Lady of Mazes

by Karl Schroeder

  Livia bit her Up. "But where do we even start — "

  "We will start," he said loudly, "by getting as close to our goal as we can. Cicada, set a course for the Fallow Lands."

  It had taken the flying house weeks to pass the border of the Lethe Nebula and enter Archipelagic space; Pease-blossom and Cicada's little ship traversed the distance in a matter of hours. For the bulk of the journey, Livia lay asleep on a bunk in one of the ship's cramped little cabins. Qiingi checked in on her from time to time, but she didn't even roll over.

  Qiingi sat in the cockpit with the lads (as Livia called her agents) while they plotted their course and bickered endlessly about what to do. The ship's cockpit was purely superfluous, of course; but the lads loved sitting in retro-style flight chairs with a big instrument panel in front of them and a broad diamond-glass windshield through which they could watch the approaching Lethe.

  The flying house had avoided the denser clouds on the way out of the nebula. Now they were steering directly for them. Above the glowing instrument panel, the light from the Lethe was delicate, almost invisible against the blackness of space itself. But if Qiingi looked closely he could see vast curves and billows of rose, green, and palest white hiding the stars. As a boy he'd been told these Night Clouds were reflections of the distant camp- fires of the thunderbirds. He supposed that wasn't too far from the truth.

  Remembering the thunderbirds brought Qiingi to thoughts of home. Was it possible he would walk those forests again, and commune with their enchanted inhabitants? He had given up on such hopes — yet here they were, arrowing closer to Teven by the second.

  He didn't allow himself to hope yet They had a plan now, but he doubted it would succeed. It was, in its own way, too obvious an idea to work.

  The nebula grew over the hours until its curves took up the entire sky. Finally the little ship approached a wall of pale mauve that stretched to infinity above, below, and to both sides. It seemed close enough to reach out and touch.

  "No," said Cicada with a laugh when Qiingi suggested it. "We're still a million kilometers away."

  The little ship reduced its velocity somewhat; still, when they shot into the cloud, Qiingi half expected to feel some sort of impact, diffuse though he knew it was. He sat in the cockpit for a while watching it slowly solidify behind them.

  Then came the message they had been waiting for. Suddenly light bloomed ahead of them in a rapidly fading sphere: an explosion? Simultaneously every instrument on Cicada's board squawked or blinked.

  A deep voice spoke out of the air. "Archipelagic ship: alter your trajectory or you will be destroyed."

  Peaseblossom looked pleased. "Well, that's a clear directive!"

  "Should I wake Livia?" Cicada asked Qiingi. He shook his head.

  "Not yet We'll do what we discussed. If it doesn't work, at least she doesn't have to watch it fail."

  Peaseblossom nodded. "Here goes."

  He and Cicada had spent the previous evening hacking into parts of the Life of Livia that would never have been controllable back in Teven. This had been Livia's idea; after walking through the Life for a while with Sophia, she had returned thoughtful, even a bit excited. "The anecliptics don't know us," Qiingi had pointed out. 'They will turn us away. How can the Life change that?"

  "Something the lads said yesterday got me thinking," she said. "Peaseblossom? The copy of the Life that's out there ends at the arrival of the ancestors, right?" Pease-blossom nodded.

  "And you changed everybody's name and appearance in the sim."

  "I can't speak for all my versions," he said. "But we always changed you. Not everybody else," he added guiltily. Qiingi nodded; his face had not been changed, at least not in the version Lindsey had seen.

  "But it's likely that agents of the anecliptics could have looked at the sim and not recognized anybody."

  Peaseblossom looked puzzled. "Who would they know to recognize?"

  "One person," Livia had murmured, wide-eyed at her own idea. "They only need to recognize one."

  Now, Cicada poked at some of the controls and inscape blossomed back into being around them. Everything looked the same — except that someone else sat where Peaseblossom had been.

  She stood up and leaned forward over the instrument panel to flip the manual speaker switch Cicada had insisted on installing.

  "I'm not an Archipelagic," she said. "This is Maren Ellis of Teven Coronal. You know me, though we haven't met in two hundred years. I request permission to return to the coronal you gave me."

