Lockstep

Twenty

NATHAN KENANI SAT UP, blinking, and swung his feet over the edge of the cicada bed. He rubbed his eyes, looked around the chamber, nodding in satisfaction as he apparently recognized where he was. Then his gaze fell on Toby.

“Hello, Nathan.”

To his credit, Kenani didn’t miss a beat. “And a fine good morning to you, too, Toby. I see you’ve been busy.” He squinted, taking in the deeply tanned and weatherbeaten skin, the new beard, and the uniform. “Been a long night, has it?”

His eyes were shifting around the room again. He’d registered the troops; now he noticed Shylif, and Jaysir, who slouched in one corner. He looked around some more, appearing puzzled.

“Where’s your girlfriend, Toby?”

“She … went home.” Damn him! thought Toby. Kenani was dangerously astute. Even freshly awakened from thirty years’ sleep he was able to instantly zero in on Toby’s single weakness.

He couldn’t have known about any of the events on Thisbe, much less anything about the veiled threats that had been radioed to Toby’s ship. Those messages suggested that Corva’s life could be made a living hell if Toby didn’t return there. He’d commanded his men not to acknowledge the messages in any way. The instant those who’d sent them knew he’d received them, he’d be on the hook of the Toby cultists.

Halen had given Corva up to them. That fact had provided Toby with the final lesson—as if he’d needed it, after Evayne—in just how badly family could treat family.

Toby couldn’t turn the whole planet over looking for her. He had known where Jaysir and Shylif were wintering over, and when he’d waked them he’d pleaded with them to look for her. To his surprise, they had chosen to come with him instead.

“You’ve not finished what you came here to do,” Shylif had explained. “Getting that done’s the best way to get her back. And, let’s face it, you’re no expert on the locksteps yet. You’ll need help.”

“Well, that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?” Kenani was saying. “To help her get home?” He crossed his arms. “I’m a little cold, and hungry, Toby. Do you have…” Toby had looked back and nodded, and now somebody came forward carrying Kenani’s folded uniform. A bot entered the room pushing a rolling cart stacked with hot food.

Kenani stared at this little performance. “Huh. I always wondered how much like them you’d turn out to be when you grew up.”

“Them?”

Toby assumed Kenani was talking about his brother and sister, but the Guide said, “The trillionaires. Those bastards we left Earth to get away from. Seems you’re coming along quite nicely, the way you handle the servants and all.”

“You’re not my servant, Nathan, and I haven’t come to kill you or anything—in case you were wondering.” Toby smiled at him. “Look, I did my homework; there’re decades of news reports about you and the things you’ve done in the service of the lockstep. There’s nothing horrible—you’re pretty much the same man I met on that airship back when I was fifteen. I’m pretty sure you’ve been trying to keep everything together, just like your job description says.”

“Well.” Now it was Kenani’s turn to look uncomfortable. “Thank you.”

“Nathan, you’ve got integrity, that’s why I came back to you. I mean, you deliberately gave me a chance to escape, last … last night. Didn’t you?”

Kenani shrugged. “Let’s just say I decided to be a bit sloppy … I knew what those denners of yours could do, but most of my men hadn’t seen them before. So I just … overlooked something and neglected to warn them about it, too. I wanted plausible deniability in case you did get away …

“Hell, what am I saying? I thought you deserved a chance is all.”

“That’s good enough for me.” Toby gazed away at the awakening city, thinking.

After a few moments, he was able to summon the courage to ask the question he’d come here to ask: “Mom didn’t go to sleep to wait for me, did she? At least, not the last time.”

An ironic smile played across Kenani’s lips.

“Just tell me.”

Kenani looked put out. “I didn’t lie to you, boy—well, not entirely. She did start wintering over to wait for her search probes to report back. And that is what got the whole lockstep thing started.” He frowned even deeper. “What makes you think that last time was any different for her?”

“It’s a little discovery I made on Thisbe. It seems I can override Evayne’s commands to the lockstep system.”

“Really, now?” Kenani looked genuinely surprised. “I never thought she’d done that.”

