Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Aprli 2014

by Penny Publications

  The indicators didn't change. "That's interesting," said Toby. So, his guess had been right; the tightness in all his muscles loosened just a bit.

  "I found out about this on Thisbe," he said, "when Evie tried to block my commands in the system. Turned out she couldn't. I wondered whether it'd work the same with you. I guess it does.

  "Bots! Stand down!"

  As one, Peter's military bots folded in on themselves, and went still.

  Peter whirled, gasping. He grappled a pistol out of the closed fist of one of his guards, and pointed it at Toby. Close enough to touch now, he was so visibly himself, yet so aged, so different, that Toby's bluster all evaporated— not from the threat of the gun, but just from the strange disconnect between the Peter Toby had known, and who he was now. "You—" he looked from Toby to the bed and back again. "You're waking her up!"

  "Yes and you can't change that. She's a few hours away still, but she'll be back before Evie arrives. Which means, little brother, that you have to make a choice."

  Peter's eyes were wide. "What—"

  "See, I'm not armed. I wasn't about to mess up Mom's bedroom with a gun battle. And that means you've got me right where you want me. You can kill me before she wakes up. But you can't stop Mom from waking... and you alone don't have the power to put her to sleep again. Do you?"

  Warily, Peter grabbed a hand-hold on the cicada bed and settled himself opposite Toby. "Evie told you about the share system?"

  Toby shook his head. "Evie... didn't tell me anything." He didn't try to disguise the disappointment in his voice. "She's become rather good at following orders." Now, the anger was slipping out. "Is that her, or did you twist her that way?"

  Peter didn't say anything, but the pistol was still pointed at Toby.

  "You know when I found out what I could do, on Wallop, I figured Mom had given me a superuser account on the corporate system. It made all kinds of sense, but the question was, did you guys have the same privileges? You must—unless... she didn't entirely trust you."

  "We had our disagreements," said Peter. "But you were out of the picture."

  "So if she was the superuser, holding the administrator's account to the whole lockstep system, then you two might just have ordinary user's privileges. And if she didn't like how you were scheduling worlds in the lockstep, she could block you, or cancel your actions entirely.

  "But that's not how the system works, is it?"

  Peter had been staring at Toby with a kind of fascination; now he shook himself and seemed to snap to attention. "Why does it matter?" he said. "Evie caught enough of your people on Thisbe to learn what you're up to. It's the whole messiah thing, just like we foresaw."

  This time it was Toby who started to object, and Peter who overrode him: "Come on! They love you there! You came down from the sky and promised to reset their frequency, and last I heard, you were building a nice little army to storm Destrier." He sneered. "Don't get high and mighty about family stuff now, Toby."

  In that moment, Toby knew they were brothers again—even if Peter wanted to kill him, he'd just acknowledged who Toby was. As when Evie had done it, it made all the difference. Suddenly all the armies, lockstep bots and expectations of the outside world were irrelevant; the Universe had closed down to just him and Peter. He and his brother, fighting.

  "And who set up the messiah thing to begin with?" He matched Peter's glare. "It's your script, Pete. You guys jammed it into my hands, and that whole damned planet wanted—demanded!—that I follow it.

  "Only I'm not going to do it, because it's a red herring, isn't it? You were never afraid I'd try the messiah gambit if I came back. You were counting on it."

  "The religion..." Peter's lips thinned. "That was Evie's department."

  "But it had a purpose, didn't it? Over and above keeping people in line, I mean. The prophecy's a honey-trap for would-be conquerors. I hear it's worked pretty well. And me, well," Toby spread his arms, "of course I'd run back to wake Mom if I returned. The second I tried, all the people whose loyalty to you might be shaky, and everybody who'd been plotting behind her your back, they'd all jump on my side. They'd all be exposed. We'd troop on over to Destrier, and then you'd crush us all there.

  "Pete, that's just so... so Consensus." Toby shook his head in disgust. "And vicious. And what I could never figure out was, why in Hell would you be so vicious to me? How could I ever have threatened this grand empire you've built? If I came back, don't you think I'd want to celebrate it with you?"

