Across Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Yel‚n was amused by Dilip Dasgupta's dealings with New Mexico: "Good for him; no one should be taking any crap from those atavists.

  "You know what Tioulang and Fraley did when I started Mama's giveaway?" she continued. "They told me how they had their disagreements, but that the future of the race was of supreme importance; their experts had gotten together, come up with a `Unity Plan.' It specified production goals, resource allocation, just what every damn person was going to do for the next ten years. They expected me to jam this piece of wisdom down everyone's throat.... Idiots. I have software that's spent decades crunching on these problems, and 1 can't plan at the level of detail these jerks pretend to. Marta would be proud of me, though; I didn't laugh out loud. I just smiled sweetly and said anyone who wanted to follow their plan was certainly welcome to, but that I couldn't dream of enforcing it. They were insulted even so; I guess they thought I was being sarcastic. It was after that that Tioulang started peddling his line about majority rule and unity against the queen on the mountain."

  Other items were more serious, and did not amuse her at all. There were 140 low-tech females. Since the founding of the settlement, her medical service had diagnosed only four pregnancies. "Two of the women requested abortions! I will not do abortions, Brierson! And I want every woman off contraceptive status."

  They had talked around this problem before; Wil didn't know quite what to say. "This could just drive them into the arms of the NMs and Peacers." Come to think of it, this was one issue where Korolev and the governments probably saw eye to eye. Fraley and Tioulang might make a show of supporting reproductive freedom, but he couldn't imagine it as more than a short-term ploy.

  The anger left Yel‚n's voice. She was almost pleading. "Don't they see, Wil? There have been settlements before. Most were just a family or two, but some-like Sanch‚z's were around half our size. They all failed. I think ours may be big enough. Just barely. If the women can average ten children each over the next thirty years, and if their daughters can perform similarly, then we'll have enough people to fill the gaps left as automation fails. But if they can't, then the technology will fail, and we'll actually lose population. All my simulations show that what's left won't be a viable species. In the end, there'll be a few high-techs living a few more subjective centuries with what's left of their equipment."

  Marta's vision of a flamed-out ramjet diving Earthwards passed through Wil's mind. "I think the low-tech women want humanity back as much as you, Yel‚n. But it takes a while to get hardened to this situation. Things were so different back in civilization. A man or a woman could decide where and when and whether-"

  "Inspector, don't you think that I know that? I lived forte years in civilization, and I know that what we have here stinks.... But it's all we've got."

  There was a moment's awkward silence, then: "One thing I don't understand, Yel‚n. Of all the travelers, you and Marta had the best intuition about the future. Why didn't..." The words slipped out before he could stop them; he really wasn't trying to provoke a fight. "Why didn't you think to bring along automatic wombs and a zygote bank?"

  Korolev's face reddened, but she didn't blow up. After a second she said, "We did. As usual, it was Marta's idea. I made the purchase. But... I screwed up." She looked away from Brierson. It was the first time he'd seen shame in her manner. "I, I didn't test the shipment enough. The company was rated AAAA; it should have been safe as houses. And we were so busy those last few weeks... but I should have been more careful." She shook her head. "We had plenty of time later, on the future side of the Singularity. The equipment was junk, Brierson. The wombs and postnatal automation were shells, with just enough processing power to fake the diagnostics."

  "And the zygotes?"

  Yel‚n gave a bitter laugh. "Yes. With bobbles it should be impossible to mess that up, right? Wrong. The zygotes were malformed, the sort of nonviable stuff even Christians won't touch.

  "I've studied that company through GreenInc; there's nothing that could have tipped us off. But after their last rating, the owners must have gutted their company. The behavior was criminal; when they were caught, it would take them decades to make reparations. Or maybe we were a one-shot fraud; maybe they knew I was making a long jump." She paused. The zip returned to her voice. "I wish they were here now. I wouldn't have to sue them; I'd just drop 'em into the sun.

  "Sometimes innocent people have to pay for the mistakes of others, Inspector. That's how it is here. These women must start producing. Now."

  Wil spread his hands. "Give them, give us some time."

