It must have been visible on his face, because suddenly Corva reached out to put her hand on his knee. “We do this all the time,” she said. “We really do! You have to trust your denner. What’re you going to call him, anyway?”
“How—” He laughed, half hysterically. “How can I trust him when I haven’t even had time to give him a name. And I’m expected to risk my life on his implants…” No, it was too crazy. Suddenly he knew he had to get out of there, and he turned and tried to stand up—and saw stars as he hit his head. “Ah!”
“Toby! Just keep it together!” Shylif and Corva held his hands and talked quietly, reassuringly, about how they’d done this before, and about how denner instincts drew them to curl up with sleeping people. In that space of shared mammalian warmth, the thrum of their purr would synchronize their metabolisms and keep both creatures alive. The denners’ synthorgans provided energy and diagnostic data to guide the systems that supported the more massive humans.
Toby calmed down enough to know he was going to try to go through with this. But he still needed something to keep him from thinking about it. “Tell me more,” he said to Corva. “About Peter and Evayne. Do they … are they … older?” She’d said something about forty years having passed in the lockstep, as opposed to the fourteen thousand that had gone by outside it. “Have they been awake all this time? Or did they winter over some of it?”
He could see in the dim light that Shylif and Corva were staring at him wide-eyed. “Amazing,” said Shylif. “Just to hear you say those names as if—well, like they’re your own family.”
“They are!”
“But you have to understand,” said Corva gently, “that we grew up hearing them spoken as names from legend. Like you’d hear about some ancient conqueror.”
He shook his head. “They’re just family.”
There was a long silence. Then Corva said, “Right. Why don’t I go on with the story, then, and you can judge for yourself when I’m done?” Cautiously, he nodded. She shot an uncertain smile at Shylif, who shrugged.
“Toby, I don’t know what really happened, way back at the start. The fact is, your family figured out how to thrive out here between the stars, and they made sure they controlled the technology. Well, mostly. For centuries of realtime, all the action was around the stars. Empires rose, posthuman species came into being, there were wars and crashes and exploration and terraforming and everything you can imagine and lots that you can’t. All the while that was happening, Sedna was growing bit by bit. Slowing down, too—we’re pretty sure the lockstep frequency was small at first, maybe even 1/1. See, if you can winter over, you use resources more slowly, so if your bots can mine and manufacture slowly and steadily over all that time, you’ll have so much more to work with in those times when you’re awake.”
He nodded. “But Ammond said that the big advantage was that you could trade more.”
“Right! If you can travel to any of twenty or thirty thousand worlds overnight, it’s a huge advantage. Because your potential trading partners aren’t scattered around a flat map but in three dimensions, if you double how far you travel while you’re asleep, you increase the worlds you can visit during that sleep by a factor of eight! They say you figured that out, and your mother took your message to the other Sedna colonists after you left…” He was shaking his head. “O-kay,” Corva continued uncomfortably. “So anyway there was constant pressure to winter over for longer and longer times. While she was Chairman, your mother got us up to thirty years down, one month up. We’ve been at that since before I was born.”
“And then she what? Went into sleep to wait for me?” He shook his head again. “That doesn’t sound like her. I mean … sure, she’d miss me, but she wouldn’t abandon Peter and Evayne. Or Dad. Just to wait for me. Something’s screwy here.”
“That’s the story I know. Your mother began the locksteps, and your brother and sister control ours, the biggest one.”
“Control it? Isn’t Cicada Corp just a company? Why not just skim profits like the trillionaires always have and sit back and let it run itself?”
“Toby, if only a hundred people decided to immigrate to the lockstep every real-time year, there’d be three thousand showing up every lockstep month and, what … thirty-six thousand new citizens per lockstep year! But people in the wider world have known about the locksteps for millennia. Tens of thousands come to find us every year … realtime. Sometimes, millions. You do the math.”
He thought about Sedna—but a Sedna without him and with a strange new custom pioneered by his mother. People hibernating, maybe just a few at a time at first, and not for too long. He could already see how useful that would have been: lower life-support costs, which would translate to a greater carrying capacity for the whole colony … more to go around. And then, blinking faster and faster forward through time, eventually the whole colony at once. Then people showing up, just a few at first, but soon floods. Three decades of colonization effort passing in one night: you’d wake and there’d be a new city next door that hadn’t been there when you went to sleep. Whole worlds could appear that way.
“How could you possibly deal with a pace of change like that?”
Corva gazed at him, looking … sad?
“Simple,” she said. “Peter and Evayne used you to do it.”
He was trying to figure out what that meant and what to ask next, when suddenly the whole shipping container shook. All around the three stowaways, packages and boxes shifted ominously. At the first rumble Toby braced his hands and feet in alarm against the plastic-wrapped walls that surrounded him. His denner chirped and leaped to his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” said Corva. “We’re just being loaded.”
A sense of swirling motion made Toby push even harder against the walls. It went on for nearly a minute, then they were thumped down hard somewhere, and it ceased.
“Why now?” he asked. “I mean, why are they loading ships if there’re weeks to go before everybody winters over? Wouldn’t they wait until then to leave the planet?”
Shylif shook his head. “There’s a sizable queue. These docks started running weeks before the population woke up, and they’ll keep going for weeks after everybody goes to sleep. It’s great for us—means we’ll be off planet and asleep while they’re still looking for us down here.”
“Unless they look for us up there.”
Shylif shrugged. “Then we’re screwed.” He reached out to ruffle Shadoweye’s fur, then said, “Well, I’m going to find a stable cavity and retire. See you in thirty years.” He and his denner clambered away through the jam-packed packaging.
Corva still wasn’t meeting Toby’s gaze. “We should, too. Toby, I want to tell you everything about your family and your … situation. But we need a better time and place. It’s pointless to use up what little air’s in here, because we won’t have time for me to answer all your questions anyway.”
“You keep putting me off—”
She clucked and Wrecks climbed into her survival bag with her. Toby could hear him purring.
“We have to do this now, Toby. Zip yourself into your bag with your denner,” she said. “He starts to purr, you fall asleep, and you deep-dive: your metabolism slows by ninety percent, and so does his. When we get to space all the heat’s going to leak out of here, so as the temperature drops he’ll stimulate your body to produce the natural antifreeze and other substances that’ll protect you in the next stage.”
“Which is…?” He thought he knew.