Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-03

by Penny Publications

"Corva Keishion of Thisbe sent me," Toby said. "Who're you?"

  "Where is she!" The young man stepped forward and half-raised his arms, maybe to grab Toby's arms. The combat bots shifted, and he didn't complete the gesture, but said, "She's my sister. I'm Halen."

  The other men had fallen silent; they were looking around themselves in a new way—appraising, even hopeful. "We're outside the lockstep," said one.

  "You're in the Weekly," corrected Toby. He pointed at the distant lantern-sphere hanging kilometers overhead. "Or, you will be, as soon as we get up there."

  "But they won't have us!" It was the first man who'd spoken. He had the same wealthy air that Ammond had exhibited, and he had a whole team of bots to carry his luggage. "It doesn't matter if it's 360 or the Weekly. We're banned for twelve months!"

  "You were," said Toby. He was beginning to enjoy this. "As to the Weekly—leave it to me."

  "And who are you?" demanded Halen.

  "Somebody whose life your sister saved." It looked like the last elevator had unloaded, and the lounge was now full of scared but defiant-looking people.

  Toby turned to the five men who'd confronted him. "Can you keep a lid on things here for an hour? There's an... important reunion I want to arrange."

  They glanced at one another, and then a sly grin appeared here, a brusque nod over there. "You're going to take us into the Weekly?" said the rich-looking one. "We could visit it back on Thisbe, but not stay or pass through—"

  "This time is different." I hope. Toby didn't know what power he might have over the Weekly's government, but unloading the passengers into the Weekly had been part of Corva's original plan. She must think it would work.

  "Come on," he said to Halen, and stepped into the fearsome cold of a connecting corridor. As they walked Toby couldn't help glancing over at Corva's brother. He was tall and strong looking. Toby was acutely aware of how pale and scrawny he looked in comparison. What did Corva see when she looked at him? Certainly something substandard, if Halen was what she was used to.

  "Where is she?" her brother repeated. "And how did you wake us up in the middle of winter?"

  "I've... got an interface to the McGonigal clocks," Toby told him as they slid carefully down an ice-sheeted ramp. "I was able to override them."

  "But—but nobody's ever been able to do that! How—" Halen had breathed the dangerously cold air too deeply, and started coughing.

  "It's a long story. I'll let your sister tell you."

  The McGonigal bots let them into the high-security area and Toby led Halen to the chamber where Kenani had imprisoned him and the others. When he opened the door Orpheus came bounding up and in his usual style, climbed Toby with his claws out; luckily he was in the suit, which the denner's claws wouldn't penetrate. Still, Toby said, "Hey, watch it!" and only when he had the denner settled on his shoulder did he see it wasn't just the denners who were awake. Shylif and Jaysir stood over Kenani's bed. Shylif was pensively sipping a steaming cup of something. And Halen... where had he gone?

  Corva sat on a crate in the next room, one hand tightly clutching her oval locket. Halen knelt in front of her, and was speaking to her in an insistent way. Toby hesitated a moment in the doorway, then backed away to give them their privacy.

  Jaysir noticed and grinned. "You did this, didn't you? But how?"

  "Nothing magical," mumbled Toby, trying, while trying not to be obvious about it, to eavesdrop on Corva and Halen. Distractedly, he continued, "I just set Orpheus's clock before we were separated. He woke me up."

  Jay nodded, and a grin battled against Shylif's serious demeanor. "But your bed wouldn't have let him do it," said Jaysir. "Not unless you overrode that. Ours too."

  Toby shrugged. "The secret was out the instant I reprogrammed the passenger unit. I can't stop the McGonigal network from broadcasting my presence—it already did it, seven years ago."

  Of course, Peter and Evayne had already known. Were there others, though, like Kenani, for whom the news would just be arriving? He didn't know how public the login details on the beds were. Or who might be monitoring them.

  He stole a look at Corva and her brother. She seemed heartbroken. Why? Did Halen seem older? She'd spent all her effort to rescue him and the rest of her family, but now that it had actually happened, she would be faced with the reality of how time had already altered them.

