Lockstep

Nine

LATE THAT EVENING, TOBY found he couldn’t sleep. Things were finally starting to go his way, as he explained to Orpheus. On his haunches on the floor, he frowned seriously at the denner and listed his accomplishments on his fingers. “One: I know Mom’s on Destrier. I just have to get there. But two: I’ve figured out how to make money so I can get there. Three: I met a girl. Well, you met her, but we’re going out together tomorrow!

“And four: Jaysir’s unlocked this for me.” He waggled the twentier’s data block. “Shall we take a look inside?”

There were two kinds of data in the block. It was mostly backups, which kind of made sense; what else would you stick in the bin of bot like this? The backups were in turn partly stuff he didn’t recognize, but some were Consensus Empire worlds, dated after he’d left Sedna. Peter’s work, then.

He was as uneasy about opening these as he was about accessing the libraries’ worth of information you could find online about his brother and sister. The way those library books took his family and turned their lives into dry discourses and reports, printed and categorized and cross-referenced … It was supremely creepy. The idea that these Consensus backups might reveal some side of Peter that he didn’t know was also unsettling.

The second category of data in the block consisted of recordings made by the twentier itself. Shots of home: that seemed innocuous enough. So he linked the data block to his glasses and sat back against the bed.

Orpheus came to curl up in his lap. “Okay,” said Toby, “here we go.” And he loaded the first of the twentier’s own records.

Ice and a black sky. He was looking at the horizon of Sedna. The twentier was crawling forward across the reddish plains, along with five or six others. Its scanning software classified the rocks (actually rock-hard water ice) and sand (smaller chunks of the same) as it went, so virtual labels kept popping up to obscure the vista. A faint murmur of radio chatter between the bots sounded like crickets chirping.

“Hmm.” Toby fast-forwarded, getting a crazy zoom view of crater rims, giant rocks and plains, and the legs of space-suited humans flicking back and forth. Then the horizon disappeared, and it was all about digging.

“Well, crap.” Digging. Then more digging. He zipped through hours and days and weeks of clawing, crumbling, heating and zapping as the twentiers excavated the Sedna homestead. A couple hundred meters below the surface, they hollowed out a vast circular cavern, and in this, other bots built a centrifuge. Sedna’s gravity was minuscule, so they just pretended it didn’t have any and made rotating habitats that spun to create centrifugal weight.

Toby remembered this time, and despite the lack of human faces and voices in the images, he felt a strange sense of nostalgia. He knew that tunnel and this rocky spire outside the entrance … wait, they were outside again. The twentiers were off to prospect.

Fast-forward … more fast-forwarding … It was all stars and rocks, rocks and stars. He was just about to give up when suddenly light and sound burst on him. “Ah!” Everything was moving way too fast and he scrambled to back up the picture to where the change had happened.

At first everything was a bright blur.

Then came sound, a voice: “Is it recording?”

Toby sucked in a sharp breath.

The blur receded, sharpened, and became a face.

“Yes, this makes us no better than our enemies,” said Carter McGonigal, Toby’s father, as he scowled into the twentier’s little lenses. “But what choice do we have?

“Let’s get started.”

BOTH TOBY’S PARENTS LOOKED a little older than the last time he’d seen them. Mother, in particular, seemed careworn and tired. She was clutching a steaming coffee cup, and even though the twentier didn’t record odors, Toby felt the pungency of its scent lighting up memories—so many of them!—of times she’d sat this way on Earth, and in the habitat.

That wasn’t where they were now. His parents had lit some lamps in one corner of the vehicle bay outside the centrifuge and its meager comforts. Mother’s backdrop was a wall of tools and machinery, and they both wore mud-smeared space suits.

“It’s not just that you’re talking about spying on your own friends,” Mother said now. “It’s a slippery slope. Where’s it going to end, Carter? Isn’t this exactly how the trillionaires got to where they are? One little betrayal at a time?”

