Lady of Mazes

by Karl Schroeder

  — And it shattered.

  Reflexively she grabbed for the edge as she fell, and swung out and then back, slamming against the side of me wall below the level of the ballroom's floor. Above her was a gabble of concerned voices and several arms reached down, waving futilely just out of reach. She slid down a centimeter, then another, and made the mistake of looking down.

  Clouds wavered past, kilometers away. Below them, nothing but cold ocean.

  She screamed, feeling the jagged edge of broken window cut through her fingers, then she had to let go and she fell —

  — And was standing again in the ballroom. She stumbled and this time when she leaned against the unbroken diamond wall, it held. She looked at her hands; there were no cuts.

  The votes were staring at her with a creepy intensity. Doran Morss looked angry.

  "Told you she'd pass," said the vote Morss had been arguing with. He swore at it and walked away. The vote turned back to Livia.

  "My apologies for the ... unexpected nature of the test. It's to see whether you still have normal human responses to threat situations. Most Archipelagics who suddenly found themselves hanging from a cliff would assume it was just another inscape experience, and would not struggle. They'd have had no adrenalin reaction; yours on the other hand was strong."

  "What does that mean?" Her heart was still pounding in her chest, and she was angry, but unsure at who or what

  "It means you might be useful to us," said the vote. "Ms. Haver, would you like a job?"

  Aaron had accused her of being idle. It was hard not to be when every avenue that might lead home brought you in circles. If only for her own sanity, she had to do something that produced results.

  "Yes," she said to the vote, "I'll take your job." Whatever it is.

  The solar system pinwheeled around Aaron. For hours he had swept like an angel through inscape visions of the Archipelago, trying to learn everything about everything. He loved it, loved this place and the ocean of information. But his back was starting to ache and there was a persistent pain behind his eyes. Worse, he was feeling guilty. He should have spent his time searching for ways back into the Fallow Lands, instead of catching up on two centuries of history. But he couldn't help himself.

  For a while he had hovered over the sun, amazed at the detail of the boiling Hadley cells like rice grains on its surface. Even down in that incandescent chaos, Archipel-agic machines grazed. Vast tethers swung down and up, harvesting material from the inner orbits of the sun in an intricate dance. Farther out, the heavy-metal asteroids known as the vulcanoids had been taken apart and made into giant arching machines that focused the outpouring solar wind into discrete streams. These hurricanes of energy were directed with pinpoint accuracy throughout the solar system, where they acted like trade winds to push cargoes, and even whole coronals, from port to port.

  The closer he looked the more detail there was. Each of the thousands of coronals had its own history and local flavor, all open and visible in a way the manifolds had never been. True, everyone could live everywhere at once through inscape so there were few real cultural distinctions. Automatic translation hid any language differences; and since any coronal could have its own mile-high waterfalls or any other wonder imaginable, natural beauty was kind of redundant here. Qiingi and Livia kept complaining that this place lacked the overwhelming abundance of Teven's manifolds.

  There was more here than could be learned hi a lifetime, though. Couldn't they see that? With a heavy sigh he wiped away the inscape view. Now he stood in a sumptuous apartment somewhere in Doran Morss's chandelier city. Outside the French doors to his left was a wide balcony that currently looked out over a view of the drifting sands of Mars. Once or twice he'd tuned it to see the blasted heaths and hills of Morss's Scotland. That was his physical location, after all. It made no difference; when he stepped out of this apartment he could just as easily view the streets of Brand New York or an aerostat city on Venus. He could be anywhere — except Teven Coronal.

  He stalked into the kitchen to find an analgesic patch for his neck. While there he saw that one of his discussion boards had filled up with comments. He had generated dozens of agents to comb the Archipelago for any clues to the identity or location of 3340. While doing this he had often succumbed to the temptation to spin off queries about his various passions in science and technology. One agent had led him to this board, where amateur AI designers compared tricks and techniques, and speculated on topics that he'd wondered about his whole life.

  Why such a horror of trans-humanism? he had asked in a recent posting. People who try to improve themselves in the Archipelago seem to be persecuted for it. Before they came here, he had sometimes daydreamed about the wider world beyond Teven. Without the deliberate tamping-down of the tech locks, he assumed, people would remake themselves however they wanted. And why not? Why not grow wings to fly, or new senses to see microwaves and hear the hiss of radio? Imperishable bodies, networked minds — these had been his fantasies for years, because such things were banned in Teven. Yet they were banned here, too.

  One person had posted several replies, he noticed. They were signed Veronique. Many of us feel as you do, Veronique had written. But it is difficult to speak out right now, because of the Omega Point crisis. It makes us all look bad.

  "But why?" he asked the board. "What did they do?"

  They tried to become gods.

  He stared at the reply. He'd always known it was possible; there were entities within the Archipelago that had such power — and not just the armies. But as he reread the words, he remembered the devastation of the farside accident; remembered the corpses. One gray and awful day he had come upon the body of a woman dressed in some fabulous costume from a manifold he didn't recognize. Her face had been like porcelain, perfectly clean and composed. It had hit him then: she could still be alive. The technology existed, the angels were a small example.

