Lady of Mazes

by Karl Schroeder

  Livia shook her head in frustrated anger. "The peers are talking to your founders, I mean government, now. There's nothing more we could ... "

  "This is somebody else. Don't think about it now. Get some rest! You look like you're going to collapse right here. I'll come by tomorrow morning and we'll talk about stuff, how's that?"

  The mention of rest made Livia aware that she was, quite literally, swaying on her feet. "Yes. Find me in the morning," she said. Then she stumbled away to her tent, sparing no time to wonder at this strange meeting.

  The hour before dawn was cold and scented with ocean spray. For some reason, the opening bars of "The Thieving Magpie" kept running through livia's head. She huddled under her blankets for a long time before venturing out; it was a shame this manifold was not one of those that permitted personal climate control. When she finally climbed out of her cot, she avoided anything more than polite hellos to the others who were up. Instead, she walked away from the tent to watch the dawn. The lands to the east had been bright with sunlight for an hour now. The line of lit terrain rolled down toward Livia, apparently faster and faster. The moment that line crossed you was always startling. A vast wave of sunlit air leapt forward, clouds catching fire under it in flickers of purest blinding white. Livia looked straight up in time to see two narrow lines of brilliance appear at the zenith. In seconds they burgeoned into twin suns: one the ancient sun of humanity, the other a local starlette called Miranda. Of the two, Miranda was by far the brighter.

  Now the lands shone in full daylit glory. To the east they swept away and up, forests, plains of gold and green, glittering brooks and lakes merging together in the distance into a white haze. Beyond that, seemingly at infinity, a vast sweeping spire was etched on the sky itself: half of an arch bigger than the world, its surface painted with clouds and land that rose to the zenith and vanished behind the suns. Continuing the circle, its distorted reflection curved back down the western sky and disappeared in the dark hazy quarters where night still reigned.

  Livia strapped on her sword, visited Qiingi's new outhouse, then stalked through tall wet grass to the mess tent. Taking her plate with her she retreated to an upthrust of broken cable material in the corner of the clearing and sat down to eat. In the distance, a knot of white sails dotted the horizon — an Oceanan floating town.

  She was sitting hunched over her breakfast, heedless of the evaporating dew scenting the air, when inscape chimed. She flinched. The last thing she wanted to do right now was confront her Society, with its terrible gaps. But duty demanded it. She took a deep breath and let the call come through.

  Aaron Varese appeared before her — in projected form, not as an anima. Livia blew out her held breath. "Aaron! You're ... Where have you been? I've been trying to find you for days. What — where ... " Why did you abandon me?

  His projection sat on the log next to Livia. "I know," it said. "I'm sorry I didn't warn you. I tried to call you when the attack started, but things were too crazy in the Societies."

  "I heard you escaped — well, that you were never in Barrastea," she said. "Maren Ellis told me."

  He nodded. "A group of us have been working at the aerie for a while now. Are you coming here?"

  "I don't know yet." She was happy that he'd escaped the battle, but couldn't hide her anger all the same. Once, she and Aaron had been inseparable. She'd felt she need never keep anything from this young man who had seen the things she had seen, including Livia scrabbling like an animal to survive in the ruined lands of Teven's far side. Now he was keeping secrets from her.

  "But what are you doing up there?" she asked him. "And why the secrecy? You left my Society!"

  He looked uncomfortable. "It was the founders. They asked us to keep it secret. At the time, I thought it was because we were playing around with technologies that went against the tech locks. Now, I'm starting to wonder if there wasn't more going on."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It started," he said, "with an invitation from Lady Ellis."

  Three weeks ago, Ellis had asked Aaron to visit her at the aerie. He had never spoken to any of the founders before, and had eagerly agreed. "I tried to tell you that afternoon" he insisted, "but Ellis's agents blocked me. Whatever I said to you, they'd intervene and change the words. It was ... frightening, the power they had." Intrigued, but more than a little confused, he had flown out to the Southwall mountains to meet the founder.

