Lockstep

Four

HANDS OR PAWS OR grippies had hold of him. They hauled him over a rough wall and Toby sprawled, retching, among nets and floats and dead fish.

Blurred silhouettes surrounded him—people and some smaller shapes with tall pointed ears that were aiming those ears at him like antennae. Past this jumble of motion and noisy voices, he could see a dimly lit night sky that seemed to be paved with icebergs.

He took a couple of whooping breaths and knew he wasn’t going to drown, but he was shuddering from the cold. Then, suddenly, like a switch being thrown, the cold vanished. In its place, he felt a pleasant warmth spreading out from the core of his body.

“Aw, crap,” somebody said. “His implants have kicked in. They’re putting him into stasis.”

Speckles and lozenges of light were floating in his vision now, and he was finding it hard to chase his last thought. Despite himself, he found himself nodding, his eyes drifting closed.

A deep vibration had joined the warmth; it seemed to be coming from all around him. The sound was like the purr of a cat, only deeper and more powerful. He lay in its grip for what seemed like forever and then heard an answering vibration—a second purr. Only this one was coming from inside him.

Cold rushed back into him, and suddenly he was lying on the deck of a boat, shuddering again and coughing. “Nice work, um, we really should name you,” somebody said.

As his eyes refocused, Toby followed the sound of the voice and discovered that he was sitting across from the black-haired girl whom he’d seen once in Ammond’s courtyard and once outside his cicada bed. She was seated, feet planted wide apart, on a crate under the ship’s wheel, her face lit by the green starboard light. Even if he hadn’t recognized her face, she wore the same long-tailed coat he’d seen her in the first time. This time he noticed a distinctive locket that glimmered at her throat: a miniature tree inside an oval shape. She reached up absently to touch it with one hand as she rubbed the water off the catlike creature’s back.

“Somebody bring him a blanket,” she added, as if Toby’s chattering and shivering were an afterthought.

He was handed a coarse gray square of cloth that he wrapped around himself. Only then did he realize that there were three other people on the boat besides himself. The vessel itself was small; if you lay down you could practically stretch across its width, and a few paces would take you stem to stern. It was crowded.

A man with skin black as the Sedna sky knelt in front of Toby. “You okay?” His accent was thick but musical and pleasant. Toby couldn’t place it.

“Y-yeah. Thanks for—” Well, he wasn’t sure what for. He gestured weakly at the water. “Well, you know.”

The man laughed. “Sure.” He stuck out a beefy hand. “I’m Shylif.” He wore a long capelike hooded coat, similar to the girl’s, with more layers of black clothing half visible beneath it. “That’s Corva.” He indicated the girl, who was now working at something with her back to them. “And this is Jaysir.” Over at the other rail, a thin-faced young man with uneven stubble on his chin grunted and let go his death grip on the gunwale just long enough to wave. He was swaddled in some sort of bright yellow survival suit and seemed to be trying to fight every pitch and roll of the boat, his body rigid with the effort.

“Toby.”

Shylif laughed again. “You really are, are you? Well, it doesn’t matter right now. You’re going to go back into hibernation if we don’t get you properly warmed up.” He stood up and looked ahead but didn’t put his hand on the wheel. The boat seemed to be steering itself.

“They’ve spotted us.” It was the girl—Corva—who was also standing now, looking back the way they’d come. Toby heard faint sirens coming from the receding glitter of city lights.

“Uh, guys? Less talk, more motion,” Jaysir said through gritted teeth. “They’re gonna be on us any second now. Sheez, you just had to poke the hypermafia in the eye, didn’t you?”

The boat, at least, seemed to be paying attention, as it suddenly accelerated through the choppy waves.

Toby looked at the three of them; they made an unlikely rescue squad. “What were you doing out here anyway?”

Jaysir barked an angry laugh. “Talk to Shylif, it was his idea. ‘Outflank them’ or something, right, Shy?” He shook his head mockingly.

The creature that had tapped on his window appeared at Toby’s feet. “And then this one…” Jaysir rolled his eyes. “Dove out of the boat and we spent ten minutes looking for him. Then what happens? He surfaces with you in tow!”

Little amber eyes met Toby’s. He reached out cautiously, and when it let him, he smoothed his hand between its ears. “Thanks … What’s his name?”

“Doesn’t have one,” said Jaysir. “Not yet.”

There were two more of the creatures in the boat. They wouldn’t have taken up much room except that they kept squirming around each other and the humans, running from side to side and looking all around with excited curiosity. “These guys, though,” added Jaysir. “Meet Rex and Shadoweye.”

Rex had paused to dramatically peer into the darkness off the bow of the boat. That prompted Toby to look out as well. Ahead was … nothing. Misty blackness. “Where are we going?”

“Just somewhere to lay low for a while,” said the girl. “Unless you want to go back?” He shook his head violently. She hmmphed.

“Well, this is great and all, Corva,” said Jaysir, “so when were you going to tell us you’d given this guy”—he nodded at the wet creature—“a depth charge?”

