Lockstep

Seven

ORPHEUS WAS LIKE A lead weight wrapping Toby’s shoulders by the time he found the place. It was a cathedrallike building sitting by itself in a plaza in one of the larger city bubbles.

Getting here had been a magical, if exhausting, journey. Though there was public transit throughout the Continent (as the locals called the raft of bubbles), it mostly consisted of slidewalks and escalators. Toby had been carrying his denner for over an hour now, buoyed only by the occasional vistas of the Continent that opened out before him. Some of the city bubbles were many kilometers in diameter, and each had others next to, above, or below it, so that the eye followed lines of city and forest up to dizzying perches far overhead or down to cavernous depths. Outside it was a permanent storm-lit night; Wallop, it seemed, was a nomad planet like Lowdown, orphaned somewhere between the stars. Yet it was a hub of commerce and culture for the lockstep.

Religion was clearly a major part of that culture. Men and women in white robes were lined up between velvet ropes, patiently waiting to enter the cathedral—if that was what it was. Toby could see none of the religious symbols he knew from Earth. The only repeating motif seemed to be carvings and statues of a seated man, perhaps a king on a throne.

The backdrop for the cathedral was a wall of tessellated glass that swept up a hundred meters or more. No lights glowed behind it, nor any lightning. He trudged over and shaded his hand to look through the glass.

Frost had painted the other side of it, but through gapsin this he glimpsed darkened buildings and snow-draped sidewalks. “Is that another lockstep?” he asked a passerby.

The man laughed. “Naw, it’s the Weekly. It’ll open up in four or five days.”

“Weekly?” He was too tired to hide his puzzlement.

The man tilted his head and peered at Toby. “Where are you from that you don’t know the Weekly? Lockstep 90/.25? Client to 360?”

Toby shook his head. “Sorry, I’m from a … a little station.”

“Must be.” The man shook his head and walked away.

The line of pilgrims started at a set of tents where tearful people were saying good-bye to relatives and friends. They entered one tent and came out the other side wearing robes. Apparently, they were required to leave their bots behind, too, because there was a fair number of these milling around the tents but none in the lineup.

Toby approached a woman who was directing people. “Excuse me, I was told I could get to Destrier from here.”

“Ha-ha, very funny,” she said. “You can get fitted for robes that way.”

“Okay, but seriously, can I get to Destrier from here?”

She stared at him. “Where else would we all be going?”

“How much does it cost?”

“Pilgrimage doesn’t cost anything!” She seemed genuinely offended. “Who told you it did?”

“Then I can just show up?” he said hopefully.

She nodded. “Just take the vows and find a role in the Order you’re assigned to, and you can go.”

Vows. Orders? He nodded politely but stepped backward. “Uh, thanks. Maybe, maybe in a bit.” Sure, you could get to Destrier to free—provided you joined some religion or other. Who knew what that would involve?

Disappointed, he was turning away when he spotted a commotion near the line. Was that an actual fight?

A small group of people had approached the line and were apparently handing out printed (physical, not virtual) pamphlets of some kind. This was being taken very badly by some of the ones in the queue. Toby couldn’t make out all the words, but the pilgrims were shouting something about blasphemy, and the pamphleteers were saying something like, “Origin is false!”

Everybody around the tents seemed paralyzed with shock or indecision. That wasn’t really surprising; Toby had seen no real violence since he’d arrived in the lockstep. Even now, he kept expecting bots to step in and separate the men and women who were shouting at one another, yet it wasn’t happening.

Suddenly a pilgrim vaulted the line and struck one of the interlopers. Fists started flying. Toby crossed his arms and watched, increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that nobody was doing anything to stop it. He’d had to step in between Peter and Evayne on numerous occasions; it was what you did if you were a responsible adult. So where were the adults in this crowd?

A flicker of fair hair appeared among the fighting people. It was a young woman, maybe a year or two older than Toby, dressed in street clothes and carrying a shopping bag. She’d probably just been passing by, but now she was caught up in the mob.

One of the pilgrims grabbed her by the wrist.

