So, by degrees of wonder, Livia left the world of West-erhaven behind, and came within the realm of Raven.
"They are heralds of the ancestors," Qiingi said. Livia had asked him about the Impossibles. "The ancestors are returning to us, so all things change. You should not be surprised if the walls of your world are beginning to crumble. The elders told us to expect it."
"Who are these ancestors?" she asked. She really wanted to grill Lucius about what he was up to, but the man kept cagily near Qiingi, and as they crossed the border into Raven's country, her normal inscape resources had shut down. She couldn't call upon Peaseblossom and Cicada to run sims of Lucius, nor could she ask her Society what he might be doing.
The term for this, she mused, was working without a safety net. Most of her peers prized the stability of their reality above all else, and she had no doubt they would have run screaming back to Westerhaven long before now. In that, at least, Lucius had judged right: Livia was unfazed by this journey. Or so she kept telling herself, while her pulse pounded and she jumped at every strange sound coming through the forest.
Qiingi smiled at her; he had been very impressed to learn she was a singer. He had taken to calling her Word-weaver Kodaly. "A time is coming when what you call the horizons of the world crack and fall," he said. "The ancestors wait beyond the horizons. They are returning to us to bring us the wisdom of centuries that they have gathered during our long isolation in this place. Our best have come to Skaalitch because this is the first place where the walls of the world will crack."
"Oh." She didn't know what to say to that. But it sounded tike some new myth was being born in this place. Myths and stories were a common spark for birthing new manifolds. Was a new reality being born within Raven's people? Was that what Lucius had brought her to witness? If so, it was a momentous occasion, and a tremendous coup for both of them.
"You have followed me well," Qiingi said. "Behold the city of Skaalitch."
Livia knew where they were. They had come to the shoreline of the lake that spread sinuously through the valley below the Romanal estate. The air here was cold and damp, full of the mist that hung around the redwoods. Livia drank in the sound of waves lapping on the shore of the dark water. She had been here many times; the Romanal boathouse should be right over ... there ... Where the boathouse should be, a jagged mound of boulders thrust up out of the ground.
Of course, that was the boathouse — or how it appeared from within Raven's country. She looked the other way, and gasped.
The lake was ringed by gigantic trees and backed by low mountains. For hundreds of meters along the shore, long canoes lay upended on wooden frames and tall totem poles presided magisterially over scores of men and women who were working near the water. Behind them, receding half-seen into the maze of trees, were dozens of log longhouses, their roofs adrift with woodsmoke. Bright things like flying banners flitted half-seen in the deepening green of the forest; birds and animals laughed, and out in the lake, something huge and dark breached the surface momentarily, then sank away.
Livia had sunbathed on these sands many times, and canoed with friends on those net-strewn waters. She had never imagined this place existed parallel to the lake she knew.
Drumbeats started up somewhere among the long-houses. "We must hurry now," said Qiingi. "The potlatch of the ancestors is about to begin." He hurried into the city, greeting people left and right as he went.
Lucius and Livia smiled and nodded at Raven's people, who grinned and talked about them as they passed.
Children raced alongside them, laughing and screaming in mock fear. Ahead, a crowd was growing.
"You're a very bad man," Livia said. "Bringing me out here on a pretext, then kidnapping me!" But I am having fun, she was about to add, when she saw that he wasn't laughing. Indeed, he looked tired, and maybe even a bit frightened.
"Lucius, what's wrong?"
People were now appearing from all over — some blinking into view from whatever submanifold they had been inhabiting. All were converging on the great open circle that lay ahead. Lucius shook his head, and looked away from Livia.
"I had no one else I could trust with this," he said. "Nobody I knew who might understand. Except you."
"What do you mean?"
"Look at this!" He waved at the fabulous totems and rearing longhouses that surrounded them. "It's wondrous, isn't it — and you never knew it was here! Livia, don't you feel even the slightest bit claustrophobic living in just one manifold?"
