Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  "Help to do what?"

  Shylif shook his head, and headed aft.

  There was no point in pressing; Toby knew he'd get no more from the man. With nothing else to do, he sat back with Orpheus, followed the denner's gaze into the darkness, and quickly became transfixed by what he saw.

  He'd thought of the continent as self-contained, locked away from the environment it sailed through—but that wasn't the case at all. The piled-up bubbles sprouted gantries and balconies and docks and diving boards, and the air around and above them was full of darting, soaring shapes: airships, like the one he was in, but also aircraft, and even winged humans. Some of these were nearby, so he could make out what they were doing—they seemed to be engaged in some sort of sporting event as they swooped and soared within a volume defined by six giant, glowing hoops.

  The continent was a collision of lanterns, or a surf of glowing pearls hanging untroubled amid Wallop's storms. The cities' curving sides cradled the white of towers and the green of cultivated jungles that raveled them like verdigris staining a glass ball.

  Wisps of dark cloud began drifting across this vision as the airship picked up speed. Toby was too excited to be tired now; he tore his gaze from what was behind them, and as he did he spotted something. Far, far away, in the darkness beyond the Continent, a tiny yellow speck played peekaboo from behind the black skirts of a thunderhead a hundred times its size. With a jolt he realized that this tiny dot of light was another city. Now that he could use it for scale, the rest of the hammer-heads and towers of billowing, lightning-lit vapor surrounding him were suddenly revealed as utterly gigantic, way bigger than mountains—as big, it seemed, as worlds.

  Way, way up above this cloud deck lightning momentarily silhouetted a tiny black dot against the highest of the charcoal-colored clouds. Then the lightning was gone leaving cut-out thunderhead shapes against a velvet, star-spattered night.

  With this he realized they'd been rising quite quickly; the continent was a smear of yellow far below his feet. They rose and rose through the stratified layers of Wallop's atmosphere, and eventually the stars became regular companions. They'd left the lightning far below, so it was by starlight that Toby came to see the horizon of Wallop. The little airship seemed surrounded by vast towers of black, but through gaps in these he could see similar thunderheads foresting the distance in smaller and smaller ranks. On any reasonably-sized planet those ranks would have lowered steadily to fall below the horizon line, but according to the tourist glasses Wallop was somewhere around the size of Neptune, so they simply became smaller and smaller until they merged in a blur at infinity. Staggered by distance and scale, Toby fell silent and just watched.

  All the while, the distant city grew larger, like a blackened crystal ball, empty of prophecies. "It's not lit up," Toby said, and now he knew he sounded worried.

  "It's wintering over." Shylif had returned and was standing next to him. "No need for lights when everybody's asleep. 'Course, its reactors are still keeping it warm enough to float. But the air up there is pretty calm; it's the best place to park a city if you want to avoid the storms for a decade or two." He pointed, and now Toby could see that the city-sphere trailed hundreds of fine thread-like cables into the depths below it, like some technological jellyfish. "Those strips filter-feed trace amounts of metal and minerals out of the air. Takes decades to accumulate enough for a month's industry."

  "Okay," Nissa called from the bow, "here's how this works. Those boys," she nodded up at the black bowl of the sky, "intercepted some of our cargoes while we wintered over. The government doesn't care. It's a civil matter—lost property, and all that. So the owners have to recover it. They've sent their bots to do that." She pointed her chin at the motley crowd of household bots and bulkier worker drones milling in the back of the airship. "Whatever it is they've lost is worth more than a bot or two, 'cause they risk losing them and getting nothing back. Casson and I are along because it's against all kinds of rules, laws, and treaties to invade somebody else's wintering habitat using bots. Those same laws say that you can't deny shelter and life-support to a visitor. So we can walk right in there and get the stuff, and the bots can come with us."

  Toby frowned doubtfully. "What if they resist?"

  "If they really wanted to resist, we wouldn't get within ten kilometers of the place," said Casson. "They don't want a war with the lock-step. All they can do is bare-faced lie and say they don't have the stuff. And since we know where it is, they can't stop us walking in and taking it."

