Lady of Mazes

by Karl Schroeder

  Unless there was another way ... She turned and gazed at Qiingi's sleeping face. He seemed to sense her, and opened one eye. "What?" he mumbled.

  "Qiingi, how is it you were able to travel with us all the way to the aerie? The others all dropped away as they found places they couldn't believe in enough to enter. But you walked through every world with us. How did you do that?"

  "I believed," he murmured.

  "In what?" she said, allowing herself a moment of hope.

  "You," he said. "I believed in you." Then he turned over and went back to sleep.

  Shocked and confused, Livia lay for a long time staring at the dark curve of his shoulder. Was he just another believer in the stories about her? The thought hurt; disappointed, she finally turned away from him.

  Her eyes were dry; quietly, in the dark, she withdrew her sympathy from herself. She let it go, and let go too of her parents, her friends, of Barrastea and her rooms and all the things she had done or wanted to do. They drained out of her leaving her cold and empty. Then she curled under the warm wall of Qiingi's back and went to sleep.

  The week passed in boredom and increasing tension. Qiingi came to Livia's bed as often as not, but they continued to spend much of their daytime apart She supposed they were brooding on their separate losses. He and she were such different people that their intimacy seemed forced anyway.

  Aaron was barely polite to either of them. He hid in his room much of the time, building a radio using components he hoped were not contaminated with the nanotech-nology of the tech locks. He smelled of copper and oil when they passed in the hall.

  Qiingi had fashioned a spear out of scavenged household materials, and spent much of his time casting it in an upstairs hallway. Livia found out about it one day when she awoke to the sound of a furious argument between the two men. Arriving at the scene, she found a wooden pole sticking out of a wall that was peppered with diamond-shaped holes from previous throws. " — Know what could happen if you hit a circuit that can't repair itself?" Aaron had been shouting.

  Livia walked away without intervening.

  There was a time when she had considered Aaron her closest friend; had he wanted more than that? Did he love her now? He had never expressed such desires to her before. Livia resented his silence but didn't feel that it was her place to bring up this subject. They all began avoiding one another's eyes, and skulking about.

  Meanwhile anything could have happened back home — manifolds conquered, people killed or made into quislings of 3340. There was no way to know. Outside the windows the towers of cloud that made up the Lethe turned slowly, revealing deep cavities and slopes within themselves. And beyond the Lethe, something else was becoming visible, day by day. Coronals and starlettes glowed out there, as well as brilliant pinpricks that moved almost perceptibly fast Aaron had brought a telescope with him from the aerie, and he spent a lot of time peering at the newly revealed wonders. Once, as they were all sitting in the living room, he turned and said to Qiingi, "Come here."

  The warrior looked over at him warily. "Come on. I want to show you something," said Aaron. Reluctantly Qiingi went over and looked through the eyepiece.

  Livia had no interest in telescopes, and Qiingi said nothing at the time about what he saw. That night, though, as they lay together, he told her.

  "I remember trying to catch mist in my hand when I was a boy. I had thought that the Lethe would be the same, that it was a kind of fog too insubstantial to see." Instead, when he pointed the telescope at the Lethe he saw, not mist, but a broad distribution of starlike points that only merged to form the cloud at a seemingly infinite distance. Aaron had showed Qiingi how to zoom in on one of the points; up close, it looked something like a dismembered aircar leg was coalescing out of the fog. It hung alone in space, distant sunlight picking out fine detail on one half of it, the other half an unformed smudge. He focused the scope on another pinprick of light; this looked like it would become a bundle of girders, given time. And over there was a curved diamond-glass window, visible only as arcs and lozenges of reflection. Each of the objects was separated by many kilometers from its nearest neighbor — but there were billions, trillions of such pieces. Between them, Aaron had explained, an unguessable amount of virtual matter floated. Its components seemed to drift together over time and spontaneously morph into objects and devices of any sort.

