"I hadn't heard about this," said Ishani.

"Well, you've been avoiding inscape," said Lindsey. "Which, if we listened to 'Qiingi,' here, the rest of us should be doing, too. Except that he obviously isn't, himself ... "

Qiingi was so astonished he could barely speak. "Show me this Life"

As inscape winked open and Qiingi watched an unfamiliar young woman walk die calm streets of Barrastea, he thought furiously about what must have happened. Livia's xhants had been stolen in those few moments after the flying house was picked up, and before the intervention of the Government. Whoever had done it had repackaged Livia's personal records as an entertainment and was distributing them throughout the Archipelago.

"Who is that?" he asked, indicating the young woman.

"That's Livia, the protagonist."

Most of the people Qiingi had met in his brief stay with Livia's peers now looked different; Aaron and Qiingi himself were idealized, almost caricatures. "How much is there?" he asked worriedly. Lindsey flipped through memory after memory, and Qiingi felt his heart sink. Not all of Livia's history was here — much less than half her years, perhaps. And it ended just before the attack on Barrastea.

But her agents were here, and many people's animas as well. Her whole Society, in fact, though Lindsey hadn't known they were there and was astonished when Qiingi called up Livia's mother and spoke to her briefly.

Finally he closed the window and put his head in his hands. "This is a catastrophe," he murmured. "What will she do when she finds out?"

Lindsey stared at him. "You're not telling me ... " An expression of delight came over her. "The Life is real?"

"Real," he said with a deep sigh, "and stolen. A violation of my dearest friend's privacy and soul. Poor Livia, this will destroy her when she learns of it."

But Lindsey stood up in a fever of excitement, knocking her chair over. "But don't you understand?" she said. "This changes everything! If the Life is real, and contemporary, then maybe a real verso world is possible. Not just a playground version like this one."

She and Ishani began talking, their WorldLing going by too quickly for Qiingi to follow. For a while he stared at the damnable heat pump stove, mourning for Livia's private existence.

After supper he excused himself, refusing Ishani's offer of a pallet by the fire. He walked out into the drizzle, head down, letting the worldship shed its tears for him.

17

Doran Morss looked across the table at the play of candlelight in Livia Kodaly's eyes. The towers of Bar-rastea glittered behind her. Blinking lights of aircars cruised the sky, and a sigh of cool evening air drifted in over the window's open transom. Livia lifted one side of her mouth in a coy smile. "Having fun?" she asked, swirling her wine.

"You have no idea," he said, digging into his roast duck with gusto. The duck and the wine were the only real objects in this sim, and he was determined to honor their reality by enjoying them to the full.

"I rarely visit a sim more than once," he said past a mouthful. He gestured at her with his fork. 'Testament to your design."

"You think I'm just an anima?" she asked. Anima was a special word in this place, he'd learned. The sim had a whole vocabulary of its own, which might have been pretentious had it not been so consistent.

"That's not supposed to matter in Westerhaven, is it?" he asked astutely. She shrugged. "So tell me, are you based on a real person?"

"I am a real person," she answered.

Doran was disappointed. The entities in this simulation were not cagey enough to retain an understanding of the world outside their own milieu. That would certainly limit his ability to interact with them. A little self-awareness could make an artincial mind so much more interesting.

"Your own reality seems to weigh heavily on you," Livia said suddenly. Doran sat back in surprise. His mind was gloriously blank for a few seconds.

"If that were not so," continued Livia, "then you could not travel here, could you?"

"What do you mean?"

"To travel you have to value. And un-value." She looked away sadly.

Doran chewed angrily. "What's real is what's valuable. Everything else is just an illusion." Just like you.

"So you see yourself as someone who shatters illusions?"

He nodded warily. "If not me, then who?"

She smiled dazzlingly at him. "But what if it were the other way around — that what's valuable is what's real?"

Doran cursed and stood up. He dismissed the sim with a wave of his hand and everything — windows, cityline, music, and entrancing young lady — all vanished. All except for one chair, a small table, and a plate and wineglass.

He stood in his stone bedchamber, alone.

Sims weren't supposed to challenge you like that. They adjusted to your narrative, after all. Livia Kodaly should have provided Doran a quiet evening of relaxation and witty conversation. He needed rest from too much planning. He needed to forget for a while that he had to make a decision about the eschatus machine.

Doran's chambers were unadorned — stark, even. He knew his servants and the versos he indulged didn't understand. They thought he was an ascetic at heart. But it was just the opposite. To Doran Morss, the ability to see the world unaugmented, as he did now, was the ultimate luxury. Alone in these quarters, he could revel in the simplicity of his own five senses.

At least, he should — but instead found himself wallowing in these senseless sims when he should be making decisions. Would he ever again be able to see the world in this simple way if he used the eschatus machine? Or would the virtual overwhelm the real at last?

The brodys had delivered the machine two days ago. It waited now in a scan-shielded grotto hidden deep in one of his mountains. Twice now Doran had walked down the wet stone steps that led to its resting place — a place he couldn't help but think of as its altar. Twice he'd trudged back up those steps without having touched the thing.

He felt ashamed of himself. In the past, he knew, men had been capable of making hard sacrifices. Countless soldiers had died for causes they knew to be false. Doran had spent decades preparing for this moment. Why, at the last minute, should he balk at throwing down the gauntlet to the anecliptics?

The seconds ticked on in silence and solitude. Finally, he sat down and took up his knife and fork. But he no longer tasted the food as he ate it.

A faint vibration reached him through the floor. He kept eating — but seconds later, he heard distant shouts. Doran cocked his head, annoyed. Somebody's loud party had spilled over into crippleview, apparently. He gestured open an inscape link to one of his servants and said, "Can you find out who's — "

He stopped. The inscape link wasn't open. Puzzled, he tried again. Nothing.

Doran stood and walked to the door. The shouts were closer now. He opened the door in time to see one of his people round the far corner of the arched, balconied hallway. "Sir! It's gone down!" The man appeared positively frantic.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Inscape! Inscape has crashed!" Doran could see the whites all the way around the man's eyes. He was practically wetting himself in terror.

"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."