Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  "Uh oh," said the lead cop-bot. They were walking across the greenhouse, and it abruptly stopped and turned to the others. "Did you get that? One of them's come in person."

  The iced cop swore. "Why?" It turned to Corva and Toby. "What did you do to attract the attention of the guides?"

  Corva gasped. Toby was about to ask Jaysir what a guide was, but there was no time. Corva turned to him, suddenly frantic. "Do it!" she hissed.

  "Do what?" asked the cop even as Toby focused his eyes on the virtual glyph over its head. With a slight squint he turned it from green to gray, and the cop-bot froze, its torso leaning back in a skeptical pose, its head tilted to one side.

  The others hadn't noticed yet, so while the leader was saying, "They're not even going to tell us what it was all about," Toby shut them down.

  "... Are they? Just gonna take over like they always—" The last cop-bot suddenly realized it was alone. "Hey—" Toby shut it down.

  "Why didn't you do that before?" Corva was wavering between outrage and delight.

  Using the console felt like cheating. It felt criminal, like an assault on the legitimacy of the whole lockstep. But he couldn't say that; she wouldn't understand... and he would sound like a McGonigal. He just shrugged.

  Corva grimaced. "Come on! We've gotta find the boys."

  A few calls summoned the denners from where they'd been hiding. They seemed very pleased with themselves, especially Orpheus, who pranced around Toby's feet before climbing him to hang off his backpack. Wrecks was circling the immobile cop-bots, obviously curious as to what had happened to them.

  "Hurry!" Corva mounted the steps three at a time. Toby couldn't understand her sudden panic; in fact, now that he'd crossed the bridge of actually using the console to control his surroundings, he felt strangely elated. Sure, it was a cheat, but he hadn't hurt anybody, just cut the remote connection to some people in a distant building. With luck they wouldn't even be able to tell that it was a McGonigal override that had done it.

  Since he was thinking this way, Toby wasn't at all unnerved when they reached the gallery level and found the corridors crowded with bustling military bots.

  "Oh, crap." Corva shrank back as dozens of weapons were raised and aimed at them—but Toby just squinted, and the guns drooped.

  He strolled through the frozen combat units. "It's fine," he said. He wanted to laugh. "These guys can't touch us!"

  "Oh, they can't," somebody said.

  Standing in the middle of the corridor was an armored man. One of his metal-sheathed arms was crooked around Shylif's throat, and the other hand held a gun to his head.

  "But I sure can," he said. "... McGonigal."

  Toby and Corva exchanged a glance. Jaysir looked at the floor. Then Toby sighed.

  "Really, does everybody know about me now?"

  The man with his gun to Shylif's head barked a quick laugh, then said, "I don't know what you did to my bots, but I can't afford to have you take them over. If any of them so much as twitches, I'm shooting your friend here."

  "That leaves us at a bit of a standoff, doesn't it?"

  "Not really. Elevator's this way. Come on." He backed in the direction of the antechamber.

  "I'm sorry, Corva," mumbled Shylif. "When I heard the name I started off without thinking—but then I changed my mind, and I came back but it was too late and..."

  Toby had always thought that Shylif was a powerful man and might be a formidable fighter. Indeed, he was the same size as the man whose arm was around his throat, but his own space gear was strictly commercial. The other man's had a military exoskeleton built into it; he could have squashed Shylif's throat with a simple twist of his arm.

  They disappeared back down the corridor, and Corva, Jaysir, and Toby reluctantly followed. The man's voice floated back from up ahead: "Glad to see you haven't lost your sense of humor, Toby. It's what I always liked about you."

  Toby blinked. "Wha—"

  "He's a guide," whispered Corva. "One of the original Sedna colonists. You didn't think your family were the only ones to use the locksteps?"

  The idea hadn't occurred to him, like so many other details about this mad future that, once someone mentioned them, became blindingly obvious. He shook his head. "Too much going on." Then he called out, "Hey! Who are you! It's been forty years, you know."

