Lockstep

Twenty-one

“HEY, TOBY, OVER HERE!”

He looked up from the shard of blue pottery he’d dug out of the dirt. Sol was standing framed by two pillars that once might have been straight but had been sculpted by the wind for aeons, until now they looked like twisted tree trunks.

Miranda’s head popped up from below Sol’s feet. “You really should see this,” she shouted. “I think it’s an intact chamber!”

Toby dropped the potsherd and picked his way through a landscape of tumbled stone blocks and irregular red earth. He had to climb around a fissure that separated him from his two friends, and he momentarily stood higher than Sol’s head. From here he could see down the long slope behind the twin pillars, to where irregularly joined pools of water sketched the direction of an ancient canal. Hazy distance veiled the rise of other plateaus—green on their lower slopes, Martian red on the summits where ruin after ruin teased at the sky. Noctis Labyrinthus, this region was called—the Maze of Night—and it was one of the most ancient settled parts of Mars. Barsoom, as it was called now.

Miranda stood up, dusting herself off. If Toby had taken off his glasses, he’d have seen her as she really was: a gangly tour guide robot like the one pretending to be Sol. Through his interface, he could pretend they were real people. He’d given these bodies the personalities of his game characters but let this one retain the tour bot’s database of historical data. So it wasn’t surprising when Miranda said, “Six different cultures built here. This whole hill is a rubble pile, who knows what’s at the bottom?”

She knelt again. “I think we might be able to squeeze in there. There’s a tiled floor, it might date from the second Thark Flowering.”

Toby wasn’t listening. His fingers had strayed out to stroke the side of one of the pillars. It was so old it had lost all sign of being artificial. It reminded him of Stonehenge—and then, uncomfortably, of the grand avenue on Destrier. He snatched back his hand.

“It’s going to take awhile,” he said with a sad smile, “to catch up.”

If Miranda and Sol had been human, they might have caught his irony and laughed, or expressed some sympathy. As it was they just smiled and nodded.

Toby knelt to look through the gap Miranda had found. It was dark in there. He doubted he could have fit through, but it would have been easy for Orpheus.

He stood up again, gazing out at the dying canals.

At least this landscape didn’t change in an eyeblink, like Earth’s did. Toby had been on Barsoom for six months now; for three before that, he’d lived in a lockstep fortress in the Amazonian uplands of what had once been Brazil. He’d wanted to be around green and real sunlight, but every thirty days, the landscape hiccuped and changed completely. New trees, a new tributary to the river below the fortress, or a new town full of people who barely remembered those whom he’d gotten to know over the past weeks. He’d hated it there, and Mom convinced him to come back to Mars.

Barsoom was practically homey compared to the rest of the solar system. Mercury didn’t even exist anymore; it had been eaten and its constituent matter spread out to form a vast Dyson cloud that gathered sunlight to power starship launchers and other less comprehensible machines for the posthumans who’d taken over much of the place. Venus was fully terraformed now, a world of shallow oceans that forbade any locksteps from settling there. Space itself was crowded with artificial worlds, some inhabited, many ruined and silent.

Considering the godlike powers possessed by the posthumans, Toby had been a bit surprised that humans—or conventional life-forms of any kind—still existed. When he’d expressed this to Peter, his brother had just laughed. “Technology can speed up evolution, but it can’t do anything to give it a direction. What these AIs and robot cultures keep forgetting is that purpose comes from vulnerability. Give people the power of the gods, and they’ll eventually run down like wind-up toys for lack of reasons to go on. It’s happened around here so many times that the posthumans finally figured out that they need us. We’re kind of the bottom-feeders of their ecosystem—a necessary evil. Humans are optimized to care about things, and the posthumans feed off our passions. Without us, they just speed-evolve into useless lumps. The solar system’s crowded with those.

“It’s not a flattering role to have in the grand scheme of things,” he’d added with a shrug, “but it’s a living.”

