The indicators didn’t change. “That’s interesting,” said Toby. So his guess had been right; the tightness in all his muscles loosened just a bit.
“I found out about this on Thisbe,” he said, “when Evie tried to block my commands in the system. Turned out she couldn’t. I wondered whether it’d work the same with you. I guess it does.
“Bots! Stand down!”
As one, Peter’s military bots folded in on themselves and went still.
Peter whirled, gasping. He grappled a pistol out of the closed fist of one of his guards and pointed it at Toby. He didn’t look like Peter now, just like a hostile older man with a gun. All Toby’s bluster evaporated. “You—” Peter looked from Toby to the bed and back again. “You’re waking her up!”
Despite the gun pointed at him, Toby told himself, he had to go ahead with what he’d planned. “Yes,” he said, “and you can’t change that. She’s a few hours away still, but she’ll be back before Evie arrives. Which means, little brother, that you have to make a choice.”
Peter’s eyes were wide. “What—”
“See, I’m not armed. I wasn’t about to mess up Mom’s bedroom with a gun battle. That means you’ve got me right where you want me. You can kill me before she wakes up. But you can’t stop Mom from waking … and you alone don’t have the power to put her to sleep again. Do you?”
Warily, Peter grabbed a handhold on the cicada bed and settled himself opposite Toby. “Evie told you about the share system?”
Toby shook his head. “Evie didn’t tell me anything.” He didn’t try to disguise the disappointment in his voice. “She’s become rather good at following orders.” Now the anger was slipping out. “Is that her, or did you twist her that way?”
Peter didn’t say anything, but the pistol was still pointed at Toby.
“You know, when I found out what I could do, I figured Mom had given me a superuser account on the corporate system. It made all kinds of sense, but the question was, did you guys have the same privileges? You must—unless … she didn’t entirely trust you.”
“We had our disagreements,” said Peter. “But you were out of the picture.”
“So if she was the superuser, holding the administrator’s account to the whole lockstep system, then you two might just have ordinary user’s privileges. And if she didn’t like how you were scheduling worlds in the lockstep, she could block you, or cancel your actions entirely.
“But that’s not how the system works, is it?”
Peter had been staring at Toby with a strange kind of fascination; now he shook himself and seemed to snap to attention. “Why does it matter?” he said. “Evie caught enough of your people on Thisbe to learn what you’re up to. It’s the whole messiah thing, just like we foresaw.”
This time it was Toby who started to object and Peter who overrode him: “Come on! They love you there! You came down from the sky and promised to reset their frequency, and last I heard, you were building a nice little army to storm Destrier.” He sneered. “Don’t get high and mighty about family stuff now, Toby.”
In that moment, Toby knew they were brothers again—even if Peter wanted to kill him, he’d just acknowledged who Toby was. As when Evie had done it, it made all the difference. Suddenly all the armies, lockstep bots and expectations of the outside world were irrelevant; the universe had closed down to just him and Peter. Him and his brother, fighting.
In that case, he knew what to say next, like he usually did with Peter. “If I was really playing the messiah card, I’d have brought my army here, wouldn’t I? But I didn’t. I wanted to talk to you.”
He could see that this had hit home, because the pistol finally wavered. Because this was Peter, though, and because they’d argued their whole lives, he couldn’t resist adding, “And who set up the whole messiah thing, anyway?” He matched Peter’s glare. “It’s your script, Pete. You guys jammed it into my hands, and that whole damned planet wanted—demanded!—that I follow it.
“Only I’m not going to do it, because the messiah plan is a red herring, isn’t it? You were never afraid I’d try it if I came back. You were counting on it.”
“The religion…” Peter’s lips thinned. “That was Evie’s department.”
“But it had a purpose, didn’t it? Over and above keeping people in line, I mean. The prophecy’s a honey trap for would-be conquerors. I hear it’s worked pretty well. And me, well”—Toby spread his arms—“of course I’d run back to wake Mom if I returned. The second I tried, all the people whose loyalty to you might be shaky, and everybody who’d been plotting behind your back, they’d all jump on my side. They’d all be exposed. We’d troop on over to Destrier, and then you’d crush us all there.
“Pete, that’s just so … so Consensus.” Toby shook his head in disgust. “And vicious. And what I could never figure out was, why in hell would you be so vicious to me? How could I ever have threatened this grand empire you’ve built? If I came back, don’t you think I’d want to celebrate it with you?”
Peter’s eyes shifted, ever so slightly, but he wasn’t meeting Toby’s gaze anymore.
“Even if you thought I’d disapprove, what would it matter? My disapproval wasn’t going to topple your empire. It was a puzzle with no answer. Peter, you tried to have me killed.”
“Shut down,” Peter McGonigal said to their mother’s cicada bed. Its lights stayed green.
“You can still shoot me, by the way.” Toby waved at the gun in Peter’s hand. “At least now I know why. Cicada Corp’s systems recognize four shareholders, right? You, me, Evie, and Mom. We don’t own the same number of shares, though. You and Evie each have one. Mom has two—and so do I.”
“I couldn’t believe it when she told me,” said Peter. “She’d given you two—you! You’d been gone for years. And she kept two for herself, just to keep Evie and me in line.”
“Yeah, and when that got too inconvenient for you, you guys trapped her in here and voted her to sleep. Permanently. Except you didn’t kill her.”
“No.” Peter reared back, outraged at the idea. “We wouldn’t—”
“But you’d kill me.”
“That’s—”
“Different? Why?”
That one question hung in the air, while silence stretched between them. Finally, and to Toby’s surprise, Peter jammed the pistol into his belt and crossed his arms. “You really don’t know?” he asked skeptically.
Slowly, Toby shook his head. They remained that way, in a standoff, for a long minute. Finally, Toby said, “It had to be something that happened before I left. I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think it was anything I did on Sedna. So earlier …
“Guess what,” he said suddenly. “I’ve got backups of Consensus in my glasses. I was going through them the other day, and I found something. You might want to see it. You’ve got implants, I assume?” Guardedly, Peter nodded. “Then let me share it with you.” Slowly, in case Peter went for his gun again, Toby reached up to tap his glasses awake. He uttered several quiet commands, and a virtual environment blossomed around himself and his brother.
Peter gasped, then stared. “That?”
“The very first thing I did in Consensus,” said Toby. “I showed it to you that first time we went in together. Our house.”
It was the house Toby had grown up in, where Maria Teresa had died trying to protect Peter; the place they had never returned to as a family after the kidnapping. Toby had built this virtual copy as a healing exercise for himself, but he’d shown it to Peter and issued a challenge: Figure out a way to prevent what happened here from ever happening again. Build a better world.