Lady of Mazes

by Karl Schroeder

  "Out of the way." He ran down the corridors, passing several open doors. People stood slack-jawed here and there. One woman had her nose to the wall and as he passed, she placed her fingers on the surface, and reached out to tentatively lick it

  "Was it some kind of accident?" he shouted back to his man as he bounded up a flight of stairs. "Is it just the city, or has the whole worldship gone down?"

  "I ... how should I know?" Doran looked back at him. The man splayed out his hands, shrugging. "I can't link to anybody."

  "You're in crippleview now. Talk to people. Find a window and look for incoming aircars. See if any have crashed. Go on! I'll be in the plaza upstairs."

  He raced up the stairs to find himself in the diamond-domed central plaza of the chandelier city. Glittering towers loomed high on all sides, their apexes joined by flying buttresses in a complex knot half a kilometer up. Doran stopped at the entrance to the plaza, stunned.

  A field of bodies lay strewn for a hundred meters in every direction.

  One person remained standing in the center of this tableau. It was the new baseline, Alison Haver.

  Livia had been talking to the votes to distract herself from Aaron's continued refusal to speak with her. She'd gotten comfortable with several of the ones that had retained bodies aboard the worldship after the Omega Point fiasco; they were sufficiently different from human beings to temporarily take her away from her worries. Today the votes were as usual arguing and debating in a great scrum in the central plaza, when suddenly all of them fell over as if on cue. For an absurd second she thought she was the object of some strange joke, or maybe another cliff test Then it hit home that she really was the only one left standing.

  It was obvious what had happened. Inscape had failed. Strange, that she could coolly and analytically reason this out, while in the distance other human citizens of Doran's city were beginning to scream and run blindly.

  For a while she was paralyzed by indecision — and memory. The field of bodies reminded her of the airbus, seen as she and Aaron staggered away from it There was the same random quality to the out-flung arms and tilted heads surrounding her now.

  As she was thinking this, someone appeared in a nearby archway. It was Doran Morss, looking disheveled and breathing heavily. "Haver!" he snapped. "What the hell is going on?"

  The spell was broken and she found herself actually laughing. "Maybe it was something I said."

  He swore and turned away. "Wait!" she called. "I'm fine. Those others," she pointed at some distant wailing human figures, "are going to need our help."

  He looked past her, chewing his lip. "Right It's a place to start."

  "There's probably no way to find out what just happened," she said as she gingerly stepped over the fallen votes to reach him. "Not until inscape comes back up. Meanwhile it's a safety issue."

  "Right Right" He nodded vigorously, eyes wide. "So ... we should start with, uh ... "

  "We have to keep people from hurting themselves or others," she said.

  "Right So ... how are we going to do that?"

  Hours later, Livia walked back to her apartment through the eerily silent city. She weaved a bit as she walked; she was dead on her feet. For a day that had felt like a week, she and Doran, and some versos who happened to be in the city, had fought the rising hysteria of people thrown out of inscape for the first time in their lives. They had used words, fists, ropes, and stun weapons to subdue knots of rioting people. Most individuals had seized on any instruction and allowed themselves to be docilely led back to their apartments. Tonight everything was locked down, and Doran's people patrolled the corridors of the city. A concerted effort was being made to communicate with distant parts of the ship; it seemed the city was not alone in being affected. Just what had happened, though, was anybody's guess.

  She entered the grand gallery that led to her rooms, her breath steaming ahead of her. The gallery looked down over kilometers of open air to the cold moors, and without the networked environmental controls, the city was starting to cool down.

  Something caught her eye. A small fire was burning near the gallery's rail. She hesitated, wondering if she should call for fire fighting assistance.

  Then she spotted the man warming his hands near the heap of burning furniture. Doran Morss looked up as Livia approached. He smiled.

