued. "What we know is that you can't have just one technology. Like you can't have just one silverfish in your house. Technologies come in families, like people, and when you invite one into your home, the whole family will eventually move in and they won't leave."

Both women were now looking back at him.

"And even if you don't let the rest of the family into your house, they will camp out on your doorstep and pester you whenever you go by. The one inside your house will constantly remind you of the ones outside. And each family of technologies comes with a particular way of life. To invite that family in is to accept their way of life. To invite just one member in is to be constantly reminded that you could be living another way. It brings doubt into your house.

"Think of your stove, which does not burn. Is it not a reminder of everything you are trying to forget?

"Knowing this, our ancestors drew the family trees of all the technologies. And men they made a ... a meta-technology that was able to suppress any of the others. It is easier for me to call this Ometeotl, for that is the name I was told as a boy. This great spirit knows what way of life — what family — each technology belongs to. Like people's families, technology's families shift and overlap. So it is never easy for a person to know what family he is inviting in when he adopts a new tool. But the spirit knows. You tell it the way of life you want to have, and it evicts the family members that go against that way.

"I tell you this: you cannot be happy in the life you are trying to make here, if you only evict one member of a family. You must evict them all — all serlings, agents, and helpers. You must leave inscape behind.

"You must throw away that stove."

Lindsey suddenly laughed and clapped her hands. "I know where I've heard the name!"

Qiingi and Ishani stared at her.

"It just came to me," said Lindsey. "Qiingi — you got that name from the Life of Livia!"

Qiingi nearly fell off his chair. "What?"

"Am I not right? Are you a fan?" Lindsey slipped into the chair opposite him.

"How do you know that name?" he asked apprehensively.

"See?" Lindsey waved Ishani over. "I was right. It took me a while. See, Qiingi is one of the characters from the Life ofLivia." She turned back to him. "You adopted his name. That's very interesting."

"Qiingi Voicewalker is the name Raven gave me when I was born," he said. "I did not adopt it. But tell me, what is Dais Life of Livia?"

Lindsey looked uncertain. "It's just seconds-new. Everybody's talking about it. It's the perfect verso sim, except it's not as interactive as a narrative. More like an old-style game. Livia Kodaly is this woman, she lives on a coronal, only it's not any real coronal, more like a mix of all of them. The Life is packed with scenes from all different parts of her life, mostly her childhood, and they're much more realistic than most sims. The characters are so real — I mean, any competent AI can mimic Archipelagic minds, but these people are different Not part of the narratives at all. And so strong in what they believe ... People are just eating it up."

"I hadn't heard about this," said Ishani.

"Well, you've been avoiding inscape," said Lindsey. "Which, if we listened to 'Qiingi,' here, the rest of us should be doing, too. Except that he obviously isn't, himself ... "

Qiingi was so astonished he could barely speak. "Show me this Life"

As inscape winked open and Qiingi watched an unfamiliar young woman walk die calm streets of Barrastea, he thought furiously about what must have happened. Livia's xhants had been stolen in those few moments after the flying house was picked up, and before the intervention of the Government. Whoever had done it had repackaged Livia's personal records as an entertainment and was distributing them throughout the Archipelago.

"Who is that?" he asked, indicating the young woman.

"That's Livia, the protagonist."

Most of the people Qiingi had met in his brief stay with Livia's peers now looked different; Aaron and Qiingi himself were idealized, almost caricatures. "How much is there?" he asked worriedly. Lindsey flipped through memory after memory, and Qiingi felt his heart sink. Not all of Livia's history was here — much less than half her years, perhaps. And it ended just before the attack on Barrastea.

But her agents were here, and many people's animas as well. Her whole Society, in fact, though Lindsey hadn't known they were there and was astonished when Qiingi called up Livia's mother and spoke to her briefly.

Finally he closed the window and put his head in his hands. "This is a catastrophe," he murmured. "What will she do when she finds out?"

Lindsey stared at him. "You're not telling me ... " An expression of delight came over her. "The Life is real?"

"Real," he said with a deep sigh, "and stolen. A violation of my dearest friend's privacy and soul. Poor Livia, this will destroy her when she learns of it."

But Lindsey stood up in a fever of excitement, knocking her chair over. "But don't you understand?" she said. "This changes everything! If the Life is real, and contemporary, then maybe a real verso world is possible. Not just a playground version like this one."

She and Ishani began talking, their WorldLing going by too quickly for Qiingi to follow. For a while he stared at the damnable heat pump stove, mourning for Livia's private existence.

After supper he excused himself, refusing Ishani's offer of a pallet by the fire. He walked out into the drizzle, head down, letting the worldship shed its tears for him.

17

Doran Morss looked across the table at the play of candlelight in Livia Kodaly's eyes. The towers of Bar-rastea glittered behind her. Blinking lights of aircars cruised the sky, and a sigh of cool evening air drifted in over the window's open transom. Livia lifted one side of her mouth in a coy smile. "Having fun?" she asked, swirling her wine.

"You have no idea," he said, digging into his roast duck with gusto. The duck and the wine were the only real objects in this sim, and he was determined to honor their reality by enjoying them to the full.

"I rarely visit a sim more than once," he said past a mouthful. He gestured at her with his fork. 'Testament to your design."

"You think I'm just an anima?" she asked. Anima was a special word in this place, he'd learned. The sim had a whole vocabulary of its own, which might have been pretentious had it not been so consistent.

"That's not supposed to matter in Westerhaven, is it?" he asked astutely. She shrugged. "So tell me, are you based on a real person?"

"I am a real person," she answered.

Doran was disappointed. The entities in this simulation were not cagey enough to retain an understanding of the world outside their own milieu. That would certainly limit his ability to interact with them. A little self-awareness could make an artincial mind so much more interesting.

"Your own reality seems to weigh heavily on you," Livia said suddenly. Doran sat back in surprise. His mind was gloriously blank for a few seconds.

"If that were not so," continued Livia, "then you could not travel here, could you?"

"What do you mean?"

"To travel you have to value. And un-value." She looked away sadly.