That told Toby part of what he wanted to hear. “You’re not surprised that she could do it. Only that she did.”

Kenani pretended to be absorbed with the difficulties of dressing himself. Toby let him get away with his silence for a minute or so, then he said, “Tell me how it happened. How did my mother end up being trapped in hibernation like that? It wasn’t her own choice, was it?”

Kenani began to tuck into his food. He was obviously thinking about his options—what he could say, what he could leave out, what he could get away with. Finally he sighed and said, “I don’t know for sure what happened that day. None of us were there, just the three of them. But they’d been arguing pretty fiercely, that’s for sure.”

“About what?”

“This myth about you being some kind of messiah was part of it…” Kenani hesitated, then took the plunge. “But not all of it. Fact is, your mother’d been overriding their commands to the system. There were some new worlds that had joined the lockstep—this was, what, about eight years in, our time—and they wanted to use their own cicada beds. Break the McGonigal monopoly. Peter and Evayne were having none of that, let me tell you. So many services are tied to the beds that they could shut whole cities out of the system—and they did. Your mother brought ’em back in. She wanted to change the way the lockstep operated, but somehow the other two weren’t letting her do it. She wanted a democratic system, they wanted to keep control.

“Here’s the thing, Toby. If Evie did something, Cassandra would just shut it down; she could do the same with Peter. If both Peter and Evie both ordered something, Cassie couldn’t override them. But neither of them alone could override her, either.”

“Ah,” said Toby. It was as he’d thought.

“I don’t know how they got her into the bed. Might have knocked her on the head for all I know. But anyway, she wasn’t able to counter their command when they put her under. They came back and told us she was wintering over to wait for you, like she had in the past. We were suspicious, but what could we do? The time stretched out and she didn’t wake up, and then we found out Evayne had been sending people to worlds outside the lockstep, feeding them this rubbish about Toby being the messiah and Cassie some mystic figure waiting for the end of time. It was pretty clear at that point what had happened.”

Toby sighed, then glanced back at his people. Some of the former officers in Evayne’s private army were looking extremely uncomfortable. Well, if they hadn’t figured out yet that he was just a human being like them, then they’d better wake up fast. Things were going to get real uncomfortable for the Toby myth, real fast.

“Thanks for being up front with me. You’re nobody’s servant, Nathan. I’m not going to do anything to you, or order you to do anything … But there is one thing you could do for me—as a favor.”

Kenani looked relieved but cautious. “What?”

“You’re a Guide. That means you’ve got a direct line to Peter, right?”

Kenani nodded slowly. “Any messages I send will go straight to him. Anybody else’ll have to go through the bureaucracy.”

“Right. So you can forward a message to him for me.”

Kenani gulped. “You know, they sometimes shoot the messenger.”

“Don’t worry. Anyway, I’ll keep it short.”

Toby had been thinking about what to say to Peter, and he’d rehearsed several different speeches and declarations—but now he found he didn’t like any of them. “You know, Evayne, she … she fled Thisbe after we defeated her there. She said she was on her way to Destrier to kill Mom.”

Kenani blinked and went very still for a second. Toby watched him carefully, then said, “Now here’s the thing … she changed course. She’s not going to Destrier at all. It looks more like she’s on her way to Earth.”

“Ah. Really?” Kenani was visibly fighting to keep his cool look.

“I know my mother’s not on Earth, Nathan. But I also know she’s not on Destrier. She never was, was she? Destrier is a honeypot. It’s a trap to catch Toby pretenders. It’s a pit for drowning navies. She’s so sure I’m going to go there that she doesn’t think she has to show up herself. But she’s just worried enough that she’s on her way to where she and Peter really hid Mom.”

“Well, obviously, the capital is Mars now,” stammered Kenani. “They call it Barsoom these days, isn’t that hilarious?”

“I said it looked like she was on her way to Earth, but really, there’re a lot of worlds between here and there. You don’t know which one it really is?”

Kenani said nothing, but he was pale and just shook his head.

