He knew he should be learning more about the lockstep civilization, but where could he start other than with his brother and sister? Yet he had only to glimpse a photo or video of Peter or Evayne as grown-ups and his heart started to thump painfully. It was impossible to look at them. He didn’t want to know they were real. So instead of broadening his knowledge of the year 14,000, he plotted how he was going to get to Destrier, where his mother waited for him.
Nothing would be easier than to announce his presence to the world. He should just get it over with, but his mouth turned dry at the very thought of telling somebody who he was. It wasn’t the idea of suddenly being famous or important that terrified him, nor was it the possibility that Peter and Evayne didn’t want him around for some reason. It was the prospect of actually being reunited with them—or, really, the colorless middle-aged versions who’d replaced the incandescent children he knew as Evayne and Peter.
Luckily, he had Orpheus. He and the denner were getting to know each other. Orpheus was very catlike, and he’d obviously made his choice where Toby was concerned. He’d romp away to investigate some bush or staircase winding down the terraced interior of the city sphere, and when he disappeared from sight Toby would be seized with a sudden terrible anxiety that he wouldn’t come back. But he always did—often with some pretty girl oohing and aahing after him.
“Orph, are you trying to set me up?” he’d muttered after one of these encounters. Orpheus had sent him an enigmatic stare, then flounced away again.
The denner’s own interface wasn’t keyed to verbal commands or gestures. It read Orpheus’s pupil dilation, stance and other attentional factors, as well as pheromones and major motions. It tracked his circadian rhythms and energy use, and then translated all that it saw into terms Toby could understand. He knew when Orpheus was hungry—well, that was easy. But he could also piggyback on the denner’s reactions to the people around them. Orpheus would scan the crowd with a quick twitch of his head, and then tags would blossom over the heads of everybody in sight: green for those people Orph thought were trustworthy, red for those who weren’t. Other colors appeared, too, standing for assessments Orpheus had made but that Toby couldn’t now (and maybe never would) understand.
He’d been talking to Orpheus all along, but after a couple of days with the interface Toby realized he was no longer saying things half rhetorically, the way you did to pets. He’d stopped assuming that Orpheus didn’t understand him, because it was becoming very plain that the denner did—just not in the way a human would. Orph saw the context of Toby’s speech, things like whether he was talking because he was nervous or socially cued by the situation he was in; his emotional state; even, broadly, what it was he was trying to get out of speaking. All without understanding a single word. And the glyphs and icons that twirled around Orpheus’s head like pain stars over a cartoon character told Toby as much about him.
And so yes, it became obvious that when Orpheus dragged yet another girl out from behind some bush or shop door, he really was trying to set Toby up.
Now, even though he couldn’t bear to open the books about his family or watch the many movies, Toby felt he was finally ready to explore the world he and Peter had built.
“THANKS FOR COMING.” JAYSIR stood outside Toby’s door, his bot—really less of a bot, more of a mobile contraption—taking up much of the hall behind him.
Noticing this, Toby poked his head out the door to look around. “My landlady doesn’t like visitors. Particularly bots.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have said to meet here, then.” Jaysir stood waiting until Toby moved aside, then came in and plunked himself in the room’s only armchair. This left Toby the bed to sit on. Orpheus slunk as far from the cargo bot as he could get, while Toby rehearsed the things he wanted to ask Jaysir.
“Where is it?” Jaysir leaned forward eagerly. “You said you’d let me read it.”
“Did you tell Corva where I’m staying?”
“No … but I might have, if I’d seen her this morning. She’s not hunting you down or anything, you know.”
“Of course not, I didn’t mean—well, it’s just that…” Toby decided to quit while he was behind. “Anyway, I’m glad you came by.” Toby brought out the data block and held it up.
Jaysir leaned forward to examine it without touching it. “Where’d you get it? Brought it with you on that little ship?”
“They had it. The people Ammond and Persea were meeting with on Auriga.”
Jaysir’s eyes met Toby’s. “You should have told me that right off.”
“Why? It was buried in the brain of a twentier—an old mining bot. Ammond’s friends used the bot to see if I was who I said I was. Got me to wake it up.”
“Wait, what? Explain!”
Uncomfortable with Jaysir’s suddenly intense attention, Toby recounted the events in the underwater house on Auriga. Jaysir had him go through the sequence in detail twice. Then he sat back, thinking.
“It never struck you as odd that they tested your identity with the bot?”
Toby shook his head. “Why would it? The twentier was probably the only thing they could get that dated back to my time on Sedna. How else would they verify my ID?”
Jaysir snorted. “By telling you to command any bed anywhere on any lockstep world!” He waved at the one Toby was sitting on. “That one, for instance. Haven’t you even tried to wake one up, reset its clock?”
“You told me not to.” He had that feeling of things moving too fast for him again. “Why? Because it’s a Cicada Corp bed, like—”
“—Like every other legal hibernation bed in the seventy thousand worlds. Which means you should be able to command it: start it up, shut it down, change its schedule to whatever you want. You sure you never tried?”
“No…”
“Good.”
Toby got off the bed and knelt beside it. It looked like a standard pedestal bed, but the base had a label on it with some kind of iridescent insect shape. A cicada, dimwit, he told himself. There were various hatches and ports in the bottom, too.
“There’re other locksteps, right?” he asked. “Do they use these?”
“Well, not these. Not McGonigal beds. Those are locked to our frequency. And using other beds in our lockstep is … well, not strictly illegal, but they make it damned inconvenient if you try.”
Jaysir knelt next to him. “You don’t have an interface for this, do you?”
“You mean in my glasses? No…”
“Well, that’s part of the mystery, I suppose. But these things do have voice activation, too. Anyway, it’s a good thing you haven’t tried it.”
“So you said. But why?” Toby got up, and this time he took the armchair.
Jaysir didn’t seem to notice. “Why do you think those people who had you used the twentier to test you? And why do you think they did the test in that house, in an underwater room?”
“Well, I…” Auriga had been such a strange and exotic place, it had never occurred to Toby that meeting in the dockside house would be considered in any way unusual there.
“The bot wasn’t connected to the Cicada Corp network, not then, and maybe not ever. It predated it. But it didn’t predate your biocryptography. And the house was shielded, at least by the water and maybe by other countermeasures. It was a safe place to test you.”
“Why safe? Safe from what?”
“Think about it. What would happen if you commanded the bed you’re sitting on?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about them.”
“They’re all networked, Toby. The first thing it would do would be announce to the rest of the network that Toby Wyatt McGonigal had just switched it on! Don’t you think that little piece of information might just be … important to some people?”