Lockstep

Ten

AS JAYSIR HAD BEFORE her, Corva sat in his room’s one armchair, and Toby perched on the bed. Orpheus looked from one human to the other, obviously torn; then he climbed into Corva’s lap. She stroked his forehead and he began purring loudly.

“We came here to save my brother’s life,” said Corva.

The statement hung there; she didn’t go on. Toby shook his head and said, “What?”

“He’s in quarantine,” she said. “On board a passenger ship from Thisbe.” She said that name as if she expected him to know what it meant. He could have done a search on it, but that would have taken his attention away from watching Corva and the uncertainty and anger warring for dominance in her expression.

Toby took the bait. “Why do you need to save him?”

“Don’t you know what quarantine means? Your brother has frozen him out of the lockstep!”

He jerked back at her sudden fury. “What do you mean, frozen out?” Even as he asked this, Toby had a flash of memory—of himself, standing on the outer hull of the tug and staring down at a black planet dotted with silent, frozen cities: unknowing that he’d arrived at a settled world, or because he’d awakened at the wrong time.

“All the 360 ports are closed to Halen’s ship,” she said. “They haven’t got fuel to go home or to any other world, so they’ve been forced into hibernation until the ports open. And your brother’s decreed that won’t be for another six months.”

Toby was shocked that Peter would do such a thing—but he was also puzzled. “That’s … really bad. I guess. I don’t know why … But if your brother’s hibernating, all you have to do is wait. It’ll take awhile, yeah, but he’s perfectly safe, right?”

She shook her head, and for the first time since he’d met her, he saw Corva near tears. “It’s not just that. He came here to try to find me, and because of that, they quarantined his ship for a year. And half that’s done.”

“Yeah, but—”

“But Thisbe! Thisbe’s government wanted to trade with another lockstep. There’s one on the planet that’s even more successful locally than 360-to-1. It’s called 240-to-1. The local council hacked the hibernation timing repeaters so we’d Jubilee with them—wake on their turns as well as ours. We could trade with both that way! But your brother found out and he … punished Thisbe.”

A sick feeling, almost of watching from somewhere else, had taken hold of Toby. “Punished … how?”

“All ships from Thisbe are quarantined until it’s gone three of our years at a ratio of 360-to-12!”

“Wait, what?” He had to sit back and think about that for a moment. “They’ve accelerated time on your world … by twelve times?”

She nodded rapidly. “All the McGonigal beds have shifted from wintering over for thirty years per turn to two and a half. For every month that passes for you and me, a full year passes back home. I came here to study for a year, before the quarantine. But it’s been going for”—now her eyes scrunched up and she did begin to cry—“for eight months!”

Eight months had passed for Corva. Eight years were already gone by for her friends and family on Thisbe.

Those pictures of Peter and Evayne came to Toby’s mind—the ones that he couldn’t look at—and there were all those books he’d been afraid open that talked about all the things that they’d done and seen, without him, in the past forty years. He should have known all about this, but he’d been afraid to investigate.

Corva sat across from him, crying, and he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think of a single way to make it better for her.

But there was still something puzzling about the situation. “Why didn’t you go home when this first started? You were living out here, I get that, but why stay here?”

“But that’s the whole point, McGonigal!” She glared at him. “A lot of people from Thisbe travel, hell, half our economy runs on remittances from foreign workers! Of course we all want to go home, but who’ll take us there? Any ship that goes back to Thisbe will be stranded there for at least a year! Travel’s dried up—I couldn’t get back—so my brother boarded a ship that was going to try to sneak around the quarantine. They got caught.” Her hand went up, fingers half curling around her locket.

He was trying to picture the time in his mind. If you took a calendar and pasted it into just one month of another calendar, you’d have a year inside a month. But what they’d done to Corva’s brother was take the bigger calendar and drop it into just one month of an even larger one. “Your brother’s gone from living a year for every month you live, to living a month for your next year … while everybody back home lives twelve years … It’s crazy. But why? Why do this extra thing to the ship he’s on?”