Doran chewed angrily. "What's real is what's valuable. Everything else is just an illusion." Just like you.

"So you see yourself as someone who shatters illusions?"

He nodded warily. "If not me, then who?"

She smiled dazzlingly at him. "But what if it were the other way around — that what's valuable is what's real?"

Doran cursed and stood up. He dismissed the sim with a wave of his hand and everything — windows, cityline, music, and entrancing young lady — all vanished. All except for one chair, a small table, and a plate and wineglass.

He stood in his stone bedchamber, alone.

Sims weren't supposed to challenge you like that. They adjusted to your narrative, after all. Livia Kodaly should have provided Doran a quiet evening of relaxation and witty conversation. He needed rest from too much planning. He needed to forget for a while that he had to make a decision about the eschatus machine.

Doran's chambers were unadorned — stark, even. He knew his servants and the versos he indulged didn't understand. They thought he was an ascetic at heart. But it was just the opposite. To Doran Morss, the ability to see the world unaugmented, as he did now, was the ultimate luxury. Alone in these quarters, he could revel in the simplicity of his own five senses.

At least, he should — but instead found himself wallowing in these senseless sims when he should be making decisions. Would he ever again be able to see the world in this simple way if he used the eschatus machine? Or would the virtual overwhelm the real at last?

The brodys had delivered the machine two days ago. It waited now in a scan-shielded grotto hidden deep in one of his mountains. Twice now Doran had walked down the wet stone steps that led to its resting place — a place he couldn't help but think of as its altar. Twice he'd trudged back up those steps without having touched the thing.

He felt ashamed of himself. In the past, he knew, men had been capable of making hard sacrifices. Countless soldiers had died for causes they knew to be false. Doran had spent decades preparing for this moment. Why, at the last minute, should he balk at throwing down the gauntlet to the anecliptics?

The seconds ticked on in silence and solitude. Finally, he sat down and took up his knife and fork. But he no longer tasted the food as he ate it.

A faint vibration reached him through the floor. He kept eating — but seconds later, he heard distant shouts. Doran cocked his head, annoyed. Somebody's loud party had spilled over into crippleview, apparently. He gestured open an inscape link to one of his servants and said, "Can you find out who's — "

He stopped. The inscape link wasn't open. Puzzled, he tried again. Nothing.

Doran stood and walked to the door. The shouts were closer now. He opened the door in time to see one of his people round the far corner of the arched, balconied hallway. "Sir! It's gone down!" The man appeared positively frantic.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Inscape! Inscape has crashed!" Doran could see the whites all the way around the man's eyes. He was practically wetting himself in terror.

"Out of the way." He ran down the corridors, passing several open doors. People stood slack-jawed here and there. One woman had her nose to the wall and as he passed, she placed her fingers on the surface, and reached out to tentatively lick it

"Was it some kind of accident?" he shouted back to his man as he bounded up a flight of stairs. "Is it just the city, or has the whole worldship gone down?"

"I ... how should I know?" Doran looked back at him. The man splayed out his hands, shrugging. "I can't link to anybody."

"You're in crippleview now. Talk to people. Find a window and look for incoming aircars. See if any have crashed. Go on! I'll be in the plaza upstairs."

He raced up the stairs to find himself in the diamond-domed central plaza of the chandelier city. Glittering towers loomed high on all sides, their apexes joined by flying buttresses in a complex knot half a kilometer up. Doran stopped at the entrance to the plaza, stunned.

A field of bodies lay strewn for a hundred meters in every direction.

One person remained standing in the center of this tableau. It was the new baseline, Alison Haver.

Livia had been talking to the votes to distract herself from Aaron's continued refusal to speak with her. She'd gotten comfortable with several of the ones that had retained bodies aboard the worldship after the Omega Point fiasco; they were sufficiently different from human beings to temporarily take her away from her worries. Today the votes were as usual arguing and debating in a great scrum in the central plaza, when suddenly all of them fell over as if on cue. For an absurd second she thought she was the object of some strange joke, or maybe another cliff test Then it hit home that she really was the only one left standing.

It was obvious what had happened. Inscape had failed. Strange, that she could coolly and analytically reason this out, while in the distance other human citizens of Doran's city were beginning to scream and run blindly.

For a while she was paralyzed by indecision — and memory. The field of bodies reminded her of the airbus, seen as she and Aaron staggered away from it There was the same random quality to the out-flung arms and tilted heads surrounding her now.

As she was thinking this, someone appeared in a nearby archway. It was Doran Morss, looking disheveled and breathing heavily. "Haver!" he snapped. "What the hell is going on?"

The spell was broken and she found herself actually laughing. "Maybe it was something I said."

He swore and turned away. "Wait!" she called. "I'm fine. Those others," she pointed at some distant wailing human figures, "are going to need our help."

He looked past her, chewing his lip. "Right It's a place to start."

"There's probably no way to find out what just happened," she said as she gingerly stepped over the fallen votes to reach him. "Not until inscape comes back up. Meanwhile it's a safety issue."

"Right Right" He nodded vigorously, eyes wide. "So ... we should start with, uh ... "

"We have to keep people from hurting themselves or others," she said.

"Right So ... how are we going to do that?"

Hours later, Livia walked back to her apartment through the eerily silent city. She weaved a bit as she walked; she was dead on her feet. For a day that had felt like a week, she and Doran, and some versos who happened to be in the city, had fought the rising hysteria of people thrown out of inscape for the first time in their lives. They had used words, fists, ropes, and stun weapons to subdue knots of rioting people. Most individuals had seized on any instruction and allowed themselves to be docilely led back to their apartments. Tonight everything was locked down, and Doran's people patrolled the corridors of the city. A concerted effort was being made to communicate with distant parts of the ship; it seemed the city was not alone in being affected. Just what had happened, though, was anybody's guess.

She entered the grand gallery that led to her rooms, her breath steaming ahead of her. The gallery looked down over kilometers of open air to the cold moors, and without the networked environmental controls, the city was starting to cool down.

Something caught her eye. A small fire was burning near the gallery's rail. She hesitated, wondering if she should call for fire fighting assistance.

