by Vernor Vinge
"You think mankind devolved into the fishermonkeys and these... things?" Wil pointed at the display. He couldn't keep the revulsion from his voice.
Raines sniffed. "That's absurd. And presumptuous, really. Homo sapiens was about the most self-deadly variation in the theme of life. The species insulated itself from physical stress for so long that what few individuals survived the destruction of technology would have been totally unable to live on their own. No, the present-day primates are descended from those in wilderness estates at the time mankind did itself in."
She laughed softly at the look on Wil's face. "You have no business making value judgments on the dragons, Mr. Brierson. Theirs is a beautiful variation. It's survived half a million years -almost as long as Man's experiment with fire. The starterpyres began as small piles of glitter, a kind of sexual display for the males. The first fires were accidental, but the adaptation has been refined over hundreds of thousands of years. It doesn't provide them with all their food, or even most of it. But it's an extra advantage. As a mating ritual, it even survives climatic wet spells. When summers are dry again, it is still ready to use.
"This is how fire was meant to be used, Mr. Brierson. The dragons have little impact on the average tonnage burned; they just redistribute the fires to their advantage. Their way is selflimiting, fitting the balance of nature. Man perverted fire, used it for unlimited destruction."
Every one crazier than the last, thought Wil. Monica Raines sat surrounded and served by the fruits of that "perversion," and all she could do was bitch. She sounded like something out of the twentieth century. "So you don't believe Juan Chanson's theory that man was exterminated by aliens?"
"There's no need for such an invention. Can't you see, Mr. Brierson? The trends were all there, undeniable. Mankind's systems grew more and more complicated, their demands more and more rapacious. I-lave you seen the mines the Korolevs built west of the Inland Sea? They stretch for dozens of kilometers-open pits, autons everywhere. By the late twenty-second century, that's the scale of resources demanded by a single individual. Science gave each human animal the presumption to act like a little god. The Earth just couldn't take it. Hell, I'll bet there wasn't even a war. I'll bet the whole structure collapsed under its own weight, leaving the rapists at the mercy of their victim-nature."
"There's the asteroid belt. Industry could be moved offplanet." In fact, Wil had seen the beginnings of that in his time.
"No. This was an exponential process. Moving into space just postponed the debacle a few decades." She rose to her knees and looked at the telescope display. The vultures had resumed their slow strutting about the rock pile. "Too bad. I don't think we'll get a fire today. They try hardest in the early afternoon."
"If you feel this way about humans, why are you out of stasis just now?" said Lu.
Wil added, "Did you think you could persuade the new settlement to behave more... respectfully toward nature?"
Raines made one of her turned-down smiles. "Certainly not. You haven't seen any propaganda from me, have you? I couldn't care less. This settlement is the biggest I've seen, but it will fail like all the others, and there will be peace on Earth once more. I, um... it's just a coincidence we're all out of stasis at the same time." She hesitated. "I-I am an artist, Ms. Lu. I use the scientist's tools, but with the heart of an artist. Back in civilization, I could see the Extinction coming: there would be no one left to rape nature, but neither would there be anyone to praise her handiwork.
"So I proceed down through time, averaging a year alive in each megayear, making my pictures, taking my notes. Sometimes I stay out for just a day, sometimes for a week or a month. The last few megayears, I've been very active. The social spiders are fascinating, and now-just in the last half million years -the dragon birds have appeared. It's not surprising that we all should be living at the same time."
There was something fishy about the explanation. A year of observing time spread through a million years left an awful lot of empty space. The settlement had only been active for a few months. The odds against meeting her seemed very high. Raines sat uneasily, almost fidgeting under his gaze. She was lying, but why? The obvious explanation was certainly an innocent one. For all her hostility, Monica Raines was still a human being. Even if she could not admit it to herself, she still needed others to share the things she did.
