Karl Schroeder - Lady of Mazes

"We have to deal with 3340," insisted Maren.

"What you're really saying," Livia said in an undertone, "is that the locks are yours alone, and you won't give them up."

"Someone escort Ms. Kodaly back to her bedroll," snapped Maren. "I believe she needs a rest."

Bisson stepped forward, an apologetic look on his face. Before he could lay a hand on her, Livia stepped forward and hissed in Maren's ear, "I'll tell them who you are."

Maren sneered at her. "What do you know, really?"

"I have memories I could give them," hissed Livia as Bisson took her arm. "Those who haven't carved inscape out of their heads at your request. There's one recent scene I could replay; it involves you standing on a balcony in Cirrus, not long after die farside explosion. It starts with you welcoming Choronzon like an old friend. You want me to tell you how it ends?"

Maren turned white. Livia had never seen such fury, but not for an instant did the founder lose her legendary self-control. No one standing more than a few meters away could have told that Maren Ellis was in a murderous frame of mind.

"Maren!" Someone ran up panting from the other end of the high tented space. "We got the signal from Lucius. This Filament person will see you."

"Wow, Maren," murmured Livia. "I will take them and go, I promise. Consider it a wise backup plan." The founder stared at her. "He is coming, Maren," said Livia.

Maren looked around at the uncomprehending faces of her lieutenants. Her shoulders slumped. "All right, then," she hissed. 'Take them and go."

To her waiting lieutenants, she said, "I just realized I didn't thank Livia here properly for her bravery and ... well, sheer audacity in leaving Teven to bring us help. Make sure you grant her full authority here — give her anything she needs," she added to a now thoroughly confused Bisson. Then she leaned in close.

"Remember, girl," she whispered, "this is my world." She smiled brightly, took Livia's hand and shook it —

— And columns of faint light leaped up behind her and all around, signaling the download of some tremendous amount of data into Livia's implants. "Th-thanks," Livia stammered as an inscape serling popped into existence beside Maren.

"The data you are downloading is too big for your existing storage. Would you like to delete material to accommodate it?"

"Yes," she said under her breath. "Go ahead, delete it all." It's just my memories. Just Westerhaven.

But what Maren Ellis had just handed her was incomparably greater.

Maren stepped back. She gave Livia a little squint, a kind of gentle "do as I say now" warning that seemed to hold no anger; then she turned and walked away with her delegation.

"Think the negotiation will work?" asked Rene from behind Livia.

"No." Livia crossed her arms, to hide the way her hands were shaking.

"Huh." Rene watched the small group leave. "But when this Choronzon comes, he'll drive out 3340?"

Livia nodded absently. "Oh, he'll do that; he'll be following the orders of the anecliptics — the ones who made Teven, and the Lethe. But he won't give us the manifolds back, Rene. I think the annies consider kicking out 3340 to be their only obligation to us. I'm very much afraid that we will be at the mercy of whatever Utopian experiment Choronzon might have in mind for us."

"So what can we do about it?"

"A great deal." She grinned at him. "I've got a part to play. So might you — but listen, I have to check to verify that Maren gave me what she promised. Give me a few minutes."

She retreated to a quiet corner and sat down. Once she was sure she was alone, she checked the memory in her implants. It was full, but it only had one object in it. Nervously, she told inscape to open the file.

She saw a tangle of glowing threads like hair spilling into existence in front of her. Livia shut her eyes to sharpen the image, and found herself immersed in a whirling vortex made up of sharp lines, almost like arrows that pointed and rotated. She reached out her hand and grabbed at one.

Towers of data flickered into being around her. The arrow flattened out, broadened, became a plain. Thousands of other lines stood up out of that plain, like a forest She moved her virtual body through the forest, checking the tiny labels on some of the lines: Resistance, Capacitance, said one; Condensers, designs and uses, said another. Instead of a forest, she imagined she was sailing across a sea of technologies, able with a gesture to pull any invention or principle to herself and, as if she was hauling a net full of fish, come up with all the other technologies that it necessitated. She grabbed one at random (Ballistics, it said) and pulled.

With it in hand, new options appeared as floating reticles around her. The tech locks were a multidimensional database, and the technological dependencies were just one way to cut the data. If she chose another view, she could see the anthropology and politics that spears, bows, and cannon each entailed. She dropped ballistics to explore more; to her surprise, even the five senses were listed here as technologies. They led her to the politics of the human body, and of other body plans: four-footed, winged, finned. The tech locks made no distinction between biology and mechanism.

Each technology equated to some human value or set of values, she saw. She'd known that But on Earth, in the Archipelago and everywhere else, technologies came first, and values changed to accommodate them. Under the locks, values were the keys to access or shut away technologies.

"But how do you work?" She dismissed the database view, and found herself looking at a set of genetic algorithms, compact logical notations. They didn't describe particular machine designs, but rather specifications; in practice, sims would evolve machinery for particular cases and according to local conditions and resources. The locks could work anywhere.

The specifications were the key. They relied on the database and couldn't be duplicated without it. They told how and when to employ energy fields to suppress various powers and macro effects. In Teven, the sims seemed to evolve machines to manipulate programmable matter. Raw materials couldn't be dug out of the ground in a coronal, since the ground only went down a meter or so. What metals or inorganic compounds were available were actually composed of bulk quantum dots which mimicked the qualities of the real thing: with a single command, a chunk of virtual iron could be transformed into pseudo-sulphur or silicon, or given characteristics that no natural element possessed. To disable any device, all the tech locks had to do was change its material composition. And all this required was a command sent through inscape.

The locks proclaimed that there were no neutral technologies. The devices and methods people used didn't just represent certain values — they were those values, in some way.

The system was self-consistent and seemed complete. And yet, though she searched through the database for a long time, nowhere could Livia find the one thing she was looking for.

She left inscape. Rene was standing over her, looking concerned. "Livia?"

"They're not there!" She laughed in relief and delight 'I was right!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Horizons, Rene. Horizons were not part of the design of the tech locks!"

"What do you mean — " But she had jumped to her feet, laughing, and embraced him.

"I'd always felt it, you know that? It was the one thing that seemed unnatural about life, the way the other manifolds were so totally inaccessible to us. For Raven's people or the others to be invisible, that was one thing; for them to be impossible to find — that's the crime!"

"What crime?"

"Maren Ellis's crime. The crime of assuming that the manifolds were so fragile that they had to be separated from one another by invisible walls. In the end, Maren didn't trust any of us to be able to resist the temptation of other ways of life."