She flung up her hands in frustration. “Because they tried to get around the quarantine by pretending to be coming from another world. And apparently it isn’t enough to have everybody back home aging like that, they had to make any ships that left not come back for the full twelve years! It’s a blockade, is what it is.”

Toby swallowed. “Have they … have they done this before?”

She stared at him. “Your family has done this to other worlds, yes.”

There was nothing he could say to that. He sat there, uncomfortable, until Corva said, “You’re a McGonigal.”

“I’m not my brother.” It wasn’t the first time he’d ever had to distance himself from Peter’s behavior. After the trauma of the kidnapping, Peter had acted out in all kinds of ways, some pretty destructive. Toby had apologized for him more than once; he couldn’t believe he was still doing it.

“I don’t care about that,” snapped Corva. “I mean, you’ve got your family’s biocrypto. You’re coded to be able to operate anything that’s owned by the McGonigal family, right?”

“Well, I was,” he said doubtfully. “Fourteen thousand years ago.”

“Your mother refused to admit you were dead. Everybody knows she made sure you’d always be able to get back into the colony. There’re stories about that—songs, epic poems. The very least of them has you returning from deep space while Sedna’s sleeping and putting your hand on the doorplate and it opens for you.”

“Epic poems,” he said. “That figures.”

“Toby, you can override the dock bots. You can wake the passengers. Just do that, and you’ll never have to see me again. I’ll go back to Thisbe with Halen and you McGonigals can sort things out however you want. Just … let us have our lives, too.”

Had Jaysir told her about the interface they’d found in the data pack from the twentier? Or, more likely, it was Corva who’d put Jaysir up to helping Toby in the first place. As a way of discovering whether Toby really could do what he was rumored to be able to do.

He rubbed his eyes. Was there nobody he could trust? “Maybe I can do it,” he said and shrugged. “I don’t know. And anyway, won’t the local government have something to say about it?”

“You’re a McGonigal,” she said, as if that explained everything. “They can’t stop you.”

CORVA INSISTED HE STAY invisible for the next few days. Maybe nobody could stop Toby once he publicly announced himself, but it was pretty clear that right now he was vulnerable. He could still be killed—or neuroshackled. So for now, he must pay for everything with cash, not take on any jobs that might get him noticed—and of course, tell no one his real name. He didn’t bother to point out that he was already living that way, as per Jaysir’s instructions.

Corva had to “make arrangements.” Something about that made him nervous. Was there more to this than walking into the port authority office and commanding the bots to let her brother’s ship disembark? He could picture himself ordering bots around, but people were another matter entirely. Every time he imagined himself trying to face down the city’s masters, he thought of how easily Ammond and M’boto had kept him under their control. Whatever Corva meant when she used the name “McGonigal,” Toby wasn’t that. The instant he tried to bluff these people, everybody would know it.

So he tossed and turned through the night, and when he wasn’t imagining himself getting thrown in some cell by the local police, he was thinking about Peter. Peter the tyrant.

He kept asking himself, How could Peter do that to Corva’s people? But then he’d remember how Peter and he had built worlds and ruled them with fists iron and otherwise. In Consensus, they had practiced tyranny, rehearsed it. Of course it was just a game, and this was real. Where, though, had the dividing line been for Peter? Had he woken up one day and thought, “I could actually build my perfect society”? Or had the steps shaded into each other so gradually that he never really stopped believing it was all a game?

Hideous thoughts. They chased Toby away from the comfort of sleep, and in the morning Orpheus whined at his haggard appearance.

He felt awful, but he still had to pay for his lodgings, and that meant finding some lazy bot whose job he could do for the day. It wasn’t hard, because the robots that supported Peter’s perfect world had a built-in sense of economy. They also knew, pretty much to the day, when their various systems were due to fail. Toby could stroll into a local factory and just loiter until one came up to him with an offer. This time around he found himself sorting plastic fasteners for four hours, a mind-numbing task that was somehow also soothing—provided you weren’t doing it every day.

