Lady of Mazes

by Karl Schroeder

  "Maybe it should be," he'd muttered. He rubbed at his eyes, making the gesture a bit too dramatic as with all he did. "Anyway, that's my point. We can only work within the system. Not jump out of it. And Iivy, I do want to get out And I think you do, too."

  Stop, commanded Livia now. The conversation froze, a night moth paused mid-flap above Aaron's ear. The talk had deteriorated after this point anyway.

  She scowled out at the green park with its dancing couples. What had she just learned? Nothing, really; only that Aaron had an ache he couldn't satisfy in Wester-haven. But would that be enough for him to abandon the manifold of his birth? She couldn't believe he'd move to another reality without discussing it with her first.

  She had just raised her hand to invoke another inscape session, when Peaseblossom appeared in front of her, frantically waving. "Liv-Livia, you won't believe what's happening!"

  Cicada popped into being next to him. "Hsst you said you wouldn't tell."

  "Yes, but — "

  "Hallooo!" Someone was waving down on the ground, for all the world as if she could see Livia. Impossible, of course; this platform was a personal privacy zone.

  "It's her!" Cicada pointed. Livia followed his gaze and met the eyes of a woman whose face she knew, but whom she'd never met in person. She was staring up at Livia from the ground. She could see Livia.

  "Sorry to barge in. Can I talk to you?" said Lady Maren Ellis.

  Livia was too shocked to reply at first. Then she stalked over to the ladder and climbed down. How could anyone — even a founder — so easily penetrate a privacy zone?

  The question — and indignation — went out of her head when the founder shook her hand and said, "You're the young lady of whom I've heard so many good things."

  Livia smiled weakly back. Ellis knew of her? She would never have expected such a thing. The founders, after all, were impossibly remote from day-to-day life. No one saw them. No one knew them, anymore.

  Ellis didn't seem so intimidating up close. She appeared younger than Livia herself; even her eyes gave nothing away, seemingly those of an ingenue. But she took Livia's arm without hesitation and created her own zone of privacy around them. "I've been hoping I could meet you," she said. "We need to talk."

  "I'm ... honored to meet you, Lady," said Livia, disengaging herself carefully so that she could curtsy. Warily, she said nothing more. Lady Ellis returned them to a bench directly below Livia's bed. With a wave she dismissed Livia's Society. The partygoers were still laughing and dancing only a few meters away, but Livia had no doubt that she and the founder were inaccessible to them now.

  "We've been watching you," said the lady as she sat languidly on the bench. "Your veto over the annexing of the drummers' lands shows great promise; of all the youth of your generation, you and Aaron Varese have perhaps the most acute awareness of the world around you — the real world, I mean, not this paradise of phantasms we call home."

  "I'm ... not sure what you mean. In case you failed to notice, I'm actually in a state of disgrace right now."

  "Oh, I'm well aware of that. You voted against the interests of Westerhaven. But I'm well aware that you did so because you had actively tried to put yourself in the drummers' place. However briefly, you let yourself see through the eyes of strangers. And that is the kind of human being we were aiming to raise when we came to Teven. The annoyance of your peers is of no account." She dismissed them with a wave.

  "Oh. Well, to what do I owe this ... "

  The founder smiled dazzlingly. "I know, we've never approached you before. It's because we wondered ... well, I wondered whether your particular character has not been shaped by a circumstance that my own peers would rather not believe could be so ... fertile."

  It took Livia a moment to see through the weave of words to Lady Ellis's meaning. "Character? The crash ... you think Aaron and I are special because of the crash?"

  "I?" Lady Ellis gently tapped her own breastbone, leaning in close. "Not I, Livia, but all of us. Whether secretly or openly; and therein has lain the problem, for some time now." She sighed heavily. "My own peers have conveniently forgotten the circumstances under which we created this place." She gestured broadly, indicating not just Westerhaven, Livia felt sure, but all of Teven Coronal. "We bought this place with tragic loss and personal discipline. We built a paradise, so that our children should not have to go through what we went through. And what do we find? Our descendants are increasingly like the people we fled from. Yet two of them were lost to us for a short time — sheep strayed from the fold. And then they returned leading a train of refugees from devastated manifolds, like the sighted leading the blind. They were not like those helpless ones. They were more like us. Hard. Unsentimental. Everyone senses it. And your own peers are envious of those qualities."