Then she spotted the man warming his hands near the heap of burning furniture. Doran Morss looked up as Livia approached. He smiled.

"You're welcome to share my fire," he said. "It's all I've got right now ... "

"Any leads?" she asked as she came to stand next to him. It was utterly quiet except for the crackle of the flames, and darkness ruled beyond this small zone of light He shook his head. "I'm sure the systems will come back on line soon. Meanwhile, I just want to get warm." He stared at the flames, and muttered under his breath, " ... Can't get warm anymore ... Not for years."

"Are you all right?"

He sat down on the marble floor, and seemed to shrink into himself, staring into the fire. 'This? This is nothing. I'll get over it And you, how are you holding up?"

"Exhausted. I'm going to bed."

Doran grunted. "I can't do that. Not until I find out what the hell is going on."

"What will you do when you do find out?"

"Throw whoever's responsible off the tallest tower of the city, I mink." He shrugged. "For now, I'm sort of enjoying the peace and quiet."

Livia sat down wearily next to him. "Me too," she said, a bit surprised at herself. It was peaceful, knowing that at least for now, there could be no inscape-driven interruption to your thoughts.

They sat together companionably for a time while the wind sighed over the balcony, teasing the flames back and forth. Livia felt a deep and wistful melancholy settle over her. Drowsy, her limbs heavy, she just wanted to lie down here on the stone floor and sleep.

Doran looked over at her. "You're a strange one, Haver."

She nodded back to full awareness. "Why do you say that?"

"You live like a verso, but you spend all your free time talking to the votes. Don't deny it; you're using my resources to do it, and I keep tabs on such things. I found you today in a heap of votes, didn't I? So what is it that you're looking for so passionately that it's all you can think about?"

Livia thought of Aaron and laughed humorlessly. "Well apparently I'm no good at seeing what's right under my nose." Should she tell Doran the truth about her origins and quest? It would be good to finally drop the caution advised by the Government Doran stared into the flames. "I don't know exactly what you're doing here," he said finally. "But I know you're expending a great deal of effort and energy working on the same levels where I used to work — among votes, between narratives. Doing things that in another age used to be called political. I just hope it doesn't turn out to be as futile an exercise as my own attempts to reform the Government."

"Well ... " Comfortable in the moment, Livia decided to tell him everything. She opened her mouth to begin —

Light welled up around them. She blinked at the disappearance of the cloudscape beyond the balcony.

Doran leaped to his feet. "Finally!"

She turned to look behind her. Though this avenue wasn't large, suddenly it was crowded with inscape phantoms. Throngs of humans and semihumans chattered as they walked by; sentient gases and weird glow-in-the-dark aliens sailed buzzing overhead; a line of chanting monks left footprints of gold behind themselves, while rioting agents set loose by irresponsible adolescents reappeared right where they'd left off, spraying virtual paint in virtual letters across virtual kiosks in the center of the aisle.

The fire seemed small and almost invisible in the face of all this. Doran glanced down at it, sighed, and said, "Back to work, I guess. See you, Haver." He walked away.

Livia sat there a while. She was too tired to move — too tired to query inscape about what had caused the outage. She wanted nothing more than to summon her bedroom around herself and fall asleep. Ordinarily, she could have trusted herself to wake in the real bed by morning. But what if inscape went down again? She could find herself stranded in the corridor in a cube of utility fog.

She dragged herself to her feet and walked slowly to her apartment.

She thought about her men as she flopped onto the bed. There was nothing she could do to salvage her relationship with Aaron if he wouldn't talk to her. And she longed to feel Qiingi's strong arms around her. He would probably laugh at what had happened tonight — but she could never tell him about Aaron. He was no doubt completely unaware and unaffected by all that had happened, sitting down there in whatever hut he'd built for himself on the bleak moor.

It seemed that the three of them had carried a great freight of personal baggage all the way from Teven to the Archipelago. They were never going to breach the walls of history and attitude that separated them, and maybe trying was wrong.

She flung an arm over her eyes. How could she have been so blind as to miss Aaron's attraction to her? The whole fiasco filled her with guilt — but she had tried to reach Aaron, and he was shutting her out. Just like he'd shut her out in the weeks leading up to the potlatch and the invasion.

Just how responsible did she have to be? She had done her best by him and by Westerhaven. She had exiled herself to save her friends and family and she would if given any chance at all, find a way to heal her bond with Aaron.

And if she failed in all of it? Would she deserve punishment then? Or might it be all right if she took some enjoyment from life, something for herself and not others for a change?

She fell asleep before she could really think about it.

An inscape chime awoke Livia. She lay there for a few seconds, disoriented, then groaned and sat up. "Yes, what is it?"

"Respected Haver? May I speak with you?"

Livia blinked and gradually took in where she was. Apparently, it was late afternoon; she'd slept most of the day. Whoever was calling her — she didn't recognize the voice — was apparently right outside her door. She staggered out of bed, summoned some clothes and said, "Just a minute!"

When she opened the door it was to find two women standing there. Still fuzzy-headed from sleep, it took her a minute to realize that they were identical twins. "Yes, can I help you?"

"You're Alison Haver?" asked one. The other was glancing up and down the gallery with a worried expression. "You're a friend of Georges Milan?" That was the name Aaron was using here.

"Yes, I — well, come in, sorry to keep you standing in the hall, uh, Respected ... "

"Veronique," said the other woman. They both stepped into the apartment and Veronique shut the door after peeking outside.

"Is he here?" asked Veronique's twin.

"I'm sorry, I didn't get your name," Livia said to her.

"Veronique," she said. "I'm both Veronique. I know, it's hard to understand when there's only two of me. And I'm really sorry to bother you, but I have to find Georges — "

"He's not here." Livia crossed her arms, frowning at the two women. "I don't know where he is."

"Oh." The twins looked deflated. "Oh, this is terrible."

"What's going on?"