She nodded, eager to have someone agreeing with her for a change. "Everyone says that Westerhaven is the most cosmopolitan place in Teven. We visit other manifolds, sure — but how many of them? What you were saying earlier about us being butterfly collectors ... I know what you mean. We see the world only from our own narrow perspective. We're tourists in other people's realities."
He nodded enthusiastically. "I heard your friend Aaron Varese speaking in Barrastea last week. He was proposing that we eliminate manifolds altogether."
She laughed, a bit uncertainly. "He's just trying to stir things up. It's just not possible. Worldviews don't mix."
"Don't they?" He stared at her with an intensity she had never seen before, as if he were about to start yelling — or running. "Are you sure about that?"
"Lucius ... I don't ... "
Livia heard pounding feet, shouts. The noises came from the plaza they were approaching. People were crowded around its outskirts, all talking at once, some hopping up and down to see over others. The drumbeat was seductive; the musician in her responded, analyzing its meter even as her imagination half consciously wove melodies and patterns around it.
Qiingi waved to them. "The potlatch begins!" He was obviously excited, but from the way he kept looking about himself it was clear he was a bit nervous, too. By now the crowd was pressing in on all sides. Lucius grabbed Livia's arm.
"Stay close," he said. "I don't know how far this will go"
"What — " But he pressed on ahead through the crowd, and she followed. Livia had never been in such a strange situation, surrounded by people in buckskins and beads, permeated with the smells of woodsmoke, chicken fat, and tanned leather.
Silence fell suddenly; then a collective gasp rose from the crowd. Lucius let go of Livia's arm and she staggered to a halt She was close to the front of the circle, and peered past a tanned shoulder to see what was happening.
All across the earthen plaza, ghostly figures wavered into existence. At first there were only a handful, but in seconds there were dozens, then scores of them.
The ancestors filled up the plaza, and they came bearing Impossible gifts.
They were too perfect to be human. Of course, in her lifetime Livia had seen people wrapped in many guises — as idealized sexual objects, as animals, as fabulous mythical beasts. She had seen people pretend to be angels. These ancestors didn't seem to be pretending.
She could see a kind of shimmering arch above and around the plaza; outside it, the world looked ordinary — that is, it was filled with wise trees, hollow-eyed birds that might in the blink of an eye transform into lynxes and bound away into the underbrush. Raven's world. Within the arch the plaza was still there, and in it stood beautiful, smiling men and women. That was fine; people could appear in mid-manifold like that But in their hands, and around and above them, were things that could not exist here.
One woman stood next to a man-sized, chrome robot that looked around itself curiously with big lens-eyes. Substitutes for human labor were limited even in technophilic Westerhaven, yet here a robot stood where properly it could not be. Another of the strangers held up a big device Livia recognized as a laser saw; at least, she hoped that was all it was. Piled around the strangers' feet were all manner of machines, livedevices, and mobile bots.
The tech locks should be disabling, removing, or hiding all these things. Livia kept waiting for the gifts — for if this was a potlatch, then that was what these things were — to flicker and go out, the way that R
ene had on the road to the drummers' city. It didn't happen.
She found herself blinking again and again, and backing away. Around the edge of the circle other people were doing the same. It was like looking at an object and it refusing to come into focus, even while everything around it became sharp. Control of reality should be as automatic as sight; it had been that way for Livia all her life.
Except once.
She found she had turned and was trying to run. Stop! she commanded herself. You mastered this fear! Or she'd thought she had. With an effort she turned back to look at the circle.
The closer she looked the worse it was. Some of the strangers were suffused in a golden glow that came from the clouds of programmable matter that suspended them as if they were weightless, ten or fifteen centimeters above the ground. The quantum dots composing the virtual matter swirled and glowed, making them appear like pillars made of countless infinitesimal stars — ostentatious, mat, even gauche, given that the ordinary angels of Westerhaven were composed of just such fogs, but were careful to remain invisible. Embedded in the fogs were many strange objects: globes and rods of crystal and metal, things with handgrips that might be weapons; and humming, flittering things that could be alive but for the fact that they gleamed like bronze.
