“You freeze solid and stay that way for three decades. Then, when we get to Wallop, our denners will wake up in anaerobic mode and start pumping energy into us. They’re used to the rhythm of this lockstep, their circadian clocks are accurate to the millisecond.”
“And you’ve done this.”
Wrecks was purring even louder now. Corva smiled as she zipped herself up to her nose and settled herself back against the crates. “Enough times that I trust Wrecks with my life, yeah.” She finished the zip-up and was completely engulfed in the survival bag.
His own denner sat at his feet, its tail coiled around its feet. It was looking up at him expectantly.
This was it. If he was going to get out of this death trap, it would have to be now. He could find a ride back to the city, maybe do some work for lazy robots like Shylif had been doing. He could hide out, learn what was really going on here. That was the sensible thing to do.
His denner was purring, a lulling, hypnotic sound. “Stop it,” he said. “I don’t even know your name.”
And suddenly there were tears in his eyes.
Corva hadn’t known anything about Toby’s father. That could only mean one thing: Dad was dead. Funny thing—Toby had spent the past month knowing this as a fact, thinking that Mother was long gone, too, and Peter and Evayne. Suddenly the others were alive again, but Dad wasn’t and somehow that made him … more than dead. Corva didn’t even know he’d existed. He was gone, erased from history, and somehow that was so much worse than his simply having died long ago.
Peter, tyrant of seventy thousand worlds? And Evayne, did she know Toby was alive? Had she agreed with this insane order to have him killed? It was all crazy.
He shuffled his way into the little chamber where Corva now lay like a lifeless doll and climbed into his bag. The denner watched him alertly as he zipped the bag up to his chin. “I’m alone,” he said aloud.
A little furry paw tapped him on the cheek. He turned to find himself staring into two golden eyes. His denner was small enough to be the runt of its litter and as lonely, maybe, as Toby.
Toby brought it into the bag, hugging it against his chest, and began to cry. “You need a name. You can’t go to sleep without a name.” Its purr was becoming hypnotic, and as had happened on the boat, Toby felt an answering vibration start deep within himself.
“It’s gotta be good,” he said sleepily. “Not Blacky or Midnight.” He laughed at himself.
He thought about the gods and heroes of ancient mythology, many of whom had come to virtual life in the games he and Peter played. Which of them had gone between life and death? —A lot of those crazy Greeks, actually. Persephone would be perfect, except that she was a woman and this denner was male. Charon, the boatman of the dead? Too bleak.
The song of the denner was all around him now, and he knew its name. “You’re Orpheus,” he muttered. Orpheus, the hero whose music was so powerful that he used it to lull all the monsters of the underworld into sleep, allowing him to sneak into the afterlife and steal back his dead wife.
“All right, Orpheus. Let’s go see Hades.”
Six
THE AIRSHIP WAS A flying wing a little over two kilometers long, its transparent skin made of something so thin that you couldn’t see it head-on; only in its outward curves could you make out the oily iridescence of its shape. It was as if the ion engines and passenger gondolas were suspended in midair. Toby had loved it—and why not? He was only fourteen.
They’d been on their way to orbit for two days now, circling Earth at ever-greater altitudes. The ionosphere was so thin here that satellites could plow right through it—but a light enough airplane with a wing this wide could use it for lift and fly all the way to orbit. This was the way poor people went into space. Mom and Dad had decided on a slow leave-taking, rather than a quick rocket to orbit and then on to Sedna. Until an hour ago, Toby had thought they were indulging an uncommon nostalgia.
But then, just after lunch as he’d been wandering the long galleries that looked down on the strangely patterned landscapes forty kilometers below, the ship had shuddered—just ever so slightly. Peter ran up, a blot of dark disheveled clothing and hair like a moving stain on the perfect white plastic surfaces of the corridor. “An airship just docked!” he’d cried. “An invisible one!”
“More invisible than this old thing?” But Toby was intrigued. Over the next twenty minutes they watched as the suborbital stealth rocket (now visible) disgorged cargo and passengers, each of whom Mom and Dad greeted with handshakes and serious expressions.
Peter had nudged Toby at one point. “I know that guy. He’s Nate what’s his name, the composer-thing guy.” Ever precise, that was Peter—but Toby did recognize the long-limbed man with the easy grin. More than a composer, he invented whole genres and was famous for starting bands of startling and varied styles. He’d stay with one just long enough to propel it to international fame and drive a new trend into the spotlight; then he’d be off in a new direction. Like the McGonigals, he wasn’t a trillionaire, merely rich and famous—which counted for everything, or nothing at all as Toby was learning. “But what’s he doing here?” Peter stared as if he could burn the secret out of the man with his gaze. “Is he coming with us?”
The answer, which was yes, had come sometime after the stealth craft had broken off from the airship to plummet back into the air above the failed state of France. Toby and Peter were standing at the gallery rail, pointing out this or that detail along a filigreed coastline beneath their feet, when a shadow joined them. They looked up to see Nate standing a few meters away. He was gazing down, too, his expression more pensive than Peter’s.
“Hey!” Peter went over to him. “You’re that guy, right?”
Nate what’s-his-name raised an eyebrow, then stuck out his hand for Peter to shake. “Nathan Kenani. You’re Carter’s boys, aren’t you?”
“Whatcha doing?” Peter nodded at the passing landscapes. “You coming with us?” To Toby’s surprise, Kenani nodded.
“I can’t do it anymore,” he said. “I mean, look at that.” He pointed down. They were passing over southern China. Like everywhere else on the planet, it was divided into two kinds of landscape: sprawling city and empty, verdant parkland. The one was a gray mottle from this height, the other smooth green.
The gray was where billions of people lived all heaped atop one another, struggling to survive in the microeconomies they could cobble together from garbage and wind power in the ruins of their ancestors’ dreams. The green was the estates of the trillionaires, who let in no one but their ecologists and a few people they wanted to reward or bribe.
The green was much bigger than the gray.
Kenani sighed. “I just wanted to look at it all one last time. Before they take out my implants, I mean.” He tapped the side of his head.
“So it’s true?” Peter was practically hopping up and down. “They say you got more than anybody!”
“Not really.” Kenani smiled lopsidedly. “But I do have auditory augments, and visual ones and tactile. I can see seventeen primary colors and hear way down into infrasound and up past where dogs can go. But your mother says they’re likely to kill me during her new hibernation process. Something about different expansion and contraction rates than human flesh … So I’m having them out.”
“In Consensus, either everybody gets them or nobody does,” announced Peter. “They’re an unfair advantage.”
Kenani looked puzzled. “Consensus?”
“It’s a gameworld we’ve been building for … well, months and months,” Toby explained.
Peter said, “No security without equality of opportunity!”