Lady of Mazes

by Karl Schroeder

  "Hang on, Mom," she said to the anima that had been speaking to her. She scowled at the little glowing figure. "What's the matter with you?"

  "It's the peers! They're setting you up — "

  " — for a fall," finished Peaseblossom. "Somebody snuck into the drummers' city and replaced the drum with a fresh one! While the drum beats the manifold still exists — "

  "And nobody else can move in," said Cicada. "Jach-man's blaming you and Aaron. After all, you stopped them from shutting it down in the first place. And Aaron's snubbing everybody — "

  Livia groaned. "That's all I need. Okay, thanks, I'll deal with it on my own."

  "But it's an attack on your authority!" livia half smiled. "And what's new about that?"

  "Well, firstly — "

  "Go away!"

  They spiraled up and away, muttering in bell-like tones.

  She rounded the stone and green intersection, and entered the Kodaly ballroom. This presented itself as a public park, open to the sky, surrounded by hedges and dotted with trees and ivied walls that stood in isolation like planned ruins. The place appeared completely empty and peaceful, save for several couples strolling enwrapped in the scent of grass and sound of buzzing cicadas. On the far side was a giant crumbling stone archway, its far end walled up except for a small door at the bottom. Invisible to everyone but Livia were several platforms attached under the top of the arch. For years chests of real cloth apparel, dolls, and books had sat on these platforms; various paintings and ceramics she had made as a child adorned the curving stone of the arch; and there sat her bed. That place was where she often lounged and usually slept — directly above the heads of public traffic through the park. She could lie on her stomach and kick her bare feet in the air while staring straight down at strangers strolling through the archway. This was how the Kodalys liked to live — in the interstices of the public world.

  As she stepped onto the lawn the park was suddenly full of people.

  She sauntered now between hedgerows festooned with centuries' worth of portraits and statues, and under long crimson and gold banners displaying the Kodaly crest. Knots of revelers were scattered across the grass, with children running back and forth between them and tables piled high with food. The strolling couples, having not been invited to this party, were invisible now.

  This place was familiar and comforting to Livia. She had played here as a child, as her mother had before her. High overhead, giant parasols of tenting cunningly filtered sun and rain to indirection; the luminous light, the fine geometry of the distant parasols, the paintings — they were not furnished with alternatives, but were pleasant constants in an otherwise turbulent world. Westerhaven knew time intimately, after all, both in its fluidity and its fixedness. It was the Westerhaven Great Families' ability to live simultaneously in chaotic inscape and changeless tradition that attracted so many other manifolds as supporters and clients.

  "Aren't you going to announce yourself, Livia?" asked Mother. She stood on the other side of the field, under a grotesque bronze statue of Shakespeare's Feste. Livia had once kissed Jachman's older brother behind that statue.

  "I'll join in when I'm ready," said Livia. She draped herself across a comfortable leather armchair that she remembered playing hide-and-seek behind as a girl; this was a Kodaly chair, impervious to weather and imperceptible to any public visitors to the park. For a while she watched through a filigree of leaves as the peers danced, but she didn't yet want to merge them with her Society.

  "Why isn't he here to support me?" she asked her Society.

  "Is that who you're moping about?" Natalia, an old friend and former rival, came to perch on the arm of the chair. "Aaron's not your lover, he's just your friend. Livia, how you cling!"

  The rest of the Society all made various pooh-poohing noises. "Why worry about such things?" asked Sebastian, who stood next to her as well as fifteen meters away in the heart of the party. "He'll turn up. And this authority thing will sort itself out."

  "It's not even proper to talk about," said Natalia. "But you're a strange one, Livia, so we indulge you." They all laughed.

  They were probably right. Even if she and Aaron had been an inseparable pair for years, working parties like this one as a team ... They could exchange a nod from across a crowded room and know whom to talk to next, whom to convince or cajole to support or censure some mad plan of the peers. Until recently, they had shared a silent understanding of how the world worked, and more important, how it should work. Until the most ridiculous arguments, over abstracts and impossible dreams, had begun to separate them.

  It did no good to think about it now. She stretched and stood up. "All right," she said. "Let's enter the lion's jaws." She changed her shift into a ball gown and with a single gesture entered the party at its center.

  Livia's two pipsqueak agents watched her join the submanifold from a vantage point high above the city. Insofar as they had any consciousness at all, it was an imitation of Livia's own; they soared the virtual thermals and vortexes of the city with delight and abandon, because they thought that she would have in their place.

  Spread below them they saw the whole panoply of Westerhaven life, a mazelike throng of people walking, gathering, talking, and working together — single-minded in the results of their labor, though all of them might be seeing a different city. Some would be cruising sexual submanifolds invisible to the majority; others would be meditating in plazas empty of all people. Some had only their own self-made phantasms for company; these mediated between them and the real people in their lives, who had forever gone beyond their horizons. And then, interpenetrating all of this, thousands of visitors from other manifolds walked in half or full immersion in their own realities. Some could be seen, some could not. Who knew what they were experiencing?