“I didn’t,” said the girl.

“Well, how did he blow that underwater window, then?”

“I did it,” croaked Toby.

“What?”

“I broke the window. They were coming for me, to do something … to neuroshackle me.”

Shylif muttered something and shook his head; Jaysir swore. Corva threw her shoulders back and stared the other two down. “Lucky we were here, then, wasn’t it?” she said. Jaysir shrugged and looked down.

“Jay, you should check him for trackers,” Shylif said. Jaysir jerked as if someone had given him an electrical shock and forgot about his death grip on the gunwale as he rummaged through a backpack at the stern of the boat. He brought out a long green rod that he waved around Toby.

“Yep, he’s hot. There’s a whole bunch of them, but nothing I haven’t seen before. Just give me one minute, and I’ll disable them.” He made some adjustments on the rod and waved it more slowly at various points around Toby’s torso. “Now, you may feel some little explosions in there…”

“He’s joking,” Shylif said hastily. In any case Toby felt nothing, and after a short time Jaysir grunted in satisfaction and returned his device to the pack. He said, “Nobody’s gonna track him now, except, oh, wait, we’re out in the open water, anybody who looks can just see us!”

“Patience, Jay,” muttered Shylif. The boat continued to pound through the waves.

There was silence for a while as they followed a circuitous route around down-drooping sections of ice ceiling, some of which touched the water. In places the ceiling rose, too, to become lost in misty darkness above. There were other boats in the water and lights below the surface.

Toby put a hand on his chest. “What did you mean earlier about me going into stasis? And what was that? The purring sound, me falling asleep like that…?”

Jaysir stared at him and laughed, shaking his head. Shylif said, “Give him a break, Jay, some of us didn’t grow up with hibernation implants in us.”

“Is that what—?”

“They’re artificial organs that help you go in and out of hibernation. They hadn’t been invented yet … where you come from.”

Toby shook his head, though Persea had told him about them. He supposed he hadn’t actually believed they were real.

He was still freezing, and spray kept sheeting up behind him, sometimes sprinkling across his head and neck. The thought of the bottomless ocean below them was making him queasy, too. But he sat up straighter when Shylif said, “The purring … well, that was this little guy.” He patted the animal that was sitting at Toby’s feet. It accepted the rough mashing of its ears without complaint. “He kept you from going under.”

Toby had no idea what to ask about that, so he moved on. “Why were you out here at all? And why’d you follow me from Lowdown?” He looked at Corva as he said this.

Corva shrugged. “We found out who you were, and we knew a little about the people who’d picked you up. It didn’t seem like a … healthy place for you to come back to us.”

Hypermafia, Jaysir had called them. Toby had to laugh at Corva’s understatement. But: “How did you find out about me? Nobody else in seventy thousand worlds did, apparently.” He tried to keep bitterness out of his voice. “And why should you care?”

Corva and Shylif exchanged glances. Toby was getting really tired of that kind of glance. Corva said, “As to why we care, it’s a shame you even have to ask. This one”—she patted the creature with the golden eyes—“had spotted you inside and said you were scared. I don’t know how you broke the window, but we saw you in the water, and … well, you’re important, and that means you’re valuable.”

“Ah,” said Toby. “Some honesty at last.”

“Well, I don’t know what those other people had planned, but we have no intention of keeping you against your will,” she said.

“Speak for yourself,” said Jaysir. “I think a little ransom might go a long way right about now.”

Shylif rolled his eyes but said, “It’s no mystery how we found you in the first place. We’re stowaways, after all.”

When Toby just stared at him, mystified, Corva said, “That means we wake up before everybody else, and we usually go into hibernation after everybody else has gone to sleep. So we were awake on the transport ship that had brought us to Lowdown when your people started filling the airwaves with chatter. We spotted them reeling in your little ship, and when the city’s net booted up later that week we matched up what we’d seen to the historical records. I was visiting the place they’d taken you for … my own reasons … and just as I was leaving you came running out of the building like an army was on your tail. I guessed who you must be, and I knew you’d be confused and all, but what was I to do? Take you and run? They’d have chased us down.”

The boat had been bobbing through dark, ill-defined spaces for a while now. Ahead were city lights but sparser than those in the metropolis they’d left behind. Shylif steered the boat in the direction of a run-down dock at the edge of an indistinct jumble of lights.

“Wait,” Toby said, “you hibernate illegally? On ships.”

It was Jaysir this time who gave a crooked grin and spread his arms, saying, “Welcome to the vagabond life! We don’t work—but then, neither do most people. We travel, but so does everybody else. The difference is we don’t let the government track us.”

“And we don’t let them tell us when we can go into hibernation and when we have to come out of it,” said Shylif.

“In other words, we’re free—or as free as you can be in a lockstep,” finished Corva.

“And what do you want from me?”

“There’re only two things anybody’s gonna want from you,” she said. “To help them continue the oppression and exploitation of seventy thousand worlds—or set those worlds free.”