“Yeah,” said Father distractedly. He was poking at the air, obviously using an interface that probably connected to the twentier. “Same methods. Different goals.”

Toby stared at his parents, mesmerized by the little differences he could see in them. They were older—aged, for him, literally overnight. The change wasn’t so drastic as in those pictures of Peter and Evayne, and that somehow made it all more real. It was a bit like seeing pictures of them from the time before he’d been born—equally strange and unimaginable, yet obviously real.

Mother sighed. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Well. These twentiers are right at the edge of the network. They’re the bottom-feeders of the colony, which makes them perfect. If the trillionaires really have planted a mole in our group—or more than one—then we can’t trust the high-level network anymore. That’s the first thing they’re going to hack. So the Internet feeds, communications, entertainment—basically everything we use day to day in the habitats—is suspect. That’s why I want to build a secure network of our own out here. Using these guys and the other infrastructure bots.”

She knelt down to peer into the twentier’s eyes; to Toby it was disconcertingly like both his parents were examining him. “What does that get us?”

“Well, security, for one thing. If we’ve been hacked, the trillionaires could send a kill signal to some critical piece of life support and kill us all in our sleep. Then they move in and jump our claim.”

She reared back, obviously shocked. “You can’t believe they’d do that?”

“Of course they’d do that,” Toby’s father said impatiently. “In a heartbeat. Which is why we have to secure all the low-level infrastructure. Gas supplies, electricity. Heat. Hell, the circuits that open the doors. Route that stuff away from the top-level computers and into our own network.

“The second thing it gets us is spies. We can monitor them, like they’re monitoring us. Only we’ll use the most basic pieces of equipment as our bugs. Let ’em have the TVs and e-mail.”

“I see you’ve thought this through.” She frowned in thought. “How do we secure it?”

“Turing-test biocrypto. Whoever issues a command to our equipment can’t have only the right fingerprint, iris scans, or DNA. They’ll have to have it all, and the personality markers, and more.”

“So,” she said, “you, me, and who else?”

“Peter and Evayne. Nobody outside the family. We don’t know who the mole is.”

There was a momentary silence while he worked at his interface. Mother was staring at him.

“What about Toby?”

Carter McGonigal froze, then slowly looked round at his wife. “Dear … if you want. We have his metrics. But … he’s gone.”

She stood up, and her head left the frame of the picture. “He’s missing,” she said flatly. “Not the same. Not the same.”

Toby’s mother walked away quickly, leaving his father staring into empty space, an angry expression on his face. After a long motionless minute, he stood up and walked away, too—but in the opposite direction.

The twentier sat staring at the wall, and the record didn’t end until nearly a half hour later, when Toby’s father came back and switched off the bot.

THERE WERE MANY MORE records in the twentier’s data block. Toby didn’t have the heart to look at them—at least, not tonight.

Even less able to sleep than before he’d accessed the record, he lay there in bed while Orpheus grumbled and shifted next to him. He thought about how the present had so suddenly become a distant past, and grew by turns tearful, self-pitying, angry and, at last, resigned.

Here and now was where he was stuck, unless somebody had invented time travel while he’d been away. That meant he had a date tomorrow, and at the rate things were going, he was going to show up bleary-eyed and disheveled. That wouldn’t do.

“Get over yourself,” he muttered, then turned on his side and mentally pushed away the past. “Tomorrow.

“Tomorrow…”

Reciting that mantra worked, eventually. He slept.

TOBY CAUGHT ONE GLIMPSE of Kirstana’s house, but that was enough to tell him how important her family must be. She met him at her front door, wearing a combination of dark tunic and leggings, and a long dark cape whose hood was thrown back. The foyer behind her was actually a balcony at the top of a high open space; with a start he realized that the house clung to the outside of the local city sphere and was shaped like a drop of water, frozen in midtrickle down the aerostat’s curve. Spiral stairways curled down to lower balconied levels within the drop. The big curving outer wall was one continuous sheet of glasslike graphene, so transparent that it seemed not to be there at all.

