“Of course it stops being water at some point,” Ammond said with a laugh. “Down at the bottom, it’ll crush diamond. So don’t fall in.”
The peekaboo interplay of walls and slopes, deeper cavern spaces and green cavities, was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. This was not what he’d imagined the ocean under Sedna would look like, and Toby desperately wanted to be able to share what he was seeing with his parents, with Evayne or Peter.
He glanced up at his benefactors while they chatted together and pointed out sights in the rising city. They weren’t laborers, these two. They had the easy confidence of executives, and Ammond had said he owned orbital tugs and other worker bots. Also, they weren’t married—at least, they didn’t act like it. They never touched.
They were being awfully good to him, and he still didn’t know why. He remembered them arguing, and the sudden decision to travel.
And then there was that other thing Persea had said to him this morning. Toby couldn’t believe it at first; he’d laughed, then stared at her when he realized she was serious.
“I’m supposed to be using an alias, now?”
“Yes,” she’d said, “but just if you talk to strangers. You’re Garren Morton, remember that. I’ll explain later.”
She’d tried to be casual about it, but he could see she was nervous. “And just for now. Okay?”
He should have been alert for signs that something was wrong, but he’d been so sunk in his own misery since waking, he couldn’t summon the energy. That had been foolish.
“Are you guys married?” he blurted.
They stared at him, then both laughed. “We’re business partners,” said Persea. “Didn’t we tell you that?”
“So what are we doing here? —I mean, not that it isn’t amazing.”
“More business, I’m afraid,” said Ammond with a sigh. “Maybe we could have conducted it by dispatch, but you’re a good excuse to come out here in person. I’ve always liked Auriga.”
But what kind of excuse am I? He bit his lip and looked down at the glass-and-steel towers. That wasn’t the right question, but he wasn’t exactly sure what the right question was. He’d have to figure that out, and soon.
THEY CHECKED INTO AN expensive-looking hotel. The hotel, and the city around it, was just like Earth or Mars, with broad vehicle-choked streets, crowds of pedestrians, and bright light from the sky. You had to look up and squint to notice that there were multiple suns up there—powerful lamps, actually—and that the “sky” behind them was a ceiling of ice.
Standing at the window of their suite, Toby shook his head and said, “Why would a world like this shut itself down for thirty years at a time? I mean, it’s obviously rich.”
Ammond had changed into an old-fashioned business suit and was adjusting his tie in front of the mirror. “If this city were awake all the time, the other worlds in the lockstep wouldn’t be next door anymore, would they? They’d be ten, twenty, thirty years away, instead of just overnight. How do I look?” he asked Persea.
“Fine.” She hadn’t had to change, but always dressed well.
Toby thought about Ammond’s logic, but he couldn’t wrap his head around it. “When will you be back?” he asked instead of pursuing the matter. This sort of day, at least, was something he was used to, from the many business meetings his parents had attended in the run-up to their settling Sedna.
To his surprise Ammond said, “Oh, no, you’re coming, too. We need you for this one,” and Persea said, “You don’t have to dress up. Just be yourself.” For some reason this last comment struck Ammond as funny, and he kept bursting into laughter as they left the room and went downstairs to hail a botcab.
The cab took them along the waterfront. The city was built into the lower slopes of the cavern wall. Where the floor should be there was a flat plain of black water, turned emerald green here and there by subsurface lights. There were many boats out there, and seeing them added to Toby’s homesickness. He longed for Earth as much as he longed for his family.
Way out there, something dark emerged from the water, just a roll of black against the glittering waves. Then a white spout of vapor shot into the air. “Ho!” he shouted. “Did you see that?”
Persea nodded. “Whales.”
Whales? With a sudden ache in his heart Toby remembered all the life of Earth he’d left behind: robins and crows, squirrels and horses, circling hawks and darting fish. “How can there be whales?”
“Well, they do go into hibernation with the rest of the place,” said Ammond in a reasonable tone. “Takes thirty years for enough plankton and krill to accumulate for a month’s meal for ’em, or so I hear. Always wondered what a whale cicada bed looked like, though…”
Toby had no idea if he was kidding, but just then the cab pulled in at a long green-glass building that extended like a dock out over the water. “Come on, then.” Ammond and Persea hopped out, and Toby followed. The air was cold and fresh.
Household bots let them through the glass doors into a wide foyer. With its pebble garden in the corner, individually spotlit paintings, and low leather couches, the place was either an architect’s office or a mansion; Toby couldn’t tell, though he knew he could never be comfortable living in such a sterile setting.
Three men approached and shook Ammond’s and Persea’s hands with much enthusiasm and backslapping. They were like Ammond: older, graying, and obviously used to getting their own way. One turned to Toby and stuck out his hand. “Naim M’boto.”
Toby glanced at Ammond as he returned the crushing handshake. Ammond smiled and said, “We’re among friends. You can tell him your real name.”
“Toby Wyatt McGonigal,” said Toby.
“Yes…” The man squinted at him. “Yes … well, we’ll see about that.” He turned to Ammond. “Any sign of trackers?”
Ammond shook his head. “We’re clean, I swear. Though, even so, we should hurry things along…”
“Right.” M’boto led the group down a flight of stairs. The glass walls on this level looked into hazy green water; the mirrored undersides of waves danced overhead. Fish darted about just out of reach; their exuberance captivated Toby and for a moment he forgot everything else.
“Toby? Over here.” Persea was gesturing from the middle of the main room, which was as wide as the building and so looked into the water on two sides. This was a lounge or living room, with stone flooring, hidden lights, and just a single round white shag carpet in the middle. Four black couches were arranged around this, and clearly the space in the middle usually had low glass tables in it, but these had been pulled aside into a jumble near one wall. Between the couches was—
“Hey, that’s a twentier!” Toby ran up to it.
Twentiers were mining bots, very tough, capable of independent action, and cheap. They were called twentiers because they were the twentieth version of something or other. This one looked kind of like a waist-high metal crab, its hard back scuffed and scratched to the point where you could barely make out the original yellow and black chevrons painted there. At its back end, under the carapace, there was an oval sample container, which was as tough as the rest of the bot.
“You know what this is?” said M’boto.
“Sure, we use –I mean, used … lots of these back on Sedna.” He knelt down and checked the stamped serial numbers on the crab’s side. “Actually, this looks like it is one of ours.”
“These bots were locked to their owners’ biocryptography,” said M’boto. He was telling this to Ammond and Persea. Persea was chewing a fingernail, her eyes darting about as she listened. “DNA alone wouldn’t unlock one,” M’boto continued. “You needed a combination of that and voice, gait analysis, retinal scans, fingerprints, and so on, before it would accept you.”