  "Okay."

  The city loomed overhead like a perfect thundercloud. Casson switched on a powerful spotlight and they searched for a while until they found a landing platform that stuck a good hundred meters out of the city's flank. You could have landed an ocean liner on it, yet Casson set their little airship down right in the center as if claiming the entire space.

  As they drifted in, Toby wondered how they were going to come to a stop; he started as, with a clang, six bots fell or jumped off the underside of the airship. They must have been holding onto it all this time. They carried cables that they proceeded to unreel as they searched for attachment points. There were plenty of these, and in seconds they'd secured the airship.

  Toby started to follow the others to the hatch, but Orpheus stopped him by weaving in between his feet, causing him to nearly trip. "Hey! Stop it. What—" Orpheus skipped back to the nose of the airship, pressed his snout against the transparent plastic and planted his paws on either side, looking for all the world like a little man staring out. Toby paused, laughed, and went to join him. There was a traffic jam at the hatch anyway; he had a moment.

  The gameworlds he'd crafted with Peter had contained nothing like this. The boys had plundered centuries worth of science fiction and fantasy art to build their virtual worlds. They'd generated thousands of planets, from vast ringed monstrosities laced with rainbows of cloud, to airless chunks of pure gold orbiting close to yellow stars and roaring with leonine light. They'd imagined desert worlds and water worlds, jungle planets and glacier-bound icescapes. Nothing they'd done had prepared Toby for the three actual worlds he'd encountered since awaking in the lockstep. Nothing could have prepared him for what he was seeing now.

  The airship looked like a glass tube lying on its side on a shelf that, no matter how broad it was, still seemed precarious. They were perched at the very top of this world's atmosphere. The delicacy and mesmerizing detail of a starlit cloudscape lay below them, all the more hypnotic because the peaks and out-flung arms of vapor appeared perfectly still. It was like the entire world was wintering over.

  Toby had a flash of vision then, an image of himself curled up and as still as this for the past thirty years—no, more: motionless and waiting, for fourteen thousand...

  Just for that one moment, he felt equal to this place, for the city was only doing what he'd already done. Then Shylif called his name and he had to turn away.

  "This way." He left Orpheus on the ship, but made sure he was in his survival ball just in case. Then he followed space-suited human figures, and incongruously ordinary-looking bots, across the stillness of the platform and through a set of gigantic, half-open doors. Apparently the city wasn't worried about maintaining its internal atmosphere right now; he saw other open portals at intervals around the curve of the dark interior.

  Here were city towers, houses, and trees, all in a very different style from the ones in the Continent. "They're sort of Mayan," he commented.

  "What's Mayan?" asked Shylif.

  "Before your time, I guess." Thankfully, it was hard to make out details in the darkness; he didn't really want to feel the oppressive gaze of all those empty windows on him. How many frozen human forms were curled up behind them, waiting out the years of what, to them, would feel like a single night?

  That made him think of what Shylif had said earlier, about "wandering the halls of the dead, calling out to people who'll never respond." Jaysir said he had waited thirty years for his lost love t
o awaken again. Chilled by the thought, Toby hurried after the others.

  The fans of light cast by the bots' headlamps were easy to follow, so he jogged after them across frosted, snow-drifted balconies and ramps. Soon he saw where they were going: an incongruous heap of crates lay half-submerged in snow near a frozen fountain. Without ceremony, the bots began rooting through the boxes, tossing aside the ones that, presumably, weren't owned by their masters.

  "That's it?" Toby watched the free-for-all in puzzlement. "We just pick 'em up and go home?"

  Shylif laughed shortly. "You want it to be exciting?"

  "Well... maybe not."

  "Anyway, it's not like they're not watching us." He pointed, and Toby, looking where he indicated, experienced a sudden heart-stopping shock. Somebody was standing there, in the shadows. It wasn't a bot, but a space-suited figure, human-shaped. It stood as still as the icicles that hung above it like Damocles's sword, its metal arms crossed, feet planted wide, face-plate blank and dark.