  "That it has, Toby. Come in here." He was waiting for them by the elevator. Four more military bots were standing by its doors.

  "Get in the elevator." The man was nervously eyeing his own bots. Toby knew he could take those over, but he couldn't be sure he could do it without being noticed. All it would take would be one of them nodding or saluting and Shylif would die. So, he marched into the elevator and Corva followed. Their captor edged in, still pushing Shylif ahead of him.

  "You spent so much time in those god-damned games that you probably wouldn't remember me if your life depended on it," he said as he gave a glance-command to the elevator to start. "I'm Nathan Kenani."

  Toby peered into his face, and suddenly saw the younger man in this careworn face. "Nathan!" It was Nathan Kenani, the composer.

  "Nice to see you again, Kid." Suddenly Kenani shoved Shylif over to stand coughing next to Toby and the others. "I'm glad you remember me."

  "Of course I remember you! You know, Peter and I used your music in our games."

  "I know you did. Your brother made a god-damned anthem out of one of my pieces. Now every time I hear some innocent young thing belt it out with tears in her eyes, I get the creeps."

  "Sorry about that," said Toby. "But it's not really my fault."

  "Isn't it? You got him started on all this." Kenani made a wide wave with his gun. "You and your game therapy. Oh yeah, I remember all about that." He grinned, the drawn skin of his face suddenly giving him a shark-like aspect. Behind him, lightning flickered.

  He eyed Corva. "She know about that?" Toby shook his head minutely. "They don't know anything, do they? Hey, Toby, you remember sheep? Peter and I, we joke about that sometimes. These people have never heard of sheep. If they had, they might be better at recognizing their situation."

  Toby felt sick. "If this world's so awful, why do you put up with it? There must be others— the whole first generation. Did you all just decide to blindly follow my brother into... this?"

  Kenani shook his head. "Some of them fought, but there was a side that was always going to lose, and I decided not to be on it. Us, we're all that's left. And, no, this future's not 'awful' at all."

  He glanced up at the approaching city-scape above, but kept his pistol steadily aimed at Shylif. "You know what a guide is, Toby?"

  The word had popped up frequently in his library, but so had dozens of other terms; Toby had been overwhelmed by all the details of lockstep history, and hadn't known what to skim and what to research deeply. "Sounded like thought police when I read about it," he said.

  "If you don't like the lockstep, you can leave anytime you want," Kenani snapped. "We just have standards for those who stay. It's pretty simple: if you want to live in Peter's lockstep, you have to assimilate. That means accepting our way of life— your way of life, Toby, you and your family's, and mine and all the originals'. We've got millions of people immigrating every year, did you know that? For the most part they come from worlds that are separated from the culture you and I share by more than ten thousand years. They speak languages that share no common words or grammar with ours. They have totally different ideas about basic things like family structure, morality, clothing.... If we let them keep their ways, the whole place'd come apart at the seams. And Hell, people arriving this month have three hundred and sixty years of history separating them from somebody else who came from the exact same place, one year ago lockstep time.

  "We're the only thing they have in common. The guides are there to teach people how to live in our culture, is all. That's why they call us guides."

  "People worship you like gods," Corva accused. Her face was pale.

  "Not
something we encourage," Kenani retorted. "Unlike your sister," he added to Toby with an ironic smile.

  "Evayne," said Toby, and his heart was in his throat. He was as responsible for her as he was for Peter. When she ran through the halls of the gray Sedna habitats singing, his heart lifted and felt he could relax for a minute. When she was silent, or had locked herself in her room, then Toby prowled the halls thinking of how to break her out of her shell through some game or gift or clever word. Evayne and Peter, he juggled the happiness of both.

  "How is she?"

  Kenani blinked at him in surprise. Then he laughed. "You're probably the first person to ask after her like that in ten thousand years. And nobody'd be more aware of it than her."

  "I want to see her!"

  Again the surprise. Then Kenani laughed. "That's actually what I had in mind."

  "Wait, you can't," interrupted Corva. "You're a guide, you work for Peter McGonigal."