"He talked about you a lot, I just thought if he were going to go somewhere it would be here ... "

He'd been talking about her? "Sit down." Livia indicated her couch. "You're obviously upset — would you like some tea? Maybe a nice tropical view ... "

The women shook their heads. "I have to find him. Morss is after us, I'm afraid he might have caught up to Georges already — "

"What do you mean Morss is after you?" Even as she said this Livia figured it out; this whole situation, the collapse of inscape, the chaos, Aaron's cryptic pronouncements. "You were part of this, weren't you? You engineered the inscape crash. And he was part of it, too."

Both Veroniques nodded. "But it wasn't supposed to come off like this. We'd built a supervirus, it was supposed to take inscape away from the Government and narratives, give it back to the people ... It wasn't supposed to crash the Scotland's defensive systems — "

"What? Slow down — and sit down! — and tell me what you're talking about."

Veronique sat, and gradually Livia got the story out of her. She described how she had, on very little evidence, convinced herself that a conspiracy of AI hackers existed — a diffuse group determined to fly under the radar of the votes and narratives. She had contributed her skills to a project barely hinted at, certainly not controlled from any discemable point. With Aaron as her sponsor, she had come to the Scotland because it was the best place from which to launch the virus she imagined she was building. Yesterday, after months of effort, she had done it.

"Our little AI clawed its way through the Scotland's system, deteriorating as it went. Like in any whisper network, its message packets got garbled as it tried to propagate itself. But just when it was about to disintegrate, it hooked up with another entity coming from, well, somewhere! You can't imagine how I felt! The conspiracy was real! We cheered and danced around when we saw that. Georges and I watched as the two AIs merged and grew and the new entity went on. It found more components, one after another, and got stronger and stronger. Twenty minutes after we let it go, it woke to full power and took over the whole worldship."

The entity sent out queries to the rest of the conspirators before the anecliptics even became aware of it. Veronique's face lit up as she described it "We established error-free links and the code flooded in. While in-scape was going down here, a new AI was being born in Morss's network. The plan had gone off without a hitch."

And that, Veronique now knew, should have been the first clue that something was terribly wrong.

"We sat up all night in a state of exhilaration, waiting for the system to come back. It was so eerie, silent, only the distant shouts of birds from far below the window, and the cold creeping in slowly in the dark ... When in-scape did return, I knew, there would be no Government in it, no votes — no anecliptic presence. We talked about what we would say, the announcement we would make, and we debated about how people would react

"And then the moment came — hours too soon. Everything hummed back into life around us; inscape windows popped open, virtual objects reappeared, and the heat came back on."

Some parts of the network were still down — including the worldship's asteroid defense and outside traffic control. "While Georges and I were combing through the data, trying to figure out what had happened, a knock came at the door."

Aaron had opened it — warily, but with a look of proud defiance on his face. There, slouching in the hallway, was a short, shabby-looking man with amber eyes. He was a vote.

Veronique buried her face in her hands. "But he wasn't just any vote. Do you understand? Do you know what happened next?"

Livia sat down next to her. "He was your vote."

The AI introduced himself. He was, he said, the representative of Veronique and her conspiracy — a mind brought into existence by tonight's attack, the very attack that had sought to wipe out the Government. "I even incorporate your virus!" he had said proudly as he shook Aaron's hand.

"And do you know what he said next?" Veronique's voice rose to a wail. "I'm here to help!" Both of her burst into tears.

Livia patted her hand, bewildered. After a while one of Veronique canned down enough to say, "Well, you can see the effect it had on me. But I think it was worse for Georges. He turned white as a cloud when he realized what had happened. And then he ran out of the apartment. I haven't seen him since."

Livia didn't know whether to be worried, or to laugh out loud. She was still trying to sort it all out when the door chimed again.

Veronique leaped to her feet. "Maybe that's him!" She ran to the door and pulled it open.

Doran Morss stood there, a number of his loyal servants crowding the gallery behind him. Standing between two of them was Qiingi, who was looking very unhappy.

Doran took in the vision of Livia and Veronique standing together. "Well," he said with a scowl. "Doesn't this look incriminating."

Aaron Varese stood on one of the chandelier city's highest balconies. It was icy cold up here and the air was thin. The dizzying feeling reminded him of Cirrus and the vast landscapes of Teven Coronal. What he now looked out upon was incomparably bigger.

He had his inscape view tuned to the consensus version of the Archipelago. It stretched out before him as an apparently infinite plain covered with cities and oceans, parkland and the occasional mountain range. Mars was visible by its color, a patch of sandy red off to the left; Earth's skies were a particular shade of blue to the right In between, and stretching far beyond both, were the patchwork landscapes of countless coronals.

Aaron had come up here to convince himself that what seemed impossible, really was so.

The vista that opened out below him was breathtaking in its scale and detail. That very size bespoke an impossible inertia. At any moment millions of people were being born and millions more were dying. Humanity was huge and powerful and unstoppable. It was a cage so big that its bars were invisible with distance; but it was still a cage. And after the events of the past day he now knew that he would never escape it.

Aaron was not given to dramatic gestures; he wasn't about to jump off this balcony. What he felt would happen was much worse. In moments, or hours, he would take a deep breath, and let go of everything he had ever believed in and wanted. He would throw away the bedrock of determination that had kept him going for years. He would surrender. After that, no matter what happened, his future would hold nothing but different shades of failure. He'd drift like a ghost through his own life, smiling at all the right jokes, getting up every morning, going to sleep every night. And nothing would ever matter again.

He heard a sound behind him. Maybe Doran Morss's people were here to throw him off the worldship. Almost eager for that, he turned.

She leaned in the tower's doorway, her eyes the brightest thing in the shadows. "They're looking for you," she said.

"What does it matter?" He shrugged and turned back to the view. "Anyway, you're a vote — aren't you going to turn me in?"

"Not at all. In fact, I greatly admire what you've just attempted. More people should be trying such things."

"Why?" he said bitterly. "Nothing works."

"Well, nothing's worked so far" she said. At this Aaron turned, to see the vote smiling mischievously.

"In order to stage a credible attack on the anecliptic's empire, you need a staging area that's free and clear of the Government's influence." She sauntered out onto the balcony. "Doran Morss's worldship was a good idea, but as you discovered, it's not far enough removed from the Government networks."

