In the other direction, past the hills, Toby could now make out the towers of a sizable city. “I don’t understand,” he said, shading his eyes and peering upward. The light source was as bright as the sun, but it was a tiny dot, too intense to look at. “What is that?”
“About eight thousand years ago some civilization or other built this shell of energy harvesters around Proxima Centauri. That’s the nearest star to Earth,” Jay said.
“I know that.”
“Right. Well, a few thousand years after they died off, one of the locksteps made a devil’s pact with the things that had inherited the harvesters in return for a little fraction of that power. They built thousands of these asteroid-size lasers—red, blue, and green, to make white, you know?—and aimed them at some of the nearer nomad planets. Like this one.”
“Wait—we’re, how far from Proxima Centauri here?”
“Oh, a good two light-years away. You couldn’t even see it with the naked eye. But the laser light reaches us, and it’s enough to heat the whole planet to livable temperature.”
Toby knew he was staring, slack-jawed, at the sky. He couldn’t help himself, his mind had gone blank. Finally Orpheus head-butted him in the cheekbone and he stammered, “O-kay. How many worlds did you say?”
“Thousands. But they’re not lockstep worlds—well, except for a few discards like Thisbe. They’re too hot. Too fast.” He nodded at the overgrown runways.
Corva nodded in agreement. “They’ve gone strange, a lot of them. Alien and dangerous, and they don’t communicate with the outside world anymore. The Wastes, that’s what we call them.”
“And Thisbe is…?”
She shrugged and jabbed a thumb at the sky. “Far out on the edge—and glitchy. So not worth the effort for your average self-respecting civilization. Perfect for us, though.”
“—And with that, here’s my ride,” said Jay. He waved at an older man and middle-aged woman who were strolling toward them across the landing field. The man was accompanied by a cargo bot like Jay’s, which balanced an impossibly tall pile of machinery on its back. The woman was surrounded by a … Toby squinted … a flock of some kind of glittering metallic things. Behind her stalked a tall, willowy, and sinuous bot, not quite human formed but beautiful.
“Makers?” said Toby. Jaysir nodded.
“We’re not loners, you know. There just weren’t any on Wallop. We love to get together, we just refuse to engage in social relations that are based on material inequity. Anyway, I’ve got a lot to talk about with these guys. About what we should do next.”
“You’re not going to tell them who—”
“—You are? Not until you give me the all-clear.” Jaysir grinned at him. “But you understand, I need to … set them up for it, so it’s not a complete shock when you do. And you’ll probably want to know whether we can help, when you make your move.”
“I don’t know that there’re any moves to be made, Jay.”
“You just keep thinking that.” With a cheerful wave, the maker walked off to meet his kin.
Halen had flagged down an empty aircar, and they piled their few belongings into it and set off for the city. A few minutes into their flight, the “sunlight” went from psychotic blue to eerie green. It stayed that way for a minute, then flipped back to yellow-white.
Now that he could properly see, Toby realized that their car was part of a regular stream converging on the core of the city; the awakened passengers from a dozen ships were on their way into town. The sky would probably have been dark with aircars, he supposed, if it weren’t for the blockade.
As the shock of seeing and feeling sunlight faded, Toby remembered his nervousness upon awaking today. He and Orpheus had used cicada beds on the flight out, so woke refreshed, and he’d been instantly aware of the ordeal that was to come.
Today, he was going to meet Halen and Corva’s parents.
It didn’t help that Shylif was guesting with them as well. Corva had invited him to stay at her parents’ place until the Thisbe courts heard his case against Sebastine Coley. At first he’d been reluctant but had finally agreed just this morning. Toby was simultaneously cheered and uneasy that he’d accepted. After the incident on Wallop, he wasn’t entirely comfortable around Shylif anymore.
Having Shylif there when he met Corva’s parents might help to defuse the tension. On the other hand, it made Toby seem like yet another possibly disreputable member of her rogues’ gallery, and he was eager to counter this impression. He rehearsed his words as buildings of alien architecture, and occasionally the Consensus style, flicked past below. “Pleased to meet you, sir, ma’am,” he’d say, or something like that. “Yes, I saved your son.” Or, “No I didn’t save anybody, your daughter saved my life.”
Or maybe, “Hi, I’m the brother of the man who’s oppressing your entire planet.”
“Am I Garren Morton today? Or Toby McGonigal?” he’d asked Corva before they went into hibernation—last night, or so it felt like.
She’d frowned. “Let’s start with Garren and work our way up,” she’d said.
“Ah, Orph, what do I do?” He put his face next to the denner’s and scritched the fur between his ears. Orpheus made a bouquet of smiley-face emoticons to go with the purr he gave off. He seemed quite unconcerned with the strangeness of this new world. Toby wasn’t so comfortable.
Corva’s brother was some kind of revolutionary. They’d talked a few times while he and his older, gray-haired companions from the ship had worked to secure them a ship back to Thisbe. That wasn’t the only ship they were after: more than half the men and women Toby had rescued from Wallop’s frozen clouds were on their way to other worlds, where they claimed they intended to do “business.”
Ammond had been doing “business,” too. Even if the strange quarantine of Thisbe was unjust, Halen and his friends seemed to be doing more than just trying to undo it. Halen, at least, hated Peter’s lockstep. You could hear it in his voice when he said even the most innocent thing about it. He wanted to take down Peter’s world.
So should Toby help him do it? The towers of the city swept slowly by below them. The place looked postapocalyptic: the building façades were cracked and vine choked, the streets overgrown with grass and trees. Various big machines were struggling to cut it back, and bots were working to fix the damage to the buildings. Still, the place looked busy, with crowds of people in the streets and lots of aerial vehicles hopping between the districts. The aircars from the spaceport thinned out, most landing on this or that downtown platform. Theirs was one of the few that kept on into the forested suburbs.
“The city’s not under a dome or anything,” he suddenly realized. “Do you get any winter here?”
Halen shook his head. “It stays subtropical most of the time—except when the sun has an outage. Those can last for weeks, and then the whole world’ll freeze over. It’s brutal. The rest of the time, everything’s constantly growing, so while we’re hibernating it just takes over.” He nodded at the grass-choked streets. “Normally that all gets cleaned up before we wake, but the bots can’t keep up with the blockade schedule. Too many turns too close together; they’re breaking down.”
“Home,” said Corva. Her voice was tense.
The aircar settled on the overgrown lawn of a fairly modest-looking stone house. The place was ringed with trees, and only narrow paved footpaths wound between those to the neighbors and beyond. Apparently, out here in the suburbs they’d given up on keeping the streets clear of invading vegetation.
Toby stared at the trees. He hadn’t seen so many in one place since he’d left Earth. They made him want to cry, and he felt a pang of intense envy for Corva and her family, who were lucky enough to live among them. Although, they probably never had time to get used to them. A sapling this month would be a stout adult after just one turn and dead after a few more.