Toby shrugged. “I think you do—after all, you’ve been part of Peter’s inner circle from the start. If Peter and Evayne never actually moved her, then she’s where she had become accustomed to wintering over. I’m pretty sure I know where Evie’s going. I want you to send this message to Peter:

“Tell him Evie’s threatening to kill our mother, and tell him I have a better idea. Tell him I’ll meet him and we can work that out.”

“Meet him where?”

“Just say I’ve gone to finish the job I started.”

He nodded politely to Kenani, then (still stung by Kenani’s comment about servants) picked up his own chair and carried it to a nearby table. He clapped Jaysir on the shoulder, nodded to Shylif, and together with their officers in tow, left Nathan Kenani sitting with his forgotten breakfast.

“I CAN’T BELIEVE IT,” said Jaysir a few days later. “This is the most heavily defended place in the whole lockstep? I never even heard of it!”

Toby smiled sadly at the irregular, faintly starlit shape that they could just barely make out a few kilometers from the ship. “You know what they say,” he said. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em. Everything important about that thing was thrust upon it.

“Welcome to Rockette.”

Jaysir, Shylif and Toby hung weightless in front of a large curving window in the officers’ lounge of Toby’s ship. They were alone for now, as the crew bustled about reviving the vessel’s systems. Toby had chosen the fleet’s fastest courier vessel, and then they’d stripped it of its armor and weapons, sawed off and discarded the cargo container, even thrown out most of the furniture. With extra boosters bolted on, the fusion engine could edge them up to an impressive ten percent light speed. Even if Evayne were throwing her own furniture out the window, she hadn’t taken a particularly fast ship and had only the fuel she’d left Thisbe with. Peter had to come all the way from Barsoom, after a delay because of the time it would have taken Kenani to relay Toby’s message to him. Toby had the advantage over Evayne in speed, and the advantage over his brother in timing. So he’d gotten here before either of them—but just barely.

“Sir?” The captain had appeared in the door of the lounge. “They can destroy us, sir, if they want to. We have no defenses.”

Toby smiled at her. “I know. This was never going to be an even match.”

“But what is this place?” She ventured into the room. The woman was as intimidated by Toby as was the rest of her crew, but at least she wasn’t a fanatical Toby worshiper: she was worried about the safety of her people. “Sir, I’ve been in the lockstep navy for twenty years and I never heard so much as a rumor that this … this fortress”—she nodded at the window—“existed.”

“I expect if you looked it up, you’d find that Rockette was private property,” said Toby. “Owned by my family. And I doubt there’s a single human being manning those lasers and ships.” They were invisible to the naked eye, but radar had revealed thousands of them, as well as mines and missiles, forming a cloud around Rockette far larger than the comet itself. “Rockette’s important to the McGonigals. That’s all I can tell you right now. But tell your men they’re safe. None of that firepower is directed at us.”

“Very good, sir.” She bowed in midair.

“Could you get a boat ready? My brother’s arriving soon and I want to meet him on the comet.”

“Yes, sir!” She flew gracefully out of the room.

“Hmm.” Jaysir scratched his head. “None of it directed at us? Yeah, I kinda think it’s all aimed at us. And anybody who finds out this place exists.”

Shylif was taking it all in calmly; after Sebastine Coley’s trial and punishment, nothing seemed to faze him. “But Jay, you yourself said we’d be safe.”

“Yeah, and you believed me? How long have you known me, Shy?”

Toby grinned at them, but he was hugely anxious. He’d made a guess on Thisbe about why he was able to override Evayne’s commands to the lockstep systems. Jay agreed that he’d guessed rightly, and now as their little courier ship had approached Rockette, Toby had issued a command to its defenses to stand down. If his guess was wrong, then yes, they really could be blasted out of the sky at any moment.

Even if it was right, he was safe only while it was just him and Peter at Rockette. When Evayne arrived in a few days, he’d be helpless.

He might be heading into a tearful reunion with his siblings—or an interrogation. Knowing them as he did, Toby suspected this meeting would be a bit of both.

“Tell me again,” he said to Jaysir, “why this is going to work?”