  "Wh-who's that?"

  Shylif turned away. "A sentry, a keeper... call him what you want. This lockstep has them. They walk up and down the ramparts of the city, twenty years alone.... If that one wanted us dead, we would never have made it this far."

  "You boys got a manifest?" Casson's voice broke Toby out of his uneasy distraction.

  "Yes," said Shylif. He called up the list of crates he and Toby were to haul. There weren't too many, but still, they'd have to make several trips. Toby cut a wide berth around the other bots, which were tumbling whatever they didn't want into a broad debris field around the central mound of boxes. He quickly found the first of the crates, heaved it onto his shoulder, and began to make his way back to the airship.

  It was on his third trip that he began to realize how weak he still was. He'd just come out of hibernation, after all—and not your normal, run-of-the-mill thirty year sleep, either. That wry thought made him laugh, and drop his crate.

  He was sitting on it when Shylif came by, toting a much bigger box. "Tired?"

  "I'll hire you to carry this one back too."

  Shylif laughed, but didn't take him up on the offer. After hibernation, he was probably nearing the last of his strength, too. Toby took a deep breath and hoisted his box to follow.

  This was a different lockstep from Peter's. Shylif had said that there were a number of them here on Wallop—and why shouldn't they be scattered throughout the Universe? The name 270/2 described a timing ratio different than three-sixty—Maybe they all ran on their own frequencies, and those might or might not ever sync up. Also, they might have been started at any time during the past fourteen thousand years. Even a lockstep full of human beings just like himself might have a culture and traditions—not to mention language and technologies—thousands of years removed from Toby's. The mere thought made his head whirl, but all he had to do was glance around to know it must be true.

  He struggled under the weight of the last crate on his shoulder, and barely registered Orpheus's greeting when he reached the airship. The other bots all made it back with their cargoes and Nissa cast off. Then she and Casson chattered on about the thieving habits of decadent locksteps as they turned the ship's nose into a canyon of open black air and began the long dive back to the Continent. Fatigued as he was, Toby barely heard them.

  Shylif sat with him in companionable silence as they sailed back to the raft of cities. Somehow this easy quiet made Toby decide to trust the older man in a way he'd never quite managed with talkative Ammond. When they reached the city-spheres and docked, Toby was able to unload his share of the crates himself, and took payment on the spot from Shylif.

  Once they were out of their suits and the dock was behind them, Shylif said, "Give me a call tomorrow. I'll show you how to find bots that want to subcontract."

  Toby grinned. "Sounds good. And, Shy, thanks."

  "Don't mention it. No, seriously, don't let Corva know." He rolled his eyes. "I'll talk her around. But give me a few days.

  "Thanks."

  In a kind of daze, he walked out of the warehouse district and rode an escalator up into the city. Orpheus chittered and danced about, obviously glad to be back on what passed here for solid ground. Toby smiled vaguely at him, but his gaze kept drifting. He was thinking about how vastly different the locksteps might be, and how strangely familiar this one seemed. The people, the buildings... it was all bizarre and alien, this bubble-city and the civilization it cradled—but there remained that strange familiarity.

  It hit him when a woman passed him wearing a completely recognizable outfit of tunic and leggings. He spun, staring at her as she receded, and then he swore, and laughed, and swore again.

  He'd seen that apparel just a couple of months ago. In fact, he'd helped to design it.

  In creating Lockstep 360/1, his brother Peter hadn't merely been inspired by the culture, customs, and technologies of the game-world he and Toby had created together.

  Lockstep 360/1 was Consensus.

  Chapter 8

  Toby and Peter had built a world together.

  It hadn't been fun.

  If you were the right kind of rich, and living on Earth, you could afford those things the rich needed: gated communities, 24/7 security bots, and human bodyguards who came with their own micro-armies of hand-sized flying guns and gnat-shaped spies. You could move through the world in your own little bubble of safety this way—if you were the right kind of rich.

  The McGonigals weren't that kind of rich.