He snorted. "And I suppose you know of a better place?"

"As a matter of fact," said Filament, "I do."

18

Qiingi watched the little boat pop up to the tops of waves and then disappear into the pits that rolled after diem. It was only a kilometer away from shore now; he was surprised it had made it this far. Behind it stretched a gray expanse of sea that curved slowly up until the shoreline of Doran's Scapa became visible, a mottled gray-green scab in the haze.

Either a couple of fishermen from Scapa's verso hamlet were lost, or this was some kind of a rescue party. Did they really mink that they wouldn't be caught? He shook his head in grudging admiration at the sheer determination they were showing. But in the week that he and Livia had been stranded here on this rocky isle, no one had made it to shore here.

In his fury over their supposed part in the attack on the Scotland's systems, Doran Morss had exiled them here in an inscape-free part of the worldship. The woman Veronique had been sent to another nearby island. Doran had declared that he would summon them all to account for themselves soon. But even he seemed to have forgotten about them.

Squatting on the sand, Qiingi idly drew a circle with a cross inside it Everything moved in circles, the elders had told him; everything was made of teotl and so was hurrying to become whatever it was not. Teotl might be just a story, but it was a story about a real thing. It was the story of how men and women made sense of their lives.

Teotl was inscape, he knew. It made a story out of life. And the great spirit Ometeotl was the tech locks. Inscape could tell the tale — as it did in the Archipelago — but only the locks could make the narrative of life both meaningful and true.

He watched the waves roll in and out. They didn't change at his whim. Qiingi felt a laugh build up in him; shaking his head he walked back up the beach.

He was humming as he pushed open the driftwood and pine-bow door. Livia looked up from where she was coaxing more heat from the fire. "You're uncommonly cheerful today," she said.

"I was just thinking," he said. "Doran Morss does not know it, but he did us a favor by stranding us here."

"A favor?" She squinted at him. "How?"

"His rules have become our tech locks," said Qiingi. "As the days roll on, my mind clears more and more. I'm beginning to understand everything that happened to us. Without this stable manifold," he gestured at the walls, "I could not have done that." He sat down on the flat stone bench that was the only piece of furniture here other than their rude bed.

She smiled ruefully and shook her head. "Lucky for you that the place is so similar to where you grew up."

"Of course, you must miss your Society." He took her hand. "But at the same time, there is a marvelous silence here that I haven't felt since I left Raven's people. Don't you feel it?"

"I feel cut off and helpless," she said, hugging herself. "But I was starting to feel that way even before we were stranded here. Doran was right — public life isn't possible under the annies. Anyway, what would we be doing if we were free? Just wallowing in our narratives like everybody else."

"Maybe — but the Archipelago no longer intimidates me," he said with a shrug. "These people think they have access to every answer humanity has invented to explain life and the world. They believe they can pick and choose, but it is not so. When there are too many explanations for something, its meanings are lost"

She frowned at him. "That's unusually cryptic, even for you."

He sighed. "We suffered a great loss. We are refugees. I know you struggled long against accepting mat The narratives helped you do that, by fitting everything that happened to you here into a meaningful story with you at its heart. You tried not to be deceived, as did I — but as long as you could even change your view of this Archipelago, you could find some new way to put off facing our loss. Would you have done that back home? I don't think so. You can only run so far in a manifold."

She turned away. "You're saying Teven was real, and the Archipelago is an illusion."

"Yes. And I am saying that we have lost Teven." She looked at him again, her face still as a statue. "Perhaps the time for grieving is over," he continued quietly. 'It is time to feel awe and pride at what we once had; accept that we have it no more, and move on."

"And how do I do that?" she asked.

He quirked a smile. "I don't know. But Livia, there is a tiny boat out in the bay. It seems to be trying to make it to shore."

"Oh!" She jumped up and ran to open the door. "Think they'll make it?"

"No." He looked over her shoulder; she needed a bath, he thought idly — but then, so did he. "Look there."

A hair-thin black line had appeared below the clouds: a skyhook, lowering down over the bay.

"A week ago you would have run down the sands to see if it was Aaron returning to you," said Qiingi. She had waited for Aaron for the first few days; she had stood by the shore and watched for boats. But he had not come, nor had Doran Morss's agents delivered him as a prisoner. She had not spoken his name for two days.

She winced. "Are you asking whether I've finally stopped struggling? If I've accepted our situation?" She returned to the fire and sat by it, clenching her hands in her lap. She peered up at him with stark intensity. "You're asking me to accept that we failed our mission. That we've let down our friends, our families — everyone who ever meant anything to us. You say they're gone forever. And I need to accept that."

He watched her sadly as she struggled to breathe around these words. Finally she looked down at the dirt floor. "I can do it, you know. I can let them all go. It's just that ... once I've done that, what will I have left?" Her eyes held agony.

"I don't know," he said softly. "But learning that is our task now." She nodded, her shoulders slumped.

Several minutes passed. She remained sitting, head bent, and he stood by the door. Then she looked up, a ghost of a smile on her face. "Go on," she said.

"What?"

"You're dying to go down to the shore, just to see what's happening, aren't you?" Qiingi crossed his arms uncomfortably. But she was right. "Oh, go on," she said with a weary wave of the hand. "I'll be all right. And I'm sure they'll appreciate knowing that you saw them." He smiled, and left the cabin to trudge back to the beach.

He raised his hand to the little boat, and was rewarded by a wave back. The skyhook resolved into a black cable with a nest of grappling arms at its end. Its claws were big enough to pick up the entire boat and it seemed determined to do just that. Qiingi watched with interest and some regret. It would have been good to know what was happening elsewhere in the wide world.

Suddenly some kind of wooden arm shot from the bottom of the fishing boat. A whirling net flew straight up and entangled the descending hand of the skyhook. Qiingi gave a shout of surprise, then laughed. They had seen this coming; the versos were not so naive as people assumed — himself included, apparently.

The fishing boat shot forward. They had some kind of engine in there. Now it left a white wake behind it and the nose tilted up with the force of its push. "Livia, you should see this!" he shouted, knowing his voice probably wouldn't carry inside the cabin from here.