  "You're welcome to share my fire," he said. "It's all I've got right now ... "

  "Any leads?" she asked as she came to stand next to him. It was utterly quiet except for the crackle of the flames, and darkness ruled beyond this small zone of light He shook his head. "I'm sure the systems will come back on line soon. Meanwhile, I just want to get warm." He stared at the flames, and muttered under his breath, " ... Can't get warm anymore ... Not for years."

  "Are you all right?"

  He sat down on the marble floor, and seemed to shrink into himself, staring into the fire. 'This? This is nothing. I'll get over it And you, how are you holding up?"

  "Exhausted. I'm going to bed."

  Doran grunted. "I can't do that. Not until I find out what the hell is going on."

  "What will you do when you do find out?"

  "Throw whoever's responsible off the tallest tower of the city, I mink." He shrugged. "For now, I'm sort of enjoying the peace and quiet."

  Livia sat down wearily next to him. "Me too," she said, a bit surprised at herself. It was peaceful, knowing that at least for now, there could be no inscape-driven interruption to your thoughts.

  They sat together companionably for a time while the wind sighed over the balcony, teasing the flames back and forth. Livia felt a deep and wistful melancholy settle over her. Drowsy, her limbs heavy, she just wanted to lie down here on the stone floor and sleep.

  Doran looked over at her. "You're a strange one, Haver."

  She nodded back to full awareness. "Why do you say that?"

  "You live like a verso, but you spend all your free time talking to the votes. Don't deny it; you're using my resources to do it, and I keep tabs on such things. I found you today in a heap of votes, didn't I? So what is it that you're looking for so passionately that it's all you can think about?"

  Livia thought of Aaron and laughed humorlessly. "Well apparently I'm no good at seeing what's right under my nose." Should she tell Doran the truth about her origins and quest? It would be good to finally drop the caution advised by the Government Doran stared into the flames. "I don't know exactly what you're doing here," he said finally. "But I know you're expending a great deal of effort and energy working on the same levels where I used to work — among votes, between narratives. Doing things that in another age used to be called political. I just hope it doesn't turn out to be as futile an exercise as my own attempts to reform the Government."

  "Well ... " Comfortable in the moment, Livia decided to tell him everything. She opened her mouth to begin —

  Light welled up around them. She blinked at the disappearance of the cloudscape beyond the balcony.

  Doran leaped to his feet. "Finally!"

  She turned to look behind her. Though this avenue wasn't large, suddenly it was crowded with inscape phantoms. Throngs of humans and semihumans chattered as they walked by; sentient gases and weird glow-in-the-dark aliens sailed buzzing overhead; a line of chanting monks left footprints of gold behind themselves, while rioting agents set loose by irresponsible adolescents reappeared right where they'd left off, spraying virtual paint in virtual letters across virtual kiosks in the center of the aisle.

  The fire seemed small and almost invisible in the face of all this. Doran glanced down at it, sighed, and said, "Back to work, I guess. See you, Haver." He walked away.

  Livia sat there a while. She was too tired to move — too tired to query inscape about what had caused the outage. She wanted nothing more than to summon her bedroom around herself and fall asleep. Ordinarily, she could have trusted herself to wake in the real bed by morning. But what if inscape went down again? She could find herself stranded in the
corridor in a cube of utility fog.

  She dragged herself to her feet and walked slowly to her apartment.

  She thought about her men as she flopped onto the bed. There was nothing she could do to salvage her relationship with Aaron if he wouldn't talk to her. And she longed to feel Qiingi's strong arms around her. He would probably laugh at what had happened tonight — but she could never tell him about Aaron. He was no doubt completely unaware and unaffected by all that had happened, sitting down there in whatever hut he'd built for himself on the bleak moor.

  It seemed that the three of them had carried a great freight of personal baggage all the way from Teven to the Archipelago. They were never going to breach the walls of history and attitude that separated them, and maybe trying was wrong.

  She flung an arm over her eyes. How could she have been so blind as to miss Aaron's attraction to her? The whole fiasco filled her with guilt — but she had tried to reach Aaron, and he was shutting her out. Just like he'd shut her out in the weeks leading up to the potlatch and the invasion.