Peter could always make Toby smile. He’d developed a hard crust of cynicism, decades of learning and incident having weathered his heart like the wind had done to these pillars; yet he was still Peter. It was as if the brother Toby had known was a bright light that still managed to shine through all the brambles and encrustations time had wrapped around it. Even the revelation about Dad.

It was shocking how little Peter remembered of his childhood with Toby and Evayne—even though that time had made him who he was. When the melancholy of time began to coil around Toby’s soul, he only had to spend ten minutes with Peter for it to entirely lift.

It was a good thing Toby had discovered his brother in the Chairman, because unexpectedly, he’d lost his own childhood when Peter told him about their father’s part in the kidnapping. He still didn’t believe it—not all the time, anyway. He would struggle with that, he knew, for years.

He knelt again next to the little cave entrance and was seriously considering squirming in there when a message tone pinged in his ear. “Toby,” he answered curtly.

“Where’d you go?” It was Mom—Cassandra, as she liked to be called now. “I looked all over the grounds!”

“Sorry, I was … restless. I’m just doing a little exploring.”

“Hmmph.” He could hear the distaste in her voice. Cassandra couldn’t understand Toby’s interest in the ocean of time that separated them from their previous lives. Maybe it was because she’d had practice skipping forward before Peter and Evayne had locked her away. She had deliberately turned her back on everything she’d lost. “Well, the last of the delegates is here. There’re some from that world where you argued with Evayne. Thought you might want to know.”

“Ah! Thanks. I’ll be right there.”

He didn’t dare hope. Thisbe had been one of the last holdouts in Peter’s drive to create a lockstep parliament. The cult of Toby was raging there—in various flavors, he’d heard, who fought one another in the streets over minor points of doctrine. Halen Keishion was a major leader in one of those factions, and the rumor was he was trying to set up his own lockstep. Toby had sent Jaysir back to try to locate Corva, but try as the makers might, they’d so far been unable to uncover any information about her whereabouts.

The cults were entirely focused on Destrier. Cassandra and Toby had found it surprisingly easy to adopt new identities on Barsoom, with easy access to Peter. He supposed it was inconceivable to the cultists that Cassandra might not have been in her imitation Taj Mahal on Destrier all these millennia—and therefore inconceivable that she might have been quietly awakened somewhere else, to exit the historical stage into an ordinary life.

One result was that there were few security milbots monitoring his progress through the ruins. Toby had felt free to come here almost unaccompanied. He bounded back to the Martian aircar, ducking under its cartoonishly big lift fans, forgetting Miranda and Sol. They quietly dissolved back into tourist bots as the aircar whined into life.

“Oh, and your sister’s here, too,” added Cassandra as two military bots ducked under the closing clamshell doors of the aircar to sit behind Toby. He didn’t miss the chilly sound in his mother’s voice; she and Evayne were still not talking.

“Thanks.” His mother rang off, and Toby pensively watched the ruined palaces of Noctis dwindle below him. He tilted the aircar east, toward Valles Marineris and the triple cities of Ius, Calydon, and Louros. Home was Peter’s sumptuous palace on the north slope of Ius Chasma, but it was in Calydon Fossae that all the action was happening.

As he approached the vast canyon complex, he could see aircraft buzzing over the city like a cloud of midges. Delegates were arriving literally by the boatload, from the farthest reaches of the lockstep. They were here to hammer out a lockstep-wide scheduling policy now that Peter and Evayne had made their one-bed, one-share public ownership offer in the lockstep monopoly. Calydon’s minareted streets were crowded with democrats, autocrats and cybercrats, monarchists, panarchists, and demarchists. All were bravely stepping into realtime to debate and deliberate for as long as it took to come up with the new lockstep government. It might take months, or years—but in lockstep time, it would all be over by next turn.

The chaos made it easy for Toby and his mother to come and go. Peter’s palace was overrun with middle-aged women and young men anyway, and everybody was distracted by the new governmental proposal. Toby was posing as Dickson Mu, a delegate from Eris. Cassandra wasn’t acting at all like the Holy Mother was supposed to, so nobody suspected her.

Still … He tapped his glasses and said, “Call Evayne.” The little dancing icon signified that she was being hailed—and this went on for a long time—and then a window opened in his interface, and she was there.