  Dad had made his fortune in salvage—the deep-sea kind. His company hunted down methane clathrates and CO 2 sinks in ocean trenches, and converted their carbon to less volatile forms. Nobody wanted a repeat of the Big Belch, when the Arctic oceans had vomited up millions of years' worth of greenhouse gases in just a few short decades, undoing two generations' work in reducing CO 2 emissions. Temperatures had shot up to intolerable levels after the Belch; small consolation that the frantic international effort to build orbital sunshades had finally kick-started an offworld civilization.

  Dad called himself a lowly greenhouse gas exterminator, but he'd made enough doing it to approach the threshold of being noticed by the truly wealthy. Mom was a garbage designer; it was her genius at optimizing the wastes of one industrial process so that you could sell them as inputs to another, that had ultimately made possible the colonizing of Sedna. Nobody else could have built the super-efficient resource management system that was the key to the colony's success. Toby's parents had skills that were perfect for settlers taking on a hostile environment at the edge of the Solar System. But they had never planned to go there.

  If Dad had become just wealthy enough to be noticed by the more condescending of the trillionaires, he'd also become just wealthy enough to be noticed by those who preyed on them.

  So one bright spring day, Toby came home to find the front door of their mansion smashed in. The nanny was dead on the kitchen floor. Toby spent a long time staring at the blood matted in her long blond hair, how it stuck to the tiles, until he suddenly realized that Peter was missing.

  All he could clearly remember now was that he'd run through the house, shouting Peter's name. Later, policemen and detectives had shown up—lots of them. Mom and Dad were there, and Evayne too. Evayne had tightly clutched her plush toys, peering over their heads as they (minor robots as they were) also peered around. The toys had known something was wrong, and they'd gone into traumacounseling mode as soon as the police arrived. Evayne had spent the next month listening to their soothing voices, and talking to them, and with that and the right kind of pills, she'd come out of the whole thing just fine.

  For Toby, the only thing that kept him from screaming himself awake at night was full participation in the investigation. He had to know everything that was being done; had to go with Dad to the police station to hear the latest updates. He learned all about the kidnapper culture that had developed out of the unholy marriage of interplanetary organized crime and a highly polarized society w
here you were either rich and independent, or destitute and indentured.

  He remembered whole days of the search, entire conversations with his parents and with Evayne. But like the day of the kidnapping itself, he could barely recall the day Peter had come home.

  The kidnappers were dead. Peter had seen them go down in a spray of gunfire. By the time that had happened, he'd been with them long enough that he'd started to bond with them, or so the psychiatrists said. Even though his captors promised to kill him if his parents didn't pay the ransom, Peter had begun to trust them, even grudgingly agree with their claim that they were justified in kidnapping him. The husband and wife team was poor, after all—deeply and irrevocably poor. There was no hope for them ever climbing out of that by legal means. Society was at fault here, not them, Peter insisted.

  The kidnappers hadn't told Peter that they'd killed the nanny. Toby remembered the moment in the interview room when Peter found out. He'd been sitting there defiant, tears in his eyes, after screaming insults at the detectives. They'd murdered his friends, he accused. They were the monsters here.

  "How can you say that?" the lead detective had burst out. "They killed Maria Teresa."

  Peter had just blinked at him.

  "Your nanny," the detective said. "They killed your nanny when they took you."

  "Stop it, he's only eight years old," Dad said.

  It was too late. Toby could see it in Peter's eyes, like a sudden crumbling. He'd gotten very quiet after that.

  The quiet stretched for days, then weeks. Psychiatrists came and went. Mom and Dad had been distraught during the kidnapping, but now that it was over, a deeper despair seemed to be settling on them. Peter no longer smiled, and so neither did they.

  Evayne was okay. She had her trauma-counselor toys. They tried these on Peter, and they helped a little. But nothing really worked, and Toby knew it even if Mom and Dad didn't. Somebody had to do something for Peter, and whatever it was, it would have to be just as huge as the kidnapping itself had been.