Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  "Actually, we'd woken up two weeks ahead of time, while the city was still thawing out. Corva figured we needed the time to get our bearings, recover, and find you. She was right. And you—you'd had days asleep in your cicada bed while they moved you from the ship to the docks. Cicada beds are a lot easier on the system than denners, man. You can't just bed down again today."

  Toby turned and looked away through the ranks of shipping containers. Everything Jaysir said might be true, but the more Jaysir tried to convince him to stay, the more Toby felt himself pulling away. "Okay sure," he said, waving Jaysir into silence. "Say you're right about all that. I've got some things I'm pretty sure I'm right about, too."

  He imitated Jaysir, ticking points off on his fingers. "First of all, Jay, I'm not going to start trusting you just because you tell me you can be trusted. I fell for that once, I'm not going to do it again."

  Jaysir made a kind of reluctant shrug of agreement.

  "Second, you guys want something from me, but you're not telling me what it is. Tell me, and maybe I'll start trusting you!"

  Now it was Jaysir's turn to look hesitant. "It's really up to Corva. This is her thing...."

  "And you're, what? Along for the ride?" Toby shook his head. "Third, I'm totally dependent on you, just like I was dependent on Ammond and Persea. If you were really friends, you'd help me get set up on my own, and then ask me for whatever help it is you want."

  Jaysir thought about it. "Okay, I can see that. Problem is, you've got no money, no idea how to survive on your own, and the instant you tell anybody who you are, you'll be jumped on by a hundred police-bots."

  "So you say."

  Now Jaysir was starting to look a bit desperate. "Say I let you go. What do I tell the others? Corva... Corva needs you, man."

  "I'll be around. You can call me—" But Jaysir was shaking his head.

  "We can't call you, you don't have a legal identity. Oh, I heard about this 'Garren Morden' alias, but you can't use it. And you can't use... your real name, either. Shouldn't even say it aloud." He glanced around at the blank boxes surrounding them.

  "Then tell me what I have to do to avoid getting caught while I sort myself out."

  "Pfaw! Why would I do that?"

  Toby stopped, gently set down Orpheus, then reached inside his tunic for the object he'd carried since bursting into the water on Auriga. He held it up in the cold factory light, and was rewarded as Jaysir's eyes snapped to it with sudden intensity.

  "This is a data block from Sedna. I don't know exactly how old it is in lockstep terms, but it was hidden in the back of a twentier—a bot from the original colony. You said you collect procedural computer code, Jay. I bet you've never gotten to hack something this old."

  "Ah," said Jaysir. He hadn't looked away from the block.

  "If you can help me get the data off of it, I'll give you whatever code's written into it. But only if you let me go."

  Jaysir blinked and looked away. "What you need to do is buy a pair of tourist glasses. I'll give you our URNs and you can send me your glasses' address. So we'll be able to contact each other, but we won't be able to track you, and don't have to use your URN or name.

  "Don't open any accounts, don't buy anything virtually, or do anything that requires an identity check! I have a list of places you can stay that won't ask. And you're going to need a cash card." He rummaged in his baggy trousers and came out with one. Handing it to Toby, he said, "This should last you a day or two. But you can't just go running off to Destrier! You need to know where you are and what's going on first. And it's a hell of a story to tell."

  With Jaysir's unique identif ier, his URN, Toby would be able to phone, email, or—if they shared services—locate him when needed. Jaysir was offering him a way to deal with him and Corva and Shylif at arm's length. Suddenly he felt horribly guilty about taking off like this. But Ammond and Persea had been prepared to kill him....

  "Don't stick your head up, it'll get shot off." Jaysir turned away. "I gotta figure out what I'm going to tell the others. It won't be pretty, let me tell you."

  "Thanks, Jay. I will call you."

  Jaysir grunted. "It's a small world. It's not like you can go very far." Then he thought of something. "Hey—whatever you do, don't use any Cicada Corp equipment!"

  "Why—"

  "Just, just don't! I'll explain when I see you." Troubled, but determined, Toby ducked his head in agreement, and walked away.