At an unspoken signal the strangers began to walk toward the crowd.
She became aware that Qiingi was standing next to her. "I didn't really believe it would happen," he said softly. "They have broken the walls of the world." He didn't sound happy.
It's not like after the accident, Livia was telling herself. This isn't a crash. It's controlled, somehow.
As the first of the "ancestors" stepped outside the earthen circle the crowd came to life. A sudden madness seemed to sweep them and Livia found herself getting caught up in it Some people were shouting, shaking their fists. Others were laughing and crying. Was this a miracle or a nightmare? No one seemed to know.
As she edged back through the crowd, livia realized that Lucius was missing. He was taller than most of these people. He should be visible.
Someone jostled her; she grabbed Qiingi's arm so as not to lose him, too. "But what are they? What are they doing here?"
He shrugged uncertainly. "Our founders have blessed their presence. They call them ancestors; so I must accept that this is what they are."
"But where did they come from?"
He looked at her and for a moment his composure almost broke. He was frightened, she realized with a chill. "Wordweaver Kodaly," he said stiffly, "if they are our ancestors, men they have always been here."
More of the strange people were appearing by the moment; as each waded into the crowd, he or she would stop to speak to people. As the ancestors spoke, they reached about in a leisurely way, picking now this, now that item from their belts or materializing it out of the fog of virtual matter, and handing it to the person they were talking to. The one closest to Livia was male, and had a sonorous voice; and it was a real voice, not processed by inscape. He turned his head and his eyes met Livia's. She felt the gaze as a shock.
"Livia Kodaly," he said. 'This is a day of gifts. What would you like to receive from us?"
She backed away, suddenly aware that her only countryman had vanished and her Society was inaccessible. "I don't want anything," she said.
"Perhaps that is your problem," he said. "You want to want something. We can help you with that."
"W-what?"
The ancestor laughed, a rich and reverberant sound. "There is something new under the sun," it said. "There has never been anything like us before. We extend a hand of friendship to all in Westerhaven, through you." He did extend his hand, and she found herself staring at it as though it were a snake.
"Come with us," he said. "We have much we could show you."
"How do you know my name?" she asked.
"You wear it in your aura," he said.
"But that shouldn't be visible here," she objected. "We're in Raven's manifold."
He shrugged. "There are no more distinctions here. Come, I'll show you."
"No, please." She stepped outside of his reach.
The ancestor nodded, as if he'd expected this reaction. "You do not wish to see how other people live, because it might pollute your culture."
She bristled. "I don't know what you — "
"You have chosen not to see rather than to see wrongly," said the ancestor. "I understand. But there is another way of seeing. We have come to show it to you. Raven's people understand; I hope you will, too, soon."
The ancestor turned and spoke to someone else while Livia was trying to think of some reply. Livia turned to talk to Qiingi, but Raven's warrior had vanished in the throng. Without pausing to look for him she made a break for the edge of die crowd. Everything felt unreal; she was dizzy.
And where was Lucius? He should be visible even if her Society was quiescent; in Westerhaven his authority would make him a magnet for her sight The sudden sense of aloneness was frightening — anything could happen to her here, and her audience and supporters wouldn't see it. It was like that other time, years ago, when reality had torn and Livia found herself with only the dead for company. Outside of inscape, she knew, was a world that would not talk to her or hide its ugliness under a veil of Society. She would not go back there again.
Fleeing blindly, she ricocheted from person to person until she reached the redwoods and then she kept running through mem, enduring scratches and twisting her ankle.
She stopped when she came to the shore of the lake, and knelt panting in the shadow of a giant grinning totem pole. The beach was nearly deserted. Sounds of the pot-latch echoed weirdly through the brown pillared ways of the city, but there was no one nearby to speak to and none of the spirits of the woods approached. Maybe she should go back and look for Lucius.
