“It wasn’t snowing in the city!”
“Oh, this stuff wouldn’t make it that far,” said Ammond. “It’s mostly carbon dioxide, with some nitrogen slush. Things cool down pretty quickly once you leave the city limits.”
The structures they’d seen from orbit had been surrounded by these big target-shaped splash marks. Now Toby knew why: they were the eyes of local storms while their citizens were awake. He barked a laugh. Persea turned to see where he was looking.
“Impressive, isn’t it? I almost couldn’t believe those storms myself, when I first moved here,” she said.
The storm was abating. Toby looked back and up, at a sky-topping mountain of cloud lit with lightning flashes and traces of a hellish orange glow.
“You said you’d been asleep for twenty years. How long do you stay awake?” Toby asked her.
“Actually, we sleep for thirty years. You drifted into Lowdown’s orbit ten years into our ‘winter.’ We sleep for thirty years, and then we’re awake for a month. That’s known as a turn.”
He stared at her. “A month? That’s … that’s ridiculous!”
“What’s important is the ratio,” explained Ammond. “The ratio between dormancy and living time in a turn. You could use any sort of ratio—five to one, two to one, a hundred to one. We use 360-to-one.”
“But why? Does it take that long to recover from these storms?”
“No, though that’s a good guess. It’s not just Lowdown that uses the 360-to-one ratio. There’s over seventy thousand other planets do the same.”
“Almost all of them,” added Persea, “nomad worlds like this one, drifting in interstellar space between the solar system and Alpha Centauri.”
Toby had taken a crash course in astronomy before they left for Sedna, and it was only then that he’d learned that interstellar space wasn’t completely empty. There were a hundred thousand nomad planets for every star in the galaxy. Most were frozen like Sedna and Lowdown, but some—the really big ones—cradled the heat from their birth for billions of years. These could sustain volcanoes and oceans under thick blankets of atmosphere. Sunless worlds, impossibly lonely, but life might actually exist on these ancient nomads.
But … all of these worlds switching themselves off and on like lights? And all on the same weird schedule. “Why? It’s crazy,” he said. “Why would you possibly want to do that? Go into cold sleep after a month, then sleep for years…”
The clouds were clearing, revealing the vast spangling of stars above a black landscape. There were the familiar constellations, proof that they were no more than a few light-years from Earth. Less, if Ammond was telling the truth.
“Two reasons,” said Ammond. “You can stop here,” he told the driver. They were now perched at the top of a hill overlooking a plain where floodlights showed busy graders and excavators chomping at the landscape. In the distance were more lit buildings, maybe factories.
“If we tried to live like this all the time we’d use up these little worlds in no time,” said Ammond. “That’s reason one. We live like arctic flowers, with a short growing season and long winter. It works for them, it’ll work for us. But secondly…”
Persea put a hand on his arm. Toby’s head was drooping with sudden exhaustion—and from the reminder of how far through time he’d fallen and how much was now lost to him.
“Maybe … we’ll talk about that another time,” said Ammond.
They drove back to the city in silence.
THE CITY TURNED OFF its orange canopy to create a local night. As it came back on to create a new morning, Toby lay in the sumptuous bed he’d been provided. In a half-waking reverie, he found the amber light reminding him of sunsets on Earth, and he ached with longing to see one again.
As his mind drifted, though, it was one particular sunset that memory summoned. He’d been younger by a few years, and full of nervous energy. On this evening he was in the family’s rooftop garden, staring out beyond the manicured lawns and well-trimmed trees, the perfect shingled angles of the neighbors’ roofs. A tall wrought-iron fence surrounded this little enclave of civility, and on the other side of it, people were rioting.
He’d seen his father’s car pull up a few minutes before, so he knew Dad was safe. The skittering crowds and the clouds of tear gas were unnerving, though. What if they got in? That was impossible, Mom had insisted. But Toby was not so sure.
Indifferent to the chaos in the streets below, the sky was a magnificent ocean of light, fading from mauve behind Toby to shades of lime green and canary yellow near where the sun had just disappeared. The radiance gave everything a half-real aura, just as distance reduced the shouting and screams of the mob to a grumbling murmur.
He heard a louder sound behind him and turned to see his father stepping out of the glass doors of the dormer room. “Toby! Come away from there.”
“I want to see, Dad.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Mom said it was.”
Father came to stand next to Toby. He pointed, and Toby could see little sparks of red peppering the air above the fence. He’d assumed these were firecrackers somebody was setting off. “Those are bullets being exploded by the community laser defense. People are shooting at us, Tobe. If just one gets through…”
Alarmed, Toby had followed his father back to the center of the garden, out of sight of the riot. Only then had he noticed that his dad’s eyes were red and that his mouth had a bitter downturn to it. Toby had never seen him like this.
His father made him sit next to him on a bench under a cherry tree. He hunched forward, clasping his hands nervously between his knees. “I … I saw Terry Idris as the car was coming through the gate. You remember Terry? He used to come to dinner a lot. Tall, black hair…?” Toby shook his head.
“Terry’s a good friend.” Dad’s voice cracked on that last word. “And he’s out there throwing stones at the fence—at our fence. He saw me, I know he did. I … I would have picked him up, brought him … it’s dangerous out there, but…”
Toby stared at his father in wonder. “What? Why didn’t you?”
“We can’t be seen to be sympathizing with the rioters.” His father hung his head. “We’d lose our membership, have to move out into the city…” Toby understood that this would be a bad thing to do. “It’s not right, Toby. Terry’s my friend. They … they were all my friends.”
Toby wasn’t sure who they were, but he sensed that this was far too important a moment to interrupt.
“Listen, Toby, we can’t ever talk about this. The house, the car—they can overhear us anywhere.” This was a different they now, and Toby knew his dad was talking about their business partners, the political authorities, and everybody else who served the dwindling circle of the trillionaires. You were either in that circle, or outside, with the starving mobs. Toby did understand that.
Now his father turned to him. “We can’t talk about it from this day on, but I want you to know something, Toby. You must understand that I’m not going to stand for it. 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. Just remember, whatever happens, that it’s happening to help them.” He nodded in the direction of the muffled shouting. “Because they don’t deserve what’s happening to them.”
Toby couldn’t remember the rest of that evening. He knew they’d spoken no more about it after they went inside. It wasn’t that the house was bugged, exactly. It was that the bots and screens and devices it was crammed with had their own tiny minds, and those minds had been designed to be archconservative, suspicious snoops. The TV, the air-conditioning system, the duster bots—they were all tattletales, loyal not to the people who owned them but to the people who’d built and sold them.