Jaysir had suggested he buy a pair of tourist glasses. He did but found they did little more than highlight local sights and were constantly popping ads up for this or that restaurant or gaming room. Every time they did that he jumped or stumbled. He got back to the room okay, though, and plunked himself down next to a lethargic Orpheus. “Let’s see if I can at least connect to you,” he said to the denner.
Jaysir had mentioned in an offhand way that the denners had interfaces, and sure enough, when he looked at Orpheus through the tourist glasses, the denner sprouted icons and emoticons. His interface was pretty simple, actually: Orpheus could broadcast his location, could signify basic needs like thirst or a need to pee, and he had an alarm clock for setting hibernation wake-up times.
The clock showed that it had last been set by a user named Guest. That would be Corva, he reasoned. The heavy man on Auriga had left the primary account wide open, so he quickly set the security levels on the alarm so only he could use it. So. That was done.
Now for the other thing he’d wanted to do.
“Search word McGonigal,” he said. It seemed the easiest place to start—but Toby had no sooner spoken the word than his vision was filled with plane after plane of hovering pictures and hot links to videos, movies, books … There were thousands.
He reached out hesitantly and tapped one of the virtual pictures, which spun and enlarged.
Who was this? Toby was looking at a middle-aged, bullet-headed, bald man with grim frown lines around his mouth. Next to him stood a similarly grim woman, of similar age, her face narrow and her eyes and mouth pinched and severe.
They looked like relatives, but from which side of the family? Had there been other McGonigals on Earth, who’d come to Sedna after Toby’s disappearance?
Then he saw the picture’s caption: Peter and Evayne McGonigal inaugurating a new pilgrimage center on Cephus, Lockstep Year 32.
A rushing filled Toby’s ears, and the room seemed to bend around him. He sat back cursing.
It was them, and yet not them. Instead of his brother and sister, here were their strange ghosts—specters not of the past but of some terrible future of decline and severe disappointments. So they seemed, anyway, as they stared out at him: bitter, unsatisfied, even accusing.
He could barely breathe. The picture continued to hang there, perfectly still yet looming larger and larger in his vision. Toby tried to look Peter in the eyes, but it was like staring into the sun—after just a glimpse he had to turn away–and when his gaze fell on Evayne’s face, the same thing happened again.
His mouth was dry and he was panting as, with a frantic gesture, he wiped away the photos and the search term.
Who were those people? That uncompromising woman in her forties who’d looked so much like his mother—was it really Evayne? And the other one, whose eyes held accusation and so much adult impatience—was that Peter? Even their clothes and their glimpsed backgrounds—how many worlds, how many years lined the dizzying abyss down which he’d just looked? Years, decades of separation taunted him from just those two pictures.
He didn’t know these people. He didn’t want to know them; he wanted the family he’d had barely a month ago.
“Mrph?” He looked up, realizing he’d buried his face in his drawn-up knees. Orpheus’s huge eyes held concern, and he reached to ruffle the denner’s fur. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “We just need to … sort it all out.”
He was doubly exhausted now and lay back. Before he knew it he was waking up in his clothes, apparently having not moved a muscle for hours. Orpheuswas curled up next to him. When he put on his glasses he found it was six o’clock in the morning.
“Aw, crap.” His croaking voice woke up the denner, who yawned and stretched in a very catlike manner, then stared at him expectantly.
They had breakfast, paid for the night’s lodgings and, after that, they were almost out of money. Toby found himself sitting on the whitewashed hotel steps watching Orpheus nose around the base of the decorative hedges. He had nowhere to go now, unless it was back to Corva with his tail between his legs. He could call Jaysir, but he was reluctant to play that card. The data block was pretty much the only leverage he had right now.
Or … he should just walk right up to the town hall and tell them who he was. He was the long-lost heir to the entire lockstep empire, after all.
And yet, and yet … There were those faces he’d seen in the photo. People with the names of his brother and sister, but utterly alien eyes. What if Corva wasn’t lying?
If she wasn’t, then not only Peter and Evayne were alive. Their mother was waiting in cold sleep for the day when he returned.
That was a terrible thought. He had to go to her.
The glasses pointed only to local sights. Amazing as those were—dozens of city spheres made up a kind of raft continent—the glasses wouldn’t tell him anything about how to travel to other worlds. Apparently you needed to buy an upgrade for that. He thought about this for a while, then went back into the hotel.
“Excuse me,” he said to the bot at the front desk, “how can I find out about flights to, well, a planet named Destrier?”
“That’s easy, sir,” said the bot in its perkily helpful synthetic voice. “What you need to do is visit the pilgrimage center.”
Seven
ORPHEUS WAS LIKE A lead weight wrapping Toby’s shoulders by the time he found the place. It was a cathedrallike building sitting by itself in a plaza in one of the larger city bubbles.
Getting here had been a magical, if exhausting, journey. Though there was public transit throughout the Continent (as the locals called the raft of bubbles), it mostly consisted of slidewalks and escalators. Toby had been carrying his denner for over an hour now, buoyed only by the occasional vistas of the Continent that opened out before him. Some of the city bubbles were many kilometers in diameter, and each had others next to, above, or below it, so that the eye followed lines of city and forest up to dizzying perches far overhead or down to cavernous depths. Outside it was a permanent storm-lit night; Wallop, it seemed, was a nomad planet like Lowdown, orphaned somewhere between the stars. Yet it was a hub of commerce and culture for the lockstep.
Religion was clearly a major part of that culture. Men and women in white robes were lined up between velvet ropes, patiently waiting to enter the cathedral—if that was what it was. Toby could see none of the religious symbols he knew from Earth. The only repeating motif seemed to be carvings and statues of a seated man, perhaps a king on a throne.
The backdrop for the cathedral was a wall of tessellated glass that swept up a hundred meters or more. No lights glowed behind it, nor any lightning. He trudged over and shaded his hand to look through the glass.
Frost had painted the other side of it, but through gapsin this he glimpsed darkened buildings and snow-draped sidewalks. “Is that another lockstep?” he asked a passerby.
The man laughed. “Naw, it’s the Weekly. It’ll open up in four or five days.”
“Weekly?” He was too tired to hide his puzzlement.
The man tilted his head and peered at Toby. “Where are you from that you don’t know the Weekly? Lockstep 90/.25? Client to 360?”
Toby shook his head. “Sorry, I’m from a … a little station.”
“Must be.” The man shook his head and walked away.
The line of pilgrims started at a set of tents where tearful people were saying good-bye to relatives and friends. They entered one tent and came out the other side wearing robes. Apparently, they were required to leave their bots behind, too, because there was a fair number of these milling around the tents but none in the lineup.