Lockstep

Thirteen

TOBY STEPPED ONTO THE soil of Thisbe, stopped, and began to cough. Tears filled his eyes and he had to step away from the others and cover his face for a moment. Orpheus climbed up to perch on his shoulder and said, “mrrt?”

It was years since he’d breathed the dust-laden, mold-and-bug-filled air of a real planetary biosystem. It was like fire in his lungs. There was more to the shock than that, though.

Blazing sunlight sent waves of heat into his face. The air was hot and felt free of the heaviness of the subsurface domes and close metal passages he’d been condemned to after they left Earth. When he squinted his eyes open again, he beheld a wilderness of rolling hills, green grass, and trees nodding in the breeze. Blue sky presided over it all, where white clouds reached for and overtopped one another. He could smell the grass and wildflowers. The buzz of insects sounded from nearby. It was all so beautiful and overwhelming, so like Earth.

“Wh-where are we?”

The sun flickered and went out. Toby blinked and ducked with a shout of surprise. “Damn,” he heard Halen say.

Then the light came back on, only now it was a lurid, monochromatic blue. Everything was suddenly electric and strange, the trees pale parodies of themselves, the sky white. “What the hell—?”

Corva glanced up and shrugged. “Glitches. They happen. You’ll see. I don’t actually mind the blue ones. It’s the red I hate.”

Toby put his hand up to his face—but no, he hadn’t absentmindedly donned his glasses. This was no virtual world. He could still feel the heat of the strange sunlight on his face and smell the flowers. The bugs were still zizzing in the warm air. “That’s not a sun?”

Jaysir and Shylif were with them, and now Jay laughed. “Welcome to the Laser Wastes. Or, at any rate, their slummy edges.”

Behind them the Travelers’ Rest was a long low building on the edge of a fairly conventional, if overgrown-looking, spaceport. A few bots were struggling to cut down young trees that were blocking some of the buildings’ exits, and only one runway was clear; the others sprouted grass and more small trees through cracks in the pavement.

In the other direction, past the hills, Toby could now make out the towers of a sizable city. “I don’t understand,” he said, shading his eyes and peering upward. The light source was as bright as the sun, but it was a tiny dot, too intense to look at. “What is that?”

“About eight thousand years ago some civilization or other built this shell of energy harvesters around Proxima Centauri. That’s the nearest star to Earth,” Jay said.

“I know that.”

“Right. Well, a few thousand years after they died off, one of the locksteps made a devil’s pact with the things that had inherited the harvesters in return for a little fraction of that power. They built thousands of these asteroid-size lasers—red, blue, and green, to make white, you know?—and aimed them at some of the nearer nomad planets. Like this one.”

“Wait—we’re, how far from Proxima Centauri here?”

“Oh, a good two light-years away. You couldn’t even see it with the naked eye. But the laser light reaches us, and it’s enough to heat the whole planet to livable temperature.”

Toby knew he was staring, slack-jawed, at the sky. He couldn’t help himself, his mind had gone blank. Finally Orpheus head-butted him in the cheekbone and he stammered, “O-kay. How many worlds did you say?”

“Thousands. But they’re not lockstep worlds—well, except for a few discards like Thisbe. They’re too hot. Too fast.” He nodded at the overgrown runways.

Corva nodded in agreement. “They’ve gone strange, a lot of them. Alien and dangerous, and they don’t communicate with the outside world anymore. The Wastes, that’s what we call them.”

“And Thisbe is…?”

She shrugged and jabbed a thumb at the sky. “Far out on the edge—and glitchy. So not worth the effort for your average self-respecting civilization. Perfect for us, though.”

“—And with that, here’s my ride,” said Jay. He waved at an older man and middle-aged woman who were strolling toward them across the landing field. The man was accompanied by a cargo bot like Jay’s, which balanced an impossibly tall pile of machinery on its back. The woman was surrounded by a … Toby squinted … a flock of some kind of glittering metallic things. Behind her stalked a tall, willowy, and sinuous bot, not quite human formed but beautiful.

“Makers?” said Toby. Jaysir nodded.