They pulled up to the dock, which was built of water-worn plastics and carbon fiber. Toby had yet to see wood on this world. Jaysir tied up the boat and proceeded to strip off the garish survival suit. Underneath it he wore the orange leggings of a counterpressure suit and a thermal muscle shirt whose battery pack hung loosely from his belt. He was as scrawny as his face had suggested.

The ice ceiling dipped nearly to water level in this region, and sometimes past it. These squashed spaces were jammed with a great bewildering clutter of buildings—some above the surface, some glowing below it—joined by catwalks, pontoon roads, and tunnels melted through the turquoise ice.

“We’re camping out up here,” said Shylif, nodding to the complicated mess. “You’re welcome to join us for a meal … or you could always go back to the people who brought you here.”

“What if I went to the police?”

“That would either be the safest move for you, or the most dangerous,” said Corva as she clambered out of the tilting boat. “You may know which, but we sure don’t.”

Back on Earth, the police had officially served the public, but in reality, they’d worked for the trillionaires. Toby looked back at the boat, which he wasn’t sure would take orders from him, then at the cold blank water, then at the icebound buildings, where bright spotlights harshly lit the tunnels.

“Look, we’re not after selling you,” said Corva. “You can walk away right now. Go on.” She made a shooing motion, aiming Toby in the direction of a pontoon road that wandered away over fog-capped water.

“You know I can’t go back.”

“Then come with us or walk away—but make a decision!” She spun on her heel, the tails of her coat belling out, and stalked away. Her friends followed her, two of the catlike animals dancing around their feet. The third one sat at Toby’s feet and stared up at him, unblinking, until he said, “Oh, all right!” He set off after the others.

Up ahead was a cavern with four towering factory façades built into its icy sides. The space between them was utter bedlam—driverless freight carriers shot out of tunnels and slammed through the space at a hundred kilometers per hour, smaller vehicles rumbled through in four directions without stopping, and bots sauntered among them all. There were half a dozen narrow misses every second, but no collisions—and Corva and her friends walked right down the center of the road and into it all. Flinching and jumping at the humming, careering traffic, Toby tried to keep up.

He trusted machine vision and reflexes, but he hadn’t been in a place like this before, either on Earth or Sedna. Toby breathed a huge sigh of relief when they reached the far side and Corva clattered down a flight of metal steps into a structure that was half embedded in ice, the other half plunging into the cold depths below.

“Anyway,” said Shylif as if there’d been no break in the conversation, “sell a McGonigal? That would be suicidal.”

“Much better to have one on our side,” said Jaysir.

It wasn’t significantly quieter inside the building. Dim lights sketched a hostile tangle of rumbling machines, zigzagging catwalks and scrambling bots. This was where the real work of the city happened, clearly—but it was bots doing it. There wasn’t another human in sight.

Corva suddenly turned to Shylif and said, “Told you we’d be back in time for your shift.” He sighed and nodded.

Luckily they didn’t move into that intimidating maze of machinery but headed down another flight of stairs. Toby expected a windowless room, but when they came out of the stairwell it was into a long glass-walled gallery that looked out into the deep ocean. The factory noise from above had become a muffled background drone. Sleeping rolls were laid out on the floor here, as well as a couple of little camp stoves. Some of the sleeping rolls had big backpacks next to them.

Shylif went to a jumble of bright machinery near the glass. He snapped something onto his wrist, and a suit began to build itself onto his body—not a space suit, however. Through the glass behind him Toby could make out blue ocean under an undulating ceiling of ice, its higher points inhabited by juddering silvery bubbles of air. This pale blue-green surface was lit by bright lamps that stretched far into the indigo distance; below them, all was black.

“You’re going out in that?” Toby asked.

“Right,” said Shylif, glancing behind himself. “It’s not nearly as interesting as it looks. I’ll see you all later.” With that he let the diving suit’s helmet cover his head and then walked to a set of heavy doors at the end of the gallery.

“Stamina,” said Jaysir. “Ah, to be young again!”

“He’s twice your age,” Corva pointed out.

Toby watched as the doors closed and, a minute later, a burst of bubbles and froth spewed into the water somewhere off to the right. Shylif’s silvery form shot into the dark water and disappeared.

“Everybody, this is Clark,” Corva was saying.

Toby finally noticed the other people in the gallery. Jaysir had joined several other young men at the camp stoves, where an elderly man and two middle-aged women also sat. They greeted Corva’s team in a friendly way, but all eyes were on Toby. He grinned weakly and tried to look harmless.

“That’s cool,” he said, aiming a thumb at the dark water.

Clark? When he realized that Corva had meant him, he nearly corrected her, not because he didn’t know what she was doing but because he couldn’t picture himself as somebody named Clark. Apparently these five could, though, as they accepted the name with nods. “I’m Dorvas.” “Nix.” “Elden,” said the older man. “Sofial.” “Salome.”

“We were just about to eat,” said William. “Care to join us?”

“S-sure,” said Toby. Jaysir shot him a warning look and Corva shook her head. “Maybe later.” Jaysir proceeded to spin out an elaborate and loud story about some adventure or other they’d been on all day—one that didn’t include boats—and all eyes turned to him.

