Lockstep

Six

THE AIRSHIP WAS A flying wing a little over two kilometers long, its transparent skin made of something so thin that you couldn’t see it head-on; only in its outward curves could you make out the oily iridescence of its shape. It was as if the ion engines and passenger gondolas were suspended in midair. Toby had loved it—and why not? He was only fourteen.

They’d been on their way to orbit for two days now, circling Earth at ever-greater altitudes. The ionosphere was so thin here that satellites could plow right through it—but a light enough airplane with a wing this wide could use it for lift and fly all the way to orbit. This was the way poor people went into space. Mom and Dad had decided on a slow leave-taking, rather than a quick rocket to orbit and then on to Sedna. Until an hour ago, Toby had thought they were indulging an uncommon nostalgia.

But then, just after lunch as he’d been wandering the long galleries that looked down on the strangely patterned landscapes forty kilometers below, the ship had shuddered—just ever so slightly. Peter ran up, a blot of dark disheveled clothing and hair like a moving stain on the perfect white plastic surfaces of the corridor. “An airship just docked!” he’d cried. “An invisible one!”

“More invisible than this old thing?” But Toby was intrigued. Over the next twenty minutes they watched as the suborbital stealth rocket (now visible) disgorged cargo and passengers, each of whom Mom and Dad greeted with handshakes and serious expressions.

Peter had nudged Toby at one point. “I know that guy. He’s Nate what’s his name, the composer-thing guy.” Ever precise, that was Peter—but Toby did recognize the long-limbed man with the easy grin. More than a composer, he invented whole genres and was famous for starting bands of startling and varied styles. He’d stay with one just long enough to propel it to international fame and drive a new trend into the spotlight; then he’d be off in a new direction. Like the McGonigals, he wasn’t a trillionaire, merely rich and famous—which counted for everything, or nothing at all as Toby was learning. “But what’s he doing here?” Peter stared as if he could burn the secret out of the man with his gaze. “Is he coming with us?”

The answer, which was yes, had come sometime after the stealth craft had broken off from the airship to plummet back into the air above the failed state of France. Toby and Peter were standing at the gallery rail, pointing out this or that detail along a filigreed coastline beneath their feet, when a shadow joined them. They looked up to see Nate standing a few meters away. He was gazing down, too, his expression more pensive than Peter’s.

“Hey!” Peter went over to him. “You’re that guy, right?”

Nate what’s-his-name raised an eyebrow, then stuck out his hand for Peter to shake. “Nathan Kenani. You’re Carter’s boys, aren’t you?”

“Whatcha doing?” Peter nodded at the passing landscapes. “You coming with us?” To Toby’s surprise, Kenani nodded.

“I can’t do it anymore,” he said. “I mean, look at that.” He pointed down. They were passing over southern China. Like everywhere else on the planet, it was divided into two kinds of landscape: sprawling city and empty, verdant parkland. The one was a gray mottle from this height, the other smooth green.

The gray was where billions of people lived all heaped atop one another, struggling to survive in the microeconomies they could cobble together from garbage and wind power in the ruins of their ancestors’ dreams. The green was the estates of the trillionaires, who let in no one but their ecologists and a few people they wanted to reward or bribe.

The green was much bigger than the gray.

Kenani sighed. “I just wanted to look at it all one last time. Before they take out my implants, I mean.” He tapped the side of his head.

“So it’s true?” Peter was practically hopping up and down. “They say you got more than anybody!”

“Not really.” Kenani smiled lopsidedly. “But I do have auditory augments, and visual ones and tactile. I can see seventeen primary colors and hear way down into infrasound and up past where dogs can go. But your mother says they’re likely to kill me during her new hibernation process. Something about different expansion and contraction rates than human flesh … So I’m having them out.”

“In Consensus, either everybody gets them or nobody does,” announced Peter. “They’re an unfair advantage.”

Kenani looked puzzled. “Consensus?”

“It’s a gameworld we’ve been building for … well, months and months,” Toby explained.

Peter said, “No security without equality of opportunity!”

“Pete’s just discovered socialism. Last week it was meritocracy.”

