Lady of Mazes

by Karl Schroeder

  She blinked and stepped back. Then she noticed something hanging from the rightmost gate pillar. It was an ornately framed mirror with lettering under it She went over to it choose an avatar to enter said the sign under the mirror. She looked up at her own reflection.

  She seemed wild-eyed and haggard — and as she thought this, her reflection's eyes widened even more, impossibly more, while her pupils shrank into little dots. She was so surprised she laughed. This just made her reflections' teeth pop all over the place like mushrooming skyscrapers, and as she blinked and tried to figure out what she was seeing, Livia found her mirrored self had turned into a cartoon version of her. She had huge buck teeth, her hair was a sweeping wave that plummeted past her big saillike ears, and her body had been reduced to a sketch, except for the outlandishly big hands and feet The apparition would have looked funny in other circumstances; now, though, it seemed bizarre and threatening. She felt her anxiety returning, but by now the manifold seemed to have stabilized.

  There was a tinkling click and the big gold gate swung open. Without hesitation she ran through.

  The forest where she had stood moments ago was gone. Livia looked around herself, and nearly fell down. Distance was seriously distorted everywhere she looked. Also, the whole landscape was rendered in fluorescent primary colors. She had to sit down on the road and stare at the ground in front of her to keep from becoming sick.

  It was all simplified, that was it. The dirt was a single seamless substance, with a simple texture and one color, brown. She reached out to touch it, and felt dirt — but her brain wasn't allowing any variation to it, no pebbles, no fines. It was just ... dirt.

  When her head stopped spinning Livia looked up. Now it was obvious what was going on here. The grass with its wildflowers and the rolling hills were all simplified as well. Some things were nearby — like the grass on either side of the road and the road itself — while some were in the middle distance, and some were far away. Her eye was telling her that there were only three possibilities: near, middle, and far. The clouds overhead were/a/; all equally far, just like the distant bills and mountains.

  She stood up and walked up the road, taking in the strangely simplified landscape. She had definitely escaped Oceanus; the question was, had anyone else?

  It came as no real surprise when she spied a strange figure approaching her from the middle distance. It was hopping. By this time Livia had begun spotting all sorts of detail. The skies were full of gamboling birds. There were jaunty trees here and there with friendly faces plastered on their trunks. They smiled and winked at her as she passed; the feeling of friendly surveillance gave her the creeps.

  So the fact that she was being approached by a giant rabbit seemed perfectly consistent with the rest of the place. The rabbit was a pale pink, with three-fingered hands and giant, bent-over ears. Something subtle about its face suggested it was male. It — he — approached in big bounding hops, each one accompanied by a ridiculous boinging sound. He touched down in front of Livia, bounced a bit, then said, "You're new!" in an appropriately big-rabbitish voice.

  Livia said, "My name is Livia Kodaly, of Westerhaven manifold. I'm looking for some friends of mine ... " She didn't finish because what she'd said wasn't what she heard coming out of her own mouth. She heard: "Hi! I'm Livia. Will you be my friend?"

  "Okay!" said the rabbit. "I'm Bounder. It's my own name and I chose it myself. I'm going to Centertown. Do ya wanna come?"

  "All right," she said, which translated as an enthusiastic

  "Sure!" Bounder set off, each of his hops apparently covering a dozen meters or more. Livia found she could keep up with him by simply strolling. Movement here was simple: head in the direction of something that was in the middle distance, and pop, it became part of the near distance. The disturbing implication was that nothing in Block-world was more than a few steps away from anything else.

  "What do you mean, you chose your name?" she asked Bounder. He didn't answer; instead, a pair of absurdly blue birds spiraled down from above, one landing on each of Livia's simplified shoulders.

  "Bounder was born William Mackenzie Casterman," peeped one. "He is forty-six years old," added the other.

  "Why ... uh, why is he pretending to be a rabbit?" she asked the bird-shaped agents.

