He paused, thinking. “What hangs over your head is not being able to go back. Earth’s not the same place as when you left it. There’s nowhere to go but forward.”
Was he hinting that Toby shouldn’t try to go to Destrier? If he was, he was being pretty roundabout with it. Toby wanted to ask him about the dark past that Jaysir had hinted at, but he wasn’t sure how. “You came from outside the locksteps, right?”
Shylif nodded. “And now I can’t return. The moment you step into this world, you give up everything you had before. It’s like time burns it away before your very eyes.”
“Then, why…”
“Why come here at all?” Shylif turned sad eyes on Toby. “Some people treat it like a train to a better future. They hop on, and when they hear about some world or civilization that’s come up that appeals to them, they step off. Some people think it’s a way of leaving mortal time altogether and becoming eternal, but that’s ridiculous. We all die. And some … some just get tired of wandering the halls of the dead, calling out to people who’ll never respond.”
He started to walk away, but Toby said, “Hey, what’s your connection to Corva?”
Shylif looked back. “She came to the docks looking for a way to get to Lowdown. Some of us stowaways were there—as well as other people who’d have eaten her for lunch. She needed help. I … needed somebody to help.” He shrugged, a motion barely visible through his suit.
“Help to do what?”
Shylif shook his head and headed aft.
There was no point in pressing; Toby knew he’d get no more from the man. With nothing else to do, he sat back with Orpheus, followed the denner’s gaze into the darkness—and quickly became transfixed by what he saw.
He’d thought of the continent as self-contained, locked away from the environment it sailed through—but that wasn’t the case at all. The piled-up bubbles sprouted gantries and balconies and docks and diving boards, and the air around and above them was full of darting, soaring shapes: airships, like the one he was in, but also aircraft and even winged humans. Some of these were nearby, so he could make out what they were doing—they seemed to be engaged in some sort of sporting event as they swooped and soared within a volume defined by six giant glowing hoops.
The continent was a collision of lanterns, or a surf of glowing pearls hanging untroubled amid Wallop’s storms. The cities’ curving sides cradled the white of towers and the green of cultivated jungles that raveled them like verdigris staining a glass ball.
Wisps of dark cloud began drifting across this vision as the airship picked up speed. Toby was too excited to be tired now; he tore his gaze from what was behind them, and as he did he spotted something. Far, far away, in the darkness beyond the Continent, a tiny yellow speck played peekaboo from behind the black skirts of a thunderhead a hundred times its size. With a jolt he realized that this tiny dot of light was another city. Now that he could use it for scale, the rest of the hammerheads and towers of billowing lightning-lit vapor surrounding him were suddenly revealed as utterly gigantic, way bigger than mountains—as big, it seemed, as worlds.
Way, way up above this cloud deck, lightning momentarily silhouetted a tiny black dot against the highest of the charcoal-colored clouds. Then the lightning was gone, leaving cutout thunderhead shapes against a velvet, star-spattered night.
With this he realized they’d been rising quite quickly; the continent was a smear of yellow far below his feet. They rose and rose through the stratified layers of Wallop’s atmosphere, and eventually the stars became regular companions. They’d left the lightning far below, so it was by starlight that Toby came to see the horizon of Wallop. The little airship seemed surrounded by vast towers of black, but through gaps in these he could see similar thunderheads foresting the distance in smaller and smaller ranks. On any reasonably-sized planet those ranks would have lowered steadily to fall below the horizon line, but according to the tourist glasses Wallop was somewhere around the size of Neptune, so they simply became smaller and smaller until they merged in a blur at infinity. Staggered by distance and scale, Toby fell silent and just watched.
All the while, the distant city grew larger, like a blackened crystal ball, empty of prophecies. “It’s not lit up,” Toby said, and now he knew he sounded worried.
“It’s wintering over.” Shylif had returned and was standing next to him. “No need for lights when everybody’s asleep. Course, its reactors are still keeping it warm enough to float. But the air up there is pretty calm; it’s the best place to park a city if you want to avoid the storms for a decade or two.” He pointed, and now Toby could see that the city sphere trailed hundreds of fine threadlike cables into the depths below it, like some technological jellyfish. “Those strips filter-feed trace amounts of metal and minerals out of the air. Takes decades to accumulate enough for a month’s industry.”
“Okay,” Nissa called from the bow, “here’s how this works. Those boys”—she nodded up at the black bowl of the sky—“intercepted some of our cargoes while we wintered over. The government doesn’t care. It’s a civil matter—lost property and all that. So the owners have to recover it. They’ve sent their bots to do that.” She pointed her chin at the motley crowd of household bots and bulkier worker drones milling in the back of the airship. “Whatever it is they’ve lost is worth more than a bot or two, ’cause they risk losing them and getting nothing back. Casson and I are along because it’s against all kinds of rules, laws and treaties to invade somebody else’s wintering habitat using bots. Those same laws say that you can’t deny shelter and life support to a visitor. So we can walk right in there and get the stuff, and the bots can come with us.”
Toby frowned doubtfully. “What if they resist?”
“If they really wanted to resist, we wouldn’t get within ten kilometers of the place,” said Casson. “They don’t want a war with the lockstep. All they can do is bare-faced lie and say they don’t have the stuff. And since we know where it is, they can’t stop us walking in and taking it.”
“Okay.”
The city loomed overhead like a perfect thundercloud. Casson switched on a powerful spotlight and they searched for a while until they found a landing platform that stuck a good hundred meters out of the city’s flank. You could have landed an ocean liner on it, yet Casson set their little airship down right in the center as if claiming the entire space.
As they drifted in Toby wondered how they were going to come to a stop; he started as with a clang six bots fell or jumped off the underside of the airship. They must have been holding on to it all this time. They carried cables which they proceeded to unreel as they searched for attachment points. There were plenty of these, and in seconds they’d secured the airship.
Toby started to follow the others to the hatch, but Orpheus stopped him by weaving in between his feet, causing him to nearly trip. “Hey! Stop it. What—” Orpheus skipped back to the nose of the airship, pressed his snout against the transparent plastic and planted his paws on either side, for all the world like a little man staring out. Toby paused, laughed, and went to join him. There was a traffic jam at the hatch anyway; he had a moment.
The gameworlds he’d crafted with Peter had contained nothing like this. The boys had plundered centuries’ worth of science-fiction and fantasy art to build their virtual worlds. They’d generated thousands of planets, from vast ringed monstrosities laced with rainbows of cloud, to airless chunks of pure gold orbiting close to yellow stars and roaring with leonine light. They’d imagined desert worlds and water worlds, jungle planets and glacier-bound icescapes. Nothing they’d done had prepared Toby for the three actual worlds he’d seen since awaking in the lockstep. Nothing could have prepared him for what he was seeing now.