  "You are to take credit for what we are about to do," Ellis had told him. Aaron told Livia that the founder had reinforced this by later wiping the record of their conversation from inscape. He hadn't known that was possible, but Aaron had always suspected that the creators of the tech locks had resources they kept hidden from their descendants.

  "It's right up your alley," Ellis said as they walked along a rocky path at the foot of one of the Cirrus glaciers. Below them, past mountain slopes and broken peaks, Teven Coronal spread out like an ocean of cloud and detail; above, huge cables formed a horizontal grid across the sky.

  "Explain," he'd said, putting his back to a rain-slick slab of black rock. "You're somehow opposed to the peers' city project?"

  "Not opposed to it," she said carefully. "We want your generation's ambitions to go forward. The city is a worthy project. No, you can view this as a ... complementary activity."

  "So what do you want us to do?" She had contacted some twenty other peers, apparently — choosing those who'd opposed the city project.

  Ellis gazed out over the coronal; in profile, she looked very like the young goddess many of the peers grudgingly imagined her to be. "It's pretty simple," she said. "I want you to reinvent science."

  Aaron barked a laugh, but she didn't join in. His smile died, replaced by a quizzical frown. "Science was completed centuries ago," he said. "We know it all."

  "You know nothing," she said dismissively. "Despite the fact that you benefit from the knowledge. It's the AIs of inscape, and the system of the tech locks that know. You only know the broadest outlines of natural science, because your generation doesn't need to know more. You benefit from it without understanding it. But even the application of that knowledge — what it allows you to do — is disguised in one way or another by every manifold in Teven. Your generation doesn't learn science, and the locks have hidden much technical knowledge from you."

  None of this came as any surprise; long-range radio was impossible in any manifold Aaron knew of. So was space travel, and astronomy was almost impossible because the Lethe Nebula blocked so much of the sky. "Let me get this straight," he said. "We deliberately forget some things in order to create the culture we want to live in; then you, who did this in the first place, tell me you want us to open those books again?"

  She shook her head. "We don't want to recover old ideas. Science embodied in a device or object is pure. Science written down and interpreted by humans always comes with historical and ideological baggage. We ereated the manifolds so you could jettison that baggage whenever you wanted."

  "But if all of scientific knowledge is embedded in the tech locks anyway — if we could get it out without violating their programming, we could just ask them for it."

  She shook her head. "We want you to rediscover it. Reinvent it Make it yours. Do the experiments. Theorize. Build the missing parts of the edifice again, and put your stamp on them." He remembered her eyes shining as she said this. "We wiped the slate clean when we came here, so mat we could start anew. That always included the history of science as well as culture. We're ready, Aaron — that's the point. Westerhaven is confident, full-blooded, and unique. So are some of the other manifolds. We can do this now without falling under the shadow of long-dead thinkers and their belief systems. We can have an utterly Westerhaven science."

  He got it then, and the idea flooded him like a benediction. This was something he could do, something worthy of all the restless energy and passion that he'd wasted so long on petty intrigues and face-saving.

  Maybe it didn't matter that E
llis had wiped the record of this conversation; Aaron remembered its every detail with electric clarity anyway.

  "That's what you've been doing?" Livia asked angrily. "Reinventing things?" On another day it might have seemed a very Westerhaven thing to do. Now, the whole escapade looked trivial and foolish. "Even while Bar-rastea burned?"

  He winced, but held his ground. "I know how it looks, in the race of what's been happening. Unless you look at where Ellis wanted us to start."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'll show you: come here." He stood up and held out his hand. Livia took it, and with a shimmer of transition, found her virtual self standing elsewhere.

  This place was something like a half-cave hewn out of the side of a mountain — huge, cold, and echoing. The mouth of the cave was closed by a single sheet of cleanly transparent glass or diamond. Outside that vast window was a broad ledge of white metal, and beyond that nothing but an abyss of stars.