Toby shouted, then found himself running across the plaza. Orpheus dug his claws painfully into his shoulders, complaining loudly. The man who’d grabbed the girl had raised his hand to slap her, but Toby got there just in time to grab him by the wrist and elbow, like Dad had shown him.

The pilgrim let go of his intended target and tried to hit Toby instead, but Toby pulled down on the wrist he was holding and pushed on the elbow. The pilgrim went down on his knees just as a spitting Orpheus landed on his head.

“Run!” Toby caught a glimpse of the girl’s face before she whirled and bolted. Then Toby too danced out of the reach of the gabbling, shouting mob. He ran back to the tent area, but by the time he felt he was safe and turned to look back, the girl was gone.

AN HOUR LATER, TOBY and Orpheus sat together at a sidewalk café while he tried to recover his strength. The whole incident had taken only seconds, and he hadn’t even been hit, but he felt like he’d run a marathon. Orpheus wasn’t much better. With his dwindling money, Toby was trying to revive them both with hot food.

He was wearing the tourist glasses, so the landscape around him was tagged and labeled, and he’d come to ignore all that information—but now the universal symbol for New Text Message suddenly appeared in the upper right of his field of vision. Startled, he said, “Somebody just texted me,” to Orpheus.

A WTF? icon appeared over Orpheus’s head. Toby laughed, then focused on the message flag. “Should I open it?” There were only three people on this world who might be contacting him.

NEED CASH? GOT A JOB FOR TODAY. —SHYLIF

“Huh.” Shylif, not Jaysir, and definitely not Corva. There was a kind of sting to that fact. She wasn’t talking to him. Or maybe he was just making that up? “Oh, Orph, I’m getting paranoid.”

It was true he was already out of money. Jaysir’s list had provided some alternative choices of lodging, and Toby had looked at a couple of those while they walked. The cheapest was a stack of shipping containers just above the warehouse level; Orpheus had growled as they approached it.

He thought for a while, then shrugged and replied: OKAY. WHERE DO I MEET YOU?

Shylif sent a map, and a little later Toby found himself down at the dock level of the city sphere, which was crowded with bots and machines, and almost empty of living people.

He spotted Shylif and raised his hand to wave—then lowered it and nearly ducked behind a pillar before cursing and stopping himself. Shylif was talking with Corva. After a minute or so she nodded to him and walked off to join a more-or-less human-shaped bot that handed her a bag of grippies and morphing tools. It poured a bunch of hand-sized swarmbots out of another bag and they hopped and danced around her feet. Wrecks swatted at these as they moved away.

It seemed Corva was working, too.

Toby shrugged off his misgivings and went up to Shylif. “Thanks for the job offer,” he said, then added, “And sorry about running out on you guys.”

Shylif laughed, a rich human sound among the otherwise mechanical noises of the docks. “I totally understand,” he said. “I’d probably have done the same thing.”

“But does she understand?”

“Corva’ll come around. She’s a bit like you—she needs time.”

Toby had no ready comeback for that, so he just followed as Shylif set off through the maze of gantries, cargo racks and rushing bots. Shylif seemed content not to talk, and soon Toby found himself saying, “So … What are we doing today?”

“Oh, just a little theft recovery from Lockstep 270/2.”

It took Toby a moment to process that. “There’s another lockstep on Wallop?”

“There’re six that I know of. Two-seventy-to-two is a pretty big one, and it’s also pretty aggressive. If you don’t watch ’em, their guys’ll raid our cities while we’re wintering over.”

“They … raid us?”

“Theft of resources and manufactured goods.” Shylif sent him a sardonic look. “Yeah, I thought it was pretty weird when I first heard about it. But then again, everything about the locksteps is weird.”

“No, really?”

“Locksteps raid one another during hibernation periods,” Shylif went on. “There’re treaties forbidding retaliation, but they don’t forbid recovery of the stolen material if you can find it. Some of 360’s missing supplies were spotted in one of 270/2’s cities, so an expedition is being mounted to recover them.”

“How did we get in on it?”