  Livia lay there a long time thinking about it, aware that Qiingi was doing the same beside her. The Lethe Nebula was nothing more or less than several civilizations' worth of parts and supplies, drifting slowly in currents and eddies of their own diffuse gravity. According to Aaron, countless fusion-powered ships grazed up and down the vast outer surface of the cloud. Qiingi suggested that this might be the solar system's watering hole: a gathering place for whatever it was that lived beyond all manifolds, beyond the tech locks. Here they — whatever they were — fed off the bounty provided by the anecliptics.

  And somewhere within that abyss of drifting machines and parts, the anecliptics themselves might lurk — watchful, alert for anyone who tried to take too much or enter too deeply into what Lucius had called the "Fallow Lands."

  Or, perhaps, alert for anyone who tried to leave.

  11

  Their experiences at Rosinius Coronal remained vivid in Livia's memory later; the coronals that followed tended to blur together. Maybe it was because they spent more time at this first stop, or maybe it was that in those first days Livia wondered whether its desolate jungle was to be their home for the rest of their lives.

  When the coronal first loomed ahead of them, they talked in anticipation about what they might find there: a culture of manifolds like their own, perhaps — or perhaps a fallen civilization, captured and conquered like their own by 3340. They spent time getting their stories straight, depending on what the people were like and how they were received.

  No one received them.

  Invisible grapples delicately plucked the flying house's tether and drew them through the skin of the coronal, depositing the house in what Aaron said was an airlock chamber similar to those underneath Teven. The room was big enough to accommodate a dozen houses; giant letters on one wall spelled out rosinius. After an hour of tense waiting, during which hissing and popping sounds indicated an atmosphere being pumped into the chamber, they finally ventured out their front door. Qiingi brought his spear. But there was no welcoming committee in the dusty corridors that opened off the airlock — only soil-clogged stairs that led upward into steaming air and the buzz of unfamiliar insects.

  They looked at one another uncertainly, then Aaron grimaced and said, "Might as well see what's up there."

  At the top of the half-blocked stairs they emerged in a clearing where some forest giant had fallen long ago, taking many of its neighbors with it. The tumbled logs were overgrown with moss and ferns and up-thrusting darts of new forest. It was bright under the hazy suns — three starlettes — but beneath the encroaching forest nothing was visible but gloom. They walked slowly into this cathedral of trees and stopped, daunted right at the start of their exploration.

  There were no landmarks that would make it easy for them to find their way back here. Still, nobody raised the issue; they all needed to know what had happened here. Unspoken was the thought that perhaps this was what Teven would look like once 3340 was done with it Then Qiingi pointed. "There is a deer track there," he said. "A track for something, at least; these plants are unlike any I've ever seen."

  Indeed, all the vegetation in sight seemed bloated, about to burst with water or sap. There was an unhealthy, fetid stench under the trees. Insectlike birds flitted under the high forest canopy. The ground here was clear of underbrush, but rows of huge fungi crisscrossed the loam like fences.

  "If we follow that track, we return the same way," said Qiingi confidently.

  "And what if we get lost?" said Aaron.

  Qiingi stood up straighten "I will not become lost."

  "Oh, like that's reassuring. I — "
>
  "Hey!" shouted Livia. "Are we going or not?"

  Aaron shrugged breezily. "All right. But I don't see what you hope to find."

  They walked in silence. After the first hundred meters livia was drenched in sweat; she found it hard to breathe this thick air, but she wasn't about to complain. She felt like they were finally doing something. Qiingi took the lead, and for the first time in weeks he looked alert, even happy.

  Asteroidal rocks, weathered with time, poked up here and there along the trail, which meandered back and forth but always maintained its general direction. They saw no animal life other than the distant avians. The creatures always stayed high above where stout branches reached out and vines drooled from the forest climax. The air was full of midges, but nothing bit them.