  Peter's eyes shifted, ever so slightly, but he wasn't meeting Toby's gaze anymore.

  "Even if you thought I'd disapprove, what would it matter? My disapproval wasn't going to topple your empire. It was a puzzle with no answer. Peter, you tried to have me killed."

  "Shut down," Peter McGonigal said to their mother's cicada bed. Its lights stayed green.

  "You can still shoot me, by the way." Toby waved at the gun in Peter's hand. "At least now I know why. See, I found out about the shares."

  Peter looked up.

  "Mom didn't have a superuser account. There's no such thing. That meant I didn't have one either. If I could override Evie's commands in the system—and yours—it must work some other way.

  "The system recognizes four shareholders, doesn't it, Pete? You, me, Evie, and Mom. We don't own the same number of shares, though. You and Evie each have one. Mom has two—and so do I."

  "I couldn't believe it when she told me," said Peter. "She'd given you two—you! You'd been gone for years. And she kept two for herself, just to keep Evie and me in line."

  "Yeah, and when that got too inconvenient for you, you guys trapped her in here and voted her to sleep. Permanently. Except, you didn't kill her."

  "No." Peter reared back, outraged at the idea. "We wouldn't—"

  "But you'd kill me."

  "That's—"

  "Different? Why?"

  That one question hung in the air, while silence stretched between them. Finally, and to Toby's surprise, Peter jammed the pistol into his belt and crossed his arms. "You really don't know?" he asked skeptically.

  Slowly, Toby shook his head. They remained that way, in a standoff, for a long minute. Finally, Toby said, "It had to be something that happened before I left. I've been thinking about that. I don't think it was anything I did on Sedna. So, earlier...

  "Guess what," he said suddenly. "I've got backups of Consensus in my glasses. I was going through them the other day, and I found something. You might want to see it—You've got implants, I assume?" Guardedly, Peter nodded. "Then let me share something with you." Slowly, in case Peter went for his gun again, Toby reached up to tap his glasses awake. He uttered several quiet commands, and a virtual environment blossomed around himself and his brother.

  Peter gasped, then stared. "That?"

  "The very first thing I did in Consensus," said Toby. "I showed it to you that first time we went in together. Our house."

  It was the house Toby had grown up in, where Maria Teresa had died trying to protect Peter; the place they had never returned to as a family after the kidnapping. Toby had built this virtual copy as a healing exercise for himself, but he'd shown it to Peter and issued a challenge: figure out a way to prevent what happened here, from ever happening again. Build a better world.

  Peter reached out, very slowly, and took the handles of the model to rotate it. He zoomed them in and suddenly he and Toby were inside, hovering above the landing where Maria had died. Peter stared at the tiled floor for a while. Then he said, almost inaudibly, "I could hear them talking."

  Toby waited. Haltingly, his brother said, "There was this spot near the back of the room where they were keeping me. There was an air vent in the floor, and if I put my ear to it, sometimes I could hear them. It was too faint for me to make out what they were saying, but I knew the voices."

  Now he looked up at Toby. "One day, after I'd been there for, oh it must have been a couple of weeks... I put my ear down there and heard them talking to somebody
else who was there. I could feel the footsteps through the floor, and I heard his voice.

  "It was Father."

  Toby blinked, and suddenly his thoughts were sliding all over, trying to catch each other. "W-what?"

  "Our. Father." Peter had come around the cicada bed and was closing in on Toby, his eyes wide. "Our. Father. Was. There. He was part of it. It might even have been him who let them in—him who killed Maria—"

  The words came out in a rush now. "After all why would they need to kill her? They could have tied her up, they were wearing masks so she wouldn't have seen their faces and I didn't see them kill her, I didn't even know about it until after. But if she'd caught him helping, if he'd been seen, then he couldn't let her live, could he? It would have ruined everything."

  Toby was too horrified to speak. He wiped away the virtual model of the house, and so it was just him and his brother, eye to eye in the cold machine space of the chamber. "But... why...?"

  "Why?" Peter's brows crunched into a sarcastic expression; he'd made that as a boy, but it had never drawn so many wrinkles with it in the old days. "Why? Sedna.

