Karl Schroeder - Lady of Mazes

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.