In the next street, they found the bodies of Wester-haven's peers among the blackened remains of tech lock machinery. It seemed too late for shock or sorrow, even when livia spotted the face of Rene Caiser on one of the bodies.
As they stood gazing at the carnage, a shadow flickered across the road. Livia instinctively ducked; she heard laughter from above, and then Choronzon the god was touching down lightly not three meters away.
He looked untroubled by the death and destruction, his hair perhaps in a bit more boyish disarray than usual. He bowed to the silent group and said, "At your service, madam, sirs. I heard you needed a bit of liberating, so I thought I'd drop in."
His callousness made Livia want to throw up.
Emblaze had also recovered her poise. "We're grateful for your help," she said to Choronzon.
"Are we?" snapped Livia. "That remains to be seen." She stepped in front of Emblaze. "Choronzon, I don't want to appear ungrateful, but I'd like to know what you're going to do now that Teven's been retaken."
"Do?" He looked innocently surprised at the question.
"Who rules here now?" she asked bluntly. "Will you leave us in peace to restore the manifolds? Or did you make some other arrangement with the annies while you were on your way here?"
"Livia Kodaly." He shook his head sadly. "You don't know when's the wrong time to pick a fight, do you? I've just taken this world, Liv. Leave it to those of us who accomplished that — those of us who made this world in the first place! — to decide what will happen next"
"In other words," she said, "you're not going to leave us alone. Are you?"
He crossed his arms. "Things will have to change, certainly."
"No more manifolds?"
"No more manifolds. I didn't like the results of that experiment. Maren went too far."
"Maybe. But it wasn't all bad. The tech locks ... "
"Are officially banned. I'll be wiping every last repository that might hold their plans before I leave. And the annies have agreed that Teven Coronal should join the rest of the Archipelago. Of course, there's the little problem of what to do about that," he crooked a thumb at the distant eschatus machine, "and about the Good Book in general. We'll have a fight on our hands, no doubt about it. But I'm sure we'll win. And then we'll build better firebreaks. Ones that will hold for a million years."
Livia looked at Qiingi. He gazed back despairingly and in his eyes she saw the death of Ometeotl. Choronzon was talking about the end of any human person's right to decide the shape of their own world. By the time he was done, an invincible tyranny would have settled over the human race, for all time. What was that term the versos used to describe it? Wallpaper: an endless repeating pattern of identical lives. If men and women could no longer select the technologies that would frame their lives, the Archipelago might remain a wondrous, dazzling place to live but it would never change. No man like Qiingi would ever exist again because no place like Raven's country could exist. Neither would there be drummers, nor the slow measured beat of lives lived in the dream-time of Oceanus.
"I think it's about to go off," Emblaze said, pointing.
They turned to look; the black cloud was beginning to glow an electric blue. A faint hissing sound reached livia's ears in the eerie post-battle silence.
"You'd better be going," said Choronzon. "I'll deal with whatever comes out of that explosion."
Livia was no longer listening. She looked around at the others: Emblaze and her lads, Qiingi, Doran Morss, and the haggard, shattered Sophia. She turned to gaze across the skyline of Barrastea, and thought of the strange twist of fate that had made her the Ariadne to Westerhaven's lost people. It was a fate she would never have chosen for herself, but it was a fate she could no longer avoid or deny.
There was only one place left where the tech locks might be preserved. It was the one place she most feared to go. livia still had the little inscape jamming device in her pocket. She drew it out now and stared at it. "Doran, what will get copied by the eschatus machine?" she murmured. "Just minds? Or implants and their contents, too?"
"What?" said Choronzon.
"Everything," said Doran. "A data map of all objects and persons within the blast radius."
She couldn't help but meet Choronzon's eye. He appeared puzzled for a second, and then as the light of understanding dawned in his eyes Livia yelled to her lads, 'Take him down!"
Then she turned and sprinted up the street She had no chance to glance back to see if Peaseblossom dropped Cicada and tackled the self-styled god; nor to see the expression on Qiingi's face as he yelled and belatedly pursued her. Livia clipped the inscape jammer to her ear without pausing; she kept her eyes fixed on the crowd, above which a blue sun was rising and eating away the whole world, even the ground itself as she hit the edge of the throng and pushed her way in —
The concussion knocked them to their knees, all save Choronzon who stood upright, a black knifelike shadow scoring back a dozen meters behind him. A wall of flame reared up along the perimeter of the park. Sophia Eckhardt watched in horror, knowing that it was men and women feeding that fire. Qiingi ran into the holocaust and disappeared, and Livia's creatures — Pease-blossom and Emblaze — followed him.
The fire licked up once or twice more and died, and the bright light from the center of the park went out. Sophia blinked away afterimages and stared.
Where two million people had stood, the ground was bare and black — more than that, the very soil was stripped away, revealing the glossy skin of the coronal. There was nothing there at all, except at the very edge of the circle, where blackened bodies lay piled, and at the very center, where a single incandescent human form danced.
Choronzon kicked away Cicada, who had kept him from leaping into the air for the crucial seconds it had taken Livia Kodaly to run into the holocaust. Now he rose into the sky, cursing.
The distant figure stopped dancing. It was hard to tell, but it might have been looking in their direction. Suddenly it jumped up for all the world like a diver, and with a bright flash a circular piece of coronal skin imploded below it. It shot through the opening and disappeared as a vortex of wind formed above the hole.
Choronzon flew after it, disappearing through what turned out to be a hole straight through the coronal into space. Hours later he returned, as people began emerging from their homes to meet the anecliptic bots that now patrolled the streets. He came empty-handed. Thirty-three forty had escaped.
25
"It's here," said Cicada. "Just keep walking, you're there now."
"Thanks." Doran Morss shook hands with the AI. Cicada walked away whistling. He wore workman's clothes today and had a five-o'clock shadow. Doran shook his head. Was Livia Kodaly's former agent sentient now? It was impossible to know — but he and Peaseblossom had made lives for themselves. They seemed content.
Doran walked between the pair of hedges Cicada had brought him to. Here the Kodaly estate began. He realized without surprise that he had crossed these grounds several times over the past few days. Like so many places in Teven, the chambers of the Kodaly family were both private and public — wide open to any visitor, yet opaque to any investigation. Pilgrims had begun to come here from all over the Archipelago, hoping to somehow touch the real life of Livia. In her sim, Doran had learned she was a minor legend in Westerhaven. Now, she was a figure of myth throughout the Archipelago. So it was fitting that, like her, even the Kodaly estate itself faded away from those trying to reach it. Doran could have spent weeks walking in circles without ever being let in. He was grateful entry had been as easy as it seemed to have been.