  For a few seconds there was no response. Then, not words, but a flow of numbers across one of the cockpit's archaic display screens.

  Peaseblossom/Maren turned to Qiingi, a triumphant smile curiing his/ her lip. "They're coordinates," he said, still in Ellis's voice. "We've been invited in."

  Livia came up to the cockpit when the ship began to decelerate. She felt impossibly weary, and nervous at the same time. Everybody was crowded into the little room; Sophia quickly slid out of the way when Livia came up behind her.

  Qiingi also made room for her. "It could be something other than an anecliptic," he said. "We found it hiding in the deeps, emitting no information stream. It's very cold."

  "We're ten thousand kilometers in," added Peaseblos-som. He still looked like Maren Ellis; the sight made Livia ache for her Society. With an effort she looked past the disguised agent. No stars were visible out there, just a faint, iridescent curve that rose from left to right.

  "Is that it?" she asked. Peaseblossom/Maren shook her head.

  "As best we can tell, that's a new starlette they're building in here. It's a big geodesic sphere, hundreds of kilometers in diameter. No, we were kind of thinking it might be that." He/she pointed.

  Silhouetted against the faint gleam of the unlit starlette, at first it looked like nothing more than a stray grain of rice, hanging in darkness. But Livia's heart skipped a beat. "Magnify that," she said tightly.

  The thing expanded to fill her vision.

  She remembered once laughing with Aaron's parents. It was seconds before their deaths. Livia had glanced away from them, her gaze caught by something happening outside the airbus's window. She had leaned toward the glass, puzzled.

  They were a thousand meters above the waving grasslands of Teven's far side, yet somehow a white tower higher than them had grown up in an eyeblink. The tower was translucent, more like an expanding cone of light than something solid. Balanced on its very top, disintegrating even as she glimpsed it, was a white oval. It wiped away the clouds around it, giving some sense of scale in that instant: it was huge. Hundreds of meters across, a kilometer long. And the tower was gone; where it had been, a wall of fading white rushed outward like a ripple in water. A split second later the Shockwave hit and Livia was raked by swirling flinders that had been the window. After that: jumble, pain, and screaming.

  She turned away, feeling sick. "That's it," she said unsteadily. "An anecliptic."

  About the only encouragement they got from the silent anecliptic was the fact that it hadn't trained any weapons on them. It was festooned with them, according to the ship — enough firepower to burn off a small planet But the lozenge-shaped vessel had no windows or hatches, and remained obstinately silent for the next day.

  Then, unexpectedly, the black billows of the Lethe lit up in the distance. A long flickering spear of light tunneled through the millions of kilometers, sliding to a stop right next to the anecliptic. There it hung, a small incandescent point like a man-sized sun. When Cicada showed Livia the recording, it seemed like the anecliptic glowed for a moment; then a slot-shaped hatch opened in its back and the brilliant bead drifted into it.

  "And that's it," Cicada said with a flourish. "Whatever it was, it's inside now. And the door's still open."

  "So we better go," added Peaseblossom.

  " ... If we're going to get inside."

  "Because it sure isn't talking to us out here."

  So after a solid lunch that Peaseblossom
insisted on, he, Livia, and Qiingi jetted away from the frost-rimed hull of their little ship toward the curving wall of the silent anecliptic. It was hundreds of degrees below zero out here and their shifts couldn't keep up, so for the first and hopefully last time in her life, Livia found herself totally encased hi a metal contraption Peaseblossom called a "space suit." It was like medieval armor upgraded with lights and Plexiglas — no less uncomfortable, but easy to use in free fall.

  "I don't like this view," Qiingi muttered as they crossed me infinite abyss between the ships. "I would almost prefer the illusions of the Archipelago." He sounded as anxious as she felt.

  "It's not a 'view,' Qjingi," she said, for distraction. "This is reality,"

  "No," he said. The man-shaped blot to her right — she'd thought that one was Peaseblossom — waved a gloved hand. "We are not truly experiencing the vacuum and cold. We are inside a manifold mediated by these suits."