  Dealing with Jaysir had worn him out. Toby felt tired and dizzy, and like his tongue and skin had been sunburnt. Even the dim lighting here was too bright, and as soon as he began to move he started puffing as if he'd just run a race. Cradling Orpheus, Toby plodded between the rows of stacked containers, peering about for a way out. With every step he took, he felt worse, and more guilty about leaving the others—especially Corva, whom he suspected would not be as understanding as Jaysir.

  He'd seek them out as soon as he'd recovered from hibernation and felt a little safe and had some money, however one got that. Then, he'd pay Jaysir back for the cash card. He might even help Corva with whatever it was she wanted from him; but he had to find out what that was first.

  There were bots working in the warehouse. In his condition he couldn't have hidden from them if he'd wanted to, but they ignored him. Maybe he could subcontract to them, the way Shylif did.

  The general traffic of robots, automated cargo carts and moving cranes gave him a direction to follow, and shortly he emerged squint-eyed into what at first seemed to be hot sunlight. He shaded his narrowed eyes with his free hand, and looked up.

  It wasn't sunlight. He wasn't outdoors, and this place was like nowhere he'd ever seen or heard of.

  The warehouse entrance was one of a number of similar doorways that opened onto a circular plaza cluttered with shops and food stands, and crowded with people. So far so good. Around the plaza, tiers of heavily forested cityscape rose up in a sweeping curve, so for a second or two he thought he was at the bottom of a small, bowl-shaped valley. These weren't uncommon on Mars or the Moon, where ancient impact craters made perfect circular depressions that could be domed over.

  This landscape's curve became vertical, and then kept curving, inward now, to close a couple of kilometers overhead. He wasn't in a bowl, but a bubble. At its very summit, its north pole, brilliant sun lamps pulsed with light and heat. There was even a single little white cloud hovering in the middle of the space.

  Tongues of forest and towers of glittering window and balcony swept up for much of the upper hemisphere of the bubble he was in, but gradually they gave way to buildings that seemed to sit on the outside of the sphere. These thrust elevator shafts and escalators through the bubble's skin—and that skin was transparent wherever it showed.

  Flickers of lightning beyond it brought him glimpses of billowing cloudscapes far larger than this sphere. And, in the distance, he thought he could make out the ghostly outline of a mottled moon nestled in the clouds: another sphere?

  Something broke the symmetry of the curve, and it took him a while to figure out what it was. With one of those figure-toground flips of perspective, he suddenly realized that what he'd thought was a flat circular formation high up on the sphere was a hole — a gap in the geodesic curve. Along its edges, escalators and walkways led from his bubble into another, larger space. He even spotted an aircar sailing out of there. And, were those even bigger bubbles beyond?

  Okay, he'd heard of aerostats—giant, spherical living spaces that could be floated in the atmospheres. Before he'd left Earth, there'd been a news report about some of the trillionaires wanting to colonize Venus by building such things. That had been amazing, but this—!

  The bubble he was in was at least a kilometer across, yet it was attached to an unknown number of others, like one soap bubble clinging to a raft of others. If a single bubble-city could take flight, he supposed a knot of them could too, and so this raft hovered high in the atmosphere of some vast, dark planet.

  When he
could pull his eyes back to ground level, Toby blinked at a vision of chaos totally unlike the majesty that presided overhead. Here, craft stalls, food, and robot-part outlets were mashed together and half-piled over one another; there were carpet salesmen here, and wood-carvers, perfumeries, neon-lit bars, and shadier, slotted doors in ramshackle huts that were guarded by hulking milbots. People crowded everywhere, jostling one another and talking, shouting, arguing, and haggling. And what people!

  He and Peter had watched all the old movies set in galactic empires and ancient solar civilizations. They'd devoured science fiction books from the dawn of spaceflight—and so, when they came to build the universe of Consensus, they had given it faster-than-light ships and a vast culture of aliens and evolving humans. All of that was impossible, of course: in the real Universe, no such thing could ever exist, for traveling between the stars was a multidecade affair for even the most advanced civilization. No matter how much wealth you had; no matter how much power; there could never be, in the real world, a marketplace where denizens of thousands of worlds and hundreds of cultures met. Nowhere could dozens of species and subspecies of human and alien crowd together to meet and trade and celebrate an empire of reason and commerce vaster than any solar system.

