If you lived on a relatively rich world, like Lowdown or Wallop, you could harvest resources and manufacture goods as fast as you wanted to. You could leave the 360/1 lockstep for a faster one, such as 36/1, which experienced ten months for every one in Peter’s empire. You’d think that this would provide a huge advantage to your industries because you’d be producing ten times as much as 360/1 in any given time period. Since you were awake ten times longer, however, you’d also use ten times as many resources.
The second reason was less intuitive but more important. If you increased your frequency, you’d have far fewer “nearby” monthly trading partners than 360/1. It wasn’t obvious why, but travel between the lockstep worlds took decades of realtime. Because Peter’s lockstep slept for thirty years at a time, you could travel half a light-year while wintering over (if you were going at the average speed of a cheap fission-fragment rocket). One wintering-over journey between 36/1 worlds could take you only one-tenth that far—but that didn’t translate into having one-tenth the possible destinations for the trip. Because the lockstep worlds were scattered through three-dimensional space rather than being on a two-dimensional planet, when you doubled the distance you could travel, you did far more than just double the volume of space you could access.
Lockstep 36/1 might have ten turns for every one in 360/1, but each 360/1 world could trade with a thousand times more worlds per turn.
So Peter’s network was vast, and it ran on mutual trust that no one would take advantage of higher trading frequencies. Thisbe had broken that trust.
A couple of days later, he was listening to one of these historical programs as he walked home from work. As he turned the corner to his bed-and-breakfast, he saw a motley crew of people sitting on its front step: Shylif, Jaysir—and Corva. His landlady was visible in the front window, glaring at them.
Toby paused his program. Corva was poking at the ground with a stick, and Jaysir and Shylif were looking everywhere but at her. “What’s up?” said Toby.
Corva stood up, brushing off her pants. She wouldn’t meet his eye. “The plan’s off,” she said. “We can’t get to the passenger module.”
“You mean we can’t get your brother back?” She nodded; she seemed to be on the brink of tears.
Toby knew he should be relieved, because what Corva had been proposing was both illegal and highly dangerous. He knew what he should be asking, too: Will you honor your promise to show me how to get to Destrier?
Instead he said, “What’s the problem?”
Corva told him, the words coming out in a rush. As soon as she started to talk, the answer popped into Toby’s mind.
He should just nod sympathetically and ask for what they’d promised. But Corva wasn’t like Ammond and Persea; she really had saved his life, and if all she’d said about the McGonigals was true, she was taking a terrible risk in even confiding to Toby.
He said, “I know a way.”
SIX HOURS LATER, THEY were descending between brooding mountains of cloud, down a single, endless cable that stretched from zenith to nadir through the awesome dark skyscapes of Wallop. The little elevator car, which Jaysir had hijacked for them using his black arts, had been moving for many minutes now. Just how far below the continent had the authorities hung the passenger unit?
“I still don’t like it.” Corva crossed her arms, glaring out the glass. “You don’t know anything about this Kirstana person.”
“I don’t know anything about you, either.”
“Yes, and look where it’s gotten you.” She glowered at him. “What does she know about you? About us? Probably a lot more than you think. You’re not exactly very good at keeping secrets, Toby.”
“What are you, my mother? I agreed to help you because you can show me how to stow away on a ship to Destrier. That’s all.” He turned away from her, ignoring the look Shylif and Jaysir were sharing.
He was still kicking himself for telling Corva how they could get down here. It turned out that the reason he hadn’t heard from her for days was that she’d been agonizing about how to actually get to the quarantined passenger unit. It hung many kilometers below the continent’s customs complex. The logical way down was by airship, but there was radar and other eyes to prevent that. The next logical approach was to simply board the elevator on the customs level—but but getting into that would be next to impossible.
He’d had his chance to get out of having to do all of this. Instead, when Corva had explained the issue, he’d heard himself say, “I know a way. Why don’t you just fly?”
“I told you, they track the dirigibles—”
“No, not by airship,” he’d said. “With wings.”
So it was that he’d called Kirstana and asked her about outdoor-certified exowings. Jaysir had modified them so that they would ignore proximity warnings and no-go zones. Jay couldn’t bring along his beloved bot; he’d ordered it to wait near the docks for their return. That was how they intended to return.
First, they would simply spiral down through the black air to a landing jetty and airlock at the base of the customs complex.
Simply? —Well, if donning a space suit and bundling their denners into airtight carrying cases, then relying on the artificial muscles and reflexes of strap-on wings in the hostile atmosphere of a gas giant was simple. The three stowaways had experience with similar environments—such as the oceans of Auriga—and Toby had walked the ices of Sedna at temperatures near absolute zero. Also, fourteen thousand years of refinements to the safety of the wings had helped. To his surprise, it had been fairly easy to skim close to the outside skin of the continent, so radar wouldn’t catch them. The dark helped, making the danger of a fall more abstract than it would otherwise have been. But they could never safely descend all the way to the passenger unit this way. This elevator was still the only safe way to do that.
Now that the adrenaline-pumping flight was over, Toby was actually kind of enjoying the elevator ride. It was clear that Corva, at least, was having trouble with the precarious sense of being balanced above an infinite fall. She spent her time sitting in the center of the floor with her knees pulled up, Wrecks protectively wrapped around her ankles. Toby had tried to get her to talk a number of times as they droned through the black, still air beneath the cloud deck. She just grunted or answered with a simple yes or no. He was trying this again when the autopilot abruptly put them into a dive, and what had been a stable ride turned into a slewing, bumping fall. Toby had been turning green himself by the time they reached a small aerostat with a ring-shaped docking platform under it. They had left the blimp to find nothing there but an elevator car and a cable stretching down into the dark.
For some reason Corva found riding an elevator to nowhere preferable to flying. Well, at least she was talking.
Orpheus was staring into the gray emptiness of the sky, as if those depths held secrets only denners could see. Toby knelt to pat him and after a minute of communing felt a bit better.
“You know,” he said, to try to restart the conversation, “I kind of thought we’d be going up.”
Corva tried to look nonchalant. “You can leave ships in orbit for decades at a time,” she said, “but people … well, they get fried by the cosmic rays. So the passenger modules from Halen’s ship are down here.”
“And we’re just going to waltz in and wake them up?”
Jaysir smiled, rather falsely—he was trying to pace in the tiny space, with little success. He had also dressed uncharacteristically in drab clothing today and didn’t look comfortable in it. “Well, you couldn’t, but I can. We makers have our ways, you know.”