“We’re not loners, you know. There just weren’t any on Wallop. We love to get together, we just refuse to engage in social relations that are based on material inequity. Anyway, I’ve got a lot to talk about with these guys. About what we should do next.”

“You’re not going to tell them who—”

“—You are? Not until you give me the all-clear.” Jaysir grinned at him. “But you understand, I need to … set them up for it, so it’s not a complete shock when you do. And you’ll probably want to know whether we can help, when you make your move.”

“I don’t know that there’re any moves to be made, Jay.”

“You just keep thinking that.” With a cheerful wave, the maker walked off to meet his kin.

Halen had flagged down an empty aircar, and they piled their few belongings into it and set off for the city. A few minutes into their flight, the “sunlight” went from psychotic blue to eerie green. It stayed that way for a minute, then flipped back to yellow-white.

Now that he could properly see, Toby realized that their car was part of a regular stream converging on the core of the city; the awakened passengers from a dozen ships were on their way into town. The sky would probably have been dark with aircars, he supposed, if it weren’t for the blockade.

As the shock of seeing and feeling sunlight faded, Toby remembered his nervousness upon awaking today. He and Orpheus had used cicada beds on the flight out, so woke refreshed, and he’d been instantly aware of the ordeal that was to come.

Today, he was going to meet Halen and Corva’s parents.

It didn’t help that Shylif was guesting with them as well. Corva had invited him to stay at her parents’ place until the Thisbe courts heard his case against Sebastine Coley. At first he’d been reluctant but had finally agreed just this morning. Toby was simultaneously cheered and uneasy that he’d accepted. After the incident on Wallop, he wasn’t entirely comfortable around Shylif anymore.

Having Shylif there when he met Corva’s parents might help to defuse the tension. On the other hand, it made Toby seem like yet another possibly disreputable member of her rogues’ gallery, and he was eager to counter this impression. He rehearsed his words as buildings of alien architecture, and occasionally the Consensus style, flicked past below. “Pleased to meet you, sir, ma’am,” he’d say, or something like that. “Yes, I saved your son.” Or, “No I didn’t save anybody, your daughter saved my life.”

Or maybe, “Hi, I’m the brother of the man who’s oppressing your entire planet.”

“Am I Garren Morton today? Or Toby McGonigal?” he’d asked Corva before they went into hibernation—last night, or so it felt like.

She’d frowned. “Let’s start with Garren and work our way up,” she’d said.

“Ah, Orph, what do I do?” He put his face next to the denner’s and scritched the fur between his ears. Orpheus made a bouquet of smiley-face emoticons to go with the purr he gave off. He seemed quite unconcerned with the strangeness of this new world. Toby wasn’t so comfortable.

Corva’s brother was some kind of revolutionary. They’d talked a few times while he and his older, gray-haired companions from the ship had worked to secure them a ship back to Thisbe. That wasn’t the only ship they were after: more than half the men and women Toby had rescued from Wallop’s frozen clouds were on their way to other worlds, where they claimed they intended to do “business.”

Ammond had been doing “business,” too. Even if the strange quarantine of Thisbe was unjust, Halen and his friends seemed to be doing more than just trying to undo it. Halen, at least, hated Peter’s lockstep. You could hear it in his voice when he said even the most innocent thing about it. He wanted to take down Peter’s world.

So should Toby help him do it? The towers of the city swept slowly by below them. The place looked postapocalyptic: the building façades were cracked and vine choked, the streets overgrown with grass and trees. Various big machines were struggling to cut it back, and bots were working to fix the damage to the buildings. Still, the place looked busy, with crowds of people in the streets and lots of aerial vehicles hopping between the districts. The aircars from the spaceport thinned out, most landing on this or that downtown platform. Theirs was one of the few that kept on into the forested suburbs.

“The city’s not under a dome or anything,” he suddenly realized. “Do you get any winter here?”

Halen shook his head. “It stays subtropical most of the time—except when the sun has an outage. Those can last for weeks, and then the whole world’ll freeze over. It’s brutal. The rest of the time, everything’s constantly growing, so while we’re hibernating it just takes over.” He nodded at the grass-choked streets. “Normally that all gets cleaned up before we wake, but the bots can’t keep up with the blockade schedule. Too many turns too close together; they’re breaking down.”