“How are you?”

“I’m good.” Actually, he was. He had awoken feeling like he was doing the right things, however difficult it all was.

Kirstana had stepped through the door, and the large, hulking bot accompanying her closed it with a thump. “I hope you don’t mind if I bring Barber,” she said when she noticed Toby sizing up the bot. “After what happened the other day, my parents are giving me all kinds of grief for going out without a bodyguard.”

“Will he rip my arm off if I get too close?” Actually, Toby wasn’t intimidated by the thing; he and the other kids had grown used to having similar devices around after Peter’s kidnapping. It was remembering those days, not so long ago really, that had given him momentary pause.

“Don’t be silly.” Kirstana set off with purpose down the street. “Meeting in person,” she said as she walked. “One of those ancient customs that I just can’t get used to. Back home, we’d be just as likely to send avatars and recover the memories later. After all, if you go yourself, you’re, well, committing yourself to whatever experience you have in that place. That would have been so gauche where I come from.”

“And where, exactly, is that?”

“Barsoom.”

He’d heard that puzzling name before. “I thought Barsoom was a storybook name for Mars.”

“Mars?” She rolled the word around in her mouth. “Maaaars. Never heard of it. Barsoom, though, that’s the fourth planet of the solar system. Covered in ancient ruins and dried-out canals from all kinds of terraforming attempts. The water always drains away, but every thousand years or so drops another comet on it and tries again. The inside of the planet’s getting quite wet at this point!”

“… Right. And Barsoom’s the new capital of the lockstep?”

“Well, that’s the irony, isn’t it?” She sighed. “Our family left because the place had become a backwater. It was dying. Again. But I remember it as a magical place. I’d get Barber to dig the sand away from some ancient doorway, and while he kept watch for the Tharks I’d crawl down in there with just a hand lamp to find ancient hieroglyphs and bar codes. I’d wonder what kind of people had lived there, so long ago. If they were people at all.

“There was one faded hieroglyph I’d run into in a bunch of different ruins, but I could never find the translation to it. One day I came downstairs and my parents were sitting at the dinner table arguing over a holo. And in the middle of the holo was that glyph.

“They told me it was one of the oldest symbols known to Man—as old as the symbol for computer, say. The symbol meant lockstep. And a lockstep, they told me, was a place even older than Barsoom, older than nearly anything, but still alive! The locksteps had been forgotten on Barsoom for centuries, but there were stories if you knew where to dig them up. And those stories went back … dizzyingly far, from our civilization through the one before, from language to language, back all the way to the beginning. I fell in love with everything lockstep, and my parents noticed. They were glad, because they’d learned about another family that had moved away, and people said they’d gone to the McGonigal lockstep.

“McGonigal!” Her eyes were shining as she said the name. “That name I’d heard, and I’d seen it, too. It was written everywhere, in some of the oldest religious texts put down thousands upon thousands of years ago.”

“Religious texts…” He stopped, shoulders hunched, but Kirstana continued up the stairs, oblivious of his reaction. He hurried to catch up.

The bubble city Toby was staying in opened out onto another one at its top, and this one did the same to a third, higher one. Kirstana’s house was near the top of this highest sphere, yet she’d been leading him upward since they left it. Now they were close enough to its sunlamps that big shades were needed to cool the stairs and galleries.

“Are we going to an aircar platform?” he asked politely.

Now she looked back and smiled, shrugged, and said, “What’s the fun in sitting in some vehicle while you fly? I can get us something much better.”

“What?”

“Wings.”

The elevators and escalators continued on, until they reached a plaza—a broad balcony, really—that stuck out near the top city’s solar lamps like a giant diving board. From here Toby could look out through the glass ceiling at the permanent storms, or down through widening and converging rings of city and forest, through a gap to more of the same, down and down.

A modest hut here rented angel’s wings.

