She shrugged. “We moved here when I was sixteen. I guess I’ve been exploring ever since. Every day when I step outside and look around I just … it’s like I’m living in some kind of fairy tale. Even these words—‘fairy tale’—the ancient idea of fairies, the language we’re talking about them with … it’s all so … amazing!”
He shook his head, puzzled. “Why?”
“Because it’s ancient and ever-present at one and the same time. So amazingly, impossibly old, yet still here. Living in a lockstep is like hopping in a time machine and shooting back to the dawn of history while simultaneously being shot into the far future. It’s that incredible age everything has here—it’s all preserved, the world as it was thousands of years ago.”
Thoughtful, he put on his wings, and they looked for a convenient balcony to jump off of.
Suddenly Toby stopped. “What’s Destrier?”
Kirstana stumbled. She looked closely at him. “You were in line to join the pilgrimage there. How can you not know?”
“I’m … not from round here either, remember?” He’d told her that his family was from one of the first lockstep colonies, a little comet world isolated from most of 360 for the past forty years. It was obviously time to embellish the story a little. “You know I’m from a second-generation world. But my grandfather took us out of the lockstep a few cycles back and … well, time got away from us. It’s been a couple of generations since any of us were here. And Grandfather never wanted to talk about what he’d left. But he was, you know, one of the first generations in the lockstep. Which is where I get my accent.”
“Destrier’s the symbol of everything that’s wrong with this place,” she said darkly.
Toby was surprised. “But all this—” He tilted a wing at the wonders of the continent.
She shook her head. “Could be so much more, if it weren’t for Origin.”
Origin. Another word nobody’d mentioned to him yet.
“Is that the symbol for Origin, then?” he said. He pointed at the thing that had prompted his question.
She looked and scowled. “Oh. The shrines.”
They’d mostly been invisible outside of augmented reality; from a distance this one looked like a simple niche in the wall that flanked the restaurant. Behind the wall, the outer skin of the city sphere curved down, very close here, forming a dark ceiling drawn with mazy rain patterns. Trees curled up to nearly touch the glassy surface. It was details like this that had been catching his attention since he’d arrived here, so he’d walked by little niches like this one many times without noticing them.
Up close he could see a human figure seated on what looked like a stone throne. A kind of sundial pattern formed the backdrop.
“Who’s that?”
She reached out to touch the little throne with one finger. “The Emperor of Time.” She gave an exasperated sigh. “He’s been a major mythological figure for over ten thousand years, and you’re saying he’s new to you?”
He shrugged awkwardly.
“Right. Well, he sits on a throne, see? He’s been sitting on it since the beginning of time. And here’s the thing: he’s perfectly free to stand up and walk away or run in circles or stand on his hands or whatever he wants to—free at any moment and every moment, and he has the power and everything. And every moment, every single moment since the beginning of time, he’s freely chosen to stay right where he is.”
Toby shook his head, puzzled. “Does he have a name?”
Now Kirstana laughed. “Of course! You know who he is. Everybody knows the Emperor of Hyperchaos—Emperor of Time, Lord of Origins, the One Who Waits.
“He’s Toby McGonigal.”
SOMEHOW, HEARING THIS JUST made Toby feel really, really tired. He waved a hand and said, “I should have guessed.”
But then, as he turned away from the shrine, a new and deep unease filled him. There were the houses and spiraling stairs of the city—a place modeled on Peter’s design. “Whose idea was that?” he muttered, wondering. Then, to Kirstana, “Why’re there shrines?”
She stared at him, perplexed. “It’s the lockstep’s official religion. People join the lockstep because it’s eternal; that’s why my parents brought me here. ’Cause even in twenty, thirty thousand years, this place will barely have changed at all. The Emperor remains unchanged, and we’re supposed to model our lives on his.”
“Lives?” He shook his head. “I thought Toby McGonigal was just lost in space.”
Surprisingly, she looked uncomfortable. “That’s not a very nice way to put it. He waits. And the lockstep unfolds according to His grand design.”
“His design?” Not Peter’s? Toby walked back to the railing that overlooked the tiers of the city. The sunlamps were tuning toward evening. “And who…” he groped for the word. “Who enforces this grand design?”
She harrumphed. He looked back; Kirstana stood with her arms crossed, hipshot. “Next you’re going to tell me you’ve never heard of Evayne McGonigal.”
Something inside Toby spasmed and he quickly looked away. “Sorry,” he managed to say. “You’ve got an eleven-thousand-year advantage on me.”
“No…” She leaned on the balcony next to him. “The advantage is yours. You’d be a celebrity on any nonlockstep world you cared to visit, you know. You’re ancient, practically prehistoric. People would have, oh, so many questions for you!”
He was starting to realize what he was to her. “Like you have questions?”
“Well, yeah.” She looked away shyly. “How often do you get a chance to meet somebody who remembers the beginning?”
“But I don’t,” he said hastily. “I’m third generation.”
“Meaning your family moved to the lockstep only centuries of realtime after it began?” She shook her head. “The blink of an eye, in historical terms. You’re still from right back at the beginning.”
“I guess.”
She looked away at the cityscape, a troubled expression on her face.
“I’m tired. Let’s head back.” She nodded, and they dove into the sky again, retracing their path but this time up and up through dizzying layers of city black, rain-threaded glass.
They smiled but barely spoke as they parted. Both were exhausted, but somehow despite the awful news about this strange religion and Evayne’s part in it, Toby was content for now. He felt like he’d accomplished something today, though he’d found no work among the local bots. He’d learned important things and made a friend. Also, he’d discovered a way his age could be important without all the politics and family complications that Corva and Jaysir attached to it.
Maybe he could hire himself out to explain the ancient world, say, at local rich people’s houses. The thought was startling: could there be a career in being old?
Toby was still musing over this idea as he wandered back to the bed-and-breakfast. He was so absorbed in his fantasy of getting paid to talk about the early days of Sedna that he barely noticed as Orpheus suddenly bounded up. Only when a flood of icons popped up and he had to bat at them to dismiss them all, did he look up and see who was sitting on the step outside his lodgings.
“… Haven’t seen you in days!” Orpheus ran back to her, and she vigorously scratched his ears, making his head wobble. Orpheus stretched high and licked her forehead.
Toby just stood there, mind a blank, until Corva looked over Orpheus’s head and said, “Hi, Toby. Fancy meeting you here.”
Jaysir must have told her where he was. Well, it stood to reason: the maker had what he wanted now, why shouldn’t he? “Uh, hi. You’re, um, doing well? Getting work?”