"Lady of Mazes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Schroeder Karl)

4

Cicada and Peaseblossom were a bit distracted at that moment. Four people had entered the ballroom several minutes before. They did not appear at its center as Livia had, but popped into visibility on the periphery, as unobtrusively as possible. Still, heads turned throughout the park as the two couples strolled forward magisterially.

Founders! Cicada had clutched Peaseblossom and pointed. Founders have come!

Livia's friend Sylvie turned to the anima of Livia she'd been chatting with and said, "Oh, look! Isn't that Lady Ellis?" She pointed, hiding the gesture behind a mask. Livia's anima followed her gaze to look at the woman standing with her parents. It was indeed Ellis, one of the original creators of the Westerhaven manifold. Nearly mythological, Lady Ellis was seldom seen at this level. She and her own peers resided in mansions and realities of their own creation, rarely deigning to interfere with the affairs of their descendants. For her to be here was truly an honor for the Kodalys.

"Do you think we might be able to speak to her?" mused Sylvie.

Livia's anima laughed. "Try walking over there. You could vanish on the way!"

"Oh, wouldn't that be embarrassing!" Sylvie shook her head. "Better to wallow in real anonymity, I think."

Cicada glanced back to the authority sims he and Pease-blossom had been running, and gave the inscape equivalent of a shriek. Look! he said. What are they doing?

Agents of the founders were fanning out through the shifting clouds of simulations. Whenever they encountered a sim where Livia was being confronted over the drummers incident, they gestured imperiously and, using their unmatched authority, terminated it The agencies of the peers fell back in confusion, and a few began trying to get the attention of their real counterparts, who naturally would not have been sullying their hands by participating directly in political scapegoating.

— Why are they saving Livia?

— Let's sim them!

— Sim a founder? Impossible!

— Not impossible. Important! Come, let's try.

Before they had the chance to try it, the founders' agents acted, generating animas that summoned corresponding ghosts of Livia herself.

— What are they doing?

— I don't know. Let's tell Livia!

The two faeries dove from the sky, ready to defend their mistress at the first hint of trouble, even if it came from the founders themselves. But just as they were about to manifest in front of Livia, another figure appeared before them. It stood on the air, beautiful and radiating authority, and put a finger to its faintly smiling lips.

"Where are those guys?" Livia opened an inscape window herself and called up some generic agents. "I want to review my last conversation with Aaron Varese," she told one. "And find Cicada and Peaseblossom!"

The agent bowed and vanished in a puff of faux-smoke. At the same time, the sights, sounds, and scents of a different time descended around Livia: her last talk with Aaron.

It had only been a few days ago, so she remembered the occasion well even without artificial aids. Livia had been lounging on a couch in a gazebo on the grounds of Aaron's estate, while he paced the old wooden floorboards. It was evening and another party was winding down; the air was delicately scented and still warm from the day. The sky was clear, revealing thousands of stars, those to north and south wheeling slowly west, while those directly above turned grandly around the zenith. Aaron had sought her out to express his boredom with the other guests, then stayed for one of those half-drunken conversations that it was valuable but sometimes embarrassing to record.

"Everywhere I look I see limits," he was saying. "And I wonder why we tolerate them."

Livia had shrugged, languidly turning to look at the stars. "Limits are the fountain of creativity," she said. "Without them there is no novelty."

"So they say." Aaron crossed his arms and glared down at her. "They being inhuman powers that control our lives, and over which we have no control. Inscape; the demented AI of the tech locks; even the founders. They parcel out a tiny fraction of their power to us, just enough to allow us to live tiny, inconsequential lives. It's a tyranny. Something should be done."

She'd smiled ironically. "Like what? Should I gather the peers together and overthrow nature?"

He shook his head. "I've said it before, but the peers' plan to build a new city doesn't impress me. It's not ambitious enough by far. Westerhaven ... we've deliberately limited ourselves like all the other manifolds. Discarded technologies that we could have used to increase our power and influence in the coronal. Nobody here has the balls to try to effect real change in the world. It's a mediocre manifold, Livy."

"Then change it," she asserted. "Or make a new one! You've got the charisma and the convictions to do it single-handedly. Lean on your Society, Aaron, and it will happen. That's how a manifold comes to be, after all."

"What, with fifty, a hundred years of wheedling and cajoling?" He shook his head. "In the old days they'd just blow up the capital and take over."

She laughed. "In many places, they still do. But that's not our reality, Aaron, you know that"

"Maybe it should be," he'd muttered. He rubbed at his eyes, making the gesture a bit too dramatic as with all he did. "Anyway, that's my point. We can only work within the system. Not jump out of it. And Iivy, I do want to get out And I think you do, too."

Stop, commanded Livia now. The conversation froze, a night moth paused mid-flap above Aaron's ear. The talk had deteriorated after this point anyway.

