"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."
Livia's face went white with anger. "How dare you "
Not that one. Peaseblossom pointed out another sim to Cicada. This has more authority.
Two young women sat with Livia. One held her hand. "We understand that you advised the committee according to what you thought the drummers would have wanted," she was saying. "But what makes you think that you knew them so well? You'd never visited their manifold while any of them were still alive. And yet you chose to speak for mem in a situation of great ambiguity. That, I'm afraid, is what we can't forgive."
The real Livia Kodaly had finished her song and was laughing with both these women; their conversation had nothing to do with the drummers' land and their mutual affection was obvious. But as the agents watched, the authority given to this sim continued to grow. Cicada was trying to minimize it, but throughout inscape the ani-mas of the other peers were rushing to the node. Any minute now this scenario would hit the tipping point, and what was now part of the artificial imagination would become reality. Livia would be chastised, and some of her authority revoked.
We must warn her!
She's blocking me. I can't get through to her.
Indeed, as the party wore on, Livia felt less and less connected to it. People began to vanish from her senso-rium, starting with the ones she liked least. Eventually she put a stop to that, but at the same time she drifted into the shade
of the stone arch. Climbing a ladder no one else could see, she sat on the lowest of her platforms to watch the party. Insects buzzed around her, and birds wheeled above the treetops. Music and pleasant voices came from the revelers, and it all would have been relaxing had she not been nagged by a sense of dissatisfaction.
She watched while the peers strutted and posed. The young men challenged one another constantly; their swords were not for show. For the peers, arguments about manners or fashion were far from academic: they were the building blocks of their own generation's civilized future. Westerhaven's existence and development depended on the excellence of this generation, and these youths knew it. They were all deeply passionate about such things and she loved them for that. But they felt it was gauche, at least, to express an interest in something outside their circle. Mysterious disappearances or upheavals in nearby manifolds were not the subject of polite conversation.
"You're not mingling," said Mother.
Livia shrugged, and leaned back so that an errant beam of sunlight could rest on her face. "It's just a party, Mother."
"You're worried about losing your authority? Well, don't be. It's a minor issue."
"Oh, Mother!" She scowled at the anima, tempted to dismiss it. "I just spent the past hour and a half engaging a dozen or more peers in idle chitchat to remind them of my position. I know what's going on here. I'm on trial for the drummers thing. Well, I've made my defense. It's the prosecution's turn let what happens, happen. Meanwhile, I'm going to enjoy this little sunbeam I've found."
A loss of authority wouldn't be the end of the world, she mused. She might not be able to requisition aircars quite so cavalierly, or count on the best guests for her soirees. Rene and Jachman might get diplomatic assignments instead of her for a while. Life would go on. She could always sing for her supper.