Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Aprli 2014

by Penny Publications

  Miranda stood up, dusting herself off. If Toby had taken off his glasses, he'd have seen her as she really was: a gangly tour-guide robot like the one pretending to be Sol. Through his interface, he could pretend they were real people. He'd given these bodies the personalities of his game characters, but let this one retain the tourbot's database of historical data. So it wasn't surprising when Miranda said, "Six different cultures built here. This whole hill is a rubble pile, who knows what's at the bottom?"

  She knelt again. "I think we might be able to squeeze in there. There's a tiled floor—it might date from the second Thark Flowering."

  Toby wasn't listening. His fingers had strayed out to stroke the side of one of the pillars. It was so old it had lost all sign of being artificial. It reminded him of Stonehenge— and then, uncomfortably, of the grand avenue on Destrier. He snatched back his hand.

  "It's going to take a while," he said with a sad smile, "to catch up."

  If Miranda and Sol had been human, they might have caught his irony and laughed, or expressed some sympathy. As it was they just smiled and nodded.

  Toby knelt to look through the gap Miranda had found. It was dark in there. He doubted he could have fit through, but it would have been easy for Orpheus.

  He stood up again, gazing out at the dying canals.

  At least this landscape didn't change in an eyeblink, like Earth's did. Toby had been on Barsoom for six months now; for three before that, he'd lived in a lockstep fortress in the Amazonian uplands of what had once been Brazil. He'd wanted to be around green and real sunlight; but every thirty days, the landscape hiccupped and changed completely. New trees, a new tributary to the river below the fortress or a new town full of people who barely remembered those whom he'd gotten to know over the past weeks. He'd hated it there, and Mom convinced him to come back to Mars.

  Barsoom was practically homey compared to the rest of the Solar System. Mercury didn't even exist anymore; it had been eaten, and its constituent matter spread out to form a vast Dyson cloud that gathered sunlight to power starship launchers and other less comprehensible machines for the posthumans who'd taken over much of the place. Venus was fully terraformed now, a world of shallow oceans that forbade any locksteps from settling there. Space itself was crowded with artificial worlds, some inhabited, many ruined and silent.

  Considering the godlike powers possessed by the posthumans, Toby had been a bit surprised that humans—or conventional life forms of any kind—still existed. When he'd expressed this to Peter, his brother had just laughed. "Technology can speed up evolution, but it can't do anything to give it a direction. What these AIs and robot cultures keep forgetting is that purpose comes from vulnerability. Give people the power of the gods, and they'll eventually run down like wind-up toys for lack of reasons to go on. It's happened around here so many times that the posthumans finally figured out that they need us. We're kind of the bottom-feeders of their ecosystem—a necessary evil. Humans are optimized to care about things, and the posthumans feed off our passions. Without us, they just speed-evolve into useless lumps. The Solar System's crowded with those.

  "It's not a f lattering role to have in the grand scheme of things," he'd added with a shrug, "but it's a living."

  Peter could always make Toby smile. He'd developed a hard crust of cynicism, decades of learning and incident having weathered his heart like the wind had done to these pillars; yet he was still Peter. It was as if the brother Toby had known was a bright light that still managed to shine through all the brambles and encrustations time had wrapped around it. Even the revelation about Dad.

  It was shocking how little Peter remembered of his childhood with Toby and Evayne—but that time had still made him who he was. When the melancholy of time began to coil around Toby's soul, he only had to spend ten minutes with Peter for it to entirely lift.

  It was a good thing Toby had discovered his brother in the chairman, because unexpectedly, he'd lost his own childhood when Peter told him about their father's part in the kidnapping. He still didn't believe it—not all the time, anyway. He would struggle with that, he knew, for years.

  He knelt again next to the little cave entrance, and was seriously considering squirming in there when a message tone pinged in his ear. "Toby," he answered curtly.

  "Where'd you go?" It was Mom—Cassandra, as she liked to be called now. "I looked all over the grounds!"

  "Sorry, I was... restless. I'm just doing a little exploring."

