It was hilarious in a way. Evayne and Peter were acting up again. It was time for the eldest brother to clean up the mess as he had so many times in the past. He had to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” She sent him one of her special glares.
Toby shook his head. “It’s all been going by too fast for me to keep up,” he said. “But that’s got to change.
“It’s time I started planning my next turn.”
Fourteen
SHYLIF WENT EVERYWHERE NOW with a guard of McGonigal bots. These were entirely under Toby’s control, and Shy knew it, yet he hadn’t complained. In fact, he seemed oddly cheerful, despite the fact that Toby—and the Thisbe government—were keeping him from confronting Sebastine Coley again. Coley’s whereabouts were known, but so far, the Thisbe authorities couldn’t charge him with anything. The alleged crime had taken place on another world, and thousands of years ago in real-time terms. The odds of Shylif achieving actual justice seemed very long indeed.
Yet he’d come to see Toby one morning and said nothing about any of that. On the contrary, he’d volunteered to help Toby catch up on his history. After all, as he’d put it, “I had to do all this reading, too, once.”
Thisbe’s public records were open to Toby, and he’d finally summoned the courage to confront those images and videos of his brother and sister taken after he left. After what he’d just done on Wallop, it seemed silly to keep avoiding a few pictures. Yet as the days passed and he combed through old news stories, he found very little that made the new Peter and Evayne come to life for him.
“Look at this!” he said in exasperation. He and Shylif had their glasses on and were sharing a set of research windows. “Says here about half the original Sedna colonists are still alive—which I kind of figured after meeting Kenani. I mean, it’s been forty years since I left, after all. You’d think they would have written memoirs, made documentaries, said something about the early years.”
“Not if they’re being threatened,” Shylif pointed out reasonably. “Obviously, the Chairman wants to keep his secrets.”
“Yeah.” Toby didn’t try to hide his disappointment. Had Peter learned nothing from Consensus?
“But there’s another reason, Toby,” Shylif went on. “You’re kind of uniquely positioned to not see it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lockstep time is strange. This history you’re looking for, at one and the same time there’s nothing to it—only forty years!—and way too much of it—fourteen thousand years. Both at once. How are you supposed to think about that?”
Toby didn’t know. The official records were disappointing, being merely a litany of massive immigrations, explosive economic growth and the conquest of new worlds. There were about a million pictures of Peter standing on some podium or other, waving and smiling. It just went on and on.
But he had another source. The archive from the twentier contained chaotic and fragmented records from Carter McGonigal’s surveillance of the Sedna colony. Toby went back to these.
There were two kinds of records. One was the surveillance footage itself, which came in giant terabyte dumps from hundreds of cameras and listening devices, mostly standard bots eavesdropping while they went about their business. Toby assigned this to some game personalities in his local copy of Consensus, telling them to review it for relevant items.
The other kind of record, though, was much more interesting. Carter had recorded family meetings held in a cramped little closet, where he and, initially, just Mother, had talked about their fears and suspicions. Toby’s father was convinced the trillionaires had planted one or more spies or saboteurs among the Sedna colonists. Months went by, and nothing turned up to confirm that worry. Toby watched it all anyway, fascinated and sorrowful at being so close to and still so far from his dearest people.
One day it wasn’t just Mom and Dad meeting. Peter and Evayne were there, too. And Peter wasn’t happy.
“You’re doing what?” He stalked back and forth, his head and eyes turning to remain fixed on the open surveillance windows in the physical control panel at the focus of the room. “Isn’t this what they do? Why are we doing it?”
“Listen,” their father said tightly. “You’re going to have to know how this stuff works. I’m not going to be around … well, for a while. I have to return to Earth, there’s a challenge to our claim. While I’m away, we’re going to be vulnerable. If something’s going to happen, it’ll be while I’m en route, do you understand? You have to be ready.”
“It’s wrong! I’m not doing it!” Peter stopped still and glared at his parents, and Toby found himself smiling. He wasn’t sure of the date stamp, but at this point Peter must be almost as old as Toby had been when he set off for Rockette. That meant he’d be pretty much as old here as Toby was now. A kind of twin, yet Toby could still see the boy in him. He could see the man, too—the density of Peter’s bones was making itself known in the angles of his face, the round solidity of his skull—but he still seemed so young. It made Toby wonder whether he, too, seemed as young to the people around him.
Evayne walked over and put her hand on Peter’s arm. “I get it,” she said. “It’s how things are, Pete, we can’t change it.
“Why don’t … why don’t you just treat this like it was a Consensus scenario? Play it through? I’ll help.”
Toby skipped ahead, taking giant steps through time—weeks, months, a year. After his father left for Earth again, the records became unevenly spaced. At last he came to the final one.
The shot was of Sedna’s landscape. Nearby everything was utterly black, and out at the horizon it was, too, with only the sky blazing with stars to indicate up and down. In the middle distance was a cratered plain, and on it bright flashes of light created a stroboscopic impression of bots—big mining units and smaller, human-formed ones—locked in combat. The flashes were explosions and electrical discharges. The scene was, at first, utterly silent.
Then Peter’s voice came on line, perfect and stereoscopic. “We’re going to be hiding this backup as soon as I’m done. I just wanted to record what’s happening … in case what we’re going to try doesn’t work.
“The trillionaires have made their move.”
The camera pulled back. The image was taken near ground level and had the quality of the twentier’s own cameras. Amplified starlight illuminated a sheltered ring of rocks where several space-suited figures sat, surrounded by bots, butlers, and weapons both makeshift and purpose built. One of the space-suited figures stood in the center of the space, and although its faceplate was blank, it moved with the jittery intensity recognizable as Peter’s.
That suit knelt now in front of the camera. “We woke up today to find the colony bots running amok. They tried to kill us in our beds. Luckily this surveillance network my parents set up isn’t connected to the main Internet. We were alerted by that surveillance system and were able to get out. The bots we’d committed to it are still on our side, who knows for how long? And they’re all fighting it out down there.” He pointed, and the camera obligingly turned to take in the sight of the distant silent battle.
“It’s pretty clear what they’re trying to do. They’ve ruptured the colony’s oxygen tanks, blown up the greenhouse—”
“I saw a pack of them going into the food stores before we got out,” said someone else. The camera turned again, this time revealing who else was on this rise above the battle: everyone, it seemed. There were hundreds of space-suited figures sitting, standing, and pacing here. Only a few bots, mostly twentiers, squatted among them.