Mrs. Kodaly smiled down at her hands.

"But 3340 was never here," said Doran. "The embodied version Livia joined fled immediately after it was born. And the armies have sworn not to allow the tech locks to spread through inscape by any ordinary means. After all, the locks let anybody opt out of the armies' version of the Archipelago."

"Perhaps they haven't been able to stop the spread," said Mr. Kodaly.

"Well, yes they have — up until now. Cracks are just starting to appear in the annies' firewalls. I had the devil of a time smuggling my own copy of the locks back here. I thought that I'd be the first one to return here with them. But they're already here.

"So how did the tech locks return to Teven?"

There. He'd asked the question he'd come to ask, and Livia Kodaly's parents were not offended nor alarmed, indifferent nor suspicious. To his surprise, in fact, the Ko-dalys were both smiling at him. He sat back, puzzled, and waited.

Mr. Kodaly glanced at his wife. She shrugged. He leaned forward. "Have you heard anything of the warrior of Raven, this man Qiingi?"

Doran sat up straight. "He vanished. The last I saw, he was chasing Livia into the eschatus machine's blast radius. I don't think he made it before it went off. So the residual effects of the blast would have killed him instantly."

Mr. Kodaly nodded. "Some people say they saw Qiingi walk out of the blast area afterwards. Carrying someone."

The sunlight, buzzing insects, the tea all seemed unreal suddenly. "She's alive," murmured Doran.

Livia's father shook his head. "Alive? Be careful how you use such words here. We are within the manifolds, Mr. Morss. You might meet our daughter anywhere — walking on the street, even. But how could you be sure it was really her? How can you know it of any of us? We love masks, after all." This last statement was made by an anima; the real Jason Kodaly had retired into some sub-manifold. Moments later, his wife did the same.

Doran sat with the two animas, swirling his tea and scowling. Had Livia become like the Kodaly estate? — a mirage to be chased, never found? Was she really here somewhere, alive and happy, perhaps no more than ten meters away?

He slammed the cup down and stalked away from the table.

Yet, when Doran came to the edge of the estate, he found himself reluctant to step beyond it. The boundary was invisible, of course; indeterminate, even. He knew that if he walked past the corner where he now stood and lost himself in the crowd, Livia's home would evaporate behind him, and he was half certain he would never find it again.

He turned and slowly strolled back the way he'd come. Each shaded bower and stone cottage he passed could contain anything or anyone; the whole Archipelago was layered in illusion, yet here it seemed he was more aware than ever of invisible lives lived just out of reach. That covered walkway there might contain armchairs and tables invisible to him, where patriarchs of the Kodalys older than Livia's parents still sat. Conversations might be going on all around him, all infinitely removed. Yet the impression was not of people hiding; it was more that in this place, time did not move inexorably forward, but layered its moments one on top of the other. If you knew how, you could tunnel through the layers and find the moment you needed — the pipe smoke still swirling, the laughter of lost decades still echoing.

His anger dissolved as he walked through sun and shade. And perhaps this was the condition that a particular manifold had set for him: that he should never be able to find Livia while driven by anger. For as he strolled, hands in pockets, admiring the stonework, he glanced up at random and found himself looking straight at her.

Livia Kodaly was walking, head down, arms crossed, along a flagstone path. She looked over as he approached, and smiled.

Doran's inscape interface couldn't tell him if this was a real person, an anima, or an agent. Something was spoofing her identity. So he stopped several meters away from her, his own arms crossed, and grimaced in frustration. "Hiding in plain sight again, I see."

She laughed. "Still demanding definite answers, I see. How are you, Doran?"

He stuck out his hand to shake, but she opened her arms and hugged him. Whatever her state of being, she felt real just now. When they disengaged he stepped back, unsure of himself now that he was here.

A thousand questions crowded: Had she survived the eschatus machine, being on the edge of the blast radius? Was the warrior Qiingi alive as well? And most of all, was she behind the strange appearance of manifolds across the Archipelago?

"How are you?" she asked.

He opened his mouth and closed it again. "I ... I don't know," he said, surprised at his own honesty. "I showed the worst side of myself when I was here last. The cowardly side. Since then ... I've become a smuggler, did you know that? I'm helping distribute tech lock technology throughout the solar system." He grinned at her. "You never knew, but I fell in love with Westerhaven when I visited the Life of Livia." I fell in love with you. "So I'm trying to make places like it in the Archipelago. Manifolds. I've become a hero to the versos. And the versos are becoming something new. They're like the seeds around which new values are crystalizing — "

"Founders?" she asked.

"Yes! I've given my Scotland to some of them, you should see the manifold they're crafting there, Livia. Hard lives they're trying to lead — but theirs''

"And what's yours, Doran?" she asked as she began strolling again. "What do you own?"

"Shame," he said. "And determination. But I guess those have been what drove me all along."

They walked together, she did not vanish in the sunlight "Your vote is riding high these days," he said after a while. "She represents the new manifolds and her constituency is huge. And there are wars going on, Livia, between the annies and the followers of the Book ... " He shook his head. "But you don't care, do you? You've been hiding here in your garden, and you don't care what happens to the rest of the world."

"That's not true," she murmured. "The Government hired me to be a baseline, remember? It's just that I'm not the baseline for the Government's reality anymore. Nor am I for crippleview. I've become a goal for people like you who are trying to find their way out of the one-sided reality of the Archipelago. Naturally you can't see me as long as you still live inside that view."

She smiled. "I'm a founder now, Doran, and my manifold is vast You just haven't found your way there yet."

Desperately, he said, "But aren't you really here? Can't I see you? I came all this way just to see you."

"To see who, exactly?" she asked. "The Livia of me Life of Livia? The hero of the far side accident? The guide who led the peers out of fallen Westerhaven? The rescuer, who returned to chase the villains out of Teven? Or is it Alison Haver you're looking for?" She shook her head. "I could have stood back and let you meet one of those; but then you wouldn't have found me."

"And is this the real you? Or just another mask?"

Sadly, she turned away. "You haven't understood the first thing about manifolds, have you? It's not me who's put the mask on my face. It's you."

For a while Doran walked with her, confused and wondering. Finally she looked back, and her expression softened a bit "Let me teD you a story," she said. "You won't find this one in the Life of Livia. Nobody's ever heard it before.

"What have I had that's truly mine? What was it that I wanted? In my old life, here, I was unhappy with the peers, and Aaron's radical pronouncements rang a false note with me, too. I didn't have the words to explain my feelings to myself or anybody else, then. But you could see it all around you, in the peers fighting duels over fine points of aesthetics, or planning grand cities and works to renew Westerhaven when and if they came to power. They fought over a million different issues, but it always came down to one thing: How could we find a balance between our own uniqueness and our place in the world? Should we try to liberate ourselves from the constraints that the world and the previous generation had placed on us — and maybe abandon reality entirely — or should we throw away our creative souls and conserve the world that was? Westerhaven was always in a tug-of-war between those two poles, the liberal and the conservative.