  "How can I be what you say, when I don't even remember that time?" Livia objected. "Hard? Not me — and certainly not ... " Aaron, she almost said; but there was no way she was going to reveal her feelings to this woman, especially not when her own masks seemed temporarily down.

  Suddenly angry, she said, "We gained nothing from the crash. Nothing! And yet we've been marked for life by it. It gave us nothing, it took away people we loved."

  The lady nodded, unapologetic. "I never said it was a positive experience. On the contrary, it must have been awful. That's precisely what your peers don't understand about it, isn't it? That nothing good came of it. Yet that is the very reason why you and Aaron seem the stronger for it."

  "I don't understand."

  "Of course not. You have no real peers to compare yourself with ... that you have met prior to today, that is." Lady Ellis smiled in a conspiratorial way. "I have no doubt that people have asked you many times for the story of what happened. No?" Livia nodded. "But has anyone ever told you how the crash affected us? The founders, I mean?"

  "N-no." She had never even thought about it. "It was a great tragedy. All of Westerhaven mourned the families that died ... "

  "Oh, so did we." The lady waved away that thought too. "No, the crash itself. How did we react to that?"

  Livia looked at her blankly.

  "Look." The founder looked down, frowning at the grass. "Inscape has let us create a perfect mask over reality on this world. You grew up in it, so the very notion that there could be something else ... it never occurs to you. But it occurs to us. We think about it all the time ...

  "Two airbuses of Westerhaven Great Families were circumnavigating the ring-shaped coronal that morning. It was an educational outing for you, wasn't it? But your family remained here. Aaron's went along for the ride. And almost halfway around the world — thousands of kilometers from home — you were suddenly engulfed in a massive electromagnetic pulse. We saw it happen: I was standing outside, I remember a flash of light at the zenith as the mad anecliptic hit the coronal's undersurface and exploded through it. He tore up ten kilometers of forest and left a great hole in the ground, through which the air began to escape. I saw that, too — after the flash, clouds appeared out of nowhere and turned into a vast whirling cyclone on the far side of the world. What I didn't see was that the magnetic Shockwave had destroyed every artificial intelligence on that side of the coronal. Inscape was dead, your angels were dead, the manifolds there had crashed — and your buses were caught in a hurricane."

  What was that word Lady Ellis had just used? Aneclip-tic? Livia had never heard the word before; the official story was that a meteoroid had pierced the coronal's skin.

  The founder continued. "It's fortunate the coronal's healing powers are so great. The puncture was sealed before you could be sucked into space — but the buses crashed and everyone from Westerhaven except you and Aaron was killed. That much is history. But do you know what went through my mind when I saw that flash in the sky? Not that the coronal was being destroyed, although that was the rumor for some hours. No, what I thought was: they have found us."

  She stood up, and to Livia's astonishment, began to pace. "They have found us.
I thought that the oppressive culture that we fled, oh so many years ago now, had learned of our existence. That we were about to be pulled, kicking and screaming, back into the embrace of that monstrous empire they call the Archipelago."

  She looked down at Livia, and now Lady Ellis's eyes did show her age. "You and Aaron experienced what such a catastrophe would be like, Livia. That is why you are special." livia matched her gaze, tight-lipped. "Special? You mean we're not Westerhaven."

  "Westerhaven is not about conformity! You should know that No, it's just that you have the potential to see more of the world than merely this manifold. And that would be honorable, and truly Westerhaven of you."

  Livia was troubled. She knew now that she was speaking not just with Lady Ellis, but with the founders as a whole; and the words she was hearing might or might not be coming from this woman standing before her. They had, it seemed, pierced the defenses of her Society, raising issues and incidents she would rather have edited away. Yet ultimately, her private inscape filters would not have allowed the conversation to get this far if they didn't think she would want to hear this. In fact, that was what was most disturbing.

