Religion was clearly a major part of that culture. Men and women in white robes were lined up between velvet ropes, patiently waiting to enter the cathedral—if that was what it was. Toby could see none of the religious symbols he knew from Earth. The only repeating motif seemed to be carvings and statues of a seated man, perhaps a king on a throne.
The backdrop for the cathedral was a wall of tessellated glass that swept up a hundred meters or more. No lights glowed behind it, nor any lightning. He trudged over and shaded his hand to look through the glass.
Frost had painted the other side of it, but through gaps in this he glimpsed darkened buildings and snow-draped sidewalks. "Is that another lockstep?" he asked a passerby.
The man laughed. "Naw, it's the Weekly. It'll open up in four or five days."
"Weekly?" He was too tired to hide his puzzlement. The man tilted his head and peered at Toby.
"Where are you from that you don't know the Weekly? Lockstep 90/.25? Client to three-sixty?"
Toby shook his head. "Sorry, I'm from a, a little station."
"Must be." The man shook his head and walked away.
The line of pilgrims started at a set of tents where tearful people were saying goodbye to relatives and friends. They entered one tent, and came out the other side wearing robes. Apparently, they were required to leave their bots behind, too, because there was a fair number of these milling around the tents, but none in the lineup.
Toby approached a woman who was directing people. "Excuse me, I was told I could get to Destrier from here."
"Ha, ha, very funny," she said. "You can get fitted for robes that way."
"Okay, but seriously, can I get to Destrier from here?"
She stared at him. "Where else would we all be going?"
"How much does it cost?"
"Pilgrimage doesn't cost anything!" She seemed genuinely offended. "Who told you it did?"
"Then, I can just show up?" he said hopefully. She nodded.
"Just take the vows and find a role in the Order you're assigned to, and you can go."
Vows? Orders? He nodded politely, but stepped backward. "Uh, thanks. Maybe, maybe in a bit." Sure, you could get to Destrier for free—provided you joined some religion or other. Who knew what that would involve?
Disappointed, he was turning away when he spotted a commotion near the line. Was that an actual fight?
A small group of people had approached the line and were apparently handing out printed (physical, not virtual) pamphlets of some kind. This was being taken very badly by some of the ones in the queue; Toby couldn't make out all the words, but the pilgrims were shouting something about blasphemy, and the pamphleteers were saying something like, "Origin is false!"
Everybody around the tents seemed paralyzed with shock or indecision. That wasn't really surprising; Toby had seen no real violence since he'd arrived in the lockstep. Even now, he kept expecting bots to step in and separate the men and women who were shouting at one another, yet it wasn't happening.
Suddenly a pilgrim vaulted the line and struck one of the interlopers. Fists started flying. Toby crossed his arms and watched, increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that nobody was doing anything to stop it. He'd had to step in between Peter and Evayne on numerous occasions; it was what you did if you were a responsible adult. So where were the adults in this crowd?
A flicker of fair hair appeared among the fighting people. It was a young woman, maybe a year or two older than Toby, dressed in street clothes and carrying a shopping bag. She'd probably just been passing by, but now she was caught up in the mob.
One of the pilgrims grabbed her by the wrist.
Toby shouted, then found himself running across the plaza. Orpheus dug his claws painfully into his shoulders, complaining loudly. The man who'd grabbed the girl had raised his hand to slap her, but Toby got there just in time to grab him by the wrist and elbow, like his Dad had shown him.
The pilgrim let go of his intended target and tried to hit Toby instead, but Toby pulled down on the wrist he was holding and pushed on the elbow. The pilgrim went down on his knees just as a spitting Orpheus landed on his head.
"Run!" Toby caught a glimpse of the girl's face before she whirled and bolted. Then Toby too danced out of the reach of the gabbling, shouting mob. He ran back to the tent area, but by the time he felt he was safe and turned to look back, the girl was gone.
