She cut the connection, but her words rang in his head, echoes of unstated regret distracting him enough that the aircar took over the flying. He didn’t come to himself again until he felt it touching down and realized they’d arrived in a courtyard in central Calydon.
He queried the location of the Thisbe delegation and was told they were settling in to a redbrick hotel a couple of kilometers down the avenue. Too close to fly to, too far for a quick walk, which meant he would have to take a leisurely one instead. That was okay, because it gave him a chance to explore the crowds and architecture of the city as he strolled. There were hints of Consensus style to it all, but Barsoom had its own history and layers of culture. It was unbelievably rich, as was the diversity on the street. Toby found himself spinning around now and then to stare at a person—or thing—that had just passed by him while he’d been ogling something else. Great fun.
As his footsteps approached the Thisbeans’ hotel, though, they slowed even further. Eventually he came to a stop just outside its main entrance.
He’d tried looking up the names of the delegation, but they weren’t listed yet. And anyway, here he was.
He took a deep breath, stepped forward—
“Sir!”
All the air shot out of him. Toby turned. “What?”
Four of the Lockstep palace guard were standing there, accompanied by a small army of bots. The woman at the head of this squad saluted and said, “The Chairman requests your presence.”
“The Chairman? He can—” Toby stopped himself. These people had no idea who he was, and nobody defied the Chairman. It might be fun to try, but the momentary courage that had led him to take that step into the entrance of the hotel was gone now anyway. He shrugged.
“Sure, whatever. Where are we going?”
To the other side of town, it turned out. Here was the palace proper—the Palace, with a capital P and emphasis and fanfares. The place was designed to impress by people who’d studied thousands of years’ worth of such architecture. Toby suspected a few posthuman minds had added their insights into human herd behavior; even just stepping out of an aircar onto one of the upper residence levels, he felt himself shrink a bit with awe. It wasn’t just the scale, the majestic sweep of the colonnades, or the beauty of the frescoes. The way all the lines of wall and pillar wove together, the whole building seemed poised to pounce on him.
Yet all he had to do was glance over and notice that one of the fabulous pieces of wall art depicted the Emperor of Time embarking on his mystical journey into the future … and he just had to laugh. He thanked his escort and hurried on to meet his brother.
“Sorry to tear you away from your ruins, but Evie’s hardly been home a day and the delegates already want a speech from her. It’s a good thing she’s rested.”
Peter stood with his arms crossed in the center of a domed chamber that rivaled the nave of any cathedral from ancient Earth. He was surrounded by the latest in virtualizing technology, so that as Toby came beside him, the walls appeared to fly away and the ceiling lifted off, and they seemed to be standing out in the open. There was even a breeze sliding slowly along the tiers of the city’s biggest and oldest amphitheater. He and Peter stood at one end of it, on stage with one other person. It was Evayne.
“They’ve come to see both of us,” said Peter. He was in full dress uniform. “Don’t worry about them seeing or overhearing us,” he added. “My stage projection’s a puppet; I could moon the crowd and the projectors would compensate and make it look like I’d bowed.”
“And I’m invisible and inaudible,” said Toby.
“Yes—but you’re here. Evayne asked me to call you in. She insisted, actually.”
Invisible and inaudible—but not to Evayne and Peter. Toby thought he could accept that.
“Of course Mom wouldn’t come.”
“Of course not,” agreed Peter breezily. “Oh, here we go. She’s about to start.”
Evayne’s dais stood just off center in the giant oval of the outside theater. She walked alone to her spot, dressed in a fabulous gown of ivory white with gold hems. Her hair was drawn up and tangled with diamonds. As she walked, the most glorious fanfare Toby had ever heard rose in swells. It clutched at his heart though he didn’t even recognize the instruments, let alone the style: the music, like so much else here, echoed out of the well of unguessable time that, somehow, his brother and sister had mastered.
There were tears in his eyes when the music ended. By that time, Evayne stood in her place, gazing up at the multitude that thronged the ancient amphitheater’s seats.
She began:
“How could we have known, my family and I, when we began this, that time in a lockstep runs backward? To us founders, and to the smallest and original parts of the empire, our colony between the stars is only forty years old. As far as the youngest and largest parts of the lockstep are concerned, it is so old as to be one with the foundations of the universe. Immovable. Eternal.
“I remember the day Peter and I realized what was happening. Overnight, sixteen minor worlds, little orbs no bigger than Sedna, had been colonized by settlers from Alpha Centauri. All declared their intention to join the lockstep. They were excited to do so. They’d been hearing stories about us for generations! Together, their population exceeded that of all the worlds we already had. Peter and I panicked.”
“Ha,” said Peter. “Look at that little smile she’s giving there. She’s reassuring them that she’s joking. But it’s true. We freaked.”
“This,” she continued, “is why the Guides were created. They were to test immigrants, both individual people and entire worlds, to see if they would enrich the lockstep or might tear it apart. In retrospect, this was a good idea. Over the years we’ve excluded whole populations that would have obliterated our culture, enslaved or killed many of our people, or subjected us all to one of several dead-ending posthuman ‘uplifts.’”
“Of course, she’s not saying the obvious here,” Peter pointed out.
The obvious was that the official state religion, Toby’s cult, had also been engineered to stabilize incoming culture around conservative ideas. “Is she going to say it?” Toby asked.
Peter shook his head. “Maybe someday, but it’s too touchy right now. Our own fault, of course.”
“While centuries passed on the fast worlds, years went by for us,” Evayne was saying. “Only years. How could we have imagined that there was such a thing as a ‘lockstep civilization’? We’d been administering our little worlds for so short a time! This…” She paused and looked down, letting her shoulders drop. “This is where my brother Peter and I failed.”
The amphitheater reverberated with sound—a roar of voices so broad that some might be cheering, some angry, it was impossible to tell. Peter laughed.
He was so casual, so comfortable with this, that Toby had a flash of déjà vu. This moment was so similar to many others he’d had with Peter in Consensus, when they’d built virtual worlds together, ruled them, and sometimes lost them to this or that angry mob. Paralyzed by the strength of the memory, he just smiled.
“To us, the lockstep was a tiny economic experiment we were making up as we went along! Our actions couldn’t be so consequential that they would ring down the centuries. What we were building couldn’t have a life of its own. It was just us back then, and we steered the ship because without us, it would have been rudderless. We failed to understand how time passes in a lockstep, and so we didn’t notice when the ship became capable of steering itself.