  "The kidnapping is what convinced Mom to leave Earth. Same with nearly everybody else who came. The incident galvanized a whole movement, remember? Maybe you don't. Money came in from everywhere to pay my ransom, and afterward, it hung around, because suddenly Dad had a plan, see, he went back to all the people who'd helped and told them, 'look, there's something better we can do with this money. We can't trust Earth any-more, either the trillionaires or the poor. We've got to get out.' My disappearance, my being tied up in that room, my seeing them killed in front of me and learning about Maria—all that, all that was just part of the plan."

  He was trembling now and had shed all the years that separated them. He was just Peter now, just Toby's little brother.

  "And I knew it," he said. "I knew it every step of the way—from when we left Earth to setting up the colony, to after you abandoned us to when he did too—"

  "I never abandoned you," objected Toby.

  "You two were close, you and Dad."

  "Wait, what are you trying to—you think I knew about this? You think Dad told me?"

  Peter lowered his head, looking up past his brows at Toby. "You're saying he didn't?"

  "I..." There'd been that conversation on the rooftop... Peter was beginning to smile; he was taking Toby's hesitation as a yes, so Toby said, "Wait, there was something!" He recounted that conversation, and their Father's words to him. I'm going to do something to help change things, and it could get rough for us for a while. You may not understand everything that's happening.

  "That's it," he finished.

  "That's it?" Peter was glaring at him. Toby stared him down.

  "Look, Pete, you've got the tug I left Sedna in. Your forensics people have to have gone over it. You know it really was adrift for fourteen thousand years. You know what happened to knock it out of commission. You may have spent the past forty years thinking I abandoned you, but you know now that I didn't. It was an accident. I got lost. And now, I'm home.

  "And I knew nothing about... what you just told me."

  It was unbelievable, horrible, couldn't be true—but even as Toby was thinking these things, his imagination was fitting it all together. His awakening on Lowdown, the order from the chairman, and all his discoveries about the locksteps and the Toby cult and the guides. They all spun in his mind, a whirlpool with its center at that single moment in the past, when Peter crouched on the floor of his cell listening at a grate.

  "This... all of this... you've been running ever since." And not just Peter, but Carter Mc-Gonigal, too—fleeing from his crime on Earth and pulling his family and friends with him. Had Mom known, or suspected? She, too, jumping forward through time, each leap farther than the last. Telling everyone all the while that she was hunting for that moment when her lost Toby would return to her when really, she was trying to get away from something else, some knowledge she couldn't unlearn.

  "Evayne... does she...?"

  Peter nodded. "I told her, oh, thirty years ago I guess. Long after you'd left. She never really came to terms with it, I think."

  Toby hung his head. Everything had changed, and he wasn't ever going to get back what he'd just lost.

  "Sorry, Toby," said Peter. "It's funny—you know there was a day, a long time ago now, when I suddenly realized you weren't my older brother anymore. That I was the older one. I'm older than Dad now, did you know that? Older than Mom too. The family's on my shoulders now. I'm not yours to command."

  It came to Toby then that Peter really had intended to kill him on Lowdown, and just now when he'd pointed that vicious looking little pistol at Toby, he really had been within seconds of pulling the trigger. A wash of adrenalin hit Toby, and he hid his suddenly shaking hands behind his back.

  He tried to pull himself together. For a moment he'd forgotten why he'd come here; he was adrift, and at the mercy of the chairman. Then his gaze caught the green tell-tales of their mother's cicada bed, and he clutched at the purpose and idea that had brought him here.

  He looked up at Peter again, all his cockiness gone. "I get it. And you're right. By the time I got to Thisbe I thought I knew what was going on. I was the big brother, come back to set you guys right." He laughed humorlessly at himself. "Yeah, that was totally wrong, wasn't it?"

  Peter nodded. "You see, things have changed. You'll understand why later, but right now, Toby, you have to shut Mom's bed down again. Put her back to sleep."

  Toby sucked in a deep breath, looked him in the eye, and said, "No."