  "It may be hard for you to believe, but time is something we don't have a whole lot of. We waited fifty million years to get everyone together. But once this exercise is begun, there are certain deadlines. You've noticed that I haven't given away any medical equipment."

  Wil nodded. Peacer and NM propaganda noticed it loudly. Everyone was welcome to use the high-techs' medical services, but, like their bobblers and fighting gear, their medical equipment had not been part of the giveaway.

  "We have almost three hundred people here now. The high-end medical equipment is delicate stuff. It consumes irreplaceable materials; it wears out. This is already happening, Brierson, faster than a linear scale-up would predict. The synthesizers must constantly recalibrate to handle each individual."

  There was a tightness in Wil's throat. He wondered if this was how a twentieth-century type might feel on being told of inoperable cancer. "How long do we have?"

  She shrugged. "If we gave full support, and if the population did not increase, maybe fifty years. But the population must increase, or we won't be able to maintain the rest of our technology. The children will need plenty of health care.... Now, I don't know how long it will be before the new civilization can make its own medical equipment. It could take anywhere from fifty to two hundred years, depending on whether we have to mark time waiting for a really large population or can get exponential tech growth with only a few thousand people.

  "No one need die of old age; I'm willing to bobble the deathbed cases. But there will be old age. I'm not supplying age maintenance-and, with certain exceptions, I will not for at least a quarter century."

  Wil was a biological twenty. Once, he'd let it slide to thirty -and discovered that he was not a type that aged gracefully. He remembered the flab, the belly that swelled over his pants.

  Yel‚n smiled at him coldly. "Aren't you going to ask me about the exceptions?"

  Damn you, thought Wil.

  When he didn't reply, she continued. "The trivial exception: those so foolish or unfortunate as to be over bio-forty right now. I'll set their clocks back once.

  "The important exception: any woman, for as long as she stays pregnant." Yel‚n sat back, a look of grim satisfaction on her face. "That should supply any backbone that is missing."

  Wil stared at her wonderingly. Just a few minutes before, Yel‚n had been acting as a civilized person might, all amused by the Peacer/NM plans for central control. Now she was talking about running the low-techs' personal lives.

  There was a long silence. Yel‚n understood the point. He could tell by the way she tried to stare him down. Finally her gaze broke. "Damn it, Brierson, it has to be done. And it's moral, too. We high-techs each own our medical equipment. We've agreed on this action. Just how we invest our charity is surely our business."

  They had argued the theory before. Yel‚n's logic was a thin thing, going a bit beyond what shipwreck law Wil knew. After all, the advanced travelers had brought the low-techs here, and would not allow them to bobble out of the era. More clearly than ever, he understood Yel‚n's reaction to Tammy. It would take so little to destroy the settlement. And over the next few years, disaffection was bound to grow.

  Like it or not, Wil was working for a government. Sieg Heil.

  EIGHTEEN

  The mornings Wil devoted to research. He still had a lot of background to soak up. He wanted a basic understanding of the settlers, both low-tech and
high. They all had pasts and skills; the more he knew, the less he might be surprised. At the same time, there were specific questions (suspicions) raised by his field trips and discussions with Yel‚n.

  For instance: What corroboration was there for Tun‡ Blumenthal's story? Was he the victim of an accident-or a battle? Had it happened in 2210-or later, perhaps from within the Singularity itself?

  It turned out there was physical evidence: Blumenthal's spacecraft. It was a small vehicle (Tun‡ called it a repair boat), massing just over three tonnes. The bow end was missing-not cut by the smooth curve of a bobble, but flash-evaporated. That hull had a million times the opacity of lead; some monstrous burst of gamma had vaporized a good hunk of it just as the boat bobbled out.

  The boat's drive was "ordinary" antigravity-but in this case, it was a built-in characteristic of the hull material. The comm and life-support systems bore familiar trademarks; their mechanism was virtually unintelligible. The recycler was thirty centimeters across; there were no moving parts. It appeared to be as efficient as a planetary ecology.

