In some sense, the estate had always been like this. Even the architecture played with ideas of identity: many buildings in this vicinity had been constructed without walls or roofs, while tapestries of ivy and soaring multicolored sails made of tough tenting cast new definitions of in and out in the gardens themselves. At some point you just gave over to it and stopped trying to define where you were.

Maybe he'd have found the place himself if he'd ever learned to stop looking.

Now that he was here, he had no trouble finding Livia's parents in a green-walled bower deep within the estate. They were sipping tea at a wrought-iron table. Bees hummed around the marmalade. The two elders of the Kodaly clan smiled in recognition as Doran approached, and Livia's father stood to summon up another chair.

"How are you, Mr. Morss?" Livia's mother poured him something hot in a fine china cup. He took it, noting the cadences of her accent, the unique patterning on the china. "I'm well, thanks," he said. This was no sim, nor any narrative.

"What news of your world?" Mr. Kodaly asked.

"It's hard to be sure of anything these days," he said ruefully. "The anecliptics are trying to break up 3340 by garbling all long-range communications. It seems to be working; I think the Book is losing ground. Of course, 3340 has a body now, and defeating that is proving to be a bit more of a problem. Not that I care; since the annies and the Government are totally tied up battling 3340, there's a power vacuum in the Archipelago. I've been taking advantage of that to ... pursue a new line of work."

Mr. Kodaly did not ask what that work was. "Does Teven Coronal play some part in your plans, Mr. Morss?"

"It has to do with the tech locks," he said.

"But the tech locks were destroyed," said Mr. Kodaly with a cryptic smile.

There was a brief pause. Faint city sounds infiltrated the little bower, gentle reminders of the bustle and liveliness available just a few paths away. The morning sunlight was slanting farther toward vertical, but neither of the Kodalys seemed inclined to pick up the thread of the conversation.

Finally Doran said, "I've been doing a little touring around since I got here. It looks like you've fully restored Barrastea. The museum's reopened. As an outsider I can't say, but it looks like Westerhaven is back to the way it was."

Mr. Kodaly smiled wryly. "Oh, no, it'll never be that. We've had our balloon punctured, Mr. Morss. All manner of strange outside influences are pouring into Teven these days. And anyway, this," he gestured around himself, "isn't Westerhaven. Westerhaven was a particular performance we put on, with ourselves as the audience. Nowadays we're being asked to perform it for tourists from the Archipelago. That's a totally different thing. No ... " He peered away down a corridor of vine-topped trestles. "We haven't given a name to this manifold yet. We may never get around to it."

Doran narrowed his eyes skeptically. "I know you tell everyone that you're not using tech locks here. But I visited Raven's people yesterday. They have no aircars, no long-distance communications ... It sure looks like the locks are working there."

Mr. Kodaly shrugged. "The locks are an idea first, a technology second. We don't need the machinery to live much the way we once did. We only need commitment. In some ways that's better, isn't it?"

Doran sat back, musing. "Maybe. And yet the locks do exist In fact — here, let me show you." He leaned forward and gestured open an inscape window. Within that window shone a seemingly endless ocean of flickering lines and labeled boxes — an abstract maelstrom of information. They all gazed into it for a second, then Doran dismissed it.

"I thought I might need something to move the conversation along," said Doran. "So I brought the status interface for the locks with me. Yes, I cany a copy of the interface wherever I go these days. Can you guess where I found it?"

They sat attentively. Neither said anything. "Up until last year," continued Doran, "the only person in any world who had access to that interface — or even knew it existed — was Maren Ellis. She'd appropriated all the manifolds' utilities for herself. But with this I can monitor the health of the system. Or communicate with an active, local instance of the locks. Which I did this morning. The locks are running right now," he said. "They are all around us, even in this garden. So you see you don't have to give me the official line. I know the truth."

Doran realized suddenly that Mr. Kodaly was no longer represented by an anima: it was the real man sitting across from him, his features rendered a bit abstract by the play of dappled leaf-light across his brow. He seemed to be smiling.

"So what is it that you've come here to do?" asked Livia's father.

"I'm merely continuing my work." Doran stood up and restlessly paced over to the close-clipped hedges. "Ever heard the term 'open-source government'? That's what we have in the Archipelago. The Government and votes are open to anyone to examine and tinker with, they're totally under our control. I used to think that the kind of freedom they gave us was enough — and I used to blame the post-humans for the dissatisfaction with the status quo that, well, we all felt on some level. But it wasn't transcendence of the human condition that people were longing for. It was something else, something that the tech locks make possible."

"Not open-source government," said Mrs. Kodaly. "But open-source reality?"

He stared at her. She smiled and patted her mouth modestly with a napkin. "Because technologies are control systems," she said. "They dictate your reality. Really, Mr. Morss, we've known this for hundreds of years."

Doran returned and sat down. "How did you do it?

Choronzon swore he would destroy the locks, and he did, didn't he? I was here, I saw it done."

"Yes," said Mrs. Kodaly blandly. She picked up her tea and sipped it, staring off through the humming air of summer.

Doran pressed on. "So we must assume that someone escaped with the locks' technology before he arrived, and returned with it once he was gone."

"That sounds reasonable," said Mr. Kodaly.

"Funny thing," said Doran.

The silence stretched. Finally, Mrs. Kodaly said, "What do you mean?"

"Funny thing," he repeated. "Because we know that didn't happen. Once the annies knew 3340 was using Teven, they locked down the entire Lethe Nebula. Nobody got out while Choronzon was here. So the tech locks couldn't have survived."

"Oh?"

"And yet," continued Doran, "lately, all over the Archipelago, little pockets of ... I don't know what to call them — super sims? Autonomous zones? ... Manifolds? Call them manifolds, though they're much more open than the ones you had here — well, little pockets keep popping up. Somebody's distributing the tech locks throughout the Archipelago, they slip past even the best firewalls the annies can come up with. I found my copy on Mercury. And the really funny thing — the truly hilarious, gut-bustingly hysterical thing is, that they only appear in areas where 3340 has taken control."

Now they were watching him closely. They knew something, he was sure of it. "I've been traveling around the Archipelago trying to figure out what's going on," said Doran. "It may not please you to hear me speak of your daughter ... " They waited politely. "But then, you have your animas to intercede for you if you become upset by what I'm about to say."

Neither spoke. Doran shrugged and said, "Livia Kodaly was one of those copied into the eschatus machine; we know that. A version of her mind exists inside 3340's new body, along with two million others. But while they're all working hard to create the mind of 3340, is it possible that Livia has another purpose?

"She can't be rooted out; maybe she hides from the rest of the true believers who make up 3340's mind, I don't know. But what I do know is that every now and then, when 3340 lets down his guard, Livia Kodaly finds a way to slip a copy of the tech locks out into the real world."