That was the beginning of their estrangement. It was also the day when she had realized that, on some level, she had been thinking about whether to give up and stop, like the other survivors had before their rescue. And she had realized that she didn't want to — no matter how far she had to fall.

An indeterminate amount of time had passed when Livia stood up again. Somehow, in the depths of her despair, something had kept nagging at her. There was something the sims hadn't revealed; she felt it must be obvious, but what was it? For a while she stared around at the ruined landscape, wondering what was hidden in plain sight. There was nothing — and that, of course, was it.

She had looked at the field from within Oceanus, and through Westerhaven eyes. There was no trace of the fearsome beasts from Raven; that suggested that the battle had happened within Oceanus only. And that in turn meant that, at least so far, Oceanus had still not had its horizons collapsed by 3340. Certainly they had been up yesterday, when the refugees from Westerhaven first arrived — otherwise the peers' military equipment wouldn't have vanished when they entered Oceanus.

During the fight here, the Oceanans could easily follow anyone who tried to flee back into Westerhaven. The manifolds were close; Alison had lived with a foot in each, after all. But might there be other places here — places that a warrior of Raven might find, but not a soldier of Oceanus?

Livia tore her gaze away from the trampled, bloody grass. She tried to remember how Raven's people saw things. The grass was not merely grass, it was a gift of Ometeotl. This clearing, it wasn't random, it was a place with some significance, even if that meaning wasn't apparent to human eyes.

She faced the forest and opened her senses to it — feeling the warmth of the air, scenting the grass. You traveled between manifolds by caring; could she find the values of some nearby manifold that was like Raven's? It would be tricky, because she might merely summon up the ghahlanda or qqatxhana of Raven itself. The task here was to reject both the social whirl of Westerhaven and the animism of Raven. To look for something new.

She stood, arms raised to the sunlight, and opened herself to the possibilities. And, after a while, she saw something new under the leaves of the forest. It wavered in and out of existence, fading when she worried about the terrible things she was ranning from, solidifying when, for a second or two at a time, she simply admired its colors.

To travel there she would have to abandon the distress she was feeling. For a long time she couldn't do it; then in one moment she sighed, let it all go, and was there.

The gateposts were tall and candy-striped in red and white. They held up an arching sign that said block-world. The gate was closed by filigreed gold bars. Iivia walked up to it, looked past the gleaming gold, and looked again. Past the gate, the sky seemed, well, mauve. And the clouds were big rounded affairs, all their detail stripped off, more like clusters of balloons.

She blinked and stepped back. Then she noticed something hanging from the rightmost gate pillar. It was an ornately framed mirror with lettering under it She went over to it choose an avatar to enter said the sign under the mirror. She looked up at her own reflection.

She seemed wild-eyed and haggard — and as she thought this, her reflection's eyes widened even more, impossibly more, while her pupils shrank into little dots. She was so surprised she laughed. This just made her reflections' teeth pop all over the place like mushrooming skyscrapers, and as she blinked and tried to figure out what she was seeing, Livia found her mirrored self had turned into a cartoon version of her. She had huge buck teeth, her hair was a sweeping wave that plummeted past her big saillike ears, and her body had been reduced to a sketch, except for the outlandishly big hands and feet The apparition would have looked funny in other circumstances; now, though, it seemed bizarre and threatening. She felt her anxiety returning, but by now the manifold seemed to have stabilized.

There was a tinkling click and the big gold gate swung open. Without hesitation she ran through.

The forest where she had stood moments ago was gone. Livia looked around herself, and nearly fell down. Distance was seriously distorted everywhere she looked. Also, the whole landscape was rendered in fluorescent primary colors. She had to sit down on the road and stare at the ground in front of her to keep from becoming sick.

It was all simplified, that was it. The dirt was a single seamless substance, with a simple texture and one color, brown. She reached out to touch it, and felt dirt — but her brain wasn't allowing any variation to it, no pebbles, no fines. It was just ... dirt.

When her head stopped spinning Livia looked up. Now it was obvious what was going on here. The grass with its wildflowers and the rolling hills were all simplified as well. Some things were nearby — like the grass on either side of the road and the road itself — while some were in the middle distance, and some were far away. Her eye was telling her that there were only three possibilities: near, middle, and far. The clouds overhead were/a/; all equally far, just like the distant bills and mountains.

She stood up and walked up the road, taking in the strangely simplified landscape. She had definitely escaped Oceanus; the question was, had anyone else?

It came as no real surprise when she spied a strange figure approaching her from the middle distance. It was hopping. By this time Livia had begun spotting all sorts of detail. The skies were full of gamboling birds. There were jaunty trees here and there with friendly faces plastered on their trunks. They smiled and winked at her as she passed; the feeling of friendly surveillance gave her the creeps.

So the fact that she was being approached by a giant rabbit seemed perfectly consistent with the rest of the place. The rabbit was a pale pink, with three-fingered hands and giant, bent-over ears. Something subtle about its face suggested it was male. It — he — approached in big bounding hops, each one accompanied by a ridiculous boinging sound. He touched down in front of Livia, bounced a bit, then said, "You're new!" in an appropriately big-rabbitish voice.

Livia said, "My name is Livia Kodaly, of Westerhaven manifold. I'm looking for some friends of mine ... " She didn't finish because what she'd said wasn't what she heard coming out of her own mouth. She heard: "Hi! I'm Livia. Will you be my friend?"

"Okay!" said the rabbit. "I'm Bounder. It's my own name and I chose it myself. I'm going to Centertown. Do ya wanna come?"

"All right," she said, which translated as an enthusiastic

"Sure!" Bounder set off, each of his hops apparently covering a dozen meters or more. Livia found she could keep up with him by simply strolling. Movement here was simple: head in the direction of something that was in the middle distance, and pop, it became part of the near distance. The disturbing implication was that nothing in Block-world was more than a few steps away from anything else.

"What do you mean, you chose your name?" she asked Bounder. He didn't answer; instead, a pair of absurdly blue birds spiraled down from above, one landing on each of Livia's simplified shoulders.

"Bounder was born William Mackenzie Casterman," peeped one. "He is forty-six years old," added the other.

"Why ... uh, why is he pretending to be a rabbit?" she asked the bird-shaped agents.

"He isn't," said one agent

"Pretending," said the other. "He understands bunnies. He thinks bunnies are people and he feels like a rabbit.

"It's quite simple, really. William was born with subnormal neural processes. You are going to ask why he was not fixed. It is because his parents live in one of the lower-technology manifolds. Their culture does not permit meddling in natural events such as childbirth."