  Just how responsible did she have to be? She had done her best by him and by Westerhaven. She had exiled herself to save her friends and family and she would if given any chance at all, find a way to heal her bond with Aaron.

  And if she failed in all of it? Would she deserve punishment then? Or might it be all right if she took some enjoyment from life, something for herself and not others for a change?

  She fell asleep before she could really think about it.

  An inscape chime awoke Livia. She lay there for a few seconds, disoriented, then groaned and sat up. "Yes, what is it?"

  "Respected Haver? May I speak with you?"

  Livia blinked and gradually took in where she was. Apparently, it was late afternoon; she'd slept most of the day. Whoever was calling her — she didn't recognize the voice — was apparently right outside her door. She staggered out of bed, summoned some clothes and said, "Just a minute!"

  When she opened the door it was to find two women standing there. Still fuzzy-headed from sleep, it took her a minute to realize that they were identical twins. "Yes, can I help you?"

  "You're Alison Haver?" asked one. The other was glancing up and down the gallery with a worried expression. "You're a friend of Georges Milan?" That was the name Aaron was using here.

  "Yes, I — well, come in, sorry to keep you standing in the hall, uh, Respected ... "

  "Veronique," said the other woman. They both stepped into the apartment and Veronique shut the door after peeking outside.

  "Is he here?" asked Veronique's twin.

  "I'm sorry, I didn't get your name," Livia said to her.

  "Veronique," she said. "I'm both Veronique. I know, it's hard to understand when there's only two of me. And I'm really sorry to bother you, but I have to find Georges — "

  "He's not here." Livia crossed her arms, frowning at the two women. "I don't know where he is."

  "Oh." The twins looked deflated. "Oh, this is terrible."

  "What's going on?"

  "He talked about you a lot, I just thought if he were going to go somewhere it would be here ... "

  He'd been talking about her? "Sit down." Livia indicated her couch. "You're obviously upset — would you like some tea? Maybe a nice tropical view ... "

  The women shook their heads. "I have to find him. Morss is after us, I'm afraid he might have caught up to Georges already — "

  "What do you mean Morss is after you?" Even as she said this Livia figured it out; this whole situation, the collapse of inscape, the chaos, Aaron's cryptic pronouncements. "You were part of this, weren't you? You engineered the inscape crash. And he was part of it, too."

  Both Veroniques nodded. "But it wasn't supposed to come off like this. We'd built a supervirus, it was supposed to take inscape away from the Government and narratives, give it back to the people ... It wasn't supposed to crash the Scotland's defensive systems — "

  "What? Slow down — and sit down! — and tell me what you're talking about."

  Veronique sat, and gradually Livia got the story out of her. She described how she had, on very little evidence, convinced herself that a conspiracy of AI hackers existed — a diffuse group determined to fly under the radar of the votes and narratives. She had contributed her skills to a project barely hinted at, certainly not controlled from any discemable point. With Aaron as her sponsor, she had come to the Scotland because it was the best place from which to launch the virus she imagined she was building. Yesterday, after months of effort, she had done it.

  "Our little AI clawed its way through the Scotland's system, deteriorating as it went. Like in any whisper network, its message packets got garbled as it tried to propagate itself. But just when it was about to disintegrate, it hooked up with another entity coming from, well, somewhere! You can't imagine how I felt! The conspiracy was real! We cheered and danced around when we saw that. Georges and I watched as the two AIs merged and grew and the new entity went on. It found more components, one after another, and got stronger and stronger. Twenty minutes after we let it go, it woke to full power and took over the whole worldship."

  The entity sent out queries to the rest of the conspirators before the anecliptics even became aware of it. Veronique's face lit up as she described it "We established error-free links and the code flooded in. While in-scape was going down here, a new AI was being born in Morss's network. The plan had gone off without a hitch."

  And that, Veronique now knew, should have been the first clue that something was terribly wrong.