  "What is it that you want of me?" she asked. What am I willing to let you request?

  Lady Ellis had lost her smile. She came and sat by Livia again. "Let me show you something," she said. She gestured, and a square of space in front of them opened to reveal a picture. It was a 3-D photograph of a city, taken from the air. The longhouses of Skaalitch were guarded by tall redwoods, and in the center of the photo several tall, intricate totem poles rose almost to the height of the trees.

  "One of our people took this picture about six hours ago," said the founder. "From the air."

  It took a moment for her meaning to sink in. Then Livia stood up quickly. "Oh! But that's ... "

  "Impossible? Yes, it is." They both stared at the photo.

  Taking pictures from the air was simple in Wester-haven. In Raven's world, however, photography did not exist. Neither did flying machines. Inscape and tech locking worked together to exclude inappropriate technological interactions; the upshot was that Raven's world and everything in it was invisible from Westerhaven. The two technology sets were mutually invisible. Lady Ellis was showing her a picture that by all Livia knew simply could not exist.

  "The light from the towers reached the camera," mused the lady. "That's to be expected; it would reach our eyes too if we were flying by. But then, the tech locks should have edited it out of the camera's image, just as inscape would edit it out of our sensorium. The pilot said he saw this Raven city, Livia. What does that mean?"

  She shook her head. An unquiet feeling had started in the pit of her stomach.

  "It's like what happened at this potlatch thing, isn't it?" continued the founder. "I hear the diplomats dismissed the event as unimportant. Pah!" She waved away the window. 'They were too busy obsessing about Lucius Xavier to pay attention to the real issue. Worse yet, when we confronted them just now with this picture, they all hemmed, hawed, or hid behind their animas. Nobody wants to take this on."

  Here it came, thought Livia. "Take what on?"

  "Livia, someone has to go investigate what's happened in Skaalitch. That should be obvious. We think it should be someone who's had ... experience with situations of instability in the tech locks and inscape."

  Livia blew out a heavy sigh. It was momentarily amusing to picture Jachman and his cronies going to the founders to manipulate them for this outcome. But they could never have had the authority for it. Nobody did. Which meant either that Ellis was telling the truth about her motives for asking Livia ... or there were politics here she knew nothing about.

  Either way, this conversation couldn't have happened, no matter how strong Lady Ellis's authority, unless Livia was willing to let it happen. That alone was sufficient to guarantee her answer.

  "Yes," she said. "I'll go check it out."

  5

  Qiingi of Raven's people trailed his fingers in the water and looked down over the side of the canoe. Below him, sleek blue beings cavorted. Beneath them, in the depths, the trees and house poles of a half-real city shimmered.

  He had come to the center of the bay to find peace. Qiingi had always been able to do that, ever since he was able to paddle on his own: he would glide silently over the hurrying water, watching the mist consume the bottoms of the nearby mountains. That mist was where a being could trade its ghahlanda and become something else, as Livia Kodaly had when she visited from the world of ghosts. The mist devoured everything and in it this became that, lost became found.

  Today there was no mist. The distant shoreline remained crystal clear under limpid sunlight. He could see the individual rocks along the shoreline, the splashing as the waves lunged against them.

  He slapped the water and one of the sleek beings surfaced next to him. "Qiingi," it said, after playfully shaking water all over him. "You neglect your studies."

  "I know," he said regretfully. "There are problems in the houses of men. Strangers who have no qqatxhana."

  He no longer thought of them as ancestors — that fabrication had fallen in the first day of their visit

  "Yes, we know of them. You must trust them." The being flicked its flukes, dove and rose again. "But for now, we must pick up where we left off last time. Tell me, Qi-ingi: where does teotl come from?"

  "It is not ours," he said stiffly. Qiingi's skin was crawling; these beings had never endorsed interlopers such as the ancestors before. "Teotl was the guiding principle of the Nahuatl of Earth," he went on. "Like everything else we have, we stole the idea from someone else."

