Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-03

by Penny Publications

  "For what?"

  "For using you the way I did. For being mean. I just... didn't think I could trust you."

  "But you can."

  She was silent. Then she pulled away.

  "Toby, we have to face them some time. For me, it's today I guess. For you... do you really know what'll happen when you do that?"

  He clasped his hands and looked down.

  "No. I guess not."

  "Then don't make any promises, okay?"

  Fair enough, he thought, though her words had hurt him. He stood up briskly. "Come on. They're waiting for you. I think you need to make the first move."

  "And... how I feel? About seeing them so different?"

  He laughed shortly. "Maybe you should hide that for a day or so. See how it goes."

  Corva stood too, and blew out a deep breath. Then she smiled. "Nobody else could have said that to me, but maybe you're right. I'll pretend for a day and then... see."

  They almost joined hands, but she turned away first, and they went downstairs.

  The Keishions were loud. They had definite opinions about everything, and every last one of them needed to be right all the time. Their arguments started at breakfast, continued all day, and spilled out onto the lawns and echoed through the forest around the house. At first, Toby just stayed out of the way, but gradually he realized that they appreciated his opinions and he began to relax. Most importantly, they knew he was an ignoramus when it came to the lockstep worlds, so he felt comfortable asking them the dumbest questions— about Thisbe, the locksteps, about their family, and sometimes—when he could be nonchalant about it—Corva.

  Like him, she was the eldest—or, had been. She still won the most arguments and the others deferred to her despite the age gap. What she had lost to them in time, she'd more than made up in experience.

  Corva was no help at all during his first few days in the house; she was too busy getting reacquainted with everybody else. Halen hung around the edges, brooding and watching Toby. Meanwhile, outside permanent pitched-battle of the Keishion household, Thisbe was fully awake now and working hard to catch up with the damage from the frequency-shift that Peter had wrought on it.

  Toby found it natural to help the bots clearing the underbrush and fixing years of storm damage. Orpheus spent all day outside anyway, and Toby loved the fresh air too, but also in some ways it was like being back on Sedna, where there had always been building or repair work to be done. He loved fixing stuff and while doing this absorbing work, he could completely forget his troubles for hours at a time.

  (Although, on those rare occasions when the "sun" changed color, he came crashing back to reality, at least for a minute or two.)

  Gradually, he noticed that Corva was often nearby while he was working. She would bring him water, or simply be seen reading in the crook of a tree while he was hacking at the underbrush. Then, she began perching, not far off, on a newly-repaired wall or a lawn chair she'd dragged over; and since, well, they were in the same space anyway... they talked.

  "I had a denner when I was growing up," she said as they watched Wrecks and Orpheus chase each other around the ragged, but finally mowed, lawn. "Chauncey was his name. I was pretty lonely at first when I went off to school, so I looked into getting another one, but you couldn't get them on Wallop. I wasn't going to let that stop me so I kept asking people and pushing, and that's how I found out about these people on Lowdown who bred them."

  Toby was startled, and then it all made sense. "Ammond and Persea!" They'd bred denners.

  She nodded. "They owned the operation, they didn't do it themselves. They had them implanted with the cicada-bed tech for shady customers. Total gray-ware stuff, it's just barely acceptable to the lockstep monitors. Anyway, I had no intention of using Wrecks that way, it seemed wrong, but these were the only denners you could get. Then the blockade happened. My money got cut off, I couldn't go home, then I found out that Halen had tried to run the blockade and was trapped in stasis. I had to sell my bots for food, I couldn't afford to travel... but I'd heard about the stowaways when I got Wrecks."

  She told Toby how she'd met Shylif, and how they'd stowed away on a flight back to Lowdown, where, with the last of her money, she'd bought Orpheus. "He was for Halen, you see. I had this crazy idea of sneaking into the quarantined ship and getting him to wake Halen up. I had no idea how it was going to work, but I was damnwell going to try."