  Yet all of this was merely the tacit, superficial reality of Barrastea. Cicada and Peaseblossom saw something few others bothered to see. Overlaying the city within in-scape were hundreds of other Barrasteas, most containing the same citizens going about very similar activities. These were sims; and in any given sim, some citizens were making sims of each other too, until the ghosts and might-have-beens redoubled and recomplicated in an explosion of possibilities.

  While this went on, Livia danced with an old friend; Livia hesitated at a drinks table, scanning the crowd for evidence of cliques forming and alliances shifting; Livia scowled in anger at a delegation of the peers who had come to confront her.

  Her physical self — her Subject, as it was called — was talking to the stars of the party, six visitors from a distant manifold that had recently opened its doors to Wester-haven. Mother introduced them, saying, "Livia is continuing the family tradition of seducing strangers into our ways."

  "Mother!" She grinned at the visitors. "She makes it sound so ... prurient."

  "Our founders might agree," said one, a handsome youth who represented himself as older, with silvery hair. His accent was stilted; his manifold had successfully invented its own tongue and he was obviously unused to speaking in Westerhaven's Joyspric. "It is only with our generation that our people have stopped feeling threatened by ... manifolds like yours." He gestured around. "Big, uh, big cultures that eat little ones ... for lunch." They all laughed.

  "Your mother said you have a good singing voice," said another man. "We like to sing in our — at our home."

  "Really?" She called a quick anima to serve as her mask; scowled at her mother from behind it; then dismissed it. "Would you like to hear something?"

  "We would be delighted."

  She considered, then smiled wickedly at her mother. "All right, since we're talking about how we lure people away from their realities ... You may know this one, because it's a traditional, older than Teven: it's called 'The Stolen Child.'"

  She sang and for a while, only the song was real.

  Under the shadow of the great stone arch, another version of Livia had been cornered by some friends. "West-erhaven has no existence unless we
continue to create it, every day," one peer said as he hooked his thumbs in his ornamental belt and glared at her. He was one of the Golden Boys, a mover and shaker in the New City movement. "I think you've forgotten that. You think we can live with a foot in two worlds — be of more than one manifold at a time. But you know perfectly well that unless we all work together, all of this" — he gestured around himself — "will dissolve as if it never existed." He shook his head dismissively. "You've let down your generation, Livia Kodaly."

  Livia's face went white with anger. "How dare you — "

  Not that one. Peaseblossom pointed out another sim to Cicada. This has more authority.

  Two young women sat with Livia. One held her hand. "We understand that you advised the committee according to what you thought the drummers would have wanted," she was saying. "But what makes you think that you knew them so well? You'd never visited their manifold while any of them were still alive. And yet you chose to speak for mem in a situation of great ambiguity. That, I'm afraid, is what we can't forgive."

  The real Livia Kodaly had finished her song and was laughing with both these women; their conversation had nothing to do with the drummers' land and their mutual affection was obvious. But as the agents watched, the authority given to this sim continued to grow. Cicada was trying to minimize it, but throughout inscape the ani-mas of the other peers were rushing to the node. Any minute now this scenario would hit the tipping point, and what was now part of the artificial imagination would become reality. Livia would be chastised, and some of her authority revoked.

  We must warn her!

  She's blocking me. I can't get through to her.

  Indeed, as the party wore on, Livia felt less and less connected to it. People began to vanish from her senso-rium, starting with the ones she liked least. Eventually she put a stop to that, but at the same time she drifted into the shade of the stone arch. Climbing a ladder no one else could see, she sat on the lowest of her platforms to watch the party. Insects buzzed around her, and birds wheeled above the treetops. Music and pleasant voices came from the revelers, and it all would have been relaxing had she not been nagged by a sense of dissatisfaction.

  She watched while the peers strutted and posed. The young men challenged one another constantly; their swords were not for show. For the peers, arguments about manners or fashion were far from academic: they were the building blocks of their own generation's civilized future. Westerhaven's existence and development depended on the excellence of this generation, and these youths knew it. They were all deeply passionate about such things and she loved them for that. But they felt it was gauche, at least, to express an interest in something outside their circle. Mysterious disappearances or upheavals in nearby manifolds were not the subject of polite conversation.

  "You're not mingling," said Mother.

  Livia shrugged, and leaned back so that an errant beam of sunlight could rest on her face. "It's just a party, Mother."

  "You're worried about losing your authority? Well, don't be. It's a minor issue."

  "Oh, Mother!" She scowled at the anima, tempted to dismiss it. "I just spent the past hour and a half engaging a dozen or more peers in idle chitchat to remind them of my position. I know what's going on here. I'm on trial for the drummers thing. Well, I've made my defense. It's the prosecution's turn — let what happens, happen. Meanwhile, I'm going to enjoy this little sunbeam I've found."

  A loss of authority wouldn't be the end of the world, she mused. She might not be able to requisition aircars quite so cavalierly, or count on the best guests for her soirees. Rene and Jachman might get diplomatic assignments instead of her for a while. Life would go on. She could always sing for her supper.

  Livia was a bit surprised to realize that she wasn't just telling herself that — it was true. I'm turning into Aaron. Though he was as adept a political player as anyone in Westerhaven, he had contempt for the great game. They had argued about that recently, too.