She scowled out at the green park with its dancing couples. What had she just learned? Nothing, really; only that Aaron had an ache he couldn't satisfy in Wester-haven. But would that be enough for him to abandon the manifold of his birth? She couldn't believe he'd move to another reality without discussing it with her first.

She had just raised her hand to invoke another inscape session, when Peaseblossom appeared in front of her, frantically waving. "Liv-Livia, you won't believe what's happening!"

Cicada popped into being next to him. "Hsst you said you wouldn't tell."

"Yes, but — "

"Hallooo!" Someone was waving down on the ground, for all the world as if she could see Livia. Impossible, of course; this platform was a personal privacy zone.

"It's her!" Cicada pointed. Livia followed his gaze and met the eyes of a woman whose face she knew, but whom she'd never met in person. She was staring up at Livia from the ground. She could see Livia.

"Sorry to barge in. Can I talk to you?" said Lady Maren Ellis.

Livia was too shocked to reply at first. Then she stalked over to the ladder and climbed down. How could anyone — even a founder — so easily penetrate a privacy zone?

The question — and indignation — went out of her head when the founder shook her hand and said, "You're the young lady of whom I've heard so many good things."

Livia smiled weakly back. Ellis knew of her? She would never have expected such a thing. The founders, after all, were impossibly remote from day-to-day life. No one saw them. No one knew them, anymore.

Ellis didn't seem so intimidating up close. She appeared younger than Livia herself; even her eyes gave nothing away, seemingly those of an ingenue. But she took Livia's arm without hesitation and created her own zone of privacy around them. "I've been hoping I could meet you," she said. "We need to talk."

"I'm ... honored to meet you, Lady," said Livia, disengaging herself carefully so that she could curtsy. Warily, she said nothing more. Lady Ellis returned them to a bench directly below Livia's bed. With a wave she dismissed Livia's Society. The partygoers were still laughing and dancing only a few meters away, but Livia had no doubt that she and the founder were inaccessible to them now.

"We've been watching you," said the lady as she sat languidly on the bench. "Your veto over the annexing of the drummers' lands shows great promise; of all the youth of your generation, you and Aaron Varese have perhaps the most acute awareness of the world around you — the real world, I mean, not this paradise of phantasms we call home."

"I'm ... not sure what you mean. In case you failed to notice, I'm actually in a state of disgrace right now."

"Oh, I'm well aware of that. You voted against the interests of Westerhaven. But I'm well aware that you did so because you had actively tried to put yourself in the drummers' place. However briefly, you let yourself see through the eyes of strangers. And that is the kind of human being we were aiming to raise when we came to Teven. The annoyance of your peers is of no account." She dismissed them with a wave.

"Oh. Well, to what do I owe this ... "

The founder smiled dazzlingly. "I know, we've never approached you before. It's because we wondered ... well, I wondered whether your particular character has not been shaped by a circumstance that my own peers would rather not believe could be so ... fertile."

It took Livia a moment to see through the weave of words to Lady Ellis's meaning. "Character? The crash ... you think Aaron and I are special because of the crash?"

"I?" Lady Ellis gently tapped her own breastbone, leaning in close. "Not I, Livia, but all of us. Whether secretly or openly; and therein has lain the problem, for some time now." She sighed heavily. "My own peers have conveniently forgotten the circumstances under which we created this place." She gestured broadly, indicating not just Westerhaven, Livia felt sure, but all of Teven Coronal. "We bought this place with tragic loss and personal discipline. We built a paradise, so that our children should not have to go through what we went through. And what do we find? Our descendants are increasingly like the people we fled from. Yet two of them were lost to us for a short time — sheep strayed from the fold. And then they returned leading a train of refugees from devastated manifolds, like the sighted leading the blind. They were not like those helpless ones. They were more like us. Hard. Unsentimental. Everyone senses it. And your own peers are envious of those qualities."

"How can I be what you say, when I don't even remember that time?" Livia objected. "Hard? Not me — and certainly not ... " Aaron, she almost said; but there was no way she was going to reveal her feelings to this woman, especially not when her own masks seemed temporarily down.

Suddenly angry, she said, "We gained nothing from the crash. Nothing! And yet we've been marked for life by it. It gave us nothing, it took away people we loved."

The lady nodded, unapologetic. "I never said it was a positive experience. On the contrary, it must have been awful. That's precisely what your peers don't understand about it, isn't it? That nothing good came of it. Yet that is the very reason why you and Aaron seem the stronger for it."

"I don't understand."

"Of course not. You have no real peers to compare yourself with ... that you have met prior to today, that is." Lady Ellis smiled in a conspiratorial way. "I have no doubt that people have asked you many times for the story of what happened. No?" Livia nodded. "But has anyone ever told you how the crash affected us? The founders, I mean?"

"N-no." She had never even thought about it. "It was a great tragedy. All of Westerhaven mourned the families that died ... "

"Oh, so did we." The lady waved away that thought too. "No, the crash itself. How did we react to that?"

Livia looked at her blankly.

