“Because we’d been tracking these dots. They were on their way to Wallop, but they changed course right about the time you left.”
“Ah. How many ships?”
“A hundred forty.”
They couldn’t be that big, individually … but still, each one could have the nuclear power to wipe out a few cities.
Toby stared at the display. He, Peter and Evayne had deployed fleets like this in Consensus many times. Of course, that had been a fantasy world of faster-than-light travel. Still, he remembered Evayne’s attitude toward military solutions. She’d never hesitated.
Long was talking, but Toby wasn’t listening anymore. He was remembering how they’d divided empires among them and how passionate Peter had been about the game. It wasn’t a game to him, it was his lifeline, his only route to feeling secure about the world.
Redesign it. Make it perfect. Then make sure it stayed that way.
Evayne had been too young to understand Peter’s passion, but she’d certainly picked up on it. And now? They both ruled a real empire, and they’d been doing it for decades. It wasn’t a game anymore, the stakes were real, and the one person in the world who could destroy everything they had built had just reappeared.
For the first time Toby got it—he understood how Evayne could really be on her way here to kill him. All he had to do was stop imagining the Evayne he’d known, the little girl, and imagine an older woman whose childhood was a blur now and whose reality was rulership.
His mouth dry, he said, “How does this work?”
People had been talking, but his words stopped everyone.
“What does she do when she gets here?”
Long cleared his throat. “We’ll be wintering over. The whole world will be hibernating, at least all the McGonigal beds will be. Normally ships arrive at different times, and they all go dormant until start-of-turn. But in a case like this … you want to be awake first. So they’ll take action as soon as they arrive.”
“What action?”
He looked uncomfortable. “Land in force, wake us up and demand that we turn you over.”
Toby nodded slowly. Advantage went to whoever woke first. “Can you just stay awake until she gets here?”
“We can leave a military force awake, but it’ll cost us. We could also set the force to wake up a month before she arrives. We’ve got a lot of non-McGonigal cicada beds, but not enough yet for a real defense. Either way, it ends in a confrontation, and she can threaten millions of innocent lives. Most of the population will be wintering over, so they’ll be helpless.”
“Not if I wake everybody,” said Toby.
“Exactly.”
“And we know when she’s going to get here?”
“We know the earliest date she can arrive, yes.”
The tables would be turned if all of Thisbe was awake and ready when Evayne arrived. She had to know that, but she was coming anyway, and that made Toby uneasy. Did she really want to kill him? If not, then why bring a whole fleet with her? It made no sense.
He looked around the room, and his gaze fell upon Halen Keishion. Corva’s brother was watching him in return, and he had a smile on his face that could only be described as smug.
There would be no more doubts about who he was if he changed Thisbe’s frequency. Only a McGonigal could do that. There might be rumors and leaks coming from the Thisbe government now, but if he repelled Evayne word would spread instantly through the lockstep. People would wake at the next turn to the news that the Emperor of Time was returned. Sooner or later he would go to Destrier and wake up the Great Mother. And then time—or at least lockstep time—would come to an end.
There was going to be panic and mass hysteria. Millions would flock to Toby’s side, believing that somehow they would be saved by him. Others would side with Peter and Evayne, especially if they abandoned the myth and revealed the truth that Toby was just an ordinary person. There would be chaos and civil war if Thisbe didn’t give Toby to Evayne.
Halen knew this. He’d planned for it.
And he was smiling.
TOBY HAD BEEN BOMBARDED with options, proposals, and facts and details for days now. On the third afternoon, mentally overloaded, he managed to break away from the crush of subdued but frantic officials for a few minutes. He hunkered down on his haunches to toss pebbles into the cold lake.
“How am I supposed to know what to do?” he asked. “There’s just too much to take in.”
“I disagree.” It was Sol, invisible but audible through the earpiece in Toby’s glasses. About halfway through the day of meetings, Toby’d had the brilliant idea of waking his two remaining Consensus characters. Sol and Miranda had been listening in since then, but until this moment they’d been silent.
“What do you mean?” He picked up another smooth pebble and gave it a toss that he hoped would skip it. It sank immediately.
“Before all of this happened, you were following where your own research took you.” Now it was Miranda, speaking in his other ear while Toby groped for another pebble. “You’ve been reviewing the records from the twentier. But they’re not the only source available to you, you know.”
“Huh. I guess.” Summoning the courage to watch the twentier’s records had been exhausting. Because of how difficult those had been, he’d been holding off exploring the other aspect of lockstep life that had made him most uneasy. Obviously, he was out of time with that one.
“Show me Destrier,” he told the glasses.
As always, the amount of information on offer was overwhelming, so Toby had learned to start with kids’ picture books. He found one in the Thisbe Internet and flipped to a page captioned THE GRAND PROCESSIONAL.
In the picture, a sea of pilgrims—he recognized the robes he’d seen at the pilgrimage center on Wallop—were caught midshuffle as they moved down a vast, seemingly endless avenue. The scene was lit by a dozen or so little suns, probably orbital light platforms.
The stones of this grand avenue were worn into smooth grooves by millennia of sliding feet. According to the book, they were replaced every few centuries. The stones of the pyramidal towers that lined the avenue were also replaced on a rotating schedule, such that out here, at least, nothing of the original building material remained. The holy city renewed itself like a living body, shedding cells continuously. —Maybe, but everywhere Toby looked, the surfaces were smoothed and sculpted into natural-looking contours. It was uncanny, as if by wind and rain Nature had sculpted something that looked like a city yet was entirely natural.
The book proudly told how this shuffling procession had been inching forward, reciting one particular chant without pause, for over ten thousand years. Supplicants from all over the galaxy came here; not all were human. They gave up fortunes, families, entire lives to endure decades, even centuries of travel, simply for the chance to put on a coarse robe and parade, just once, down this avenue. Some fainted on the way and others died—just for the opportunity to spend a few precious minutes in the presence of the divine.
The domes of the city looked out on a plain of dazzling white frost dotted with towering spires. It was illegal to walk there, and to the discerning eye that plain should have been far more awe-inspiring than this little road. Those spires had stood, unmoved and unchanging, for eight billion years. Next to that, the centuries of wear and tear visible around the Great Mother’s resting place were nothing. Less than an eyeblink.
Sol and Miranda were reading along with Toby as he flipped through the book. “It says here,” said Sol, “that all of Destrier experienced time within the 360/1 lockstep, except for the domes in these pictures. They’re in realtime.”
“So those people there…” Miranda’s forearm and finger appeared in Toby’s virtual view as she pointed to a bald-headed man in one of the shots. “His family’s been helping pilgrims into their robes for hundreds of generations.”