"You mean you can move freely here?"
"Yes! Isn't it wonderful?"
She leaned away from it in confusion. "Go then get out of here. Reconnoiter. Tell me what's happening in the city."
"Yes, ma'am!" It saluted and flew away. Livia found her heart pounding; it should not have been able to appear here.
"Your qqatxhana?" inquired Qiingi politely.
"Why, yes. He's ... rude." Qiingi had seen the pixie, and her interaction with it! It was her own private agent; nobody else should be able to perceive it unless she explicitly willed it Livia felt exposed, embarrassed and shocked at the event.
She sat down on an outthrust of knotted wood and gazed up at the open ring of bark twenty hand-spans above them. She tried to order her thoughts. "We've been interrogating inscape, I mean the Song of Ometeotl, about this breakdown. It's not even aware there's a problem. Something is deeply wrong, and it's all the doing of these 'ancestors,' isn't it? When did they first approach you? Sometime before the potlatch, isn't that right?"
"A few months ago," he said, sitting cross-legged in front of her. "At first there were only two. They came as visitors, we believed they were from a village under the bay, or from inside a hill. But they preached our own stories at us fluently, and claimed to be our true ancestors the parents of Raven's people."
"But only Raven created Raven's people," she said.
"Yes but he did not appear to us to explain or deny any of it. He was ... strangely absent."
She sat up, eyes widening. "He said nothing about the arrival of the ancestors?"
"The last time Raven appeared he was angry. He said something strange then. That we should not play with ... what was the word? It was an old word, disused now. Yes: we should not play with transcendence. It is possible ... " Qiingi looked sick. "That he has left us," he whispered.
Qiingi must believe he'd said that behind a mask. Livia was embarrassed for him, and kept on as if she hadn't noticed.
"Have you asked the ancestors about that? You lied earlier when you said they weren't around, didn't you?"
"Livia, I think it would be very dangerous for you to approach them now. They are too sure of themselves, like young men who have staged a successful raid. They might do anything."
She remembered the way inscape had broken down when they first appeared. Her angels had not protected her in their presence. Livia fingered the hilt of her sword, wondering.
"Your animals and spirits aren't helping, are they?"
"They are under the control of the ancestors."
"What about basic inscape services? Memory, communication, querying?"
"The Song of Ometeotl does not include the xhants or qqatxhana of the ancestors. They carve no marker for themselves. But perhaps if we hunt among our own people for your Lucius Xavier, we will discover something about them as well."
She shook her head. "I've already back-stepped through my whole history with Lucius, Qiingi. I didn't find anything."
"Qiingi?" It was a man's voice, coming from somewhere outside the stump. They both froze for a moment, staring at the entrance.
"You must stay hidden here," said Qiingi in a low voice. "I do not know what the ancestors will do with you." He saw the uncertainty in Livia Kodaly's face; finally she nodded.
Qiingi stepped out of the stump and walked up the path. As he came next to the propped-up tree, Kale appeared around over a hump in the path. "Ah, there you are," boomed the ancestor. "Have you seen our friend Livia Kodalyr
"She left," said Qiingi.
"Really? That's strange. Her aircar is still here."
Qiingi knew that the stump where Livia Kodaly hid was not visible from where they were standing. Of course, Kale controlled the Song now;
he could probably find Livia using the eyes of the forest as easily as his own.
"Well, let's just see what's down this path, hmm?" Kale went to brush past him.
"You're not really our ancestors," said Qiingi.
Kale stopped "What do you mean?"
"Ever since you arrived, you have been pretending to follow our traditions and practices," said Qiingi quickly. "You say that when the walls between the worlds have fallen, all those in the other worlds will come back to Raven, and we will be pure again. You speak our stories with great familiarity, and you promise a world in which there is only us only the mountains and ocean and Raven."
Kale nodded gravely. "That is so."
"Do you think we're idiots?" said Qiingi. "Do you think we actually believe that we live on a planet on Earth? That our traditions are some sort of orthodoxy that we all believe like little children? What are we to you, Kale, innocent forest people who know nothing of the wider world?"
Kale simply stared at him.
"Kale, we know who we are. We are the inheritors of a civilization that has conquered the stars. We built this world. We made the soil and the air and the sunlight with our mastery of physics and manufacturing, and then we made the Song of Ometeotl what Wordweaver Kodaly calls the manifolds to live in. And like every other people within the Song, we are busy with the work of generations, quite deliberate and careful, to build meaningful ways of life for ourselves and our children."