Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-03

by Penny Publications

  All of this was familiar to Toby, because he and Peter had explored these possibilities. The plan was that Sedna would eventually become a full-fledged nation, and Father had emphasized that it would need a well-designed government. This was a major reason their parents had tolerated the many hours Toby and Peter spent in Consensus.

  Now, having admitted he could directly control Thisbe's frequency, Toby tried to gauge the reaction among the politicians. They were all stone-faced or smiling, of course; luckily the political translation layer they'd given him gave a different view through his glasses. Some of the politicos were literally turning green—not with envy, but with approval, which subtitles translated in various ways: that fellow over there was happy that Toby was telling the truth, while the woman to the left of him had just had her worst predictions confirmed. Other ministers were yellow, still others crimson, and several had turned black, apparently signifying that they were not psycho-culturally capable of actually absorbing the meaning of what he'd just said.

  Above them all, the interface was showing a disk-like balance of power meter, which was currently tilting around like a top. Everything was in play, apparently.

  This was all amazing and showed how far government had come since his day. To Toby, though, it just confirmed something that had been obvious since the day he awoke here: the whole Consensus plan had been flawed.

  Thisbe could organize its government however it wanted. It didn't matter, if private individuals like the McGonigals controlled just one critical utility. On Thisbe, they controlled time itself.

  "I can change the lockstep frequency," he continued once the power meter had stabilized a bit. "But I can't give the power to do that to anyone else. It's locked to me, somehow."

  They all nodded politely and orderly waves of change moved through the political model—except that somebody somewhere said, sarcastically, "That's convenient."

  Toby looked for whoever had spoken. Finally, somebody who wasn't going to be creepily polite! "Probably designed to keep us alive," he said. "Otherwise, you could torture me into giving you super-user status then kill me." Or, you could just neuroshackle me. He really hoped they wouldn't think of that.

  "Sound planning." The speaker was an elderly gentleman with a flat face and high cheekbones, and a dry, sardonic voice. Through the glasses, he appeared amber-colored right now, and his subtitle read LONG SEVILLE, MINISTER OF SECURITY.

  "Look, I'd give you all super-user access if I could," said Toby. "This isn't where I want to be right now. I just want to get to Destrier and find my mom..."

  The entire assembly had turned black and red and green, except for a couple of amber hold-outs. One was Long Seville.

  Toby appealed to him. "What did I say?"

  The old man sighed and sat back, crossing his arms. "You, the Emperor of Time, just announced that you intend to fulfill the ancient prophecy by throwing open the gates of time itself and awakening the Mother of All. What did you expect to happen?"

  "It's my family," he said sullenly. "I just want to be reunited with them."

  The old man took off his glasses. Toby frowned, then took off his own. Freed from the intricate political interface, they were now just two people seated at a table. Everybody else was talking, gesturing, looking around inside a shared virtual space. It was as if Toby and this minister were in their own little bubble of reality.

  "Not supposed to do this," Long said, holding up the glasses, "but you're obviously new to our way of doing things. Listen, kid, most of the room didn't even hear what you just said, because their translation systems couldn't figure out a way to have it make sense in their worldview. Thisbe's a pretty sophisticated world, but everybody here was still raised on the myths and legends about you. For the most part these people don't believe them, but you just said they were true! What you have to do now is back up and start over, only this time, please try to avoid pushing any religious buttons, would you?"

  They put their glasses back on and Toby said, "What I meant was... I don't want to run the lockstep. Everybody has these ideas about what I'm going to do now that I'm back, but nobody's thought to consult me about them."

  This got through, largely. Encouraged, he continued, "I know my brother changed your frequency. That was wrong, and I'll talk to him about it when I see him. I'll reset it for you." He turned to smile at Corva, who was watching him stone-faced. "All I ask in return is a little help with..." Was there any way he could say, "being reunited with my family" without pressing those "religious buttons"? "... with settling in to my new life."