  "Qiingi ... " The being sounded reproachful. "Good artists borrow, great artists steal. And truly great artists forget that they've stolen. You sound like an adolescent Is it because you have been polluted by the ideas of the Westerhaven girl?"

  "Unlikely," he said, reluctant to talk about the strangers who had visited the day of the potlatch.

  "Tell me, what is teotl?"

  He scowled at the being for a few moments — but he had come here to find peace. If he was truly to do that, he must shift his worries away from what was transpiring on land. Qiingi sighed. 'Teotl is the region of the fleeting moment" he recited. "Ometeotl is the one near to everyone, to whom everyone is near. But teotl can only be a thing, it cannot be itself."

  "What? Qiingi, what are you talking about? Are you speaking nonsense?" The being dove under the boat, emerging on the other side.

  They did this all the time — teach you something then pretend you were speaking gibberish when you recited it back to them. The being was trying to get him to think about what he was saying, not just recite.

  As he focused on explaining what he meant Qiingi found his thoughts settling. This was what he'd come here for. 'Teotl is ... teotl is that which is always something other than itself. It is everything and everything is it"

  "Qiingi, again you talk nonsense. Do you mean that those trees aren't really trees, but something else?"

  "No. That would be a lie." He concentrated. "Since ... since teotl is always other than itself, those trees must really be trees, because if they were teotl they would not be teotl, but something else, and that something else is trees. Teotl can only be by being those trees. That is how teotl comes to be. And yet, the trees are only teotl, and nothing more."

  "Very good!" The being spun around and ducked its head, flicking water on Qiingi again. "But, silly human, if teotl is always something other than itself, how is it that it hasa/iowie?"

  With that it dove, and didn't resurface. Qiingi stared down into the depths, pondering, until he became aware of a voice coming from shore.

  "Halloooo ... "

  A gull flew by, wings trembling just above the wave tops. "Answer, answer," it cried. "The ancestors summon you."

  Qiingi watched it go, suppressing a sharp retort. Seagulls were never smart. The ones around here had fallen for the "ancestors" unreservedly; Qiingi was not about to let one order him
about.

  But the voice called again. Reluctantly he turned his canoe and began paddling back. He could hear singing in the distance, and the smells of wood smoke and seaweed drifted out to him. As he pulled his canoe up onto the round rocks of the shore, the ancestor sauntered over, looking lazy as always. These beings never worked, but simply plucked what they needed from the mist. That alone made them worthy of suspicion. At least the beautifully masked Wordweaver Kodaly worked.

  "I couldn't quite make out what you were talking about out mere. Were you discussing the Aspect of Eros or the Pulsation Process of the Absolute?" asked the ancestor. He loomed over Qiingi, radiating health and pent-up energy.

  "Neither. And both."

  The ancestor laughed. This one was named Kale; he was blond and had a perfectly chiseled face, which he never changed. It was yet another thing that marked these people as strange: they worshiped beauty, and yet they would not change their faces to suit the tastes of those around them.

  They had contempt for ghahlanda and for the Song of Ometeotl, Qiingi had learned.

  "How can I help you this morning?" asked Qiingi.

  "We are holding a meeting in the grand hall," said the ancestor affably. "I was thinking you might like to be one of those in the council circle."

  Qiingi's uneasiness grew. Things had been strange for the past few days. It felt like the buildup of tension before a thunderstorm. His cousin Gwanhlin, who always had time to talk, now hurried to and fro, never meeting Qiingi's eyes. Even the forest people, bear, badger, and fox, had begun singing strange songs and congregating in shadowed spaces, always slinking away when interrupted. And everywhere, the ancestors walked and brayed their confident heresies.

  "I am not sure what it is that we have to discuss," he said. Despite himself he was intimidated by this big man. He looked like he could snap Qiingi in two if he wanted.

  "Things are changing," said Kale. "Very rapidly. Some of your people are adapting with admirable speed. Some are having difficulty. You're not having difficulty, are you, Qiingi?"