The skyhook clenched and unclenched its spider fingers, trying to dislodge the net. Above it a second one popped out of the clouds and plummeted at the boat. Do-ran must have an endless supply of those things, and they would be wary of the nets now.

A brave attempt by the versos, but doomed to failure.

A shimmer just offshore caught Qiingi's attention. The waves there seemed skewed, out of synch with one another in one — no, in two spots. The horizon became clipped and rose up and down just over the waves; then he understood what he was seeing.

Two man-sized, man-shaped things had just stood up out of the water. They were nearly invisible, but the view of the waves behind them was updated just a fraction of a second late, making the sea and sky jerky in those spots. The two nearly-invisible men splashed out of the surf and ran toward Qiingi.

He backed away, frightened but aware that it was far too late for him to try anything. Irrationally, he wondered whether one of those figures was the false ancestor Kale, come to pay Qiingi back for dropping a tree on him.

"Come on!" said a male voice as a half-visible arm waved at him. "We need to get inside." The two forms raced past Qiingi and he found himself standing still for a moment, staring. Then he ran after them.

"The boat," he shouted. "It was a decoy!"

"Yeah, aren't we brilliant?" Both human-shaped blurs were waiting at the hut's door. One gestured for Qiingi to precede them. "After you, Voicewalker."

"How did you know — " He pushed in ahead of them. Livia stood up, eyes wide. "Livia, we have visitors, I — "

"Who are you?" she said. Qiingi turned.

As the door shut the two men became visible. They looked like brothers, similarly tall and slender, with elfin faces and delicate jaws. They were sopping wet and had identical, ridiculous grins on their faces as they high-fived one another.

"Ha, I knew it would work!"

"No you didn't, you whined about the plan all the way — "

"That was just to motivate you."

"I'll motivate you, just wait."

"But Livia, here we are! You didn't think we'd leave you helpless, did you?" The man puffed out his chest with pride.

"It can't be," muttered Livia.

Qiingi looked from her to the men. "What? Who are these people?"

She swallowed and shook her head. "If I'm right, you've met them before, Qiingi. But you were never formally introduced." She walked up to the first man. "Qiingi Voicewalker, this is — "

"Peaseblossom!"

"And I'm Cicada!" And they stuck out their hands for him to shake.

The lads professed to be hungry, so Livia brought out one of the loaves of bread that occasionally fell from the sky. "Are these bodies biological, then?" asked Qiingi politely, as the agents piled cheese and raw onions on big slabs of bread.

"Oh, no, we just like to eat," said Cicada.

"Give me that!" Livia grabbed the sandwich away from him.

The momentary annoyance — somehow reassuring because it proved to her that these really were her faeries — finally made Livia snap out of the state of shock she'd been in since they arrived. "But what are you doing here? And how did you get ... these?" She indicated their robust bodies.

"Some of your fans made them for us," said Cicada.

"Along with some supplies; and when they heard that Doran Morss had kidnaped you, the whole bunch of them went together and got us a ship. It's waiting outside." He pointed down.

"Fans? What fans?'

"Well, you know," said Peaseblossom around a large mouthful. "You're a huge celebrity now so there's thousands of people willing to kick in to support whatever you do."

"Celebrity?" She stared at them, then noticed that Qi-ingi was looking guilty. "Why? Tell me."

"Well." Qiingi looked to the others for support. Cicada whistled and examined his fingernails. Peaseblossom just grinned.

"Remember when we first arrived in mis place," said Qiingi reluctantly. "Our inscape was unguarded. Your own data stores were raided by data-thieves ... "

She paled. "Oh no."

"Many of your recorded experiences were stolen in those few seconds. We didn't know. And ... Livia, we just found out about the Life of Livia — "

"The what?"

In a state of horrified disbelief, she heard Qiingi tell her that her memories had been distributed as an entertainment; millions of people had seen them. As the vast depths of die data began to become obvious, he said, the Life of Livia had recently taken on a new significance. There was enough of Teven there for people to become intensely curious about the manifolds. Versos and even mainstream citizens had begun styling themselves after Westerhaven fashions, and adjusting their narratives to resemble the Societies of Livia's home.

"But this is — it's impossible!" She couldn't stay still, but paced up and down the narrow confines of the cabin, wringing her hands. "It's like rape! How much do they know? What have they seen?" She felt physically ill at the thought. Finally she rounded on Qiingi. "Why didn't you tell me?"

He shrank back from her intensity. "I did not think you were prepared to hear it in the right spirit," he said. "It would have been one more confirmation that your public life has been stolen from you."

"It's not that bad," said Cicada, patting her arm. "When people copy the Life, they also unknowingly copy us, and we've been guarding the stuff you wouldn't want anyone to see."

"We even changed your looks — "

"We've been talking to the other copies of us, so we could coordinate it — "

"And we hide the important stuff."

She shook her head. "That was not your decision to make! You should have told me! So ... so how many copies are there?"

"As of now?" Cicada leaned back, cracking his knuckles behind his head. "Well, about seven hundred million, I'd say."

Screaming seemed too weak a reaction at this point. Livia slumped down in a corner, hating them all.

"It's the versos," said Qiingi hurriedly. "It's not you they're interested in — well, except insofar as you're what Mr. Morss called a 'baseline' for them to emulate. No, it's Westerhaven they're fascinated by. And Raven's people, and the other manifolds. There is nothing like them here."

Cicada nodded violently. "There's this huge movement to try to make manifolds, but they don't know how to do it, because the plans for the tech locks weren't included in the Life. People know about tech locks now, but they're having trouble making them — "

"Because the key to the locks is this giganormous database," said Peaseblossom, "that cross-references a thousand years of anthropological data on how technologies affect culture."

"We looked into this database thing," said Cicada. "The data were compiled centuries ago by scientists in the monoculture. A huge effort. But all existing copies were corrupted in the Viability War that ended with the anecliptics coming to power."

"There were rumors at the time that a clean copy of the database was saved," said Peaseblossom. "By one of the main researchers. A woman named — "

"Ellis!" laughed Cicada. "Maren — "

" — Ellis." Peaseblossom glared at Cicada.