While he worked he listened to history lessons from the library. His original plan was to get some sense of what had been going on outside the lockstep, in the wider world that Kirstana had been born into—but that was impossible. Time had been on fast-forward in that world, to such an extent that any history lesson that touched on major events out there had to skip over centuries and even entire millennia, or summarize them with terms like “the gray ages” or “the second transhumanist efflorescence.” You could spend days reviewing the highlights of just one little century out of those thousands of years, because all that history hadn’t unfolded on only one world. There were thousands of planets, so take that original fourteen thousand years and multiply it by that much … Impossible.

All he could really sort out was that humanity and its many subspecies, creations and offspring had experienced many rises and falls over the aeons. Since they had the technology, and lots of motivations, people kept reengineering their own bodies and minds. They gave rise to godlike AIs, and these grew bored and left the galaxy, or died, or turned into uncommunicative lumps, or ran berserk in any of a hundred different ways. On many worlds humans wiped themselves out, or were wiped out by their creations. It happened with tedious regularity. The only reason there were humans at all, these days, was that there were locksteps. They served as literal freezers, preserving ancient human DNA and cultures. All kinds of madness might descend upon the full-speed worlds circling the galaxy’s stars—expansions, contractions, raptures, uploading, downloading, mind control, and body-swapping plagues (quite apart from the usual wars, dark ages, and terraforming failures)—but everybody ignored those useless frozen microworlds drifting between the stars. Their infinitesimal resources and ancient cultures held no interest to the would-be gods of the inner systems. So once those would-be gods had wiped themselves out, the telltale silence from formerly buzzing stars would alert this or that lockstep, and they would send some colonists back. A few millennia later, the human population on Earth and the other lit worlds would again number in the billions or trillions, and some of those would return to the locksteps. And so Peter’s realm survived and, in its own fashion, thrived.

He had better luck researching the lockstep laws; he began to understand why Peter might want to punish Thisbe. Locksteps were a kind of network—specifically, something called a synchronous network, where every node in the mesh sent and received messages at the same time. All the worlds shipped out cargo and passenger ships at the same intervals, and doing this put them all on equal footing. If a couple of worlds doubled or tripled their frequency, they could grow faster than their neighbors. Lockstep worlds were always tempted to do this, and worlds that did often made out very well indeed.

At first, Toby couldn’t see why that mattered. Why shouldn’t everybody just communicate as quickly or slowly as they wanted? Lockstep rates should naturally speed up over time until the whole system collapsed.

There were two reasons. The first had to do with resources.

Part of the reason why Peter’s lockstep was the biggest was that he’d tuned its trading frequency to match the rate of production that the smallest outpost could keep up with. There were tiny colonies that didn’t own even a chunk of cometary ice but harvested the impossibly thin traces of gas found between the stars using modified magnetic ramscoops. In an abyss so empty that there was only one hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter, the scoops filled their vast lungs like baleen whales filtering tenuous oceanic plankton. It could take them decades to fuel a single fusion-powered ship with enough hydrogen to visit their nearest neighbor. Yet even these little starvelings could contribute to the wealth of Lockstep 360/1, because its clock ticks were slow enough for them to keep up.

If you lived on a relatively rich world, like Lowdown or Wallop, you could harvest resources and manufacture goods as fast as you wanted to. You could leave the 360/1 lockstep for a faster one, such as 36/1, which experienced ten months for every one in Peter’s empire. You’d think that this would provide a huge advantage to your industries because you’d be producing ten times as much as 360/1 in any given time period. Since you were awake ten times longer, however, you’d also use ten times as many resources.

The second reason was less intuitive but more important. If you increased your frequency, you’d have far fewer “nearby” monthly trading partners than 360/1. It wasn’t obvious why, but travel between the lockstep worlds took decades of realtime. Because Peter’s lockstep slept for thirty years at a time, you could travel half a light-year while wintering over (if you were going at the average speed of a cheap fission-fragment rocket). One wintering-over journey between 36/1 worlds could take you only one-tenth that far—but that didn’t translate into having one-tenth the possible destinations for the trip. Because the lockstep worlds were scattered through three-dimensional space rather than being on a two-dimensional planet, when you doubled the distance you could travel, you did far more than just double the volume of space you could access.

Lockstep 36/1 might have ten turns for every one in 360/1, but each 360/1 world could trade with a thousand times more worlds per turn.