“How are you?” she said in a clipped and guarded tone.

“Always talking on the phone, but never getting together,” he said. “When are we going to have dinner?”

“Very funny,” she said flatly. “You know how delicate things are.”

“Actually, Evie, I don’t. You had some chores you were going to do. Did you get to them?”

“Where do you think I’ve been the past forty-five years?”

“Oh!” He’d last spoken to her two months ago, lockstep time. “You’re not serious. You haven’t been—” He peered at her in the little window. She didn’t seem older.

Evayne grimaced. “Six years, Toby. For me, it’s been six years since the last time I spoke to you. Seven since we woke Mom.”

He sucked in his breath. “Does she know?” Evayne shook her head. “Tell her! Evie, she’s not going to punish you forever! Six years!” His heart sank at the thought. This wasn’t at all like the evidence of time he’d seen in the ruins just now. There were different kinds of time, and that which separated you from your loved ones was the slowest. “Where were you?” he ventured.

“Tau Ceti. Sirius. Points in between. Peter can tell you—he provided the ship. We were doing almost fifty percent light speed back and forth—a new record, I think.”

“And…?”

“Our clients and partners are winding down the Toby myth. The Emperor of Time is no more. It’s already been a couple of generations, realtime, since I left Sirius. Any new immigrants into 360 are going to be several generations out of our official endorsement of the myth. Pilgrimages to Destrier are going to dry up soon, and since the keepers of Mom’s tomb live in realtime anyway, they’ll probably have turned it into a tourist trap and theme park by now. Except for the holdouts actually in the lockstep, you’re safe now.”

He snorted. “There’re billions of those. But thank you. Thank you so much, Evayne. I really was serious about dinner.”

She just stared at him. Under the weight of that gaze, Toby suddenly felt acutely self-conscious. His last words echoed in his ears and those platitudes sounded so glib that he instantly regretted them. In that second he went from not knowing that he was feeling any emotion at all to realizing he was being flooded with grief and longing. “I mean”—to his astonishment his voice cracked—“I never meant to leave you. I’m sorry I left, and I want to see you. To catch up … on all those lost years.” Tears were blurring the inside of his glasses.

When he blinked himself into seeing again, he realized that Evie was wiping her eyes, too. Time was when she’d come to him, when she’d bawled in his arms, a tangle of limbs and hair butting his chin. It was so recent, those moments almost seeming more real than this one and that little girl more real than his hard-bitten older woman—who had already regained her own composure and said, “I know, Toby. Yes, I’d like to have dinner with you. We’ll talk soon.”

She cut the connection, but her words rang in his head, echoes of unstated regret distracting him enough that the aircar took over the flying. He didn’t come to himself again until he felt it touching down and realized they’d arrived in a courtyard in central Calydon.

He queried the location of the Thisbe delegation and was told they were settling in to a redbrick hotel a couple of kilometers down the avenue. Too close to fly to, too far for a quick walk, which meant he would have to take a leisurely one instead. That was okay, because it gave him a chance to explore the crowds and architecture of the city as he strolled. There were hints of Consensus style to it all, but Barsoom had its own history and layers of culture. It was unbelievably rich, as was the diversity on the street. Toby found himself spinning around now and then to stare at a person—or thing—that had just passed by him while he’d been ogling something else. Great fun.

As his footsteps approached the Thisbeans’ hotel, though, they slowed even further. Eventually he came to a stop just outside its main entrance.

He’d tried looking up the names of the delegation, but they weren’t listed yet. And anyway, here he was.

He took a deep breath, stepped forward—

“Sir!”

All the air shot out of him. Toby turned. “What?”

Four of the Lockstep palace guard were standing there, accompanied by a small army of bots. The woman at the head of this squad saluted and said, “The Chairman requests your presence.”

“The Chairman? He can—” Toby stopped himself. These people had no idea who he was, and nobody defied the Chairman. It might be fun to try, but the momentary courage that had led him to take that step into the entrance of the hotel was gone now anyway. He shrugged.