“They’re just exos,” Kirstana explained as she browsed a rack of furled feathered things as tall as she was. “You know, visitors from lower-g worlds wear them to amplify the strength of their legs and back, so they can walk here. These ones … well, they’re wings. That’s all.”

Furled, they made up a tall, heavy backpack. Unfurled, they were huge; the black ones Toby chose had a wingspan of at least eight meters. Kirstana’s were white. She chatted with the proprietor about the details of using them. Then, when properly strapped in, she simply walked to the edge of the platform and stepped off. Her security bot, Barber, stepped after her.

Toby shouted in alarm—but seconds later she reappeared, soaring so close to the sunlamps that she blazed white as if she herself were a lamp. Barber was riding on what seemed to be jets built into his shoulders. “Hoo-hoo!” shouted Kirstana. “Come on, the air’s fine!”

He gulped at the proprietor. “You’re good to go,” said the young lady, slapping him on the back. Closing his eyes and trusting to the millennia of technological development that separated Kirstana’s age from the one he’d grown up in, he ran and jumped.

The wings unfurled, and suddenly he was flying.

All you had to do was look the way you wanted to go, and tilt or shift your body that way; the wings took care of the rest. He learned early on that they had a mind of their own and wouldn’t let you run into buildings or hit the glass wall of the city. Within those limits, he could do what he wanted.

In this way they spiraled down through the geodesic froth of the continent, pausing to perch here and there while Kirstana pointed to the sights.

“People come here from thousands of worlds to fly, both inside and outside,” she shouted as they diverged and converged in the air. “There’re tournaments and contests. Of course they trade, too.”

The continent was mostly made up of Lockstep 360/1 cities, but not entirely. Some of the spheres attached to it were closed off and dark, and some of the 360 cities weren’t inhabited by humans.

He gawked at the distance-blurred glitter of the first one she pointed out. “Aliens? There are real aliens?”

Kirstana laughed. “No, not real aliens, if you mean intelligent beings who evolved separately from us. Nobody’s ever found those yet, I mean we’ve only been expanding into the galaxy for fourteen thousand years, we’ve hardly explored out to a thousand light-years. No, those ones there are uplifted chimpanzees. You’ll also find apes and dolphins and-well, other things that are entirely new species unrelated to anything on Earth. And then there”s artificial intelligences from the fast worlds, and augmented humans.” She banked away, her voice fading as she singsonged the list: “—and mutants and heavy-worlders and hybrids and single-genders and neandertals and hypercats and…”

When they stopped for lunch in the heights of a jungle sphere full of mist and rainbow-colored birds, he tried to find words for how overwhelming he found it all. “We’re in the middle of nowhere between the stars, but this place seems as rich as Earth. Though that can’t be. Earth, Mars—I mean Barsoom—they must be so much more than this. More than we could imagine…” Yet she was looking at him strangely.

“Earth? Barsoom? Oh, come on,” she chided. “We have so much more than the fast worlds could ever have. Earth only has Barsoom and Jupiter and a couple of other planets and artificial worlds. Venus, sure; Saturn. What’s that? Four or five trading partners? And then, the next fast worlds are four light-years away, that’s decades of travel time—a one-way trip for anybody living in realtime.” She shook her head. “No, Toby, the fast worlds are sad places, hopelessly impoverished. How could they ever have this kind of diversity? The richness? The vibrancy? And reach out and be able to actually touch it?”

“Heh.” Toby was grinning again. Way to go, Peter. He noticed she was smiling, too. “You love playing tour guide, don’t you?”

She shrugged. “We moved here when I was sixteen. I guess I’ve been exploring ever since. Every day when I step outside and look around I just … it’s like I’m living in some kind of fairy tale. Even these words—‘fairy tale’—the ancient idea of fairies, the language we’re talking about them with … it’s all so … amazing!”

He shook his head, puzzled. “Why?”

“Because it’s ancient and ever-present at one and the same time. So amazingly, impossibly old, yet still here. Living in a lockstep is like hopping in a time machine and shooting back to the dawn of history while simultaneously being shot into the far future. It’s that incredible age everything has here—it’s all preserved, the world as it was thousands of years ago.”