An hour later, Toby and Orpheus sat together at a sidewalk café while he tried to recover his strength. The whole incident had only taken seconds, and he hadn't even been hit, but he felt like he'd run a marathon. Orpheus wasn't much better. With his dwindling money, Toby was trying to revive them both with hot food.
He was wearing the tourist glasses, so the landscape around him was tagged and labeled, and he'd come to ignore all that information— but now the universal symbol for New Text Message suddenly appeared in the upper right of his field of vision. Startled, he said, "Somebody just texted me," to Orpheus.
A WTF? icon appeared over Orpheus's head. Toby laughed, then focused on the message flag. "Should I open it?" There were only three people on this world who might be contacting him.
NEED CASH? GOT A JOB FOR TODAY.
—SHYLIF
"Huh." Shylif, not Jaysir, and definitely not Corva. There was a kind of sting to that fact. She wasn't talking to him. Or maybe he was just making that up? "Oh, Orph, I'm getting paranoid. "
It was true he was already out of money. Jaysir's list had provided some alternative choices of lodging and Toby had looked at a couple of those while they walked. The cheapest was a stack of shipping containers just above the warehouse level; Orpheus had growled as they approached it.
He thought for a while, then shrugged and replied:
OKAY. WHERE DO I MEET YOU?
Shylif sent a map, and a little later Toby found himself down at the dock level of the city sphere, which was crowded with bots and machines, and almost empty of living people.
He spotted Shylif and raised his hand to wave—then lowered it and nearly ducked behind a pillar before cursing and stopping himself. Shylif was talking with Corva. After a minute or so she nodded to him and walked off to join a more-or-less human-shaped bot that handed her a bag of grippies and morphing tools. It poured a bunch of hand-sized swarmbots out of another bag and they hopped and danced around her feet. Wrecks swatted at these as they moved away.
It seemed Corva was working, too.
Toby shrugged off his misgivings and went up to Shylif. "Thanks for the job offer," he said, then added, "and sorry about running out on you guys."
Shylif laughed, a rich human sound among the otherwise mechanical noises of the docks. "I totally understand," he said. "I'd probably have done the same thing."
"But does she understand?"
"Corva'll come around. She's a bit like you— she needs time."
Toby had no ready comeback for that, so he just followed as Shylif set off through the maze of gantries, cargo racks, and rushing bots. Shylif seemed content not to talk, and soon Toby found himself saying, "So... what are we doing today?"
"Oh, just a little theft-recovery from Lockstep 270/2. "
It took Toby a moment to process that. "There's another lockstep on Wallop?"
"There's six that I know of. Two-seventy-totwo is a pretty big one, and it's also pretty aggressive. If you don't watch 'em, their guys'll raid our cities while we're wintering over."
"They... raid us?"
"Theft of resources and manufactured goods." Shylif sent him a sardonic look. "Yeah, I thought it was pretty weird when I first heard about it. But then again, everything about the locksteps is weird. "
"No, really?"
"Locksteps raid one another during hibernation periods," Shylif went on. "There're treaties forbidding retaliation—but they don't forbid recovery of the stolen material if you can find it. Some of three-sixty's missing supplies were spotted in one of 270/2's cities, so an expedition is being mounted to recover them."
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"How did we get in on it?"
"I found a couple of bots that had been ordered to go after their owner's stuff," said Shylif. "They're city units, not really built for wintering-over conditions. So I offered to subcontract for 'em. We'll get paid one hundred fifty if we return with any of the bots' stuff, and two hundred if we return with all of it. I've got a manifest—here, I'll share it with you." An itemized list blinked into visibility in the corner of Toby's vision.
"That's it?"
"Well, no." Shylif looked a bit put out. "It takes a lot of time and effort to find opportunities like this."
"Can you teach me how to do it?"
Shylif grinned. "I can."
"Thanks."
"The ship's leaving from Portal Eighteen in twenty minutes. You're gonna need pressure suits. Are you bringing your denner?"
"I have nowhere to put him. I checked out of the hotel. Where do I get suits?"