  The land became swampy, and the path wound its way in between dark pools. These were fringed with gouts of green vegetation that seemed frozen in some complex fight for space above the water; those stalks and branches that won were turned downward, leaves pointing at the black water. The gargantuan trunks of trees reared up in between the pools, and sometimes the path followed the backs of twisting exposed roots that formed bridges across the still, leaf-paved surfaces. There was no sign of the creatures that had created the path, but as they were crossing one of the pools Livia happened to glance down, and stopped.

  "That's odd." She pointed at a distant glow of pastel light that glimmered deep in the water. It seemed like frozen clouds of radiance were trapped down there. There was something familiar about the glow, but it was unlike anything she had ever seen in the forests and pools of Westerhaven. As she watched, the glowing roils moved slowly to one side, as though some great river were flowing beneath her feet.

  Then the first stars came into view.

  Aaron breathed an inarticulate sound of wonder. A glittering starscape appeared beneath the bridge, delicately shimmering as if trapped in the depths of the pool. "It's a window," said Livia. Qiingi frowned in confusion. "Don't you see?" She pointed. "The skin of the coronal is transparent here."

  He shook his head, uncomprehending — then gasped as a starlette appeared below, and bright dawn came to the shadowed pillars of the forest.

  The sunlight appeared first in the far distance; it looked as though some giant were lifting the trees away in patches here and there, leaving bright spring-green and yellow shining in shafts of sunlight. A crimson and gold glow welled up in the pool — and the little sun appeared there, too bright to look at. The wreaths of foliage around them were now bathed in full daylight, and the underside of the forest canopy far above was painted bright green.

  "This window could be kilometers in size," said Aaron. "Maybe once it was all clear, like a shallow lake. You could have canoed over the stars. But the soil's invaded it ... "

  The strange ground-lit day only lasted five minutes. But its glitter revealed vast distances under the forest canopy, and it was plain that there were no buildings here, no clearings — no sign of humanity.

  So, though they made several more forays out to the jungle, they never traveled farther than that very spot There seemed little point. They gathered large armfuls of various plants to feed into the food processors in the house; they came up at night and scanned the visible ring of the coronal for any signs of a living civilization, and they debated endlessly about what might have happened here. And finally, after four days, they trooped back to the house and Aaron replaced the rosinius sign on its side with the next name on the list of coronals he'd compiled while exploring Teven's underside. Sure enough, after another day of tense waiting, a creaking and popping signaled the withdrawal of atmosphere from the giant airlock — and then suddenly the house was falling, everybody shouting as the furniture flew every which way. Rosinius had released them.

  So began weeks of travel and disappointment, as each coronal turned out to be empty — whether jungle like Rosinius, waving grassland like Makhtar, or ice and mountains like some others. Barren as they were, though, with each coronal they visited they came closer to the outer boundary of the Lethe Nebula.

  When they emerged from the stairwell in the last coronal for which Aaron had a name, it was to find themselves standing on an island no more than five meters on a side, in an endless ocean choked with ice floes. The sky was full of low, brooding clouds and the wind cut like daggers.

  They had talked about what they would do when they ran out of destinations. Aaron had proposed a bold solution, one that might not work. If it didn't, there would be no disastrous fallout They simply wouldn't go any farther, and would have to retrace their steps back to Teven. But if it did work ...

  He and Qiingi changed the sign on the house to read JUPITER.

  A day later, as usual without warning, they fell into blackness. This time, they had no idea what their destination would be. All they knew was that the Lethe Nebula had begun to recede. The glittering complexity of the greater solar system lay ahead, its threats and promises unknown.

  By the second day of this new journey, something changed. Aaron's crude radio had begun to pick up faint voices.

  There were thousands of them, overlapping on all frequencies. It was difficult to pick out and follow any one for more than a few seconds. Some of the complex noises they heard might or might not be human, but many spoke an understandable dialect of WorldLing. Understanding the language didn't help; very little that Livia heard made any sense. She listened for an hour, and the impression that built up was of a vast and vibrant civilization completely concerned with its own affairs, either ignorant or uncaring of the discarded worlds right next to it.

