Peter shook his head. “You don’t understand—the politics, the—”
“Oh, I do understand. You’ve run off a cliff and as long as your legs keep pedaling, you’re going to stay up. The instant you stop, you fall. But it’s not the lockstep that’ll collapse, is it? You’ve just told me … about Dad,” Toby coughed and had to stop for a second. “You have to keep running or that is going to catch up to you. But you don’t need to keep pulling the lockstep along with you.”
“You don’t get it, we built it like a machine, Evie and me. The Toby cult, the whole Emperor of Time crap, the Guides, the messaging to the fast worlds, how we handle immigration … It’s a system, Toby. You can’t break it. You can’t return, or the whole thing falls apart. Mom can’t wake up, or the same thing happens—”
“Isn’t it really that you’re afraid we’d outvote you? ’Cause, you know, we will.”
Peter fell silent. Toby floated over to rest his hand on the warming cicada bed. “We’re back to arguing over how many possibilities there are. You’re saying there’re only two: the status quo you and Evie spent so many years building, or a catastrophic collapse. But you know that’s not true.”
The Chairman of Cicada Corp watched Toby warily, saying nothing.
“Mom’ll be awake in a few hours,” said Toby. “Then we’re going to wait for Evie to arrive. And then … the shareholders of Cicada Corp are going to hold a vote.”
He raised his hand. “All in favor of issuing one share per cicada bed user, say aye. All opposed…”
Peter still said nothing. Toby shrugged. “There’re four of us, and six shares. One vote per share. Mom built the system, she knows how to make the necessary changes. Was this what she was proposing when you guys tricked her into this last sleep? Don’t answer that, I don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter anyway. The fact is, you and Evie have a chance to redeem yourselves now. We can make the vote unanimous.”
“One vote per bed…” Peter was practically strangling on the words. “That’d be democracy!”
“Yeah. Worst system of government except for all the others, right? But it’s not like the people of 360 don’t know how to handle it. They’re mostly free anyway. I mean I saw how the government on Thisbe handles things. Peter, they have built the world you and I tried to build with Consensus. You can fool yourself into thinking you’ve been the guiding hand, but really, it was them, them all along.” He thought of Corva’s fierce passion, and even her brother’s determination to right the wrongs of the world. They weren’t passive subjects of Peter McGonigal. They didn’t need him.
“The only thing standing in their way now is Cicada Corp and our stranglehold on the lockstep frequencies. We are going to give it up—you, me, Mom, and Evie. Take our hands off the wheel and watch the ship steer itself.”
Bravado and determination had kept Toby going this far; he’d said his piece, done what he came to do. Now that he had, he found he was trembling, practically fainting. It was all catching up to him.
His voice cracking with exhaustion and sorrow, he held out his hand to his brother and said, “Peter, I just don’t want to run anymore.
“And I don’t think you do, either.”
Twenty-one
“HEY, TOBY, OVER HERE!”
He looked up from the shard of blue pottery he’d dug out of the dirt. Sol was standing framed by two pillars that once might have been straight but had been sculpted by the wind for aeons, until now they looked like twisted tree trunks.
Miranda’s head popped up from below Sol’s feet. “You really should see this,” she shouted. “I think it’s an intact chamber!”
Toby dropped the potsherd and picked his way through a landscape of tumbled stone blocks and irregular red earth. He had to climb around a fissure that separated him from his two friends, and he momentarily stood higher than Sol’s head. From here he could see down the long slope behind the twin pillars, to where irregularly joined pools of water sketched the direction of an ancient canal. Hazy distance veiled the rise of other plateaus—green on their lower slopes, Martian red on the summits where ruin after ruin teased at the sky. Noctis Labyrinthus, this region was called—the Maze of Night—and it was one of the most ancient settled parts of Mars. Barsoom, as it was called now.
Miranda stood up, dusting herself off. If Toby had taken off his glasses, he’d have seen her as she really was: a gangly tour guide robot like the one pretending to be Sol. Through his interface, he could pretend they were real people. He’d given these bodies the personalities of his game characters but let this one retain the tour bot’s database of historical data. So it wasn’t surprising when Miranda said, “Six different cultures built here. This whole hill is a rubble pile, who knows what’s at the bottom?”
She knelt again. “I think we might be able to squeeze in there. There’s a tiled floor, it might date from the second Thark Flowering.”
Toby wasn’t listening. His fingers had strayed out to stroke the side of one of the pillars. It was so old it had lost all sign of being artificial. It reminded him of Stonehenge—and then, uncomfortably, of the grand avenue on Destrier. He snatched back his hand.
“It’s going to take awhile,” he said with a sad smile, “to catch up.”
If Miranda and Sol had been human, they might have caught his irony and laughed, or expressed some sympathy. As it was they just smiled and nodded.
Toby knelt to look through the gap Miranda had found. It was dark in there. He doubted he could have fit through, but it would have been easy for Orpheus.
He stood up again, gazing out at the dying canals.
At least this landscape didn’t change in an eyeblink, like Earth’s did. Toby had been on Barsoom for six months now; for three before that, he’d lived in a lockstep fortress in the Amazonian uplands of what had once been Brazil. He’d wanted to be around green and real sunlight, but every thirty days, the landscape hiccuped and changed completely. New trees, a new tributary to the river below the fortress, or a new town full of people who barely remembered those whom he’d gotten to know over the past weeks. He’d hated it there, and Mom convinced him to come back to Mars.
Barsoom was practically homey compared to the rest of the solar system. Mercury didn’t even exist anymore; it had been eaten and its constituent matter spread out to form a vast Dyson cloud that gathered sunlight to power starship launchers and other less comprehensible machines for the posthumans who’d taken over much of the place. Venus was fully terraformed now, a world of shallow oceans that forbade any locksteps from settling there. Space itself was crowded with artificial worlds, some inhabited, many ruined and silent.
Considering the godlike powers possessed by the posthumans, Toby had been a bit surprised that humans—or conventional life-forms of any kind—still existed. When he’d expressed this to Peter, his brother had just laughed. “Technology can speed up evolution, but it can’t do anything to give it a direction. What these AIs and robot cultures keep forgetting is that purpose comes from vulnerability. Give people the power of the gods, and they’ll eventually run down like wind-up toys for lack of reasons to go on. It’s happened around here so many times that the posthumans finally figured out that they need us. We’re kind of the bottom-feeders of their ecosystem—a necessary evil. Humans are optimized to care about things, and the posthumans feed off our passions. Without us, they just speed-evolve into useless lumps. The solar system’s crowded with those.