Lockstep

Fifteen

ONE DAY TOBY LOWERED his glasses down his nose and frowned at the sudden appearance of heavily laden carts on the neighborhood footpaths and cargo quadcopters over the trees. They all buzzed about with a sense of excitement, and many of the neighbors were out on their porches watching. Bots ran to and fro as well; some were setting up tables on the lawn of the Keishion estate.

He dismissed the scenario he was exploring and walked over. “What’s going on?”

A bot bowed to him. “Tomorrow is end-of-turn, sir. We are preparing a potlatch party.”

“Tomorrow?” He’d really lost track of time. It felt like the city had just gotten back on its feet. If this was how turn’s end felt after wintering over for only two and a half years, what was it like when the turns took their usual thirty?

He skittered around nervously, too, until he ran into Corva. She was sitting in one of her favorite places, the stone wall that ran into the house, and she was reading a book.

“Oh, just ignore it,” she said when he pointed at the organized chaos going on around them. “It’s just turn’s end. Join in or not, it’s entirely up to you.”

“Oh.”

So he tried, not very successfully, to be nonchalant; he’d experienced this gigantic transition only a few times so far. Corva had grown up with it, had seen it literally hundreds of times. He couldn’t help but imagine himself a week from now, silent and still as a dead man and lying in a cicada sarcophagus. He’d be behind locked doors in a hermetically sealed chamber, the house’s solar heat exchangers keeping his body so cold he’d freeze solid if not for the antifreeze in his veins. This was normal? He’d done it on the flight to Sedna, and again on his way to Rockette. Since then he’d experienced hibernation—what, five times? He would never get used to it.

Time had flown while he brooded over what Halen had said. Toby hadn’t come up with a good answer to Corva’s brother. He’d just started avoiding him. The whole idea of the god gambit preyed on him, though. It was so fundamentally dishonest he didn’t even know where to start to say why. It was creepy. Halen thought it was the only way to go.

All of it—turn’s end, the god gambit, the inescapable fact that ninety-nine percent of the people living in the lockstep were from civilizations that had come into existence while he slept—forced him into an awed awareness of time. Saplings would grow in the yard while he slept tomorrow. If not for the acceleration of the blockade, entire trees would appear during that one night. The grass would be long and weed shot between the closing and opening of one’s eyes.

So much had happened, too, in recent weeks, and yet Wallop was still asleep. Nathan Kenani had only just closed the lid on Toby’s bed, as far as the traitorous Guide was concerned. Kirstana had only just said good-bye to Toby, probably in full expectation of seeing him when she awoke. So it was on seventy thousand other worlds. They were all wintering over simultaneously, billions frozen solid, waiting the tick of a new turn. Between one beat of their hearts and the next, whole lives would flash past on the fast worlds near the stars.

People did pause to think about it, he knew. Evayne tapped into the wonder and terror that lurked under the sensible façade of the locksteps; the myths and the Toby cult channeled those feelings in directions that were politically useful to Evayne and Peter.

Toby was curious, and the turn’s end parties sounded like fun, so he convinced Corva to go out with him, and they house-hopped through the neighborhood. Everywhere they went, people pushed food and drink on them. They ate a lot of fresh fruit. Everybody also seemed to have one or more big pieces of machinery they couldn’t fit into their vaults. These were doomed to sit under the rain and weather for more than two years if nobody claimed them. Corva offered advice about how to store them based on her studies in ruin design, and they moved on to the next house.

It was fun, and a good distraction to the prospect of imminent hibernation. When they got home, it was very late and nobody else was up. The house’s windows were sealed with metal covers, and how Toby could see how the place was built with a bright and relatively open outer layer and an inner core containing the bedrooms and cicada machinery. After stripping off her shoes, Corva headed in that direction, but he hung back.

She looked around, frowned. “What’s the matter?”

“It still seems unnatural to me.”

She laughed in surprise. “But you hold the record for the longest hibernation of all time!”

He crossed his arms and looked away. This wasn’t funny to him at all, and after a moment Corva seemed to realize it. She tilted her head at the kitchen. “Let’s sit up awhile.”