  The view out the windows reinforced this impression. They kept the lights off in the living room much of the time now. All took turns sitting in the darkness and watching, as something like a giant scintillating galaxy emerged hour by hour from behind the Lethe Nebula. Countless storiettes of all sizes lit the sides of the nebula from within that tangle of detail. There were hundreds of worlds for every miniature sun: ring-shaped coronals, long oval cylinders, round balls of metal just a few kilometers in diameter, and crystal rods, cubes, and spheres like teeming one-celled organisms. All of space beyond the Lethe seemed to be filled with light and structure, starlettes and mists of worlds receding in layers and sheets, runnels of light raveling and overlapping into an infinity of detail.

  Aaron fussed over the radio and finally announced that the transmitter part was working. He actually joined Livia and Qiingi for dinner that night. "We can send voice, but nothing so sophisticated as inscape or even video," he announced. "The question is, what do we say?"

  They looked at one another. Qiingi nodded slowly. "We know that our elders' stories about this place are largely true," he said. "The elders speak of a single Song of Ometeotl mat encompasses all the gardens of the sun. All the planets and coronals, you would say. For some reason, our world of Teven is not part of this Song. These radio voices do not give any clues as to why."

  "Except one," said Livia, waving a fork at Qiingi. "We've heard ships signaling one another and their ports. None of them mentioned Teven, or Rosinius, or any of the coronals we've visited. It's as if diose places don't exist to them."

  Aaron shrugged. "Beyond their horizon. Nothing unusual there."

  "But, the elders have always been adamant about one thing," said Qiingi. "The rest of the solar system does not have horizons. It is all one place. So how could we be beyond its horizon?"

  They debated as the evening wore on. Raven's histories were very different than Westerhaven's; each manifold saw the past through a different lens. It was no surprise that they could find few common denominators in the stories.

  In particular, the history leading up to and immediately following the self-imposed exile of the founders to Teven varied wildly from place to place. Qiingi claimed mat this was natural, because that period constituted the origin, or dreamtime, of all the manifolds. "We each make it our source myth," he explained.

  Aaron opened his mouth to make some snide comment,
but was interrupted by a squawk from the radio.

  Qiingi raised an eyebrow. "Did it just say 'house'?"

  They crowded into me bedroom. Sure enough, the radio was saying, "Attention the house, attention the house. You have no identification beacon. This is a violation of — " bzzzzt. The last noise sounded tike machine-language.

  Aaron grabbed the crude microphone he had built. "Well, what do I say?"

  "Say we need help," Iivia said. "What's the Old Worldling word ... Mayday?"

  "Mayday, mayday," Aaron said into the mic. "We are unpowered and unarmed. Can you hear us?"

  Rich laughter poured out of the speaker. If this isn't the craziest stunt I've ever seen!" The voice faded a bit. "Hey, guys, take a look at this thing. Some damn fools built themselves a flying house."

  Iivia and Aaron looked at each other. "I doubt we're dealing with officials here," he said.

  Qiingi was staring out the bedroom window. "What do you think mat is?" he said, pointing.

  It looked tike a tittle metal star, seven-pointed and twirling sedately. Livia went to the window and shielded her eyes with her hands. In the second or two it took to do that the distant vision had expanded from an intricate speck to button-sized. Then all of a sudden it was on top of them: kilometers-long, sides of white metal, with chandelier cities on the ends of long netted cables slung from its central body.

  A shudder went through the house. "We've been caught," shouted Aaron. For a second Livia's inner ear told her she was felling, men things leveled out with a bounce.

  She was about to comment on the smoothness of then-capture when the bedroom was suddenly filled with vertical yellow bars, spaced about one per meter. These flickered, faded, and were replaced by a set of nested blue spheres. The black outside the window turned to static, and then landscapes appeared out there: a plain of wheat fields, turned sideways; a glittering cityscape; a vista of mountains.