"Why are you saying this?"

"I know you have the best of intentions. But we should be encouraging people to push the limits of human nature — we shouldn't be holding them back! Of course some will crash — that's natural selection. But if we don't try to improve on our design, how is humanity ever going to match the annies? And if nobody confronts them, how are you and I ever going to get home again?"

She gaped at him. "Confront them? But that's ... "

"Impossible? So was leaving Teven, if you'll recall. I don't think it's impossible. In fact — " He hesitated, then shrugged and looked down. "I just want to know which side you're on here."

She looked down at the powdery grit inscape was telling her lay under her feet "I should have thought that was clear," she murmured.

After a moment she realized Aaron was standing over her. Livia looked up. He had the oddest expression on his face.

"Liv ... " He bit his lip. "Stay here tonight," he blurted.

"What?"

"Stay. With me. Tonight"

"Oh ... Sure. I can just summon a bed for myself, and — "

"That's not what I meant." He looked terrified at what he'd just said. Realizing what he did mean, Livia felt supremely uncomfortable.

"Oh! Aaron, I ... I can't."

"You're not still with him? After what he — "

"No!" She stood up, twining her hands in distress. "At least, I don't know. I'm not not with him. Aaron, mis ... this just isn't the right time for us to have this conversation."

Something changed in his face — a shuttered look as though he'd replaced himself with an anima. "I see," he said coldly. "It seems it never was the right time, was it?"

"Aaron." She went to him, but he shied away from her touch. "You know me better than anyone else. You've been my best friend ever since ... well, you know. And we've never in all that time had this conversation. Maybe we should have — "

"It's okay, I understand." He turned away, his shoulders hunched. "I'll see you later, then. Don't worry; I'll be all right"

"Well no, wait a second. This is serious, Aaron. How long have you been thinking this?" Wanting me?

Still not looking at her, he plodded toward a distant cloud of inscape windows. "We both have work to do ... To save our people. It's no time to let our emotions run away with us."

"But you brought this up, Aaron. We have to deal with it."

"Not now." He vanished into some view inaccessible to her. Stunned, Livia stared at the spot where he'd just been standing.

She didn't know what to do. After several long minutes, she turned and left the now-empty apartment Summoning up Qiingi's footprints, she stared at them for a long while. Then she walked the other way.

Doran Morss watched his newest employee from under the shadow of some trees. He had come here to confront Alison Haver about some irregularities in her work for him. From the size of the crowd here in her narrative, she was obviously thriving in her dual roles of soundtrack and baseline. So now he felt foolish at walking over there and confronting her. He fidgeted, trying to think how to justify his presence here.

Haver's narrative was set in an open-air parkland. The buildings all had a 1950s rocket-ship chic that she seemed to have fallen in love with. In inscape, her estate was currently docked next to one of Doran's trouble-spots: a coronal whose population had just revolted against the anecliptics. They'd been put down, and now boiling resentment was pushing a lot of people toward post-human experimentation. Doran had sent her there to work as a soundtrack; her real job was to act as a Government baseline.

Doran had insisted that her narrative be stable. On his way by the drinks table he saw that she had taken his advice. The drinks were served on a table by a human-shaped agent; the liquids came from bottles; the bottles came from crates at the agent's feet. Any link in this chain could have been interrupted — customized into something inconsistent, such as having the bottles snorted out of an elephant's trunk. Most people's personal narratives had many such breaks because they had never lived in an environment where all objects had consistent relationships. Haver seemed to know intuitively what a seamless view would look like; thus, the very act of visiting her narrative should be healing for many people exhausted by the arbitrary dreamworlds of their own inscape.

He'd had few opportunities to speak with this highly capable young woman since the Omega Point incident. When they did speak, he found her disarmingly direct, apparently unafraid of his power. Whether it was this or something else about her that put him off balance, he didn't know. But around her, he always seemed to forget whatever he was about to say. He wasn't used to that kind of weakness, and he inevitably ended up saying the wrong tiling.

It would definitely not help matters if he revealed mat he had been investigating her use of his inscape agents. Haver was sending them on errands all over the Archipelago. She and her two friends seemed to be searching for something, but they were being damnably secretive about it They wouldn't even tell the agents — his agents — what they were after. Their cavalier use of his resources was galling.

But every time he spoke to her, it ended badly. And he didn't like that fact, either.

He cursed and walked toward Haver. As he did, Sophia Eckhardt converged on her from the other direction. Eck-hardt got there first and Haver, not yet noticing Doran, greeted her warmly.

"Welcome to my narrative," she said to the soundtrack. "I'm currently the Sage — though I don't feel very smart today."

Sophia smiled at her, pursed her lips in thought, then said, "Well, Sage and Minstrel cancel. I believe that makes us both the Student What's wrong?"

Haver looked down disconsolately. "I may have just broken my oldest and most precious friendship."

Doran had been wracking his brains for some clever opening line and was thrown by the realization that Haver might be pursuing a romantic life he knew nothing about Consequently his mind was now a blank as he walked up to the two women. "You'll have better luck if you stop playing dress-up with that damnable book," he heard himself say.

They both turned to glare at him. Doran mentally kicked himself for being a clod, which made him even angrier. He glowered at Sophia, acutely aware of Haver's gaze on him. He desperately tried to recover. "And how's the other you today? The ... non-book side?"

Haver's smile was coldly polite. "Well, Respected Morss, publically, I'm very well, thank you. If you have no interest in other sides of me, then we can leave it at that."

Doran knew he should stop, retreat, that this whole conversation was a slow-motion crash. What he said was, "That's a laugh. There is no public life anymore. Only private life, ridiculously intensified. Isn't that what we're fighting against?"

"Well," she said seriously, "that would certainly explain the sense of claustrophobia I've been feeling ever since we got here."

Was she humoring him? He was used to people doing that — ignoring or absorbing his anger. But he hadn't expected Haver to do it, and somehow that just added to his sense of humiliation. "It's like there's no wider world outside my own garden," she said. "I've been trying to get a handle on the big picture here in the Archipelago. But every time I think I get it, it turns out to be just another view." She looked up at him expectantly. She's throwing me a line to save myself, he suddenly realized. Not because she was afraid of his anger, but because she was more adroitly diplomatic than he'd ever imagined.

He nodded gratefully. "Yeah, you can't see the big picture because there is no big picture. There's just individual people — and the armies. The Government, the votes, the narratives — they're all personal. There's no public life."