Livia groaned. "That's all I need. Okay, thanks, I'll deal with it on my own."

"But it's an attack on your authority!" livia half smiled. "And what's new about that?"

"Well, firstly — "

"Go away!"

They spiraled up and away, muttering in bell-like tones.

She rounded the stone and green intersection, and entered the Kodaly ballroom. This presented itself as a public park, open to the sky, surrounded by hedges and dotted with trees and ivied walls that stood in isolation like planned ruins. The place appeared completely empty and peaceful, save for several couples strolling enwrapped in the scent of grass and sound of buzzing cicadas. On the far side was a giant crumbling stone archway, its far end walled up except for a small door at the bottom. Invisible to everyone but Livia were several platforms attached under the top of the arch. For years chests of real cloth apparel, dolls, and books had sat on these platforms; various paintings and ceramics she had made as a child adorned the curving stone of the arch; and there sat her bed. That place was where she often lounged and usually slept — directly above the heads of public traffic through the park. She could lie on her stomach and kick her bare feet in the air while staring straight down at strangers strolling through the archway. This was how the Kodalys liked to live — in the interstices of the public world.

As she stepped onto the lawn the park was suddenly full of people.

She sauntered now between hedgerows festooned with centuries' worth of portraits and statues, and under long crimson and gold banners displaying the Kodaly crest. Knots of revelers were scattered across the grass, with children running back and forth between them and tables piled high with food. The strolling couples, having not been invited to this party, were invisible now.

This place was familiar and comforting to Livia. She had played here as a child, as her mother had before her. High overhead, giant parasols of tenting cunningly filtered sun and rain to indirection; the luminous light, the fine geometry of the distant parasols, the paintings — they were not furnished with alternatives, but were pleasant constants in an otherwise turbulent world. Westerhaven knew time intimately, after all, both in its fluidity and its fixedness. It was the Westerhaven Great Families' ability to live simultaneously in chaotic inscape and changeless tradition that attracted so many other manifolds as supporters and clients.

"Aren't you going to announce yourself, Livia?" asked Mother. She stood on the other side of the field, under a grotesque bronze statue of Shakespeare's Feste. Livia had once kissed Jachman's older brother behind that statue.

"I'll join in when I'm ready," said Livia. She draped herself across a comfortable leather armchair that she remembered playing hide-and-seek behind as a girl; this was a Kodaly chair, impervious to weather and imperceptible to any public visitors to the park. For a while she watched through a filigree of leaves as the peers danced, but she didn't yet want to merge them with her Society.

"Why isn't he here to support me?" she asked her Society.

"Is that who you're moping about?" Natalia, an old friend and former rival, came to perch on the arm of the chair. "Aaron's not your lover, he's just your friend. Livia, how you cling!"

The rest of the Society all made various pooh-poohing noises. "Why worry about such things?" asked Sebastian, who stood next to her as well as fifteen meters away in the heart of the party. "He'll turn up. And this authority thing will sort itself out."

"It's not even proper to talk about," said Natalia. "But you're a strange one, Livia, so we indulge you." They all laughed.

They were probably right. Even if she and Aaron had been an inseparable pair for years, working parties like this one as a team ... They could exchange a nod from across a crowded room and know whom to talk to next, whom to convince or cajole to support or censure some mad plan of the peers. Until recently, they had shared a silent understanding of how the world worked, and more important, how it should work. Until the most ridiculous arguments, over abstracts and impossible dreams, had begun to separate them.

It did no good to think about it now. She stretched and stood up. "All right," she said. "Let's enter the lion's jaws." She changed her shift into a ball gown and with a single gesture entered the party at its center.

Livia's two pipsqueak agents watched her join the submanifold from a vantage point high above the city. Insofar as they had any consciousness at all, it was an imitation of Livia's own; they soared the virtual thermals and vortexes of the city with delight and abandon, because they thought that she would have in their place.

Spread below them they saw the whole panoply of Westerhaven life, a mazelike throng of people walking, gathering, talking, and working together — single-minded in the results of their labor, though all of them might be seeing a different city. Some would be cruising sexual submanifolds invisible to the majority; others would be meditating in plazas empty of all people. Some had only their own self-made phantasms for company; these mediated between them and the real people in their lives, who had forever gone beyond their horizons. And then, interpenetrating all of this, thousands of visitors from other manifolds walked in half or full immersion in their own realities. Some could be seen, some could not. Who knew what they were experiencing?

Yet all of this was merely the tacit, superficial reality of Barrastea. Cicada and Peaseblossom saw something few others bothered to see. Overlaying the city within in-scape were hundreds of other Barrasteas, most containing the same citizens going about very similar activities. These were sims; and in any given sim, some citizens were making sims of each other too, until the ghosts and might-have-beens redoubled and recomplicated in an explosion of possibilities.

While this went on, Livia danced with an old friend; Livia hesitated at a drinks table, scanning the crowd for evidence of cliques forming and alliances shifting; Livia scowled in anger at a delegation of the peers who had come to confront her.

Her physical self — her Subject, as it was called — was talking to the stars of the party, six visitors from a distant manifold that had recently opened its doors to Wester-haven. Mother introduced them, saying, "Livia is continuing the family tradition of seducing strangers into our ways."

"Mother!" She grinned at the visitors. "She makes it sound so ... prurient."

"Our founders might agree," said one, a handsome youth who represented himself as older, with silvery hair. His accent was stilted; his manifold had successfully invented its own tongue and he was obviously unused to speaking in Westerhaven's Joyspric. "It is only with our generation that our people have stopped feeling threatened by ... manifolds like yours." He gestured around. "Big, uh, big cultures that eat little ones ... for lunch." They all laughed.

"Your mother said you have a good singing voice," said another man. "We like to sing in our — at our home."

"Really?" She called a quick anima to serve as her mask; scowled at her mother from behind it; then dismissed it. "Would you like to hear something?"

"We would be delighted."

She considered, then smiled wickedly at her mother. "All right, since we're talking about how we lure people away from their realities ... You may know this one, because it's a traditional, older than Teven: it's called 'The Stolen Child.'"

She sang and for a while, only the song was real.

Under the shadow of the great stone arch, another version of Livia had been cornered by some friends. "West-erhaven has no existence unless we continue to create it, every day," one peer said as he hooked his thumbs in his ornamental belt and glared at her. He was one of the Golden Boys, a mover and shaker in the New City movement. "I think you've forgotten that. You think we can live with a foot in two worlds — be of more than one manifold at a time. But you know perfectly well that unless we all work together, all of this" — he gestured around himself — "will dissolve as if it never existed." He shook his head dismissively. "You've let down your generation, Livia Kodaly."