Lady of Mazes

by Karl Schroeder

  She had come to terms with this strange new world — was beginning to accept it — when one afternoon she found herself crawling out of the burst skin of an airbus, drenched in blood that she could not will away.

  None of the blood was hers. The whole world had turned a strange yellow, the sky given over to a pillar of dust the width of a mountain that seemed to rise to infinity. In every direction the landscape was torn and flattened as if giants had rampaged across it. After a while of puzzling, Livia decided that the strewn matchsticks in the distance had once been a forest. In many places the underlying skin of Teven Coronal showed through the stripped soil. These scars were midnight black, and smooth as glass.

  She turned, a slow stagger as her legs failed to coordinate. She looked for her Society. "Hello?" There were no human forms visible anywhere. Only what she'd seen in the gash she'd just exited. Human forms — partly. Some still moving where they hung; none alive.

  The moment of realization came like white light, like the burn of a flare overtaking reason. Livia ran — — and here was one of those holes in her memory.

  Some time later she huddled with Aaron under the trunk of a downed tree, as rain plummeted around them, fat, oily drops of it. There was no sound except the mindless drumming of the downpour and Livia's own cries as she called over and over for her Society. For anyone.

  Neither of them understood it. They tried over and over to switch off the rain. Stand the trees back up. Bring the corpses in the bus back to life. Things changed when you willed it. People listened, the right things happened. Yet all was silence and the world had turned its back on them.

  The first thing Livia had said to Aaron was, "Where are we?' Not what happened; what happened had to do with where you were in inscape. What happened was what you decided happened. Next was, "Who's doing this?" After all, whatever happened did so for a reason, and it was always somebody's reason in particular.

  She supposed that the next few holes in her memory had to do with realizing that none of these assumptions was true anymore.

  Later, after jumbled recollections of fear, pain, and hunger, she remembered other survivors. They had wandered like ghosts through the blasted landscape; the story was that Livia had led them, and Aaron, out of the dead zone and back to the manifolds. But about half didn't make it In retrospect, she could name the things that had killed some: thirst, exposure, shock. But two of the adults had simply stopped, without apparent reason. They had struggled for a time to comprehend what had happened to them, and failed.

  Years later, she wondered if it wasn't the indecisive realities of adolescence that had given her the strength to guide the others after the crash. She and Aaron were already living in a phase where inscape had come unlocked; it was a huge step from that to having no inscape at all, but still they had been able to take it. Not so the other survivors.

  Westerhaven had weapons and troops aplenty to withstand any assault by Raven's people. They were part of the games submanifold and were never intended to be used on people, but were still potent. It didn't matter. As the hours dragged on, defeat after defeat changed the zones of the compass-sky over Livia's head from green to red. When it became too much and she couldn't watch any more, Livia left the games manifold to find herself sitting in sunlight in a park full of well-manicured shrubs and exuberant flower beds: the Great Library's grounds. The only sounds here were the zizzing of passing bees and the clear-throated song of a skylark.

  She remembered then that catastrophe takes its time as much as any ordinary day. Later, memory would erase this moment, leaving only the pain. For now, this place was real. In wonder and emotional exhaustion, she simply stared at the gardens through the trembling air of afternoon.

  She was still sitting that way when the founders returned. They were grim-faced and silent. There was no need to explain the situation; Whyte simply gestured and Livia's Society reappeared, now populated with what was left of the peers. All were running or trudging in her direction while behind them Raven's warriors burned the houses and shattered the towers of Barrastea. Survivors of other generations were rallying behind their own exemplars, some to fight, others to flee.

  "As you travel you must leave behind one or two people in each manifold," said Lady Ellis as the first aircars of the evacuation flattened the flower beds Livia had been contemplating. "There must be a chain of people capable of getting messages back to us here."

  "All right."

  "There's one other thing, Livia." She leaned in and spoke quietly — an action Livia had only ever seen in old movies. "If everything fails, you are to make your way to the aerie. Do you know it?" Livia nodded; the aerie was a Westerhaven outpost built into the south wall of the coronal, high in the mountains. It was reachable only by air-car, or from the Cirrus manifold.

  "I've sent Aaron Varese there with his team," said the founder. "I don't know what good he can do, but ... your peers have workshops at the aerie. And it's in the skin of the coronal. That should make it impregnable. If ... if this catastrophe is everywhere ... go there."

  Livia wanted to know more about Aaron's part in all this, but in the end she simply nodded, watching as her an-ima shouted and waved, rallying weary fighters near and far. "Come!" it cried. "Form up and tell us your status!"

  Her pixies appeared, sporting little military hats. "We've got our orders!" one said, saluting smartly. "Re-connoiter and report!" It waved a tiny map. "This is your path to safety, Livia."

  The map, expanded, showed a flight plan in real space as well as circled points that indicated where she should leave each of four charted manifolds. As she was tracing a trembling finger across it, Qiingi came to stand by her. "I have spoken with your founders," he said glumly. "I am of your family now, Livia Kodaly. My home is gone."

  She nodded numbly. For a moment she was tongue-tied, so her anima appeared and said briskly, "All right. You're familiar with travel between manifolds, Wordweaver Qiingi. Can you help me shepherd these people to safety?"