  Had it been too late all along? What was lost in time couldn't be returned, and here in the locksteps, any innocent sleep might cleave you from those you loved by years, by generations. Toby hugged himself and turned away again, tears starting in his eyes. Finding a bench (all its frost gone now, he noticed with some remote part of his attention), he sat.

  He gathered Orpheus into his lap, and sat there hunched over until murmured conversation arose behind him, then suddenly realized that the talking was coming from right behind him. He turned to find Corva, Halen, and Jaysir standing there. They were all looking at him. "What?"

  "Toby," said Corva, alarm sharpening her voice.

  "Where's Shylif?"

  People were yelling in the passenger lounge. As Toby and the others ran in he saw that a knot had formed over by the elevator doors; someone there was bellowing louder than anybody else. Around this cyclonic eye, other passengers milled like frightened clouds. The bots he'd left to guard the place were ignoring the chaos; as long as nobody tried to leave the lounge, they had no orders.

  "Coley!" It was Shylif's voice, but transformed by rage into that of a stranger. "Sebastine Coley?"

  Toby pushed his way through the encircling crowd, to find one man standing in the open space at its center. Shylif was glaring down, fists balled, at a man who crouched at his feet. "Please—" this man whimpered. "I'm not—"

  "You're Coley! You said you were Coley!" Shylif's denner, Shadoweye, was slinking back and forth behind Shylif's feet, wailing and hissing. His tail was fluffed out, like a scared cat's would be.

  "Shylif, stop!" Corva stepped unafraid into the ring. "You don't want to do this."

  He spared her an indifferent glance. "I've waited forty years to do this." He reached for the man at his feet.

  "He's not Sebastine Coley!"

  The voice was thin, barely audible over the jumble of voices surrounding them. But Shylif paused and looked over.

  "He's not Sebastine Coley," repeated the very old man who stood, his weak legs braced by an exo, with a group of women and children.

  "I am."

  Shylif blinked at him—and in that moment of indecision, Toby suddenly realized what he should have been doing all along. "Bots! Restrain this man!" Shylif straightened and began to turn, but the security bots were faster and he was lifted off his feet before he could even uncurl his fists.

  Toby went to stand next to Corva. He offered his hand to the man on the floor, who hesitated, then took it.

  "I... I'm Miles Coley," he said, ducking his head and looking around at everyone but Shylif. "This man said he was looking for a Coley, and I said, 'I'm a Coley.' Then he knocked me down!"

  Toby turned to the old man. "You're Sebastine Coley?"

  "He's my grandfather," said Miles in a surprised tone. "Grand-dad, what's this about?"

  "I... I don't—" But the old man wouldn't look at them.

  "You know." It was Shylif, still straining against the implacable grip of the security bot that held him. "Her name was Ouline. You stole her from Nessus."

  "Ah. Ah!" The old man suddenly wilted, and he would have fallen over had his exo not compensated to prop him up.

  "You lured her into the lockstep fortress and stole thirty years from her—from me!" Shadoweye was clawing at the security bot's ankles, wailing. The bot ignored the denner, but Corva knelt down and clucked at him. Reluctantly, he climbed into her arms.

  Miles Coley had joined his wife and daughters; they formed a protective wall in front of the old man. One of the women was comforting Sebastine, who had burst into tears at Shylif's accusation.

  Shylif's struggles had slowed. It
seemed it had begun to dawn on him that he wasn't facing the callous young man who'd stolen his life, but a pale ghost at the end of his own. He stared at Coley, and as he stilled, Corva came to him and let Shadoweye slide onto the metal shelf of the security bot's enclosing arm. Shad oweye butted the underside of Shylif's chin, but for the moment, he was ignored.

  "She died, Coley," he murmured. "She took her own life."

  The old man's sobs intensified. His grandson gaped in astonishment, turning from him to Shylif and back again. "Grand-dad? Granddad, what's this man saying?"

  Coley stammered. The moment stretched, and though all eyes were on this scene, Toby knew that the long unfolding of the drama behind it wasn't going to be resolved in the next minute, or the next day. He held up his hand.