They shared the last juice in the fridge. Bots were quietly boxing the house’s contents after photographing the exact position and orientation of every stray sock and data pad. They’d recreate the scene with perfect fidelity in two and a half years.

He felt nervous and edgy, and also utterly weary, so balanced on the kitchen stool as if it were the top of a tree. Toby hadn’t told Corva what Halen had said to him, and he didn’t know how to talk about it now. Instead he said, “My mom’s slept as long as I have. Almost. I have to go to her, Corva.”

She didn’t reply. They both knew Destrier would be crawling with Evayne and Peter’s troops. They would be waiting for Toby. Going there was his obvious next move.

“She’ll keep.”

He blinked at her; to his surprise Corva blushed.

“Gods, Toby, she’s waited for you for fourteen thousand years! She can wait a little longer.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean you could … you could stay here.” The last word was almost inaudible. She still wouldn’t look at him.

“Corva, I can’t be your house guest forever.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Now she was seriously blushing. “Oh, hell.” She jumped up and made to move away, but he grabbed her hand.

“I’d like that,” he said. “I didn’t know if you really wanted me around.”

“What are you, stupid? Of course I want you around!” She hadn’t pulled her hand away. “But you have some world or other to save, and the Empress of Time to wake, and things like that. I never thought you’d want to…”

He was afraid of meeting his mother again. Something had happened to her, something had broken, he was sure of it. Who would abandon the rest of her family—her whole world!—to wait for one lost son to come home? The thought that she’d done that made him profoundly uncomfortable. Once again, he had no idea how to explain that to Corva.

So he didn’t try.

He kissed her instead.

ORPHEUS LAY ACROSS TOBY’S belly like a thousand-pound weight. The denner was snoring, a faint but reassuring sound.

The knock on the bedroom door came again. Toby blinked and raised his head to look groggily around. He’d slept … that’s right, he’d kissed Corva last night. It had been hard to get to sleep after that, thinking about her, and also about—

—More than two years passing in one night.

He sat up, rolling Orpheus aside. The denner crawled into some bunched-up blankets and went still again.

“Garren?” It was the voice of Corva’s father. The knock came again.

Toby looked around, then down at himself. There was no sign that more than an ordinary night had passed. Intellectually he knew this was the result of vast amounts of work by bots and biomedical systems; if he’d slept for two and a half years, it was mostly in a semifrozen state. The room would have been warming up for weeks, the bots and hibernation systems working day and night to restore his body and reverse all signs of decay within the room. He shuddered at the thought, then said, “I’m here!”

“Can you come outside, son? Something’s … well, we’ve got visitors.”

Toby had been climbing out of bed; he stopped and stared at the door. Then: “Give me five minutes.”

There was no point even wondering who it would be. Whoever it was, things were out of his control again. All he had that was his were his few minutes of freshening up in the suite’s little bathroom. He could pick out his own clothes, ruffle Orpheus’s fur. Then he took a deep breath and put his hand on the door latch. Time to let go of the dream he’d spun with Corva last night.

The Keishions were waiting in the hall, faces grave. Toby walked past them and downstairs. Corva stood by the front door, hands clenched in front of her. They made eye contact, then he stepped outside.

Ranks and ranks of military bots stood on the Keishions’ lawn. He’d seen this kind of vista before, but never in real life. Armed quadcopters hovered in the air above the mechs, and farther off gray airships sat in the sky like condensed clouds.

A delegation of men and women stood in front of the bots. There must have been at least twelve of them, all in fancy uniforms. A woman in the center stepped forward, her face shining with some kind of excitement, and as she bowed deeply to him, so did all the others. As did all the bots. The copters dipped as well. Past these dipping heads, Toby could see the astonished faces of the neighbors he’d been partying with last night.

“Welcome,” said the woman in a husky voice. “Welcome, Tobias Wyatt McGonigal, to the lockstep of your creation and to the world of Thisbe!”

And all those in sight murmured their wonder and bowed even lower.