Kenani laughed. “Well, that’s cool.” He gazed sadly down at the lands below. “I’d have everybody get them, then. I’m going to miss all this richness.”

“But why?” Toby shook his head. “Why are you coming with us. Are you sneaking away?”

“Yes, I’m sneaking away, along with an assorted lot of criminals, subversives and dissidents, scientists, and whatnot.” Kenani indicated the passenger modules behind the gallery. “Most of us are just fed up living in a world that’s never going to change. Where there’re no new frontiers. Everything’s owned—I mean, there’s not a centimeter of beachfront anywhere in the world where the likes of you and I can set foot! And every last bit of the solar system’s been surveyed and claims staked. It’s all we’ve got, and all we’re ever going to have. And they own it.”

Passing below was another area of city—but this one wasn’t a roiled gray chaos like the others. It was more like an interconnected labyrinth of buildings, stretching on kilometer after kilometer, with no streets or windows to break the geometric perfection of its shapes. This place, and others like it, was where all the resources of the planets were funneled. It was a machine city, an entire economy dedicated to serving the needs and whims of the trillionaires. They had no need for human workers. They had their bots.

“In Consensus, nobody can own more than a hundred robots,” said Peter.

Kenani snorted. “Good luck with that,” he said. “Then again, why not? Make it Sedna instead of Consensus, kid, and I’ll back you all the way.”

THRUM, THRUM.

The sound was everywhere—filling the universe outside and roving through his belly and chest, his throat and his skull. Toby could feel it rattling down his arms and legs, awakening a painful tingle in them. He could feel it coursing up his spine, wrapping his jaw and tongue, penetrating his glued-shut eyelids.

He struggled to open those eyes, but when he finally did, he saw nothing. A groan escaped his lips and he felt his head loll forward. It came to him that he was sitting on some sort of surface, his knees bent up, arms lifeless at his side. And with him—

He felt the denner’s fur brush his face. The little creature was climbing around and over him, nudging him with its head. All the while, its rumbling song vibrated through Toby, awakening his body from an impossibly long sleep.

He took a ragged breath. “How long,” he tried to say. It came out as a weak croak, but Orpheus seemed encouraged. He butted Toby’s cheek and the vibration became louder still.

Now Toby felt cold, too, a biting attack on all parts of his body at once. Something deep within him was fighting against it, a radiance like a tiny inner sun. He was running on battery power, he realized, much of it supplied by his own implants. Not all of it, though. Corva had said, with a straight face, that Orpheus would heat him to life using microwave energy.

Thinking of Corva brought home to him where he must still be: bagged in a shipping container en route to a world she’d called … was it Wallop? He could feel the survival bag wrapped around him like a blanket. In fact, even when he kept his head still there was a dizzying sensation of motion. Maybe it was simple vertigo. Maybe, though, the container was on the move.

“Corva?” Toby made a supreme effort and unbent himself, reaching up a hand to cautiously unzip the bag. Fearsomely cold air puffed in, waking him even further. He stretched his right arm out of the membrane and his fingers made contact with another bag. Corva wasn’t moving, but he could feel the vibration coming from her cocoon: Wrecks was hard at work.

“Shylif!” There was no answer. Was it possible he was dead? And Corva, too? What then would Wrecks be up to?

No, there was another possibility, and however unlikely it seemed, it must be true. Skinny little Orpheus had managed to awaken Toby before the others.

He reached up to stroke the denner’s fur. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

At that moment he felt a falling sensation, and all around him the tightly wrapped packages shifted. He heard plastic wrap tearing—he hadn’t been imagining movement after all. Then, with a bone-jarring thump, the container struck something and stopped moving.

“Corva?” he asked again. There was no response, just Wrecks’s purring. Orpheus, he suddenly realized, had fallen silent. It was Toby’s own shivering that was sustaining his body heat now, and that wasn’t going to last long.

He felt terribly weak, as though he’d been sick and bedridden for days. This was nothing like the cicada beds, which pumped you full of sugars and nanotechnology that would fix you as good as new before you even woke up. Toby retched, but nothing came out; his stomach was empty and demanding to be filled.