“I found a couple of bots that had been ordered to go after their owner’s stuff,” said Shylif. “They’re city units, not really built for wintering-over conditions. So I offered to subcontract for ’em. We’ll get paid one hundred fifty if we return with any of the bots’ stuff and two hundred if we return with all of it. I’ve got a manifest—here, I’ll share it with you.” An itemized list blinked into visibility in the corner of Toby’s vision.

“That’s it?”

“Well, no.” Shylif looked a bit put out. “It takes a lot of time and effort to find opportunities like this.”

“Can you teach me how to do it?”

Shylif grinned. “I can.”

“Thanks.”

“The ship’s leaving from Portal Eighteen in twenty minutes. You’re gonna need pressure suits. Are you bringing your denner?”

“I have nowhere to put him. I checked out of the hotel. Where do I get suits?”

“Hmm.” Shylif grinned. “Let’s make that your first test.”

Twenty minutes to find a suit? Toby looked around, cursing under his breath. Shylif was walking briskly away, seemingly ignoring Toby now that he’d given him a task.

“How the hell are we going to get suits?” he muttered to Orpheus. “I mean, maybe I can rent one, but you…” He tried to think of similar situations he’d been in, either on Sedna or in Consensus, but couldn’t remember any. What would Shylif expect him to do?

Use the resources you’ve got. Which, right now, amounted to the his denner, the clothes on his back, and a pair of tourist glasses …

Of course! He lowered a mapping overlay onto his vision. He couldsee Portal Eighteen, about half a kilometer around the curve of the warehouse level. Toby did some queries as he ran after Shylif, and dozens of yellow flags popped up in his visual field, showing the locations of public pressure suit kiosks.

So Wallop was like Sedna: as with firefighting bots on Earth, pressure suits were one of those basic safety devices you had to have handy on a world like this. The atmosphere outside this bubble city was probably toxic, and you never knew when some accident or deliberate attack might pierce the city’s skin. Suits were everywhere. All Toby had to do was pause at one of the brightly colored pillars and drag out the collapsed suitcaselike shape. There weren’t any denner-shaped ones, of course, but he did find a bin full of survival balls. These were just sacks you could jump into and zip shut, but they had transparent windows and five or six grippies on the outside that could detach and act as hands or help you crawl.

“It’s this or you wait for me here,” he told the denner. Orpheus just blinked at him.

Portal Eighteen wasn’t the solid metal airlock Toby had been expecting. Instead, when he reached the outer wall of the tall warehouse space where it was set, he found himself facing what looked like a giant heart valve: three flimsy-looking plastic flaps overlapped one another to cover a circular opening about ten meters across. As Toby joined Shylif under it he could hear wind whistling around the flaps. “Is that air moving out, or something else coming in?” he wondered aloud.

Shylif shrugged. “If it was coming in, we’d be dead now.”

A heavy rail mounted in the ceiling ran through this insecure opening; hanging off the rail was a spindle-shaped transparent airship not much bigger than the shipping container they’d come to Wallop in. It was like some kind of deep-sea fish. He could see its internal machinery, and he could also see that there were no gasbags inside it—it was just a set of metal hoop-shaped ribs with plastic stretched over them. Maybe the whole thing was one big gasbag.

“Hey! What’re you doing?”

They turned to find a man in a half-furled pressure suit striding up to them. He was tall and sticklike, with long limbs and a ratcheting way of walking. Loops of rope and belts festooned with fasteners bounced as he stepped up to glare at the only humans on the floor.

Shylif said nothing; was this another test? “We’re here to work,” said Toby, trying not to sound defensive.

“Oh, you’re the replacements?” This from a woman who was standing about two meters above Toby’s head. She’d been adjusting something at the bow of the airship. “We’re on time, then!”

The man frowned at a point somewhere over Toby’s head—reading his virtual tags, no doubt. “I dunno. The big one’s flagged with a résumé as long as my arm, but the kid’s got no credentials at all. For all I know he’s never been outside before.”

Toby stuck out his jaw and tried to look bigger than he knew he was. “I’ve done hundreds of hours on the ice on Sedna.”