  Tun could explain most of this in general terms. But the detailed explanations-the theory and the specs-had been in e he boat's database. And that had been in Tun‡'s jacket, in the forward compartment. The volatilized forward compartment. The processors that remained were compatible with the Korolevs', and Yel‚n had played with them quite a bit.

  At one extreme was the lattice of monoprocessors and bobblers embedded in the hull. The monos were no smarter than a twentieth-century home computer, but each was less than one angstrom unit across. Each ran a simple program loop, IE17 times a second. That program watched its processor's brothers for signs of catastrophe-and triggered an attached bobbler accordingly. Yel‚n's fighter fleet had nothing like it.

  At the other extreme was the computer in Tun‡'s headband. I t was massively parallel, and as powerful as a corporate mainframe of Yel‚n's time. Marta thought that, even without its database, Tun's headband made him as important to the plan as any of the other high-techs. They had given him a good part of their advanced equipment in exchange for its use.

  Brierson smiled as he read the report. There were occasional comments by Marta, but Yel‚n was the engineer and this was mainly her work. Where he could follow it at all, the tone was a mix of awe and frustration. It read as he imagined Benjamin Franklin's analysis of a jet aircraft might read. Yel‚n could study the equipment, but without Tun's explanations its purpose would have been a mystery. And even knowing the purpose and the underlying principles of operation, she couldn't see how such devices could be built or why they worked so perfectly.

  Wil's grin faded. Almost two centuries separated Ben Franklin from jet planes. Less than a decade stood between Yel‚n's expertise and this "repair boat." Wil knew about the acceleration of progress. It had been a fact of his life. But even in his time, there had been limits on how fast the marketplace could absorb new developments. Even if all these inventions could be made in just nine years-what about the installed base of older equipment? What about compatibility with devices not yet upgraded? How could the world of real products be turned inside out in such a short time?

  Wil looked away from the display. So there was physical evidence, but it didn't prove much except that Tun‡ had been as far beyond the high-techs as they were beyond Wil. It really was surprising that Chanson had not accused Tun‡-rescued from the sun with inexplicable equipment and a story no one could check-of being another alien. Perhaps Juan's paranoia was not as all-encompassing as it seemed.

  He really should have another chat with Blumenthal.

  Wil used a comm channel that Yel‚n said was private. Blumenthal was as calm and reasonable as before. "Sure, I can talk. The work I do for Yel‚n is mainly programming; very flexible hours."

  "Thanks. I wanted to talk more about how you got bobbled. You said it was possible you were shanghaied...."

  Blumenthal shrugged. "It is possible. Yet most likely an accident it was. You've read about my company's project?"

  "Just Yel‚n's summaries."

  Tun hesitated, swapped out. "Ah, yes. What she says is fair. We were running a matter/antimatter distillery. But look at the numbers. Yel‚n's stations can distill perhaps a kilo per day -enough to power a small business. We were in a different class entirely. My partners and I specialized in close solar work, less than five radii out. We had easements on most of the sun's southern hemisphere. When I... left, we were distilling one hundred thousand tonnes of matter and antimatter every second. That's enough to dim the sun, though we arranged things so the effect wasn't perceptible from the ecliptic. Even so, there were complaints. An absolute condition of our insurance was that we move it out promptly and without leakage. A few days' production would be enough to damage an unprotected solar system."

  "Yel‚n's summary said you were shipping to the Dark Companion?" Like a lot of Yel‚n's commentary, the rest of that report had been technical, unintelligible without a headband.

  "True!" Tun‡'s face came alight. "Such a fine idea it was. Our parent company liked big construction projects. Originally, they wanted to stellate Jupiter, but they couldn't buy the necessary options. Then we came along with a much bigger project. We were going to implode the Dark Companion, fashion of it a small Tipler cylinder." He noticed Wil's blank expression. "A naked black hole, Wil! A space warp! A gate for faster-than-light travel! Of course the Dark Companion is so small that the aperture would be only a few meters wide, and have tidal strains above 1 E 13 g's per meter-but with bobbles it might be usable. If not, there were plans to probe through it to the galactic core, and siphon back the power to widen it."