He reached out again, found Corva’s knee, and felt around for her backpack. Opening it was hard, and he toppled over twice, scraping his chin on the corner of a crate. But inside he found some food bars and a bottle of water.

He brought out the food and water and eagerly devoured a bar. Then he hesitated.

Corva and her friends had helped him, at no apparent profit to themselves. Then again, Ammond and Persea had seemed just as selfless at first. Maybe the stowaways had no agenda beyond simple human decency. Or maybe the fact that they’d tracked him between worlds, awaiting a chance to break him out of his captivity, simply meant they had their own use for him, yet to be revealed. Corva had hinted as much.

She had also promised to finish telling him about his family. Yeah, maybe—but now that he was free of Ammond and Persea’s subtle censorship, he could surely find out the rest of the story himself. He didn’t need Corva for that.

To hell with other people’s agendas. There was one companion he knew he could rely on. He found another bar and offered it to Orpheus, who purred like crazy before attacking it. Toby gave a great sigh to quiet his inner arguers, and said, “Come on, Orph, let’s see where we are.” He groped around for the twisty passage through the boxes. After a moment Orpheus got the idea and with a chitter guided Toby into the correct gap. Moments later they were at the shipping container’s airlock.

Toby patted along the side of the door until he found a control pad. As he touched it, a little keypad glowed green, startlingly bright and the first thing he’d seen for … how many years would it be?

After his eyes adjusted, he peered at it and saw that it was reading a breathable atmosphere outside. Now that he was standing up, he could feel the drag of gravity on him, too, and it felt … well, just about normal, despite his weakness. They were either on a rotating station somewhere, or this was a pretty sizable planet. He ordered the lock to cycle, and a few seconds later the outer door opened.

It wasn’t too bright out there, but even so he had to squint. What he was looking at wasn’t at all clear. Light percolated in from the sides, but right in front of him was a kind of wavering, streaky darkness. It seemed somehow familiar, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then a crooked line of white shot from on high down into plunging depths, revealing vast billowing clouds to all sides, and he saw that the streaks were runnels and beads of rain coursing down a transparent wall just a few meters in front of him. He only just had time to realize this before thunder banged off that wall; in the distance another bolt of lightning vaulted between two towers of cloud.

Toby was so busy gaping at the bottomless well of downpouring mist that he nearly toppled right off the lip of the shipping container. Swinging wildly, he managed to grab a frost-painted handle and looked down. He was three up on a stack of containers; five more loomed overhead. This stack was just one in a row of them. The place must be a warehouse.

Grumbling to himself, Orpheus was already climbing nimbly down. Toby spared one more glance at the transparent wall and was rewarded as a flash-flicker of lightning unveiled the scene for another instant. Clouds above, clouds below, blackness beyond them in all directions. And rain, rain in sheets and billows falling everywhere.

He made it—barely—down to the floor, and his landing rang it hollowly, as if it were a lightweight deck and not a floor at all. Everything in sight was made of plastic or the transparent stuff of the outer wall. Strange. Also strange was his sudden perception that the wall leaned out at quite an angle and curved gradually to either side.

“Where are we?”

“We’re on Wallop, mate.”

He whirled and nearly fell. Jaysir laughed.

Scrawny he might be, but right now Corva’s friend looked a lot better than Toby felt. His complicated cargo bot stood a few paces behind him, hoses and wires trailing behind it. “You’re the first up, are you?” Jaysir continued.

“Uh, yeah.” His voice barely worked; he’d sounded worse on Lowdown, but that was because of the air. His whole throat felt dehydrated.

Jaysir pursed his lips. “You’re not waiting around? Corva and Shylif could use a hand, I’m pretty sure.”

Toby looked down. Until this moment he hadn’t actually been seriously considering walking away. He met Jaysir’s gaze. “I dunno. What would you do in my situation?”

“Hmm.” Jaysir scratched his chin, then ticked some points off on his fingers. “Well, first of all, you don’t know anything. You don’t even know where you are. You don’t know where you’re going—”

“I’m going to Destrier.”

Jaysir paused, one finger atop another. “You’re going to Destrier? No crap?” Then he laughed and shook his head. “She put you up to this? Or was it your idea?”