The skinny man started to say something, but the woman overhead guffawed loudly. “That mined-out hulk? What the hell were you doing there?”

Toby thought about it. “Growing up,” he said finally. Shylif was now struggling to suppress a smile.

“Aw, let’s give them a chance, Casson,” she said. “If they’ve done cold they might be okay.” She strode down the gangplank, and Toby could see she was wearing an outfit similar to Casson’s. She saw him looking and lifted her loops of climbing line and let them fall. “You need a Personal Flying Device and some cords. If you’re replacing the Segentry bot you’ll be on my team, lucky for you but bad for me if you don’t perform.”

Toby nodded. “I’m … Garren.”

“This one’s Casson. I’m Nissa. PFDs’re over there.” Up close she looked fairly ordinary, except that her eyes were a striking pale mauve. She pointed at a heap of brightly colored bins on the warehouse floor below the airship. Then she blinked. “Hey, what’s that?” She grabbed at Toby’s backpack.

Orpheus stuck out his head and hissed.

Toby tensed, but all Nissa did was shrug and say, “It’s like that, is it? He stays on board when we go in.” She shot a sidelong look at Casson, who shrugged.

“Okay.” Maybe these people had dealt with stowaways before.

“All right, now get goin’!” Casson jabbed a thumb at a line of bots that was marching up a gangplank into the open side of the airship, which apparently had nothing but ordinary air inside it. “We’re leaving in five.”

TOBY’S HEART HAD STARTED pounding when he entered the airship. The thing was so flimsy; it faced him with the reality of where they were about to go. He barely noticed the pressure suit building itself onto his body, and it wasn’t until Orpheus gently seized his ankle with his teeth that Toby snapped out of his terror.

He bent to stroke the denner’s head. “I’ll be fine.” When he straightened it was to see that they were already under way, sliding down the rail and through the city’s sphincter. This was a disturbingly biological experience. Once the ship was outside, though, it bobbed comfortably in the air. Toby didn’t know what made up Wallop’s atmosphere, but whatever it was, ordinary air at room temperature was lighter. He dragged in a couple of deep breaths to calm himself, then took his first clear look at the planet he was on.

Right then he almost begged Casson to turn around and take him back. Since he’d climbed out of the shipping container he’d known, in an intellectual sort of way, that there was no surface to Wallop. Now, looking out the transparent side of the airship and down through clouds, with clouds below those, and basements of clouds on abysses of more cloud … he had to find something else to look at.

Shylif was sitting quietly, staring at nothing. Toby’s eyes fell on Orpheus, who was also staring into the endless depths of coiling gray and black. If Orpheus had been a dog, his tail would be wagging. Toby had to laugh.

Shylif looked up, and Casson, who was up at the bow with Nissa, also heard the laugh and grunted. “Bots don’t usually do that,” he said. “Neither do first-timers.”

“It’s Orpheus,” said Toby. “I think he likes it here.”

“Orpheus? Good name. Maybe he always wished he had wings. Some of us are like that.” Casson turned back to discussing the flight plan with Nissa.

Now Shylif came to sit next to Toby. He nodded at the darkness outside. “I spent most of my life on solid ground. Took me years to get used to these worlds.”

“Plenty of them have solid ground, don’t they?”

“Yeah, but … not trees, usually. Not forests.”

“Ah.” Toby looked down. “I miss Earth. Have since we left for Sedna.”

There was a brief silence between them, then Shylif said, “You gotta know that lots of people go through what you’re going through. Except that most of them know about the locksteps in advance. But that sense of being ripped out of your world … that’s actually pretty normal.”

He paused, thinking. “What hangs over your head is not being able to go back. Earth’s not the same place as when you left it. There’s nowhere to go but forward.”

Was he hinting that Toby shouldn’t try to go to Destrier? If he was, he was being pretty roundabout with it. Toby wanted to ask him about the dark past that Jaysir had hinted at, but he wasn’t sure how. “You came from outside the locksteps, right?”

Shylif nodded. “And now I can’t return. The moment you step into this world, you give up everything you had before. It’s like time burns it away before your very eyes.”