  They heard that. The interface's feedback layer flooded him with restatements of his own words: he knew what he'd just said, now the interface was telling him what each minister had heard. Literally in other words, it told him what he'd said meant to them after being filtered through their stated expectations and hopes, known prejudices and biases, cognitive deficits and so on. The interface proposed a set of rewordings that it thought would custom-translate his meaning for them, but it was a bewildering jumble that he had no time to review. He signaled yes to it and the rewordings went out.

  This politics stuff was harder than it had seemed in Consensus. It still came down to one thing, though. They were haggling.

  "Look, I was told Evayne's on her way here, but then everybody clammed up about it. I need to know. Is she coming? When's she going to get here? Can I meet with her? Or is that... a bad idea?"

  Some of this got through. The political interface swirled through a whole spectrum of colors and the balance of power tipped and swung for a few seconds. Translations and interpretations flew back and forth, and then the whole room stabilized green.

  Long Seville nodded and stood up. "Can we get a... yes, thanks," he added as a set of windows opened in the interface. They were all dark, but if Toby squinted he could make out little points of light in one.

  "This," said Long, "is a telescope view into Sagittarius. Those bright stars there... aren't stars. They're the engine-flares of a whole fleet of ships. They're aiming for a full-stop at Thisbe, and there's little doubt who's leading them."

  Toby was unconvinced; he supposed he was giving off subtle body-stance and facial cues that would make him look amber right now. "How do you know it's her?"

  "Because we'd been tracking these dots. They were on their way to Wallop, but they changed course right about the time you left."

  "Ah. How many ships?"

  "A hundred forty."

  They couldn't be that big, individually... but still, each one could have the nuclear power to wipe out a few cities."

  Toby stared at the display. He, Peter and Evayne had deployed fleets like this in Consensus many times. Of course, that had been a fantasy world of faster-than-light travel. Still, he remembered Evayne's attitude toward military solutions. She'd never hesitated.

  Long was talking, but Toby wasn't listening any more. He was remembering how they'd divided empires between them, and how passionate Peter had been about the game. It wasn't a game to him, it was his lifeline, his only route to feeling secure about the world.

  Redesign it. Make it perfect. Then make sure it stayed that way.

  Evayne had been too young to understand Peter's passion, but she'd certainly picked up on it. And now? They both ruled a real empire, and they'd been doing it for decades. It wasn't a game anymore, the stakes were real, and the one person in the world who could destroy everything they had built had just reappeared.

  For the first time Toby got it—he understood how Evayne could really be on her way here to kill him. All he had to do was stop imagining the Evayne he'd known, the little girl, and imagine an older woman whose childhood was a blur now, and whose reality was rulership.

  His mouth dry, he said, "How does this work?"

  People had been talking, but his words stopped everyone.

  "What does she do when she gets here?"

  Long cleared his throat. "We'll be wintering over. The whole world will be hibernating, at least all the McGon
igal beds will be. Normally ships arrive at different times, and they all go dormant until start-of-turn. But in a case like this... you want to be awake first. So they'll take action as soon as they arrive."

  "What action?"

  He looked uncomfortable. "Land in force, wake us up, and demand that we turn you over."

  Toby nodded slowly. Advantage went to whoever woke first. "Can you just stay awake until she gets here?"

  "We can leave a military force awake, but it'll cost us. We could also set the force to wake up a month before she arrives. We've got a lot of non-McGonigal cicada beds, but not enough yet for a real defense. Either way, it ends in a confrontation, and she can threaten millions of innocent lives. Most of the population will be wintering over, so they'll be helpless."

  "Not if I wake everybody, though," said Toby.

  "Exactly."

  "And we know when she's going to get here?"

  "We know the minimum date she can arrive, yes."

  The tables would be turned if all of Thisbe was awake and ready when Evayne arrived. She had to know that, but she was coming anyway, and that made Toby uneasy. Did she really want to kill him? If not, then why bring a whole fleet with her? It made no sense.