Thoughtful, he put on his wings, and they looked for a convenient balcony to jump off of.

Suddenly Toby stopped. “What’s Destrier?”

Kirstana stumbled. She looked closely at him. “You were in line to join the pilgrimage there. How can you not know?”

“I’m … not from round here either, remember?” He’d told her that his family was from one of the first lockstep colonies, a little comet world isolated from most of 360 for the past forty years. It was obviously time to embellish the story a little. “You know I’m from a second-generation world. But my grandfather took us out of the lockstep a few cycles back and … well, time got away from us. It’s been a couple of generations since any of us were here. And Grandfather never wanted to talk about what he’d left. But he was, you know, one of the first generations in the lockstep. Which is where I get my accent.”

“Destrier’s the symbol of everything that’s wrong with this place,” she said darkly.

Toby was surprised. “But all this—” He tilted a wing at the wonders of the continent.

She shook her head. “Could be so much more, if it weren’t for Origin.”

Origin. Another word nobody’d mentioned to him yet.

“Is that the symbol for Origin, then?” he said. He pointed at the thing that had prompted his question.

She looked and scowled. “Oh. The shrines.”

They’d mostly been invisible outside of augmented reality; from a distance this one looked like a simple niche in the wall that flanked the restaurant. Behind the wall, the outer skin of the city sphere curved down, very close here, forming a dark ceiling drawn with mazy rain patterns. Trees curled up to nearly touch the glassy surface. It was details like this that had been catching his attention since he’d arrived here, so he’d walked by little niches like this one many times without noticing them.

Up close he could see a human figure seated on what looked like a stone throne. A kind of sundial pattern formed the backdrop.

“Who’s that?”

She reached out to touch the little throne with one finger. “The Emperor of Time.” She gave an exasperated sigh. “He’s been a major mythological figure for over ten thousand years, and you’re saying he’s new to you?”

He shrugged awkwardly.

“Right. Well, he sits on a throne, see? He’s been sitting on it since the beginning of time. And here’s the thing: he’s perfectly free to stand up and walk away or run in circles or stand on his hands or whatever he wants to—free at any moment and every moment, and he has the power and everything. And every moment, every single moment since the beginning of time, he’s freely chosen to stay right where he is.”

Toby shook his head, puzzled. “Does he have a name?”

Now Kirstana laughed. “Of course! You know who he is. Everybody knows the Emperor of Hyperchaos—Emperor of Time, Lord of Origins, the One Who Waits.

“He’s Toby McGonigal.”

SOMEHOW, HEARING THIS JUST made Toby feel really, really tired. He waved a hand and said, “I should have guessed.”

But then, as he turned away from the shrine, a new and deep unease filled him. There were the houses and spiraling stairs of the city—a place modeled on Peter’s design. “Whose idea was that?” he muttered, wondering. Then, to Kirstana, “Why’re there shrines?”

She stared at him, perplexed. “It’s the lockstep’s official religion. People join the lockstep because it’s eternal; that’s why my parents brought me here. ’Cause even in twenty, thirty thousand years, this place will barely have changed at all. The Emperor remains unchanged, and we’re supposed to model our lives on his.”

“Lives?” He shook his head. “I thought Toby McGonigal was just lost in space.”

Surprisingly, she looked uncomfortable. “That’s not a very nice way to put it. He waits. And the lockstep unfolds according to His grand design.”

“His design?” Not Peter’s? Toby walked back to the railing that overlooked the tiers of the city. The sunlamps were tuning toward evening. “And who…” he groped for the word. “Who enforces this grand design?”

She harrumphed. He looked back; Kirstana stood with her arms crossed, hipshot. “Next you’re going to tell me you’ve never heard of Evayne McGonigal.”

Something inside Toby spasmed and he quickly looked away. “Sorry,” he managed to say. “You’ve got an eleven-thousand-year advantage on me.”

