Toby gestured for the bots to let him go. “But even the fastest ship would take years to get there. Unless you’re antimatter powered, you’re looking at decades…”
Ammond shrugged. “A little over twelve years, but don’t worry. We’ll be home in a month.”
Freed of the bots and standing on his own, Toby still staggered. “What?”
Ammond laughed at the look on his face. “No, of course we’re not going to go faster than light! That’s impossible, right?
“But think about it, Toby. Little Auriga is a half light-year away. Even in the fastest possible ship any round-trip we took would mean being away from home for a year. But what if you could click a pause button when you leave—a pause button for your whole world? And when you get back from your round-trip, you unpause it and it’s like you were never away?
“That’s the main reason why our whole world winters over. All the Lockstep worlds pause and unpause on a schedule. We call the schedule a frequency, and each wake-sleep cycle is called a turn. That makes this is the only place in the universe where we can go to sleep on board a spaceship, wake up at another world a half light-year away, spend a month there, then come home to find only a month’s passed at home. There are tens of thousands of worlds open to us, and we could visit any of them and come home to find this one unchanged.”
Toby shook his head. “That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.” What was especially weird about it, though, was that it made perfect sense. He had gone into cold sleep to avoid the tedium of the five-month trip to Rockette. What if everybody back home had gone into hibernation at the same time? It would have felt like a pretty short trip. But anybody visiting Sedna in the middle of the whole thing would have found a cold, dead world …
He looked over; Ammond was grinning at him.
“What do you say, Toby?” He laughed again. “Would you like to see the universe?”
TOBY OPENED HIS EYES with a start. Were they there already? It seemed like just a few seconds ago that he’d shut his eyes in his little wedge-shaped cabin aboard the Lockstep ship Vance II.
Suddenly something eclipsed his view of the far wall—a vast pale oval. He blinked at it, and it swam into focus.
A girl about his own age was eye to eye with him, her face just on the other side of the cicada bed’s plastic cover.
She rapped on the material and he jerked. “Can you hear me?” Her words were the first he’d heard in weeks that didn’t sound like a giant was speaking them; they must have swapped out the argon in the ship’s air. She sounded like a girl.
He nodded. She looked around, the flicking movement of her head making her hair swirl around her in zero gravity. Then she gripped both sides of the bed and stared in at him with unsettling intensity.
“We’ve only got a couple of seconds before the alarms’ll go off,” she said. “Listen to me! You can’t trust those people who found you. They are not your friends. Do. You. Understand?”
Dumbly, he shook his head. She cursed in frustration.
“You’ve got to get away from them! The first chance you get. Now, I—look, I gotta go. Before the bots spot me.”
Her face swept off and away, leaving only the blank wall.
“Wait, who—” He reached for the bed’s release switch, but she’d done something to it. His strength was failing, he felt again the spiral of overwhelming sleepiness that signaled the beginning of hibernation. He had time for just one last startled thought: she was the girl who’d spoken to him in Ammond’s courtyard that first day.
Three
TOBY LOOKED AT HIS feet and tried to convince himself that the last time he’d worn these shoes was thirty years ago. He’d gone to bed on Lowdown and when he woke the gravity was different. They were on another world. Despite having been in hibernation before, he couldn’t wrap his head around it. It all seemed too easy.
After breakfast in what looked like a windowless airport lounge, he and his new friends had walked a few short corridors and come to a glass-walled elevator. Along with Ammond and Persea and the usual crowd of household bots, he was now descending in this. Their plunge into the depths seemed endless, but he knew this is what you had to do on the coldest worlds: dig deep.
“I don’t feel any different,” he said to Persea. “I mean, I feel like I just slept an ordinary night. Cold sleep—when we did it before, waking up was like getting over a dose of the flu.”
Persea nodded. “What’s the flu? —Never mind. We’ve had a little time to perfect cold sleep. But … I don’t know, should we tell him?” Free of Lowdown’s strange air, her voice was a soft soprano. Toby was having trouble getting used to that, too.
Ammond shrugged. There was light below; they were coming to some destination, and he was leaning down to try to see it. “He’ll find out eventually.”
Persea sighed. “One of the ways we improved on the old cold sleep was to implant half the hibernation system in our bodies. When we went to wake you up, we found out you didn’t have those. That’s … kind of shocking to anybody from a lockstep world. So before we revived you we, well, we put them in.”
“You what?”
She looked down, apparently embarrassed. “It’s perfectly normal. And you didn’t feel a thing, did you? Anyway, it’s just a mix of artificial organs and nanotech—we call them blue blood cells—oh, and all your cells have a kind of artificial mitochondria in them, too, that can shut down your cellular machinery nearly instantly and start it up again at an external signal. All this stuff works with the cicada beds to make the whole process easier on us. That’s why you feel so normal even though we’ve been asleep for thirty years.”
“Ah, right.” The cicada beds on the ship had certainly been very different from the pods his parents had designed. Those looked ominously like covered operating tables. The one last night had been a simple bed really, with a hard plastic canopy.
Somebody had spoken to him through that canopy. He’d tried to remember what that had been about, but the memory was elusive.
Thinking about implanted organs, he couldn’t help patting his chest and sides. Where had they stuck those things? He didn’t have any scars.
“Yeah, but…” He forgot what he was going to ask, because just below them the stone walls around the elevator swept back, becoming a ceiling that receded above them. Persea was watching with a half smile when Toby turned his attention downward; he couldn’t help the grin of delight that came over him. “It works! Ammond, Persea, this is what we wanted to do on Sedna!”
He’d glimpsed the surface of Little Auriga through a small window at the docks. Deep crimson plains under a star-spattered sky: it could have been Sedna, and he’d idly wondered whether the similarities were more than skin-deep. Apparently, they were.
The Sedna colonists had known there was an ocean somewhere under the frozen surface of the little world. If they could get there, they’d figure out some way to terraform it—that was the plan. Here on Little Auriga, they’d made that plan a reality.
The elevator was descending from the roof of a cavern floored by black water. As they descended, he could see that the space wasn’t a single cavern but more of an uneasy interface between ice and water—an undulating realm of air pockets that rose above the waves and bellies of pale white that plunged deep beneath it. It was a kind of frozen maze whose ceiling varied from impossibly high to just skimming the waves. Brilliant lamps shone deep into the blue-green walls and slanting ceilings. Directly below, the lamps revealed a city.
Persea was nodding. “Auriga’s a true water world. This ocean’s not just a thin layer under the ice. It goes all the way down.”