“Wow,” muttered Sol. “So if we took the whole of written human history up until the day Toby first set foot on Sedna, this city’s records are five times longer.”
“It’s got its own languages, its own cuisine and modes of dress,” said Miranda. “But the only reason the city exists at all is to guide visitors to the place where they can—how does it put it here?—‘glimpse the Great Mother resting forever in her crystal coffin.’”
“Quiet now,” Toby told them.
The only photos of his mother’s resting place were long shots taken from at least a kilometer away. Way over there, the procession entered a ramped slot that led down below the vast oval dome covering Mom’s cicada bed. They would shuffle into a narrow chamber containing a single quartz window, through which the blurry shape of the Great Mother could be seen. From here, the dome appeared more like a rounded hill, though it was scrupulously kept clean of vegetation by the same hereditary keepers who served the pilgrims. The dome hadn’t eroded, really, it had just settled gradually and imperceptibly over the centuries, even while the spires that surrounded it were fervently rebuilt.
The landscape beyond the city might well be impossibly old compared to this place, yet Toby had never in his life seen a place that felt as ancient as this.
And this, of course, was the point. This was the gift that Evayne and Peter had bestowed upon humankind: the gift of permanence.
History roared ahead on the lit worlds. Civilizations rose, but they fell, too, and maintaining one at a starfaring level was very difficult. On the worlds circling the stars of the Local Group, humanity and its various offspring had fallen many times in the past fourteen thousand years. Every time it did, the locksteps had been waiting, ready to pick it up again.
Toby got it now. 360/1 and its siblings were like a seed bank; they were insurance. They lived so slowly and were so dispersed that they were ignored. Yet they were always there, had always been there, and, as long as Evayne and Peter had their say, always would be there.
He took off the glasses, once again finding himself squatting by the cold lake. Reaching to pick up another round stone, he hesitated, unable to complete the gesture without wondering just how old this little rock was. “Shit!”
“I beg your pardon?”
Corva stood next to him, hands on her hips, head cocked quizzically.
“Sorry. I was … thinking.”
“Out here? You’ll catch one of those ancient diseases. Influenza. Or scrapie or something.”
“They don’t work that way.” Then he held out his hand. “Wanna walk with me?”
He saw her nearly glance over her shoulder, then think better. She took his hand and they scrunched through the wet gravel. The pink clouds stuttered and turned gray, and as his eyes adjusted, everything slowly washed into normality. He could be on Earth for all he knew.
“Are you feeling all right?”
He shrugged. “I’m okay. They want me back in ten minutes.”
“But you’ve been negotiating for three days! When is this going to end?”
“Soon,” he said curtly. The government had been making offers, and they’d been running vastly detailed simulations covering all sorts of plans. In some, Evayne somehow got past the orbital defenses and rained down fire from orbit. In those cases, the government admitted it would have to give Toby up without firing a shot in return, in order to save its own people. The simulated Evayne played much like he remembered her doing in Consensus. She rarely chose such a brutally direct option. More often, based on Thisbe’s historical records, she would land and seek to capture her target personally.
Toby was not her first Toby, apparently. There had been many pretenders over the ages, all claiming to be the returned messiah. Some had raised huge armies, but none had been able to crack the biocrypto. They couldn’t prove who they were. None had made it to Destrier, though the more deluded—those who truly believed they were Toby Wyatt McGonigal—swore that if only they were given the chance to lay their palm on the circular lock to the Great Mother’s chamber, they would prove who they really were.
Evayne usually left them to the Guides, but in particularly troublesome cases she would intervene directly. So far the sims showed her behaving exactly as she had in those cases.
Last night, Toby had sat with Corva in front of a fire under the vast peaked roof of the tent house they’d given him. He’d dared to say to her then what he couldn’t say to Halen and the other angry opponents of the McGonigals: “Maybe she doesn’t know it’s really me.”
Corva hadn’t replied. They’d been sitting close together but not touching. They hadn’t kissed since that first time before the last wintering over. He hoped it was because events were just rampaging ahead too fast; there were always people about. They hadn’t had a chance to talk about it and, well, he felt awkward.
Her silence now had seemed like a blow, though. He’d wanted her to agree. He wanted somebody to tell him his sister wasn’t a monster. But it hadn’t happened.
Now, holding her hand on the cold beach, he glanced at Corva and had to smile. Under her black bangs, her face was fierce with concentration. Thinking, always thinking, that was her. She didn’t know the first thing about rendering sympathy, but that didn’t mean she didn’t care how he felt.
Suddenly she looked up. “Where were you, just now?”
“I was visiting Destrier.”
She shuddered and let go of his hand. “That place is creepy. I can’t believe you want to … I mean, I know why, it’s just that…”
“Nobody’s more creeped out than me. But it’s not some weird goddess they’ve got under glass there. It’s my mom.”
“Not just your mom.”
“Just my mom.” When she sent him one of her skeptical looks, he growled. “Corva, she’s slept almost as long as I have. She doesn’t know that Evayne made her into the Great Mother, any more than I knew I was this stupid Emperor of Time! The world’s not going to end when she wakes up. She’s not going to make some mystical pronouncement that will change history. She’s going to…” Ask where her children are.
That, of course, was where Toby got the creeps. It wasn’t those millions of worshipers lapping against the sides of Mother’s stone dome that bothered him. It was the question of what he would have to say when he woke her:
“Why did you abandon Peter and Evayne to wait for me?”
What she’d done was wrong, it was sick. He’d been dead, as far as any of them had known. Why would she entomb herself to wait for a child who would never come home?
Corva sensed his discomfort and shrugged. “I don’t know how you’d even get there,” she said lightly. “Destrier’s better defended than Barsoom. If Evayne and Peter don’t want you there, you’d need an army and a navy as big as the whole lockstep’s just to knock on the front door.”
“Yes, well, talk to your brother about that,” he said. “He’s figured out how to get one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come,” he said, “I’ll show you.” He began walking back up the beach.
“We’ve been running sims for two days now.” He waved to one of the bots that stood near the largest tent complex, and it waved back. “In a situation like this it’s all about who can strike first. Evayne’s hoping to get here while we’re all asleep. If I’m not the real Toby, then she’s certain to be able to, because she’s going to arrive in seven months, realtime. We’ll be wintering over.”