  He looked around the room, and his gaze fell upon Halen Keishion. Corva's brother was watching him in return, and he had a smile on his face that could only be described as smug.

  There would be no more doubts about who he was if he changed Thisbe's frequency. Only a McGonigal could do that. There might be rumors and leaks coming from the Thisbe government now, but if he repelled Evayne word would spread instantly through the lockstep. People would wake at the next turn to the news that the Emperor of Time was returned. Sooner or later he would go to Destrier and wake up the Great Mother. And then time—or at least lockstep time—would come to an end.

  There was going to be panic and mass hysteria. Millions would flock to Toby's side, believing that somehow they would be saved by him. Others would side with Peter and Evayne, especially if they abandoned the myth and revealed the truth that Toby was just an ordinary person. There would be chaos and civil war if Thisbe didn't give Toby to Evayne. Halen knew this. He'd planned for it. And he was smiling.

  Toby had been bombarded with options, proposals, and facts and details for days now. On the third afternoon, mentally overloaded, he managed to break away from the crush of subdued but frantic officials for a few minutes, and hunkered down on his haunches to toss pebbles into the cold lake.

  "How am I supposed to know what to do?" he asked. "There's just too much to take in."

  "I disagree." It was Sol, invisible but audible, through the earpiece in Toby's glasses. About halfway through the day of meetings, Toby'd had the brilliant idea of waking his two favorite Consensus characters. Sol and Miranda had been listening in since then, but until this moment, they'd been silent.

  "What do you mean?" He picked up another smooth pebble, and gave it a toss that he hoped would skip it. It sank immediately.

  "Before all of this happened, you were following where your own research took you." Now it was Miranda, speaking in his other ear while Toby groped for another pebble. "You've been reviewing the records from the twentier. But they're not the only source available to you, you know."

  "Huh. I guess." Summoning the courage to watch the twentier's records had been exhausting. Because of how difficult those had been, he'd been holding off exploring the other aspect of lockstep life that had made him most uneasy. Obviously, he was out of time with that one.

  "Show me Destrier," he told the glasses.

  As always, the amount of information on offer was overwhelming; Toby had learned to start with kid's picture books. He found one in the Thisbe internet, and flipped to a page captioned THE GRAND PROCESSIONAL.

  In the picture, a sea of pilgrims—he recognized the robes he'd seen at the pilgrimage center on Wallop—were caught mid-shuffle as they moved down a vast, seemingly endless avenue. The scene was lit by a dozen or so little suns, probably orbital light platforms.

  The stones of this grand avenue were worn into smooth grooves by millennia of sliding feet. According to the book, they were replaced every few centuries. The stones of the pyramidal towers that lined the avenue were also replaced on a rotating schedule, such that out here, at least, nothing of the original building material remained. The holy city renewed itself like a living body, shedding cells continuously. Maybe, but everywhere Toby looked, the surfaces were smoothed and sculpted into natural-looking contours. It was uncanny, as if by wind and rain nature had sculpted something that looked like a city, yet was entirely natural.

  The book proudly told how this shuffling procession had been inching forward, reciting one particular chant without pause, for over ten thousand years. Supplicants from all over the galaxy came here; not all were human. They gave up fortunes, families, entire lives to endure decades, even centuries of travel, simply for the chance to down a coarse robe and parade, just once, down this avenue. Some fainted on the way; some died, just for the chance to spend a few precious minutes in the presence of the divine.

  The domes of the city looked out on a plain of dazzling white frost dotted with towering spires. It was illegal to walk there, and to the discerning eye that plain should have been far more awe-inspiring than this little road. Those spires had stood now, unmoved and unchanging, for eight billion years. Next to that, the centuries of wear and tear visible around the Great Mother's resting place were nothing. Less than an eyeblink.

