Toby laughed. “No, they do that every autumn. Just before they lose ’em for winter.”
“Oh, yeah, winter. They wake up the trees months before us, so it’s always summer when we’re awake. They spend a few months cooling them down after we go into hibernation, so maybe some of them lose their leaves then—but I’ve never seen it.”
Toby walked with Corva under the canopies of red. The sound of rain receded, but the illusion of being outside was still hard to shake.
Jaysir had slept through all the autumns of his life. For some reason, this thought made Toby’s heart ache, and he remembered leaving home for Sedna and how he and Evayne had both cried.
Peter had been silent.
Corva pointed out a set of low-lit steps that descended under the grass. “This should go down to where they dock the passenger modules.”
They went that way, and neither spoke for a while; but something was on Toby’s mind. He’d been thinking about it ever since he’d learned the significance of his family in this world.
Finally, during a short period while Jaysir was out of earshot, he asked, “What does it mean to you, that I’m a McGonigal?”
She darted a quick look at him. Toby suddenly realized that Shylif, at least, could still hear them; uncomfortable, he pressed on. “I mean, that first time in the courtyard. Did you know who I was? And all that stuff about … about me being the Emperor of Time, this cult figure, you knew about that…” He shook his head. “Are there really people out there who think I’m some sort of god?”
She’d drawn her shoulders in and wouldn’t look at him. “You have your sister to thank for that,” she said curtly.
“I’m asking about what you believe.”
“I was raised to believe you never existed at all.”
“You mean that the Emperor of Time never existed. But what about me?”
“You? As a person? A human being?” Now she met his eyes briefly. “Toby, nobody thinks about you that way.”
He didn’t ask any more questions, and she didn’t speak either.
At last they stood in the final, lowest chamber. This was a hexagonal, metal-walled drum with a suit locker in one wall and an airlock built into the floor. The sound of running, dripping rain filled the room.
“This is it,” said Jaysir. “The passenger module’s behind that door. Fire up the interface, Toby.”
He tapped the side of his glasses and awoke its augmented reality interface. “I still think we should have tested it before,” he said. “We might have been able to do all this from the city, through the net—”
“Bad idea, I told you,” said Jaysir. “If it didn’t work, and the network trapped your query, we’d have been caught. Safest to do it from here, ’cause I know we’re close enough that you can get a direct link to the module’s timer.”
Toby sighed. “All right. I’ll try.” He pinged the ship’s hibernation system.
Instantly, a bank of colorful rectangular buttons and data windows popped into view. They seemed to float, translucent, half a meter in front of him. “Hmph. Well, I do have something.” He peered at the virtual console. “It’s … it’s a passenger manifest.”
Jaysir did a little dance. “Hot damn! What about the frequency? The timing?”
Toby examined the virtual board. It was actually quite ridiculously simple. There were some clocks showing current time and a kind of alarm—strangely, rather like Orpheus’s setup. Of course, since this was a three-dimensional and virtual display, the interface elements also had little tags. He reached out to tap a little red flag attached to the main timer, and a larger window opened.
It read, OVERRIDDEN BY EVAYNE MCGONIGAL, 38.2/14372.2.
Toby swore.
“What is it?” Corva was gnawing at her fingernails again. “Is something wrong?”
“No, no, it’s fine. I just won’t know if I can reset the clock until I try.”
“Toby…” He glanced over at Corva. She was looking more distressed by the second. “Can you check … is he here? Halen, I mean. Halen Keishion?”
He looked at the manifest—momentarily distracted by the discovery that he could apparently reset individual cicada beds or select some or all at once—and ran his finger down the air until he saw it. “Yes, Corva. He’s here. His bed’s registering green. He’s okay.”
She blew out a heavy sigh, smiling weakly.
“How about Sebastine Coley?” It was Shylif’s voice, coming through the open link. Toby glanced down the list.
“Sure—” But Jaysir and Corva were both waving their hands and Corva was shouting, “No!”
Toby blinked at them, then remembered the story Jay had told him about Shylif’s past. Something about a woman, and a man who had lured her into a lockstep fortress …
“Shy? Shy? Answer me!” Corva stared at Jaysir in horror. “Oh, no,” she whispered.
“What?” Toby looked from one to the other. “What’s happening?”
“The alarm’s been triggered,” said Jaysir. “Shy’s left his post. He’s on his way down here.
“To kill Sebastine Coley.”
Eleven
“I DON’T LIKE POLICE,” Peter had told Toby once, as they were arguing over yet another point of design for Consensus. “They’re people, and how can you trust people? But I hate cop bots, too, ’cause, well, they’re not people.” In their next version of Consensus, he’d provided a solution to both problems.
Toby sat on the floor with Corva and Jay, looking up at that solution.
They had raced up from the bottom of the facility, hoping to head off Shylif. Toby couldn’t believe he was intending to kill one of the passengers in the module, but Corva had confirmed it. “He joined us because he was hunting this man Coley and he’d tracked him to Thisbe,” she’d said as they ran. “I never thought he’d actually find him!”
Apparently, now that he had, all other considerations had ceased to have any meaning for him. So he’d left his post, and in that instant the alarms that his presence there kept suspended had gone off.
It had taken surprisingly little time for the police dirigible to arrive.
In Consensus, red lights on the heads of bots like these four meant they were being “ridden” remotely by professional law officers. Telepresence had been decent in Toby’s day; he had no doubt it was perfect now. The people remotely controlling these bots would feel they were right here and had to be aware that they stood two heads taller than any normal human and had enough strength to tear off an airlock door with their bare hands—if their robot bodies would let them.
The bots had overrides to prevent their human drivers from killing or badly injuring anyone. The humans, in turn, had overrides on the kinds of simple assumptions a bot might make about what kind of situation they were in. Peter had thought it was a nearly perfect solution.
What made it actually perfect was the fifth bot that hung back from these four. Its headlights were green, meaning it was being ridden by a civilian observer, who would also be recording everything that happened here.
The cop bots didn’t seem too concerned about that fifth guy. One of the red-lit ones crouched with a gnashing sound in front of Toby. “Facial’s not getting a match on this guy. They must be stowaways.”
“They had denners,” said a second one, which stood with crossed arms over Corva. “Saw ’em scamper off that way.”
What about Shylif? Toby exchanged a glance with Jaysir, who gave a tiny shake of his head. Had they found him up top? Or was he hiding somewhere?
“Denners…” The first cop leaned toward Toby. “Is it true what they say? Those things’re altered to work like cicada beds?”