So Peter’s network was vast, and it ran on mutual trust that no one would take advantage of higher trading frequencies. Thisbe had broken that trust.

A couple of days later, he was listening to one of these historical programs as he walked home from work. As he turned the corner to his bed-and-breakfast, he saw a motley crew of people sitting on its front step: Shylif, Jaysir—and Corva. His landlady was visible in the front window, glaring at them.

Toby paused his program. Corva was poking at the ground with a stick, and Jaysir and Shylif were looking everywhere but at her. “What’s up?” said Toby.

Corva stood up, brushing off her pants. She wouldn’t meet his eye. “The plan’s off,” she said. “We can’t get to the passenger module.”

“You mean we can’t get your brother back?” She nodded; she seemed to be on the brink of tears.

Toby knew he should be relieved, because what Corva had been proposing was both illegal and highly dangerous. He knew what he should be asking, too: Will you honor your promise to show me how to get to Destrier?

Instead he said, “What’s the problem?”

Corva told him, the words coming out in a rush. As soon as she started to talk, the answer popped into Toby’s mind.

He should just nod sympathetically and ask for what they’d promised. But Corva wasn’t like Ammond and Persea; she really had saved his life, and if all she’d said about the McGonigals was true, she was taking a terrible risk in even confiding to Toby.

He said, “I know a way.”

SIX HOURS LATER, THEY were descending between brooding mountains of cloud, down a single, endless cable that stretched from zenith to nadir through the awesome dark skyscapes of Wallop. The little elevator car, which Jaysir had hijacked for them using his black arts, had been moving for many minutes now. Just how far below the continent had the authorities hung the passenger unit?

“I still don’t like it.” Corva crossed her arms, glaring out the glass. “You don’t know anything about this Kirstana person.”

“I don’t know anything about you, either.”

“Yes, and look where it’s gotten you.” She glowered at him. “What does she know about you? About us? Probably a lot more than you think. You’re not exactly very good at keeping secrets, Toby.”

“What are you, my mother? I agreed to help you because you can show me how to stow away on a ship to Destrier. That’s all.” He turned away from her, ignoring the look Shylif and Jaysir were sharing.

He was still kicking himself for telling Corva how they could get down here. It turned out that the reason he hadn’t heard from her for days was that she’d been agonizing about how to actually get to the quarantined passenger unit. It hung many kilometers below the continent’s customs complex. The logical way down was by airship, but there was radar and other eyes to prevent that. The next logical approach was to simply board the elevator on the customs level—but but getting into that would be next to impossible.

He’d had his chance to get out of having to do all of this. Instead, when Corva had explained the issue, he’d heard himself say, “I know a way. Why don’t you just fly?”

“I told you, they track the dirigibles—”

“No, not by airship,” he’d said. “With wings.”

So it was that he’d called Kirstana and asked her about outdoor-certified exowings. Jaysir had modified them so that they would ignore proximity warnings and no-go zones. Jay couldn’t bring along his beloved bot; he’d ordered it to wait near the docks for their return. That was how they intended to return.

First, they would simply spiral down through the black air to a landing jetty and airlock at the base of the customs complex.

Simply? —Well, if donning a space suit and bundling their denners into airtight carrying cases, then relying on the artificial muscles and reflexes of strap-on wings in the hostile atmosphere of a gas giant was simple. The three stowaways had experience with similar environments—such as the oceans of Auriga—and Toby had walked the ices of Sedna at temperatures near absolute zero. Also, fourteen thousand years of refinements to the safety of the wings had helped. To his surprise, it had been fairly easy to skim close to the outside skin of the continent, so radar wouldn’t catch them. The dark helped, making the danger of a fall more abstract than it would otherwise have been. But they could never safely descend all the way to the passenger unit this way. This elevator was still the only safe way to do that.