  Sol and Miranda were reading along with Toby as he flipped through the book. "It says here," said Sol, "that all of Destrier experienced time within the 360/1 lockstep, except for the domes in these pictures. They're in real-time."

  "So those people there," and Miranda's forearm and finger appeared in Toby's virtual view as she pointed to a bald-headed man in one of the shots, "his family's been helping pilgrims into their robes for hundreds of generations."

  "Wow," muttered Sol. "So if we took the whole of written human history up until the day Toby first set foot on Sedna, this city's records are five times longer."

  "It's got its own languages, its own cuisine and modes of dress," said Miranda. "But the only reason the city exists at all is to guide visitors to the place where they can—how is it put here?—'glimpse the Great Mother resting forever in her crystal coffin.'"

  "Quiet now," Toby told them.

  The only photos of his mother's resting place were long shots taken from at least a kilometer away. Way over there, the procession entered a ramped slot that led down below the vast oval dome covering Mom's cicada bed. They would shuff le into a narrow chamber containing a single quartz window, through which the blurry shape of the Great Mother could be seen. From here, the dome appeared more like a rounded hill, though it was scrupulously kept clean of vegetation by the same hereditary keepers who served the pilgrims. The dome hadn't eroded, really, it had just settled gradually and imperceptibly over the centuries, even while the spires that surrounded it were fervently rebuilt.

  The landscape beyond the city might well be impossibly old compared to this place, yet Toby had never in his life seen a place that felt as ancient as this.

  And this, of course, was the point. This was the gift that Evayne and Peter had bestowed upon mankind: the gift of permanence.

  History roared ahead on the lit worlds. Civilizations rose, but they fell too, and maintaining one at a starfaring level was very difficult. On the worlds circling the stars of the Local Group, humanity and its various offspring had fallen many times in the past fourteen thousand years. Every time it did, the locksteps had been waiting, ready to pick it up again.

  360/1 and its siblings were like a seed bank; Toby got it now. They were insurance. They lived so slowly and were so dispersed that they were ignored. Yet they were always there; had always been there; and, as long as Evayne and Peter had their say, they always would be there.

  He took off the glasses, once again finding himself squatting by th
e cold lake. Reaching to pick up another round stone, he hesitated, unable to complete the gesture without wondering just how old this little rock was. "Shit!"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  Corva stood next to him, hands on her hips, head cocked quizzically.

  "Sorry. I was... thinking."

  "Out here? You'll catch one of those ancient diseases. Influenza. Or scrapie or something."

  "They don't work that way." Then he held out his hand. "Wanna walk with me?"

  He saw her nearly glance over her shoulder, then think better. She took his hand and they scrunched through the wet gravel. The pink clouds stuttered and turned gray, and as his eyes adjusted everything slowly washed into normality. He could be on Earth for all he knew.

  "Are you feeling all right?"

  He shrugged. "I'm okay. They want me back in ten minutes."

  "But you've been negotiating for three days!

  When is this going to end?"

  "Soon," he said curtly. The government had been making offers, and they'd been running vastly detailed simulations covering all sorts of plans. In some, Evayne somehow got past the orbital defenses and rained down fire from orbit. In those cases, the government admitted it would have to give Toby up without firing a shot in return, in order to save its own people. The simulated Evayne played much like he remembered her doing in Consensus. She rarely chose such a brutally direct option. More often, based on Thisbe's historical records, she would land and seek to capture her target directly.

  Toby was not her first Toby, apparently. There had been many pretenders over the ages, all claiming to be the returned messiah. Some had raised huge armies, but none had been able to crack the biocrypto. They couldn't prove who they were. None had made it to Destrier, though the more deluded—those who truly believed they were Toby Wyatt McGonigal—swore that if only they were given the chance to lay their palm on the circular lock to the Great Mother's chamber, it would turn for them.

  Evayne usually left them to the guides, but in particularly troublesome cases she would intervene directly. So far the sims showed her behaving exactly as she had in those cases.