  People didn't have to die at all, anymore. Or if they did, they could be resurrected. But he was cursed with living in a place where such mercy wasn't permitted.

  There had been nothing he could do about it then. He suppressed the rage and grief. He'd kept it locked away ever since.

  "The votes are talking about Omega Point right now," he said to the board. "My ... friend ... says that they're going to wipe it out."

  A reply came instantly this time. How do you know that? Isn't that meeting happening off-line?

  Aaron frowned. Was he interacting with an agent, or was this the real Veronique now? "I'm there now," he said. "In Doran Morss's Scotland. We, I, were invited."

  And do you agree with them? Should Omega Point be destroyed?

  Aaron frowned, gazing out the window for a while at drifting dust devils. "I don't know," he said honestly. "Somebody on this message board said that's why the an-nies were originally created. To fight an outbreak of trans-humanism that ended the monoculture."

  That's the official story.

  He stared at the words in surprise. In a civilization without government, where anyone could say or do anything they wanted, how could there be any such thing as an "official story"? The annies were supposed to be unconcerned with the daily affairs of humans; so at least he'd come to understand in the days he'd spent exploring the place.

  He hesitated, then said, "And what's the real story?"

  There was a long pause, which often meant that an an-ima was being taken off-line while its owner prepared a personal response. Then: Do you want to meet?

  This time the signature was Veronique's, unmediated by any agent All thoughts of the search for 3340 were forgotten; so was his tiredness and sore muscles.

  "Where?" said Aaron. "And when?"

  14

  "I thought I was supposed to be working for the Government?" said livia. She settled herself into the acceleration couch next to Doran Morss.

  "It hired both of us," he said with a touch of annoyance. "It was in your briefing." He reached up to slam the hatch of the small aircar
like vessel.

  In the several days since she had been "hired" — a quaint term whose implications she had yet to explore — Livia had encountered Morss several times. One thing she had noticed was that even a slight hint of irritation on his part was enough to make most of his hangers-on cower. These hangers-on were referred to as "servants" — another old term she'd never heard used in reference to human beings. The man was a tyrant, she had decided; she did not like him. This morning he had shown up unexpectedly at her door and announced that the Government wanted them both to visit the devastated Atchity Coronal, where Omega Point's forces had just been routed.

  She was thinking about how to answer Morss's comment — she'd read the briefing, but hadn't understood much of it — when the floor fell out from under the little spaceship. They were leaving the Scotland via a hatch in its outer skin, just as Aaron's house had exited and entered Rosinius and the other coronals. So it was a familiar enough experience; still, Livia hissed involuntarily and grabbed at the arms of her chair as they fell into black space.

  "See, that's why they hired you," said Morss, unperturbed by the sudden fall. "Sophia Eckhardt wouldn't have reacted like that To her, it would be just another shift of realities in inscape. Her kind doesn't understand that mere's a real world underlying all the fantasy visions they cram into their senses." He sounded contemptuous, almost bitter as he said this. Out the windshield, livia watched the black underside of the worldship rising away like an iron cloud. Stars specked into view around them as the dark hulk dwindled. She shook her head.

  He half turned in his seat, gazing at her as if she were a suspicious fruit in the Barrastea market "You really are a foreigner. I get that. You obviously have no idea how bad things have gotten in the Archipelago. Haver, Sophia's quite tolerant for her kind, which I suppose is why the Good Book put her on to you. But the rest of humanity's turning into a race of fucking sleepwalkers. Those of us who believe in the existence of a real world are in a shrinking minority. Most people think inscape is all there is. They're more and more out of touch with reality; whole coronals have started failing the cliff test"

  Their little ship — which consisted of the cockpit they were in, and a large fusion engine behind it — leveled out and the power kicked in. Livia felt some weight return; the experience was no more dramatic than lying on her back and looking up at the stars.

  "But mat still doesn't answer my question," she said. "Why did they hire mer

  "You're what we like to call a baseline," said Morss with a shrug. "Your nervous system encodes the sorts of behavior patterns that we evolved for — what they dismiss here as the 'cripple' view. Hence the cliff test If you fell in a virtual river you'd hold your breath and try to swim. Natural human reactions for somebody from Ventus, maybe — but you have to understand, many people here get their inscape implants while still in the womb. Generations have grown up now completely inside inscape. When they fall off a cliff, they laugh and flap their arms. When they fall in a river they just keep on breathing — because they don't have the experience of a stable and dangerous reality to ground them. They lack the baseline human reactions you still have. You've got an almost pure set, by our readings. You and your two friends form a kind of behavioral standard that's getting increasingly rare. We can use that standard to judge how viable a person or inscape is."

  Oddly enough, that made sense: Morss wanted her to judge manifolds, something she'd gotten quite adept at just before leaving Teven. At least, that's what it sounded like he wanted.

  In the distance Livia saw a thin arc of light emerging from the endless sky: a coronal. "Is that AtehityT she asked. Morss didn't answer. He was talking quietly to a blurred inscape figure in front of him.