Now that the adrenaline-pumping flight was over, Toby was actually kind of enjoying the elevator ride. It was clear that Corva, at least, was having trouble with the precarious sense of being balanced above an infinite fall. She spent her time sitting in the center of the floor with her knees pulled up, Wrecks protectively wrapped around her ankles. Toby had tried to get her to talk a number of times as they droned through the black, still air beneath the cloud deck. She just grunted or answered with a simple yes or no. He was trying this again when the autopilot abruptly put them into a dive, and what had been a stable ride turned into a slewing, bumping fall. Toby had been turning green himself by the time they reached a small aerostat with a ring-shaped docking platform under it. They had left the blimp to find nothing there but an elevator car and a cable stretching down into the dark.

For some reason Corva found riding an elevator to nowhere preferable to flying. Well, at least she was talking.

Orpheus was staring into the gray emptiness of the sky, as if those depths held secrets only denners could see. Toby knelt to pat him and after a minute of communing felt a bit better.

“You know,” he said, to try to restart the conversation, “I kind of thought we’d be going up.”

Corva tried to look nonchalant. “You can leave ships in orbit for decades at a time,” she said, “but people … well, they get fried by the cosmic rays. So the passenger modules from Halen’s ship are down here.”

“And we’re just going to waltz in and wake them up?”

Jaysir smiled, rather falsely—he was trying to pace in the tiny space, with little success. He had also dressed uncharacteristically in drab clothing today and didn’t look comfortable in it. “Well, you couldn’t, but I can. We makers have our ways, you know.”

“Yes,” Toby agreed grudgingly. “So how are you going to get us past whoever’s at the other end of this elevator ride?”

“Same way I got us into this elevator,” he said. “By fooling the sensors. Nobody’s down there anyway. It’ll just be us.”

Toby eyed him, thinking. “It must have been hard for you to leave your bot up top.”

“It’ll be fine.” Jaysir looked away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

The lights in the car came on suddenly. Corva grunted in surprise. “Turn it off! Turn it off? Am I the only one who doesn’t like the idea of being the only lit-up thing for kilometers?” The sense of infinite monotony outside had disappeared; the windows were now just black mirrors.

“Hit it with my elbow,” said Jaysir as he tapped a wall plate. The lights went off. “Sorry.”

Corva gave a whoosh of relief and, gnawing at one fingernail, glanced at Toby. “And what about you? Sorry you came?”

“I’m sorry about the whole last fourteen thousand years. Why should today be any different?”

His eyes had adjusted in time to see her smile. He liked that smile. Then, “Look,” she said, “more clouds.”

Toby followed the faint indication of her pointing arm. Billows of black-on-black ascended silently outside. Suddenly a bright flicker silhouetted a bulbous thunderhead shape below them. “Lightning,” Toby murmured. “There’s another layer of storms down here?”

They watched in silent communion for a while, as the mist thickened, drawn in moments of white, and became rain.

Between lightning flashes, a faint glow became visible below them. They put their foreheads to the cold glass to try and see down. “Is that it?” asked Toby.

“Yes.” Jaysir was staring at something invisible, probably some tag within his own interface. “Time is right.”

“Why hang the passenger compartments down here?” he said after a moment. “Don’t they want to keep them deep frozen?”

“I think they are.” Corva touched the glass, snatching her fingers back as if it had burned them. “Somebody told me that when the cities are awake they stay in the only warm layer of air on the planet. Above that—and below it—it’s far, far below zero.”

Toby peered at the beads on the glass. “Then that’s not water.”

“God, no. There!”

A sliver of light had appeared below them. As they watched, it grew into a rain-dazzled arc. Toby puzzled over it for a while, until he realized he was looking at the top of a large geodesic glass structure, which must hang off the bottom of the elevator cable. The glass facets sparkled from within, breathing white and rainbow colors into the falling mist. Indistinct clouds reflected the pearly light.

Toby had time for one last glimpse of dark metal struts and glass angles dripping white or scattering spray into the swirling air before the lights came on again. He squinted at Corva, who shrugged. Behind her the window brightened, then a stanchion holding red running lights fled up and a sudden heaviness signaled their arrival. A framework of metal triangles rose around the car as it slowed to a halt. The faint vibration Toby had grown accustomed to in the past hour ended.

“Okay, Jay,” said Corva. “Time to work your magic again.”

