Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  Toby swallowed. "Have they... have they done this before?"

  She stared at him. "Your family has done this to other worlds, yes."

  There was nothing he could say to that. He sat there, uncomfortable, until Corva said, "You're a McGonigal."

  "I'm not my brother." It wasn't the first time he'd ever had to distance himself from Peter's behavior; after the trauma of the kidnapping, Peter had acted out in all kinds of ways, some pretty destructive. Toby had apologized for him more than once; he couldn't believe he was still doing it.

  "I don't care about that," snapped Corva. "I mean, you've got your family's biocrypto. You're coded to be able to operate anything that's owned by the McGonigal family, right?"

  "Well, I was," he said doubtfully. "Fourteen thousand years ago."

  "Your mother refused to admit you were dead. Everybody knows she made sure you'd always be able to get back into the colony. There's stories about that—songs, epic poems. The very least of them has you returning from deep space while Sedna's sleeping, and putting your hand on the doorplate and it opens for you."

  "Epic poems," he said. "That figures."

  "Toby, you can override the dock bots. You can wake the passengers. Just do that, and you'll never have to see me again. I'll go back to Thisbe with Halen and you McGonigals can sort things out however you want. Just... let us have our lives, too."

  Had Jaysir told her about the interface they'd found in the data pack from the twentier? Or, more likely, it was Corva who'd put Jaysir up to helping Toby in the first place. As a way of discovering whether Toby really could do what he was rumored to be able to do.

  He rubbed his eyes. Was there nobody he could trust? "Maybe I can do it," he said, and shrugged. "I don't know. And anyway, won't the local government have something to say about it?"

  "You're a McGonigal," she said, as if that explained everything. "They can't stop you.

  Corva insisted he stay invisible for the next few days. Maybe nobody could stop Toby once he publicly announced himself, but it was pretty clear that right now, he was vulnerable. He could still be killed—or neuroshackled. So for now, he must pay for everything with cash, not take on any jobs that might get him noticed—and of course, tell no one his real name. He didn't bother to point out that he was already living that way, as per Jaysir's instructions.

  Corva had to "make arrangements." Something about that made him nervous. Was there more to this than walking into the port authority office and commanding the bots to let her brother's ship disembark? He could picture himself ordering bots around, but people were another matter entirely. Every time he imagined himself trying to face down the city's masters, he thought of how easily Ammond and M'boto had kept him under their control. Whatever Corva meant when she used the name McGonigal, Toby wasn't that. The instant he tried to bluff these people, everybody would know it.

  So he tossed and turned through the night, and when he wasn't imagining himself getting thrown in some cell by the local police, he was thinking about Peter. Peter the tyrant.

  He kept asking himself, "how could Peter do that to Corva's people?"—but then he'd remember how Peter and he had built worlds and ruled them with fists iron and otherwise. In Consensus, they had practiced tyranny, rehearsed it. Of course it was just a game, and this was real. Where, though, had the dividing line been for Peter? Had he woken up one day and thought "I could actually build my perfect society?" Or had the steps shaded into each other so gradually that he never really stopped believing it was all a game?

  Hideous thoughts. They chased Toby away from the comfort of sleep, and in the morning Orpheus whined at his haggard appearance.

  Maybe he felt awful, but he still had to pay for his lodgings, and that meant finding some lazy bot whose job he could do for the day. It wasn't hard, because the robots that supported Peter's perfect world had a built-in sense of economy. They also knew, pretty much to the day, when their various systems were due to fail. Toby could stroll into a local factory and just loiter until one came up to him with an offer. This time around he found himself sorting plastic fasteners for four hours, a mind-numbing task that was somehow also soothing— provided you weren't doing it every day.

  While he worked he listened to history lessons from the library. His original plan was to get some sense of what had been going on outside the lockstep, in the wider world that Kirstana had been born into—but that was impossible. Time had been on fast-forward in that world, to such an extent that any history lesson that touched on major events out there had to skip over centuries and even entire millennia, or summarize them with terms like "the gray ages" or "the second transhumanist efflorescence." You could spend days reviewing the highlights of just one little century out of those thousands of years, because all that history hadn't only unfolded on one world. There were thousands of planets, so take that original fourteen thousand years and multiply it by that much... impossible.