The maker shrugged. “I never said it would.”

“Yes, but—”

Jaysir tilted his head from side to side, noncommittal. “The McGonigal security system is a black box. People have been poking at it from outside for thousands of years, but beyond a certain point, we just don’t know. Your mom built well.”

“Yeah.” Toby let out a long, ragged sigh. “Thanks. Can I have a minute or two alone before I…?”

“Oh, sure.” Jaysir pulled Shylif toward the door. “You know I’d say good luck, but that would just be stupid. How about, don’t get ’em any madder at you than they already are?”

“Great. I’ll remember that.”

They all laughed, and the other two left.

So there it was: the little comet he’d been on his way to when he got lost, fourteen thousand years ago. It didn’t look like they’d built much on its surface, which was still painted crimson by radiation-baked organics. Those took millions of years to build up; in its tiny gravity field, he was sure he could find two little stones balanced precariously atop one another somewhere, that had been balancing that way since before the time of the dinosaurs. Next to the inhuman aeons that passed between a pebble wobbling and falling on Rockette, all the events of the last fourteen millennia were just an eyeblink. As far as Rockette was concerned, Toby wasn’t arriving late at all.

He shook his head and turned away.

Nobody spoke to him on his way to the little inflatable lifeboat, and he made eye contact with no one. He felt like an intruder; they were well rid of him. Surely if Halen had been here, he would have organized banners and speeches and a photo op, and would have demanded of everyone present that they swear some weird blood oath or brand themselves to mark the occasion. That was the sort of thing you did with living gods. Toby was far happier sneaking out.

In the red light of a tiny utilitarian airlock he let a suit build itself onto him, as he had so many times before. Doing his checks and cycling through the airlock made him feel much better because the familiar chore reminded him of days—not so long ago, for him—when he’d cycled himself through Thisbe’s airlocks to attend to some minor repair problem on the little world’s surface. Funny thing was, he’d always grumbled about leaving Consensus to do those chores. As he settled into the ship’s little lander, he found himself smiling, just a little.

The next few minutes passed in silence, too, save for the occasional radioed flight plan update from the ship’s bridge. He acknowledged with a terse yes or no and kept his eyes on the approaching comet, where a landing field was now lit in pinpricks of light. When he did set down, nobody human was waiting for him, only a few bots that directed him into a deep slot in Rockette’s regolith. Down there was another airlock.

He never remembered, later, going through that lock, nor could he recall removing his suit or sailing down the long, dark passages into the heart of the comet. Toby was running on automatic, absolutely sure of what he was going to find here but his thoughts shocked silent by what it would mean.

As he’d expected, all the passages led to one chamber, a spherical room in the most protected heart of the comet. There was nothing ceremonial or even comfortable here, only coils of frost-covered hose, tangles of faintly humming machinery, and, tethered in the very middle of the space by wires and cables and pipes like the kernel of a seed, a single closed cicada bed.

Toby drifted up to it and, after a momentary hesitation, put out his hand to rub the frost from the top part of the canopy.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

TOBY COULD TELL IT was Peter because of the way he moved. Forty years had bulked him up and slowed him down a little, but Toby could have picked him out of a crowd even if he’d been facing the other way.

That bullet head, though; it still threw him. “You look good,” Toby called, his heart meanwhile threatening to go off the rails. “Shame about the hair, though.”

The Chairman was accompanied by some milbots, mostly big human-shaped types with guns. “You know I thought about doing that,” said Toby, pointing to them. “I guess if I didn’t know it was really you, I might take precautions.”

“Yeah, well I don’t know who you are,” said the Chairman. He started to say something more but stopped when he saw the status indicators on the cicada bed. He swore and moved down with surprising agility for (Toby tried not to think it) an old guy. Placing both hands on the bed’s canopy, while his bots encircled Toby, he swore again and then commanded it, “Shut down! Go back to sleep.”

The indicators didn’t change. “That’s interesting,” said Toby. So his guess had been right; the tightness in all his muscles loosened just a bit.