  So far, this made sense. Toby watched the denners roll around, play-fighting, while he thought through what had happened. "But how did you find out about me? Or did you even know who I was?"

  "Actually, we had a pretty good idea. See, we were stowaways. We were living a bit off-frequency anyway, and spending time in spaceports and warehouses. So, we were watching when Ammond's tug bots brought down your ship. They did it a week before everybody was supposed to wake up; but we were already awake, 'cause we'd set the denners' alarms to get us up well before there would be people nosing about. So we saw them shrouding this incredibly old, radiation-fried ship in orange plastic sheeting, and walling it up in a warehouse space off in a far corner of Ammond's operation. And then we saw them bring you out.

  "I was really curious at that point, so I looked up the lettering on the side of your ship. I expected to get a hit off the lockstep ship registry, but instead, all the hits were from books on ancient mythology...."

  He frowned in thought. "So when I saw you in the courtyard that first day..."

  "I was there to buy Orpheus—but I was also there to look for the boy we'd seen them take out of the ship. And when you came running out I freaked. First, 'cause I knew who you might be, and second, because Ammond's guards had told me they'd cut off my nose if they caught me sneaking about."

  He nodded. It all made sense. "And when you woke me up on the way to Little Auriga?"

  "You'd only just gone under. Your hibernation was still reversible—like in the boat, remember? Oh, you mean how did I get to you?" She shook her head quickly. "Ammond thinks of himself as a criminal mastermind, but his security's really lame. Thisbe is habitable all the time," she said, gesturing around at the rich trees and long grass, "and there's other locksteps here. We are good at security, at locks and vaults and alarms. We have to be. So Shylif and I didn't have much trouble breaking in while your ship was on the ground waiting for launch clearance. Shylif had already taught me how to break into a ship; you need to know how to do that if you're going to be a decent stowaway. I needed to know how, anyway, if I was going to get Orpheus to Halen."

  "But you followed me to Little Auriga. You didn't have to."

  She looked uncomfortable. "When I woke you up to warn you, it didn't seem like you'd understood me. You were all dopey and 'huh?' So... we argued about it and decided to go after you."

  "'Cause I was a McGonigal, and worth a lot?"

  She glared at him. "'Cause I thought they were going to kill you. Or worse."

  "Worse, yeah." He shuddered. "Thank you. Though, really, it was Orpheus rapping on my window who showed me the way out."

  She laughed. "Anyway, I'm just glad it's over. I suppose it's what they call an adventure, but to me it was just one long panic attack. If that's what an adventure's like, I never want another one."

  Away on the other side of the lawn, Halen was chatting with one of the neighbors. Toby nodded at him. "Halen never got his, you know."

  "His what?"

  "His adventure. He never got to have it. He started out to save you, and you ended up saving him instead. He never even got a proper look at Wallop. Went from ship to ship, sleep to sleep, and now he's back here."

  Corva gaped at Toby. "What are you trying to say? That he's disappointed? Mad at me for saving him?" Toby shrugged. "Oh, come on. Is that how boys think about these things?"

  He nodded. "That is how boys think about these things."

  "Well, it's stupid."

  She changed the subject, and soon Toby went back to working with the bots. After that, though, they spent a l
ot of time together. And they talked.

  The rhythm of life in the locksteps was starting to become clear to him, and talking to Corva helped give the abstractions flesh and blood. She described the parties that happened at the end of every turn—every month, that is, by human reckoning. Whatever resources the household, or the city or planet hadn't used during its four weeks awake had to be able to hibernate, or it had to be used up. Some things were too fragile or temporary by nature to winter over. So, you used up all the food in the fridge, and broke up, burned, or built mad sculptures out of other transient things. In some places the neighbors vied for extravagance and shock value—although, since the ritual happened so frequently, some people just ignored it and went to bed early, trusting the household bots to clear away the deteriorated and decayed objects by the next waking.

