He’d seek them out as soon as he’d recovered from hibernation and felt a little safe and had some money, however one got that. Then he’d pay Jaysir back for the cash card. He might even help Corva with whatever it was she wanted from him—but he had to find out what that was first.
There were bots working in the warehouse. In his condition he couldn’t have hidden from them if he’d wanted to, but they ignored him. Maybe he could subcontract to them, the way Shylif did.
The general traffic of robots, automated cargo carts and moving cranes gave him a direction to follow, and shortly he emerged squint-eyed into what at first seemed to be hot sunlight. He shaded his narrowed eyes with his free hand and looked up.
It wasn’t sunlight, he wasn’t outdoors, and this place was like nowhere he’d ever seen or heard of.
The warehouse entrance was one of a number of similar doorways that opened onto a circular plaza cluttered with shops and food stands, and crowded with people. So far, so good. Around the plaza, tiers of heavily forested cityscape rose up in a sweeping curve, so for a second or two he thought he was at the bottom of a small bowl-shaped valley. These weren’t uncommon on Mars or the moon, where ancient impact craters made perfect circular depressions that could be domed over.
This landscape’s curve became vertical, and then kept curving, inward now, to close a couple of kilometers overhead. He wasn’t in a bowl, but a bubble. At its very summit, its north pole, brilliant sunlamps pulsed with light and heat. There was even a single little white cloud hovering in the middle of the space.
Tongues of forest and towers of glittering window and balcony swept up for much of the upper hemisphere of the bubble he was in, but gradually they gave way to buildings that seemed to sit on the outside of the sphere. These thrust elevator shafts and escalators through the bubble’s skin—and that skin was transparent wherever it showed.
Flickers of lightning beyond it brought him glimpses of billowing cloudscapes far larger than this sphere. And, in the distance, he thought he could make out the ghostly outline of a mottled moon nestled in the clouds: another sphere?
Something broke the symmetry of the curve, and it took him a while to figure out what it was. With one of those figure-to-ground flips of perspective, he suddenly realized that what he’d thought was a flat circular formation high up on the sphere was a hole—a gap in the geodesic curve. Along its edges, escalators and walkways led from his bubble into another, larger space. He even spotted an aircar sailing out of there. And were those even bigger bubbles beyond?
Okay, he’d heard of aerostats—giant spherical living spaces that could be floated in the atmospheres. Before he’d left Earth, there’d been a news report about some of the trillionaires wanting to colonize Venus by building such things. That had been amazing, but this—!
The bubble he was in was at least a kilometer across, yet it was attached to an unknown number of others, like one soap bubble clinging to a raft of others. If a single bubble city could take flight, he supposed a knot of them could, too, and so this raft hovered high in the atmosphere of some vast, dark planet.
When he could pull his eyes back to ground level, Toby blinked at a vision of chaos totally unlike the majesty that presided overhead. Here, craft stalls, food and robot-part outlets were mashed together and half piled over one another; there were carpet salesmen here, and wood-carvers, perfumeries, neon-lit bars and shadier, slotted doors in ramshackle huts that were guarded by hulking military bots. People crowded everywhere, jostling one another and talking, shouting, arguing and haggling. And what people!
He and Peter had watched all the old movies set in galactic empires and ancient solar civilizations. They’d devoured sci-fi books from the dawn of spaceflight—and so, when they came to build the universe of Consensus, they had given it faster-than-light ships and a vast culture of aliens and evolving humans. All of that was impossible, of course: in the real universe, no such thing could ever exist, for traveling between the stars was a multidecade affair for even the most advanced civilization. No matter how much wealth you had, no matter how much power, there could never be, in the real world, a marketplace where denizens of thousands of worlds and hundreds of cultures met. Nowhere could dozens of species and subspecies of human and alien crowd together to meet and trade and celebrate an empire of reason and commerce vaster than any solar system.
Yet here it was.
Most of the humans in sight were ordinary enough, but some were incredibly tall and stringy, others short and powerful, like the man who’d kept the denners on Auriga. Yet others were green skinned, or scaly, or had become one with the machines that accompanied them. There were nonhuman shapes, too, though that was impossible: no intelligent alien life had been found within a hundred light-years of Earth … at least, not in Toby’s day.
He found he was grinning. The fantasy had been made real, not on Earth but here in the vastness between the stars. The galactic empire he and Peter had dreamed about—as so many others had before them—had been built in the only place it could be and in the only way it ever could: in lockstep time.
But he was dizzy and nearly collapsed before he could make it to a nearby escalator. As he stood leaning on its handrail, letting himself rise through level after level of the bubble city, he brought out the list of hostels and hotels Jaysir had given him. When he spotted the sign for one, he gave Orpheus a tight hug and said, “We’re home free. Just a few more minutes and I’ll order up a room-service meal like you’ve never seen.”
Provided, of course, he had enough on his cash card for that.
TOBY HADN’T HAD TIME to find the cheaper lodgings available in the city; he’d walked into the first hotel on Jaysir’s list that he could find. He’d never stayed in a hotel by himself before, but he got through the strangeness of checking in without having to use any biometrics or produce ID. It turned out not be any more overwhelming than anything else that had happened to him lately.
The bed was deep and soft, the shower was hot, and there was plenty of good food available at the hotel buffet. He ate there alone and snuck some generous portions back for Orpheus, who roused himself from a sleep of obvious exhaustion just long enough to wolf it all down.
He’d wondered how to deal with the denner’s bodily functions, but at one point Orpheus disappeared and Toby found him splayed precariously over the toilet. He glared at Toby and so his human companion retreated with a muttered “sorry.” It was quite hilarious, actually, but he stifled his laugh. Orpheus, he had begun to realize, had a real sense of dignity.
His feeling of having been sunburned proved not far from the truth. Toby’s body seemed to be shedding all manner of dead material, so his skin started to itch and flake, some of his hair came out in the shower, and his kidneys were working overtime. Orpheus wasn’t much better.
Still, he was eager to take the next step. His family was alive—all except Dad. He had to get to them. Some kind of misunderstandinghad made it seem like Peter had tried to have him killed, but that couldn’t be right. He’d sort it out as soon as he figured out what was going on. Right now, the one place he knew to go was the planet Destrier, where Mom was apparently wintering over.
He needed to know more, but there were no TVs or other screens in this world; data, music, and entertainment flowed through people’s glasses or implants. Toby had seen a stall that sold interface rigs down in the market, so once he felt able, he left Orpheus in the room for an hour while he went to buy a set of these.