Corva headed to a corner under a window and plunked herself onto one of the rolls. Rex leaped off her shoulder and went to greet several others of his kind that had emerged from somewhere.

Corva’s kit consisted of a sleeping roll, backpack, and a rather nice-looking exoskeleton that was currently rolled into a ball next to the blanket. She wore the same olive-green tunic and black leggings she’d had on the first time he saw her on Lowdown. Still, she didn’t have the air of true poverty about her that Toby had seen back on Earth.

“Until you prove to me that you can blend in, you don’t talk to people, Clark,” she said.

He crossed his arms indignantly. “The name is Garren Morton, if you must know,” he said. How could shenot think he could handle himself in a situation like this? He’d done things like it before, in Consensus and the many other simulations he and his brother and sister had spent so much time in. Being streetwise in strange situations was necessary in those games, and Toby felt he was pretty good at it.

“Yeah?” She raised a dark eyebrow. “Is that a new name, or one you were given by the very people who’re looking for you now?” He blushed, realizing his mistake. She continued, “You just asked where Shylif was going. You should already know.”

Now, that, she surely had no right to say. “Why?”

She sighed. “Because it’s basic. Look, in this lockstep, most work is done by bots—and most of that’s done while we’re all hibernating. They gather resources while the worlds are frozen over, they build stuff and stockpile it. But … well, here’s a little quiz question for you: who can own bots?”

“Robots? What do you mean, who?”

“There, you see?” She threw up her hands. “Only individual, living human beings can legally own multipurpose robots, and the owners must not be in hibernation for a whole turn. Corporations can’t own general-purpose bots, they can only own single-purpose machines like the production-line stuff upstairs, or vehicles and such. So that means that all the bots working upstairs are owned by individual people—mostly the people in the city back there.” She jabbed a thumb at the far wall.

“So the corporations pay the bots to work for them, not humans like they did in ancient times. Right?” Reluctantly, he nodded. “Then the bots hand over their wages to their owners. That’s how most people live. But stowaways like us … well, some of us don’t want to be found. We can’t send out registered bots to work for us. Shylif’s like that. If he’s going to make any money at all, he has to do it outside the normal economy. So he subcontracts to the factory bots.”

Toby was trying to keep up. “He … works for them?”

“He carries stuff, does light maintenance work, things like that. For the bots, yes. That way they don’t have to work, which minimizes wear and tear on them. They pay him less than the factory’s paying them, but at least it’s something. And so, he can buy the things he needs.”

She leaned forward. “You need to know this stuff or you’re going to stick out like a sore tooth.”

“Don’t you mean sore thumb?”

She ignored the comment. “Look, you’re the ultimate hyperrich kid, Toby. And more, you’re…” She seemed to think better of saying what that more was. “I don’t know how you feel about it all, but it makes me pretty uncomfortable, and I had a little warning about what you were. If more people find out … I don’t know what will happen. So be careful.”

Toby hugged himself, staring down and at the gray walls and at the cavorting furred things. “I want to know,” he said. “But nobody’s told me anything that makes any sense.”

“Well. You know who you are, right?” He nodded. “So does everybody else. Every single human being on all seventy thousand of our lockstep worlds, and all the other locksteps and probably most of the fast worlds, has heard of Toby McGonigal and his family. You’re one of the most famous people in history.”

“But…” He shook his head. “That makes no sense. No sense at all.”

Corva pressed her fists against her temples and yawned extravagantly. “Well, it should. If you really do know who you are.”

“And who are you? You haven’t even told me your name.”

“My name’s Corva Keishion,” she said. “My Universal Number’s 14-Tourmaline. Have you got a URN?”

He shook his head, eyeing her with uneasy confusion. She sighed in annoyance, but he didn’t care anymore. He just couldn’t keep up—and now he was yawning, too, and shivering again.

“You’re still wet,” Corva observed. She went to rummage in the heap where Shylif had gotten his diving suit and came back with a hollow metal tube. “Try this.” She thumbed the outside of the tube and it immediately began blasting hot air at Toby. “Ow!” Very hot air.

“I’ll stand back. This baby’s industrial, it’s not meant for hair.” She walked back a couple of paces and began waving the tube at Toby like a wand, head to foot. Warmth washed over him. Corva kept yawningextravagantly, and once she was finished with the heater she simply walked over to her bedroll and, without another word to Toby, lay down on it and fell asleep. Her furry companion came over to curl up under her arms. The unnamed one, who seemed to have adopted Toby, came over to sit at his feet.

Jaysir was watching, and after a few more words to the others seated around the stove, he came over. “Quite the force of nature, isn’t she?” he said, nodding at Corva.

Toby snorted in agreement. He definitely wanted to know more about Corva, but she’d told him he was too ignorant of this future he’d found himself in. He’d have to fix that problem.

“Jaysir,” he said, “can I ask you something? “What’s a neuroshackle?”