  "He isn't," said one agent

  "Pretending," said the other. "He understands bunnies. He thinks bunnies are people and he feels like a rabbit.

  "It's quite simple, really. William was born with subnormal neural processes. You are going to ask why he was not fixed. It is because his parents live in one of the lower-technology manifolds. Their culture does not permit meddling in natural events such as childbirth."

  "So they sent William here?" It seemed barbaric.

  "William's parents loved him. They were happy to rear him regardless of his mental capacity. Unfortunately he proved to be highly accident-prone. One day he wandered past a river in flood and was caught in it. William's parents believe he died in the flood."

  She nodded slowly. "He fell in the water ... and when he woke up, he was here."

  "It was his wish. Despite his love for his family, William wanted to find a place where he fit in. Falling in the river was half deliberate."

  Doubtless William had angels. Those entities would have known him better than anyone; better than his parents, probably. They, of all his friends, would have known best what William really wanted.

  "William undertook a marvelous journey," said the bird. "He saw many fabulous things. At the end of the journey, he finally came ... home."

  A town that was in the far distance had popped into the middle distance. Bounder pointed. "See?" he said. "Cen-tertown! Come on!" He redoubled his speed.

  "Bounder, wait!" He stopped, looked back inquisitively. All kinds of questions were crowding in Iivia's mind, but they all involved big words and she realized that big words might be a problem for William Mackenzie Casterman.

  "I'm looking for a pal of mine," she said finally. That statement went through without any editing. Encouraged, she said, "He's called Qiingi. Have you seen him?"

  "Qiingi!" shouted Bounder. "My pal Qiingi! Come on, I'll take you!" Without another word he hopped away to the left, and Centertown became far again.

  She found Qiingi and fifteen peers sitting under a giant, perfect oak tree in a stylized grove. They all looked strange, some like child versions of themselves, some animals or fabulous beasts. Qiingi was an animated wooden Indian. She ran and embraced him.

  "Livia! We thought you'd been taken like the others."

  "No, no ... " She told them of her meeting with Lu-cius — slowly and haltingly, because Blockworld kept changing and simplifying her language (instead of "bastards" it had her say "bad guys"). She finally managed to get the chain of events across. "Lucius told me if I didn't stay with him they would attack" — which became "beat up on" — "the camp. I didn't believe him," she finished. She found she was trembling, whether from relief at finding her people, or anger at Lucius's betrayal, she couldn't tell.

  They were all that was left of Westerhaven; they comforted her as best they could until she steadied. Wiping her eyes, she looked around at the stylized landscape. "Qiingi, what is this place?"

  He half smiled. "It seems to be a refuge for people with hurt xhants. Your friend Esther found it."

  Esther was the last person Livia would have credited with the ability to travel. Yet, here she was, appearing as a tiny girl in a canary-yellow dress.

  "Esther! How did you do it?"

  "It's just like a place we have in Westerhaven," she said with a shy laugh. "Sometimes babies are born wrong, and sometimes their parents choose not to have them fixed. Then places like this are made for them. Adults have a hard time coming here at all, and if they do they arrive without weapons and without strength. I know this because I have ... well, a cousin." She blushed. "I've been visiting him my whole life. But I never talked about it, you know, in our Society."

  Through the aw
kward interface of Blockworld language, Qiingi explained that it was the Oceanans who had attacked the camp. "They expected us to try to escape by going down to the sea; I took these people up instead. The Oceanans saw and chased us, but I am good in forest paths, and we escaped them. They were sure to find us eventually, though, so we looked for another way. Esther guided us here. I am ... surprised that you found us."

  Livia tried to smile. "I ... travel well." lam good at rejecting places would be another way to say it. She understood that now, to her own sorrow.

  "But now that we are here," said Qiingi, "where else can we go?"

  Livia thought about the sims she'd run — and before that, Lucius's assertion that 334O's people were everywhere. She shook her head. "There's only one place we might be safe now. We're going to try to make it to the aerie."