“I found out about this on Thisbe,” he said, “when Evie tried to block my commands in the system. Turned out she couldn’t. I wondered whether it’d work the same with you. I guess it does.

“Bots! Stand down!”

As one, Peter’s military bots folded in on themselves and went still.

Peter whirled, gasping. He grappled a pistol out of the closed fist of one of his guards and pointed it at Toby. He didn’t look like Peter now, just like a hostile older man with a gun. All Toby’s bluster evaporated. “You—” Peter looked from Toby to the bed and back again. “You’re waking her up!”

Despite the gun pointed at him, Toby told himself, he had to go ahead with what he’d planned. “Yes,” he said, “and you can’t change that. She’s a few hours away still, but she’ll be back before Evie arrives. Which means, little brother, that you have to make a choice.”

Peter’s eyes were wide. “What—”

“See, I’m not armed. I wasn’t about to mess up Mom’s bedroom with a gun battle. That means you’ve got me right where you want me. You can kill me before she wakes up. But you can’t stop Mom from waking … and you alone don’t have the power to put her to sleep again. Do you?”

Warily, Peter grabbed a handhold on the cicada bed and settled himself opposite Toby. “Evie told you about the share system?”

Toby shook his head. “Evie didn’t tell me anything.” He didn’t try to disguise the disappointment in his voice. “She’s become rather good at following orders.” Now the anger was slipping out. “Is that her, or did you twist her that way?”

Peter didn’t say anything, but the pistol was still pointed at Toby.

“You know, when I found out what I could do, I figured Mom had given me a superuser account on the corporate system. It made all kinds of sense, but the question was, did you guys have the same privileges? You must—unless … she didn’t entirely trust you.”

“We had our disagreements,” said Peter. “But you were out of the picture.”

“So if she was the superuser, holding the administrator’s account to the whole lockstep system, then you two might just have ordinary user’s privileges. And if she didn’t like how you were scheduling worlds in the lockstep, she could block you, or cancel your actions entirely.

“But that’s not how the system works, is it?”

Peter had been staring at Toby with a strange kind of fascination; now he shook himself and seemed to snap to attention. “Why does it matter?” he said. “Evie caught enough of your people on Thisbe to learn what you’re up to. It’s the whole messiah thing, just like we foresaw.”

This time it was Toby who started to object and Peter who overrode him: “Come on! They love you there! You came down from the sky and promised to reset their frequency, and last I heard, you were building a nice little army to storm Destrier.” He sneered. “Don’t get high and mighty about family stuff now, Toby.”

In that moment, Toby knew they were brothers again—even if Peter wanted to kill him, he’d just acknowledged who Toby was. As when Evie had done it, it made all the difference. Suddenly all the armies, lockstep bots and expectations of the outside world were irrelevant; the universe had closed down to just him and Peter. Him and his brother, fighting.

In that case, he knew what to say next, like he usually did with Peter. “If I was really playing the messiah card, I’d have brought my army here, wouldn’t I? But I didn’t. I wanted to talk to you.”

He could see that this had hit home, because the pistol finally wavered. Because this was Peter, though, and because they’d argued their whole lives, he couldn’t resist adding, “And who set up the whole messiah thing, anyway?” He matched Peter’s glare. “It’s your script, Pete. You guys jammed it into my hands, and that whole damned planet wanted—demanded!—that I follow it.

“Only I’m not going to do it, because the messiah plan is a red herring, isn’t it? You were never afraid I’d try it if I came back. You were counting on it.”

“The religion…” Peter’s lips thinned. “That was Evie’s department.”

“But it had a purpose, didn’t it? Over and above keeping people in line, I mean. The prophecy’s a honey trap for would-be conquerors. I hear it’s worked pretty well. And me, well”—Toby spread his arms—“of course I’d run back to wake Mom if I returned. The second I tried, all the people whose loyalty to you might be shaky, and everybody who’d been plotting behind your back, they’d all jump on my side. They’d all be exposed. We’d troop on over to Destrier, and then you’d crush us all there.