  She frowned at the approaching anecliptic. Of course he was right I've been spending way too much time around Doran Morss.

  They arrived at the dark entrance to the anecliptic. "Let me go first," said Peaseblossom.

  "Yes," Cicada said in their earphones. "He's expendable."

  The figure on Livia's left shot forward and down, disappearing into the dark opening. For a few seconds there was silence, then a space-suited head popped up again. "You'll never guess who's here!"

  Curious, they followed him in. At the bottom of the slot — which was about five by thirty meters, and about ten deep — was a simple, diamond-glass door. Light shone from the other side; as Livia approached she saw what looked like a red-walled apartment, with a few chairs, a canopy bed, and a kitchen area off to one side. They were upside-down with respect to it, its down oriented to the outer hull of the ship. Two human figures hung in midair in the center of the room.

  One was a young woman. She had nondescript features, and was dressed in a sparkle of flashing diamond light — a typical Brand New York fashion. Livia was pretty sure she had never met her before, but recognized the significance of her amber, glowing eyes. She was a vote.

  The other person, though ... Black hair, high cheekbones, piercing eyes — Livia immediately recognized the self-styled god, Choronzon. He nodded and crossed his arms when he saw them. The glass doors slid back and Livia and the others entered.

  "Give us a minute to bring some air into the room, then you can take off your suits," said the god over radio. Then he peered more closely at Peaseblossom, frowning. "So you're not Maren Ellis after all. We suspected that, of course ... "

  Livia took off her helmet. "No. A friend of hers." She turned to the young vote. "I haven't had the pleasure ... My name is Livia Kodaly."

  Choronzon nodded again, smiling slightly. "Alias Alison Haver. It's all starting to become clear."

  The woman bowed to Livia. "Emblaze."

  "What are you guys doing here?" asked Peaseblossom. Livia shot him a sharp look. It seemed he knew both these people.

  "Our host summoned me after hearing from someone he hadn't spoken to in two hundred years," said Choronzon. "I took it upon myself to invite Emblaze along since I suspected she'd want to talk to this 'Maren Ellis.' ... Would you like some gravity?"

  Hesitantly, Livia nodded. Remembering the flying house, she grabbed the back of a couch while the ship slowly began rotating.

  "So Maren is still alive?" asked the god, pulling himself into a chair to wait out the spin-up to full gravity. Livia and Qiingi did likewise. Peaseblossom remained standing behind them, still suited up.

  "Maren was alive when we left her," said Livia. "But I don't know if she still is."

  Choronzon looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"

  "If you know Maren Ellis, then you know Teven Coronal," she said. She felt a surge of triumpli — and relief — as Choronzon nodded. "Teven Coronal has been invaded," she went on, watching his eyes.

  He had the good grace to look surprised. "By whom?"

  She hesitated. She wasn't here to explain things to Choronzon, but to learn what she could from the annie. "I mink you know. It's true, isn't it, that the anecliptics aren't without their internal struggles? I'm sure you're aware that one of them went rogue a few years back."

  Now Choronzon really did look startled. "He was destroyed. I ... saw it done."

  "So did I," she said drily. "Yet, not long after that, strangers came to Teven Coronal. It's possible that the anecliptics let them in, but I don't believe it. If the annies had wanted to move against us, they'd have done so directly. No, these people snuck in."

  "Invaders?" He shook his head. "But they couldn't have gotten in — "

  "Unless they were able to get past the annies," she finished for him. "Which allegedly is impossible. Unless they came from some distant star where technologies have exceeded even the Archipelago's. Or ... "

  "An anecliptic gave them a way in." Choronzon stood up; the room had stabilized at about a half gravity. The woman Emblaze hadn't moved; she stood silently with her feet planted wide. "You're saying he's still alive," said Choronzon.

  "No. But I think I know what this rogue anecliptic did before he died. Please, Choronzon, I don't mean to be rude but ... I came here to speak with the anecliptics. Not to you."