  More ceremony was lavished on people who might be traveling. At the very least you wouldn't see them for a month. If they were on their way to the other side of the lockstep, or somewhere exotic like Earth or Barsoom, then it might be a year or more. Leavetaking parties were major events in any neighborhood.

  Next morning—at start-of-turn—the trees were bigger, or completely cut down, and even entire landforms like hills might have shifted slightly. The climate might be different, too—Thisbe's was none too stable. Most importantly on such mornings, though, was the fact that ships from a thousand worlds crowded the skies.

  Corva talked about visiting the port on the dawn of a new turn and watching exotic, weirdly dressed strangers step blinking into the lurid daylight of her planet. They brought crafts and gifts as alien as themselves, and stories and pictures from around the lockstep and beyond.

  The longer a world slept, the more ships could appear during that special night. As Toby had learned, if you doubled your sleep you would far more than double the number of worlds whose ships could reach you in that time. Modern fusion or fission-fragment rockets could get you about half a light-year in thirty years, and nomad planets were spaced about one every tenth of a light-year in this part of the galaxy. A world that slept for three decades couldn't visit just five times the number of worlds as one that wintered over for one-fifth the time; it could visit five hundred more. The longer you slept, the more opportunities for trade you'd have.

  Lockstep 360/1 was about five light-years across, and within that space there were more than seventy thousand worlds, ranging from little moon-sized ice balls to a couple of planets as big as Jupiter. All were easy to get to from even the smallest outpost, provided you could spend thirty years at a time accumulating fuel for the journey and wintered over.

  And yet, Thisbe had gone against the sensible rules of the locksteps and been punished for it. The blockade remained.

  Corva patiently explained why. "Thisbe's really a fast world. See," she said, pointing to where some bots were repairing a roof, "there's a huge cost in wear and tear to wintering over here. There's a trade-off between how much you can produce while you were awake, and how little you'll consume if you slept longer. There's also a trade-off between the bigger manufacturing and agriculture potential of fast worlds like this, and the bigger trading opportunities you get if you winter over longer. There're other locksteps on Thisbe, you know, and they get by on higher frequencies 'cause fast worlds like this do better at manufacturing than trade."

  Corva took Toby on walks through the neighborhood, where some houses where sealed up and silent. These were neighbors she only saw on jubilee, which only happened once or twice a year. They were the ones who were more often awake, though—it was really Corva and her people who were usually the silent, sealed-up mysteries.

  During one of these walks she told Toby what had happened. "The government wanted our jubilees to synchronize with more of the other locksteps. Those locksteps wanted it too. They don't use McGonigal cicada beds," she added, nodding at a silent estate whose lawns were overgrown with weeds and young trees. "So there was a lot of talk about scrapping our beds and using theirs. That would cost a huge amount, but more importantly we'd break the lockstep agreement."

  "What's that?" He'd read enough to know it was some sort of service agreement between the McGonigals and the 360 worlds.

  "The agreement says we promise not to change the frequency except during emergencies. In return, we get access to all the 360-toone worlds without port taxes, immigration reviews, and all that. Dad calls it a 'level playing field.' It's useful, 'cause among other things it lets all the worlds trade using the same currency and know what its value is from turn to turn.

  "The government thought of a way to bend the rules. The cicada beds all have their own timers, of course, but they're coordinated by a timing signal sent from centralized servers. One of those is here, on Thisbe, and it sets the exact frequency and times for a couple hundred worlds whose only connection to the rest of the lockstep is through us. We're the gateway. If we hack our timer to just shift our frequency a little—add a year here, drop one there—we could go into jubilee with our neighbors a lot more often. Barsoom might complain, but they wouldn't come down on us. And since we were the server for all those other worlds, they'd follow us. There's a whole bunch of different locksteps near the Laser Wastes that would come into jubilee. So with one stroke Thisbe could double its trade potential."

  Toby nodded. It was brilliant. That overgrown estate, normally silent, would be awake more often. More ships would crowd the sky. "It's perfect! Why would it be a problem?"

