He got it then, and the idea flooded him like a benediction. This was something he could do, something worthy of all the restless energy and passion that he'd wasted so long on petty intrigues and face-saving.
Maybe it didn't matter that Ellis had wiped the record of this conversation; Aaron remembered its every detail with electric clarity anyway.
"That's what you've been doing?" Livia asked angrily. "Reinventing things?" On another day it might have seemed a very Westerhaven thing to do. Now, the whole escapade looked trivial and foolish. "Even while Bar-rastea burned?"
He winced, but held his ground. "I know how it looks, in the race of what's been happening. Unless you look at where Ellis wanted us to start."
"What do you mean?"
"I'll show you: come here." He stood up and held out his hand. Livia took it, and with a shimmer of transition, found her virtual self standing elsewhere.
This place was something like a half-cave hewn out of the side of a mountain huge, cold, and echoing. The mouth of the cave was closed by a single sheet of cleanly transparent glass or diamond. Outside that vast window was a broad ledge of white metal, and beyond that nothing but an abyss of stars.
The floor of the half-cave was cluttered with lathes, cabinets, and work benches. The place was also crowded with people and when Livia saw them, she felt a knot in her stomach unwind. "They're alive!"
Many of the peers whose names had appeared on the rolls of the missing were walking and talking here. At least six of Jachman's friends, supposedly staunch advocates of the city project, were physically present. Several were enthusiastically working on what looked like a half-finished boat, planing away at the wood while slinging fragments of ribald poetry back and forth. One saluted Livia.
"So now you know," said Aaron. "I haven't been idle, and I haven't been neglecting the peers. Quite the contrary you've walked in on something of a conspiracy." He smiled at her undisguised look of astonishment.
"But what are you doing here? What could possibly have been so important that you that these people weren't there to defend the city? The city, that's now burning " She couldn't go on, but just stood there glaring at him.
Gently but firmly, Aaron took her arm and led her to the huge curving diamond window. "We were under orders from the founders. Maren Ellis commanded us to try something that the tech locks have always forbidden. And we were succeeding. When Raven attacked we were all here, and nobody had time to organize a return to the city before air travel became unsafe."
Something glowed under starlight on the broad metal shelf beyond the window. The shelf must have been fifty meters deep, and against that the barrel-shaped thing looked small. "Is that what you were working on?"
He grinned proudly. "Yes. It's
something, Livia, that we cast away over our horizon centuries ago. Something that's been impossible for any manifold for a very long time. It's a device for traveling in space."
She stared at the thing. It looked like a wine cask. Whatever it was, that unobtrusive little object should have been as impossible in Westerhaven as flying craft had been for Raven's people. "How ... T
"I wouldn't have even thought of trying it if Ellis hadn't insisted. I wanted to start by relearning the theory behind the mind-AI interface of inscape. But she insisted that wouldn't work. We had to rethink key technologies in Westerhaven terms, imagine how they could serve our values rather than change us. So the tech locks would ignore them, see? So up here, over the past few weeks, we succeeded in broadening our horizons to the point where we can build things like this.
"We tried various designs before I hit on this one," he continued when she didn't respond. "The locks won't allow anyone to build any of the old space traveling designs because they all require an industrial culture that we don't want. So how do you preserve the technological mix of your own manifold, and still end up with a device to travel between worlds?"
"Is that ... wood?"
"It is indeed. Sealed with lacquer against the vacuum, of course." The barrel she was looking at wasn't big enough to hold humans. When she pointed this out, he admitted that nobody had taken that step yet.
"But what does it do?"
Aaron crossed his arms and stared at the black sky behind the barrel. "It goes away, and it comes back. So far, that's all. But that's a lot." He turned, and she saw he was frowning. "Though it seems a strange coincidence to me that Lady Ellis should have come to us asking for such a thing, just before these so-called ancestors arrived."
"You think they're not from Teven?" she said jokingly. "And that she knew?"
He shook his head. "I have no idea, actually. But listen, you need to come here, Livia. It's not safe down there."
"Nowhere is safe," she said. "And I have people to look after down here." She was seething with anger at him for abandoning her in favor of this ridiculous project. "Look, I have to go. But ... I'm glad you called. It's good to know you're okay."