"Hmm." Shylif grinned. "Let's make that your first test."
Twenty minutes to find a suit? Toby looked around, cursing under his breath. Shylif was brisk-walking away, seemingly ignoring Toby now that he'd given him a task.
"How the hell are we going to get suits?" he muttered to Orpheus. "I mean, maybe I can rent one, but you..." He tried to think of similar situations he'd been in, either on Sedna or in Consensus, but couldn't remember any. What would Shylif expect him to do?
Use the resources you've got. Which, right now, amounted to the his denner, the clothes on his back, and a pair of tourist glasses...
Of course! He lowered a mapping overlay onto his vision. He could see Portal Eighteen, about half a kilometer around the curve of the warehouse level. Toby did some queries as he ran after Shylif, and dozens of yellow flags popped up in his visual field, showing the locations of public pressure suit kiosks.
So Wallop was like Sedna: as with firefighting bots on Earth, pressure suits were one of those basic safety devices you had to have handy on a world like this. The atmosphere outside this bubble city was probably toxic, and you never knew when some accident or deliberate attack might pierce the city's skin. Suits were everywhere. All Toby had to do was pause at one of the brightly colored pillars and drag out the collapsed suitcase-like shape. There weren't any denner-shaped ones, of course, but he did find a bin full of survival balls. These were just sacks you could jump into and zip shut, but they had transparent windows and five or six grippies on the outside that could detach and act as hands or help you crawl.
"It's this or you wait for me here," he told the denner. Orpheus just blinked at him.
Portal Eighteen wasn't the solid metal airlock Toby had been expecting. Instead, when he reached the outer wall of the tall warehouse space where it was set, he found himself facing what looked like a giant heart valve: three flimsy-looking plastic flaps overlapped one another to cover a circular opening about ten meters across. As Toby joined Shylif under it he could hear wind whistling around the flaps. "Is that air moving out, or something else coming in?" he wondered aloud.
Shylif shrugged. "If it was coming in, we'd be dead now."
A heavy rail mounted in the ceiling ran through this insecure opening; hanging off the rail was a spindle-shaped transparent airship not much bigger than the shipping container they'd come to Wallop in. It was like some kind of deep-sea fish. He could see its internal machinery, and he could also see that there were no gas-bags inside it—it was just a set of metal hoop-shaped ribs with plastic stretched over them. Maybe the whole thing was one big gas-bag.
"Hey! What're you doing?"
They turned to find a man in a half-furled pressure suit striding up to them. He was tall and stick-like, with long limbs and a ratcheting way of walking. Loops of rope and belts festooned with fasteners bounced as he stepped up to glare at the only humans on the floor.
Shylif said nothing; was this another test? "We're here to work," said Toby, trying not to sound defensive.
"Oh, you're the replacements?" This from a woman who was standing about two meters above Toby's head. She'd been adjusting something at the bow of the airship. "We're on time, then!"
The man frowned at a point somewhere over Toby's head—reading his virtual tags, no doubt. "I dunno. The big one's flagged with a resume as long as my arm, but the kid's got no credentials at all. For all I know he's never been outside before."
Toby stuck out his jaw and tried to look bigger than he knew he was. "I've done hundreds of hours on the ice on Sedna."
The skinny man started to say something, but the woman overhead guffawed loudly. "That mined-out hulk? What the hell were you doing there?"
Toby thought about it. "Growing up," he said finally. Shylif was now struggling to suppress a smile.
"Aw, let's give them a chance, Casson," she said. "If they've done cold they might be okay." She strode down the gangplank, and Toby could see she was wearing an outfit similar to Casson's. She saw him looking and lifted her loops of climbing line and let them fall. "You need a Personal Flying Device and some cords. If you're replacing the Segentry bot you'll be on my team, lucky for you but bad for me if you don't perform."
Toby nodded. "I'm... Garren."