"But my staying is no coincidence, Mr. Brierson. I've got my pictures; I'm ready to go. Besides, I expect the next few centuries -the time it takes you people to die off-will be ugly ones I'd be long gone except for Yel‚n. She demands I stay in this era. She says she'll drop me into the sun if I bobble up. The bitch." Apparently Raines didn't have as much firepower as the Robinsons. Wil wondered if any of the other high-techs were staying under duress. "So you can see why I'm willing to cooperate. Get her off my back."
Despite the sour words, she was eager to talk. She showed them her video of the early dragon birds, back when starting fires was almost an accident. In her fifty-year voyage she had created archives that would have shamed the national libraries of the twentieth century. And Don Robinson was not the only one who made home movies. Monica's automation could rearrange her data into terrifying homotopies, where creatures caught in the blowtorch of time flowed and melted from one form to another. She seemed determined to show them evervthing, and Della Lu, at least, seemed willing to watch.
When they left the blind, deep twilight lay across the grassland. Raines accompanied them to the top of her little canyon. A dry, warm wind rattled through the chaparral; the dragon birds should have no trouble starting their fire if the weather stayed like this. They stood for a moment at the top of the ridgeline. They could see for kilometers in all directions. Bands of orange and red crossed the western horizon. A hint of green lay above that, then violet and starry blackness. Nowhere was there a single artificial light. A smell like honey floated in the breeze.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Raines said softly.
Untouched forever and ever. Could she really want that? "Yes, but someday intelligence will evolve again. Even if you're right about humanity, the world won't stay peaceful forever."
She didn't answer immediately. "It could happen. There are a couple of species that seem to be at the brink of sentience --the spiders for one." She looked back at him, her face lit by the twilight band. Was she blushing? Somehow, his question had hit home. "If it happens... well, I'll be here, right from the beginning of their awareness. I'm not against intelligence by itself, just the abuse of it. Perhaps I can nudge them away from the arrogance of my race." Like an elder god, leading the new creatures in the way of the right. Monica Raines would find people who could properly appreciate her-even if she had to help in their creation.
Lu's flier drove steadily back over the Pacific. The sun rose swiftly from around the shoulder of the Earth. According to his data set it was barely noon in the Asian time zone. The bright sunlight and blue sky (which was really the Pacific below) made such an emotional difference. Just minutes ago all had been darkness and poor Monica's murky thoughts.
"Crazies," said Wil.
"What?"
"All these advanced travelers. I could go a year in police work and not meet anyone as strange: Yel‚n Korolev, who seems to be jealous of me just for liking her girlfriend, and who moped alone for a century after we jumped forward; cute little Tammy Robinson-who is old enough to be my mother-and whose object in life is to celebrate New Year's at the end of time; Monica Raines, who would make a twentieth-century ecofanatic look like a strip miner." And then there's Della Lu, who has lived so long she has to study to seem human at all.
He stopped short and looked guiltily at Della. She grinned knowingly at him, and the smile seemed to reach all the way to her eyes. Damn. There were times now she seemed totally aware. "What do you expect, Wil? We were all a little strange to begin with; the left civilization voluntarily. Since, then, we have spent hundreds-sometimes thousands-of years getting here. That takes a power of will you
would call monomania."
"Not all the high-techs started out crazy. I mean... your original motive was short-range exploration, right?"
"By your standards it wasn't short range. I had just lost someone I cared about very much; I wanted to be alone. The Gatewood's Star mission was a twelve-hundred-year round trip. By the time I got back, I had overshot the Singularity-what Monica and Juan call the Extinction. That's when I left on my really long missions. You've missed all the reasonable high-techs, Wil. They settled down in the first few megayears after Man and made the best of it. You're left with la crud de la crud, so to speak."
She had a point. The low-techs were a lot easier to talk to. Wil had thought that a matter of culture similarity, but now he saw that it went deeper. The low-techs were people who had been shanghaied, or had short-term goals (like the Dasguptas and their foolish investment schemes). Even the New Mexicans, who had an abundance of unpleasant notions, had not spent more than a few years in realtime since leaving civilization.