“Sure, whatever. Where are we going?”

To the other side of town, it turned out. Here was the palace proper—the Palace, with a capital P and emphasis and fanfares. The place was designed to impress by people who’d studied thousands of years’ worth of such architecture. Toby suspected a few posthuman minds had added their insights into human herd behavior; even just stepping out of an aircar onto one of the upper residence levels, he felt himself shrink a bit with awe. It wasn’t just the scale, the majestic sweep of the colonnades, or the beauty of the frescoes. The way all the lines of wall and pillar wove together, the whole building seemed poised to pounce on him.

Yet all he had to do was glance over and notice that one of the fabulous pieces of wall art depicted the Emperor of Time embarking on his mystical journey into the future … and he just had to laugh. He thanked his escort and hurried on to meet his brother.

“Sorry to tear you away from your ruins, but Evie’s hardly been home a day and the delegates already want a speech from her. It’s a good thing she’s rested.”

Peter stood with his arms crossed in the center of a domed chamber that rivaled the nave of any cathedral from ancient Earth. He was surrounded by the latest in virtualizing technology, so that as Toby came beside him, the walls appeared to fly away and the ceiling lifted off, and they seemed to be standing out in the open. There was even a breeze sliding slowly along the tiers of the city’s biggest and oldest amphitheater. He and Peter stood at one end of it, on stage with one other person. It was Evayne.

“They’ve come to see both of us,” said Peter. He was in full dress uniform. “Don’t worry about them seeing or overhearing us,” he added. “My stage projection’s a puppet; I could moon the crowd and the projectors would compensate and make it look like I’d bowed.”

“And I’m invisible and inaudible,” said Toby.

“Yes—but you’re here. Evayne asked me to call you in. She insisted, actually.”

Invisible and inaudible—but not to Evayne and Peter. Toby thought he could accept that.

“Of course Mom wouldn’t come.”

“Of course not,” agreed Peter breezily. “Oh, here we go. She’s about to start.”

Evayne’s dais stood just off center in the giant oval of the outside theater. She walked alone to her spot, dressed in a fabulous gown of ivory white with gold hems. Her hair was drawn up and tangled with diamonds. As she walked, the most glorious fanfare Toby had ever heard rose in swells. It clutched at his heart though he didn’t even recognize the instruments, let alone the style: the music, like so much else here, echoed out of the well of unguessable time that, somehow, his brother and sister had mastered.

There were tears in his eyes when the music ended. By that time, Evayne stood in her place, gazing up at the multitude that thronged the ancient amphitheater’s seats.

She began:

“How could we have known, my family and I, when we began this, that time in a lockstep runs backward? To us founders, and to the smallest and original parts of the empire, our colony between the stars is only forty years old. As far as the youngest and largest parts of the lockstep are concerned, it is so old as to be one with the foundations of the universe. Immovable. Eternal.

“I remember the day Peter and I realized what was happening. Overnight, sixteen minor worlds, little orbs no bigger than Sedna, had been colonized by settlers from Alpha Centauri. All declared their intention to join the lockstep. They were excited to do so. They’d been hearing stories about us for generations! Together, their population exceeded that of all the worlds we already had. Peter and I panicked.”

“Ha,” said Peter. “Look at that little smile she’s giving there. She’s reassuring them that she’s joking. But it’s true. We freaked.”

“This,” she continued, “is why the Guides were created. They were to test immigrants, both individual people and entire worlds, to see if they would enrich the lockstep or might tear it apart. In retrospect, this was a good idea. Over the years we’ve excluded whole populations that would have obliterated our culture, enslaved or killed many of our people, or subjected us all to one of several dead-ending posthuman ‘uplifts.’”

“Of course, she’s not saying the obvious here,” Peter pointed out.

The obvious was that the official state religion, Toby’s cult, had also been engineered to stabilize incoming culture around conservative ideas. “Is she going to say it?” Toby asked.

Peter shook his head. “Maybe someday, but it’s too touchy right now. Our own fault, of course.”