  He laughed. "You are speaking with them. Through me. They won't talk to you directly — not out of contempt, but they've learned to be very cautious about all communication. Many times, trans-human entities like myself have tried to infect their datanets using seemingly innocuous messages. Nowadays the annies live in a kind of dream-time; their interfaces recast and randomize any signal from the outside world, hashing it to the point that no Trojan horse programs can survive. What's left reaches their minds as distant whispered music, if at all. Getting their attention is an art, not a science.

  "This entity," he gestured around them, "is the one who opened the doors to Maren Ellis and William Stratenger, back in the days when the annies sometimes disguised themselves as humans and walked the Archipelago. You can call this fellow Gort." He smiled at some private joke.

  Livia frowned. "I have to confess that I'm suspicious of you, Choronzon," she said. "You could be here to prevent us from telling this Gort what we know." He simply shrugged. "Yes, I know," she said irritably. "We do have to trust you, don't we?"

  "I can give you a token of my faithfulness," he said. "You see, I remember Maren from the old days. I'll unreel a few of those memories, if you'd like."

  This was the perfect opening, so Livia took it. "Oh, I suspect you have memories that are a bit more recent than that, Choronzon. Isn't it true that you visited Westerhaven after the mad annie was killed?"

  After a moment he said, "She told you this?"

  "No. But she used the phrase mad anecliptic to describe something I saw but never described to anyone — something she never saw at all. How did she know what blew up over the far side of Teven, unless someone told her?"

  Choronzon grinned. "Very astute. Okay, yes, I did visit Maren after the incident. She told me there were two Westerhaven survivors, as a matter of fact. Would you like to see our meeting?"

  Livia opened her mouth to say yes, then closed it. She reached around and found Qiingi's hand; he put it on her shoulder, a warm reassurance.

  "Thanks," she said after a long pause. "I'll review it later. We have more important things to talk about right now. As I said, I know what the mad anecliptic did. I know who attacked Teven Coronal. What I don't know is why."

  "Then tell us the what, and I'll see about the why."

  Livia told him — about the invaders of Teven and how they claimed allegiance to something called 3340. She described their escape from Teven; Emblaze listened to this account with visible fascination. Livia went on to tell how she had been given a special edition of the Good Book when they arrived in the Archipelago. When she revealed that its version number was 3340, Choronzon slumped back in his chair, shaking his head.

  "What?" she said anxiously. "I'm wrong?"

 
"No," he said, "you're right, that's why I'm upset We didn't see it."

  "But what am I right about? That the mad anecliptic created the Good Book? That it's some sort of emergent intelligence that seems to be replacing the Government?"

  "Yes, and yes," he said. "But without knowing that Teven was invaded by 3340, we had no reason to make a connection between the two. And we could be wrong ... it might just be a coincidence that this number pops up twice. In a place the size of the Archipelago, coincidences are inevitable."

  "But I don't understand," she said angrily. "None of it Why the Book? What was this annie trying to do? And why invade Teven?"

  Choronzon sat still for a while, staring at nothing with a frown on his face. Then he said, "About Teven, I don't know why they're there. I have a few ideas ... As to what the annie was trying to do — what the Book is trying to do — that's clear." He thought for a moment "Do you know what the ruling principle of the Archipelago is?"

  Livia shrugged. "Agonistics," said Peaseblossom behind her.

  "And what is agonistics?"

  Her agent spoke again, as if reciting a dictionary entry. "You can compete, and you can win, but you can never win once-and-for-all."

  "Exactly. It's the same principle the great democracies used back in the Modern period. You could become president but you couldn't stay president. You could build a big corporation, but you couldn't become a monopoly. But the Moderns didn't apply agonistics to everything. They couldn't because they didn't have a good model for it."

  "And you do?" She had no idea where this was going.

  "We do." He nodded. "The problem is that whenever you build a large, well-interconnected system, you take the chance that it'll end up in a critical state."

  "And what is a ... ?"

  "Imagine you're at the beach. If you've got a pile of sand and you drop grain after grain on it, one after the other, most of them will just land there and stick. But every now and then, one will cause an avalanche. Usually it's a small avalanche. But sometimes it's a mother of all avalanches that takes down the whole pile. A sandpile is a system vulnerable to critical states: states where change is poised ready to avalanche."