Okay, so all the suspects were nuts. The problem was to find the nut that was also rotten.
"What about Raines? For all her talk of indifference, she's clearly hostile to the Korolevs. Perhaps she killed Marta just to speed up the `natural process' of the settlement's collapse."
"I don't think so, Wil. I snooped around while we were talking with her. She has good bobbling equipment, and enough automation to run her observation program, but she's virtually defenseless. She doesn't have the depth to fool the Korolev scheduling programs.... In fact, she's terribly under-equipped. If she keeps living a year per megayear, she won't last more than a couple of hundred megayears before her autons begin to fail. Then she's going to find out about nature firsthand.... You should compliment me, Wil; I'm following your advice about the interviews. I didn't laugh when she started on peace and the balance of nature."
Brierson smiled. "Yes. You were a good cointerrogator.
... But I don't think she plans on traveling forever. Her real goal is to play god to the next intelligent race that evolves o¯ Earth."
"The next intelligent race? Then she doesn't realize how rare intelligence is. You may think those fire-making birds are freaks, but let me tell you something: Such developments are a thousand times more common than the evolution of intelligence. Chances are the sun will go red giant long before intelligence reappears on Earth."
"Hmm." He was scarcely in a position to argue. Della Lu was the only living human, perhaps the only person in history, who really knew about such things. "Okay, so she's unrealistic... or maybe she's hiding her true resources, at the Lagrange zones or in the wilderness. Can you be sure she's not playing dumb?"
"Not yet. But when she gives me access to her records, I'll run consistency checks. I have faith in my automation. Raines left civilization seven years before me. Whatever automation she took, mine is better. If she's hiding anything, I will know."
One less suspect, probably. That was a sort of progress.
They flew silently for several minutes, the blue of the Earth on one side, the sun sliding down the other. He could see one of the protection autons, a bright fleck floating against the clouds.
Perhaps he should take the afternoon off, go to the Peacer meeting at North Shore. Still, there was something about Monica Raines. "Della, how do you think Raines would feel if the settlement were a success? Would she be so indifferent to us if she thought we might do permanent damage?"
"I think she would be surprised, and very angry... and impotent."
"I wonder. Let's suppose she doesn't have the usual high-tech battle equipment. If she simply wanted to destroy the settlement, she might not need anything spectacular: perhaps a disease, something with a long incubation period."
Lu's eyes widened almost comically. He had noticed the same mannerism in Yel‚n Korolev. It had something to do with their direct data interface: When confronted with a surprising
75 question demanding heavy analysis, they seemed first startled and then dazed. Several seconds passed. "That's just barely possible. She has a bioscience background, and a small autolab would be hard to spot. The Korolevs' medical automation is good, but it's not designed for warfare...."
She smiled. "That's an interesting idea, Wil. A properly designed virus could evade the panphages and infect everyone before any symptoms appeared. Bobbling out of the area would be no defense."
"Interesting" was not the word Brierson would have used. The diseases spread after the 1997 war had killed most of the human race. Even in Wil's time, less than forty million people lived in North America. By then the terror was gone, and the world was a friendly place, but still-better bombs and bullets than bugs. He licked his lips. "I suppose we don't have to worry about it immediately. She must know how deadly the high-tech response would be. But if our settlement is too successful..."
"Yes. I've put this on my list. Now that we're aware of the possibility, it shouldn't be hard to guard against. I have exploration-duty medical equipment. It's smart and very paranoid."
"Yeah." Nothing to worry about, Wil. They had lost a murder suspect--and possibly gained a genocidal maniac.
EIGHT
Wil didn't make it to the party at North Shore.
At first, the Raines thing had him wound up, and then-well, someone had killed Marta. Most likely that someone wanted the settlement to fail. And he was no nearer cracking the case today than a week ago. Parties would have to wait.