“Pete, that’s just so … so Consensus.” Toby shook his head in disgust. “And vicious. And what I could never figure out was, why in hell would you be so vicious to me? How could I ever have threatened this grand empire you’ve built? If I came back, don’t you think I’d want to celebrate it with you?”

Peter’s eyes shifted, ever so slightly, but he wasn’t meeting Toby’s gaze anymore.

“Even if you thought I’d disapprove, what would it matter? My disapproval wasn’t going to topple your empire. It was a puzzle with no answer. Peter, you tried to have me killed.”

“Shut down,” Peter McGonigal said to their mother’s cicada bed. Its lights stayed green.

“You can still shoot me, by the way.” Toby waved at the gun in Peter’s hand. “At least now I know why. Cicada Corp’s systems recognize four shareholders, right? You, me, Evie, and Mom. We don’t own the same number of shares, though. You and Evie each have one. Mom has two—and so do I.”

“I couldn’t believe it when she told me,” said Peter. “She’d given you two—you! You’d been gone for years. And she kept two for herself, just to keep Evie and me in line.”

“Yeah, and when that got too inconvenient for you, you guys trapped her in here and voted her to sleep. Permanently. Except you didn’t kill her.”

“No.” Peter reared back, outraged at the idea. “We wouldn’t—”

“But you’d kill me.”

“That’s—”

“Different? Why?”

That one question hung in the air, while silence stretched between them. Finally, and to Toby’s surprise, Peter jammed the pistol into his belt and crossed his arms. “You really don’t know?” he asked skeptically.

Slowly, Toby shook his head. They remained that way, in a standoff, for a long minute. Finally, Toby said, “It had to be something that happened before I left. I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think it was anything I did on Sedna. So earlier …

“Guess what,” he said suddenly. “I’ve got backups of Consensus in my glasses. I was going through them the other day, and I found something. You might want to see it. You’ve got implants, I assume?” Guardedly, Peter nodded. “Then let me share it with you.” Slowly, in case Peter went for his gun again, Toby reached up to tap his glasses awake. He uttered several quiet commands, and a virtual environment blossomed around himself and his brother.

Peter gasped, then stared. “That?”

“The very first thing I did in Consensus,” said Toby. “I showed it to you that first time we went in together. Our house.”

It was the house Toby had grown up in, where Maria Teresa had died trying to protect Peter; the place they had never returned to as a family after the kidnapping. Toby had built this virtual copy as a healing exercise for himself, but he’d shown it to Peter and issued a challenge: Figure out a way to prevent what happened here from ever happening again. Build a better world.

Peter reached out, very slowly, and took the handles of the model to rotate it. He zoomed them in and suddenly he and Toby were inside, hovering above the landing where Maria Teresa had died. Peter stared at the tiled floor for a while. Then he said, almost inaudibly, “I could hear them talking.”

Toby waited. Haltingly, his brother said, “There was this spot near the back of the room where the kidnappers were keeping me. There was an air vent in the floor, and if I put my ear to it, sometimes I could hear them. It was too faint for me to make out what they were saying, but I knew the voices.”

Now he looked up at Toby. “One day, after I’d been there for, oh it must have been a couple of weeks, I put my ear down there and heard them talking to somebody else who was there. I could feel the footsteps through the floor, and I heard his voice.

“It was Father.”

Toby blinked, and suddenly his thoughts were sliding all over, trying to catch each other. “What?”

“Our. Father.” Peter had come around the cicada bed and was closing in on Toby, his eyes wide. “Our father was there. He was part of it. It might even have been him who let them in—him who killed Maria Teresa—”

The words came out in a rush now. “Why would they need to kill her? They could have tied her up, they were wearing masks so she wouldn’t have seen their faces and I didn’t see them kill her, I didn’t even know about it until after. But if she’d caught him helping, if he’d been seen, then he couldn’t let her live, could he? It would have ruined everything.”

Toby was too horrified to speak. He wiped away the virtual model of the house, and so it was just him and his brother, eye to eye in the cold machine space of the chamber. “But … why…?”

“Why?” Peter’s brows crunched into a sarcastic expression; he’d made that as a boy, but it had never drawn so many wrinkles with it in the old days. “Why? Sedna.