“While centuries passed on the fast worlds, years went by for us,” Evayne was saying. “Only years. How could we have imagined that there was such a thing as a ‘lockstep civilization’? We’d been administering our little worlds for so short a time! This…” She paused and looked down, letting her shoulders drop. “This is where my brother Peter and I failed.”

The amphitheater reverberated with sound—a roar of voices so broad that some might be cheering, some angry, it was impossible to tell. Peter laughed.

He was so casual, so comfortable with this, that Toby had a flash of déjà vu. This moment was so similar to many others he’d had with Peter in Consensus, when they’d built virtual worlds together, ruled them, and sometimes lost them to this or that angry mob. Paralyzed by the strength of the memory, he just smiled.

“To us, the lockstep was a tiny economic experiment we were making up as we went along! Our actions couldn’t be so consequential that they would ring down the centuries. What we were building couldn’t have a life of its own. It was just us back then, and we steered the ship because without us, it would have been rudderless. We failed to understand how time passes in a lockstep, and so we didn’t notice when the ship became capable of steering itself.

“You no longer need us!” She raised her arms, appealing to the crowd, and again the sound swelled around her. When it died, she continued: “In the forty years of time that have passed in the lockstep, populations have moved in, but they’ve also moved out. Emigrants have taken our practices to other worlds and other locksteps, and honed and refined them over countless centuries. Our culture has touched those of other worlds again and again, like a hammer tapping a bell. Every thirty years another note, a reminder of who we are and how we live, resounding through the fast worlds. How could we have guessed that the echoes from the previous note would still be sounding when the next was rung? How could we know that its peal would grow and grow, amplified by time, until today the Guides have nothing to do—whole worlds of millions of people petition to join the lockstep, and they know more about how to live in 360 than we do!”

Again Peter laughed. “It’s true. Kenani and the others were having a bit of a problem deciding how to tell us. But for a couple of years now, they haven’t had much to do.”

“The Guides, and our family’s monopoly on the cicada beds, were necessary to stabilize our lockstep’s culture and identity through its middle years,” said Evayne. “But they’re not necessary anymore. That is why you are here today. We began the lockstep and we have lived in it from the beginning, but you have lived with it longer! It’s time you took the reins to lead us into the next era of lockstep time: the era of our full maturity as a civilization.”

There was more—much more—but Evie was just embellishing and amplifying her themes. Toby and Peter watched, and listened to the changing murmur and roar of the crowd, and eventually, to thunderous applause, Evie finished and stalked majestically from the stage.

“She’s gonna want a drink after that,” said Peter.

Toby hardly knew what to say. “She … she really came around.”

Peter shrugged. “She’s had six years to accept the idea—and to preach the new way on the fast worlds.” He tilted his head and tapped his nose mischievously. “Lockstep time, Toby. Get used to it.”

He shook his head. “I’m … not sure I can.”

Peter looked serious now. “I’ve been wondering about that. Actually, we all have. You scared Evie, dragging her so close to realtime on Thisbe. Didn’t seem to scare you, though. And my people tell me you’ve developed a fascination with the fast worlds.”

“Why wouldn’t I? There’s just so much out there!” Toby barked a laugh. “I mean, fourteen thousand years! Come on! I keep hearing about these amazing places, these incredible stories and histories. I want to see them all.”

“Why don’t you, then? Surely it’s not us that’s keeping you here?” Peter had crossed his arms again and now looked down his nose at Toby, becoming in that instant the elder friend rather than the little brother who’d shared Evie’s speech.

Toby turned away. “I would,” he admitted. “But you said it yourself: Lockstep time is tricky. If I step out of it for just a second…”

“Everyone leaves you behind?” Peter shrugged. “You’re right, you can’t step in or out of lockstep time without damage. Still, if you want to see the universe … you can return. Just be willing to pay the price.

“Hell, maybe you should go. You could come back when you’re older than me again and kick my ass!” He laughed richly and turned to go.

“I’ve got work,” he said as he crossed the marble floor, but then he seemed to remember something and looked back. “Oh, by the way. Package for you. It’s in my study.”