  Yet here it was.

  Most of the humans in sight were ordinary enough, but some were incredibly tall and stringy, others short and powerful, like the man who'd kept the denners on Auriga. Yet others were green-skinned, or scaly, or had become one with the machines that accompanied them. There were nonhuman shapes, too, though that was impossible: no intelligent alien life had been found within a hundred light-years of the Earth... at least, not in Toby's day.

  He found he was grinning. The fantasy had been made real, not on Earth, but here in the vastness between the stars. The galactic empire he and Peter had dreamed about—as so many others had before them—had been built in the only place it could be, and in the only way it ever could: in lockstep time.

  But he was dizzy, and nearly collapsed before he could make it to a nearby escalator. As he stood leaning on its handrail, letting himself rise through level after level of the bubble-city, he brought out the list of hostels and hotels Jaysir had given him. When he spotted the sign for one he gave Orpheus a tight hug and said, "We're homefree. Just a few more minutes and I'll order up a room-service meal like you've never seen."

  Provided, of course, he had enough on his cash card for that.

  Toby hadn't had time to find the cheaper lodgings available in the city; he'd walked into the first hotel on Jaysir's list that he could find. He'd never stayed in a hotel by himself before, but he got through the strangeness of checking in without having to use any biometrics or produce ID. It turned out not to be any more overwhelming than anything else that had happened to him lately.

  The bed was deep and soft, the shower was hot, and there was plenty of good food available at the hotel buffet. He ate there alone, and snuck some generous portions back for Orpheus, who roused himself from a sleep of obvious exhaustion just long enough to wolf it all down.

  He'd wondered how to deal with the denner's bodily functions, but at one point Orpheus disappeared and Toby found him splayed precariously over the toilet. He glared at Toby and so his human companion retreated with a muttered "sorry." It was quite hilarious, actually, but he stifled his laugh. Orpheus, he had begun to realize, had a real sense of dignity.

  His feeling of having been sunburned proved not far from the truth. Toby's body seemed to be shedding all manner of dead material, so his skin started to itch and flake, some of his hair came out in the shower, and his kidneys were working overtime. Orpheus wasn't much better.

  Still, he was eager to take the next step. His family was alive—all except his Dad. He had to get to them. Some kind of misunderstanding had made it seem like Peter had tried to have him killed, but that couldn't be right. He'd sort it out as soon as he figured out what was going on. Right now, the one place he knew to go was the planet Destrier, where his Mom was apparently wintering over.

  He needed to know more, but there were no TVs or other screens in this world; data, music, and entertainment f lowed through people's glasses or implants. Toby had seen a stall that sold interface rigs down in the market, so once he felt able, he left Orpheus in the room for an hour while he went to buy a set of these.

  Jaysir had suggested he buy a pair of tourist glasses. He did, but found they did little more than highlight local sights and were constantly popping ads up for this or that restaurant or gaming-room. Every time they did that he jumped or stumbled. He got back to the room okay, though, and plunked himself down next to a lethargic Orpheus. "Let's see if I can at least connect to you," he said to the denner.

  Jaysir had mentioned in an off-hand way that the denners had interfaces, and sure enough when he looked at Orpheus through the tourist glasses, the denner sprouted icons and emoticons. His interface was pretty simple, actually: Orpheus could broadcast his location, could signify basic needs like thirst or a need to pee; and he had an alarm clock. It was for setting hibernation wake-up times.

  The clock showed that it had last been set by a user named Guest. That would be Corva, he reasoned. The heavy man on Auriga had left the primary account wide open, so he quickly set the security levels on the alarm so only he could use it. So. That was done.

  Now for the other thing he'd wanted to do.

  "Search word McGonigal," he said. It seemed the easiest place to start—but Toby had no sooner spoken the word than his vision was filled with plane after plane of hovering pictures and hot-links to videos, movies, books. There were thousands.

  He reached out hesitantly and tapped one of the virtual pictures, which spun and enlarged.

  Who was this? Toby was looking at a middle-aged, bullet-headed, bald man with grim frown lines around his mouth. Next to him stood a similarly grim woman, of similar age, her face narrow and her eyes and mouth pinched and severe.