“Home,” said Corva. Her voice was tense.

The aircar settled on the overgrown lawn of a fairly modest-looking stone house. The place was ringed with trees, and only narrow paved footpaths wound between those to the neighbors and beyond. Apparently, out here in the suburbs they’d given up on keeping the streets clear of invading vegetation.

Toby stared at the trees. He hadn’t seen so many in one place since he’d left Earth. They made him want to cry, and he felt a pang of intense envy for Corva and her family, who were lucky enough to live among them. Although, they probably never had time to get used to them. A sapling this month would be a stout adult after just one turn and dead after a few more.

People were coming out of the house. Halen pushed up the aircar’s canopy and bounded out. Corva followed, but as she approached her family her footsteps slowed, and then she stopped. Suddenly she burst into tears.

“You’re older!” she exclaimed. A man and a woman rushed over to her, along with a younger man and woman. She let her parents embrace her but pushed away the other two.

“No! It’s terrible, it’s terrible!” With a sob she burst past them and ran into the house.

Toby sat in the aircar, clutching Orpheus and feeling sick. Finally Halen seemed to remember him and called, “Garren! It’s okay, come meet Mom and Dad!”

He didn’t want to get out of the car, but Orpheus squirmed from his grasp and leaped down to the grass, where he proceeded to roll back and forth in delight. Toby put a shaky hand on the canopy bed and climbed out. With slow steps he walked up to Corva’s family. They were debating who should go after Corva.

“—Rescued us from the time lock! He won’t say how he did it, but he agreed to come with us.” Halen was grinning, but his eyes were cold as he looked over at Toby.

His parents weren’t like that, they were practically in tears themselves. Corva’s other brother and sister looked to be about Halen’s age; all seemed older than Corva, but a sinking feeling in Toby’s stomach told him that, no, she must be the eldest.

“I’ll go to her,” said Corva’s sister.

“No,” Toby heard himself say.

Halen’s grin froze. “What?” he said in a slightly strangled tone.

“I’m sorry.” Toby bowed quickly. “I’m Garren Morton. Corva and I are just friends, but, the thing is…”

“What?” Halen said again. His smile was gone.

“It happened to me, too,” Toby blurted. “Having years stolen like … like’s happened to you. I know how she feels. My own brother and sister are … well, they’re a lot older than me now. And my parents are dead. For me, they were alive just a couple of months ago, but it’s been…” Halen’s eyes widened in warning, and Toby shrugged. “An impossibly long time.

“I know you want to run to her,” he said to Corva’s sister. “She looks the same to you, but for her, you’re an entirely new person. It’s going to take her awhile to get over that shock.”

Her father sighed. “It’s what I said would happen. The same thing would have happened to you,” he said to Halen. “You shouldn’t have risked it all like that, son.”

Halen was now the target of their attention. With another quick bow, Toby moved around them and entered the house, where alert bots offered him orange juice and biscuits. He stared at them, sidled past, and called out, “Corva?”

He hesitated but didn’t really feel like he had to tiptoe about; the household bots were there to protect the privacy of the family and would simply bar him from anywhere he shouldn’t go. Or so he supposed, until he saw that half the butlers were sitting silent in dusty corners: broken-down, like so much of the city.

He started up the stairs, and they didn’t stop him.

She was facedown on a bed in one of the bedrooms. This was a girl’s room, its walls tuned to shifting washes of yellow and peach; pictures of family, places and people tumbled and sailed slowly up and back in that dimensionless space. There were wooden boxes under the bed and chests of drawers whose tops overflowed with jewelry and dozens of toys, some of which had broken down and sat forlornly while the rest all crowded at the edge of the surface, watching Corva weep with concern on their tiny faces.

“Evayne’s room looked like this,” said Toby from the doorway. Corva stiffened, then turned her head enough to say, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“She’s my little sister, Corva. At least, she was last time I saw her.”