  They ate their fill of the overflowing berry bushes. Then they faded into the forest, the ghosts of children leaving home.

  It was a relief to be alone. Aaron Varese sat on a small cot in an equally small stone cell, its walls rough-hewn out of asteroidal rock. Rust from iron deposits stained it here and there. Near the small slotlike window, the stone was wet from the permanent mists that hung at the aerie's height When he'd first arrived here, he'd often stepped outside just to admire the slick black surfaces that gleamed like a god's sculpture above and below. Today he simply sat, brooding.

  The others were all huddling together, venturing out alone only when they had to. Ever since the general order had gone out that the AI of the Societies was no longer to be trusted, the peers had been miserable in their isolation. Aaron had little time for Societies; he had even less for the real company of his peers right now.

  At the moment they were all bickering over the latest news from Westerhaven — or more properly, the total lack of news. For the first time in their lives, these young men and women were cut off from the culture and gossip of Westerhaven's social network. They couldn't believe it was happening. Their responses ranged from simple denial to outrageous and suicidal schemes to retake the fallen lands of Teven.

  All that filled him with contempt. It brought back memories that he normally tried to suppress. After the death of his parents in the crash, Aaron had sat with Livia for days, waiting for rescue to arrive. It didn't come, and didn't come, and gradually, it began to dawn on him that no one was looking for them. Inscape had crashed in this part of the world — and that was such a terrifying prospect that nobody from the outside would risk entering here. He had been abandoned.

  He had never viewed the duels and posturing of the peers with any respect since then. When he'd needed it most, they hadn't been there. He would never forget that. Worse, he saw the same attitude in the endless discussions and lack of action going on around him right now.

  Everybody wanted to know what the bizarre invaders — these "ancestors" — wanted. What were their politics? Were they religious? What scope of freedom would the people of Teven have under their rule?

  "Who cares?" Aaron had said again and again. "Catch me one of them so I can find out what technologies they use. That will tell us their true manifold, and it's all we need to know about them." His words hadn't penetrated many of their thick skulls, so now they were engaged in planning some pointless raid into the lowlands thousands of meters below the aerie. It was strategically useless, just a make-work project really.

  Nobody would listen to his theory about the invaders. Old stories and movies from the time before the manifolds told that men had once seriously tried to eliminate the boundary between the human mind and artificial intelligences. The only remnant of those early explorations in Teven was the omnipresent implant technology that let people communicate with inscape. He was convinced that much more was possible. Stories from the Modern period talked of "uploading" — artificial immortality by transference of the human personality into a computing system. Such technology didn't exist here in Teven, doubtless because of the tech locks. But beyond Teven, it must be possible.

  "What does this conquest matter if the invaders are in a position to change the very nature of our humanity?" he'd asked his peers. They had returned blank stares. In just such a way must primitive tribesmen have worried over how attacking Europeans would divide the village's goats. "We have to know what they are before we know what they want," he'd insisted. "And we have to know what they want before we know how to fight them."

  Idiots. They were losing everything because of their short-sightedness. Maybe they deserved to lose it.

  "Aaron!" Francis, the group's military leader, appeared in an inscape window. "There are people coming up the main cable! We think they're refugees."

  "Right." He was already on his feet, heart pounding. Could it be Livia? It was a ridiculous hope — but word had filtered out of Westerhaven before all went silent, suggesting that an unusual search for her was underway. Nobody knew why. But she, it seemed, had so far eluded the ancestors.

  He raced down stone steps built by unknown hands, and slammed out a doorway into the arctic chill that flooded down from the glaciers. The air here was thin and bracing, its cold almost a taste on its own.

