“I want to see her!”
Again the surprise. Then Kenani laughed. “That’s actually what I had in mind.”
“Wait, you can’t,” interrupted Corva. “You’re a Guide, you work for Peter McGonigal.”
“Do I now?” Kenani appeared to consider the proposition. “If that’s the case, then I guess I should do what Brother Peter told me to do…”
“What did Peter tell you to do?”
“Why, kill you, of course.”
“No!” Toby stepped forward, his face hot and his hands balled into fists. “You’re lying! He wouldn’t hurt me!”
Now the old man just looked sad. “You’re right, he’d never hurt his brother, Toby Wyatt McGonigal. But the Lord of Time? The One who Waits to return and deliver the universe to perfection after fourteen thousand years of buildup and expectation setting? He’d kill him in a heartbeat.”
“But I’m none of those things. He knows it. You know it.”
Kenani tried to shrug in his suit, but its shoulders barely moved. “You know it, I know it, some of the other Guides know it … and that’s about it. The rest of the human race and a goodly chunk of the nonhuman intelligences in this part of the universe see you differently. Peter knows this. He knows what’s at stake if you reappear.”
“I don’t want to reappear! I just want to go home!” He bellowed the last word, and he was standing toe to toe with the Guide. Kenani hardly blinked.
“There’s no home to go back to, Toby. I’m not here to kill you. But if I don’t do that, my only alternative is to hand you over to Evayne. Then, she might kill you, but at least it won’t have been me who had to do it.”
He couldn’t believe Evayne would hurt him either, but longing for home had reminded him of something. “You do have another choice,” he said, stepping back. Outside the elevator car, the rain had stopped, the clouds had parted, and the rainbow-colored clouds and glowing spheres of the Continent were lowering toward them.
“You could bring me to my mother.”
Kenani’s eyes widened, and he gave an involuntary hiss. Then, “She went crazy after you disappeared, Toby. There’s a reason none of us has woken her in thirty years.”
Toby crossed his arms and sneered. “I don’t believe that. She went into cold sleep to wait for me. That’s what all the stories say.”
“Stories?” Kenani laughed. He glanced up at the rapidly approaching cities. “All you know is the stories, isn’t it, Toby? Since you woke you haven’t spoken to anybody who was there. You haven’t been told what really happened.”
Trying to keep his voice level, Toby said, “Then why don’t you tell me?”
WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOORS opened in the customs complex, Nathan Kenani holstered his pistol and waved his three prisoners out. A sizable crowd of human soldiers and military bots was waiting; the men all bowed as one as Kenani appeared.
“I know you’ve got the McGonigal overrides, Toby,” he said, putting a hand on Toby’s shoulder. “You could probably cause some serious mayhem if you took over these bots. But my men would fight. Probably a lot of them would die, and you might too—after all, they don’t know who you are.”
Toby shrugged off the hand. “What if I told them?”
“Any that believed you would probably faint. The rest … well, they’ve heard that one before. My point is, don’t try anything, please. It’ll just end badly.”
“Where are you taking us?” Now at the head of a very large and intimidating retinue, they entered a maze of hallways behind the spaceport’s customs hall.
“My original plan was to load you on my ship and take you back to Peter. Let him deal with you. But with everything … and considering you want to see her anyway … I’ve decided to turn you over to Evayne. So we’re not going anywhere.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s already on her way here. She’s coming through the official differential, so her ship’ll be here at the start of the next cycle. We’ll winter over here and wait for her. It’s just easier that way.”
Corva had been silent for a long time, but now she said, “You must have arrived through the Weekly lockstep.”
Kenani nodded. “We do that a lot—shift differentials to move around quicker. Peter, though—he stays on this time. Means he’s even younger than he used to be.” Now that Corva had reminded him that she was there, he eyed her and Shylif. “By the way, Toby, what do you think we should do with these friends of yours?”
“Let them go! They have nothing to do with any of this.”
“But they know who you are?” Toby had no reply to that. Kenani sighed. “I’ll let you hash that one out with Evayne.”
Toby glared at him. “You said you were going to tell me what really happened. At least do that before you let me see Evayne.”
“Let you see her?” Kenani shook his head. “You’re still living in the past. She will see you—and then only if she chooses to. She may not bother.”
“I can’t believe that!”
They’d come to a long low room with about twenty cicada beds. They looked like half-melted plastic seedpods, black and glossy under amber and mauve lights, with blue telltales dotting their sides.
Kenani gazed pensively at the beds. “There was a time when I wouldn’t have believed it either. But now … well, listen, and then tell me what you think.” He waved at the human part of his retinue and they retreated, leaving only forty or fifty armed bots surrounding them. Kenani had one drag over a recover couch from the far wall, and he sat down on it, legs planted widely apart and his hands on his knees like a Chinese emperor. He frowned at Toby.
“Once upon a time,” he said, “fourteen thousand years ago, a family that used to be rich had its last holdings bought out by the nasty hyperrich who’d taken over the solar system. They had enough money from the sale of that last business for one, maybe two generations to live in some comfort. But their grandchildren were going to be wage serfs like everybody else. There was no hope for them.
“Unless they did something crazy. The trillionaires had plowed under all the laws that might have protected the worlds of the solar system from exploitation. It was a winner-take-all situation, and asteroids and even planets belonged to whoever could get to them first.” He turned to Corva. “Toby’s parents knew that all the worlds in the solar system were claimed already—but way out past Pluto, there were other worlds.
“The parents pooled their money and made an offer to some other idealistic or desperate people—like me—to join them in homesteading Sedna. We spent all our money on a couple of ships and basic life-support and mining supplies. Other groups had done this, but they hadn’t had the resources to make it as far as Sedna. But this family was different. They’d pioneered a new kind of hibernation technology back on Earth. It was originally intended for battlefield and emergency use, but they figured they could use it to minimize their life-support needs on the long trip out.
“One day, the family’s eldest son was lost when his ship … well, it just disappeared. He’d been on his way to claim a comet for the colony. They knew where his ship should be, but if he’d been knocked off course, that straight line became a cone of possible trajectories, and the space they’d have to search in widened with each passing day.
“There were … arguments. His mother and the other kids wanted to send their remaining ship to search for him; his father said they couldn’t spare it and they should use long-range radar and telescopes first. Most of the colonists agreed with him, but as the days and weeks passed, they found nothing on the scopes. His mother’s frantic anxiety turned to bitterness and resentment. The family was…” Suddenly he stopped, glancing sidelong at Toby.