“No…” She leaned on the balcony next to him. “The advantage is yours. You’d be a celebrity on any nonlockstep world you cared to visit, you know. You’re ancient, practically prehistoric. People would have, oh, so many questions for you!”

He was starting to realize what he was to her. “Like you have questions?”

“Well, yeah.” She looked away shyly. “How often do you get a chance to meet somebody who remembers the beginning?”

“But I don’t,” he said hastily. “I’m third generation.”

“Meaning your family moved to the lockstep only centuries of realtime after it began?” She shook her head. “The blink of an eye, in historical terms. You’re still from right back at the beginning.”

“I guess.”

She looked away at the cityscape, a troubled expression on her face.

“I’m tired. Let’s head back.” She nodded, and they dove into the sky again, retracing their path but this time up and up through dizzying layers of city black, rain-threaded glass.

They smiled but barely spoke as they parted. Both were exhausted, but somehow despite the awful news about this strange religion and Evayne’s part in it, Toby was content for now. He felt like he’d accomplished something today, though he’d found no work among the local bots. He’d learned important things and made a friend. Also, he’d discovered a way his age could be important without all the politics and family complications that Corva and Jaysir attached to it.

Maybe he could hire himself out to explain the ancient world, say, at local rich people’s houses. The thought was startling: could there be a career in being old?

Toby was still musing over this idea as he wandered back to the bed-and-breakfast. He was so absorbed in his fantasy of getting paid to talk about the early days of Sedna that he barely noticed as Orpheus suddenly bounded up. Only when a flood of icons popped up and he had to bat at them to dismiss them all, did he look up and see who was sitting on the step outside his lodgings.

“… Haven’t seen you in days!” Orpheus ran back to her, and she vigorously scratched his ears, making his head wobble. Orpheus stretched high and licked her forehead.

Toby just stood there, mind a blank, until Corva looked over Orpheus’s head and said, “Hi, Toby. Fancy meeting you here.”

Jaysir must have told her where he was. Well, it stood to reason: the maker had what he wanted now, why shouldn’t he? “Uh, hi. You’re, um, doing well? Getting work?”

Still scritching at Orpheus’s ears, Corva tilted her head and peered at Toby. “I didn’t come to this planet to work.”

He’d just meant to be polite in asking that; now Toby was confused. “Oh,” he said. “So then…”

“We came here because I needed your help,” she continued, her face deadpan and her voice neutral. “There’s no point in my being here otherwise.”

He crossed his arms. “I never promised to help you.”

“Well.” She looked away. “That’s true.” After a moment, she set Orpheus aside and stood up. “I mean, all did was save your life. It’s not like you owe me anything.” This was the first time he’d seen her through his revamped glasses, but unlike nearly anybody else he might pass on the street—and unlike Kirstana—she was not festooned with virtual tags and flags, other than the green-and-gray symbol hovering near the hollow of her throat.

“Ammond and Persea also saved my life,” he pointed out. “What do I owe them?” She sputtered, but before she could say anything he added, “You won’t even tell you what you need me for. That’s hardly gonna win me over.”

“Ah. Well, I guess that’s kind of…”

He just stared at her, and after a couple of “but you sees” and “you gotta understands,” Corva finally found the right words: “I couldn’t tell you in case you screwed us over by telling the police, or got caught. If they found out…” She looked genuinely distressed.

“So this is where we were going. I guess you can tell me now we’re here, right?”

She glanced upward. “Wallop was our destination. But yeah, I’m sorry. Of course I wanted to tell you! It’s just … it’s not you I don’t trust. It’s everybody you might talk to.”

He thought of Kirstana and was suddenly uneasy. A glance around the street showed nobody lurking in any doorways—and after all, this was Peter’s Utopia, a civilization modeled on Consensus. There were no hovering microbots spying and eavesdropping on every citizen. At least he didn’t think there were.

“Come inside,” he said. “And this time, tell me the truth.”