Since he remembered no more, Toby’s thoughts drifted away, and he fell asleep again—until suddenly he saw his sister and mother standing in front of him. This was a memory, too, but one from a different time than the first. Here, Evayne was surrounded by a little retinue of walking dolls, their artificial minds set to trauma mode so that they cooed and comforted her as she went about her day. Mother had no such help, and she twisted her hands together as she said over and over, “He’ll come back to us. I know he will.”
Toby sat up with a shout and was back on Lowdown. And though the amber morning was silent and the skies serene, he was shaking.
THE DAYS INCHED BY. Toby would rise shortly after the sky was turned on and eat a gigantic breakfast before starting his exercises. After a couple of weeks he’d been able to lose the exoskeletons, but real gravity was still tough on him. He walked a little more every day.
He wasn’t allowed on the streets. When he asked Persea why, she shrugged and said, “We do a pretty good job of keeping ahead of disease these days, but there’s still ten thousand years’ worth of new and evolved bugs out there. We need to immunize you by stages before you start even going close to other people. That’s partly why it took us so long to wake you up—we had to clear our own systems first.”
The vaccines were in the food, apparently. When Persea explained all this to Toby, he almost told her about his encounter with the girl in the outer courtyard; but if she or the animal had given him something, it was probably too late now anyway. He stayed silent, but the idea of countless new diseases lurking in wait for his unsuspecting immune system kept him slightly on edge.
He couldn’t go out, but he could walk the rooftops and galleries that stretched between the buildings of Ammond’s estate. From there, he could see people in the streets below and almost hear the murmur of their conversations. He kept hoping that he would see the girl again. He hoped she’d been a legitimate visitor to the estate, but her words to him—“I’m not here”—suggested she might have been an intruder. Whichever she was, either she hadn’t come back or wasn’t allowed to see him in his current state of quarantine.
A clue to why she might have been here lay in one of the estate’s central courtyards. There, a series of cages held many little catlike creatures like the one that confronted him that first day. Persea and Ammond didn’t keep them in the main house, but apparently they bred them.
The city outside was full of chattering, lively people, and when Toby knelt on the edge of the rooftop he could hear their voices. They spoke a bewildering variety of languages. They dressed just as diversely. That uneasy familiarity still lay at the heart of all the fashions he saw and in the architecture of the coral-colored towers. Toby couldn’t figure it out but soon got used to it.
He probably should have investigated. He should have asked questions. But, on the third day of his waking, Persea gave Toby the personal effects he’d brought with him in the tug. Amid all that were his glasses, and he snatched them up and put them on.
Persea and Ammond didn’t wear glasses, but he’d seen them issue silent orders to the household bots. They must have implants—not uncommon on Earth in Toby’s day but incompatible with the freeze-thaw cycles of hibernation. Toby hadn’t thought about that too much, since there was so much else to absorb about this world. As soon as he put on his own glasses he summoned the backups of Sol and Miranda stored in them, and he wept when they came to wrap their arms around him, because he couldn’t feel their touch.
“You stupid boy, you should be asking questions,” Miranda chided him a few days later, when she found out how little he knew. Toby hadn’t been spending much time with her; when he wasn’t walking the rooftops or exercising or eating, he retreated into the Consensus Empire. Peter had uploaded several months’ worth of moves before the accident that had knocked out the tug’s engines and brain. This was all new to Toby. He could pretend for hours at a time that Peter was still alive, and that his brother could still surprise him.
“Where’s the television, the movies?” Miranda had pressed. “What about music? I haven’t heard any since you put your glasses on. How does this world work? You have to find out, Toby.”
He did start asking, at first just to get Miranda off his back. The household bots were dumb as stumps and wouldn’t answer his questions. And the few humans other than Persea and Ammond whom he met mostly shrugged their shoulders when he asked them anything complicated.
So he knew he was skating along the surface of some more complex situation, seeing the streets, the people, and skies full of air traffic but understanding none of it. When he wasn’t being overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of Lowdown he still couldn’t focus on the mystery of his current life. His thoughts always drifted back to his lost home, and when that would happen he would pick up his glasses and revisit it—or what little of it he actually had. Most of the glasses’ memory was taken up by the Consensus Empire.
The terrible thing was that before leaving for Rockette, he’d purged his glasses’ memory to make more space for Consensus. He had no pictures or video of his family, only Peter and Evayne’s Consensus avatars, who looked and sounded nothing like them.
It was in the real city that memory tended to clobber him. Walking above the hubbub, he kept thinking he saw his dad in the street below, or his mother half turned away in conversation. He’d leap to the railing with a shout, causing his robotic escort to jerk in reflexive surprise; and then he’d see that he’d been mistaken. Every time this happened—and it happened every day—that momentary leap of hope was instantly followed by a crushing sadness that practically stopped him in his tracks.
Down in the inaccessible streets (the city’s name was Windward, he’d learned) he saw people with black skin and long features, people with orange hair and blue eyes, even people whose skin was a pale green. They dressed in robes, in skin-tight jumpsuits, in dresses, skirts, tunics, space suits. They were all from here. He saw nobody from home.
After being away from Sedna for only a few weeks, he could barely remember the colony itself. It was a gray blur of plastic-sheet walls, cold pipes and crawl spaces, broke-down bots and industrial noise. His parents’ faces danced and wavered on that background, themselves threatening to fade just as quickly.
All of this drove him back to Consensus, where he could tell his miseries to game characters he’d known for years. Fake friends, but the only friends he had right now.
Two weeks after his awakening, he heard Ammond and Persea arguing. They were going at it pretty loudly, because they were audible several rooms away; but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. A little while later Ammond came to him, appearing cheerful and unconcerned—but maybe a little too cheerful. “Well, Toby,” he said, “are you ready to do some traveling?”
Toby was wrestling with some butler bots, which twisted and turned in ways guaranteed to give his muscles the best workout. He frowned at Ammond from a nearly upside-down position. “The south polar observatory?” Persea had talked about that; it was one of the places these two owned.
But Ammond shook his head. “Little Auriga. It’s a planet about half a light-year from here. We’ve got some friends there we’d like you to meet, and … well, let’s face it—it’s a beautiful world. I think you’ll like it.”