“The kidnapping is what convinced Mom to leave Earth. Same with nearly everybody else who came. The whole incident galvanized an entire movement, remember? Maybe you don’t. Money came in from everywhere to pay my ransom, and afterward, it hung around, because suddenly Dad had a plan. He went back to all the people who’d helped and told them, ‘Look, there’s something better we can do with this money. We can’t trust Earth anymore, either the trillionaires or the poor. We’ve got to get out.’ My disappearance, my being tied up in that room, my seeing them killed in front of me and learning about Maria Teresa—all that was just part of the plan.”

He was trembling now and had shed all the years that separated them. He was just Peter now, just Toby’s little brother.

“And I knew it,” he said. “I knew it every step of the way—from when we left Earth to setting up the colony, to after you abandoned us to when he did, too—”

“I never abandoned you,” objected Toby.

“You two were close, you and Dad. After you disappeared, all I could think was, ‘He’s snuck back to Earth, to make way for Dad’s return. Where they’ll be trillionaires with the Sedna wealth…’ Because, well, you were always the one who measured up. I was damaged goods after the kidnapping, a bad reminder, and anyway, if I hadn’t been expendable to begin with he’d never have used me for it.”

“Wait, what are you trying to … you think I knew about this? You think Dad told me?”

Peter lowered his head, looking up past his brows at Toby. “You’re saying he didn’t?”

“I…” There’d been that conversation on the rooftop … Peter was beginning to smile; he was taking Toby’s hesitation as a yes, so Toby said, “There was something!” He recounted that conversation and their father’s words to him. I’m going to do something to help change things, and it could get rough for us for a while. You may not understand everything that’s happening.

“That’s it,” he finished.

“That’s it?” Peter was glaring at him. Toby stared him down.

“The only reasons you think I knew is that I disappeared, and because…” He wanted to deny Peter’s other assertion, but he couldn’t. “Maybe he did favor me. I was the eldest. But that didn’t mean he confided in me. Do you really think I would have kept it together if he’d told me? Maybe I was the oldest, but he didn’t spend any more time with me than he did with you and Evie. Meaning, almost none. You were the ones I knew. He was my dad, he was important, but my life revolved around you guys!

“Look, Pete, you’ve got the tug I left Sedna in. Your forensics people have to have gone over it. You know it really was adrift for fourteen thousand years. You know what happened to knock it out of commission. You may have spent the past forty years thinking I abandoned you, but you know now that I didn’t. It was an accident. I got lost. And now I’m home.

“And I knew nothing about … what you just told me.”

It was unbelievable, horrible, couldn’t be true—but even as Toby was thinking these things, his imagination was fitting it all together. His awakening on Lowdown, the order from the Chairman, and all his discoveries about the locksteps and the Toby cult and the Guides. They all spun in his mind, a whirlpool with its center at that single moment in the past, when Peter crouched on the floor of his cell listening at a grate.

“This … all of this … you’ve been running ever since.” And not just Peter, but Carter McGonigal, too—fleeing from his crime on Earth and pulling his family and friends with him. Had Mom known, or suspected? She, too, jumping forward through time, each leap farther than the last. Telling everyone all the while that she was hunting for that moment when her lost Toby would return to her, when really she was trying to get away from something else, some knowledge she couldn’t unlearn.

“Evayne … does she…?”

Peter nodded. “I told her, oh, thirty years ago I guess. Long after you’d left. She never really came to terms with it, I think.”

Toby hung his head. Everything had changed, and he wasn’t ever going to get back what he’d just lost.

“Sorry, Toby,” said Peter. “It’s funny—you know there was a day, long time ago now, when I suddenly realized you weren’t my older brother anymore. That I was the older one. I’m older than Dad now, did you know that? Older than Mom, too. The family’s on my shoulders now. I’m not yours to command.”

It came to Toby then that Peter really had intended to kill him on Lowdown, and just now when he’d brought out that vicious looking little pistol, Toby had been within seconds of dying. A wash of adrenaline hit him, and he hid his suddenly shaking hands behind his back.