  All he could really sort out was that humanity and its many subspecies, creations, and offspring had experienced many rises and falls over the aeons. Since they had the technology, and lots of motivations, people kept re-engineering their own bodies and minds. They gave rise to god-like AIs, and these grew bored and left the galaxy, or died, or turned into uncommunicative lumps, or ran berserk in any of a hundred different ways. On many worlds humans wiped themselves out, or were wiped out by their creations. It happened with tedious regularity. The only reason there were humans at all, these days, was because of the locksteps. They served as literal freezers preserving ancient human DNA and cultures. All kinds of madness might descend upon the full-speed worlds circling the galaxy's stars—expansions, contractions, raptures, uploading, downloading, mind-control and body-swapping plagues (quite apart from the usual wars, dark ages, and terraforming failures)—but everybody ignored those useless, frozen micro-worlds drifting between the stars. Their infinitesimal resources and ancient cultures held no interest to the would-be gods of the inner systems. So, once those would-be gods had wiped themselves out, the tell-tale silence from formerly buzzing stars would alert this or that lockstep; and they would send some colonists back. A few millennia later, the human population on Earth and the other lit worlds would again number in the billions or trillions, and some of those would return to the locksteps. And so Peter's realm survived, and in its own fashion, thrived.

  He had better luck researching the lockstep laws; he began to understand why Peter might want to punish Thisbe. Locksteps were a kind of network—specifically, something called a synchronous network, where every node in the mesh sent and received messages at the same time. All the worlds shipped out cargo and passenger ships at the same intervals, and doing this put them all on equal footing. If a couple of worlds doubled or tripled their frequency, they could grow faster than their neighbors. Lockstep worlds were always tempted to do this and worlds that did often made out very well indeed.

  At first, Toby couldn't see why that mattered. Why shouldn't everybody just communicate as quickly or slowly as they wanted? Lockstep rates should naturally speed up over time until the whole system collapsed.

  There were two reasons. The first had to do with resources.

  Part of the reason why Peter's lockstep was the biggest was because he'd tuned its trading frequency to match the rate of production that the smallest outpost could keep up with. There were tiny colonies that didn't own even a chunk of cometary ice, but harvested the impossibly thin traces of gas found between the stars using modified magnetic ramscoops. In an abyss so empty that there was only one hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter, the scoops filled their vast lungs like baleen whales filtering tenuous oceanic plankton. It could take them decades to fuel a single fusion-powered ship with enough hydrogen to visit their nearest neighbor. Yet even these little starvelings could contribute to the wealth of Lockstep 360/1, because its clock-ticks were slow enough for them to keep up.

  If you lived on a relatively rich world, like Lowdown or Wallop, you could harvest resources and
manufacture goods as fast as you wanted to. You could leave the 360/1 lockstep for a faster one, such as 36/1 which experienced ten months for every one in Peter's empire. You'd think that this would provide a huge advantage to your industries because you'd be producing ten times as much as 360/1 in any given time period. Since you were awake ten times as long, however, you'd also use ten times as many resources.

  The second reason was less intuitive, but more important. If you increased your frequency you'd have far fewer "nearby" monthly trading partners than 360/1. It wasn't obvious why; but travel between the lockstep worlds took decades of real-time. Because Peter's lockstep slept for thirty years at a time, you could travel half a light-year while wintering over (if you were going at the average speed of a cheap fission fragment rocket). One wintering-over journey between 36/1 worlds could only take you one tenth that far—but that didn't translate into having one-tenth the possible destinations for that trip. Because the lockstep worlds were scattered through three-dimensional space rather than being on a two-dimensional planet, when you doubled the distance you could travel, you did far more than just double the volume of space you could access.