The sound stopped her. The murmur of the crowd seemed to be building in intensity, as if the mob were changing somehow, losing its human mind. Even with the distance and the renewed presence of her angels, Livia began to feel really afraid, not just spooked as she was a few minutes before. She had to get out of Raven's country, get back to the Romanal estate.
An angel — a physically manifest inscape agent — alighted next to her. "Let me treat your ankle," it said. With a wary look in the direction of the potiatch, she sat on the feet of the totem pole and let it wrap her foot. The physical form of this winged entity was actually her shift changing shape to brace the ankle, but inscape gave it a soothing human appearance.
She felt a bit calmer as she set out again; her angels were with her after all. She was ashamed of herself. Livia had thought herself healed of those old wounds. She was an independent woman; of all her generation in Westerhaven, only she and her friend Aaron had ever lived for months outside of the protection of inscape and the tech locks. That was years ago, though — back in a blurred time between luminous childhood and painful rehabilitation. There was a small seed in her that treasured the fact of having once been beyond all horizons, however traumatic the experience might have been at the time. Today's panic had been ... unexpected.
Grimly, she found her way to the pile of boulders along the shore. There she planted her feet and willed the stones to become wood. Gradually, the rocks faded and the boat-house of the Romanals became visible. Behind her, Skaalitch dissolved in the mist like a dream. And when Livia was once more alone on the lakeshore, with only gulls crying overhead and her heart slowed to a sane pace, she turned and walked up the path she'd known her whole life, back to the courts and libraries of Westerhaven.
3
The two people Livia most wanted to talk to were missing: Lucius was gone, and Aaron Varese was nowhere to be found when she returned to Barrastea, the city of her birth.
Late in the afternoon of the day following her strange adventure in Raven's country, she walked toward the ballroom where her parents were throwing a party. The towers and gardens of the city lay in tumbled glory about her and her laughing, bickering Society. The Ko
daly family had their estate here in an amorphous set of submanifolds that overlapped numerous other Great Family lands.
The ballroom abutted one of Livia's bedrooms; the whole complex lay just ahead where several crumbling, ivied walls nearly intersected, leaving a gap where one could walk. Sunlight dappled through leaves and warmed the stones. Livia wore her shift today, but hardly needed it in the warmth.
Barrastea was the physical home of the diplomatic corps, who had a keen interest in Lucius Xavier's disappearance. The grilling Livia had been put through today by the senior members had been long and intense; it had started before her actual arrival there, as the members appeared in her Society and began demanding to know what had happened at Skaalitch. She could not explain it to them, beyond the obvious: the tech locks had failed somehow. Livia was tired, angry, and frustrated, unable to quite get over what she'd seen. She had even dismissed her Society for a while, since without Aaron in it, it seemed empty anyway. Now the sweet air and sunlight were beginning to revive her.
The towers that shimmered in the heat-haze were two hundred years old. Here at least was stability; here was the tangible proof of Westerhaven's faith in cross-cultural mixing, a riot of styles and traditions that made it the most vibrant city in Teven Coronal.
She strolled down familiar avenues of soaring stone and stretched tenting. The high pillars and curving walls served as attachment points for the sweeping wings of translucent tenting that roughly divided "inside" from "outside" throughout me parks and avenues. They also held up the various polygonal platforms that made up the floors of buildings implied, but not fully described, by the tenting. Vines, trees, and liana sketched processional ways and plazas throughout this riot of color and shape; even private spaces often had walls made up only of foliage. It was always warm here where no mountains moderated the gaze of the suns; and one's angels could be relied upon to provide personal shelter from any truly inclement weather.
Livia's two faeries suddenly dive-bombed her from somewhere above. "Danger, danger, Livia Kodaly!" piped Cicada, waving its arms to get her attention.
Lady of Mazes Page 3