  "Hmmph." He could hear the distaste in her voice. Cassandra couldn't understand Toby's interest in the ocean of time that separated them from their previous lives. Maybe it was because she'd had practice skipping forward before Peter and Evayne had locked her away. She had deliberately turned her back on everything she'd lost. "Well, the last of the delegates is here. There's some from that world where you argued with Evayne. Thought you might want to know."

  "Ah! Thanks. I'll be right there."

  He didn't dare hope. Thisbe had been one of the last holdouts in Peter's drive to create a lockstep parliament. The cult of Toby was raging there—in various flavors, he'd heard, who fought one another in the streets over minor points of doctrine. Halen Keishion was a major leader in one of those factions, and the rumor was he was trying to set up his own lock-step. Toby had sent Jaysir back to try to locate Corva, but try as the makers might, they'd so far been unable to uncover any information about her whereabouts.

  The cults were entirely focused on Destrier. Cassandra and Toby had found it surprisingly easy to adopt new identities on Barsoom, with easy access to Peter. He supposed it was inconceivable to the cultists that Cassandra might not have been in her imitation Taj Mahal on Destrier all these millennia—and therefore inconceivable that she might have been quietly awakened somewhere else, to exit the historical stage into an ordinary life.

  One result was that there were few security milbots monitoring his progress through the ruins. Toby had felt free to come here almost unaccompanied. He bounded back to the Martian aircar, ducking under its cartoonishly big lift fans, forgetting Miranda and Sol. They quietly dissolved back into tourist bots as the air-car whined into life.

  "Oh, and your sister's here, too," added Cassandra as two milbots ducked under the closing clamshell doors of the aircar to sit behind Toby. He didn't miss the chilly sound in his mother's voice; she and Evayne were still not talking.

  "Thanks." His mother rang off, and Toby pensively watched the ruined palaces of Noctis dwindle below him. He tilted the aircar east, towards Valles Marineris and the triple cities of Ius, Calydon, and Louros. Home was Peter's sumptuous palace on the north slope of Ius Chasma, but it was in Calydon Fossae that all the action was happening.

  As he approached the vast canyon complex, he could see aircraft buzzing over the city like a cloud of midges. Delegates were arriving literally by the boatload, from the furthest reaches of the lockstep. They were here to hammer out a lockstep-wide scheduling policy now that Peter and Evayne had made their one-bed, one-share public ownership offer in the lock-step monopoly. Calydon's minaretted streets were crowded with democrats, autocrats and cybercrats, monarchists, panarchists, and demarchists. All were bravely stepping into real-time to debate and deliberate for as long as it took to come up with the new lockstep government. It might take months, or years—but in lockstep time, it would all be over by next turn.

  The chaos made it easy for Toby and his mother to come and go. Peter's palace was overrun with middle-aged women and young men anyway, and everybody was distracted by the new governmental proposal. Toby was posing as Dickson Mu, a delegate from Eris. Cassandra wasn't acting at all like the Holy Mother was supposed to, so nobody suspected her.

  Still... he tapped his glasses and said, "Call Evayne." The little dancing icon signified that she was being hailed—and this went on for a long time—and then a window opened in his interface, and she was there.

  "How are you?" she said in a clipped and guarded tone.

  "Always talking o
n the phone, but never getting together," he said. "When are we going to have dinner?"

  "Very funny," she said flatly. "You know how delicate things are."

  "Actually, Evie, I don't. You had some chores you were going to do. Did you get to them?"

  "Where do you think I've been the past forty-five years?"

  "Oh!" He'd last spoken to her two months ago, lockstep time. "You're not serious. You haven't been—" He peered at her in the little window. She didn't seem older.

  Evayne grimaced. "Six years, Toby. For me, it's been six years since the last time I spoke to you. Seven since we woke Mom."

  He sucked in his breath. "Does she know?" Evayne shook her head. "Tell her! Evie, she's not going to punish you forever! Six years!" His heart sank at the thought. This wasn't at all like the evidence of time he'd seen in the ruins just now; there were different kinds of time, and that which separated you from your loved ones was the slowest. "Where were you?" he ventured.

