“Right.”
They walked together for a long time, Corva with her head down and hands behind her back while Toby broke the trail for her. He was headed for a road that led to the next town. It was going to take a couple of days to get to it on foot, but he’d been learning patience recently. He could afford the time.
“How does it end?” she said suddenly. “This game you’re playing with your sister?”
He looked back at her, grimly satisfied. “Peter and Evayne started something they think they can control. They can’t control it—but I can.
“The game doesn’t end on Thisbe. This is just the opening move.”
THEY’D BEEN SLEEPING IN houses, but there were none here between the towns. He was pretty sure Evayne had no automated hunters in the sky right now (the Thisbe ground forces having shot most of them down) so he decided to risk a fire.
He and Corva sat side by side on a log and roasted some stringy rabbit that Wrecks had caught. It was comfortable and even romantic for a while. They talked about their vastly different childhoods, finding so little in common that it was amazing to both they could relate to one another at all. After a period of companionable silence, though, Toby noticed that Corva was staring at the sinuous river of stars that crossed the sky. After a time she stood up and put her back to the fire. “I’ve never seen this,” she murmured.
“What, the Milky Way?”
“No. That.” She nodded at the horizon.
Under the sky, there were no lights at all. Beyond the small circle of orange cast by the fire, everything was utterly black and still. The sawtoothed cutout of trees on the horizon reminded Toby of another time he’d stared into black like that. It was on his first waking in orbit around Lowdown, when he’d turned away from that same vision of the Milky Way to find sight absorbed by the vast circular blackness of the planet. He remembered what that had felt like, and coming to stand next to her, he felt a bit of it now.
Except for the occasional crackle from the fire, there was no sound at all. It was as if they were standing at the border to the land of Death, nothing ahead of them but perfected stillness.
Corva shivered. “Is this why we did it?” She turned to nod in the direction of the town they’d left. “Did we have a million years of being faced with … with this every night, and did we invent fire and weapons and clothes and culture and art and houses just so we wouldn’t have to look into it? —That awful emptiness?”
He nodded. “I guess you never camped out.”
She turned to him. “You’re not afraid of it, are you? Not the way the rest of us are.”
Toby shrugged. “I’ve seen it before, I guess.”
“You want to rub her nose in the horror of realtime?”
“Or her men’s noses. Every second that ticks by while they chase me, they age, while the people they left behind remain…”
“Perfect.”
He laughed. “Imagination does funny things. Especially when it’s faced with something like this. Right?” He shouted that last word into the night.
There was no echo. Silence and blackness ate the word and remained untouched.
“Don’t do that!” Corva sat down again, now resolutely staring into the fire. Toby noticed she was playing with her little hologram locket.
He sat next to her. “What is that, anyway? You’ve worn it since I’ve known you.”
It had been a while since Corva had given him her I-can’t-believe-you’re-so-stupid look. “You’re kidding. You’re playing this complicated mind game with your sister’s people, and you don’t even know how they think about time?”
“I know they’re afraid of it. Else why run faster and faster into the future?”
She gave a heavy sigh. “Yeah. Okay, there’re two visions of time—of what it is. The first is the oak in the acorn. You know what that is?”
He wracked his memory, trying to remember how Evayne’s official religion worked. “That everything’s predestined, unfolding according to some kind of plan?”
“Oh, it’s more than that. It’s the idea that the only true creative moment in all of time was the first one—the big bang. Everything that’s happened since is just working out the implications made possible in that first second. The engine was built before time, and now it just runs. Your sister’s taken that idea, applied it to human civilization, and put you at the heart of it. Toby,” she said, now struggling to keep a straight face, “you’re the big bang of the locksteps.”
“Great. Another title to add to my list.”
“The story is that you saw it all in a flash of vision—I mean, how humanity could cheat time and become eternal, even if our individual lives are still short. You built an eternal city of sorts, a real Olympus that would abide no matter what happened on Earth or the other fast worlds. One of the things that means is that there can be nothing new added to the locksteps. No innovation. No revolution. No change of any kind.”
“Kenani’s job,” he said with a nod. “To keep things from changing.”
“Nothing new. And nothing to look forward to. In other words, nothing to hope for.”
“Ah.” He reached out to touch the locket. He understood its shape now: a miniature tree inside an acorn. “But if that’s not what you believe…”
“I wear this to remind myself that I don’t believe it. I look at time a different way. It’s physics based. See, when the universe was emerging from the primordial fireball—”
“It’s not every conversation,” he interrupted, “where you get to use the words ‘primordial fireball.’”
“Oh, be quiet. As the … the bang cooled, things began to crystallize out of it. Quarks and leptons, electrons and protons. They weren’t there before and never had been—and then they were. Before they existed, they couldn’t exist, they were impossible. They weren’t stored somewhere in some kind of seed form before the bang. They were impossible, and then they were there.
“Same thing with life,” she said. “Before life existed, how could some immortal observer from outside the universe have seen it coming? It wasn’t one of those things that matter did—until suddenly it was doing it. And then consciousness played the same trick on life …
“The point is,” she said, gently taking his fingers off her locket, “time isn’t the working out of a predesigned destiny. Time is the possibility of surprise.”
Toby had a sudden startled image of the two types of time: one that pushed, with all the terrible weight of the iron-bound laws of history behind it; and one that pulled you forward into a future of limitless possibilities. “So what does believing in surprise get you?” he mused, looking up at again at the stars.
“What do you think, silly? It gives us the one thing that the oak in the acorn never can:
“Hope.”
TOGETHER, THEY DRIFTED THROUGH a landscape empty of any of the agendas of human civilization. In the tangled brushlands, along the edges of overgrown roads, and under the canopies of untended trees they met instead countless beings busy with the tending of their own lives: hurrying bees, chirping beetles, lazily waving rushes in the shallow waters. The frequent lurid changes in color that washed the sky didn’t affect these creatures, who’d adapted and moved on. In time, Toby got used to it, too, only occasionally reflecting on the unimaginable power hinted at by the laser sunlight.
He and Corva moved from place to place, keeping as many steps ahead of Evayne’s searchers as they could. They would curl up on cold concrete in front of some randomly chosen house’s hibernaculum and sleep for weeks or months at a time. When they emerged, the lawns would be more overgrown, the plastic wrapping of the houses a little more frayed, and the Internet news services full of automatically generated alerts and bot-authored reports of Evayne’s activities.