He waved his hands in the air, for all the world like a stage magician preparing a trick, then said, “I’m freezing the heat sensors. They’ll register the first person to step out but nobody else. And as long as that person doesn’t go any farther, they’ll stay in an infinite loop … So somebody will have to stay here by the elevator.”

“You didn’t mention that earlier.” She was annoyed.

“Wasn’t sure this would be the setup.” He shrugged. “I’ll stay if you want.”

“No, we might need you. Shylif?”

The normally placid Shylif frowned. “I want to come.”

“It’s you or me,” said Corva. “I could stay, I suppose…”

He turned away. “No. This is your show.”

Jaysir pressed the key combination next to the elevator doors. Nothing happened for a moment, then the car shifted with a strange sucking sound, and the doors opened. A gasp of cold came in, followed by fresh warm air. The denners poked their heads out, Wrecks above, Orpheus below, and Corva stepped carefully over them. After the strange and wonderful skies of Wallop, and the weirdness of an elevator ride to nowhere, this vestibule lit by low lamps behind potted palms was jarringly prosaic. Shylif stepped out, and they all listened for the sound of alarms—ridiculous, really, since those might sound only in some security office kilometers above. In any case, nothing happened, and they followed him out.

“Shy, keep your comms open,” Corva said to the big man. “If anything happens, we need to know instantly.” He nodded.

After his initial surprise, Toby found the hum of the air circulation and the spotlit plants in the little antechamber reassuring. Just do this one thing, he told himself, and then you can make a run for Destrier.

Orpheus took off around a corner and, with a mild curse, Toby followed him. The denner was bounding down a long carpeted hall, at the end of which a set of shallow steps led down in a spiral. The only decoration in the hallway was a single table with a bronze buddha on it. Or was it the Emperor of Time—a Toby McGonigal? He was careful not to look too closely at it as he passed by.

“Stay in sight, damn it!” Corva and Jaysir had caught up. Toby saw how her lips were pressed together; she was scared. This was nerve-racking, but Toby didn’t know enough to know what they should be scared of down here. He was curiously numb, in fact. He’d been through too many changes lately to really register a sense of danger here.

“Where the hell are we?” Jaysir was looking around.

“Top reception area,” Corva said. The only way was down a short corridor to an arch that exited onto a broad curving balcony. Toby and Corva stepped onto this, with Jaysir and the denners following.

The gallery was suspended near the ceiling of a geodesic dome about thirty meters across. Toby looked down at a sculpted landscape of trees and pools lit by arc lights. The glass walls of the dome were an opaque black in this light.

“Oh yeah,” said Corva. “Staging area for the elevators. I remember having lunch in one of these.”

Toby looked at her. “You wouldn’t be having lunch in a passenger lounge if you were a stowaway.”

“No, of course not.”

“Wallop is where you were going to school!” For some reason he’d assumed her school was on Lowdown.

She shrugged impatiently. “You only just figured that out? Why else would my brother come here if he wanted to find me and bring me home?

“Anyway, this isn’t the same lounge as the one I came through. There’re lots of these stations, but most of them are way up in the stratosphere. The only reason this one’s down here is that it’s on ice.”

Toby could see potted orange trees down there. Looking at them, he felt achingly homesick for Earth. Wrecks and Orpheus were already on their way down a broad stairway that swept along the wall of the dome. “Come on,” said Corva as she followed them.

“Some of the rich estates are built like this,” mused Corva as she trailed her fingers along the dark glass of the outside wall. As he followed her Toby heard the faint drumming of rain and fainter murmur of distant thunder, filtering in from outside. “There are whole chandelier neighborhoods hanging down off the city spheres by the dozen. I thought it was so wonderful when I first came here.” Her voice held something in between regret and disappointment.

Jaysir was staring around nervously and now pointed at a small grove of red-leafed maples. “Look at the trees! They’re not green. They’re red! Are they fake?”

Toby laughed. “No, they do that every autumn. Just before they lose ’em for winter.”

“Oh, yeah, winter. They wake up the trees months before us, so it’s always summer when we’re awake. They spend a few months cooling them down after we go into hibernation, so maybe some of them lose their leaves then—but I’ve never seen it.”