“Totally my idea. Mom’s waiting for me. That’s what Corva said.”

Jaysir resumed ticking off items. “And you haven’t got a clue what that means.”

“Corva told me about my family, Jaysir. That Peter’s the Chairman, Evayne’s alive too and my mom … she’s on Destrier. So that’s where I’m going.”

“Maybe, but … listen, Toby, you can’t just go from waking up to deep diving on the same day. It takes time to recover from hibernation. That’s why the standard turn lasts a month. That’s why nobody lives in the Weekly for very long. You can’t just find a container bound for Destrier and climb in with your little guy. You’re going to have to spend a few weeks in the city first—”

“I was only on Little Auriga for a couple of days! And you, too!”

“Actually, we’d woken up two weeks ahead of time, while the city was still thawing out. Corva figured we needed the time to get our bearings, recover, and find you. She was right. And you—you’d had days asleep in your cicada bed while they moved you from the ship to the docks. Cicada beds are a lot easier on the system than denners, man. You can’t just bed down again today.”

Toby turned and looked away through the ranks of shipping containers. Everything Jaysir said might be true, but the more Jaysir tried to convince him to stay, the more Toby felt himself pulling away. “Okay sure,” he said, waving Jaysir into silence. “Say you’re right about all that. I’ve got some things I’m pretty sure I’m right about, too.”

He imitated Jaysir, ticking points off on his fingers. “First of all, Jay, I’m not going to start trusting you just because you tell me you can be trusted. I fell for that once, I’m not going to do it again.”

Jaysir made a kind of reluctant shrug of agreement.

“Second, you guys want something from me, but you’re not telling me what it is. Tell me, and maybe I’ll start trusting you!”

Now it was Jaysir’s turn to look hesitant. “It’s really up to Corva. This is her thing…”

“And you’re what? Along for the ride?” Toby shook his head. “Third, I’m totally dependent on you, just like I was dependent on Ammond and Persea. If you were really friends, you’d help me get set up on my own and then ask me for whatever help it is you want.”

Jaysir thought about it. “Okay, I can see that. Problem is, you’ve got no money, no idea how to survive on your own, and the instant you tell anybody who you are, you’ll be jumped on by a hundred police bots.”

“So you say.”

Now Jaysir was starting to look a bit desperate. “Say I let you go. What do I tell the others? Corva … Corva needs you, man.”

“I’ll be around. You can call me—”

Jaysir was shaking his head. “We can’t call you, you don’t have a legal identity. Oh, I heard about this ‘Garren Morn’ alias, but you can’t use it. And you can’t use your real name, either. Shouldn’t even say it aloud.” He glanced around at the blank boxes surrounding them.

“Then tell me what I have to do to avoid getting caught while I sort myself out.”

“Pfaw! Why would I do that?”

Toby stopped, gently set down Orpheus, then reached inside his tunic for the object he’d carried since bursting into the water on Auriga. He held it up in the cold factory light and was rewarded as Jaysir’s eyes snapped to it with sudden intensity.

“This is a data block from Sedna. I don’t know exactly how old it is in lockstep terms, but it was hidden in the back of a twentier—a bot from the original colony. You said you collect procedural computer code, Jay. I bet you’ve never gotten to hack something this old.”

“Ah,” said Jaysir. He hadn’t looked away from the block.

“If you can help me get the data off of it, I’ll give you whatever code’s written into it. But only if you let me go.”

Jaysir blinked and looked away. “What you need to do is buy a pair of tourist glasses. I’ll give you our URNs and you can send me your glasses’ address. So we we’ll be able to contact each other, but we won’t be able to track you, and don’t have to use your URN or name.

“Don’t open any accounts, don’t buy anything virtually, or do anything that requires an identity check! I have a list of places you can stay that won’t ask. And you’re going to need a cash card.” He rummaged in his baggy trousers and came out with one. Handing it to Toby, he said, “This should last you a day or two. But you can’t just go running off to Destrier! You need to know where you are and what’s going on first. And it’s a hell of a story to tell.”