"And anyway," pouted Cicada, "everybody's coming down hard on the versos who are trying to build manifolds. They say that tech locks would be disastrous — "

"Who says so?" Qiingi stood up in sudden excitement "Do you know who it is that's so opposed to creating locks?"

Cicada shot him a reproachful look. "Well, I was just getting to that, wasn't I? It's certainly not the Government, though it doesn't approve, as it made abundantly clear to us the last time we spoke." He nudged Peaseblossom and rolled his eyes.

"There's all kinds of people against it," said Peaseblossom. "Lots of the votes — basically, churches and any social groups that are trying to expand. They've figured out that tech locks equal horizons, in the long run. And horizons would prevent them from expanding, see?"

"And don't even get me started about the Good Book people," scoffed Cicada.

His words somehow penetrated Livia's cocoon of misery. She looked up. "The Book isn't connected to any political movement," she said. "It's just an emergent system."

"Yeah, but what emerges?" asked Cicada. "Not just a Utopian human society, but all kinds of solitons and other high-level constructs that you can't see from the human level. The Book's an insanely complex system on the macro level. And that macro level sends orders back down to the bottom; it's a feedback loop, like your own brain." He pointed at her head.

"The thing is, the book relies on open communications," said Peaseblossom, "except that it needs to communicate through different channels than inscape. Any hint of a manifoldlike horizon would fragment it It would be the network equivalent of a stroke."

Livia barely heard him. Her head was still rattling with the idea that millions of people had ransacked her private records.

Cicada was saying, "You'd have to write a new version of the Book for every manifold, because technological differences change the way the roles interact. Not that people seem to mind doing rewrites. Apparently," Cicada leaned forward conspiratorially, "they've been adapting the Book to nonhuman species in the Archipelago. Trying to make the anecliptics obsolete by creating an emergent civilization that includes the post-humans."

To shut him up, Livia reached under the rock shelf that served as a bed, and brought out her copy of the Book. "Sophia said she was giving me the very latest version." She tossed it on the table and went back to fuming.

"Really?" Peaseblossom flipped through the Book. "Oh, yeah, the text is changing — I think it's trying to figure out what class of entity I am." He stuck out his tongue at the book and slammed it shut.

Livia took it from him, but didn't put it away. Instead, she flipped distractedly through it. She hadn't looked at it since their exile here; the rules of the Book were pretty irrelevant to a society of two.

"So there's lots of versions, are there?" she said indifferently.

"Yeah. It's easy to verify," said Cicada. "With printed books, they always put that information right in the front."

"Hmmph." None of it mattered; all this talk of politics was just a way to avoid the real question that was eating at her. She nervously flipped through the Book as she summoned her courage. Then she asked, "What about Aaron?"

Cicada and Peaseblossom glanced at one another. "I'm sorry," said Cicada. "We haven't been able to find a trace of him since the inscape virus."

"Ah." Blinking, she looked down, to find herself staring at the first page of the Book. She was too bereft to think, or to really take in the column of words there, the descriptions of where it was updated, according to what sims and when.

And then some lettering near the bottom leaped into focus: Revision No. 3340.

"There's been another breach, sir."

The words came through an old-fashioned speaking tube that ran up through the ceiling of the tunnel where Doran stood. He put it to his mouth and said, "Anybody we know?"

"It's Haver and her friend. They've got visitors."

"From the fleet?"

"Apparently not, sir."

Doran shrugged. "Then forget them. We've got more important things to worry about."

He'd opened an inscape window earlier today to watch a veritable cloud of ships that was approaching his Scotland. They were of all sizes and shapes — yachts, city-ships, shutdes, freight bots, and one-person sun-dancers. All were crowded with people who individually had no idea why they were here — except that the Book had told them to come. They'd all been given roles like Warrior and Scout. One man Doran had spoken to had excitedly explained how some sort of feedback loop had set in: he couldn't change his role anymore. Every other user of the Book this man met reinforced his role as Herald.

Collectively, they had decided that their new status had something to do with Doran Morss. Now their makeshift armada was preparing to besiege the worldship — and, co-incidentally or not, the Scotland's defensive systems were still off-line.

He paced down the stone steps that led deeper into the caves. This tunnel led to one of his clean rooms — an area of the worldship free of nosy anecliptic nano, and totally lacking inscape projectors. Officially, the place didn't exist. During the chaos of the past week Doran had felt himself under a microscope; even the annies might be watching after the fiasco with inscape. So for the past week, he had been unable to come down here and confirm with his own eyes what he already knew must have happened.

He rounded a corner and the great cavern opened out below him. This was a natural space, discovered in one of the asteroids he'd dismantled to build the Scotland. Do-ran had kept the cavern and shaved away the rest of the asteroid from around it. He liked the bizarre twisting shapes the stone made overhead; the overall impression of the place was forbidding. The last time he'd been here, brilliant spotlights had pinioned a strange object that nestled in the very center of the cavern. Now he let his breath out in a whoosh as he looked down on the empty cradle where the eschatus machine had sat.

As he'd thought. The attack on his inscape had been a cover operation. The real target was to steal the eschatus machine. With no working inscape, none of his ordinary servants could prevent the theft. The versos said they'd seen lights here that night, but what could they do? All they had was a few boats.

Doran clattered down the last few meters of catwalk and approached the empty metal cradle.

He should never have hesitated. He should have just stepped inside the machine and let the overhead cranes slam home the plug. Once the seams had grown together, the thing would have been ready. A single command from him and the process would start. The machine would drop out of the Scotland and once in free fall and well away from the worldship, it would explode. This particular machine peaked at fifty megatons.

If he'd done that, he would have transcended his human form instantaneously. The energy of the explosion wouldn't burst out randomly, it would be channeled, down to the microscopic level, into a creative reorganization of the machine's matter. Doran's body and brain would have become a template for a new, vastly more sophisticated and powerful entity. An equal to Choronzon. Eventually, perhaps, he might have become an equal to the annies themselves.

