“Heaven?” He shook his head. “Heaven wouldn’t be that cold. Or cramped.”
Shylif covered a smile, and Corva’s eyes widened before she turned away.
“What’d I say?” said Toby, puzzled.
“That’s the core of the legend, right there.” Now she was smiling, too. “That you were—are—some kind of genius at the least, or a divinely inspired prophet at most. That you preached a solution to all the problems of the world. You dropped hints but nobody would listen. Then you disappeared into deep space. Your mother converted and started wintering over to await your return, and people started following her. Peter and Evayne had this great conversion experience, too. That was how the locksteps started—and once they started, people began to realize that this was what you’d been preaching about all along.”
“This? What ‘this’?”
“This.” She waved around at the general world. “A way to defeat time while remaining true to what it means to be human. Your mother unwittingly built a way for human civilization to become eternal—or as close as is possible. Fourteen thousand years have passed, yet only forty for your sister and brother!”
“Wait, you’re talking and Peter and Evayne and Mom … what about my father?”
Corva looked uncomfortable. “There’s no mention of a father, sorry. Though there’re lots of stories about that, too—”
“I don’t want stories! So Peter and Evayne are alive. And Mom?”
“Your mother is wintering over until you return.”
He shook his head; that just didn’t make sense. “Where? Where are they?”
“Evayne travels around. Peter rules the lockstep from Barsoom. Your mother … she’s on a planet called Destrier, about half a light-year from here.”
Toby scowled up at the black sky. “Then that’s where I have to go.”
There was no response from the others. When he looked down, he saw that they were standing several steps away from him, both wide-eyed. Spooked, he would have said, had there been anything nearby to scare them. He glanced around in case, but no, they were alone here.
At that moment Jaysir reappeared with a gangly chrome-plated bot by his side. “This one’ll let us into the containers,” he said. “But we have to hurry. The loaders are on their way.”
He led them through the cargo stacks. Corva and Shylif hung back, whispering together heatedly. Toby shook his head and, growling under his breath, followed Jaysir.
The shipping containers were inflated cylinders with flat magnetic plates on top, bottom, and sides; the plates let you stack them under gravity or daisy-chain them in space. Each was about four by ten meters, and there were crude airlocks on either end. These were uncannily like the ones they’d had in his day, and Toby felt his steps slowing as he approached the one the chrome bot was opening. He knew these things had no windows, no propulsion, no power supply, no life support. They were just bags to stuff things in.
“See you on the other side,” said Jaysir. He and his cargo bot headed toward another cylinder, leaving the three stowaways with the denners standing by the first one.
“He’s by himself?” Toby watched him disappear into the maze of containers.
Corva shrugged; she seemed to have recovered her composure. “He and his … machine … weigh more than all of us put together. He’d tip the scales way over if we bunked together.”
Toby turned his dubious gaze to the shipping container the silver bot had brought them to. “We’re not seriously getting in that,” he said.
She squinted at him, a touch of humor returning to her face. “What part of ‘stowaway’ didn’t you understand?”
“But I thought … wouldn’t you find somewhere inside the passenger compartments—I mean, in a closet or…?”
She brayed a laugh. “Closets? You know there’s no such thing. Oh, sure, in the smaller ships you could hack the glasses interface, make it so people and bots don’t see you, but that only works until it doesn’t work. This,” she said, patting the side of the container, “always works.”
“Almost,” added Shylif as the bot did something beside the airlock door and it sprang open. “Quick, before the cranes get here.”
He and Corva rushed into the container lock. Shylif offered Toby his hand. Toby hesitated.
“Go on back to the city, then,” said Shylif, and he pulled his hand back.
“Wait!” Toby clambered up and into the square lock. Immediately, the doors slammed shut behind him. They were in darkness now.
The inner door opened and he heard somebody groping around for a switch. After a moment weak utility lights came on, back- and sidelighting a wall of plastic-wrapped merchandise that filled the cylinder right up to the airlock. Shylif and Corva let their denners climb down, and the little creatures slipped into crevasses between the packages, chittering back and forth as their humans crouched and murmured encouragement.
“Mrf?” Toby started as a little black-furred face appeared next to his. It looked at him, then after the other two. “Sure,” Toby said. “Go on.” He didn’t know whether the denner actually understood his words, but it got the sense of them anyway because it hopped down and began exploring with the other two. Toby found himself peering through gaps with Corva and Shylif, calling out encouragement with them.
After a few moments, the denners had identified a few spaces around the curve of the outer wall that a determined human might be able to squeeze through. “There’re always gaps in the packing,” said Shylif optimistically. “Like hidden chambers in a pyramid.”
The utility lights hinted at spaces back there, but still, Toby shook his head. “There isn’t even room to stand up. And what are we going to do for air?”
“Another secret of these places,” said Corva. She was burrowing her way after Wrecks. “Emergency air supplies—they’re required by law. Keep us going for a day or two on the other side, if we need it.” Her voice became increasingly muffled as she wormed her way between boxes. “We won’t need it on this end.”
“But this is insane.”
“Yeah,” she shouted back. “That’s why they never catch us at it. Nobody in their right mind would travel this way. But really—weren’t those early ships of yours this cramped?”
He thought about the little tug that he had taken into the vast empty reaches beyond Sedna. It really hadn’t been much roomier than this; it was just that its virtual reality and synthetic personalities had provided the illusion of unlimited space for its single passenger.
Toby’s denner poked its head out from between packages and meow-chattered at him. “All right, all right, I’m coming.” He took a deep breath and began forcing his way through the gaps.
It turned out the denners had found a sizable chamber, and with some shuffling and shoving, the humans were able to enlarge it until all three could sit, knees up, with their denners perched or draped on out-jutting boxes around them. Then Corva and Shylif brought out several survival bags—sleeping bags, really, but airtight when sealed and insulated to withstand deep cold. Corva handed one to Toby.
“What about, well…” He waved a hand.
“Bodily functions?” Shylif laughed. “You should have thought of that before we left home! Seriously, we are going to leave some evidence of ourselves behind here. They’ll know there’ve been stowaways. But as long as we don’t damage the merchandise or tip the freighter’s payload mass past its tolerances, nobody’ll care.”
Toby’s heart was pounding. He had the momentary thought that these two people he was with were actually crazy. How could a trio of animals—pets!—keep any of them alive through being frozen and shipped like packaged meat ten or twenty times the breadth of the solar system?