With it in hand, new options appeared as floating reticles around her. The tech locks were a multidimensional database, and the technological dependencies were just one way to cut the data. If she chose another view, she could see the anthropology and politics that spears, bows, and cannon each entailed. She dropped ballistics to explore more; to her surprise, even the five senses were listed here as technologies. They led her to the politics of the human body, and of other body plans: four-footed, winged, finned. The tech locks made no distinction between biology and mechanism.

Each technology equated to some human value or set of values, she saw. She'd known that But on Earth, in the Archipelago and everywhere else, technologies came first, and values changed to accommodate them. Under the locks, values were the keys to access or shut away technologies.

"But how do you work?" She dismissed the database view, and found herself looking at a set of genetic algorithms, compact logical notations. They didn't describe particular machine designs, but rather specifications; in practice, sims would evolve machinery for particular cases and according to local conditions and resources. The locks could work anywhere.

The specifications were the key. They relied on the database and couldn't be duplicated without it. They told how and when to employ energy fields to suppress various powers and macro effects. In Teven, the sims seemed to evolve machines to manipulate programmable matter. Raw materials couldn't be dug out of the ground in a coronal, since the ground only went down a meter or so. What metals or inorganic compounds were available were actually composed of bulk quantum dots which mimicked the qualities of the real thing: with a single command, a chunk of virtual iron could be transformed into pseudo-sulphur or silicon, or given characteristics that no natural element possessed. To disable any device, all the tech locks had to do was change its material composition. And all this required was a command sent through inscape.

The locks proclaimed that there were no neutral technologies. The devices and methods people used didn't just represent certain values — they were those values, in some way.

The system was self-consistent and seemed complete. And yet, though she searched through the database for a long time, nowhere could Livia find the one thing she was looking for.

She left inscape. Rene was standing over her, looking concerned. "Livia?"

"They're not there!" She laughed in relief and delight 'I was right!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Horizons, Rene. Horizons were not part of the design of the tech locks!"

"What do you mean — " But she had jumped to her feet, laughing, and embraced him.

"I'd always felt it, you know that? It was the one thing that seemed unnatural about life, the way the other manifolds were so totally inaccessible to us. For Raven's people or the others to be invisible, that was one thing; for them to be impossible to find — that's the crime!"

"What crime?"

"Maren Ellis's crime. The crime of assuming that the manifolds were so fragile that they had to be separated from one another by invisible walls. In the end, Maren didn't trust any of us to be able to resist the temptation of other ways of life."

"But there's adolescence — the horizons dissolve for a while when you hit puberty."

"I bet she had to do that, or everything would stagnate." Livia shook her head. "Remember what we used to say in Westerhaven? — "The manifolds preserve abundance in human culture.' But what good's abundance if nobody can experience it? — if all we can see is our own little tile on the grand design? There's got to be a better way."

Rene laughed sadly. "Well, maybe. But that's all water under the bridge, isn't it? The manifolds are gone."

"Are they? Your people have been staging attacks on the ancestors using the locks, haven't you?"

"Yes, but the ancestors have been dismantling them.

They have bots digging up the streets and boulevards all over the city ... "

"Including under the park where that big crowd is gathered?" He nodded. "They're trashing the machinery?" she asked.

"Most of it Some of it they've taken to a storage depot near the edge of the city. They're studying how the locks work, I guess."

"Hmm." She gazed sadly at the wedge of scar tissue visible above Rene's ear. "Rene, how many of the peers do you think would do something if I asked them? Something that's not, ah, sanctioned by Maren Ellis?"

He frowned. "You're still a hero in a lot of people's eyes — those who don't think you cut and run when the ancestors started to win." She winced. "Why?" he said with a faint smile. "Is there something you're going to ask us to do?"

"Well, it's about this negotiation with Filament. Negotiation is all about strength, isn't it? Leverage?"

"Leverage ... " He grinned. "You want us to steal the tech lock machines that 3340's been studying." She smiled encouragingly. "And ... ring the park with them," he said, now not seeing her at all but some vision of his own. "Even inscape is under the locks' control. If we could threaten to shut it down for the sleepwalkers — "

"Now that would be leverage," Livia said with a grin.

"We'd have to let Maren know what we'd done somehow." He scowled. "Why didn't she think of this to begin with?"

Livia sighed. "Maren can't accept that Teven was conquered just to provide a staging ground for 3340's transformation. She still believes the Book has some grand plan for the whole coronal; I'm afraid Maren has too high a view of her own value to believe that all of this," she gestured around to take in the city, the manifolds, and the whole coronal, "could be expendable."

"And when she does realize it ... "

"She'll need to have the tools to do something about it."

Rene nodded curtly. "Right I'll round up the others. Where should we meet, or are you going to come with me?"

She shook her head. "I have something else I have to do, which is just as important." When he looked doubtful, she put her hand on his shoulder. "You can do this, Rene. You'll be a fine leader, today and in the future."

He grinned and saluted her. As he walked away he was already waving somebody over. Livia watched him fondly for a few seconds, then jogged for the encampment's exit Qiingi was waiting in a doorway three blocks from the encampment He looked haggard, as if he hadn't slept since she'd last seen him.

She kissed him. He said, "I thought it better to wait for you here."

She laughed. "My friends don't bite."

They walked in silence for a while, passing people out strolling, or working on rebuilding the city. It seemed quiet and peaceful, and no one paid them any attention.

"What did you find when you returned home?" she asked after a while.

He sighed. "Nothing. Skaalitch is almost abandoned. Why live in a hide hut when you can have central heating? And yet my friends and family, they are still there ... and they long for the old days.

"They begged me to stay with them," he added after a while.

She looked away sorrowfully. "As soon as Choronzon arrives, he'll destroy the locks, both the physical machinery and all copies of the plans — including ours. The only way to preserve the locks is to leave with them now."

"I know."

"But." She stopped. "You don't have to come with me," she said in a low voice. "Qiingi, these are your people! Why don't you stay with them?"

"I think you know why."

She frowned. "You mean when you told me that Teven was real, and the Archipelago an illusion? And you said that we'd lost Teven."

He nodded.

"You know," she said pensively, "even a few days ago, I thought we were coming back here to save our homes. You never thought so, did you? So why did you come? Not simply to be with me?"