Corva lay very still for a long time. Then she rolled over and sat up. She wouldn’t meet Toby’s eyes. “I was hoping to totally redo this room before I showed it to any young man. I haven’t lived here in years.”

“You were at school.”

She nodded. “Studying architecture! How to design buildings to last thousands of years. Ruin design, it’s called.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Suddenly, something seemed to occur to her, and now she did send Toby a puzzled look. “What about you? You got lost because you were away from home for some reason. There’re a billion stories about why, but most of them are ridiculous—”

“We had to seal our claim to Sedna by visiting all its moons. One was stupidly far away. Rockette, we called it. I got lost on the way there.”

It was strange. What had been his immediate experience yesterday was something he could talk about as being in the past; it was a story he could tell. He grinned and shrugged. “That’s really all there was to it. I didn’t want to go, but Mom and Dad weren’t home, and Peter and Evayne weren’t old enough.”

Corva frowned, thinking. “That must have been tough on all of you.”

“Toughest on Peter. He hates change, he’s afraid of his own shadow. He cried for days when he found out Mom and Dad were going.”

“What about when you left?”

Toby shrugged. “We had this gameworld we shared, called Consensus. I promised I’d meet him in it every day. He was fine with that.”

Corva gave him a long measured look. “Are you sure about that?”

His heart was suddenly hammering again. He shook himself angrily and scowled at her toys. They backed away, all except for a little warrior with a sword that stood bravely with its thumbnail-size weapon raised.

“We can’t talk about any of this without tripping over it, can we?”

“Tripping over what?” He thought he knew, but he wanted her to say it.

“The change. How we slept, and overnight they got older. And … how it’s all around us all the time. These cliffs of time you could just fall over accidentally at any moment. Lose a day, lose a century … I hate it.”

He was surprised. “You want to leave the lockstep?”

“That would be worse. To be stranded in realtime? Left behind by everybody you ever knew?” She shuddered. “No, it’s just so unfair how a year can be snatched away from you like that. Or … or a whole life.”

He found himself sitting on the bed next to her, and she leaned in to him. As he had so many times with Evayne, he put his arm around her, but this was different and he knew it. Corva buried her face in his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said, voice muffled.

“For what?”

“For using you the way I did. For being mean. I just … didn’t think I could trust you.”

“But you can.”

She was silent. Then she pulled away. “Toby, we have to face them some time. For me, it’s today I guess. For you … do you really know what’ll happen when you do that?”

He clasped his hands and looked down. “No. I guess not.”

“Then don’t make any promises, okay?”

Fair enough, he thought, though her words had hurt him. He stood up briskly. “Come on. They’re waiting for you. I think you need to make the first move.”

“And … how I feel? About seeing them so different?”

He gave a short laugh. “Maybe you should hide that for a day or so. See how it goes.”

Corva stood, too, and blew out a deep breath. Then she smiled. “Nobody else could have said that to me, but maybe you’re right. I’ll pretend for a day and then … see.”

They almost joined hands, but she turned away first, and they went downstairs.

THE KEISHIONS WERE LOUD. They had definite opinions about everything, and every single one of them needed to be right all the time. Their arguments started at breakfast, continued all day spilled out onto the lawns and echoed through the forest around the house. At first, Toby just stayed out of the way, but gradually he realized that they appreciated his opinions, and he began to relax. Most important, they knew he was an ignoramus when it came to the lockstep worlds, so he felt comfortable asking them the dumbest questions—about Thisbe, about the locksteps, about their family, and sometimes—when he could appear nonchalant—about Corva.

Like him, she was the eldest—or had been. She still won the most arguments, and the others deferred to her despite the age gap. What she had lost to them in time, she’d more than made up in experience.

Corva was no help at all during his first few days in the house; she was too busy getting reacquainted with everybody else. Halen hung around the edges, brooding and watching Toby. Meanwhile, outside the permanent pitched battle of the Keishion household, Thisbe was fully awake now and working hard to catch up with the damage from the frequency shift that Peter had wrought on it.

Toby found it natural to help the bots clearing the underbrush and fixing years of storm damage. Orpheus spent all day outside anyway, and Toby loved the fresh air, too, but also in some ways it was like being back on Sedna, where there had always been building or repair work to be done. He loved fixing stuff, and while doing this absorbing work, he could completely forget his troubles for hours at a time.

