Her pixies appeared, sporting little military hats. "We've got our orders!" one said, saluting smartly. "Re-connoiter and report!" It waved a tiny map. "This is your path to safety, Livia."
The map, expanded, showed a flight plan in real space as well as circled points that indicated where she should leave each of four charted manifolds. As she was tracing a trembling finger across it, Qiingi came to stand by her. "I have spoken with your founders," he said glumly. "I am of your family now, Livia Kodaly. My home is gone."
She nodded numbly. For a moment she was tongue-tied, so her anima appeared and said briskly, "All right. You're familiar with travel between manifolds, Wordweaver Qiingi. Can you help me shepherd these people to safety?"
"If safety exists." He frowned at the map. "What are these places?"
"Close neighbors of Westerhaven that don't overlap any of Raven's lands. If the ancestors' warriors aren't there, we can use them to stage a counterattack." She let the anima talk; Livia's own attention was on the increasing flood of arriving aircars and running squads of men and women. "Since these places are so close to our own reality, most of the peers should be able to travel to them without difficulty. If we have to go beyond them ... " The line on the map continued beyond the neighboring manifolds, but the next circle had a question mark next to it Qiingi nodded. "Maybe I will be able to help with those places. Some may be similar to Raven's." She heard a trace of wistfulness in his voice.
She stared in an agony of grief at the survivors who now stood or sat about, or wept on one another's shoulders. Some of the wounded floated unconscious in grayish clouds of angel-stuff. If this war was spreading generally, they might all have to flee far from what they knew. She doubted that all of these people would be able to make such a journey; paradoxically, as with Livia and Aaron after the crash, it might be the youngest peers who would have the least difficulty.
A dozen meters away, a young man was walking between the wounded, comforting them. He was covered in dust and blood, his hair matted and his face grim. But he spoke to each injured man or woman himself, not through his anima. Livia felt a flash of admiration for his courage, and shame at herself for hiding behind her agencies. It was Rene, who had run back into the streets after delivering her here, days ago it seemed.
She dismissed her anima and walked over to him. He looked up as she put her hand on his shoulder. "Livia Did you find Xavier?"
Livia almost burst into tears, but suppressed the anima that offered to take her place in the conversation. "We just barely got out," she managed to say. "The ancestors are in control of Raven's people ... Have you met Word-weaver Qiingi?"
Rene looked Qiingi up and down angrily. "You invited the monsters in."
Qiingi didn't reply. After a moment Rene broke his gaze and sighed. "What are we doing here?" he asked.
"We need your help," she said. Briefly she outlined the founders' plan to fall back into other manifolds. The fear on Rene's face became sharper as she spoke; finally he shook his head. "I don't understand it," he said. "Why do we have to do something so ... suicidal? Abandon our homes? Then they've won."
"Westerhaven isn't its geography," she said, trying to make herself believe it was true. "We are the manifold, Rene. That's why we have to make sure we're not divided. Going next door is our only option for now. But it doesn't mean we've lost."
"But to 'go next door' as you put it ... No, Livia, we will lose ourselves. To travel at all you have to reject your own manifold and embrace the ways of another. How can we do that and not lose ourselves?"
Others had heard and were gathering around now. She could see the doubt on many faces. In moments they might reject the idea entirely, and then would even the founders be able to rally them?
It was time to play the card she hated the most, and at this moment Livia wished more than anything that she could do so from behind a mask. Let her anima take over for a while. But they would know if she did that and she couldn't have even one person believe that she didn't have faith enough in the plan to support it wholeheartedly.
Livia adjusted her voice to carry to all the peers, including those not yet here. "You know me," she said reluctantly. "I'm one of the famous survivors of the farside crash. I have lived outside of all manifolds and come back to tell about it. I know I haven't spoken much about the crash over the years. But I did learn something; my survival and return are the proof that I learned it" She took a deep breath, wishing that she really believed what she was about to say.
"We think Westerhaven lies in the way we live — in our Societies, our chosen technologies and systems. But when you have all those things stripped away, you find that you're still of Westerhaven. How can that be? It's because all of this," she gestured around herself, "is only the visible manifestation of what Westerhaven really is. It is what we value — about ourselves, each other, and the world. The Societies, the animas and agencies, these are merely how we manifest those values. When we travel we will find equivalents and recreate Westerhaven in other forms. And when we return we will be stronger for it. Believe me. I know, I have the scars and the knowledge to prove it. I came back.
"Follow me. Follow me now, and I will lead you there and I will lead you back again."
Without masks, she stared down the doubters. And for the first time in her life, Livia knew what it was like to truly lie.
7
No one could see it; inscape was not transmitting from the vicinity of the Great Library. But the news spread quickly throughout Westerhaven: the library was burning.
Livia had walked those halls many times. She had gazed at exotic paintings from manifolds now erased from inscape — portraits of men and women, of places that had once held all the importance in the world to those who lived in them. She had listened to strange music and wondered what sort of mind could think it beautiful. In such a way she had done what her people prized above all else: she had given her respect to those different from herself.
In one contemptuous gesture, all that abundance was being wiped away. The ancestors were treading on the accumulated treasures of the past, blind to the value of those diverse lives lived before theirs. They thought they knew what was real. That confident and terrible belief would only spread with their success. The circle of annihilation would ripple out from Barrastea and swallow all of Teven, if someone didn't stop it.
But it would have to be someone more heroic than Livia. She had done as Lady Ellis had asked — she had led her peers out of their homeland. But after they had arrived here, one of the peers — a youth she barely knew — had come up to Livia and said, his voice quivering with rage, "I guess you've got what you wanted, Kodaly: no more manifolds."
Now, she wandered the edges of a grassy clearing far from Westerhaven, trying to stay unnoticed. It was all she could do to help direct the setting up of tents and tables for the widening flood of Westerhaven refugees; she flinched whenever someone looked her way.
A dozen citizens of the manifold of Oceanus were easing the wounded out of arrears and into the tents. All wore their own faces, and there was no aura of authority around them to indicate social rank. Esther Mannus was profoundly disturbed by that little detail; she'd had trouble reaching Oceanus and now clung to Livia's arm or walked about the clearing twisting her black hair in her fingers.
This space where they had landed was a hundred meters up the slope of a forested island; below, the trees ended in a sandy beach that fronted seemingly endless ocean. The slope continued up, and up, its sides converging with perspective until the "hill" became visible as the attachment point of a giant cable. As the eye tracked it and it rose into the air, breaking from the ground below with waterfalls and trailing snapped strands, it became something impossible, a highway stretching all the way to heaven.