More ceremony was lavished on people who might be traveling. At the very least you wouldn’t see them for a month. If they were on their way to the other side of the lockstep, or somewhere exotic like Earth or Barsoom, then it might be a year or more. Leave-taking parties were major events in any neighborhood.
Next morning—at start-of-turn—the trees were bigger, or completely cut down, and even entire landforms like hills might have shifted slightly. The climate might be different, too—Thisbe’s was none too stable. Most important on such mornings, though, was the fact that ships from a thousand worlds crowded the skies.
Corva talked about visiting the port on the dawn of a new turn and watching exotic, weirdly dressed strangers step blinking into the lurid daylight of her planet. They brought crafts and gifts as alien as themselves, and stories and pictures from around the lockstep and beyond.
The longer a world slept, the more ships could appear during that special night. As Toby had learned, if you doubled your sleep you would far more than double the number of worlds whose ships could reach you in that time. Modern fusion or fission-fragment rockets could get you about half a light-year in thirty years, and nomad planets were spaced about one every tenth of a light-year in this part of the galaxy. A world that slept for three decades couldn’t visit just five times the number of worlds as one that wintered over for one-fifth the time; it could visit five hundred more. The longer you slept, the more opportunities for trade you’d have.
Lockstep 360/1 was about five light-years across, and within that space there were more than seventy thousand worlds, ranging from little moon-size ice balls to a couple of planets as big as Jupiter. All were easy to get to from even the smallest outpost, provided you could spend thirty years at a time accumulating fuel for the journey and wintered over.
And yet Thisbe had gone against the sensible rules of the locksteps and been punished for it. The blockade remained.
Corva patiently explained why. “Thisbe’s really a fast world. See,” she said, pointing to where some bots were repairing a roof, “there’s a huge cost in wear and tear to wintering over here. There’s a trade-off between how much you can produce while you were awake and how little you’ll consume if you sleep longer. There’s also a trade-off between the bigger manufacturing and agriculture potential of fast worlds like this and the bigger trading opportunities you get if you winter over longer. There’re other locksteps on Thisbe, you know, and they get by on higher frequencies ’cause fast worlds like this do better at manufacturing than trade.”
Corva took Toby on walks through the neighborhood, where some houses were sealed up and silent. These were neighbors she only saw on Jubilee, which happened only once or twice a year. They were the ones who were more often awake, though—it was really Corva and her people who were usually the silent, sealed-up mysteries.
During one of these walks she told Toby what had happened. “The government wanted our Jubilees to synchronize with more of the other locksteps. Those locksteps wanted it, too. They don’t use McGonigal cicada beds,” she added, nodding at a silent estate whose lawns were overgrown with weeds and young trees. “So there was a lot of talk about scrapping our beds and using theirs. That would cost a huge amount, but more important, we’d break the lockstep agreement.”
“What’s that?” He’d read enough to know it was some sort of service agreement between the McGonigals and the 360 worlds.
“The agreement says we promise not to change the frequency except during emergencies. In return, we get access to all the 360-to-1 worlds without port taxes, immigration reviews and all that. Dad calls it a ‘level playing field.’ It’s useful, ’cause among other things it lets all the worlds trade using the same currency and know what its value is from turn to turn.
“The government thought of a way to bend the rules. The cicada beds all have their own timers, of course, but they’re coordinated by a timing signal sent from centralized servers. One of those is here, on Thisbe, and it sets the exact frequency and times for a couple hundred worlds whose only connection to the rest of the lockstep is through us. We’re the gateway. If we hack our timer to shift our frequency just a little—add a year here, drop one there—we could go into Jubilee with our neighbors a lot more often. Barsoom might complain, but they wouldn’t come down on us. And since we were the server for all those other worlds, they’d follow us. There’s a whole bunch of different locksteps near the Laser Wastes that would come into Jubilee. So with one stroke Thisbe could double its trade potential.”
Toby nodded. It was brilliant. That overgrown estate, normally silent, would be awake more often. More ships would crowd the sky. “It’s perfect! Why would it be a problem?”
“If they let us get away with time shifting, everybody might try it. Then there’d be chaos, because the value of money couldn’t be predicted anymore and ships leaving port for their farthest trading partners couldn’t be guaranteed to get there in time. What happens if I’ve got a crucial trading trip planned with a world that’s a twenty-nine-year journey away, and they decide to slip their schedule and come awake after twenty-seven years so they can Jubilee with somebody else? I get there and they’re wintered over. I have to wait another turn to do my trading with them. Instead of one month lockstep time, that trip’s taken at least two. It’s crazy.”
He was puzzled. “You think your people were wrong to do what they did?”
“Yes!” She threw up her hands in frustration. “It was stupid. But it’s more stupid what Barsoom did to punish us! Way too extreme.”
He had to agree with that. Corva had lost eight years of her family’s lives to the blockade, and could have lost four more. Shifting Thisbe’s frequency into high gear like this was a brutal overreaction. The global economy was depressed, with resources that normally could accumulate for decades being used up faster than they could be renewed. Trades that had happened once a month now occurred only every year, and the Jubilees were totally screwed up.
“I’m surprised you put up with it,” he said. “Better to leave the lockstep entirely than suffer like this.”
“If only it were that easy,” she said. “Leave 360 and we slash our trading partners. If we permanently speed up, we’ll lose dozens or hundreds of worlds as next-day neighbors. But we can’t go on this way, either. It’s unfair. It’s evil.”
So there it was. She didn’t say the words, but Toby heard them in his head as in her voice: You’re a McGonigal, maybe you can stop this. He had no idea whether he had the power, yet also unspoken was another accusation: the fault lay not with the lockstep system but with the fact that it was ruled by the McGonigals.
The peaceful setting, combined with Corva’s comment about her adventure being over, had been making Toby wonder: could his own be over, too? If he’d escaped Nathan Kenani, maybe he’d escaped Evayne as well … and maybe he didn’t need to ever confront her or Peter. They were different people now; his beloved brother and sister were lost forever to time. Wouldn’t the sensible thing be to just accept that and find a life for himself in this wondrous and strange world his family had built while he slept? But things were far from perfect here. Corva was right: what was happening to Thisbe was unfair.