THE KEISHIONS WERE LOUD. They had definite opinions about everything, and every single one of them needed to be right all the time. Their arguments started at breakfast, continued all day spilled out onto the lawns and echoed through the forest around the house. At first, Toby just stayed out of the way, but gradually he realized that they appreciated his opinions, and he began to relax. Most important, they knew he was an ignoramus when it came to the lockstep worlds, so he felt comfortable asking them the dumbest questions—about Thisbe, about the locksteps, about their family, and sometimes—when he could appear nonchalant—about Corva.
Like him, she was the eldest—or had been. She still won the most arguments, and the others deferred to her despite the age gap. What she had lost to them in time, she’d more than made up in experience.
Corva was no help at all during his first few days in the house; she was too busy getting reacquainted with everybody else. Halen hung around the edges, brooding and watching Toby. Meanwhile, outside the permanent pitched battle of the Keishion household, Thisbe was fully awake now and working hard to catch up with the damage from the frequency shift that Peter had wrought on it.
Toby found it natural to help the bots clearing the underbrush and fixing years of storm damage. Orpheus spent all day outside anyway, and Toby loved the fresh air, too, but also in some ways it was like being back on Sedna, where there had always been building or repair work to be done. He loved fixing stuff, and while doing this absorbing work, he could completely forget his troubles for hours at a time.
(Although, on those rare occasions when the “sun” changed color, he came crashing back to reality, at least for a minute or two.)
Gradually, he noticed that Corva was often nearby while he was working. She would bring him water, or simply be seen reading in the crook of a tree while he was hacking at the underbrush. Then she began perching, not far off, on a newly repaired wall or a lawn chair she’d dragged over; and since, well, they were in the same space anyway … they talked.
“I had a denner when I was growing up,” she said as they watched Wrecks and Orpheus chase each other around the ragged, but finally mowed, lawn. “Chauncey was his name. I was pretty lonely at first when I went off to school, so I looked into getting another one, but you couldn’t get them on Wallop. I wasn’t going to let that stop me, so I kept asking people and pushing, and that’s how I found out about these people on Lowdown who bred them.”
Toby was startled, and then it all made sense. “Ammond and Persea!” They’d bred denners.
She nodded. “They owned the operation, they didn’t do it themselves. They had them implanted with the cicada-bed tech for shady customers. Total gray-ware stuff, it’s just barely acceptable to the lockstep monitors. Anyway, I had no intention of using Wrecks that way, it seemed wrong, but these were the only denners you could get. Then the blockade happened. My money got cut off, I couldn’t go home,then I found out that Halen had tried to run the blockade and was trapped in stasis. I had to sell my bots for food, I couldn’t afford to travel … but I’d heard about the stowaways when I got Wrecks.”
She told Toby how she’d met Shylif and how they’d stowed away on a flight to Lowdown, where, with the last of her money, she’d bought Orpheus. “He was for Halen, you see. I had this crazy idea of sneaking into the quarantined ship and getting him to wake Halen up. I had no idea how it was going to work, but I was damn well going to try.”
So far, this made sense. Toby watched the denners roll around, play fighting, while he thought through what had happened. “But how did you find out about me? Or did you even know who I was?”
“Actually, we had a pretty good idea. See, we were stowaways. We were living a bit off frequency anyway, and spending time in spaceports and warehouses. So we were watching when Ammond’s tug bots brought down your ship. They did it a week before everybody was supposed to wake up; but we were already awake, ’cause we’d set the denners’ alarms to get us up well before there would be people nosing about. So we saw them shrouding this incredibly old radiation-fried ship in orange plastic sheeting and walling it up in a warehouse space off in a far corner of Ammond’s operation. And then we saw them bring you out.
“I was really curious at that point, so I looked up the lettering on the side of your ship. I expected to get a hit off the lockstep ship registry, but instead, all the hits were from books on ancient mythology…”
He frowned in thought. “So when I saw you in the courtyard that first day…”
“I was there to buy Orpheus—but I was also there to look for the boy we’d seen them take out of the ship. And when you came running out I freaked. First, ’cause I knew who you might be, and second, because Ammond’s guards had told me they’d cut off my nose if they caught me sneaking about.”
He nodded. It all made sense. “And when you woke me up on the way to Little Auriga?”
“You’d only just gone under. Your hibernation was still reversible–like in the boat, remember? Oh, you mean how did I get to you?” She shook her head quickly. “Ammond thinks of himself as a criminal mastermind, but his security’s really lame. Thisbe is habitable all the time,” she said, gesturing around at the rich trees and long grass, “and there’re other locksteps here. We are good at security, at locks and vaults and alarms. We have to be. So Shylif and I didn’t have much trouble breaking in while your ship was on the ground waiting for launch clearance. Shylif had already taught me how to break into a ship; you need to know how to do that if you’re going to be a decent stowaway. I needed to know learn how anyway, if I was going to get Orpheus to Halen.”
“But you followed me to Little Auriga. You didn’t have to.”
She looked uncomfortable. “When I woke you up to warn you, it didn’t seem like you understood me. You were all dopey and ‘huh?’ So … we argued about it and decided to go after you.”
“’Cause I was a McGonigal and worth a lot?”
She glared at him. “’Cause I thought they were going to kill you. Or worse.”
“Worse, yeah.” He shuddered. “Thank you. —Though, really, it was Orpheus rapping on my window who showed me the way out.”
She laughed. “Anyway, I’m just glad it’s over. I suppose it’s what they call an adventure, but to me it was just one long panic attack. If that’s what an adventure’s like, I never want another one.”
Away on the other side of the lawn, Halen was chatting with one of the neighbors. Toby nodded at him. “Halen never got his, you know.”
“His what?”
“His adventure. He never got to have it. He started out to save you, and you ended up saving him instead. He never even got a proper look at Wallop. Went from ship to ship, sleep to sleep, and now he’s back here.”
Corva gaped at Toby. “What are you trying to say? That he’s disappointed? Mad at me for saving him?” Toby shrugged. “Oh, come on. Is that how boys think about these things?”
He nodded. “That is how boys think about these things.”
“Well, it’s stupid.”
She changed the subject, and soon Toby went back to working with the bots. After that, though, they spent a lot of time together. And they talked.
The rhythm of life in the locksteps was starting to become clear to him, and talking to Corva helped give the abstractions flesh and blood. She described the parties that happened at the end of every turn—every month, that is, by human reckoning. Whatever resources the household or the city or planet hadn’t used during its four weeks awake had to be able to hibernate or else had to be used up. Some things were too fragile or temporary by nature to winter over. So you used up all the food in the fridge and broke up, burned, or built mad sculptures out of other transient things. In some places the neighbors vied for extravagance and shock value—although, since the ritual happened so frequently, some people just ignored it and went to bed early, trusting the household bots to clear away the deteriorated and decayed objects by the next waking.