Corva grimaced. “Come on! We’ve gotta find the boys.”
A few calls summoned the denners from where they’d been hiding. They seemed very pleased with themselves, especially Orpheus, who pranced around Toby’s feet before climbing him to hang off his backpack. Wrecks was circling the immobile cop bots, obviously curious as to what had happened to them.
“Hurry!” Corva mounted the steps three at a time. Toby couldn’t understand her sudden panic; in fact, now that he’d crossed the bridge of actually using the console to control his surroundings, he felt strangely elated. Sure, it was a cheat, but he hadn’t hurt anybody, just cut the remote connection to some people in a distant building. With luck they wouldn’t even be able to tell that it was a McGonigal override that had done it.
Since he was thinking this way, Toby wasn’t at all unnerved when they reached the gallery level and found the corridors crowded with bustling military bots.
“Oh, crap.” Corva shrank back as dozens of weapons were raised and aimed at them—but Toby just squinted, and the guns drooped.
He strolled through the frozen combat units. “It’s fine,” he said. He wanted to laugh. “These guys can’t touch us!”
“Oh, they can’t,” somebody said.
Standing in the middle of the corridor was an armored man. One of his metal-sheathed arms was crooked around Shylif’s throat, and the other hand held a gun to his head.
“But I sure can,” he said.
“… McGonigal.”
TOBY AND CORVA EXCHANGED a glance. Jaysir looked at the floor. Then Toby sighed.
“Really, does everybody know about me now?”
The man with his gun to Shylif’s head barked a quick laugh, then said, “I don’t know what you did to my bots, but I can’t afford to have you take them over. If any of them so much as twitches, I’m shooting your friend here.”
“That leaves us at a bit of a standoff, doesn’t it?”
“Not really. Elevator’s this way. Come on.” He backed in the direction of the antechamber.
“I’m sorry, Corva,” mumbled Shylif. “When I heard the name I started off without thinking—but then I changed my mind, and I came back but it was too late and…”
Toby had always thought that Shylif was a powerful man and might be a formidable fighter. Indeed, he was the same size as the man whose arm was around his throat, but his own space gear was strictly commercial. The other man’s had a military exoskeleton built into it; he could have squashed Shylif’s throat with a simple twist of his arm.
They disappeared back down the corridor, and Corva, Jaysir and Toby reluctantly followed. The man’s voice floated back from up ahead: “Glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor, Toby. It’s what I always liked about you.”
Toby blinked. “Wha—”
“He’s a Guide,” whispered Corva. “One of the original Sedna colonists. You didn’t think your family were the only ones to use the locksteps?”
The idea hadn’t occurred to him, like so many other details about this mad future that, once someone mentioned them, became blindingly obvious. He shook his head. “Too much going on.” Then he called out, “Hey! Who are you! It’s been forty years, you know.”
“That it has, Toby. Come in here.” He was waiting for them by the elevator. Four more military bots were standing by its doors.
“Get in the elevator.” The man was nervously eyeing his own bots. Toby knew he could take those over, but he couldn’t be sure he could do it without being noticed. All it would take would be one of them nodding or saluting and Shylif would die. So he marched into the elevator and Corva followed. Their captor edged in, still pushing Shylif ahead of him.
“You spent so much time in those goddamned games that you probably wouldn’t remember me if your life depended on it,” he said as he gave a glance-command to the elevator to start. “I’m Nathan Kenani.”
Toby peered into his face and suddenly saw the younger man in this careworn face. “Nathan!” It was Nathan Kenani, the composer.
“Nice to see you again, kid.” Suddenly Kenani shoved Shylif over to stand coughing next to Toby and the others. “I’m glad you remember me.”
“Of course I remember you! You know, Peter and I used your music in our games.”
“I know you did. Your brother made a goddamned anthem out of one of my pieces. Now every time I hear some innocent young thing belt it out with tears in her eyes, I get the creeps.”
“Sorry about that,” said Toby. “But it’s not really my fault.”
“Isn’t it? You got him started on all this.” Kenani made a wide wave with his gun. “You and your game therapy. Oh yeah, I remember all about that.” He grinned, the drawn skin of his face suddenly giving him a sharklike aspect. Behind him, lightning flickered.
He eyed Corva. “She know about that?” Toby shook his head minutely. “They don’t know anything, do they? Hey, Toby, you remember sheep? Peter and I, we joke about that sometimes. These people have never heard of sheep. If they had, they might be better at recognizing their situation.”
Toby felt sick. “If this world’s so awful, why do you put up with it? There must be others—the whole first generation. Did you all just decide to blindly follow Pete into … this?”
Kenani shook his head. “Some of them fought, but there was a side that was always going to lose, and I decided not to be on it. Us, we’re all that’s left. And, no, this future’s not ‘awful’ at all.”
He glanced up at the approaching cityscape above but kept his pistol steadily aimed at Shylif. “You know what a Guide is, Toby?”
The word had popped up frequently in his library, but so had dozens of other terms; Toby had been overwhelmed by all the details of lockstep history and hadn’t known what to skim and what to research deeply. “Sounded like thought police when I read about it,” he said.
“If you don’t like the lockstep, you can leave anytime you want,” Kenani snapped. “We just have standards for those who stay. It’s pretty simple: if you want to live in Peter’s lockstep, you have to assimilate. That means accepting our way of life—your way of life, Toby, you and your family’s, and mine, and all the originals’. We’ve got millions of people immigrating every year, did you know that? For the most part they come from worlds that are separated from the culture you and I share by more than ten thousand years. They speak languages that share no common words or grammar with ours. They have totally different ideas about basic things like family structure, morality, clothing … If we let them keep their ways, the whole place’d come apart at the seams. And hell, people arriving this month have 360 years of history separating them from those who came from the exact same place one year ago lockstep time.
“We’re the only thing they have in common. The Guides are there to teach people how to live in our culture, is all. That’s why they call us Guides.”
“People worship you like gods,” Corva accused. Her face was pale.
“Not something we encourage,” Kenani retorted. “Unlike your sister,” he added to Toby with an ironic smile.
“Evayne,” said Toby, and his heart was in his throat. He was as responsible for her as he was for Peter. When she ran through the halls of the gray Sedna habitats singing, his heart lifted and he felt he could relax for a minute. When she was silent or had locked herself in her room, then Toby prowled the halls thinking of how to break her out of her shell through some game or gift or clever word. Evayne and Peter, he juggled the happiness of both.
“How is she?”
Kenani blinked at him in surprise. Then he laughed. “You’re probably the first person to ask after her like that in ten thousand years. And nobody’d be more aware of it than her.”