With that he disappeared into a cloud of bots and human advisers who had converged on him from various directions. In a babel of conversation, he left the airy chamber.

Toby stared after him, mind blank; then he shook his head and put his glasses on. He needed the online maps to find his way around here.

Peter’s study was two levels down and half a kilometer away, through a maze of corridors and chambers. There were guards and attendants everywhere, but they all smiled and waved Toby through. More than a few of them must have guessed who he was, but apparently Peter didn’t employ fanatics. (Or maybe they just stopped being fanatics after knowing a real-life McGonigal for a while.)

He was distractedly focused on the map when he came around the last corner, and he’d passed so many people that at first he took no notice of two more. They were leaning on the gold wall next to the door to Peter’s study, and it was finally their casual (and utterly out of place) stances that made Toby look up.

“Shy! Jay!”

Jaysir laughed. “You’d have walked right by us. What’re yer watchin’, Toby?”

“Just lost. But I guess this is the right place.” He didn’t know whether to shake hands or what, but Sheilif stepped into his hesitation and hugged him. Jay, as usual, just stood back grinning.

“When did you get in?”

“We hitched a ride with the Thisbe delegation,” said Jay. No, no, we didn’t stow away! They gave us a cabin. Even a bed for Shadoweye.”

Toby nodded but impatiently went on. “Did you find her? Is she here?”

Jaysir and Sheilif exchanged a glance. “We didn’t exactly … find her,” said Jay. “It’s complicated. Why don’t you take a look?” He nodded at Peter’s study. Uncertain, Toby frowned at them and opened the door.

Like the room where he’d watched Evie’s speech, the study was round, but much homier. It was lined in imported wood and paneled with bookcases. The carpet was deep green, featuring a compass rose in gold; north pointed to a single vast desk with an incongruous twentieth-century banker’s lamp and blotter on it. Toby hadn’t been here before, so it took him a moment to absorb the details—red leather armchairs, liquor cabinet—and then actually see what couldn’t be a normal fixture of the place.

A small cicada bed, the kind used for babies or pets, stood next to a large Martian globe. A small shape was curled up inside it.

Toby took a hesitant step, then another, then one of those Martian bounds that could cover three meters. He flung open the bed’s canopy and gathered Orpheus into his arms. Jay and Shy had followed him into the room, but Toby had all but forgotten them now.

“You—you’re…” The denner was asleep, or unconscious, and his fur felt very, very cold. Toby fell into one of the armchairs, wrapping himself around his friend and trying to will his own body heat into him.

Thrum, thrum … There was the familiar vibration, coming from deep inside his own body. He hadn’t felt it in a long time; he’d been using McGonigal beds to winter over since leaving Thisbe. He felt the strength of that signal building, though, like a call to Orpheus. I am here, I am here, it said.

Faintly, he felt an answering tremor through his fingers.

“He wouldn’t wake up,” someone said.

Toby closed his eyes. That hadn’t been Shylif or Jay.

“We tried, but he wouldn’t answer our call. Even after we healed his wounds, he dove deep, to places we couldn’t follow. Down a well of sleep…”

Through tears, he looked up at Corva. She stood in small doorway opposite the one he’d come in. Wrecks sat at her feet, his tail curled around his paws. “You disappeared,” she went on. “I didn’t know if your sister had killed you, or if you were on your way to Destrier like Halen said…”

Toby stood, shooting an accusing glance at Jaysir. “You said you didn’t find her!”

The maker shrugged. “We didn’t. She found us.” Both he and Shylif were grinning shamelessly.

Toby went to her. He couldn’t let go of Orpheus, whose purr was strengthening, but he lowered his face to Corva’s. They stayed close in that way for long moments, then kissed. “What happened?”

Her mouth formed a rueful line. “I was traded. Me, in return for Thisbe being allowed to send a delegation to this conference thing.” She wrapped her arms around him and put her head on his chest. He felt Wrecks doing a curling walk around his ankles.

“That’s just so Peter,” mused Toby; but he wasn’t going to complain this time.

