His projection sat on the log next to Livia. "I know," it said. "I'm sorry I didn't warn you. I tried to call you when the attack started, but things were too crazy in the Societies."

"I heard you escaped — well, that you were never in Barrastea," she said. "Maren Ellis told me."

He nodded. "A group of us have been working at the aerie for a while now. Are you coming here?"

"I don't know yet." She was happy that he'd escaped the battle, but couldn't hide her anger all the same. Once, she and Aaron had been inseparable. She'd felt she need never keep anything from this young man who had seen the things she had seen, including Livia scrabbling like an animal to survive in the ruined lands of Teven's far side. Now he was keeping secrets from her.

"But what are you doing up there?" she asked him. "And why the secrecy? You left my Society!"

He looked uncomfortable. "It was the founders. They asked us to keep it secret. At the time, I thought it was because we were playing around with technologies that went against the tech locks. Now, I'm starting to wonder if there wasn't more going on."

"What do you mean?"

"It started," he said, "with an invitation from Lady Ellis."

Three weeks ago, Ellis had asked Aaron to visit her at the aerie. He had never spoken to any of the founders before, and had eagerly agreed. "I tried to tell you that afternoon" he insisted, "but Ellis's agents blocked me. Whatever I said to you, they'd intervene and change the words. It was ... frightening, the power they had." Intrigued, but more than a little confused, he had flown out to the Southwall mountains to meet the founder.

"You are to take credit for what we are about to do," Ellis had told him. Aaron told Livia that the founder had reinforced this by later wiping the record of their conversation from inscape. He hadn't known that was possible, but Aaron had always suspected that the creators of the tech locks had resources they kept hidden from their descendants.

"It's right up your alley," Ellis said as they walked along a rocky path at the foot of one of the Cirrus glaciers. Below them, past mountain slopes and broken peaks, Teven Coronal spread out like an ocean of cloud and detail; above, huge cables formed a horizontal grid across the sky.

"Explain," he'd said, putting his back to a rain-slick slab of black rock. "You're somehow opposed to the peers' city project?"

"Not opposed to it," she said carefully. "We want your generation's ambitions to go forward. The city is a worthy project. No, you can view this as a ... complementary activity."

"So what do you want us to do?" She had contacted some twenty other peers, apparently — choosing those who'd opposed the city project.

Ellis gazed out over the coronal; in profile, she looked very like the young goddess many of the peers grudgingly imagined her to be. "It's pretty simple," she said. "I want you to reinvent science."

Aaron barked a laugh, but she didn't join in. His smile died, replaced by a quizzical frown. "Science was completed centuries ago," he said. "We know it all."

"You know nothing," she said dismissively. "Despite the fact that you benefit from the knowledge. It's the AIs of inscape, and the system of the tech locks that know. You only know the broadest outlines of natural science, because your generation doesn't need to know more. You benefit from it without understanding it. But even the application of that knowledge — what it allows you to do — is disguised in one way or another by every manifold in Teven. Your generation doesn't learn science, and the locks have hidden much technical knowledge from you."

None of this came as any surprise; long-range radio was impossible in any manifold Aaron knew of. So was space travel, and astronomy was almost impossible because the Lethe Nebula blocked so much of the sky. "Let me get this straight," he said. "We deliberately forget some things in order to create the culture we want to live in; then you, who did this in the first place, tell me you want us to open those books again?"

She shook her head. "We don't want to recover old ideas. Science embodied in a device or object is pure. Science written down and interpreted by humans always comes with historical and ideological baggage. We ereated the manifolds so you could jettison that baggage whenever you wanted."

"But if all of scientific knowledge is embedded in the tech locks anyway — if we could get it out without violating their programming, we could just ask them for it."

She shook her head. "We want you to rediscover it. Reinvent it Make it yours. Do the experiments. Theorize. Build the missing parts of the edifice again, and put your stamp on them." He remembered her eyes shining as she said this. "We wiped the slate clean when we came here, so mat we could start anew. That always included the history of science as well as culture. We're ready, Aaron — that's the point. Westerhaven is confident, full-blooded, and unique. So are some of the other manifolds. We can do this now without falling under the shadow of long-dead thinkers and their belief systems. We can have an utterly Westerhaven science."

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?"