  "If safety exists." He frowned at the map. "What are these places?"

  "Close neighbors of Westerhaven that don't overlap any of Raven's lands. If the ancestors' warriors aren't there, we can use them to stage a counterattack." She let the anima talk; Livia's own attention was on the increasing flood of arriving aircars and running squads of men and women. "Since these places are so close to our own reality, most of the peers should be able to travel to them without difficulty. If we have to go beyond them ... " The line on the map continued beyond the neighboring manifolds, but the next circle had a question mark next to it Qiingi nodded. "Maybe I will be able to help with those places. Some may be similar to Raven's." She heard a trace of wistfulness in his voice.

  She stared in an agony of grief at the survivors who now stood or sat about, or wept on one another's shoulders. Some of the wounded floated unconscious in grayish clouds of angel-stuff. If this war was spreading generally, they might all have to flee far from what they knew. She doubted that all of these people would be able to make such a journey; paradoxically, as with Livia and Aaron after the crash, it might be the youngest peers who would have the least difficulty.

  A dozen meters away, a young man was walking between the wounded, comforting them. He was covered in dust and blood, his hair matted and his face grim. But he spoke to each injured man or woman himself, not through his anima. Livia felt a flash of admiration for his courage, and shame at herself for hiding behind her agencies. It was Rene, who had run back into the streets after delivering her here, days ago it seemed.

  She dismissed her anima and walked over to him. He looked up as she put her hand on his shoulder. "Livia Did you find Xavier?"

  Livia almost burst into tears, but suppressed the anima that offered to take her place in the conversation. "We just barely got out," she managed to say. "The ancestors are in control of Raven's people ... Have you met Word-weaver Qiingi?"

  Rene looked Qiingi up and down angrily. "You invited the monsters in."

  Qiingi d
idn't reply. After a moment Rene broke his gaze and sighed. "What are we doing here?" he asked.

  "We need your help," she said. Briefly she outlined the founders' plan to fall back into other manifolds. The fear on Rene's face became sharper as she spoke; finally he shook his head. "I don't understand it," he said. "Why do we have to do something so ... suicidal? Abandon our homes? Then they've won."

  "Westerhaven isn't its geography," she said, trying to make herself believe it was true. "We are the manifold, Rene. That's why we have to make sure we're not divided. Going next door is our only option for now. But it doesn't mean we've lost."

  "But to 'go next door' as you put it ... No, Livia, we will lose ourselves. To travel at all you have to reject your own manifold and embrace the ways of another. How can we do that and not lose ourselves?"

  Others had heard and were gathering around now. She could see the doubt on many faces. In moments they might reject the idea entirely, and then would even the founders be able to rally them?

  It was time to play the card she hated the most, and at this moment Livia wished more than anything that she could do so from behind a mask. Let her anima take over for a while. But they would know if she did that and she couldn't have even one person believe that she didn't have faith enough in the plan to support it wholeheartedly.

  Livia adjusted her voice to carry to all the peers, including those not yet here. "You know me," she said reluctantly. "I'm one of the famous survivors of the farside crash. I have lived outside of all manifolds and come back to tell about it. I know I haven't spoken much about the crash over the years. But I did learn something; my survival and return are the proof that I learned it" She took a deep breath, wishing that she really believed what she was about to say.

  "We think Westerhaven lies in the way we live — in our Societies, our chosen technologies and systems. But when you have all those things stripped away, you find that you're still of Westerhaven. How can that be? It's because all of this," she gestured around herself, "is only the visible manifestation of what Westerhaven really is. It is what we value — about ourselves, each other, and the world. The Societies, the animas and agencies, these are merely how we manifest those values. When we travel we will find equivalents and recreate Westerhaven in other forms. And when we return we will be stronger for it. Believe me. I know, I have the scars and the knowledge to prove it. I came back.

  "Follow me. Follow me now, and I will lead you there and I will lead you back again."

  Without masks, she stared down the doubters. And for the first time in her life, Livia knew what it was like to truly lie.

  7

  No one could see it; inscape was not transmitting from the vicinity of the Great Library. But the news spread quickly throughout Westerhaven: the library was burning.

  Livia had walked those halls many times. She had gazed at exotic paintings from manifolds now erased from inscape — portraits of men and women, of places that had once held all the importance in the world to those who lived in them. She had listened to strange music and wondered what sort of mind could think it beautiful. In such a way she had done what her people prized above all else: she had given her respect to those different from herself.

  In one contemptuous gesture, all that abundance was being wiped away. The ancestors were treading on the accumulated treasures of the past, blind to the value of those diverse lives lived before theirs. They thought they knew what was real. That confident and terrible belief would only spread with their success. The circle of annihilation would ripple out from Barrastea and swallow all of Teven, if someone didn't stop it.

  But it would have to be someone more heroic than Livia. She had done as Lady Ellis had asked — she had led her peers out of their homeland. But after they had arrived here, one of the peers — a youth she barely knew — had come up to Livia and said, his voice quivering with rage, "I guess you've got what you wanted, Kodaly: no more manifolds."