  What had he said at the time? "Nobody here has the balls to effect real change in the world." She smiled despite herself.

  She knew why she was thinking about this now. Lu-cius's disappearance and the weird potlatch of the ancestors had served to remind her of a time of blood and pain and loneliness — a period when authority had been meaningless. She recalled the electric emotions of the crowd at the potlatch. That had been the moment when carefully suppressed memories had started to boil up in her again.

  Like it or not, traumatic and ineradicable experience marked her as different from these careless people laughing and dancing a few meters below her. So maybe that was why she finally stood up and said, "Cicada, Peaseblossom, bring me an anima of Aaron — even a sim will do.

  "We're going to find out where he's gone."

  4

  Cicada and Peaseblossom were a bit distracted at that moment. Four people had entered the ballroom several minutes before. They did not appear at its center as Livia had, but popped into visibility on the periphery, as unobtrusively as possible. Still, heads turned throughout the park as the two couples strolled forward magisterially.

  Founders! Cicada had clutched Peaseblossom and pointed. Founders have come!

  Livia's friend Sylvie turned to the anima of Livia she'd been chatting with and said, "Oh, look! Isn't that Lady Ellis?" She pointed, hiding the gesture behind a mask. Livia's anima followed her gaze to look at the woman standing with her parents. It was indeed Ellis, one of the original creators of the Westerhaven manifold. Nearly mythological, Lady Ellis was seldom seen at this level. She and her own peers resided in mansions and realities of their own creation, rarely deigning to interfere with the affairs of their descendants. For her to be here was truly an honor for the Kodalys.

  "Do you think we might be able to speak to her?" mused Sylvie.

  Livia's anima laughed. "Try walking over there. You could vanish on the way!"

  "Oh, wouldn't that be embarrassing!" Sylvie shook her head. "Better to wallow in real anonymity, I think."

  Cicada glanced back to the authority sims he and Pease-blossom had been running, and gave the inscape equivalent of a shriek. Look! he said. What are they doing?

  Agents of the founders were fanning out through the shifting clouds of simulations. Whenever they encountered a sim where Livia was being confronted over the drummers incident, they gestured imperiously and, using their unmatched authority, terminated it The agencies of the peers fell back in confusion, and a few began trying to get the attention of their real counterparts, who naturally would not have been sullying their hands by participating directly in political scapegoating.

  — Why are they saving Livia?

  — Let's sim them!

  — Sim a founder? Impossible!

  — Not impossible. Important! Come, let's try.

  Before they had the chance to try it, the founders' agents acted, generating animas that summoned corresponding ghosts of Livia herself.

  — What are they doing?

  — I don't know. Let's tell Livia!

  The two faeries dove from the sky, ready to defend their mistress at the first hint of trouble, even if it came from the founders themselves. But just as they were about to manifest in front of Livia, another figure appeared before them. It stood on the air, beautiful and radiating authority, and put a finger to its faintly smiling lips.

  "Where are those guys?" Livia opened an inscape window herself and called up some generic agents. "I want to review my last conversation with Aaron Varese," she told one. "And find Cicada and Peaseblossom!"

  The agent bowed and vanished in a puff of faux-smoke. At the same time, the sights, sounds, and scents of a different time descended around Livia: her last talk with Aaron.

  It had only been a few days ago, so she remembered the occasion well even without artificial aids. Livia had been lounging on a couch in a gazebo on the grounds of Aaron's estate, while he paced the old wooden floorboards. It was evening and another party was winding down; the air was delicately scented and sti
ll warm from the day. The sky was clear, revealing thousands of stars, those to north and south wheeling slowly west, while those directly above turned grandly around the zenith. Aaron had sought her out to express his boredom with the other guests, then stayed for one of those half-drunken conversations that it was valuable but sometimes embarrassing to record.

  "Everywhere I look I see limits," he was saying. "And I wonder why we tolerate them."

  Livia had shrugged, languidly turning to look at the stars. "Limits are the fountain of creativity," she said. "Without them there is no novelty."

  "So they say." Aaron crossed his arms and glared down at her. "They being inhuman powers that control our lives, and over which we have no control. Inscape; the demented AI of the tech locks; even the founders. They parcel out a tiny fraction of their power to us, just enough to allow us to live tiny, inconsequential lives. It's a tyranny. Something should be done."

  She'd smiled ironically. "Like what? Should I gather the peers together and overthrow nature?"

  He shook his head. "I've said it before, but the peers' plan to build a new city doesn't impress me. It's not ambitious enough by far. Westerhaven ... we've deliberately limited ourselves like all the other manifolds. Discarded technologies that we could have used to increase our power and influence in the coronal. Nobody here has the balls to try to effect real change in the world. It's a mediocre manifold, Livy."

  "Then change it," she asserted. "Or make a new one! You've got the charisma and the convictions to do it single-handedly. Lean on your Society, Aaron, and it will happen. That's how a manifold comes to be, after all."

  "What, with fifty, a hundred years of wheedling and cajoling?" He shook his head. "In the old days they'd just blow up the capital and take over."

  She laughed. "In many places, they still do. But that's not our reality, Aaron, you know that"