Karl Schroeder - Lady of Mazes

Livia Kodaly was walking, head down, arms crossed, along a flagstone path. She looked over as he approached, and smiled.

Doran's inscape interface couldn't tell him if this was a real person, an anima, or an agent. Something was spoofing her identity. So he stopped several meters away from her, his own arms crossed, and grimaced in frustration. "Hiding in plain sight again, I see."

She laughed. "Still demanding definite answers, I see. How are you, Doran?"

He stuck out his hand to shake, but she opened her arms and hugged him. Whatever her state of being, she felt real just now. When they disengaged he stepped back, unsure of himself now that he was here.

A thousand questions crowded: Had she survived the eschatus machine, being on the edge of the blast radius? Was the warrior Qiingi alive as well? And most of all, was she behind the strange appearance of manifolds across the Archipelago?

"How are you?" she asked.

He opened his mouth and closed it again. "I ... I don't know," he said, surprised at his own honesty. "I showed the worst side of myself when I was here last. The cowardly side. Since then ... I've become a smuggler, did you know that? I'm helping distribute tech lock technology throughout the solar system." He grinned at her. "You never knew, but I fell in love with Westerhaven when I visited the Life of Livia." I fell in love with you. "So I'm trying to make places like it in the Archipelago. Manifolds. I've become a hero to the versos. And the versos are becoming something new. They're like the seeds around which new values are crystalizing — "

"Founders?" she asked.

"Yes! I've given my Scotland to some of them, you should see the manifold they're crafting there, Livia. Hard lives they're trying to lead — but theirs''

"And what's yours, Doran?" she asked as she began strolling again. "What do you own?"

"Shame," he said. "And determination. But I guess those have been what drove me all along."

They walked together, she did not vanish in the sunlight "Your vote is riding high these days," he said after a while. "She represents the new manifolds and her constituency is huge. And there are wars going on, Livia, between the annies and the followers of the Book ... " He shook his head. "But you don't care, do you? You've been hiding here in your garden, and you don't care what happens to the rest of the world."

"That's not true," she murmured. "The Government hired me to be a baseline, remember? It's just that I'm not the baseline for the Government's reality anymore. Nor am I for crippleview. I've become a goal for people like you who are trying to find their way out of the one-sided reality of the Archipelago. Naturally you can't see me as long as you still live inside that view."

She smiled. "I'm a founder now, Doran, and my manifold is vast You just haven't found your way there yet."

Desperately, he said, "But aren't you really here? Can't I see you? I came all this way just to see you."

"To see who, exactly?" she asked. "The Livia of me Life of Livia? The hero of the far side accident? The guide who led the peers out of fallen Westerhaven? The rescuer, who returned to chase the villains out of Teven? Or is it Alison Haver you're looking for?" She shook her head. "I could have stood back and let you meet one of those; but then you wouldn't have found me."

"And is this the real you? Or just another mask?"

Sadly, she turned away. "You haven't understood the first thing about manifolds, have you? It's not me who's put the mask on my face. It's you."

For a while Doran walked with her, confused and wondering. Finally she looked back, and her expression softened a bit "Let me teD you a story," she said. "You won't find this one in the Life of Livia. Nobody's ever heard it before.

"What have I had that's truly mine? What was it that I wanted? In my old life, here, I was unhappy with the peers, and Aaron's radical pronouncements rang a false note with me, too. I didn't have the words to explain my feelings to myself or anybody else, then. But you could see it all around you, in the peers fighting duels over fine points of aesthetics, or planning grand cities and works to renew Westerhaven when and if they came to power. They fought over a million different issues, but it always came down to one thing: How could we find a balance between our own uniqueness and our place in the world? Should we try to liberate ourselves from the constraints that the world and the previous generation had placed on us — and maybe abandon reality entirely — or should we throw away our creative souls and conserve the world that was? Westerhaven was always in a tug-of-war between those two poles, the liberal and the conservative.

"Well, before the invasion — in fact, just days before I met with Lucius and he took me to Raven's country — I took an aircar up in the night. Nobody saw me leave Bar-rastea; even my agents were asleep. I touched down ever so gently on the edge of a forest and left the aircar. The trees made a canopy of complete black overhead so I navigated entirely by inscape, walking into a wood alone, at night, far from family and friends.

"And as I walked I began to sing, and as I sang a different world opened before me. I had come to the manifold of the drummers — the manifold I had helped to save a few weeks before. When I emerged from the trees it was to see their towers still standing in the glow of the coronal's arch. Faintly, I could hear a single drum beating in the distance. It was very cold, the ground leeched all heat from your feet as you stepped through the spongy, wet grass. But I knew where I was going.

"Doran, nothing in the Life of Livia could hint at the feelings of freedom and fear I felt there, alone, breaking into a place that was currently guarded by the peers in daylight. My heart was pounding as I found the tower and walked up its steps in complete darkness.

"I replaced the water-worn drum of the last drummer with a new one I'd brought. Keeping the Drummers' manifold alive for another month or two was that simple. I secured the new drum and checked that the rains had topped up the cistern that dripped onto the skin. Then I walked back out again. It wasn't until I reached the outside that I paused for a minute to listen.

"Each drumbeat sounded clear and distinct. Each one rolled out into the night, reaching nobody's ears, but real nonetheless. It was a tremble of air, nothing more, yet in that tremble the drummers lived. In that tremble of air was something not of Westerhaven, not preserved by your Government or to be found in the narratives. Call it the Song of Ometeotl, if you wish. It remained in my ears as I stole back through the forest and returned in secret to my home."

She smiled at his astonished expression. "At the time I didn't know why I did it It was one of those actions that you can't reconcile with the person you think you are. But now I understand. I was honoring the existence and dignity of a reality independent of my own.

"If you want to understand any of the decisions I've made, you have to start there."

Suddenly she laughed. "Don't look so serious, Doran. I've got everything I wanted. I have my music and the people I love around me. I'm part of a Society. I'm a part of my world, I'm not struggling against it the way you have your whole life."

He winced. But it was a fair comment. After a while he asked, "So what happens now? Do you vanish back into the manifolds again?"

She shook her head. "You vanish. But hopefully not forever. I'm glad you came to find me, Doran. Perhaps we'll meet again. For now, all I can offer you is my thanks for being my friend. The best way I know to do that is in music."

Livia grinned, and walking backward in front of him, she began to sing. She sang about youth and age, and the turn of the seasons. It was a song about change and acceptance, and the small human things that made up a day, or a life.