  The floor of the half-cave was cluttered with lathes, cabinets, and work benches. The place was also crowded with people — and when Livia saw them, she felt a knot in her stomach unwind. "They're alive!"

  Many of the peers whose names had appeared on the rolls of the missing were walking and talking here. At least six of Jachman's friends, supposedly staunch advocates of the city project, were physically present. Several were enthusiastically working on what looked like a half-finished boat, planing away at the wood while slinging fragments of ribald poetry back and forth. One saluted Livia.

  "So now you know," said Aaron. "I haven't been idle, and I haven't been neglecting the peers. Quite the contrary — you've walked in on something of a conspiracy." He smiled at her undisguised look of astonishment.

  "But what are you doing here? What could possibly have been so important that you — that these people weren't there to defend the city? The city, that's now burning — " She couldn't go on, but just stood there glaring at him.

  Gently but firmly, Aaron took her arm and led her to the huge curving diamond window. "We were under orders from the founders. Maren Ellis commanded us to try something that the tech locks have always forbidden. And we were succeeding. When Raven attacked we were all here, and nobody had time to organize a return to the city before air travel became unsafe."

  Something glowed under starlight on the broad metal shelf beyond the window. The shelf must have been fifty meters deep, and against that the barrel-shaped thing looked small. "Is that what you were working on?"

  He grinned proudly. "Yes. It's something, Livia, that we cast away over our horizon centuries ago. Something that's been impossible for any manifold for a very long time. It's a device for traveling in space."

  She stared at the thing. It looked like a wine cask. Whatever it was, that unobtrusive little object should have been as impossible in Westerhaven as flying craft had been for Raven's people. "How ... T

  "I wouldn't have even thought of trying it if Ellis hadn't insisted. I wanted to start by relearning the theory behind the mind-AI interface of inscape. But she insisted that wouldn't work. We had to rethink key technologies in Westerhaven terms, imagine how they could serve our values rather than change us. So the tech locks would ignore them, see? So up here, over the past few weeks, we succeeded in broadening our horizons to the point where we can build things like this.

  "We tried various designs before I hit on this one," he continued when she didn't respond. "The locks won't allow anyone to build any of the old space traveling designs because they all require an industrial culture that we don't want. So how do you preserve the technological mix of your own manifold, and still end up with a device to travel between worlds?"

  "Is that ... wood?"

  "It is indeed. Sealed with lacquer against the vacuum, of course." The barrel she was looking at wasn't big enough to hold humans. When she pointed this out, he admitted that nobody had taken that step yet.

  "But what does it do?"

  Aaron crossed his arms and stared at the black sky behind the barrel. "It goes away, and it comes back. So far, that's all. But that's a lot." He turned, and she saw he was frowning. "Though it seems a strange coincidence to me that Lady Ellis should have come to us asking for such a thing, just before these so-called ancestors arrived."

  "You think they're not from Teven?" she said jokingly. "And that she knew?"

  He shook his head. "I have no idea, actually. But listen, you need to come here, Livia. It's not safe down there."

  "Nowhere is safe," she said. "And I have people to look after down here." She was seething with anger at him for abandoning her in favor of this ridiculous project. "Look, I have to go. But ... I'm glad you called. It's good to know you're okay."

  "Look, I'm sorry I couldn't ... " He saw the look on her face and shrugged. "Come to us," was all he said. Then the vision dissolved andLivia was back amidst grass and morning dew.

  People were talking a few meters away; two of the peers were walking through the field. Livia started to hurry away; now was not a time when she wanted to play fearless leader to anyone.

  "Ms. Kodaly?" She hunched her shoulders, turned and smiled, still backing away. One of the men stared; the other smiled and, still smiling, steered his companion away from her. For the moment, Livia couldn't care less what she looked like. Just as long as they left her alone.

  "Livia!"

  Alison was waving to her from across the beaten-down grass. Relieved at the distraction, Livia walked over to her. She took a deep breath and forced her face into a carefree expression.