Toby walked with Corva under the canopies of red. The sound of rain receded, but the illusion of being outside was still hard to shake.

Jaysir had slept through all the autumns of his life. For some reason, this thought made Toby’s heart ache, and he remembered leaving home for Sedna and how he and Evayne had both cried.

Peter had been silent.

Corva pointed out a set of low-lit steps that descended under the grass. “This should go down to where they dock the passenger modules.”

They went that way, and neither spoke for a while; but something was on Toby’s mind. He’d been thinking about it ever since he’d learned the significance of his family in this world.

Finally, during a short period while Jaysir was out of earshot, he asked, “What does it mean to you, that I’m a McGonigal?”

She darted a quick look at him. Toby suddenly realized that Shylif, at least, could still hear them; uncomfortable, he pressed on. “I mean, that first time in the courtyard. Did you know who I was? And all that stuff about … about me being the Emperor of Time, this cult figure, you knew about that…” He shook his head. “Are there really people out there who think I’m some sort of god?”

She’d drawn her shoulders in and wouldn’t look at him. “You have your sister to thank for that,” she said curtly.

“I’m asking about what you believe.”

“I was raised to believe you never existed at all.”

“You mean that the Emperor of Time never existed. But what about me?”

“You? As a person? A human being?” Now she met his eyes briefly. “Toby, nobody thinks about you that way.”

He didn’t ask any more questions, and she didn’t speak either.

At last they stood in the final, lowest chamber. This was a hexagonal, metal-walled drum with a suit locker in one wall and an airlock built into the floor. The sound of running, dripping rain filled the room.

“This is it,” said Jaysir. “The passenger module’s behind that door. Fire up the interface, Toby.”

He tapped the side of his glasses and awoke its augmented reality interface. “I still think we should have tested it before,” he said. “We might have been able to do all this from the city, through the net—”

“Bad idea, I told you,” said Jaysir. “If it didn’t work, and the network trapped your query, we’d have been caught. Safest to do it from here, ’cause I know we’re close enough that you can get a direct link to the module’s timer.”

Toby sighed. “All right. I’ll try.” He pinged the ship’s hibernation system.

Instantly, a bank of colorful rectangular buttons and data windows popped into view. They seemed to float, translucent, half a meter in front of him. “Hmph. Well, I do have something.” He peered at the virtual console. “It’s … it’s a passenger manifest.”

Jaysir did a little dance. “Hot damn! What about the frequency? The timing?”

Toby examined the virtual board. It was actually quite ridiculously simple. There were some clocks showing current time and a kind of alarm—strangely, rather like Orpheus’s setup. Of course, since this was a three-dimensional and virtual display, the interface elements also had little tags. He reached out to tap a little red flag attached to the main timer, and a larger window opened.

It read, OVERRIDDEN BY EVAYNE MCGONIGAL, 38.2/14372.2.

Toby swore.

“What is it?” Corva was gnawing at her fingernails again. “Is something wrong?”

“No, no, it’s fine. I just won’t know if I can reset the clock until I try.”

“Toby…” He glanced over at Corva. She was looking more distressed by the second. “Can you check … is he here? Halen, I mean. Halen Keishion?”

He looked at the manifest—momentarily distracted by the discovery that he could apparently reset individual cicada beds or select some or all at once—and ran his finger down the air until he saw it. “Yes, Corva. He’s here. His bed’s registering green. He’s okay.”

She blew out a heavy sigh, smiling weakly.

“How about Sebastine Coley?” It was Shylif’s voice, coming through the open link. Toby glanced down the list.

“Sure—” But Jaysir and Corva were both waving their hands and Corva was shouting, “No!”

Toby blinked at them, then remembered the story Jay had told him about Shylif’s past. Something about a woman, and a man who had lured her into a lockstep fortress …

“Shy? Shy? Answer me!” Corva stared at Jaysir in horror. “Oh, no,” she whispered.

“What?” Toby looked from one to the other. “What’s happening?”

“The alarm’s been triggered,” said Jaysir. “Shy’s left his post. He’s on his way down here.

“To kill Sebastine Coley.”