  Lockstep 36/1 might have ten turns for every one in 360/1, but each 360/1 world could trade with a thousand times more worlds per turn.

  So Peter's network was vast, and it ran on mutual trust that no one would take advantage of higher trading frequencies. Thisbe had broken that trust.

  A couple of days later, he was listening to one of these historical programs as he walked home from work. As he turned the corner to his bed-and-breakfast, he saw a motley crew of people sitting on its front step: Shylif, Jaysir— and Corva. His landlady was visible in the front window, glaring at them.

  Toby paused his program. Corva was poking at the ground with a stick, and Jaysir and Shylif were looking everywhere but at her. "What's up?" said Toby.

  Corva stood up, brushing off her pants. She wouldn't meet his eye. "The plan's off," she said. "We can't get to the passenger module."

  "You mean we can't get your brother back?" She nodded; she seemed to be on the brink of tears.

  Toby knew he should be relieved, because what Corva had been proposing had been both illegal and highly dangerous. He knew what he should be asking, too: Will you honor your promise to show me how to get to Destrier?

  Instead he said, "What's the problem?"

  Corva told him, the words coming out in a rush. As soon as she started to talk, the answer popped into Toby's mind.

  He should just nod sympathetically; he should ask for what they'd promised. But Corva wasn't like Ammond and Persea; she really had saved his life, and if all she'd said about the McGonigals was true, was taking a terrible risk in even confiding to Toby.

  He said, "I know a way."

  Six hours later, they were descending between brooding mountains of cloud, down a single, endless cable that stretched from zenith to nadir through the awesome dark sky-scapes of Wallop. The little elevator car, which Jaysir had hijacked for them using his black arts, had been moving for many minutes now. Just how far below the continent had the authorities hung the passenger unit?

  "I still don't like it." Corva crossed her arms, glaring out the glass. "You don't know anything about this Kirstana person."

  "I don't know anything about you, either."

  "Yes, and look where it's gotten you?" She glowered at him. "What does she know about you? About us? Probably a lot more than you think. You're not exactly very good at keeping secrets, Toby."

  "What are you, my mother? I agreed to help you because you can show me how to stowaway on a ship to Destrier. That's all." He turned away from her, ignoring the look Shylif and Jaysir were sharing.

  He was still kicking himself for telling Corva how they could get down here. It turned out that the reason he hadn't heard from her for days was because she'd been agonizing about how to actually get to the quarantined passenger unit. It hung many kilometers below the continent's customs complex. The logical way down to it was by airship, but there was radar and other eyes to prevent that. The next logical approach was to simply board the elevator on the customs level—but getting in to that would be next to impossible.

  He'd had his chance to get out of having to do all of this. Instead, when Corva had explained the issue, he'd heard himself say, "I know a way. Why don't you just fly?"

  "I told you, they track the dirigibles—"

  "No, not by airship," he'd said. "With wings."

  So it was that he'd called Kirstana and asked her about outdoor-certified exo-wings. Jaysir had modified them so that they would ignore proximity warnings and no-go zones. Jay couldn't bring along his beloved bot; he'd ordered it to wait near the docks for their return. That was how they intended to return.

  First, they would simply spiral down through the black air to a landing jetty and airlock at the base of the customs complex.

  Simply? Well, if donning a space suit and bundling their denners into airtight carrying cases, then relying on the artificial muscles and reflexes of strap-on wings in the hostile atmosphere of a gas giant was simple. The three stowaways had experience with similar environments—such as the oceans of Auriga—and Toby had walked the ices of Sedna at temperatures near absolute zero. Also, fourteen thousand years of refinements to the safety of the wings had helped. To his surprise, it had been fairly easy to skim close to the outside skin of the continent, so radar wouldn't catch them. The dark helped, making the danger of a fall more abstract than it would otherwise have been; but they could never safely descend all the way to the passenger unit this way. This elevator was still the only safe way to do that.