  "Do I now?" Kenani appeared to consider the proposition. "If that's the case, then I guess I should do what Brother Peter told me to do..."

  "What did Peter tell you to do?"

  "Why, kill you, of course."

  "No!" Toby stepped forward, his face hot and his hands balled into fists. "You're lying! He wouldn't hurt me!"

  Now the old man just looked sad. "You're right, he'd never hurt his brother, Toby Wyatt McGonigal. But the Lord of Time? The One who waits to return and deliver the Universe to perfection after fourteen thousand years of buildup and expectation-setting? He'd kill him in a heartbeat."

  "But I'm none of those things. He knows it. You know it."

  Kenani tried to shrug in his suit, but its shoulders barely moved. "You know it, I know it, some of the other guides know it... and that's about it. The rest of the human race and a goodly chunk of the nonhuman intelligences in this part of the Universe see you differently. Peter knows this. He knows what's at stake if you reappear."

  "I don't want to reappear! I just, want, to go, home!" He bellowed the last word, and he was standing toe to toe with the guide. Kenani hardly blinked.

  "There's no home to go back to, Toby. I'm not here to kill you. But if I don't do that, my only alternative is to hand you over to Evayne. Then, she might kill you; but at least it won't have been me who had to do it."

  He couldn't believe Evayne would hurt him either; but longing for home had reminded him of something. "You do have another choice," he said, stepping back. Outside the elevator car, the rain had stopped, the clouds had parted, and the rainbow-colored clouds and glowing spheres of the Continent were lowering toward them.

  "You could bring me to my mother."

  Kenani's eyes widened, and he gave an involuntary hiss. Then, "She went crazy after you disappeared, Toby. There's a reason none of us has woken her in thirty years."

  Toby crossed his arms and sneered. "I don't believe that. She went into cold sleep to wait for me. That's what all the stories say."

  "Stories?" Kenani laughed. He glanced up a the rapidly approaching cities. "All you know is the stories, isn't it, Toby? Since you woke you haven't spoken to anybody who was there. You haven't been told what really happened."

  Trying to keep his voice level, Toby said, "Then why don't you tell me?"

  When the elevator doors opened in the customs complex, Nathan Kenani holstered his pistol and waved his three prisoners out. A sizable crowd of human soldiers and military bots was waiting; the men all bowed as one as Kenani appeared.

  "I know you've got the McGonigal overrides, Toby," he said, putting a hand on Toby's shoulder. "You could probably cause some serious mayhem if you took over these bots. But my men would fight. Probably a lot of them would die, and you might too—after all, they don't know who you are."

  Toby shrugged off the hand. "What if I told them?"

  "Any that believed you would probably faint. The rest... well, they've heard that one before. My point is, don't try anything, please. It'll just end badly."

  "Where are you taking us?" Now at the head of a very large and intimidating retinue, they entered a maze of hallways behind the spaceport's customs hall.

  "My original plan was to load you on my ship and take you back to Peter. Let him deal with you. But, with everything... and considering you want to see her anyway... I've decided to turn you over to Evayne. So, we're not going anywhere."

  "Why?"

  "Because she's already on her way here. She's coming through the official differential, so her ship'll be here at the start of the next cycle. We'll winter over here and wait for her. It's just easier that way."

  Corva had been silent for a long time, but now she said, "You must have arrived through the Weekly lockstep."

  Kenani nodded. "We do that a lot—shift differentials to move around quicker. Peter, though—he stays on this time. Means he's even younger than he used to be." Now that Corva had reminded him that she was there, he eyed her and Shylif. "By the way, Toby, what do you think we should do with these friends of yours?"

  "Let them go! They have nothing to do with any of this."

  "But they know who you are?" Toby had no reply to that. Kenani sighed. "I'll let you hash that one out with Evayne."

  Toby glared at him. "You said you were going to tell me what really happened. At least do that before you let me see Evayne."