  She tamped down on her annoyance, and watched out the windshield for a while. The coronal was beautiful: a fat ring or short can with open ends, its interior surface brilliantly lit in swirling cloud and blue by a round mirror angled in its central space. But as the ship's trajectory took it toward the sunward side of the coronal, the light shifted to reveal something else — something that took up so much of the sky that Livia hadn't even seen it The two-mousand-kilometer-wide ring of the coronal was half cupped in the arcing metal claws of something that dwarfed it — something planet-sized. So this was an anecliptic dreadnought: a vast nightmare of machinery, its outstretched arms the size of continents. It looked like nothing so much as a mailed fist ready to crush the delicate ring-shaped world.

  The sight was extremely unnerving. Livia needed to look at something else, so she pulled out the copy of the Good Book that Sophia had given her as a gift.

  The Book was a physical object, a rarity for Sophia.

  Bound in vat-grown leather, it held a pleasing odor. Its hundred or so chapters used parables, stories, and poetry to describe particular "roles" such as Phoenix, Priestess, or Pack-Carrier. "Pick a role, any role to start with," Sophia had said. "That's you — for now." While you were acting in a particular role, you were supposed to try to emulate its qualities as closely as possible. At the end of each chapter were a few pages of rules about what each role should do when encountering people playing other roles. You might take charge of that person for a time; your own role might change to something else; so might theirs.

  There were over a thousand pages in the book, and it was heavily cross-referenced and indexed. She flipped to the back and looked for any index entries that might say Annoying People, dealing with. She couldn't find one.

  "The Good Book's not a religion." Sophia had laughed. "The Book started replacing local adhocracies about seven years ago. It's just a bunch of simple rules: if this happens, do that. People have had systems like it for thousands of years — you know, the Ten Commandments and the Categorical Imperative, that sort of thing. But those systems weren't based on systematic testing. The Good Book is the result of massive simulations of whole societies — what happens when billions of individual people follow various codes of conduct It's simple: if most people use the rules in the Book most of the time, a pretty much Utopian society emerges spontaneously on the macro level."

  The Book was like magic. Sophia had wanted Livia to try it out, so she did to be polite. Using it was like playacting; Livia found she could sup easily into some roles but had more difficulty with others. One day she was the Courier, and people came to her with packages for her to deliver until she met someone whose role changed hers. The next day she was designated the Tourist, and she did nothing but explore Brand New York until she met a Visitor, at which point her role changed to Tour Guide. That was all very simple, she thought; any idiot could have designed a system like this. But every now and men she caught glimpses of something more — something extraordinary. Yesterday she had run through a chain of roles and ended up as Secretary. Reviewing the Secretary's role in the Book, she found that she should poll inscape for anyone nearby who had one of the roles of Boss, Lawyer, Researcher, or about five other alternates. She did, and went to meet a woman who had the odd, unfamiliar role of Auditor.

  Livia met the Auditor in a restaurant. Five other people were there, too; all had been summoned to this meeting by their roles, but nobody had any idea why, so they compared notes. One man said he'd been given the role of Messenger three days before, and couldn't shake it He was being followed by a small constellation of inscape windows he'd accumulated from other roles. When he distributed these, they turned out to all relate to an issue of power allotment in Brand New York that the votes were dragging their heels on. Suddenly the Auditor had a task. As Secretary, Livia began annotating her memory of the meeting. In under an hour they had a policy package with key suggestions, and suddenly their roles changed. A man who'd been the Critic suddenly became the Administrator. According to the rules of the Book, he could enact policy provided conversion to Administrator was duly witnessed by enough other users.

  This was amazing. After a while, though, Livia had realized that far larger and more intricate interactions were occurring via the Book all the time. It wa
s simply that few or none of the people involved could see more than the smallest part of them.

  Eventually she slipped the Book back into its carrying case and looked up. The coronal loomed huge in front of them. Morss had ended his private conversation, so Livia turned to him, opening her mouth and closing it several times as she tried to think of a way to broach the subject of 3340. She was still unsure of how much to reveal about herself; but she remembered a conversation she'd had the other day. She had discreetly asked one of Morss's servants how it was that Morss could be so rich in a place where each citizen's potential for wealth was controlled by inaccessible, outside forces. "Somebody told me that you're not a citizen of the Archipelago," she said now.

  "That's right. How do you think I'm able to keep that?" He jerked a thumb at the now-tiny worldship behind them. "My Scotland was built with cometary materials I scavenged myself from outside the solar system. Took me many years to bring it in; you can do that, you know, but you have to get the stuff personally and ride it home yourself for your claim to be valid. Took years ... Anyway, I came back with a few quadrillion tons of raw materials that the annies didn't own. There's only a few humans in the Archipelago sitting on that much resource — everything else comes from the annies. Of course, they disapproved; they wouldn't let the Government work for me anymore. Said I would be putting too much resource into the 'human niche,' I might upset their precious ecology. They designated me a 'distinct entity.'" He laughed. "I'm on a par with the human race as a whole in terms of my rights. But there are precious few places where I can spend what I've got."

  "The annies again?" ventured Livia.

  "That's right. I'm a little speck of chaos in their deterministic machine. So they load me down with obligations to keep me busy — though they haven't taken my wealth away from me."