“NAH, I WON’T TELL her story,” Jaysir said a little while later. “If Corva wants you to know it, she can tell you herself.” They were sitting in a quiet corner, with two of the furry creatures Jaysir had said were denners.

Jaysir might not want to tell Corva’s story for her, but he was entirely happy to tell his own, and Shylif’s. He’d readily explained what a neuroshackle was, and it was every bit as horrible as Toby had suspected: a means of turning a person into a puppet, willing to do anything for his master, even murder or suicide. Ammond and Persea had been willing, even eager, to make Toby into a slave. He didn’t know Jaysir, Corva, and Shylif, but he already felt safer here than he had since awaking on Lowdown.

“This is Shylif’s guy, Shadoweye,” Jaysir had said to introduce his gold-and-white companion. The other one, which was notably smaller and completely black except for his golden eyes, was still sticking close to Toby, and Jaysir smiled. “You might have to name this one yourself.”

“Who does he belong to?”

“Corva got him for her brother, but…” Jaysir shrugged, “that might not work out. We’ll have to see.”

“What about you? Don’t you have a denner? You’re a stowaway, too, right?”

“Oh, I use that.” Jaysir pointed to another corner where a mass of tangled, glittering equipment lay on the concrete under the watchful eye of a hulking cargo bot. “Built it myself. Way more trustworthy than some weird animal, if you ask me. And it’s legal—I got a license for it!—’cause I’m not building them for commercial use.” Toby couldn’t imagine a comfortable way to incorporate oneself into that heap of metal and piping but decided not to say anything.

“Shylif’s an outsider, too,” said Jaysir now. “And it’s a hell of a tale.

“He grew up on Nessus, one of the Alpha Centauri worlds. It’s a fast world, terraformed thousands of years ago—but there are lockstep fortresses there.”

“Fortresses?”

“Yeah, on fast worlds like Earth or Nessus, lockstep communities need special protection from the elements and vandals and stuff. Shylif’s village had grown up around a fortress, which is pretty common. Every thirty years, the fortress’s gates would open, and the lockstep people would pour out for a month of celebration and fraternizing with the townspeople. Jubilee, they call it, when two worlds are awake at the same time. Locksteps Jubilee, too, like when 360 and 72 sync up, every two turns for us, every ten for them. Anyway, the last Jubilee had happened about twelve years before Shylif was born. That’s the funny thing—you grow up with stories and evidence of these mysterious people from the fortress, and you hope to meet them just once in your whole life. Just as he was becoming a man, Shylif met them.

“Thing is, he was deeply in love. Childhood sweetheart kind of thing, and she loved him, too. When the fortress opened, they both went to meet the people who lived in it. There were the usual parties and tours and stuff. What Shylif didn’t know was that there was a man visiting the fortress from somewhere else in the lockstep who had taken a fancy to his girl.

“On the last day of the month, the town held their traditional big send-off for the locksteppers. Shylif lost track of Ouline, his girl. Next morning he asked around, but nobody’d seen her. Gradually it dawned on him: she was still inside the fortress.

“There was nothing to be done. The place was impregnable, and it wasn’t going to open again for another three decades.”

“That’s … awful,” said Toby. The words felt foolish, not even remotely able to express the despair Shylif must have felt. “What did he do?”

Jaysir looked down, then met Toby’s eyes. “He waited.

“He waited for her for thirty years, and when the fortress opened its gates the next time, he was standing there, still waiting.

“Ouline emerged, and she hadn’t aged a day. But Shylif had, and so had everybody else she’d known. Her parents were dead, her brothers were grandfathers already. She told Shylif that she’d been lured by a man named Coley, who’d seduced her on the last night of the Jubilee and abandoned her to sleep in one of the rooms of the fortress. He’d deliberately stranded her.

“For Ouline, only a single night had passed—in the blink of an eye she’d lost her whole world, her parents, friends. Even the trees and buildings were different. She couldn’t handle what had happened. She … she killed herself.”

“Aw, no.”

Jaysir nodded. “And Shylif, who’d waited thirty years for her, had nothing left. Nothing but revenge. He went hunting Coley, but Coley fled the fortress. Shylif followed and ended up wintering over in another lockstep city. Just like her, in one night”—he snapped his fingers—“he left behind everybody he’d ever known. He’s been after Coley ever since. Corva and I met him because he thinks the little monster’s gone to ground on Thisbe, her homeworld.”

Toby sat back, trying to imagine what Shylif’s life had been like. Not like a life lived on Earth in his time. More like something out of ancient history. “And what about you?” he asked.

“I’m a maker.” He waited for Toby to react and seemed disappointed at the blank expression he got. “You know? Makers? People who are their own industrial economy?” He nodded at his complicated-looking bot. “Built entirely by me. It does everything—made my clothes, made the fabric for the clothes, mined the hydrocarbons to make the polyester … Between me and it, we don’t take any resources from the lockstep. That’s a maker. Me, though, my thing is collecting procedural computer code. It’s incredibly rare, but I have one of the biggest collections in the lockstep!” Suddenly he looked shy. “You probably have no idea what I’m talking about.”