With Jaysir’s unique identifier, his URN, Toby would be able to phone, e-mail, or—if they shared services—locate him when needed. Jaysir was offering him a way to deal with him and Corva and Shylif at arm’s length. Suddenly he felt horribly guilty about taking off like this. But Ammond and Persea had been prepared to kill him …

“Don’t stick your head up, it’ll get shot off.” Jaysir turned away. “I gotta figure out what I’m going to tell the others. It won’t be pretty, let me tell you.”

“Thanks, Jay. I will call you.”

Jaysir grunted. “It’s a small world. It’s not like you can go very far.” Then he thought of something. “Hey, whatever you do, don’t use any Cicada Corp equipment!”

“Why—”

“Just, just don’t! I’ll explain when I see you.”

Troubled, but determined, Toby ducked his head in agreement and walked away.

DEALING WITH JAYSIR HAD worn him out. Toby felt tired and dizzy, and like his tongue and skin had been sunburnt. Even the dim lighting here was too bright, and as soon as he began to move he started puffing as if he’d just run a race. Cradling Orpheus, Toby plodded between the rows of stacked containers, peering about for a way out. With every step he took, he felt worse, and more guilty about leaving the others—especially Corva, whom he suspected would not be as understanding as Jaysir.

He’d seek them out as soon as he’d recovered from hibernation and felt a little safe and had some money, however one got that. Then he’d pay Jaysir back for the cash card. He might even help Corva with whatever it was she wanted from him—but he had to find out what that was first.

There were bots working in the warehouse. In his condition he couldn’t have hidden from them if he’d wanted to, but they ignored him. Maybe he could subcontract to them, the way Shylif did.

The general traffic of robots, automated cargo carts and moving cranes gave him a direction to follow, and shortly he emerged squint-eyed into what at first seemed to be hot sunlight. He shaded his narrowed eyes with his free hand and looked up.

It wasn’t sunlight, he wasn’t outdoors, and this place was like nowhere he’d ever seen or heard of.

The warehouse entrance was one of a number of similar doorways that opened onto a circular plaza cluttered with shops and food stands, and crowded with people. So far, so good. Around the plaza, tiers of heavily forested cityscape rose up in a sweeping curve, so for a second or two he thought he was at the bottom of a small bowl-shaped valley. These weren’t uncommon on Mars or the moon, where ancient impact craters made perfect circular depressions that could be domed over.

This landscape’s curve became vertical, and then kept curving, inward now, to close a couple of kilometers overhead. He wasn’t in a bowl, but a bubble. At its very summit, its north pole, brilliant sunlamps pulsed with light and heat. There was even a single little white cloud hovering in the middle of the space.

Tongues of forest and towers of glittering window and balcony swept up for much of the upper hemisphere of the bubble he was in, but gradually they gave way to buildings that seemed to sit on the outside of the sphere. These thrust elevator shafts and escalators through the bubble’s skin—and that skin was transparent wherever it showed.

Flickers of lightning beyond it brought him glimpses of billowing cloudscapes far larger than this sphere. And, in the distance, he thought he could make out the ghostly outline of a mottled moon nestled in the clouds: another sphere?

Something broke the symmetry of the curve, and it took him a while to figure out what it was. With one of those figure-to-ground flips of perspective, he suddenly realized that what he’d thought was a flat circular formation high up on the sphere was a hole—a gap in the geodesic curve. Along its edges, escalators and walkways led from his bubble into another, larger space. He even spotted an aircar sailing out of there. And were those even bigger bubbles beyond?

Okay, he’d heard of aerostats—giant spherical living spaces that could be floated in the atmospheres. Before he’d left Earth, there’d been a news report about some of the trillionaires wanting to colonize Venus by building such things. That had been amazing, but this—!

The bubble he was in was at least a kilometer across, yet it was attached to an unknown number of others, like one soap bubble clinging to a raft of others. If a single bubble city could take flight, he supposed a knot of them could, too, and so this raft hovered high in the atmosphere of some vast, dark planet.