  "Tau Ceti. Sirius. Points in between. Peter can tell you—he provided the ship. We were doing almost 50 percent lightspeed back and forth—a new record, I think."

  "And...?"

  "Our clients and partners are winding down the Toby myth. The Emperor of Time is no more. It's already been a couple of generations, real-time, since I left Sirius. Any new immigrants into three-sixty are going to be several generations out of our official endorsement of the myth. Pilgrimages to Destrier are going to dry up soon, and since the keepers of Mom's tomb live in realtime anyway, they'll probably have turned it into a tourist trap and theme park by now. Except for the holdouts actually in the lockstep, you're safe now."

  He snorted. "There's billions of those. But thank you. Thank you so much, Evayne. I really was serious about dinner."

  She just stared at him. Under the weight of that gaze, Toby suddenly felt acutely self-conscious. His last words echoed in his ears and those platitudes sounded so glib that he instantly regretted them. In that second he went from not knowing that he was feeling any emotion at all to realizing he was being flooded with grief and longing. "I mean—" to his astonishment he heard his voice crack, "I never meant to leave you. I'm sorry I left, and I want to see you. To catch up on all those lost years." Tears were blurring the inside of his glasses.

  When he blinked himself into seeing again, he realized that Evie was wiping her eyes too. Time was when she'd come to him, when she'd bawled in his arms, a tangle of limbs and hair butting his chin. It was so recent, those moments almost seeming more real than this one and that little girl more real than this hard-bitten older woman—who had already regained her own composure and said, "I know, Toby. Yes, I'd like to have dinner with you. We'll talk soon."

  She cut the connection, but her words rang in his head, echoes of unstated regret distracting him enough that the aircar took over the flying. He didn't come to himself again until he felt it touching down, and realized they'd arrived in a courtyard in central Calydon.

  He queried the location of the Thisbe delegation and was told they were settling in to a red-brick hotel a couple of kilometers down the avenue. Too close to fly to, too far for a quick walk; which meant he would have to take a leisurely one instead. That was okay, because it gave him a chance to explore the crowds and architecture of the city as he strolled. There were hints of Consensus style to it all, but Barsoom had its own history and layers of culture. It was unbelievably rich, as was the diversity on the street. Toby found himself spinning around now and then to stare at a person—or thing—that had just passed by him while he'd been ogling something else. Great fun.

  As his footsteps approached the Thisbeans' hotel, though, they slowed even further. Eventually he came to a stop just outside its main entrance.

  He'd tried looking up the names of the delegation, but they weren't listed yet. And anyway, here he was.

  He took a deep breath, stepped forward—

  "Sir!"

  All the air shot out of him. Toby turned. "What?"

  Four of the Lockstep palace guard were standing there, accompanied by a small army of bots. The woman at the head of this squad saluted, and said, "The chairman requests your presence."

  "The chairman? He can—" Toby stopped himself. These people who had no idea who he was, and nobody defied the chairman. It might be fun to try, but the momentary courage that had led him to take that step into the entrance of the hotel was gone now anyway. He shrugged.

  "Sure, whatever. Where are we going?"

  To the other side of town, it turned out. Here was the palace proper—the Palace, with a capital and emphasis and fanfares. The place was designed to impress by people who'd studied thousands of years' worth of such architecture. Toby suspected a few posthuman minds had added their insights into human herd behavior; even just stepping out of an air-car onto one of the upper residence levels, he felt himself shrink a bit with awe. It wasn't just the scale, the majestic sweep of the colonnades or the beauty of the frescoes. The way all the lines of wall and pillar wove together, the whole building seemed poised to pounce on him.

  Yet all he had to do was glance over and notice that one of the fabulous pieces of wall art depicted the Emperor of Time embarking on his mystical journey into the future... and he just had to laugh. He thanked his escort and hurried on to meet his brother.

  "Sorry to tear you away from your ruins, but Evie's hardly been home a day and the delegates already want a speech from her. It's a good thing she's rested."