"Look." The founder looked down, frowning at the grass. "Inscape has let us create a perfect mask over reality on this world. You grew up in it, so the very notion that there could be something else ... it never occurs to you. But it occurs to us. We think about it all the time ...

"Two airbuses of Westerhaven Great Families were circumnavigating the ring-shaped coronal that morning. It was an educational outing for you, wasn't it? But your family remained here. Aaron's went along for the ride. And almost halfway around the world — thousands of kilometers from home — you were suddenly engulfed in a massive electromagnetic pulse. We saw it happen: I was standing outside, I remember a flash of light at the zenith as the mad anecliptic hit the coronal's undersurface and exploded through it. He tore up ten kilometers of forest and left a great hole in the ground, through which the air began to escape. I saw that, too — after the flash, clouds appeared out of nowhere and turned into a vast whirling cyclone on the far side of the world. What I didn't see was that the magnetic Shockwave had destroyed every artificial intelligence on that side of the coronal. Inscape was dead, your angels were dead, the manifolds there had crashed — and your buses were caught in a hurricane."

What was that word Lady Ellis had just used? Aneclip-tic? Livia had never heard the word before; the official story was that a meteoroid had pierced the coronal's skin.

The founder continued. "It's fortunate the coronal's healing powers are so great. The puncture was sealed before you could be sucked into space — but the buses crashed and everyone from Westerhaven except you and Aaron was killed. That much is history. But do you know what went through my mind when I saw that flash in the sky? Not that the coronal was being destroyed, although that was the rumor for some hours. No, what I thought was: they have found us."

She stood up, and to Livia's astonishment, began to pace. "They have found us. I thought that the oppressive culture that we fled, oh so many years ago now, had learned of our existence. That we were about to be pulled, kicking and screaming, back into the embrace of that monstrous empire they call the Archipelago."

She looked down at Livia, and now Lady Ellis's eyes did show her age. "You and Aaron experienced what such a catastrophe would be like, Livia. That is why you are special." livia matched her gaze, tight-lipped. "Special? You mean we're not Westerhaven."

"Westerhaven is not about conformity! You should know that No, it's just that you have the potential to see more of the world than merely this manifold. And that would be honorable, and truly Westerhaven of you."

Livia was troubled. She knew now that she was speaking not just with Lady Ellis, but with the founders as a whole; and the words she was hearing might or might not be coming from this woman standing before her. They had, it seemed, pierced the defenses of her Society, raising issues and incidents she would rather have edited away. Yet ultimately, her private inscape filters would not have allowed the conversation to get this far if they didn't think she would want to hear this. In fact, that was what was most disturbing.

"What is it that you want of me?" she asked. What am I willing to let you request?

Lady Ellis had lost her smile. She came and sat by Livia again. "Let me show you something," she said. She gestured, and a square of space in front of them opened to reveal a picture. It was a 3-D photograph of a city, taken from the air. The longhouses of Skaalitch were guarded by tall redwoods, and in the center of the photo several tall, intricate totem poles rose almost to the height of the trees.

"One of our people took this picture about six hours ago," said the founder. "From the air."

It took a moment for her meaning to sink in. Then Livia stood up quickly. "Oh! But that's ... "

"Impossible? Yes, it is." They both stared at the photo.

Taking pictures from the air was simple in Wester-haven. In Raven's world, however, photography did not exist. Neither did flying machines. Inscape and tech locking worked together to exclude inappropriate technological interactions; the upshot was that Raven's world and everything in it was invisible from Westerhaven. The two technology sets were mutually invisible. Lady Ellis was showing her a picture that by all Livia knew simply could not exist.

"The light from the towers reached the camera," mused the lady. "That's to be expected; it would reach our eyes too if we were flying by. But then, the tech locks should have edited it out of the camera's image, just as inscape would edit it out of our sensorium. The pilot said he saw this Raven city, Livia. What does that mean?"

She shook her head. An unquiet feeling had started in the pit of her stomach.

"It's like what happened at this potlatch thing, isn't it?" continued the founder. "I hear the diplomats dismissed the event as unimportant. Pah!" She waved away the window. 'They were too busy obsessing about Lucius Xavier to pay attention to the real issue. Worse yet, when we confronted them just now with this picture, they all hemmed, hawed, or hid behind their animas. Nobody wants to take this on."

Here it came, thought Livia. "Take what on?"

"Livia, someone has to go investigate what's happened in Skaalitch. That should be obvious. We think it should be someone who's had ... experience with situations of instability in the tech locks and inscape."

Livia blew out a heavy sigh. It was momentarily amusing to picture Jachman and his cronies going to the founders to manipulate them for this outcome. But they could never have had the authority for it. Nobody did. Which meant either that Ellis was telling the truth about her motives for asking Livia ... or there were politics here she knew nothing about.

Either way, this conversation couldn't have happened, no matter how strong Lady Ellis's authority, unless Livia was willing to let it happen. That alone was sufficient to guarantee her answer.

"Yes," she said. "I'll go check it out."