  Now that the adrenaline-pumping flight was over, Toby was actually kind of enjoying the elevator ride. It was clear that Corva, at least, was having trouble with the precarious sense of being balanced above an infinite fall. She spent her time sitting in the center of the floor with her knees pulled up, Wrecks protectively wrapped around her ankles. Toby had tried to get her to talk a number of times as they droned through the black, still air beneath the cloud deck. She just grunted or answered with a simple "yes" or "no." He was trying this again when the autopilot abruptly put them into a dive, and what had been a stable ride turned into a slewing, bumping fall. Toby had been turning green himself by the time they reached a small aerostat with a ring-shaped docking platform under it. They had left the blimp to find nothing there but an elevator car, and a cable stretching down into the dark.

  For some reason Corva found riding an elevator to nowhere preferable to flying. Well, at least she was talking.

  Orpheus was staring into the gray emptiness of the sky, as if those depths held secrets only denners could see. Toby knelt to pat him, and after a minute of communing felt a bit better.

  "You know," he said, to try to restart the conversation. "I kind of thought we'd be going

  Corva tried to look nonchalant. "You can leave ships in orbit for decades at a time," she said, "but people... well, they get fried by the cosmic rays. So the passenger modules from Halen's ship are down here."

  "And we're just going to waltz in and wake them up?"

  Jaysir smiled confidently. "We stowaways have our ways, McGonigal. That's why I'm along, isn't it? And I did fix you up a good interface to Cicada Corp."

  "Yes," he said grudgingly, "so how are you going to get us past whoever's at the other end of this elevator ride?"

  "Same way I got us into this elevator," he said. "By fooling the sensors. Nobody's down there anyway. It'll just be us."

  The lights in the car came on suddenly. Corva grunted in surprise. "Turn it off! Turn it off? Am I the only one who doesn't like the idea of being the only lit-up thing for kilometers?" The sense of infinite monotony outside had disappeared; the windows were now just black mirrors.

  "Hit it with my elbow," said Jaysir, as he tapped a wall plate. The lights went off. "Sorry."

  Corva gave a whoosh of relief, and gnawing at one fingernail, glanced at Toby. "And what about you? S
orry you came?"

  "I'm sorry about the whole last fourteen thousand years. Why should today be any different?"

  His eyes had adjusted in time to see her smile. He liked that smile. Then, "Look," she said, "more clouds."

  Toby followed the faint indication of her pointing arm. Billows of black-on-black ascended silently outside. Suddenly a bright flicker silhouetted a bulbous thunderhead shape below them. "Lightning," Toby murmured. "There's another layer of storms down here?"

  They watched in silent communion for a while, as the mist thickened, drawn in moments of white, and became rain.

  Between lightning flashes, a faint glow became visible below them. They put their foreheads to the cold glass to try and see down. "Is that it?" asked Toby.

  "Yes." Jaysir was staring at something invisible, probably some tag within his own interface. "Time is right."

  "Why hang the passenger compartments down here?" he said after a moment. "Don't they want to keep them deep-frozen?"

  "I think they are." She touched the glass, snatching her fingers back as if it had burned them. "Somebody told me that when the cities are awake they stay in the only warm layer of air on the planet. Above that—and below it— it's far, far below zero."

  Toby peered at the beads on the glass. "Then that's not water."

  "God, no. There!"

  A sliver of light had appeared below them. As they watched, it grew into a rain-dazzled arc. Toby puzzled over it for a while, until he realized he was looking at the top of a large geodesic glass structure, which must hang off the bottom of the elevator cable. The glass facets sparkled from within, breathing white and rainbow colors into the falling mist. Indistinct clouds reflected the pearly light.

  Toby had time for one last glimpse of dark metal struts and glass angles dripping white or scattering spray into the swirling air before the lights came on again. He squinted at Corva, who shrugged. Behind her the window brightened, then a stanchion holding red running lights fled up and sudden heaviness signaled their arrival. A framework of metal triangles rose around the car as it slowed to a halt. The faint vibration Toby had grown accustomed to in the past hour ended.