  Now, she wandered the edges of a grassy clearing far from Westerhaven, trying to stay unnoticed. It was all she could do to help direct the setting up of tents and tables for the widening flood of Westerhaven refugees; she flinched whenever someone looked her way.

  A dozen citizens of the manifold of Oceanus were easing the wounded out of arrears and into the tents. All wore their own faces, and there was no aura of authority around them to indicate social rank. Esther Mannus was profoundly disturbed by that little detail; she'd had trouble reaching Oceanus and now clung to Livia's arm or walked about the clearing twisting her black hair in her fingers.

  This space where they had landed was a hundred meters up the slope of a forested island; below, the trees ended in a sandy beach that fronted seemingly endless ocean. The slope continued up, and up, its sides converging with perspective until the "hill" became visible as the attachment point of a giant cable. As the eye tracked it and it rose into the air, breaking from the ground below with waterfalls and trailing snapped strands, it became something impossible, a highway stretching all the way to heaven.

  "Forget about looking around the people," Livia was telling Esther, "and look at them." She could tell who was important by the actions of the people around them. It was a trick Esther would have to learn.

  Esther frowned, staring at the Oceanans. "Th — that man, he's the leader?"

  "Good, you're getting it." Oceanus was one of the nearest neighbors of Westerhaven, both geographically and in worldview. Still, this manifold was a kind of idealized oceanic paradise whose citizens often lived their whole lives without setting foot on land. Technologically, they prohibited air travel, Societies, and animas, and Esther wasn't the only one having difficulty with the fact. About half the refugees were still clinging to Westerhaven; when Livia flipped her perspective to Oceanus's, these stragglers faded like ghosts.

  Oceanus had agreed to host the wounded, but not the healthy gamers-turned-soldiers or any weapon more advanced than swords. The gamers vanished whenever Livia entered Oceanus's realities. Qiingi, on the other hand, loved it here. Water was sacred to him, so the idea that the Oceanans lived entirely on it appealed to him. He was helping dig a latrine at the lower end of the field where the soil was still thick enough; up here it was already thinning, and a few kilometers higher the naked black substance of the cable began to predominate. Once, its surface had been festooned with life all the way up to the clouds; the crash that had traumatized Livia and Aaron had caused the coronal's cables to vibrate like plucked harp strings, and (Livia had heard) a rain of trees and whole hillsides had fallen from them for days. It would take centuries for them to regain their coating of verdure.

  Livia had no time to contemplate the view; people kept asking her questions about what to do, where to put things. She was exhausted. The remaining leaders of the peers were away, trying to explain the situation to Oceanus's founders. So far they were being met with complete disbelief. The locals thought Westerhaven had decided to war with Raven, and could not comprehend that this was not an agreed-upon conflict. Invasion was a word that had long ago become a storytelling term here, unattached to reality.

  Rene was organizing a makeshift kitchen in the shadow of a giant oak tree. He had adapted quickly to the technological matrix of Oceanus — no, the usual agencies of inscape weren't available; yes, human labor was valued; no, people were not entirely free to choose what kind of labor they performed. Even now he was distributing money cards to bewildered refugees so that they could "pay" for their food, a concept that was giving them a lot of trouble.

  Livia herself was bone weary and emotionally drained. All she wanted to do now was find a cot in one of the tents and collapse on it for twelve hours. She was wending her way in that direction when a half-familiar voice said, "Livia Kodaly?"

  She turned, expecting one of the peers. A young woman her own age stood several meters away. Her costume was all Oceanus, voluminous and colorful; but she looked familiar.

  "Livia, it's me, Alison Haver."

  "Alison!" Her face was tha
t of a young adult, but still recognizable as the girl she had been when Livia last saw her — years ago, now. And they had not parted on good terms. Livia hesitated, realized she had no anima here to hide her reactions, and made herself smile. "How are you?" She held out her hand, and Alison shook it.

  "So," continued Livia awkwardly, "you live in Oceanus now."

  "Yes, I moved ... a little while after we, uh, broke up." Alison looked down. "It wasn't you — well, not just you. I decided Westerhaven wasn't for me. The masks, the deceptions ... "

  Livia winced. For some time after her rescue from the crash, Livia had plunged herself into the shifting perspectives of adolescence. She had tried on different roles and identities, often presenting herself as several people at once at social gatherings. At one of these Alison had met a male persona of Livia's, and the two had hit it off. In her need to explore, Livia had let the relationship go on too long; Alison had fallen for the man she thought lay behind the mask. When she finally learned the truth she was devastated — not by the fact that her beloved was actually female, but because of the deception. After the painful evening when Livia revealed her true nature, she never saw Alison again. Livia had believed that Alison still lived in Westerhaven, maybe even next door, and had simply edited herself out of Livia's Society. It was a blow to think that Livia might have driven her out of Wester-haven entirely.

  24

  "It's good to see you," said Alison. "Hey, if you need a native guide, just call on me any time."

  "Thanks," she said, genuinely grateful. "But I'm not sure we're going to be staying here long."

  Alison nodded. "I understand. You want this war over right away. There's some people I know who might be able to help."