Faint sounds drifted down from the speaking tube. It sounded like someone was trying to get his attention. Do-ran hunched his shoulders, glaring at the empty cradle. Humanity needed a champion, it was as simple as that; and no merely human being could be that champion any more. The armies must be opposed. But despite decades of careful planning under total secrecy, somehow he'd been found out.

"Choronzon," he murmured.

"Good theory," said a familiar voice. "But wrong."

Doran started, cursed, and looked up. The vote Filament stood on a catwalk near die entrance of the cavern. She was cradling some sort of projectile weapon in her arms.

"The diing about an eschatus machine," she said as she strolled down the steps, "is that every atom of it has to be placed just so. Shake it up a bit, God forbid put a crack in it, and it can't organize its energies anymore. It's just a very big bomb." She hefted her weapon suggestively. "It's always best to move them when there's nobody around who might object."

"Why have you done this?" he snapped.

"But Doran, we haven't spoken in days," she said with a smile. "Not since my fleet appeared. It seems you've been avoiding me."

Doran had always known that Filament was the Good Book's vote. Despite his contempt for the Book, it had never been an issue. She was a vote, after all; ultimately she worked for the Government. And the Government had no jurisdiction over Doran Morss.

"You set this up, didn't you?" he asked as he backed away from the cradle. Filament sat down casually on a metal step, her amber eyes bright in the shadows. "Did the Government put you up to it?"

"The Government knows nothing about it," she said. "It was the Book's plan."

"The Book? How can the Book have a plan?" He shook his head in anger and frustration. "It's not a thing."

"You know that doesn't matter," she said. "Anyway, you should be saying, 'it's not a thing yet.'

"Because with your help, very soon it will be."

"I've never seen her jump like that," Peaseblossom was saying.

"There was that time when she was ten, and the wasps came out of the treehouse — "

"Oh, yeah!"

Livia and Qiingi were sitting on either side of the fire, with the Book open on the hearth between them. They had been staring at it for a while now, not knowing what to do or say. Livia felt like some primitive faced with her first radio. The thought made her giggle incongruously. "Where are the little men who make it go?" she asked, lifting one leaf of the thing to peer under.

Cicada misinterpreted her. "There's no central authority behind the Book — it's open-sourced. It's compiled by testing new rules on simulated societies. If the majority of people act a certain way, what happens? The sims are open to everyone to examine."

"The Book is one thing," said Qiingi. "The behavior of its followers is another thing entirely." He looked, if possible, even more shocked than Livia felt.

She glanced up at him. "You think the Book's users are behind the invasion of Teven? But anybody who's fanatical about the Book is so because they refuse to organize any other way ... How would they coordinate such an attack? Through the Book itself?" She shook her head. "I don't think it's that specific in its commands."

"Oh, it can be," said Cicada.

"But they wouldn't have to use it," said Peaseblossom. "After all, just like every other interest group in the Archipelago, the Book has its vote."

Livia and Qiingi both sat up straight. "Let me guess," said Livia. "The Book's vote is named — "

"Filament," said Qiingi.

Peaseblossom stood up suddenly. "Uh oh."

"Are you thinking what I'm — " said Cicada.

"Yeah. Okay, people, we gotta go."

"Go? How?" Qiingi looked from one agent to the other. "What do you propose we do? Run into the sea with you? Fly away? Or become invisible as you were and hide among the rocks? Doran Morss will find us anywhere aboard this worldship."

"Yeah, that's why we're leaving it." Cicada and Pease-blossom began clearing an area of hard-packed earth in the center of the hut's floor. "We're not going out, or up. We're going down."

Cicada then did something very unsettling. He opened his shirt, reached his right hand over to the left side of his chest, and pulled. His whole chest hinged out like a door, revealing a large cavity inside. He pulled several packages out of the space and slammed himself shut again. Behind him, Peaseblossom was doing the same.

"Activate these," said Cicada, tossing two translucent packages to Livia and Qiingi. "Emergency angels, Archi-pelagic style. They'll keep you going when we hit vacuum."

Peaseblossom knelt down and began pouring some sort of liquid in a big circle on the sand. "Sealant," he said. "It'll keep the hole from collapsing for a minute or so while we leave. You two had better step outside for a second. We're about to blow the roof off your happy home." He hefted a metal sphere about the size of a fist.

Livia and Qiingi hastily left. Outside it was getting dark, and a chilly wind was blowing in off the sea. The illusion that they were on a planet was pretty good at this time of day, but there was no way she could believe in it now. Nervously, she pressed the emergency angel against her throat and it blossomed around her like a solid mist. Beside her, Qiingi did the same.

Nothing happened for a minute or so. Qiingi paced in an agitated circle around Livia. She was about to ask him what was wrong when a fearsomely loud bang! knocked her to her knees. She watched in fascination as the hut's roof did indeed fly away. The hut's stone walls leaned out drunkenly and one collapsed. A ripple of leaping dust spread out to sea and inland up the rocks, as the skin of the worldship bounced from the explosion.

"Okay!" Peaseblossom — or Cicada, it was hard to tell — opened the door, which promptly fell apart. "Your ride is waiting, Lady!"

There was a large hole where the hard-packed floor of the hut had been. A whirling tornado stood over it, and sandwiches, bedding, spare clothes, Qiingi's tools were all being sucked into it. One of her faeries took a nonchalant step and was yanked down and away. And there went the Book —

She lunged for it, managing to snag one corner before she realized she was over the hole and being pushed from behind by what felt like a giant's hand. Livia had a split second in which to curl into a defensive ball, and then she was in the hole.

Stars whirled around her. Peaseblossom's face came into view then swung away again. She saw the flat black surface of the worldship and the hole, which was rapidly sailing away from her; now Qiingi appeared through it, blazing sunlit on one side and blackly invisible on the other, a half-man. Fog swirled around him.

Then someone grabbed her leg and she was hauled unceremoniously into an airlock that had appeared suddenly out of nowhere. The others bumped in after her and Livia staggered to her feet in a nauseatingly different rotational gravity.

"Thank the Book!" said Sophia as she slammed the hatch shut. "You're safe!"