He meshed his data set with the house archives. He could have used the house displays direct, but he felt more at ease with his portable.... Besides, it was one of the few things that had come with him through time. Its memory was an attic filled with a thousand private souvenirs; the date it displayed, 16 February 2100, was when he would be if his old life had continued.
Wil heated his lunch pack and munched absentmindedly at hot vegetables as he scanned his progress. He was behind in his reading; just another good reason to stay home this afternoon. People outside police work didn't realize how much of criminal investigation involved drawing conclusions from databases-usually public databases, at that. Wil's "reading" was the most likely source of real evidence. There was no shortage of things to look at. His house archive was far bigger than any other low-tech's. In addition to the 2201 edition of GreenInc, he had copies of parts of Korolev's and Lu's personal databases.
Wil had insisted on having his own copies. He didn't want networked stuff. He didn't want it changing mysteriously depending on the whim of the original owners. The price of such independence was a certain incoherence. His own processors had to accommodate idiosyncrasies in the structure of the imported data. With Yel‚n's databases, it wasn't too bad. They were designed both for headband use and for old-fashioned query languages. Her engineering jargon was sometimes incomprehensible, but he could get by.
Della's db's were a different story. Her copy of GreenInc was a year more recent than Yel‚n's, but a note announced that the later parts had been severely damaged during her travels. That was an understatement. Whole sections from the late twenty-second were jumbled or just plain missing. Her personal database appeared to be intact, but it used a customized headband design. His processors found it almost impossible to talk to the retrieval programs. Usually the output seemed to be allegorical hallucinations; occasionally he was blocked by the fragments of a personality simulator. Not for the first time in his life, Wil wished he could use interface headbands. They had existed in his time. If you had great native intelligence and a certain turn of imagination, they made computers a direct extension of your mind; otherwise, the bands were little more than electronic drug-tripping. Wil sighed. Yel‚n said the headbands from her era were easier to use; if only she had given him the time to learn how.
Della had nine thousand years of exploration packed away in her database. He'd had tantalizing glimpses-a world where plants floated in the sky, pictures of stars crowding close about something dark and visibly moving, a low-orbit shot of a planet green and cratered. On
one planet, bathed in the glow of a giant red sun, he saw something that looked like ruins. Nowhere else had he seen any sign of intelligence. Was it so rare that all Della ever saw were ruins or fossils of ruins-of civilizations lasting a few millennia, and missed by millions of years? He hadn't yet asked her about what she'd seen. The murder was their immediate business, and until recently she'd been difficult to talk to. But now that he thought about it, she was awfully closemouthed about her travels.
His other researches were going better. He'd studied most of the high-techs. None of them-except Yel‚n and Marta had any special relationship back in civilization. The conclusion couldn't be absolute, of course. The biography companies only had so many spies. If someone was hiding something, and was also out of the public eye, then that something could stay Bidden.
Philippe Genet was one of the least documented. Wil couldn't find any reference to him before 2160, when he began advertising his services as a construction contractor. At that time, he was at least forty years old. You'd have to live like a hermit or have lots of money to go forty years and not get on a junk-mail list or have a published credit rating. There was another possibility: Perhaps Genet had been in stasis before
160. Wil had not pursued that very far; it would open a whole new tree of investigation. Between 2160 and when Genet left civilization in 2201, the trail was sparse but visible. He had not been convicted of any crimes that involved public punishment. He hadn't been seen at public events, or written anything for public scrutiny. From his advertising-and the advertising that was focused back on him-it was clear that his construction business was successful, but not so successful as to attract the attention of the trade journals. Consumer ratings of his work were solid but not spectacular; he came out low in "customer relations." In the 2190s, he followed the herd and began specializing in space construction. Nowhere could Wil find anything that might be a motive. However, with his construction background, Genet was probably one of the best armed of the travelers.
