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 aircarlike 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.