  "We're going to deal with this, but we can't do it here," he announced. "We have to get out of here while we can."

  There was a startled silence, and then people's gazes began to shift from Coley and Shylif, to Toby. One of the men he'd spoken to earlier said, "Where is it we're going, anyway?"

  "Back to Thisbe," Toby told them, "to reset your clocks.

  "But to get there, first of all we're going to have to go through the Weekly."

  Orpheus rode Toby's shoulder as they strode under geodesic glass ceilings that revealed black skies and ahead, the looming lantern-glow of a city-sphere. This was the one source of light in Wallop's cloud-continent; the passages they'd come through were eerie and silent, and though he'd ordered heat in the main thoroughfares that led to the lit city, now and then he caught glimpses of side-corridors where hoar frost still painted the walls, and where the floors were drifted with oxygen snow.

  Though still weak, Orpheus fired off happy emoticons and his head bobbed back and forth as they reached the outskirts of the Weekly lockstep. Toby should have felt similarly triumphant—he'd just escaped one of the lockstep's most feared cultural enforcers, after all, and had rescued an entire shipload of people to boot.

  The encounter between Shylif and Sebastine Coley had deeply disturbed him, however. Not just for its own sake, but because it made him wonder, even more, what it would be like when and if he ever set eyes on his own brother and sister. Lockstep time wrenched you back and forth, and after Shylif's experience he was beginning to realize just how unpredictable and brutal it could be.

  Luckily no one approached him during the long walk through the frozen utility corridors linking the docks to the Weekly. Once they'd learned where they were going and how to get there, the exhausted and fearful passengers had gathered their things and marched in that direction, talking among themselves. They seemed a bit afraid of Toby, and no wonder since they didn't know who he was; and Corva and her brother had their heads together in excited conversation. Their circle entirely excluded Toby.

  Shylif walked, head down and eyes glazed, with two bots accompanying him. A few steps away, Sebastine Coley walked in much the same stance, while his family fluttered nervously behind him.

  It took a while to get through the airlocks. These were set up to protect the Weeklies from the dangerous cold and toxic air permeating the rest of the continent, and normally nobody came through them until Jubilee, which happened every four weeks, local time. Visitors from 360/1 being unexpected in between-times, bots and humans were now working furiously on the far side of the transparent glass walls, trying to get more doors to work. Meanwhile a trickle of humans cycled through, three or four at a time.

  There was a lot of handwaving and emotional conversation happening with the workers and security people on the other side. The cover story Corva had come up with was that an explosion had vented some of the 360/1 habitats. Those gesticulating men and women had better be sticking to that story: they'd be telling the Weeklies that the bots who watched over the 360/1 cities during their long sleeps had woken a small army of emergency drones and backup systems when they detected a blast, and had evacuated everybody from the affected area. There was a problem with the power, though, and they were unable to find enough safe beds for the residents of one particular neighborhood. So, here they were, arriving at the airlocks to the Weekly lockstep with just a few household bots and some luggage.

  The story should hold long enough for them to pass through the Weekly and take passage back to Thisbe—which seemed to be most people's plan. It helped that these 'refugees' were accompanied by numerous official 360 bots, including an impressive military escort. When Toby finally cycled through a lock himself, he left that escort behind, but even so nobody asked him any questions.

  The hubbub was subsiding by the time the last bots brought their masters' luggage through the locks. Many of the refugees had bulled their way through the emergency responders and by now had lost themselves in the crowds of the city. That was a good idea, Toby thought. Since nobody seemed to need him anymore, least of all Corva Keishion, he eventually screwed up his courage and began walking into the tiered city himself. He'd find some sort of job, make some cash, and figure out how to get to Destrier. That had been the plan. It needed to be the plan again.

  "Where do you think you're going?"

  He turned to find Corva glaring at him. She was clutching her brother's arm, but all her attention was on Toby, and Wrecks sat at her feet glaring down his nose in imitation of his mistress.

  "You got what you wanted," he said. To his own surprise, Toby found himself feeling resentful and, before he thought about it, added, "though you nearly got us all killed doing it."

  "So you admit your sister would have killed us?"