  "Let you see her?" Kenani shook his head. "You're still living in the past. She will see you only if she chooses to. She may not bother."

  "I can't believe that!"

  They'd come to a long low room with about twenty Cicada beds. They looked like half-melted plastic seed pods, black and glossy under amber and mauve lights, with blue telltales dotting their sides.

  Kenani gazed pensively at the beds. "There was a time when I wouldn't have believed it either. But now—well, listen, and then tell me what you think." He waved at the human part of his retinue and they retreated, leaving only forty or fifty armed bots surrounding them. Kenani had one drag over a recover couch from the far wall, and he sat down on it, legs planted widely apart and his hands on his knees like a Chinese emperor. He frowned at Toby.

  "Once upon a time," he said, "fourteen thousand years ago, a family that used to be rich had its last holdings bought out by the nasty hyper-rich who'd taken over the Solar System. They had enough money from the sale of that last business for one, maybe two generations to live in some comfort. But their grandchildren were going to be wage serfs like everybody else. There was no hope for them.

  "Unless they did something crazy. The trillionaires had plowed under all the laws that might have protected the worlds of the Solar System from exploitation. It was a winner-takeall situation, and asteroids and even planets belonged to whoever could get to them first. Toby's parents knew," he said to Corva, "that all the worlds in the Solar System were claimed already—but way out past Pluto, there were other worlds.

  "The parents pooled their money and made an offer to some other idealistic or desperate people—like me—to join them in home-steading Sedna. We spent all our money on a couple of ships and basic life support and mining supplies. Other groups had done this, but they hadn't had the resources to make it as far as Sedna. But this family was different. They'd pioneered a new kind of hibernation technology back on Earth. It was originally intended for battlefield and emergency use, but they figured they could use it to minimize their life support needs on the long trip out.

  "One day, the family's eldest son was lost when his ship—well, it just disappeared. He'd been on his way to claim a comet for the colony. They knew where his ship should be, but if he'd been knocked off course, that straight line became a cone of possible trajectories, and the space they'd have to search in widened with each passing day.

  "There were... arguments. His mother and the other kids wanted to send their remaining ship to search for him; his father said they couldn't spare it and they should use long-range radar and telescopes first. Most of the colonists agreed with him, but as the days and weeks passed they found nothing on the s
copes. His mother's frantic anxiety turned to bitterness and resentment. The family was..." Suddenly he stopped, glancing sidelong at Toby.

  "Look, Toby, I'm sorry..."

  "What? What happened?"

  "They grew apart," said Kenani. "Your mother and father. He ended up on one side, trying to keep the colony as a whole together, and her, and your brother and sister were, on the other, neither sure that not enough was being done to find you.

  "Finally, he relented and they used precious resources to send a small probe after you. The rest of us weren't happy. It was going to take a year just to reach your last known position. Your dad made the decision, then went back to work. He had a colony to run, after all. Your mom, and Peter and Evayne... they watched and waited."

  Toby tried to picture the situation. Yeah, Dad would be steady in the face of a crisis like that. It was painful to think this, but he hoped that Dad would just mourn him and then carry on. It would have been the right thing to do.

  "As the months wore on your mom and Peter found it harder. Peter... he checked out of day to day life. You'd built this crazy online virtual reality together, and he became obsessed with perfecting it. Your mother went further. She declared that she was going to winter over until the probe reported back. And over your father's objections, she did."

  So that's how it happened.

  Kenani gazed off at nothing. "That time, it was for a year. She revived in time to learn that the probe had found ambiguous readings. Maybe it had seen a sign of your ship, maybe it was just a comet. That was far worse than a simple yes or no answer would have been. She became obsessed with finding out what had happened to you—and because you'd gone into hibernation yourself before your ship disappeared, she was convinced that wherever you were, you were still alive.

  "It turned into a war between your mother and father; she trying to scrape together enough resources to send an expedition after you, he insisting that the colony couldn't spare anything, that it was riding the knife-edge of failure anyway. This went on for... I dunno, a year or two?" He shrugged.