  They looked like relatives, but from which side of the family? Had there been other Mc-Gonigals on Earth, who'd come to Sedna after Toby's disappearance?

  Then he saw the picture's caption.

  Peter and Evayne McGonigal, it said, inaugurating a new pilgrimage center on Cephus, Lockstep Year 32.

  A rushing filled Toby's ears, and the room seemed to bend around him. He sat back cursing.

  It was them, and yet not them. Instead of his brother and sister, here were their strange ghosts—specters not of the past, but of some terrible future of decline and severe disappointments. So they seemed, anyway, as they stared out at him: bitter, unsatisfied, even accusing.

  He could barely breathe. The picture continued to hang there, perfectly still yet looming larger and larger in his vision. Toby tried to look Peter in the eyes, and it was like staring into the Sun—after just a glimpse he had to turn away, but when his gaze fell on Evayne's face, the same thing happened again.

  His mouth was dry and he was panting as, with a frantic gesture, he wiped away the photos and the search term.

  Who were those people? That uncompromising woman in her forties who'd looked so much like his mother—was it really Evayne? And the other one, whose eyes held accusation and so much adult impatience... was that Peter? Even their clothes and their glimpsed backgrounds—how many worlds, how many years lined the dizzying abyss down which he'd just looked? Years, decades of separation taunted him from just those two pictures.

  He didn't know these people. He didn't want to know them; he wanted the family he'd had barely a month ago.

  "Mrph?" He looked up, realizing he'd buried his face in his drawn-up knees. Orpheus's huge eyes held concern, and he reached to ruffle the denner's fur. "It's okay," he murmured. "We just need to... sort it all out."

  He was doubly exhausted now, and lay back. Before he knew it he was waking up in his clothes, apparently having not moved a muscle for hours. Orpheus was curled up next to him; when he put on his glasses he found it was six o'clock in the morning.

&n
bsp; "Aw, crap." His croaking voice woke up the denner, who yawned and stretched in a very cat-like manner, then stared at him expectantly.

  They had breakfast, paid for the night's lodgings and, after that, they were almost out of money. Toby found himself sitting on the white-washed hotel steps watching Orpheus nose around the base of the decorative hedges. He had nowhere to go now, unless it was back to Corva with his tail between his legs. He could call Jaysir, but he was reluctant to play that card. The data block was pretty much the only leverage he had right now.

  Or... he should just walk right up to the town hall and tell them who he was. He was the long-lost heir to the entire lockstep empire, after all.

  And yet, and yet... there were those faces he'd seen in the photo. People with the names of his brother and sister, but utterly alien eyes. What if Corva wasn't lying?

  If she wasn't, then not only Peter and Evayne were alive. Their mother was waiting in cold sleep for the day when he returned.

  That was a terrible thought. He had to go to her.

  The glasses pointed only to local sights. Amazing as those were—dozens of city spheres made up a kind of raft continent—the glasses wouldn't tell him anything about how to travel to other worlds. Apparently you needed to buy an upgrade for that. He thought about this for a while, then went back into the hotel.

  "Excuse me," he said to the bot at the front desk, "how can I find out about flights to, well, a planet named Destrier?"

  "That's easy, sir," said the bot in its perkily helpful synthetic voice.

  "What you need to do is visit the pilgrimage center."

  Chapter 7

  Orpheus was like a lead weight wrapping Toby's shoulders by the time he found the place. It was a cathedral-like building sitting by itself in a plaza in one of the larger city-bubbles.

  Getting here had been a magical, if exhausting, journey. Though there was public transit throughout the Continent (as the locals called the raft of bubbles), it mostly consisted of slide-walks and escalators. Toby had been carrying his denner for over an hour now, buoyed only by the occasional vistas of the Continent that opened out before him. Some of the city-bubbles were many kilometers in diameter, and each had others next to, above, or below it, so that the eye followed lines of city and forest up to dizzying perches far overhead, or down to cavernous depths. Outside it was a permanent, storm-lit night; Wallop, it seemed, was a nomad planet like Lowdown, orphaned somewhere between the stars. Yet it was a hub of commerce and culture for the lockstep.