They stood that way for so long that Shylif eventually coughed discreetly, and Jaysir said, “We’re … gonna be outside. If, you know, you need us.”

Toby was intently examining Corva’s face. Was she older? She seemed to guess what he was doing, because she said, “I’ve been back on lockstep time since you reset Thisbe’s frequency. What time you and I have lost … well, we’ve lost the same amount, unless you’ve been down to realtime again…?” He shook his head.

Orpheus purred in the warm space between her and Toby. She said, “What now? Are you the head the family? Are you really going to Destrier to wake your mother, like all the myths and stories say?”

He laughed. “She’s wide awake and eating cupcakes about three rooms over.” Corva blinked at him surprise. “Long story. But no, I’m not the head of the family. Never wanted to be. And I don’t want to the Emperor of Time, either.”

Corva gently disengaged herself. “But you are that,” she said.

He gave a short laugh. “Huh?” Corva Keishion was the last person he would have expected to say such a thing.

She smiled at his discomfort. “No, really. You were supposed to make time come to an end, right? Well, you did—the old kind of time where the past pushes us into the future and farther and farther away from perfection. But remember, there’s another kind of time, where the past doesn’t push; one where the future invites us onward. Where it’s not destiny that drives us but hope. Hope and surprise.”

She stepped forward again. “You,” she said teasingly, “were a surprise.”

He drew her over to one of the armchairs and they sat together; it was a tight fit. “If you say so,” he said. “I hope you’re not too serious about it. Poor Evie’s running around to all the fast worlds trying to squash the family myths. I wouldn’t want to add one more for her to chase down.”

It was on the fast worlds where the McGonigal stories had grown; it was ironic that it was in the lockstep that they would probably take the longest to die. They’d probably hang around for generations, long after the McGonigals were gone.

She saw his expression and said, “I really was just joking. Sorta. I don’t know.”

He nodded and sighed. “The only way I can live here is in disguise. Same with Mom. Neither of us is going to be able to have a normal life anywhere near Peter and Evayne. We can sneak around right now because of all the conference chaos, but that’ll end. Then the cultists will start watching again.”

“We can go away,” she suggested.

“We?” He looked at her closely. “Do you really mean that?”

She shrugged awkwardly, not meeting his eyes.

“But what about your family? You worked so hard to return to them—”

“—And I didn’t,” she said, looking down. “I never did. I knew it the instant I saw their faces that first day. When we got to my house. It was too late. I mean, they’re still my family and I love them all, and I love the Halen I grew up with … but the change between us … it’s, well, permanent. It doesn’t matter now if I go away for a while. Different is different.

“And that’s made me wonder now, is there anywhere I can be at home? Anywhere that time’s not come unslipped. Toby, I thought about it for a long time and I realized … I’d never find that kind of time in a place. The only way to live in time instead of moving through it is to be experience things with somebody else. To share the moments.”

Toby nodded. She’d named the restlessness he’d been feeling for months now—that disconnect from his family, however much he loved them; the sense of skimming over the surface of the worlds he visited, however much he explored them.

Squeezing Orpheus a little tighter to him, he said, “I know you were joking about the Lord of Time stuff—sorta kinda. That’s the thing, though; somehow, the whole weight of it’s rubbed off on me, just a little. Everywhere I go, just when I start to relax I’ll come across one of those statues, or a damned fresco of me, or somebody’ll say my name like it’s a prayer. I’m having a little trouble being me around here. I’ve been trying to escape it, but it’s like a steady pressure in my skull …

“The only way for me to come back to myself is going to be if I leave, at least for a while, for places where nobody’s ever heard of me. And there are such places. There’re other stars and things beyond. I’d like to see them …

“But I don’t want to do it alone.

“Corva, would you come with me to see the fast worlds, the Laser Wastes, the ancient suns and all those new Earths that they made while I wintered over?

“I promise we’ll only be gone for a night.”

“A night, or forever,” she said and kissed him. “Yes, I’ll come.”

Orpheus opened one eye to observe this, then shifted into a more comfortable position and went back to sleep.