When he could pull his eyes back to ground level, Toby blinked at a vision of chaos totally unlike the majesty that presided overhead. Here, craft stalls, food and robot-part outlets were mashed together and half piled over one another; there were carpet salesmen here, and wood-carvers, perfumeries, neon-lit bars and shadier, slotted doors in ramshackle huts that were guarded by hulking military bots. People crowded everywhere, jostling one another and talking, shouting, arguing and haggling. And what people!

He and Peter had watched all the old movies set in galactic empires and ancient solar civilizations. They’d devoured sci-fi books from the dawn of spaceflight—and so, when they came to build the universe of Consensus, they had given it faster-than-light ships and a vast culture of aliens and evolving humans. All of that was impossible, of course: in the real universe, no such thing could ever exist, for traveling between the stars was a multidecade affair for even the most advanced civilization. No matter how much wealth you had, no matter how much power, there could never be, in the real world, a marketplace where denizens of thousands of worlds and hundreds of cultures met. Nowhere could dozens of species and subspecies of human and alien crowd together to meet and trade and celebrate an empire of reason and commerce vaster than any solar system.

Yet here it was.

Most of the humans in sight were ordinary enough, but some were incredibly tall and stringy, others short and powerful, like the man who’d kept the denners on Auriga. Yet others were green skinned, or scaly, or had become one with the machines that accompanied them. There were nonhuman shapes, too, though that was impossible: no intelligent alien life had been found within a hundred light-years of Earth … at least, not in Toby’s day.

He found he was grinning. The fantasy had been made real, not on Earth but here in the vastness between the stars. The galactic empire he and Peter had dreamed about—as so many others had before them—had been built in the only place it could be and in the only way it ever could: in lockstep time.

But he was dizzy and nearly collapsed before he could make it to a nearby escalator. As he stood leaning on its handrail, letting himself rise through level after level of the bubble city, he brought out the list of hostels and hotels Jaysir had given him. When he spotted the sign for one, he gave Orpheus a tight hug and said, “We’re home free. Just a few more minutes and I’ll order up a room-service meal like you’ve never seen.”

Provided, of course, he had enough on his cash card for that.

TOBY HADN’T HAD TIME to find the cheaper lodgings available in the city; he’d walked into the first hotel on Jaysir’s list that he could find. He’d never stayed in a hotel by himself before, but he got through the strangeness of checking in without having to use any biometrics or produce ID. It turned out not be any more overwhelming than anything else that had happened to him lately.

The bed was deep and soft, the shower was hot, and there was plenty of good food available at the hotel buffet. He ate there alone and snuck some generous portions back for Orpheus, who roused himself from a sleep of obvious exhaustion just long enough to wolf it all down.

He’d wondered how to deal with the denner’s bodily functions, but at one point Orpheus disappeared and Toby found him splayed precariously over the toilet. He glared at Toby and so his human companion retreated with a muttered “sorry.” It was quite hilarious, actually, but he stifled his laugh. Orpheus, he had begun to realize, had a real sense of dignity.

His feeling of having been sunburned proved not far from the truth. Toby’s body seemed to be shedding all manner of dead material, so his skin started to itch and flake, some of his hair came out in the shower, and his kidneys were working overtime. Orpheus wasn’t much better.

Still, he was eager to take the next step. His family was alive—all except Dad. He had to get to them. Some kind of misunderstandinghad made it seem like Peter had tried to have him killed, but that couldn’t be right. He’d sort it out as soon as he figured out what was going on. Right now, the one place he knew to go was the planet Destrier, where Mom was apparently wintering over.

He needed to know more, but there were no TVs or other screens in this world; data, music, and entertainment flowed through people’s glasses or implants. Toby had seen a stall that sold interface rigs down in the market, so once he felt able, he left Orpheus in the room for an hour while he went to buy a set of these.

Jaysir had suggested he buy a pair of tourist glasses. He did but found they did little more than highlight local sights and were constantly popping ads up for this or that restaurant or gaming room. Every time they did that he jumped or stumbled. He got back to the room okay, though, and plunked himself down next to a lethargic Orpheus. “Let’s see if I can at least connect to you,” he said to the denner.