  This truly was the edge of the world. High in the Southwall mountains, a giant outthrust of rock stood out like the prow of a ship between two split-backed glaciers. The cliffs behind Aaron rose sheerly for kilometers, finally ending in a seemingly infinite vertical wall of black material. Its mist-wreathed face was streaked here and there by long tongues of ice. The full height of this wall was hidden by thin planes of cloud. The spur of rock where Aaron stood was far above the tree line, too far even for lichen or wildflowers, but terminating on the flat top of the prow were several arrow-straight bridges, supported only by the cables they rode on, that stretched horizontally away into the sky. These cables connected to a whole network of similar lines that made a vast spider-web many kilometers above the lands of Teven. They were anchored here at the south wall of the coronal, and on their other ends to various of the great slanted cables that rose up from the coronal's floor.

  In happier times, Aaron had stood here and contemplated the impossible bridges that seemed to sit upon the air itself. As a boy he had watched his father meet traders from the Cirrus manifold as they stepped tentatively down to stand on solid rock for an hour or two. But he had never ventured up one of those strands himself. His parents had died before his father could deliver on a promise to take him to visit Cirrus.

  Behind him were several landing circles for arrears, and then a low entrance carved into the rock face of the cliff. Extending over many levels above and below this spot was the aerie, a Westerhaven outpost and recently Aaron's new home.

  He stood stamping his feet and watching the distant moving shapes. They slowly resolved into two parties, one seemingly running in the lead, the other following. Could both those parties be warriors of Raven, come to slaughter the remaining holdouts of the Westerhaven manifold?

  The tiny, struggling forms had as their backdrop a vast ocean of sunlit land and water that spread to a hazy infinity of distance, and curved up vertically to either side. Rows of great cables stood in ranks like delicate flying buttresses in the blued distance. Something flashed in the middle distance and he squinted at the distant dots. One of the people in the lead party seemed to be faltering. As he watched, the figure fell from the narrow bridge, tumbling helplessly into miles of air.

  Aaron turned and raced back to the entrance to the aerie. "Defend the lead party!" he shouted at his Society. All around he could see the animas of his peers racing to their posts. At the entrance he snatched up the rifle he'd had fabricated when the invasion began and turned to sight at the incoming refugees.

  He tried to count the figures, but they were nearly head-on to him now and the leaders were blocking those behind them. But they were getting closer — not yet in range, but almost ...

  A rock near his foot exploded. Aaron stumbled and fell, almost going over the edge. Loud bangs and ricochet whines filled the air as bullets tore up th
e ground where he'd been standing. Then he heard answering fire coming from overhead; his friends were firing back.

  He heard a distant shout and saw two figures fall from the bridge. He couldn't tell if they were in the lead party or the pursuers. The prey were getting close — enough so mat he could see that they were five young people, probably peers of Westerhaven. Still prone, he aimed past them at a pursuer.

  A flash of light hit him like a slap. "Ahh!" He dropped the rifle and put his hands to his eyes — too late. That had been a laser. Momentarily blinded, he froze, blinking back tears and trying to see past the ovals of light that persisted in his vision. As he was groping for his rifle, the vanguard of the refugees made it off the end of the bridge and he heard gunfire close by. The echoes were enough to nearly drown out the sound of running feet.

  Someone grabbed him by the shoulders. He surged up, trying to throw the attacker off.

  "Aaron!" It was Livia's voice. He clutched at the sound and when he felt her reality, hugged her tightly.

  "Come on!" she said. "The door's this way."

  He turned to go with her. The gunfire was coming so fast that its echoes overlaid one another to form a jumble of intolerable noise. And people were screaming —

  "It's coming down!" That wasn't Livia, but the accent was Westerhaven. He blinked again and looked over, glimpsed a face and an arm, hand pointing upward. Aaron looked up.

  A wall of sky-blue glacial ice was toppling majestically toward him. It was moving so slowly that it must be terribly far away. Hence terribly big ...

  "Come on!" Livia dragged him the last few meters into the doorway, which was crowded with a knot of bodies all struggling to get through. Before they could get inside the first blocks hit the spur behind them. Aaron found himself flying through the doorway to land on a heap of elbows and knees. Something hit his head and he spun to the floor.