  Peter stood with his arms crossed in the center of a domed chamber that rivaled the nave of any cathedral from ancient Earth. He was surrounded by the latest in virtualizing technology, so that as Toby came beside him, the walls seemed to fly away and the ceiling lifted off, and they seemed to be standing out in the open. There was even a breeze sliding slowly along the tiers of the city's biggest and oldest amphitheater. He and Peter stood at one end of it, on stage with one other person. It was Evayne.

  "They've come to see both of us," said Peter. He was in full dress uniform. "Don't worry about them seeing or overhearing us," he added. "My stage projection's a puppet; I could moon the crowd and the projectors would compensate and make it look like I'd bowed."

  "And I'm invisible and inaudible," said Toby.

  "Yes—but you're here. Evayne asked me to call you in. She insisted, actually."

  Invisible and inaudible —but not to Evayne and Peter. Toby thought he could accept that.

  "Of course Mom wouldn't come."

  "Of course not," agreed Peter breezily. "Oh, here we go. She's about to start."

  Evayne's dais stood just off-center in the giant oval of the outside theater. She walked alone to her spot, dressed in a fabulous gown of ivory white with gold hems. Her hair was drawn up and tangled with diamonds. As she walked, the most glorious fanfare Toby had ever heard rose in swells. It clutched at his heart though he didn't even recognize the instruments, let alone the style: the music, like so much else here, echoed out of the well of unguessable time that, somehow, his brother and sister had mastered.

  There were tears in his eyes when the music ended; by that time, Evayne stood in her place, gazing up at the multitude that thronged the ancient amphitheater's seats.

  She began:

  "How could we have known, my family and I, when we began this, that time in a lockstep runs backwards? To us founders, and to the smallest and original parts of the empire, our colony between the stars is only forty years old. As far as the youngest and largest parts of the lockstep are concerned, it is so old as to be one with the foundations of the Earth. Immovable. Eternal.

  "I remember the day Peter and I realized what was happening. Overnight, sixteen minor worlds, little orbs no bigger than Sedna, had been colonized by settlers from Alpha Centauri. All declared their intention to join the lockstep. They were excited to do so. They'd been hearing stories about us for generations! Together, their population exceeded that of all the worlds we already had. Peter and I panicked."

  "Ha," said Peter. "Look at
that little smile she's giving there. She's reassuring them that she's joking. But it's true. We freaked."

  "This," she continued, "is why the guides were created. They were to test immigrants, both individual people and entire worlds, to see if they would enrich the lockstep, or might tear it apart. In retrospect, this was a good idea. Over the years we've excluded whole populations that would have obliterated our culture, enslaved or killed many of our people, or subjected us all to one of several dead-ending posthuman 'uplifts.'"

  "Of course, she's not saying the obvious here," Peter pointed out.

  The obvious was that the official state religion, Toby's cult, had also been engineered to stabilize incoming culture around conservative ideas. "Is she going to say it?" Toby asked. Peter shook his head.

  "Maybe some day, but it's too touchy right now. Our own fault, of course."

  "While centuries passed on the fast worlds, years went by for us," Evayne was saying. "Only years. How could we have imagined that there was such a thing as a 'lockstep civilization?' We'd been administering our little worlds for so short a time! This..." She paused and looked down, letting her shoulders drop, "This is where my brother Peter and I failed."

  The amphitheater reverberated with sound—a roar of voices so broad that some might be cheering, some angry, it was impossible to tell. Peter laughed.

  He was so casual, so comfortable with this, that Toby had a flash of deja vu. This moment was so similar to many others he'd had with Peter in Consensus, when they'd built virtual worlds together, ruled them, and sometimes lost them to this or that angry mob. Paralyzed by the strength of the memory, he just smiled.

  "To us, the lockstep was a tiny economic experiment we were making up as we went along! Our actions couldn't be so consequential that they would ring down the centuries. What we were building couldn't have a life of its own. It was just us back then, and we steered the ship because without us, it would have been rudderless. We failed to understand how time passes in a lockstep, and so we didn't notice when the ship became capable of steering itself.