  Tun‡ paused, some of his enthusiasm gone. "That was the plan, anyway. In fact, the distillery was almost too much for us. We were on site for days at a time. It gets on your nerves after a while, knowing that beyond all the shielding, the sun is stretched from horizon to horizon. But we had to stay; we couldn't tolerate transmission delays. It took all of us linked to our mainframe to keep the brew stable.

  "We had stability, but we weren't shipping quite everything out. Something near a tonne per second began accumulating over the south pole. We needed a quick fix or we'd lose performance bonuses. I took the repair boat across to work on it. The problem was just ten thousand kilometers from our station -a thirty-millisecond time lag. Intellect nets run fine with that much lag, but this was process control; we were taking a chance. We'd accumulated a two-hundred-thousand-tonne backlog by then. It was all in flicker storage-a slowly exploding bomb. I had to repackage it and boost it out."

  Tun‡ shrugged. "That's the last I remember. Somehow, we lost control; part of that backlog recombined. My boat bobbled up. Now, I was on the sun side of the brew. The blast rammed me straight into Sol. There was no way my partners could save me.

  Bobbled into the sun. It was almost high-tech slang for certain death. "How could you ever escape?"

  Blumenthal smiled. "You haven't read about that? There is no way in heaven I could have. On the sun, the only way you can survive is to stay in stasis. My initial bobbling was only for a few seconds. When it lapsed, the fail-safe did a quick lookabout, saw where we were heading, and rebobbled-sixty-four thousand years. That was `effective infinity' to its pinhead program.

  "I've done some simulations since. I hit the surface fast enough to penetrate thousands of kilometers. The bobble spent a few years following convection currents around inside. It wasn't as dense as the inner sunstuff. Eventually I percolated back to near the surface. Then, every time the bobble floated over a blow-off, it was boosted tens of thousands of kilometers up.... For thirty thousand years a damn volleyball I was, flying up to the corona, falling back through the photosphere, floating around awhile, then getting thrown up again.

  "That's where I was through the Singularity and during the time the short-term travelers were being rescued. That's where I would have died if it hadn't been for Bil S nchez." He paused. "You never knew Bil. He dropped out, died about twe
nty million years ago. He was a nut about Juan Chanson's extermination theory. Most of Chanson's proof is on Earth; W. W. Sanch‚z traveled all over the Solar System looking for evidence. He dug up things Chanson never guessed at.

  "One thing Bil did was scan for bobbles. He was convinced that sooner or later he'd find one containing somebody or some machine that had escaped the `Extinction.' When he spotted my bobble in the sun, he thought he'd hit the jackpot. Their latest records-from 2201-didn't show any such bobbling. It was just the weird place you might expect to find a survivor; even the exterminators couldn't have reached someone down there.

  "But Bil Sanch‚z was patient. He noticed that every few thousand years, a really big solar flare would blast me way up. He and the Korolevs diverted a comet, stored it off Mercury. The next time I was boosted off the surface, they were ready: They dropped the comet into a sun-grazing orbit. It picked me off at the top of my bounce. Fortunately, the snowball didn't break up and my bobble stuck on its surface; we swung around the sun, up into the cool. From there, the situation was much like their other rescues. Thirty thousand years later, I was back in realtime."

  "Tun‡, you lived closer to the Extinction than anyone else. What do you think caused it?"

  The spacer sat back, crossed his arms. "That's what they all ask.... Ah, Wil Brierson, if I only knew! I tell them I don't know. And they go away, seeing each his own theory reflected in my story." He seemed to realize the answer was not going to satisfy. "Very well, my theories. Theory Alpha: Possible it is that mankind was exterminated. What Bil found in the Charon catacombs is hard to explain any other way. But it can't be like Juan Chanson says. Bil had it better: Anything that could bump off the intellect nets in Earth/Luna would needs be superhuman. If it's still around, no brave talk will save us. That's why Bil S nchez and his little colony dropped out. Poor man, he was frightened of what might happen to anything bigger.