  "Good morning!" Alison looked fresh and untroubled, as if nothing terrible were happening. For her, nothing probably was. "Remember when I said I might know some people who could help? Well, they've agreed to meet with you — only you, though, since they have my opinion of you to go on. Can you come now? Or do you have duties?"

  "No, I've got nothing today," she said. "This is good news, Alison. Thank you." She felt a flood of relief — though she wasn't sure whether it was at the possibility of help for her people, or because Alison offered a chance to escape the camp for a while. People looked at her like she was some kind of leader now. Visiting with a lost friend who awakened awkward memories seemed a small price to avoid being singled out that way again.

  The mess tent was a strange mix of despondent and exhilarated people. Some of the peers had woken today to find new strength in themselves. Some just wanted to go home. The tensions were spilling into argument, but so far no duels had broken out.

  After a tense meal Alison led Livia down a path to the shallow sea. On the beach was a beautiful little sailboat. "It's about a half-hour trip," she said as they climbed in. "Oceanans refuse to hurry anything; it's an important part of our life. Anyway, you and I can use the time to catch up on gossip." They pushed off from the shore and bobbed out into a light breeze.

  As it turned out, Alison had maintained many ties to Westerhaven after she left. For the first few years her absence had not been geographic: she had continued to live in her parents' house while inhabiting a different manifold. She came and went as she pleased, but gradually gave more and more of her time to Oceanus. Finally she had moved there physically to be with a new lover. His name was Cam and he was, according to her, perfect.

  Livia watched the giant cable becoming smaller and increasingly two-dimensional in the mist-blued air. Instead of the grand estates of Westerhaven, she saw yachts and giant three-masted schooners on the horizon. Alison talked quietly about the values of Oceanus, and gradually Livia drifted into a reverie, thinking how you'd have to feel to measure your days by the breezes and currents of water. As she often did, Livia turned to music to help her imagine her way into Oceanus. Dreaming a slow pavane, with Alison's guidance she began to see across the bright lapping waves the distant sails of a vast seafaring civilization. Oceanus beckoned.

  So this was how it felt to live outside of time; Oceanus seemed like a refuge from every possible worry. It was clear why Alison loved it here. For the first time in two days,
Livia felt the knot of fear and anger inside her loosen a bit. She could even begin to forget her disconcerting discovery of where Aaron had been all this time.

  The hills and forests of Teven had faded away, leaving only dappled waves extending to infinity hi every direction. For all Livia knew, she and Alison could be completely alone on an endless, placid sea.

  Eventually she realized they were arriving somewhere: a yacht bobbed in the green water, its sails furled and its anchor down. She could see no one on deck, but a number of boats, ranging from sailboats like Alison's to kayaks, were moored at its stern.

  As Alison tied up the sailboat, Livia climbed up the yacht's side. She spotted a covered deck beyond the wheelhouse. Someone sat in a wicker chair there, sipping a drink. Without waiting for Alison, she walked over, feeling the deck sway subtly under her.

  Lucius Xavier squinted up at her from a deck chair, "livia! I'm glad you made it okay. Please, have a seat"

  She stopped dead in surprise; after a moment of paralysis she realized what he had just said, and warily sat opposite him. Alison didn't approach, but instead went into the wheelhouse, emerging with a tray. She put a glass of lemonade in front of Livia then retreated again. Livia stared at the glass.

  This was one of those times when it would have been good to hide behind masks and animas. But Livia had not failed to learn from years of Westerhaven intrigue. Imitating one of her own animas, she smiled graciously and sipped the drink. In moments she had recovered her poise enough to say, "How are you, Lucius?"

  He looked careworn. "I'm as good as can be expected, under the circumstances. I hear you led the peers out of the holocaust Very well done."

  "We would have done better if you'd been with us."

  He nodded, looking tired. "I know. I'm sorry that wasn't possible. But I've been working very hard ... behind the scenes, shall we say."

  So far behind the scenes that not even the founders had known what he was up to? Or had Ellis known? She made herself nod encouragingly. "You knew about these ancestors before the potlatch?"