“Computer programs. Preneuromorphic computers, the digital type?”

Jaysir slapped the concrete floor in delight. “Yes! You do know!”

“Well, we had a few on Sedna. They’re good for databases and … stuff.” A lot of Consensus had run on those old machines, but anything that had to interact with the real world—like the twentier—was based on artificial neurons. That reminded him of the data block he’d found in the little robot’s cargo bin. Should he show that to Jaysir?

“I’ve built my own code library!” Jaysir rattled on about it, but Toby’s eyes were starting to cross. The day’s adventures had caught up with him, and after a while he waved a hand and said, “I’m only understanding every fifth word you say. ’Cause I’m tired.”

“Ah, sure.” Jaysir laughed good-naturedly. “I can put even Shylif to sleep talking about this stuff. Crash for a while, then. You can use my roll. We’ll probably need to be on the move soon anyway.”

Gratefully, Toby rolled himself onto Jaysir’s bedding and, just like Corva, fell instantly asleep.

SOMETHING COLD TOUCHED TOBY’S nose. He started awake, to find the two golden eyes of the little denner centimeters from his own. He grinned at it. “Well, hello. Did I oversleep?”

He remembered everything that had happened over the past days, but somehow, at least for now, that small touch made everything okay. The gallery looked exactly the same when he sat up, but its other inhabitants were gone. Jaysir, Corva, and Shylif were waiting with breakfast: dry rolls and fruit, which Toby devoured voraciously. Nobody spoke while he did this. Shylif showed him where to refresh himself, and then they all sat down cross-legged on the floor and looked at each other.

Finally Toby had to break the silence. “What now?”

“They’re looking for you,” said Shylif. “It’s not a police alert; there’s a private query gone around to all the bots and now they’ll be keeping an eye out.”

“So whoever they are, they don’t want the authorities to know about you,” added Corva. “Which just goes with our theory that they’re dissidents or revolutionaries.”

Toby scratched his head. “Oh, I dunno about that. They seemed more interested in money than anything.”

“Whatever. The point is, they’re after you, and I don’t think you want to announce yourself to the police either.”

“Why not?”

There was that glance between Shylif and Corva again. “Fine! What do you suggest, then?”

Corva reached behind her, making a tsk-tsk sound. Her furry companion popped its head out from behind her hip, then climbed into her lap and began its deep, droning purr.

“I’d suggest you try to make a new friend,” said Corva, patting Rex’s head. “But it looks like you’ve already done it.” She smiled at the little black denner who was sitting loyally next to Toby. “You’ll need a denner. Otherwise, you’ll have to find a cicada bed at the end of the month—and you can bet they’ll be watching all of those, legal and gray tech.”

Toby wasn’t going to say no to the little guy by his foot, but— “Jaysir said you bought this one for your brother.”

She shot a sharp look at the self-styled maker. “What did you tell him?”

Jaysir shrugged. “What he says. You bought it for Halen.”

Corva’s own denner walked over, and Toby leaned down to stroke his head. “Can he—Rex, right?” he asked Corva, “can he really do everything a cicada bed does? Keep you alive through deep-dive hibernation? Even frozen solid?”

She reached down, too, and put her hands on either side of the furry face and rubbed. Ears and whiskers tilted back and forth, but the purring never slowed.

She nodded. “Yep. And yeah, that’s his name. As in, ‘Wrecks everything.’”

Wrecks turned his head and gave Toby a slow two-eyed wink.

SOMEBODY HAD SET UP a printer near the airlock, so Jaysir printed some watertight cases for their things, as well as transparent carriers for Wrecks and the other denners. Then they kicked through the parts heap until they found the makings of three diving suits, and Corva, Shylif and Toby let them climb onto their bodies. Jaysir watched, arms crossed. “You’re not coming?” Toby asked the maker, who guaffawed.

“Trust myself to that bottomless Hell? Forget it, I’m gonna walk. Besides“—he gestured behind him to where the cargo bot was gathering up his complicated hibernation gear—“salt water’s not good for my stuff. I’ll meet you guys there.”

“They won’t be watching for him,” Shylif added. “It’s you we’re hiding.”

Moments later Toby found himself in an airlock that, for the first time in his life, was not going to turn him over to vacuum on the other side.

“It’s funny,” he said, feeling the need to talk as water gushed in around his feet. “We were drilling on Sedna when I left. It’s got this big subsurface ocean, but it was kilometers down. Dad always said we’d be ocean people someday, but it never happened while I was there.”

“It did happen, Toby,” Corva said. She sounded sad, and the words made him feel that way, too.

He felt a claustrophobic panic as the water rose over the faceplate of his suit. Before he could react, it was above his head; when he could convince himself that he was still breathing, the panic began to recede and he suddenly thought, What about the poor denners? He lifted the carrying case that held his and found two calm eyes gazing back. He had time to notice a little readout on the top that said it had five hours of remaining air; then the airlock’s outer door opened.