(Although, on those rare occasions when the “sun” changed color, he came crashing back to reality, at least for a minute or two.)

Gradually, he noticed that Corva was often nearby while he was working. She would bring him water, or simply be seen reading in the crook of a tree while he was hacking at the underbrush. Then she began perching, not far off, on a newly repaired wall or a lawn chair she’d dragged over; and since, well, they were in the same space anyway … they talked.

“I had a denner when I was growing up,” she said as they watched Wrecks and Orpheus chase each other around the ragged, but finally mowed, lawn. “Chauncey was his name. I was pretty lonely at first when I went off to school, so I looked into getting another one, but you couldn’t get them on Wallop. I wasn’t going to let that stop me, so I kept asking people and pushing, and that’s how I found out about these people on Lowdown who bred them.”

Toby was startled, and then it all made sense. “Ammond and Persea!” They’d bred denners.

She nodded. “They owned the operation, they didn’t do it themselves. They had them implanted with the cicada-bed tech for shady customers. Total gray-ware stuff, it’s just barely acceptable to the lockstep monitors. Anyway, I had no intention of using Wrecks that way, it seemed wrong, but these were the only denners you could get. Then the blockade happened. My money got cut off, I couldn’t go home,then I found out that Halen had tried to run the blockade and was trapped in stasis. I had to sell my bots for food, I couldn’t afford to travel … but I’d heard about the stowaways when I got Wrecks.”

She told Toby how she’d met Shylif and how they’d stowed away on a flight to Lowdown, where, with the last of her money, she’d bought Orpheus. “He was for Halen, you see. I had this crazy idea of sneaking into the quarantined ship and getting him to wake Halen up. I had no idea how it was going to work, but I was damn well going to try.”

So far, this made sense. Toby watched the denners roll around, play fighting, while he thought through what had happened. “But how did you find out about me? Or did you even know who I was?”

“Actually, we had a pretty good idea. See, we were stowaways. We were living a bit off frequency anyway, and spending time in spaceports and warehouses. So we were watching when Ammond’s tug bots brought down your ship. They did it a week before everybody was supposed to wake up; but we were already awake, ’cause we’d set the denners’ alarms to get us up well before there would be people nosing about. So we saw them shrouding this incredibly old radiation-fried ship in orange plastic sheeting and walling it up in a warehouse space off in a far corner of Ammond’s operation. And then we saw them bring you out.

“I was really curious at that point, so I looked up the lettering on the side of your ship. I expected to get a hit off the lockstep ship registry, but instead, all the hits were from books on ancient mythology…”

He frowned in thought. “So when I saw you in the courtyard that first day…”

“I was there to buy Orpheus—but I was also there to look for the boy we’d seen them take out of the ship. And when you came running out I freaked. First, ’cause I knew who you might be, and second, because Ammond’s guards had told me they’d cut off my nose if they caught me sneaking about.”

He nodded. It all made sense. “And when you woke me up on the way to Little Auriga?”

“You’d only just gone under. Your hibernation was still reversible–like in the boat, remember? Oh, you mean how did I get to you?” She shook her head quickly. “Ammond thinks of himself as a criminal mastermind, but his security’s really lame. Thisbe is habitable all the time,” she said, gesturing around at the rich trees and long grass, “and there’re other locksteps here. We are good at security, at locks and vaults and alarms. We have to be. So Shylif and I didn’t have much trouble breaking in while your ship was on the ground waiting for launch clearance. Shylif had already taught me how to break into a ship; you need to know how to do that if you’re going to be a decent stowaway. I needed to know learn how anyway, if I was going to get Orpheus to Halen.”

“But you followed me to Little Auriga. You didn’t have to.”

She looked uncomfortable. “When I woke you up to warn you, it didn’t seem like you understood me. You were all dopey and ‘huh?’ So … we argued about it and decided to go after you.”

“’Cause I was a McGonigal and worth a lot?”

She glared at him. “’Cause I thought they were going to kill you. Or worse.”

