“It’s not a flattering role to have in the grand scheme of things,” he’d added with a shrug, “but it’s a living.”
Peter could always make Toby smile. He’d developed a hard crust of cynicism, decades of learning and incident having weathered his heart like the wind had done to these pillars; yet he was still Peter. It was as if the brother Toby had known was a bright light that still managed to shine through all the brambles and encrustations time had wrapped around it. Even the revelation about Dad.
It was shocking how little Peter remembered of his childhood with Toby and Evayne—even though that time had made him who he was. When the melancholy of time began to coil around Toby’s soul, he only had to spend ten minutes with Peter for it to entirely lift.
It was a good thing Toby had discovered his brother in the Chairman, because unexpectedly, he’d lost his own childhood when Peter told him about their father’s part in the kidnapping. He still didn’t believe it—not all the time, anyway. He would struggle with that, he knew, for years.
He knelt again next to the little cave entrance and was seriously considering squirming in there when a message tone pinged in his ear. “Toby,” he answered curtly.
“Where’d you go?” It was Mom—Cassandra, as she liked to be called now. “I looked all over the grounds!”
“Sorry, I was … restless. I’m just doing a little exploring.”
“Hmmph.” He could hear the distaste in her voice. Cassandra couldn’t understand Toby’s interest in the ocean of time that separated them from their previous lives. Maybe it was because she’d had practice skipping forward before Peter and Evayne had locked her away. She had deliberately turned her back on everything she’d lost. “Well, the last of the delegates is here. There’re some from that world where you argued with Evayne. Thought you might want to know.”
“Ah! Thanks. I’ll be right there.”
He didn’t dare hope. Thisbe had been one of the last holdouts in Peter’s drive to create a lockstep parliament. The cult of Toby was raging there—in various flavors, he’d heard, who fought one another in the streets over minor points of doctrine. Halen Keishion was a major leader in one of those factions, and the rumor was he was trying to set up his own lockstep. Toby had sent Jaysir back to try to locate Corva, but try as the makers might, they’d so far been unable to uncover any information about her whereabouts.
The cults were entirely focused on Destrier. Cassandra and Toby had found it surprisingly easy to adopt new identities on Barsoom, with easy access to Peter. He supposed it was inconceivable to the cultists that Cassandra might not have been in her imitation Taj Mahal on Destrier all these millennia—and therefore inconceivable that she might have been quietly awakened somewhere else, to exit the historical stage into an ordinary life.
One result was that there were few security milbots monitoring his progress through the ruins. Toby had felt free to come here almost unaccompanied. He bounded back to the Martian aircar, ducking under its cartoonishly big lift fans, forgetting Miranda and Sol. They quietly dissolved back into tourist bots as the aircar whined into life.
“Oh, and your sister’s here, too,” added Cassandra as two military bots ducked under the closing clamshell doors of the aircar to sit behind Toby. He didn’t miss the chilly sound in his mother’s voice; she and Evayne were still not talking.
“Thanks.” His mother rang off, and Toby pensively watched the ruined palaces of Noctis dwindle below him. He tilted the aircar east, toward Valles Marineris and the triple cities of Ius, Calydon, and Louros. Home was Peter’s sumptuous palace on the north slope of Ius Chasma, but it was in Calydon Fossae that all the action was happening.
As he approached the vast canyon complex, he could see aircraft buzzing over the city like a cloud of midges. Delegates were arriving literally by the boatload, from the farthest reaches of the lockstep. They were here to hammer out a lockstep-wide scheduling policy now that Peter and Evayne had made their one-bed, one-share public ownership offer in the lockstep monopoly. Calydon’s minareted streets were crowded with democrats, autocrats and cybercrats, monarchists, panarchists, and demarchists. All were bravely stepping into realtime to debate and deliberate for as long as it took to come up with the new lockstep government. It might take months, or years—but in lockstep time, it would all be over by next turn.
The chaos made it easy for Toby and his mother to come and go. Peter’s palace was overrun with middle-aged women and young men anyway, and everybody was distracted by the new governmental proposal. Toby was posing as Dickson Mu, a delegate from Eris. Cassandra wasn’t acting at all like the Holy Mother was supposed to, so nobody suspected her.
Still … He tapped his glasses and said, “Call Evayne.” The little dancing icon signified that she was being hailed—and this went on for a long time—and then a window opened in his interface, and she was there.
“How are you?” she said in a clipped and guarded tone.
“Always talking on the phone, but never getting together,” he said. “When are we going to have dinner?”
“Very funny,” she said flatly. “You know how delicate things are.”
“Actually, Evie, I don’t. You had some chores you were going to do. Did you get to them?”
“Where do you think I’ve been the past forty-five years?”
“Oh!” He’d last spoken to her two months ago, lockstep time. “You’re not serious. You haven’t been—” He peered at her in the little window. She didn’t seem older.
Evayne grimaced. “Six years, Toby. For me, it’s been six years since the last time I spoke to you. Seven since we woke Mom.”
He sucked in his breath. “Does she know?” Evayne shook her head. “Tell her! Evie, she’s not going to punish you forever! Six years!” His heart sank at the thought. This wasn’t at all like the evidence of time he’d seen in the ruins just now. There were different kinds of time, and that which separated you from your loved ones was the slowest. “Where were you?” he ventured.
“Tau Ceti. Sirius. Points in between. Peter can tell you—he provided the ship. We were doing almost fifty percent light speed back and forth—a new record, I think.”
“And…?”
“Our clients and partners are winding down the Toby myth. The Emperor of Time is no more. It’s already been a couple of generations, realtime, since I left Sirius. Any new immigrants into 360 are going to be several generations out of our official endorsement of the myth. Pilgrimages to Destrier are going to dry up soon, and since the keepers of Mom’s tomb live in realtime anyway, they’ll probably have turned it into a tourist trap and theme park by now. Except for the holdouts actually in the lockstep, you’re safe now.”
He snorted. “There’re billions of those. But thank you. Thank you so much, Evayne. I really was serious about dinner.”
She just stared at him. Under the weight of that gaze, Toby suddenly felt acutely self-conscious. His last words echoed in his ears and those platitudes sounded so glib that he instantly regretted them. In that second he went from not knowing that he was feeling any emotion at all to realizing he was being flooded with grief and longing. “I mean”—to his astonishment his voice cracked—“I never meant to leave you. I’m sorry I left, and I want to see you. To catch up … on all those lost years.” Tears were blurring the inside of his glasses.
When he blinked himself into seeing again, he realized that Evie was wiping her eyes, too. Time was when she’d come to him, when she’d bawled in his arms, a tangle of limbs and hair butting his chin. It was so recent, those moments almost seeming more real than this one and that little girl more real than his hard-bitten older woman—who had already regained her own composure and said, “I know, Toby. Yes, I’d like to have dinner with you. We’ll talk soon.”