Jaysir had mentioned in an offhand way that the denners had interfaces, and sure enough, when he looked at Orpheus through the tourist glasses, the denner sprouted icons and emoticons. His interface was pretty simple, actually: Orpheus could broadcast his location, could signify basic needs like thirst or a need to pee, and he had an alarm clock for setting hibernation wake-up times.

The clock showed that it had last been set by a user named Guest. That would be Corva, he reasoned. The heavy man on Auriga had left the primary account wide open, so he quickly set the security levels on the alarm so only he could use it. So. That was done.

Now for the other thing he’d wanted to do.

“Search word McGonigal,” he said. It seemed the easiest place to start—but Toby had no sooner spoken the word than his vision was filled with plane after plane of hovering pictures and hot links to videos, movies, books … There were thousands.

He reached out hesitantly and tapped one of the virtual pictures, which spun and enlarged.

Who was this? Toby was looking at a middle-aged, bullet-headed, bald man with grim frown lines around his mouth. Next to him stood a similarly grim woman, of similar age, her face narrow and her eyes and mouth pinched and severe.

They looked like relatives, but from which side of the family? Had there been other McGonigals on Earth, who’d come to Sedna after Toby’s disappearance?

Then he saw the picture’s caption: Peter and Evayne McGonigal inaugurating a new pilgrimage center on Cephus, Lockstep Year 32.

A rushing filled Toby’s ears, and the room seemed to bend around him. He sat back cursing.

It was them, and yet not them. Instead of his brother and sister, here were their strange ghosts—specters not of the past but of some terrible future of decline and severe disappointments. So they seemed, anyway, as they stared out at him: bitter, unsatisfied, even accusing.

He could barely breathe. The picture continued to hang there, perfectly still yet looming larger and larger in his vision. Toby tried to look Peter in the eyes, but it was like staring into the sun—after just a glimpse he had to turn away–and when his gaze fell on Evayne’s face, the same thing happened again.

His mouth was dry and he was panting as, with a frantic gesture, he wiped away the photos and the search term.

Who were those people? That uncompromising woman in her forties who’d looked so much like his mother—was it really Evayne? And the other one, whose eyes held accusation and so much adult impatience—was that Peter? Even their clothes and their glimpsed backgrounds—how many worlds, how many years lined the dizzying abyss down which he’d just looked? Years, decades of separation taunted him from just those two pictures.

He didn’t know these people. He didn’t want to know them; he wanted the family he’d had barely a month ago.

“Mrph?” He looked up, realizing he’d buried his face in his drawn-up knees. Orpheus’s huge eyes held concern, and he reached to ruffle the denner’s fur. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “We just need to … sort it all out.”

He was doubly exhausted now and lay back. Before he knew it he was waking up in his clothes, apparently having not moved a muscle for hours. Orpheuswas curled up next to him. When he put on his glasses he found it was six o’clock in the morning.

“Aw, crap.” His croaking voice woke up the denner, who yawned and stretched in a very catlike manner, then stared at him expectantly.

They had breakfast, paid for the night’s lodgings and, after that, they were almost out of money. Toby found himself sitting on the whitewashed hotel steps watching Orpheus nose around the base of the decorative hedges. He had nowhere to go now, unless it was back to Corva with his tail between his legs. He could call Jaysir, but he was reluctant to play that card. The data block was pretty much the only leverage he had right now.

Or … he should just walk right up to the town hall and tell them who he was. He was the long-lost heir to the entire lockstep empire, after all.

And yet, and yet … There were those faces he’d seen in the photo. People with the names of his brother and sister, but utterly alien eyes. What if Corva wasn’t lying?

If she wasn’t, then not only Peter and Evayne were alive. Their mother was waiting in cold sleep for the day when he returned.

That was a terrible thought. He had to go to her.

The glasses pointed only to local sights. Amazing as those were—dozens of city spheres made up a kind of raft continent—the glasses wouldn’t tell him anything about how to travel to other worlds. Apparently you needed to buy an upgrade for that. He thought about this for a while, then went back into the hotel.

“Excuse me,” he said to the bot at the front desk, “how can I find out about flights to, well, a planet named Destrier?”

“That’s easy, sir,” said the bot in its perkily helpful synthetic voice. “What you need to do is visit the pilgrimage center.”