She inclined her head. “Please, Tchicaya. It’s fun doing this, but I’m lonely without you.”
“How long have you been out of Slowdown?”
Mariama averted her eyes. “A week.”
That hurt. How lonely could she be, if it had taken her a week to miss him?
She put a hand over her mouth and mumbled, “Or two.”
Tchicaya reached out to grab her arm, and she danced back and vanished from sight. He froze for a second, then rushed for the door, and stood with his back pressed against it.
He searched the room with his eyes, knowing that it was pointless looking for her if she did not want to be seen. Shadows slid across the walls and floor with hypnotic regularity. Lighting panels in the ceiling came on at night, and softened the changes at dusk and dawn, but even when he looked away from the window the diurnal cycle was obvious, everywhere.
Another week had passed, while he stood there. She could not still be in the room with him; even if she was able to go that long without food and water, she would have gone mad from boredom.
She reappeared in front of him like a trembling reflection in a pan of water, jolted into turbulence but quickly stilled.
“How did you get in?” he demanded.
She pointed a thumb at the window. “The same way I left.”
“You’re wearing my clothes!”
Mariama grinned. “They fit me nicely. And I’m teaching them lots of new tricks.” She ran a hand down one sleeve and erased the old pattern, supplanting it with golden starbursts on black.
Tchicaya knew she was goading him, hoping to prod him into giving chase. She’d handed him the key; he didn’t need anything more in order to pursue her. If he gave in and joined her now, at least he’d be spared an elaborate game of hide-and-seek.
He said, “Two weeks.” That sounded more than generous, and the risk of his parents noticing his absence would be microscopic.
“We’ll see.”
Tchicaya shook his head. “I want you to agree to it. Two weeks, then we both come back.”
Mariama chewed her lower lip. “I’m not going to make a promise I might not be able to keep.” Then she read his face, and relented slightly. “All right! Barring exceptional circumstances, we’ll come back in two weeks.”
Tchicaya hesitated, but he knew that this was the closest thing to a guarantee he could hope to extract from her.
She held out a hand to him, smiling slightly. Then she silently mouthed the word Now.
Their Mediators were smart enough to synchronize the process without needing to be told. Tchicaya sent the code to his Exoself, and the two of them dropped out of Slowdown together. Switching the metabolic modes of cells throughout his body, and reconfiguring all the higher-level systems responsible for maintaining posture, breathing, circulation, and digestion took nearly fifteen minutes. The time passed imperceptibly, though, since his Qusp only resumed its normal rate once his body had completed the shift.
The light in his room had frozen into a late-winter’s afternoon. He could hear a breeze moving through the trees beside the house, a different sound entirely to the throb of barometric pressure changes to which he’d grown accustomed. They were only six civil days into the Slowdown, but the new rhythms had seeped into his mind more rapidly than they’d had any right to, as if abetted by some process that his Exoself had neglected to retard.
Mariama tugged on his hand, pulling him toward the door. “Come on!” Her expression made a joke of it, but she couldn’t disguise the note of genuine impatience. They were like lightning now, their least purposeful meanderings a dazzling feat in everyone else’s eyes, but that still wasn’t fast enough.
“Not that way.” He gestured at the window.
Mariama said accusingly, “You’re afraid to walk past them.”
“Of course.” Tchicaya gazed back at her calmly. It was perfectly reasonable not to want to be discovered, and however skillful she was at manipulating him, he wasn’t going to be made ashamed of every last instinct of his own. “It’s safer to use the window. So we’ll use the window.”
Mariama managed to look both amused and martyred, but she didn’t argue. Tchicaya climbed out, then she followed him, carefully pulling the hinged pane closed behind her. He was puzzled for a moment; no one was going to notice an open window in the short time they’d be gone. But in two weeks, the night frosts would have left an indelible mark on some of his more fragile possessions.
As they crossed the garden, he said, “Don’t you go home to sleep?”
“No. I’ve set up camp in the power station. All my food’s there.” She turned to face him, and Tchicaya was sure she was on the verge of demanding that he go back to the house to pilfer some supplies of his own, but then she said, “You can share it. I’ve got plenty.”
The bright afternoon was eerily quiet, though Tchicaya doubted that he would have been unsettled if he’d heard no other voices for a minute, or an hour, on an ordinary day. As they stepped onto the road, he spotted two other pedestrians in the distance. During Slowdown, his Exoself had not only reprogrammed his own gait, it had tweaked his expectations of other people’s appearance: moving with both feet constantly on the ground, positioning the arms to maximize stability, had looked as normal as it had felt. With his old notions of bodily dynamics restored, the pedestrians appeared, not merely frozen, but cowed and timid, as if they expected an earthquake at any moment.
He looked back at his house, quickly lowering his eyes from the windows to inspect the garden. Wind and rain could shift soil and pebbles into unwanted places on a time scale of decades, but the plants were engineered to herd those unruly elements; he’d watched the process with his own eyes. Out in the fields, the crops would be tending themselves, collectively arranging whatever changes they needed in irrigation and drainage, glorying in the strange seasons of unharvested bounty.
Tchicaya said, “How did you find the code?” It was the first Slowdown for both of them; she couldn’t have stored it on a previous occasion.
Mariama replied casually, “It’s not a big secret. It’s not buried deep, or encrypted. Don’t you ever examine your Exoself? Take apart the software?”
Tchicaya shrugged. He’d never even dream of tinkering with things on that leveclass="underline" his Exoself, his Mediator. Next thing you were probing the working of your own Qusp, dissecting your own mind. He said, “I only take things apart if I can survive not putting them back together.”
“I’m not stupid. I make backups.”
They’d reached the park. Four giant hexapods huddled motionless in a corner. The decorative robots consisted of nothing but six coiled legs, arranged as three pairs that met at right angles in the center. If they’d been endowed with even the mildest form of sentience, they would have gone insane from the lack of stimulation, but they were little more than pattern-recognizers on springs.
Mariama ran up to them and clapped her hands. The nearest one stirred sluggishly, shifting its center of mass and wobbling on the tripod of the three legs currently touching the ground. She started dancing back and forth, encouraging it, and it began to tumble for her.
Tchicaya watched, laughing, biting back an admonition: someone would notice that they’d moved, and know that the Slowdown had been violated. He doubted that the hexapods had memories, but there was machinery everywhere, monitoring the streets, guarding the town against unlikely dangers. The fact that they hadn’t woken anyone didn’t prove that they wouldn’t be found out in the end.