This was not like being in space. There, Toby felt cradled in a way, by weightlessness and infinity. When he stepped out of this lock he immediately began to sink, and what was below, he knew, was far more hostile than vacuum.

“Clark, turn on your belt thrusters.” It was Corva’s voice, calm, almost droll.

“How? —Wait. Belt thrusters on!”

“No, silly. The big switch on your belt.”

He got the thrusters going and, when he knew they were keeping him up, finally snuck a look around. This was not space. The pearly ice ceiling stretched away to infinity on all sides; bright lamps were stuck in it at intervals, creating a regular pattern of white stars that, in the far distance, blurred together into a deepening blue line. They made the hazy water visible for many meters below, revealing its gorgeous color and the thousands of bizarre and wonderful living things that swam, pulsed, and snaked through it. Some looked like fish, though they had no eyes. They might all be native, or imported, or this whole biosphere might be bioengineered. Toby didn’t know and didn’t care: what mattered was that they were alive.

The ice was punctured here and there by giant square holes; factory machines and long pipes stuck down into water, and cables drooped into the depths.

“This way,” said Shylif as he jetted off to the right. “We could walk, of course, but there’re fewer eyes down here. Fewer eyes on things that can talk,” he added as a gape-jawed monstrosity thrashed past him.

“Does this ocean go all around the planet?” Toby asked.

Shylif jabbed a thumb at the ice overhead. “Think of that as a continent,” he said. “Like any continent, it floats on the planet’s mantle, only in this case the continent’s made of ice, not rock, and the mantle isn’t made of magma, it’s water. And that water goes—” he tilted over to look down—“so deep that it might as well be rock, it’s compressed so hard. Hot ice, harder than steel, that’s the only bottom to this ocean. Anything from up here that fell down there would be unrecognizably squished long before it got to the hot ice layer.”

Toby thought of his mining bot and felt a little jab of remorse. It had sacrificed itself for him. He clutched his denner’s carrying case more tightly.

In the depths below, gigantic black-on-black shapes moved. Toby hoped they were machines. Luckily Shylif wasn’t taking them that way; he angled his jets up at one of the big square openings and for a few minutes they wove in and out of a forest of metal pipes that extended down from it into the limitless abyss. Then the surface appeared above, as opaque as shimmering foil until Toby pierced it. He found himself on the surface among those pipes, which angled up and into the faceless façades of machines that squatted like abstract fishermen around the opening.

“This way.” Shylif was heading toward a set of iron steps that descended into the water.

“What do they do here?”

“The ice is almost pure water. So’s the ocean. They use electrolysis to slowly pull metals and other elements out of the ocean, but it takes decades to accumulate enough for a month’s worth of industrial production. These are the machines that pull it in. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here ’cause this is where the gray market is.”

There were no bots on the metal floor at the top of the steps. Nothing moved at all, in fact, though Toby could hear a thrumming vibration as of giant pumps laboring nearby. The space was well lit and he felt exposed here; still, they paused while Shylif and Corva let their denners out of the capsules they’d traveled here in. Not a drop of water had touched Wrecks’s fur, but as he climbed out of the container he shook himself as though he’d just had a dunking and gave something that was midway between a chatter and a meow.

Toby stared at the denner. Growing up he’d always longed for a pet of his own, but he’d never had the courage to ask for one. Taking care of another living creature was an awesome responsibility, one that demanded the greatest of respect and consideration. Was he up to that? He didn’t even know how to survive by himself in this strange new world, much less take care of another being, however small.

He thought of Evayne and Peter, and all the ways he’d tried to be a good example to them—not always responsible, maybe, but always an example. He’d been very young when Evayne was born, but he remembered feeling proud and a little scared at his new role in the family. With something like this feeling in him, he followed Corva and Shylif under silver pipes as wide as houses and into a shadowy area of discarded building materials and broken tools.

“Nobody respectable comes down here,” Shylif said. “No bots, I mean. It’s an exclusion zone left over from the construction; they can no more walk in here than they can deliberately walk into a wall. That makes it a great place for certain kinds of activities.”

There were people here, Toby realized—in fact, the zone under the pipes seemed to be a kind of market complete with ramshackle stalls for some vendors and others laying out their wares on blankets. Only a few customers were about, all hooded or helmeted. Toby wondered what might be for sale here that couldn’t be bought in the city, but he had no time to browse as Shylif made a straight line through the dimness toward a kind of shack that backed onto a mountain of huge yellow pumps.

Corva rapped on the plastic sheeting that passed for a doorway curtain. “Come,” said a raspy voice from inside. They stepped through, and Toby blinked in surprise.

Vaulting tree trunks rose all about, their heights lost in mist and green. Giant ferns slapped against him as he pressed forward. He couldn’t hear the pumps anymore, just a cacophony of birdsong, insect chirps, and other animal screeches. And the sound of misty water falling.

“Hey, the ferns are real, treat ’em with respect!”

He blinked and looked around more closely. Under the ferns he spotted sound dampeners, loudspeakers, and a holographic projector. The forest was an illusion, but a good one.