  He flushed angrily and turned away. "Goodbye, Corva."

  "Toby, wait!"

  He didn't stop but she ran to his side. He waited for the next cutting comment.

  "I'm... I'm sorry," she said.

  He stopped, blinked at her.

  Corva stood with one foot twisted, toeing the pavement she was staring at. Her hands were clutched, all knuckle. Wrecks sat on his haunches, watching this performance in obvious surprise. "You didn't have to do any of the things you did," she said. "I know you risked everything for people you'd never even met. And setting Orpheus's alarm like you did— that was a terrible risk you both took and I'm just... I'm amazed at it all, that's all."

  He'd never seen her like this. "You asked," he said. "I helped, is all." Oh, but he knew that wasn't all, not by a long shot. The thing was, Toby still hadn't absorbed the implications of what he'd just done. Walking away right now would probably have been best. He needed time to work through it all. Strangely, though, now that he had Corva's gratitude he was finding it made him even more uncomfortable than the indifference of her countrymen.

  He had to laugh at his own words. "I guess it was kind of a super-hero thing to do. It's just... that's not me, Corva."

  "I know. It wasn't me, a year ago, either."

  "Corva Keishion, exchange student," he said with a smile.

  "And then subcontractor to bots, then stowaway, criminal, revolutionary..." She shook her head ruefully. "I could try to say that one thing led to another, but that really doesn't begin to describe it."

  Now they both laughed. After a moment, though, Toby's smile faded. "What are you going to do now? Go back to Thisbe?"

  "I guess," she said. "Though, you know, the basic problem remains. The blockade... the punishment frequency."

  "I can't reset your whole world's clock."

  She looked him in the eye, and that steely look was back in hers. "Are you sure about that?"

  "No. I don't know. I haven't exactly had time to find out what I can or can't do. But anyway—" he turned away from her again, "I don't want to."

  "I get it," she said stiffly. "You don't want to take on your brother and sister."

  It wasn't that at all. The fact was, waking these people, evading Nathan Kenani and taking over the lockstep bots—it had all been way too easy. Disturbingly easy. It was like playing Consensus in God mode, except that this was reality. You could blow up whole planets without a second thought in the game. Nearly
anything he did with such powers in Lockstep 360/1 was bound to hurt somebody.

  "Look, why should I stick my nose into any of this?" he demanded. "I don't know anything about anything here, you said so yourself the first time we met. I've been trying to catch up, but how do you catch up? It's impossible. Now you're asking me to rejig time for an entire world? How am I supposed to tell if that's a good thing to do or an evil thing to do?

  "Corva, if I can't tell, then I'm not doing it. That's all there is to it."

  At some point in the argument Corva's brother had come up to them, and a small half-circle of refugees from Thisbe had gathered a few more paces back. "You're right," said Halen, putting his hand on Corva's arm. "You have no reason to take our word for anything.

  "Why don't you see for yourself?"

  Toby grimaced. "By going to Thisbe with you, I suppose?"

  Halen's lips twitched into a smile, with the same reluctance Toby saw in Corva. "If you're feeling insecure," he said, "you can bring that little bot army of yours."

  "But really," said Corva, "how are you planning on getting to Destrier? Evayne and Peter have to know that's where you're headed. They'll be waiting for you with an army of their own, and it won't be one you can switch off."

  "And you can get me there?"

  "Maybe. If you help Thisbe, you'll have an entire planet on your side."

  Corva had lowered her voice and was glancing around, and Toby was also growing uneasy with the listeners. He started walking, and she and her brother fell into step beside him. Wrecks was gamboling around Corva's feet and attracting a fair amount of attention from passersby; but they soon left her curious countrymen behind, and the crowds of the Weekly were diverse and strange enough that the three of them didn't really stand out.

  Once they were out of earshot of the commotion around the airlocks, Toby said, "How much have you told them? Your friends from the ship."

  "Obviously I told Halen. Some of the others know you brought us out of hibernation early, but not how. They might suspect, but the whole idea of you being a real McGonigal is so..."

  "You think they'll figure it out when I re-tune your whole planet's frequency?"