“Then, why…”

“Why come here at all?” Shylif turned sad eyes on Toby. “Some people treat it like a train to a better future. They hop on, and when they hear about some world or civilization that’s come up that appeals to them, they step off. Some people think it’s a way of leaving mortal time altogether and becoming eternal, but that’s ridiculous. We all die. And some … some just get tired of wandering the halls of the dead, calling out to people who’ll never respond.”

He started to walk away, but Toby said, “Hey, what’s your connection to Corva?”

Shylif looked back. “She came to the docks looking for a way to get to Lowdown. Some of us stowaways were there—as well as other people who’d have eaten her for lunch. She needed help. I … needed somebody to help.” He shrugged, a motion barely visible through his suit.

“Help to do what?”

Shylif shook his head and headed aft.

There was no point in pressing; Toby knew he’d get no more from the man. With nothing else to do, he sat back with Orpheus, followed the denner’s gaze into the darkness—and quickly became transfixed by what he saw.

He’d thought of the continent as self-contained, locked away from the environment it sailed through—but that wasn’t the case at all. The piled-up bubbles sprouted gantries and balconies and docks and diving boards, and the air around and above them was full of darting, soaring shapes: airships, like the one he was in, but also aircraft and even winged humans. Some of these were nearby, so he could make out what they were doing—they seemed to be engaged in some sort of sporting event as they swooped and soared within a volume defined by six giant glowing hoops.

The continent was a collision of lanterns, or a surf of glowing pearls hanging untroubled amid Wallop’s storms. The cities’ curving sides cradled the white of towers and the green of cultivated jungles that raveled them like verdigris staining a glass ball.

Wisps of dark cloud began drifting across this vision as the airship picked up speed. Toby was too excited to be tired now; he tore his gaze from what was behind them, and as he did he spotted something. Far, far away, in the darkness beyond the Continent, a tiny yellow speck played peekaboo from behind the black skirts of a thunderhead a hundred times its size. With a jolt he realized that this tiny dot of light was another city. Now that he could use it for scale, the rest of the hammerheads and towers of billowing lightning-lit vapor surrounding him were suddenly revealed as utterly gigantic, way bigger than mountains—as big, it seemed, as worlds.

Way, way up above this cloud deck, lightning momentarily silhouetted a tiny black dot against the highest of the charcoal-colored clouds. Then the lightning was gone, leaving cutout thunderhead shapes against a velvet, star-spattered night.

With this he realized they’d been rising quite quickly; the continent was a smear of yellow far below his feet. They rose and rose through the stratified layers of Wallop’s atmosphere, and eventually the stars became regular companions. They’d left the lightning far below, so it was by starlight that Toby came to see the horizon of Wallop. The little airship seemed surrounded by vast towers of black, but through gaps in these he could see similar thunderheads foresting the distance in smaller and smaller ranks. On any reasonably-sized planet those ranks would have lowered steadily to fall below the horizon line, but according to the tourist glasses Wallop was somewhere around the size of Neptune, so they simply became smaller and smaller until they merged in a blur at infinity. Staggered by distance and scale, Toby fell silent and just watched.

All the while, the distant city grew larger, like a blackened crystal ball, empty of prophecies. “It’s not lit up,” Toby said, and now he knew he sounded worried.

“It’s wintering over.” Shylif had returned and was standing next to him. “No need for lights when everybody’s asleep. Course, its reactors are still keeping it warm enough to float. But the air up there is pretty calm; it’s the best place to park a city if you want to avoid the storms for a decade or two.” He pointed, and now Toby could see that the city sphere trailed hundreds of fine threadlike cables into the depths below it, like some technological jellyfish. “Those strips filter-feed trace amounts of metal and minerals out of the air. Takes decades to accumulate enough for a month’s industry.”