“We want to make sure this denner can sustain my friend here,” Corva was saying somewhere nearby.

“Him, huh? Not very promising.”

“I also want to buy another one. It’s for my brother, he’s not with us.”

Toby pressed forward, careful not to knock over the ferns’ pots, and found Corva and Shylif standing with a very short, barrel-chested man who was dressed in layers of scrap clothing. His heavily muscled limbs were clamped into an exoskeleton frame that he appeared to strain against when he moved. It came to Toby that the exo wasn’t there to amplify his strength but to hold it in check.

He gathered the little black denner in his arms, very carefully, and the denner appeared to be enjoying the attention. Toby suppressed the jealous urge to take the creature from him.

The man stepped carefully over to Toby and glared up at him. “You know what you’re getting yourself in for?”

“I know how to take care of an … a creature, sir. I’ve done it before.”

“Oh, yeah? That would put you decidedly in the minority. What kind of ‘creature’ have you taken care of before?”

“Cats. When I was a boy.”

“You’re still a boy.” The man snorted. “Cats, huh. Well, they’re not that different from denners. You probably seen denners, too, right? Lotsa people have ’em, but not like these.” He glanced slyly over his shoulder and Toby realized that they were standing beside a large fenced pen. Inside it were a dozen or so of the animals.

He wanted to ask how these ones were different from the usual, but that would show his ignorance and he sensed this would be a bad time to show that. He thought about how to learn what he wanted to know and finally said, “They look like denners.”

The short man prodded Toby in the chest with one finger, the force of his thrust nearly knocking Toby over. “And you look like a standard human, but yer not. You got synthetic hibernation organs implanted in yer body, like all of us. And these little guys“—he swept an arm to indicate the denners—“have got the counterpart. They was engineered to hibernate outside cicada beds; we’ve just made an addition. You really prepared to take care of one? This ain’t a cat, boy.”

“I trust him,” said Corva. Toby glanced at her in surprise. She didn’t return the look, though—she was too busy staring at the denners in the cage.

“Hrmph.” The man flipped over Toby’s denner and prodded him here and there. “Yer kit looks healthy and happy enough. A’right.” He motioned for Toby to follow him. “We’ll see if you two are compatible.”

“Are these really the prices?” Corva was practically wringing her hands as she peered in at the other denners.

“No haggling. Those are the prices.

“Stop ogling yer girl and pay attention,” the short man added. Toby blushed and started to stammer an objection, but he waved it away. “Here, take the kit.” He unceremoniously dumped the black denner into Toby’s arms. “Give him a good scritch.”

It took Toby a second to realize what he meant. Then he started stroking the denner above the ears and under the chin. A deep and resonant purr erupted from it, so loud that he almost dropped the creature.

“Huh!” The short man was waving some sort of diagnostic tool at them. “That’s a strong tone … let me run a couple tests on him.” He rummaged around behind a counter for some diagnostic equipment. Meanwhile, Corva had appeared on the other side of the fencing. She had a tragic expression on her face.

“I can’t afford one,” she said.

Shylif nodded slowly. “I’d like to help you out, but I only have enough for a few days’ food.”

“Jaysir won’t help,” she muttered darkly, “he hates denners.” She aimed a speculative look at Toby. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cash card on you, would you?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I haven’t had to use money yet.”

He and the denner put up with some poking and prodding and ticking instruments being waved over them. Finally the little man grunted in surprise. “He’s good,” he said. “Never would have expected it from such a scrawny little thing … but based on these readings, he could even wake me up.”

“Then we’re good to go?” Suddenly he wondered if the little man could be trusted with the knowledge that they were planning to stow away, and he glanced up at Corva, who laughed.

“Grounce here is legendary among us stowaways,” she said. “He survives on his reputation for discretion. I think we can trust him.”

“Who says you can’t?” The little man glared at Toby.

A few minutes later, Toby walked out of the shop with his denner on his shoulder—and for the first time, he felt he could really say it was his. Or maybe he was its: the little guy was purring ridiculously loudly, and Toby knew he was grinning like an idiot. Corva and Shylif took this in stride. Trying to keep up with the situation, Toby said, “What do we do now? Swim back?”

“Oh, we’re not going back,” said Corva. “By now somebody’ll have told the wrong people about you, and assassins or bots or rentacops’ll be descending on the gallery. No, if you’re gonna stay out of their hands, we’ve got to keep going.”

“Going? But where?”

She jabbed a finger upward. “Orbit. Find us a transport and deep-dive now, so there’re no life signs if they scan it. Disappear from this world entirely. The longer we’re awake and running around, the easier it’ll be for him to find you.”

Toby nodded, then said, “Him? You mean Ammond?”

She gave him that you-idiot look again. “Of course not. His team can’t summon the resources here to really suss you out. No, I mean your brother.”

“My what?”

“You know,” said Corva, looking puzzled. “Peter McGonigal. The guy who owns this world, and Lowdown, and all the rest of them? The one they call the Chairman.”