She nodded cautiously. “Hello.”
Toby sighed. “You’re thinking that I’m surely recording this, and that you’d better mind what you say in case I spread it all over the galaxy. Does that mean we can’t have a real conversation?”
She half smiled. “We wouldn’t have that problem if you’d just meet me face-to-face.”
“Not going to happen.”
She shrugged dismissively. “It doesn’t matter. Anything we said to each other would be taken as a Sign. I’ve been playing this game a lot longer than you have. I know what would happen if you broadcast this conversation. Half the lockstep would believe it, half would think it’s a fake—and that you’re a fake. Can you tell me that you know which half would get to you first?”
For all her brave words, Evayne didn’t look as confident as she had in her first message to Thisbe. She must have accessed the planet’s lockstep system and seen that he’d reset the frequency of all the McGonigal cicada beds on the planet. It was now twelve years until Thisbe was due to awake.
“Peter and I are so sorry about the whole Lowdown thing,” she said now. “We didn’t think it was you. Why would we? There have been so many pretenders over the years…”
The knot in his stomach tightened even more. He wanted to believe her so much, but— “Ammond and Persea had my ship. If that wasn’t enough, all they had to do to prove that it was me was ask me to command any piece of Cicada Corp equipment. I’ve wondered why they waited until we went to Little Auriga to do it. It must be because somebody ordered them not to try it. Somebody … didn’t want them to know.” He shook his head. “That would have been Peter or you. And I’m sure you talked about it.”
“But they tried to kidnap you—”
“They ran because Peter ordered me killed!” The knot was unraveling and in its place he felt a rushing fury that made him careless of what he said now. “And you went along with it just as casually as if this were still Consensus and it was just another move!”
She shook her head quickly. “No no, he didn’t tell me—”
“Evayne. I know you knew.”
He hadn’t known, not for sure, but her silence now told him the truth. She didn’t reply, but she didn’t look away either. He remembered that defiance from when they were kids. He’d always known how to wear it down—but would the old ways work now?
“Why?” Damn it, his voice had cracked saying that. He bit his lip and sat tensely, scared of saying even one more word.
She crossed her arms and—a small triumph for him—broke eye contact with him. “You said it yourself,” she murmured. “We’re not playing a game here.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think you can just reset Thisbe’s frequency, and there’ll be no consequences?” She shook her head and laughed bitterly. “That wouldn’t work even in Consensus! The ripples would spread. Other worlds would be emboldened, they’d flout the lockstep rules, too. Toby, you don’t know how close it all is to breaking up as it is!”
“You called me Toby,” he said bitterly. “That’s something, I guess.”
“You think you can just come back? If you did, you’d always be a pawn. I’m sorry I set it up that way—we really did think you were dead. It is what it is: if the world finds out you’re back.”
“Evie! You tried to kill me before I’d done anything!”
She opened her mouth, closed it.
Toby hurried on: “The solution to this whole ‘Toby the messiah’ thing was obvious all along. All you had to do was bring me in and declare me as your son. Raised in secret in another lockstep, so you could say you only had me like a month ago. So I’m a McGonigal, well, it’s still a big deal, but I’m not the McGonigal. Why the hell didn’t you do that?”
She started to answer, but he cut her off. “Why not just come to me? Take me home? Didn’t you know that all I want to do is come home?” His voice was cracking again. He was on the edge of tears.
“Toby.” He was startled at the huskiness in her own voice. “Toby, do you know why I never had kids?”
He shook his head. “You used to talk about having a family when you grew up.”
“I would have, too, but we got too busy, Peter and I. First it was running Sedna with Mom. Then, when her lockstep scheme was so successful, it was all about keeping that going. It wasn’t easy. People flooded in from everywhere—at least that’s how it seemed to us, sleeping for thirty years at a time. Whole cities would spring up overnight, new colonies of people speaking new languages, even biologically different! Posthuman, or barely human. We had to wrangle it all, find a way to make them fit, or the whole thing would collapse.”
She laughed drily. “There were already legends about us. People were starry-eyed when they met Peter and me. They stammered, practically wet themselves. And they always—always—asked about you.”
“Why?”
“’Cause you’d disappeared mysteriously, and Mom had spent so much time and energy trying to find you. Understand, by that time she’d been searching for centuries, realtime. Word got around. You were the big secret at the heart of the lockstep. And it started to get out of control.”
“So you decided to steer it.”
“Toby, I was way too late.” Her expression was fierce and unrepentant. “By the time I knew what was happening, I couldn’t be seen in public with any man other than Peter without the rumors flying that it was you, secretly returned. There were no men who didn’t treat me like some unattainable goddess anyway, except for the original Sedna settlers. They all had similar problems, and what, was I going to marry one of them? They were all like uncles … it was never an option.”
“But you could have rewritten the legends,” he insisted. “Could have said I’d been found, dead or something…” But she was shaking her head again.
“By the time I realized I had to act, there were these cults, sects, which had developed their own stories. There was one that prophesied that the great sign of your return was going to be me announcing that you’d been found dead! And there was another one …
“Toby, there’s a whole branch of the religion that believes I’m going to announce I’ve got a son, and I’ll reveal him and he’ll be already grown up. And I’ll say … I’ll say”—there were tears in her eyes now—“I’ll say I only just had him but hid him away in another lockstep where he’s grown up. But I’ll be lying, because it’ll really be you. You returned!
“Don’t you get it?” She was leaning forward, very close to the camera. He felt he could almost reach out and touch her, and the stricken look on her face made him want to hug her to him. “You can never be seen with me, except as a prisoner, an official impostor. Any hint that you’re not that will be taken by someone as proof that you’re the Emperor of Time returned to end the locksteps. Toby, you can’t return. You can’t abdicate. You can’t keep a low profile, you can’t adopt an alias and try to disappear. It’s all been anticipated, it’s all expected and watched for, and any hint of this or that prophecy coming true will spark revolutions and pogroms. Peter and I aren’t just the most famous people in the local universe. We’re the most watched, most spied upon. You can’t just come home.
“You can’t be here at all.”
The idea echoed around in his mind for long seconds: trapped, we’re both trapped in this, but then … Something about Evayne’s expression sparked a memory. He could picture her so clearly standing with her hands behind her back, solemnly swearing to him that she hadn’t taken his favorite hall flyer. Yeah, he remembered that look, and he’d seen it other times, too. Toby laughed.