“Okay,” Nissa called from the bow, “here’s how this works. Those boys”—she nodded up at the black bowl of the sky—“intercepted some of our cargoes while we wintered over. The government doesn’t care. It’s a civil matter—lost property and all that. So the owners have to recover it. They’ve sent their bots to do that.” She pointed her chin at the motley crowd of household bots and bulkier worker drones milling in the back of the airship. “Whatever it is they’ve lost is worth more than a bot or two, ’cause they risk losing them and getting nothing back. Casson and I are along because it’s against all kinds of rules, laws and treaties to invade somebody else’s wintering habitat using bots. Those same laws say that you can’t deny shelter and life support to a visitor. So we can walk right in there and get the stuff, and the bots can come with us.”

Toby frowned doubtfully. “What if they resist?”

“If they really wanted to resist, we wouldn’t get within ten kilometers of the place,” said Casson. “They don’t want a war with the lockstep. All they can do is bare-faced lie and say they don’t have the stuff. And since we know where it is, they can’t stop us walking in and taking it.”

“Okay.”

The city loomed overhead like a perfect thundercloud. Casson switched on a powerful spotlight and they searched for a while until they found a landing platform that stuck a good hundred meters out of the city’s flank. You could have landed an ocean liner on it, yet Casson set their little airship down right in the center as if claiming the entire space.

As they drifted in Toby wondered how they were going to come to a stop; he started as with a clang six bots fell or jumped off the underside of the airship. They must have been holding on to it all this time. They carried cables which they proceeded to unreel as they searched for attachment points. There were plenty of these, and in seconds they’d secured the airship.

Toby started to follow the others to the hatch, but Orpheus stopped him by weaving in between his feet, causing him to nearly trip. “Hey! Stop it. What—” Orpheus skipped back to the nose of the airship, pressed his snout against the transparent plastic and planted his paws on either side, for all the world like a little man staring out. Toby paused, laughed, and went to join him. There was a traffic jam at the hatch anyway; he had a moment.

The gameworlds he’d crafted with Peter had contained nothing like this. The boys had plundered centuries’ worth of science-fiction and fantasy art to build their virtual worlds. They’d generated thousands of planets, from vast ringed monstrosities laced with rainbows of cloud, to airless chunks of pure gold orbiting close to yellow stars and roaring with leonine light. They’d imagined desert worlds and water worlds, jungle planets and glacier-bound icescapes. Nothing they’d done had prepared Toby for the three actual worlds he’d seen since awaking in the lockstep. Nothing could have prepared him for what he was seeing now.

The airship looked like a glass tube lying on its side on a shelf that, no matter how broad it was, still seemed precarious. They were perched at the very top of this world’s atmosphere. The delicacy and mesmerizing detail of a starlit cloudscape lay below them, all the more hypnotic because the peaks and outflung arms of vapor appeared perfectly still. It was like the entire world was wintering over.

Toby had a flash of vision then, an image of himself curled up and as still as this for the past thirty years—no, more: motionless and waiting, for fourteen thousand …

Just for that one moment, he felt equal to this place, for the city was doing only what he’d already done. Then Shylif called his name and he had to turn away.

“This way.” He left Orpheus on the ship but made sure he was in his survival ball just in case. Then he followed space-suited human figures, and incongruously ordinary-looking bots, across the stillness of the platform and through a set of gigantic half-open doors. Apparently the city wasn’t worried about maintaining its internal atmosphere right now; he saw other open portals at intervals around the curve of the dark interior.

Here were city towers, houses and trees, all in a very different style from the ones in the Continent. “They’re sort of Mayan,” he commented.

“What’s Mayan?” asked Shylif.

“Before your time, I guess.” Thankfully, it was hard to make out details in the darkness; he didn’t really want to feel the oppressive gaze of all those empty windows on him. How many frozen human forms were curled up behind them, waiting out the years of what, to them, would feel like a single night?

That made him think of what Shylif had said earlier, about “wandering the halls of the dead, calling out to people who’ll never respond.” Jaysir said he had waited thirty years for his lost love to awaken again …

Chilled by the thought, Toby hurried after the others.

The fans of light cast by the bots’ headlamps were easy to follow, so he jogged after them across frosted, snow-drifted balconies and ramps. Soon he saw where they were going: an incongruous heap of crates lay half submerged in snow near a frozen fountain. Without ceremony, the bots began rooting through the boxes, tossing aside the ones that, presumably, weren’t owned by their masters.

