They looked at one another. Qiingi nodded slowly. "We know that our elders' stories about this place are largely true," he said. "The elders speak of a single Song of Ometeotl mat encompasses all the gardens of the sun. All the planets and coronals, you would say. For some reason, our world of Teven is not part of this Song. These radio voices do not give any clues as to why."
"Except one," said Livia, waving a fork at Qiingi. "We've heard ships signaling one another and their ports. None of them mentioned Teven,
or Rosinius, or any of the coronals we've visited. It's as if diose places don't exist to them."
Aaron shrugged. "Beyond their horizon. Nothing unusual there."
"But, the elders have always been adamant about one thing," said Qiingi. "The rest of the solar system does not have horizons. It is all one place. So how could we be beyond its horizon?"
They debated as the evening wore on. Raven's histories were very different than Westerhaven's; each manifold saw the past through a different lens. It was no surprise that they could find few common denominators in the stories.
In particular, the history leading up to and immediately following the self-imposed exile of the founders to Teven varied wildly from place to place. Qiingi claimed mat this was natural, because that period constituted the origin, or dreamtime, of all the manifolds. "We each make it our source myth," he explained.
Aaron opened his mouth to make some snide comment, but was interrupted by a squawk from the radio.
Qiingi raised an eyebrow. "Did it just say 'house'?"
They crowded into me bedroom. Sure enough, the radio was saying, "Attention the house, attention the house. You have no identification beacon. This is a violation of " bzzzzt. The last noise sounded tike machine-language.
Aaron grabbed the crude microphone he had built. "Well, what do I say?"
"Say we need help," Iivia said. "What's the Old Worldling word ... Mayday?"
"Mayday, mayday," Aaron said into the mic. "We are unpowered and unarmed. Can you hear us?"
Rich laughter poured out of the speaker. If this isn't the craziest stunt I've ever seen!" The voice faded a bit. "Hey, guys, take a look at this thing. Some damn fools built themselves a flying house."
Iivia and Aaron looked at each other. "I doubt we're dealing with officials here," he said.
Qiingi was staring out the bedroom window. "What do you think mat is?" he said, pointing.
It looked tike a tittle metal star, seven-pointed and twirling sedately. Livia went to the window and shielded her eyes with her hands. In the second or two it took to do that the distant vision had expanded from an intricate speck to button-sized. Then all of a sudden it was on top of them: kilometers-long, sides of white metal, with chandelier cities on the ends of long netted cables slung from its central body.
A shudder went through the house. "We've been caught," shouted Aaron. For a second Livia's inner ear told her she was felling, men things leveled out with a bounce.
She was about to comment on the smoothness of then-capture when the bedroom was suddenly filled with vertical yellow bars, spaced about one per meter. These flickered, faded, and were replaced by a set of nested blue spheres. The black outside the window turned to static, and then landscapes appeared out there: a plain of wheat fields, turned sideways; a glittering cityscape; a vista of mountains.
Livia grabbed Qiingi for support. "Inscape failure!" she shouted. She had seen this before, as had Aaron.
And then the house was full of people.
A young man in an outfit of canary yellow and blue appeared in the bedroom doorway. "Fantastic!" he laughed in heavily accented WorldLing. "This is a great stunt, you really had us going there for a while."
Livia could hear a crowd of men and women in the living room pointing at the furniture and laughing. More were arguing hi the kitchen. She forced her shoulders out of their defensive hunch. Obviously these people were projections of that large ship's inscape system; this young man wasn't physically here. Not yet, anyway the house was doubtless being drawn up into one of those chandelier cities even now. She glanced out the window. Space was gone, replaced by an endless landscape of forest, trees, and lakes.
"But how did you do all this?" said the young man. "I mean, the inscape is so strange. Look at this!" He gestured, and suddenly Livia's mother stood before him.
"What can I do for you, sir?" she inquired politely. He laughed, and as Livia watched in horror, Father appeared, then Esther, and Jachman and Rene her whole Society, summoned for the first time in her life by a stranger.
"Stop it!" She gave the command to dismiss the Society, and she saw the confirmation icon blaze briefly in her lower visual field; but the animas of her friends and family remained visible. "What are you doing? Stop!"
The youth cocked his head, examining her as if she were some unusual butterfly he'd just collected. He opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by shouts from the living room. It was a female voice, saying, "Out, out! Shoo!"