  "We sat up all night in a state of exhilaration, waiting for the system to come back. It was so eerie, silent, only the distant shouts of birds from far below the window, and the cold creeping in slowly in the dark ... When in-scape did return, I knew, there would be no Government in it, no votes — no anecliptic presence. We talked about what we would say, the announcement we would make, and we debated about how people would react

  "And then the moment came — hours too soon. Everything hummed back into life around us; inscape windows popped open, virtual objects reappeared, and the heat came back on."

  Some parts of the network were still down — including the worldship's asteroid defense and outside traffic control. "While Georges and I were combing through the data, trying to figure out what had happened, a knock came at the door."

  Aaron had opened it — warily, but with a look of proud defiance on his face. There, slouching in the hallway, was a short, shabby-looking man with amber eyes. He was a vote.

  Veronique buried her face in her hands. "But he wasn't just any vote. Do you understand? Do you know what happened next?"

  Livia sat down next to her. "He was your vote."

  The AI introduced himself. He was, he said, the representative of Veronique and her conspiracy — a mind brought into existence by tonight's attack, the very attack that had sought to wipe out the Government. "I even incorporate your virus!" he had said proudly as he shook Aaron's hand.

  "And do you know what he said next?" Veronique's voice rose to a wail. "I'm here to help!" Both of her burst into tears.

  Livia patted her hand, bewildered. After a while one of Veronique canned down enough to say, "Well, you can see the effect it had on me. But I think it was worse for Georges. He turned white as a cloud when he realized what had happened. And then he ran out of the apartment. I haven't seen him since."

  Livia didn't know whether to be worried, or to laugh out loud. She was still trying to sort it all out when the door chimed again.

  Veronique leaped to her feet. "Maybe that's him!" She ran to the door and pulled it open.

  Doran Morss stood there, a number of his loyal servants crowding the gallery behind him. Standing between two of them was Qiingi, who was looking very unhappy.

  Doran took in the vision of Livia and Veronique standing together. "Well," he said with a scowl. "Doesn't this look incriminating."

  Aaron Varese stood on one of the chandelier city's highest balconies. It w
as icy cold up here and the air was thin. The dizzying feeling reminded him of Cirrus and the vast landscapes of Teven Coronal. What he now looked out upon was incomparably bigger.

  He had his inscape view tuned to the consensus version of the Archipelago. It stretched out before him as an apparently infinite plain covered with cities and oceans, parkland and the occasional mountain range. Mars was visible by its color, a patch of sandy red off to the left; Earth's skies were a particular shade of blue to the right In between, and stretching far beyond both, were the patchwork landscapes of countless coronals.

  Aaron had come up here to convince himself that what seemed impossible, really was so.

  The vista that opened out below him was breathtaking in its scale and detail. That very size bespoke an impossible inertia. At any moment millions of people were being born and millions more were dying. Humanity was huge and powerful and unstoppable. It was a cage so big that its bars were invisible with distance; but it was still a cage. And after the events of the past day he now knew that he would never escape it.

  Aaron was not given to dramatic gestures; he wasn't about to jump off this balcony. What he felt would happen was much worse. In moments, or hours, he would take a deep breath, and let go of everything he had ever believed in and wanted. He would throw away the bedrock of determination that had kept him going for years. He would surrender. After that, no matter what happened, his future would hold nothing but different shades of failure. He'd drift like a ghost through his own life, smiling at all the right jokes, getting up every morning, going to sleep every night. And nothing would ever matter again.

  He heard a sound behind him. Maybe Doran Morss's people were here to throw him off the worldship. Almost eager for that, he turned.

  She leaned in the tower's doorway, her eyes the brightest thing in the shadows. "They're looking for you," she said.

  "What does it matter?" He shrugged and turned back to the view. "Anyway, you're a vote — aren't you going to turn me in?"

  "Not at all. In fact, I greatly admire what you've just attempted. More people should be trying such things."