  Peter blinked and started to speak, but Toby said, "This part of it, I understand perfectly. You and Evie have locked yourselves and the locksteps into a pattern you can't get out of. You're riding a whirlwind that's roaring into the future, and you think you have to steer it. You think you can play Consensus with seventy thousand worlds—actually, you think you have to. Evie's terrified that it'll all fall apart if you don't keep your hands on the wheel. So are you, right?"

  Peter shook his head. "You don't understand—the politics, the—"

  "Oh, I do understand. You've run off a cliff and as long as your legs keep peddling, you're going to stay up. The instant you stop, you fall. But it's not the lockstep that'll collapse, is it? You've just told me... about Dad," Toby coughed and had to stop for a second. "You have to keep running or that is going to catch up to you. But you don't need to keep pulling the lockstep along with you."

  "You don't get it, we built it like a machine, Evie and me. The Toby cult, the whole Emperor of Time crap; the guides, the messaging to the fast worlds, how we handle immigration.... It's a system, Toby. You can't break it. You can't return, or the whole thing falls apart. Mom can't wake up, or the same thing happens—"

  "Isn't it really that you're afraid we'd outvote you? 'Cause, you know, we will."

  Peter fell silent. Toby floated over to rest his hand on the warming cicada bed. "You're saying there's only two possibilities: the status quo you and Evie spent so many years building, or a catastrophic collapse. But there's a third way, isn't there?"

  The chairman of Cicada Corp watched Toby warily, saying nothing.

  "Mom'll be awake in a few hours," said Toby. "Then we're going to wait for Evie to arrive. And then... the shareholders of Cicada Corp are going to hold a vote."

  He raised his hand. "All in favor of issuing one share per cicada bed user, say aye. All opposed..."

  Peter still said nothing. Toby shrugged. "There's four of us, and six shares. One vote per share. Mom built the system, she knows how to make the necessary changes. Was this what she was proposing when you guys tricked her into this last sleep?—Don't answer that, I don't want to know. It doesn't matter anyway. The fact is, you and Evie have a chance to redeem yourselves now. We can make the vote unanimous."

  "One vote per bed..." Peter was practically strangling on the words. "That'd be democracy!"

  "Yeah. Worst system of government ex
cept for all the others, right? But it's not like the people of three-sixty don't know how to handle it. They're mostly free anyway, I mean I saw how the government on Thisbe handles things. Peter, they have built the world you and I tried to build with Consensus. You can fool yourself into thinking you've been the guiding hand, but really, it was them, them all along..." He thought of Corva's fierce passion, and even her brother's determination to right the wrongs of the world. They weren't passive subjects of Peter McGonigal. They didn't need him.

  "The only thing standing in their way now is Cicada Corp, and our stranglehold on the lockstep frequencies. We are going to give it up—you, me, Mom, and Evie. Take our hands off the wheel, and watch the ship steer itself."

  Bravado and determination had kept Toby going this far; he'd said his piece, done what he came to do. Now that he had, he found he was trembling, practically fainting. It was all catching up to him.

  Voice cracking with exhaustion and sorrow, he held out his hand to his brother and said, "Peter, I just don't want to run anymore.

  "And I don't think you do, either."

  21

  "Hey, Toby, over here!"

  He looked up from the shard of blue pottery he'd dug out of the dirt. Sol was standing framed by two pillars that once might have been straight, but had been sculpted by the wind for eons, until now they looked like twisted tree trunks.

  Miranda's head popped up from below Sol's feet. "You really should see this," she shouted. "I think it's an intact chamber!"

  Toby dropped the potsherd and picked his way through a landscape of tumbled stone blocks and irregular red soil. He had to climb around a fissure that separated him from his two friends, and momentarily stood higher than Sol's head. From here he could see down the long slope behind the twin pillars, to where irregularly joined pools of water sketched the direction of an ancient canal. Hazy distance veiled the rise of other plateaus—green on their lower slopes, Martian red on the summits where ruin after ruin teased at the sky. Noctis Labyrinthus, this region was called—the Maze of Fantasies—and it was one of the most ancient settled parts of Mars. Barsoom, as it was called now.