“Don’t be silly.” Kirstana set off with purpose down the street. “Meeting in person,” she said as she walked. “One of those ancient customs that I just can’t get used to. Back home, we’d be just as likely to send avatars and recover the memories later. After all, if you go yourself, you’re, well, committing yourself to whatever experience you have in that place. That would have been so gauche where I come from.”
“And where, exactly, is that?”
“Barsoom.”
He’d heard that puzzling name before. “I thought Barsoom was a storybook name for Mars.”
“Mars?” She rolled the word around in her mouth. “Maaaars. Never heard of it. Barsoom, though, that’s the fourth planet of the solar system. Covered in ancient ruins and dried-out canals from all kinds of terraforming attempts. The water always drains away, but every thousand years or so drops another comet on it and tries again. The inside of the planet’s getting quite wet at this point!”
“… Right. And Barsoom’s the new capital of the lockstep?”
“Well, that’s the irony, isn’t it?” She sighed. “Our family left because the place had become a backwater. It was dying. Again. But I remember it as a magical place. I’d get Barber to dig the sand away from some ancient doorway, and while he kept watch for the Tharks I’d crawl down in there with just a hand lamp to find ancient hieroglyphs and bar codes. I’d wonder what kind of people had lived there, so long ago. If they were people at all.
“There was one faded hieroglyph I’d run into in a bunch of different ruins, but I could never find the translation to it. One day I came downstairs and my parents were sitting at the dinner table arguing over a holo. And in the middle of the holo was that glyph.
“They told me it was one of the oldest symbols known to Man—as old as the symbol for computer, say. The symbol meant lockstep. And a lockstep, they told me, was a place even older than Barsoom, older than nearly anything, but still alive! The locksteps had been forgotten on Barsoom for centuries, but there were stories if you knew where to dig them up. And those stories went back … dizzyingly far, from our civilization through the one before, from language to language, back all the way to the beginning. I fell in love with everything lockstep, and my parents noticed. They were glad, because they’d learned about another family that had moved away, and people said they’d gone to the McGonigal lockstep.
“McGonigal!” Her eyes were shining as she said the name. “That name I’d heard, and I’d seen it, too. It was written everywhere, in some of the oldest religious texts put down thousands upon thousands of years ago.”
“Religious texts…” He stopped, shoulders hunched, but Kirstana continued up the stairs, oblivious of his reaction. He hurried to catch up.
The bubble city Toby was staying in opened out onto another one at its top, and this one did the same to a third, higher one. Kirstana’s house was near the top of this highest sphere, yet she’d been leading him upward since they left it. Now they were close enough to its sunlamps that big shades were needed to cool the stairs and galleries.
“Are we going to an aircar platform?” he asked politely.
Now she looked back and smiled, shrugged, and said, “What’s the fun in sitting in some vehicle while you fly? I can get us something much better.”
“What?”
“Wings.”
The elevators and escalators continued on, until they reached a plaza—a broad balcony, really—that stuck out near the top city’s solar lamps like a giant diving board. From here Toby could look out through the glass ceiling at the permanent storms, or down through widening and converging rings of city and forest, through a gap to more of the same, down and down.
A modest hut here rented angel’s wings.
“They’re just exos,” Kirstana explained as she browsed a rack of furled feathered things as tall as she was. “You know, visitors from lower-g worlds wear them to amplify the strength of their legs and back, so they can walk here. These ones … well, they’re wings. That’s all.”
Furled, they made up a tall, heavy backpack. Unfurled, they were huge; the black ones Toby chose had a wingspan of at least eight meters. Kirstana’s were white. She chatted with the proprietor about the details of using them. Then, when properly strapped in, she simply walked to the edge of the platform and stepped off. Her security bot, Barber, stepped after her.
Toby shouted in alarm—but seconds later she reappeared, soaring so close to the sunlamps that she blazed white as if she herself were a lamp. Barber was riding on what seemed to be jets built into his shoulders. “Hoo-hoo!” shouted Kirstana. “Come on, the air’s fine!”
He gulped at the proprietor. “You’re good to go,” said the young lady, slapping him on the back. Closing his eyes and trusting to the millennia of technological development that separated Kirstana’s age from the one he’d grown up in, he ran and jumped.
The wings unfurled, and suddenly he was flying.
All you had to do was look the way you wanted to go, and tilt or shift your body that way; the wings took care of the rest. He learned early on that they had a mind of their own and wouldn’t let you run into buildings or hit the glass wall of the city. Within those limits, he could do what he wanted.
In this way they spiraled down through the geodesic froth of the continent, pausing to perch here and there while Kirstana pointed to the sights.
“People come here from thousands of worlds to fly, both inside and outside,” she shouted as they diverged and converged in the air. “There’re tournaments and contests. Of course they trade, too.”
The continent was mostly made up of Lockstep 360/1 cities, but not entirely. Some of the spheres attached to it were closed off and dark, and some of the 360 cities weren’t inhabited by humans.
He gawked at the distance-blurred glitter of the first one she pointed out. “Aliens? There are real aliens?”
Kirstana laughed. “No, not real aliens, if you mean intelligent beings who evolved separately from us. Nobody’s ever found those yet, I mean we’ve only been expanding into the galaxy for fourteen thousand years, we’ve hardly explored out to a thousand light-years. No, those ones there are uplifted chimpanzees. You’ll also find apes and dolphins and-well, other things that are entirely new species unrelated to anything on Earth. And then there”s artificial intelligences from the fast worlds, and augmented humans.” She banked away, her voice fading as she singsonged the list: “—and mutants and heavy-worlders and hybrids and single-genders and neandertals and hypercats and…”
When they stopped for lunch in the heights of a jungle sphere full of mist and rainbow-colored birds, he tried to find words for how overwhelming he found it all. “We’re in the middle of nowhere between the stars, but this place seems as rich as Earth. Though that can’t be. Earth, Mars—I mean Barsoom—they must be so much more than this. More than we could imagine…” Yet she was looking at him strangely.
“Earth? Barsoom? Oh, come on,” she chided. “We have so much more than the fast worlds could ever have. Earth only has Barsoom and Jupiter and a couple of other planets and artificial worlds. Venus, sure; Saturn. What’s that? Four or five trading partners? And then, the next fast worlds are four light-years away, that’s decades of travel time—a one-way trip for anybody living in realtime.” She shook her head. “No, Toby, the fast worlds are sad places, hopelessly impoverished. How could they ever have this kind of diversity? The richness? The vibrancy? And reach out and be able to actually touch it?”
“Heh.” Toby was grinning again. Way to go, Peter. He noticed she was smiling, too. “You love playing tour guide, don’t you?”