“Worse, yeah.” He shuddered. “Thank you. —Though, really, it was Orpheus rapping on my window who showed me the way out.”

She laughed. “Anyway, I’m just glad it’s over. I suppose it’s what they call an adventure, but to me it was just one long panic attack. If that’s what an adventure’s like, I never want another one.”

Away on the other side of the lawn, Halen was chatting with one of the neighbors. Toby nodded at him. “Halen never got his, you know.”

“His what?”

“His adventure. He never got to have it. He started out to save you, and you ended up saving him instead. He never even got a proper look at Wallop. Went from ship to ship, sleep to sleep, and now he’s back here.”

Corva gaped at Toby. “What are you trying to say? That he’s disappointed? Mad at me for saving him?” Toby shrugged. “Oh, come on. Is that how boys think about these things?”

He nodded. “That is how boys think about these things.”

“Well, it’s stupid.”

She changed the subject, and soon Toby went back to working with the bots. After that, though, they spent a lot of time together. And they talked.

The rhythm of life in the locksteps was starting to become clear to him, and talking to Corva helped give the abstractions flesh and blood. She described the parties that happened at the end of every turn—every month, that is, by human reckoning. Whatever resources the household or the city or planet hadn’t used during its four weeks awake had to be able to hibernate or else had to be used up. Some things were too fragile or temporary by nature to winter over. So you used up all the food in the fridge and broke up, burned, or built mad sculptures out of other transient things. In some places the neighbors vied for extravagance and shock value—although, since the ritual happened so frequently, some people just ignored it and went to bed early, trusting the household bots to clear away the deteriorated and decayed objects by the next waking.

More ceremony was lavished on people who might be traveling. At the very least you wouldn’t see them for a month. If they were on their way to the other side of the lockstep, or somewhere exotic like Earth or Barsoom, then it might be a year or more. Leave-taking parties were major events in any neighborhood.

Next morning—at start-of-turn—the trees were bigger, or completely cut down, and even entire landforms like hills might have shifted slightly. The climate might be different, too—Thisbe’s was none too stable. Most important on such mornings, though, was the fact that ships from a thousand worlds crowded the skies.

Corva talked about visiting the port on the dawn of a new turn and watching exotic, weirdly dressed strangers step blinking into the lurid daylight of her planet. They brought crafts and gifts as alien as themselves, and stories and pictures from around the lockstep and beyond.

The longer a world slept, the more ships could appear during that special night. As Toby had learned, if you doubled your sleep you would far more than double the number of worlds whose ships could reach you in that time. Modern fusion or fission-fragment rockets could get you about half a light-year in thirty years, and nomad planets were spaced about one every tenth of a light-year in this part of the galaxy. A world that slept for three decades couldn’t visit just five times the number of worlds as one that wintered over for one-fifth the time; it could visit five hundred more. The longer you slept, the more opportunities for trade you’d have.

Lockstep 360/1 was about five light-years across, and within that space there were more than seventy thousand worlds, ranging from little moon-size ice balls to a couple of planets as big as Jupiter. All were easy to get to from even the smallest outpost, provided you could spend thirty years at a time accumulating fuel for the journey and wintered over.

And yet Thisbe had gone against the sensible rules of the locksteps and been punished for it. The blockade remained.

Corva patiently explained why. “Thisbe’s really a fast world. See,” she said, pointing to where some bots were repairing a roof, “there’s a huge cost in wear and tear to wintering over here. There’s a trade-off between how much you can produce while you were awake and how little you’ll consume if you sleep longer. There’s also a trade-off between the bigger manufacturing and agriculture potential of fast worlds like this and the bigger trading opportunities you get if you winter over longer. There’re other locksteps on Thisbe, you know, and they get by on higher frequencies ’cause fast worlds like this do better at manufacturing than trade.”

Corva took Toby on walks through the neighborhood, where some houses were sealed up and silent. These were neighbors she only saw on Jubilee, which happened only once or twice a year. They were the ones who were more often awake, though—it was really Corva and her people who were usually the silent, sealed-up mysteries.

