Still scritching at Orpheus’s ears, Corva tilted her head and peered at Toby. “I didn’t come to this planet to work.”
He’d just meant to be polite in asking that; now Toby was confused. “Oh,” he said. “So then…”
“We came here because I needed your help,” she continued, her face deadpan and her voice neutral. “There’s no point in my being here otherwise.”
He crossed his arms. “I never promised to help you.”
“Well.” She looked away. “That’s true.” After a moment, she set Orpheus aside and stood up. “I mean, all did was save your life. It’s not like you owe me anything.” This was the first time he’d seen her through his revamped glasses, but unlike nearly anybody else he might pass on the street—and unlike Kirstana—she was not festooned with virtual tags and flags, other than the green-and-gray symbol hovering near the hollow of her throat.
“Ammond and Persea also saved my life,” he pointed out. “What do I owe them?” She sputtered, but before she could say anything he added, “You won’t even tell you what you need me for. That’s hardly gonna win me over.”
“Ah. Well, I guess that’s kind of…”
He just stared at her, and after a couple of “but you sees” and “you gotta understands,” Corva finally found the right words: “I couldn’t tell you in case you screwed us over by telling the police, or got caught. If they found out…” She looked genuinely distressed.
“So this is where we were going. I guess you can tell me now we’re here, right?”
She glanced upward. “Wallop was our destination. But yeah, I’m sorry. Of course I wanted to tell you! It’s just … it’s not you I don’t trust. It’s everybody you might talk to.”
He thought of Kirstana and was suddenly uneasy. A glance around the street showed nobody lurking in any doorways—and after all, this was Peter’s Utopia, a civilization modeled on Consensus. There were no hovering microbots spying and eavesdropping on every citizen. At least he didn’t think there were.
“Come inside,” he said. “And this time, tell me the truth.”
Ten
AS JAYSIR HAD BEFORE her, Corva sat in his room’s one armchair, and Toby perched on the bed. Orpheus looked from one human to the other, obviously torn; then he climbed into Corva’s lap. She stroked his forehead and he began purring loudly.
“We came here to save my brother’s life,” said Corva.
The statement hung there; she didn’t go on. Toby shook his head and said, “What?”
“He’s in quarantine,” she said. “On board a passenger ship from Thisbe.” She said that name as if she expected him to know what it meant. He could have done a search on it, but that would have taken his attention away from watching Corva and the uncertainty and anger warring for dominance in her expression.
Toby took the bait. “Why do you need to save him?”
“Don’t you know what quarantine means? Your brother has frozen him out of the lockstep!”
He jerked back at her sudden fury. “What do you mean, frozen out?” Even as he asked this, Toby had a flash of memory—of himself, standing on the outer hull of the tug and staring down at a black planet dotted with silent, frozen cities: unknowing that he’d arrived at a settled world, or because he’d awakened at the wrong time.
“All the 360 ports are closed to Halen’s ship,” she said. “They haven’t got fuel to go home or to any other world, so they’ve been forced into hibernation until the ports open. And your brother’s decreed that won’t be for another six months.”
Toby was shocked that Peter would do such a thing—but he was also puzzled. “That’s … really bad. I guess. I don’t know why … But if your brother’s hibernating, all you have to do is wait. It’ll take awhile, yeah, but he’s perfectly safe, right?”
She shook her head, and for the first time since he’d met her, he saw Corva near tears. “It’s not just that. He came here to try to find me, and because of that, they quarantined his ship for a year. And half that’s done.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But Thisbe! Thisbe’s government wanted to trade with another lockstep. There’s one on the planet that’s even more successful locally than 360-to-1. It’s called 240-to-1. The local council hacked the hibernation timing repeaters so we’d Jubilee with them—wake on their turns as well as ours. We could trade with both that way! But your brother found out and he … punished Thisbe.”
A sick feeling, almost of watching from somewhere else, had taken hold of Toby. “Punished … how?”
“All ships from Thisbe are quarantined until it’s gone three of our years at a ratio of 360-to-12!”
“Wait, what?” He had to sit back and think about that for a moment. “They’ve accelerated time on your world … by twelve times?”
She nodded rapidly. “All the McGonigal beds have shifted from wintering over for thirty years per turn to two and a half. For every month that passes for you and me, a full year passes back home. I came here to study for a year, before the quarantine. But it’s been going for”—now her eyes scrunched up and she did begin to cry—“for eight months!”
Eight months had passed for Corva. Eight years were already gone by for her friends and family on Thisbe.
Those pictures of Peter and Evayne came to Toby’s mind—the ones that he couldn’t look at—and there were all those books he’d been afraid open that talked about all the things that they’d done and seen, without him, in the past forty years. He should have known all about this, but he’d been afraid to investigate.
Corva sat across from him, crying, and he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think of a single way to make it better for her.
But there was still something puzzling about the situation. “Why didn’t you go home when this first started? You were living out here, I get that, but why stay here?”
“But that’s the whole point, McGonigal!” She glared at him. “A lot of people from Thisbe travel, hell, half our economy runs on remittances from foreign workers! Of course we all want to go home, but who’ll take us there? Any ship that goes back to Thisbe will be stranded there for at least a year! Travel’s dried up—I couldn’t get back—so my brother boarded a ship that was going to try to sneak around the quarantine. They got caught.” Her hand went up, fingers half curling around her locket.
He was trying to picture the time in his mind. If you took a calendar and pasted it into just one month of another calendar, you’d have a year inside a month. But what they’d done to Corva’s brother was take the bigger calendar and drop it into just one month of an even larger one. “Your brother’s gone from living a year for every month you live, to living a month for your next year … while everybody back home lives twelve years … It’s crazy. But why? Why do this extra thing to the ship he’s on?”
She flung up her hands in frustration. “Because they tried to get around the quarantine by pretending to be coming from another world. And apparently it isn’t enough to have everybody back home aging like that, they had to make any ships that left not come back for the full twelve years! It’s a blockade, is what it is.”
Toby swallowed. “Have they … have they done this before?”
She stared at him. “Your family has done this to other worlds, yes.”
There was nothing he could say to that. He sat there, uncomfortable, until Corva said, “You’re a McGonigal.”
“I’m not my brother.” It wasn’t the first time he’d ever had to distance himself from Peter’s behavior. After the trauma of the kidnapping, Peter had acted out in all kinds of ways, some pretty destructive. Toby had apologized for him more than once; he couldn’t believe he was still doing it.