  "If they let us get away with time-shifting, everybody might try it. Then there'd be chaos, because the value of money couldn't be predicted anymore and ships leaving port for their furthest trading partners couldn't be guaranteed to get there in time. What happens if I've got a crucial trading trip planned with a world that's a twenty-nine-year journey away, and they decide to slip their schedule and come awake after twenty-seven years so they can jubilee with somebody else? I get there and they're wintered over. I have to wait another turn to do my trading with them. Instead of one month lockstep-time, that trip's taken at least two. It's crazy."

  He was puzzled. "You think your people were wrong to do what they did?"

  "Yes!" She threw up her hands in frustration. "It was stupid. But it's more stupid what Barsoom did to punish us! Way too extreme."

  He had to agree with that. Corva had lost eight years of her family's lives to the blockade, and could have lost four more. Shifting Thisbe's frequency into high gear like this was a brutal over-reaction. The global economy was depressed, with resources that normally could accumulate for decades being used up faster than they could be renewed. Trades that had happened once a month now only occurred every year, and the jubilees were totally screwed up.

  "I'm surprised you put up with it," he said. "Better to leave the lockstep entirely than suffer like this."

  "If only it were that easy," she said. "Leave three-sixty and we slash our trading partners. If we permanently sped up we'd lost dozens or hundreds of worlds as next-day neighbors. But we can't go on this way, either. It's unfair. It's evil."

  So, there it was. She didn't say the words, but Toby heard them in his head as in her voice: You're a McGonigal, maybe you can stop this. He had no idea whether he had the power, yet also unspoken was another accusation: the fault lay not with the lockstep system, but with the fact that it was ruled by the McGonigals.

  The peaceful setting, combined with Corva's comment about her adventure being over, had been making Toby wonder: could his own be over too? If he'd escaped Nathan Kenani, maybe he'd escaped Evayne as well... and maybe he didn't need to ever confront her or Peter. They were different people now; his beloved brother and sister were lost forever to time. Wouldn't the sensible thing be to just accept that, and find a life for himself in this wondrous and strange world his family had built while he slept? But things were far from perfect here. Corva was right; what was happening to Thisbe was unfair.

  It was hilarious in a way. Evayne and Peter were acting up again. It was time for the eldest brother to clean
up the mess as he had so many times in the past. He had to laugh.

  "What's so funny?" She sent him one of her special glares. Toby shook his head.

  "It's all been going by too fast for me to keep up," he said. "But that's got to change.

  "It's time I started planning the next turn."

  14

  Shylif went everywhere now with a guard of McGonigal bots. These were entirely under Toby's control, and he knew it; yet he hadn't complained. In fact, he seemed oddly cheerful, despite the fact that Toby—and the Thisbe government—were keeping him from confronting Sebastine Coley again. Coley's whereabouts were known, but so far, the Thisbe authorities couldn't charge him with anything. The alleged crime had taken place on another world, and thousands of years ago now, in real-time terms. The odds of Shylif achieving actual justice seemed very long indeed.

  Yet he'd come to see Toby one morning and said nothing about any of that. On the contrary, he'd volunteered to help Toby catch up on his history. After all, as he'd put it, "I had to do all this reading too, once."

  Thisbe's public records were open to Toby, and he'd finally summoned the courage to confront those images and videos of his brother and sister taken after he left. After what he'd just done on Wallop, it seemed silly to keep avoiding a few pictures. Yet, as the days passed and he combed through old news stories, he found very little that made the new Peter and Evayne come to life for him.

  "Look at this!" he said in exasperation. He and Shylif had their glasses on and were sharing a set of research windows. "Says here, about half the original Sedna colonists are still alive—which I kind of figured after meeting Kenani. I mean, it's been forty years since I left, after all. You'd think they would have written memoirs, made documentaries, said something about the early years."

  "Not if they're being threatened," Shylif pointed out reasonably. "Obviously, the chairman wants to keep his secrets."