He tried to pull himself together. For a moment he’d forgotten why he’d come here; he was adrift and at the mercy of the Chairman. Then his gaze caught the green telltales of their mother’s cicada bed, and he clutched at the purpose and idea that had brought him here.

He looked up at Peter again, all his cockiness gone. “I get it. And you’re right. By the time I got to Wallop I thought I knew what was going on. I was the big brother, come back to set you guys right.” He laughed humorlessly at himself. “Yeah, that was totally wrong, wasn’t it?”

Peter nodded. “You see, things have changed. You’ll understand why later, but right now, Toby, you have to shut Mom’s bed down again. Put her back to sleep.”

Toby sucked in a deep breath, looked him in the eye, and said, “No.”

Peter blinked and started to speak, but Toby said, “This part of it I understand perfectly. You and Evie have locked yourselves and the locksteps into a pattern you can’t get out of. You’re riding a whirlwind that’s roaring into the future, and you think you have to steer it. You think you can play Consensus with seventy thousand worlds—actually, you think you have to. Evie’s terrified that it’ll all fall apart if you don’t keep your hands on the wheel. So are you, right?”

Peter shook his head. “You don’t understand—the politics, the—”

“Oh, I do understand. You’ve run off a cliff and as long as your legs keep pedaling, you’re going to stay up. The instant you stop, you fall. But it’s not the lockstep that’ll collapse, is it? You’ve just told me … about Dad,” Toby coughed and had to stop for a second. “You have to keep running or that is going to catch up to you. But you don’t need to keep pulling the lockstep along with you.”

“You don’t get it, we built it like a machine, Evie and me. The Toby cult, the whole Emperor of Time crap, the Guides, the messaging to the fast worlds, how we handle immigration … It’s a system, Toby. You can’t break it. You can’t return, or the whole thing falls apart. Mom can’t wake up, or the same thing happens—”

“Isn’t it really that you’re afraid we’d outvote you? ’Cause, you know, we will.”

Peter fell silent. Toby floated over to rest his hand on the warming cicada bed. “We’re back to arguing over how many possibilities there are. You’re saying there’re only two: the status quo you and Evie spent so many years building, or a catastrophic collapse. But you know that’s not true.”

The Chairman of Cicada Corp watched Toby warily, saying nothing.

“Mom’ll be awake in a few hours,” said Toby. “Then we’re going to wait for Evie to arrive. And then … the shareholders of Cicada Corp are going to hold a vote.”

He raised his hand. “All in favor of issuing one share per cicada bed user, say aye. All opposed…”

Peter still said nothing. Toby shrugged. “There’re four of us, and six shares. One vote per share. Mom built the system, she knows how to make the necessary changes. Was this what she was proposing when you guys tricked her into this last sleep? Don’t answer that, I don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter anyway. The fact is, you and Evie have a chance to redeem yourselves now. We can make the vote unanimous.”

“One vote per bed…” Peter was practically strangling on the words. “That’d be democracy!”

“Yeah. Worst system of government except for all the others, right? But it’s not like the people of 360 don’t know how to handle it. They’re mostly free anyway. I mean I saw how the government on Thisbe handles things. Peter, they have built the world you and I tried to build with Consensus. You can fool yourself into thinking you’ve been the guiding hand, but really, it was them, them all along.” He thought of Corva’s fierce passion, and even her brother’s determination to right the wrongs of the world. They weren’t passive subjects of Peter McGonigal. They didn’t need him.

“The only thing standing in their way now is Cicada Corp and our stranglehold on the lockstep frequencies. We are going to give it up—you, me, Mom, and Evie. Take our hands off the wheel and watch the ship steer itself.”

Bravado and determination had kept Toby going this far; he’d said his piece, done what he came to do. Now that he had, he found he was trembling, practically fainting. It was all catching up to him.

His voice cracking with exhaustion and sorrow, he held out his hand to his brother and said, “Peter, I just don’t want to run anymore.

“And I don’t think you do, either.”