"This one's Casson. I'm Nissa. PFDs're over there. "Up close she looked fairly ordinary, except that her eyes were a striking, pale mauve. She pointed at a heap of brightly colored bins on the warehouse floor below the airship. Then she blinked. "Hey, what's that?" She grabbed at Toby's backpack.
Orpheus stuck out his head and hissed.
Toby tensed, but all Nissa did was shrug and say, "It's like that, is it? He stays on board when we go in." She shot a sidelong look at Casson, who shrugged.
"Okay." Maybe these people had dealt with stowaways before.
"All right, now get goin'!" Casson jabbed a thumb at a line of bots that was marching up a gangplank into the open side of the airship, which apparently had nothing but ordinary air inside it. "We're leaving in five."
Toby's heart had started pounding when he entered the airship. The thing was so flimsy; it faced him with the reality of where they were about to go. He barely noticed the pressure suit building itself onto his body and it wasn't until Orpheus gently seized his ankle with his teeth that Toby snapped out of his terror.
He bent to stroke the denner's head. "I'll be fine." When he straightened it was to see that they were already underway, sliding down the rail and through the city's sphincter. This was a disturbingly biological experience. Once the ship was outside, though, it bobbed comfortably in the air. Toby didn't know what made up Wallop's atmosphere, but whatever it was, ordinary air at room temperature was lighter. He dragged in a couple of deep breaths to calm himself, then took his first clear look at the planet he was on.
Right then he almost begged Casson to turn around and take him back. Since he'd climbed out of the shipping container he'd known, in an intellectual sort of way, that there was no surface to Wallop. Now, looking out the transparent side of the airship and down through clouds, with clouds below those, and basements of clouds on abysses of more cloud... he had to find something else to look at.
Shylif was sitting quietly, staring at nothing. Toby's eyes fell on Orpheus, who was also staring into the endless depths of coiling gray and black. If Orpheus had been a dog, his tail would be wagging. Toby had to laugh.
Shylif looked up, and Casson, who was up at the bow with Nissa, also heard the laugh and grunted. "Bots don't usually do that," he said. "Neither do first-timers."
"It's Orpheus," said Toby. "I think he likes it here."
"Orpheus? Good name. Maybe he always wished he had wings. Some of us are like that." Casson turned back to discussing the flight plan with Nissa.
Now Shylif came to sit next to Toby. He nodded at the darkness outside. "I spent most of my life on solid ground. Took me years to get used to these worlds."
"Plenty of them have solid ground, don't they?"
"Yeah, but... not trees, usually. Not forests."
"Ah." Toby looked down. "I miss
Earth. Have, since we left for Sedna."
There was a brief silence between them, then Shylif said, "You gotta know that lots of people go through what you're going through. Except that most of them know about the locksteps in advance. But that sense of being ripped out of your world... that's actually pretty normal."
He paused, thinking. "What hangs over your head is not being able to go back. Earth's not the same place as when you left it. There's nowhere to go but forward."
Was he hinting that Toby shouldn't try to go to Destrier? If he was, he was being pretty roundabout with it. Toby wanted to ask him about the dark past that Jaysir had hinted at, but he wasn't sure how. "You came from outside the locksteps, right?"
Shylif nodded. "And now I can't return. The moment you step into this world, you give up everything you had before. It's like time burns it away before your very eyes."
"Then—why...?"
"Why come here at all?" Shylif turned sad eyes on Toby. "Some people treat it like a train to a better future. They hop on, and when they hear about some world or civilization that's come up that appeals to them, they step off. Some people think it's a way of leaving mortal time altogether and becoming eternal, but that's ridiculous. We all die. And some... some just get tired of wandering the halls of the dead, calling out to people who'll never respond. "
He started to walk away, but Toby said, "Hey. What's your connection to Corva?"
Shylif looked back. "She came to the docks looking for a way to get to Lowdown. Some of us stowaways were there—as well as other people who'd have eaten her for lunch. She needed help. I... needed somebody to help." He shrugged, a motion barely visible through his suit.
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