“That’s it?” Toby watched the free-for-all in puzzlement. “We just pick ’em up and go home?”

Shylif laughed shortly. “You want it to be exciting?”

“Well … maybe not.”

“Anyway, it’s not like they’re not watching us.” He pointed, and Toby, looking where he indicated, experienced a sudden heart-stopping shock. Somebody was standing there, in the shadows. It wasn’t a bot, but a space-suited figure, human shaped. It stood as still as the icicles that hung above it like Damocles’s sword, its metal arms crossed, feet planted wide, faceplate blank and dark.

“Wh-who’s that?”

Shylif turned away. “A sentry, a keeper … call him what you want. This lockstep has them. They walk up and down the ramparts of the city, twenty years alone … If that one wanted us dead, we would never have made it this far.”

“You boys got a manifest?” Casson’s voice broke Toby out of his uneasy distraction.

“Yes,” said Shylif. He called up the list of crates he and Toby were to haul. There weren’t too many, but still, they’d have to make several trips. Toby cut a wide berth around the other bots, which were tumbling whatever they didn’t want into a broad debris field around the central mound of boxes. He quickly found the first of the crates, heaved it onto his shoulder, and began to make his way back to the airship.

It was on his third trip that he began to realize how weak he still was. He’d just come out of hibernation, after all—and not your normal, run-of-the-mill thirty-year sleep, either. That wry thought made him laugh, and drop his crate.

He was sitting on it when Shylif came by, toting a much bigger box. “Tired?”

“I’ll hire you to carry this one back, too.”

Shylif laughed but didn’t take him up on the offer. After hibernation, he was probably nearing the last of his strength, too. Toby took a deep breath and hoisted his box to follow.

This was a different lockstep from Peter’s. Shylif had said that there were a number of them here on Wallop—and why shouldn’t they be scattered throughout the universe? The name 270/2 described a timing ratio different from 360. Maybe they all ran on their own frequencies, and those might or might not ever sync up. Also, they might have been started at anytime during the past fourteen thousand years. Even a lockstep full of human beings just like himself might have a culture and traditions—not to mention language and technologies—thousands of years removed from Toby’s. The mere thought made his head whirl, but all he had to do was glance around to know it must be true.

He struggled under the weight of the last crate on his shoulder and barely registered Orpheus’s greeting when he reached the airship. The other bots all made it back with their cargoes, and Nissa cast off. Then she and Casson chattered on about the thieving habits of decadent locksteps as they turned the ship’s nose into a canyon of open black air and began the long dive back to the Continent. Fatigued as he was, Toby barely heard them.

Shylif sat with him in companionable silence as they sailed back to the raft of cities. Somehow this easy quiet made Toby decide to trust the older man in a way he’d never quite managed with talkative Ammond. When they reached the city spheres and docked, Toby was able to unload his share of crates himself and took payment on the spot from Shylif.

Once they were out of their suits and the dock was behind them, Shylif said, “Give me a call tomorrow. I’ll show you how to find bots that want to subcontract.”

Toby grinned. “Sounds good. And Shy, thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Seriously, don’t let Corva know.” He rolled his eyes. “I’ll talk her around. But give me a few days.”

“Thanks.”

In a kind of daze, he walked out of the warehouse district and rode an escalator up into the city. Orpheus chittered and danced about, obviously glad to be back on what passed here for solid ground. Toby smiled vaguely at him, but his gaze kept drifting. He was thinking about how vastly different the locksteps might be and how strangely familiar this one seemed. The people, the buildings … it was all bizarre and alien, this bubble city and the civilization it cradled—but there remained that strange familiarity.

It hit him when a woman passed him wearing a completely recognizable outfit of tunic and leggings. He spun, staring at her as she receded, and then he swore, and laughed, and swore again.

He’d seen that apparel just a couple months ago. In fact, he’d helped to design it.

In creating Lockstep 360/1, his brother Peter hadn’t merely been inspired by the culture, customs and technologies of the gameworld he and Toby had created together.

Lockstep 360/1 was Consensus.