During one of these walks she told Toby what had happened. “The government wanted our Jubilees to synchronize with more of the other locksteps. Those locksteps wanted it, too. They don’t use McGonigal cicada beds,” she added, nodding at a silent estate whose lawns were overgrown with weeds and young trees. “So there was a lot of talk about scrapping our beds and using theirs. That would cost a huge amount, but more important, we’d break the lockstep agreement.”

“What’s that?” He’d read enough to know it was some sort of service agreement between the McGonigals and the 360 worlds.

“The agreement says we promise not to change the frequency except during emergencies. In return, we get access to all the 360-to-1 worlds without port taxes, immigration reviews and all that. Dad calls it a ‘level playing field.’ It’s useful, ’cause among other things it lets all the worlds trade using the same currency and know what its value is from turn to turn.

“The government thought of a way to bend the rules. The cicada beds all have their own timers, of course, but they’re coordinated by a timing signal sent from centralized servers. One of those is here, on Thisbe, and it sets the exact frequency and times for a couple hundred worlds whose only connection to the rest of the lockstep is through us. We’re the gateway. If we hack our timer to shift our frequency just a little—add a year here, drop one there—we could go into Jubilee with our neighbors a lot more often. Barsoom might complain, but they wouldn’t come down on us. And since we were the server for all those other worlds, they’d follow us. There’s a whole bunch of different locksteps near the Laser Wastes that would come into Jubilee. So with one stroke Thisbe could double its trade potential.”

Toby nodded. It was brilliant. That overgrown estate, normally silent, would be awake more often. More ships would crowd the sky. “It’s perfect! Why would it be a problem?”

“If they let us get away with time shifting, everybody might try it. Then there’d be chaos, because the value of money couldn’t be predicted anymore and ships leaving port for their farthest trading partners couldn’t be guaranteed to get there in time. What happens if I’ve got a crucial trading trip planned with a world that’s a twenty-nine-year journey away, and they decide to slip their schedule and come awake after twenty-seven years so they can Jubilee with somebody else? I get there and they’re wintered over. I have to wait another turn to do my trading with them. Instead of one month lockstep time, that trip’s taken at least two. It’s crazy.”

He was puzzled. “You think your people were wrong to do what they did?”

“Yes!” She threw up her hands in frustration. “It was stupid. But it’s more stupid what Barsoom did to punish us! Way too extreme.”

He had to agree with that. Corva had lost eight years of her family’s lives to the blockade, and could have lost four more. Shifting Thisbe’s frequency into high gear like this was a brutal overreaction. The global economy was depressed, with resources that normally could accumulate for decades being used up faster than they could be renewed. Trades that had happened once a month now occurred only every year, and the Jubilees were totally screwed up.

“I’m surprised you put up with it,” he said. “Better to leave the lockstep entirely than suffer like this.”

“If only it were that easy,” she said. “Leave 360 and we slash our trading partners. If we permanently speed up, we’ll lose dozens or hundreds of worlds as next-day neighbors. But we can’t go on this way, either. It’s unfair. It’s evil.”

So there it was. She didn’t say the words, but Toby heard them in his head as in her voice: You’re a McGonigal, maybe you can stop this. He had no idea whether he had the power, yet also unspoken was another accusation: the fault lay not with the lockstep system but with the fact that it was ruled by the McGonigals.

The peaceful setting, combined with Corva’s comment about her adventure being over, had been making Toby wonder: could his own be over, too? If he’d escaped Nathan Kenani, maybe he’d escaped Evayne as well … and maybe he didn’t need to ever confront her or Peter. They were different people now; his beloved brother and sister were lost forever to time. Wouldn’t the sensible thing be to just accept that and find a life for himself in this wondrous and strange world his family had built while he slept? But things were far from perfect here. Corva was right: what was happening to Thisbe was unfair.

It was hilarious in a way. Evayne and Peter were acting up again. It was time for the eldest brother to clean up the mess as he had so many times in the past. He had to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” She sent him one of her special glares.

Toby shook his head. “It’s all been going by too fast for me to keep up,” he said. “But that’s got to change.

“It’s time I started planning my next turn.”