by Vernor Vinge
As Wil wandered through the young forest that the street had become, the wrongness of the scene gradually percolated through: Everything was alive, but there was not another human, not a single robot. Had everyone wakened earlier, say at the moment the bobbles burst?
He walked down to the Dasguptas’ place. Half hidden by the brush, he saw someone big and black heading his way—his own reflection. The Dasguptas were still in stasis. The trees grew right up to their bobble. Rainbow webs floated around it, but the surface was untouched. Neither vines nor spiders could find purchase on that mirrored smoothness.
Wil ran through the forest, panic rising in him. Now that he knew what to look for, they were easy to spot: the sun’s image glinted off two, three, half a dozen bobbles. Only his had burst. He looked at the trees, the birds, and the spiders. The scene was scarcely pleasing now. How long could he live without civilization? The rest might come out of stasis in moments or a hundred years, or a thousand; he had no way of knowing. In the meantime Wil was alone, perhaps the only living man on Earth.
He left the street and scrambled up a rise into older trees. From the top, he should be able to see some of the estates of the advanced travelers. The fear tightened at his throat. Sun and sky sat in the green of the hills; there were bobbles where the palaces of Juan Chanson and Phil Genet should be. He looked south, towards Castle Korolev.
Spires, gold and green! No bobble there!
And in the air above the castle, he saw three close-set dots: fliers, moving fast and straight towards him, like some old-time fighters on a strafing run. The trio was over him in seconds. The middle flier descended and invited him into its passenger cabin.
The ground fell slantingly away. He had a moment’s vision of the Inland Sea, blue through coastal haze. There were bobbles around the advanced estates, around the NM quarter of town. To the west were several large ones—around the autofactories? Everything was in stasis except the Korolev estate. He was above the castle now, coming down fast. The gardens and towers looked as before, but an enormous circle circumscribed the estate—a subtle yet abrupt change in the tone of the forest’s green. Like himself, the Korolevs had been in stasis up to the recent past. For some reason they were leaving the rest bobbled. For some reason they wanted private words with W. W. Brierson.
The Korolev library had no bookcases weighted down with data cartridges or paper-and-ink books. Data could be accessed anywhere; the library was a place to sit and think (with appropriate support devices) or to hold a small conference. The walls were lined with holo windows showing the surrounding countryside. Yelén Korolev sat at the middle of a long marble table. She motioned Wil to sit across from her.
“Where’s Marta?” Brierson asked automatically.
“Marta is…dead, Inspector Brierson.” Yelén’s voice was even flatter than usual. “Murdered.”
Time seemed to stop. Marta. Dead? He had taken bullets with less physical sensation than those words brought. His mouth opened, but the questions wouldn’t come. In any case, Yelén had questions of her own. “And I want to know what you had to do with it, Brierson.”
Wil shook his head, in confusion more than denial.
She slapped the marble tabletop. “Wake up, mister! I’m talking to you. You’re the last person who saw her alive. She rejected your advances. Did that make it worth killing her, Brierson? Did it?”
The insanity of the accusation brought Wil back to his senses. He stared at Yelén, realizing that she was in a much worse state than he. Like Marta, Yelén Korolev had been raised in late twenty-second-century Hainan. But Yelén had no trace of Chinese blood. She was descended from the Russians who had filtered out of Central Asia after the 1997 debacle. Her fair Slavic features were normally cool, occasionally showing ironic humor. Those features were as smooth as ever now, but the woman kept running her hand across her chin, her forefinger tracing again and again the edge of her lip. She was in a state of walleyed shock that Wil had seen only a couple of times before—and those times had been filled with sudden death. From the corner of his eye, he saw one of her protection robots float around the far side of the table—keeping her widely separated from its target.
“Yelén,” he finally said, trying to keep his voice calm and reasonable, “till this moment I didn’t know about Marta. I liked…respected…her more than anyone in the settlement. I could never harm her.”
Korolev stared at him a long moment, then let out a shaky breath. The feeling of deadly tension lessened. “I know what you tried to do that night, Brierson. I know how you thought to repay our charity. I’ll always hate your guts because of it…But you’re telling the truth about one thing: There’s no way you—or any low-tech—could have killed Marta.”
She looked through him, remembering her lost partner, or perhaps communicating through her headband. When she spoke again her voice was softer, almost lost. “You were a policeman, in a century where murder was still common. You’re even famous. When I was a kid, I read all about you…I’ll do anything to get Marta’s killer, Inspector.”
Wil leaned forward. “What happened, Yelén?” he said quietly.
“She—she was marooned—left outside all our bobbles.”
For a moment, Wil didn’t understand. Then he remembered walking the deserted street and wondering if he was all alone, wondering how many years would pass before the other bobbles burst. Before, he had thought that being shanghaied into the future was the most terrible bobble crime. Now he saw that being marooned in an empty present could be just as awful.
“How long was she alone, Yelén?”
“Forty years. Just forty goddamned years. But she had no health care. She had no robots. She had just the clothes on her back. I’m p-proud of her. She lasted forty years. She survived the wilderness, the loneliness, her own aging. For forty years. And she almost won through. Another ten years—” Her voice broke and she covered her eyes. “Back up, Korolev,” she said. “Just the facts.
“You know we have to move down time to when the Peacer bobble bursts. We planned to begin the move the night of the party. After everyone was indoors, we’d bobble forward in three-month steps. Every three months, the bobbles would burst and our sensors would take a few microseconds to check the fast-flicker autons, to see if the Peacers were still in stasis. If they were, we’d automatically bobble up for another three months. Even if we waited a hundred thousand years, all you’d have seen was a second or so of flickering and flashing.
“So. That was the plan. What happened was that the first jump was a century long—for everyone in near-Earth space. The other advanced travelers had agreed to follow our programming on this. They were in stasis, too. The difference between three months and a century was not enough to alarm their controller programs. Marta was alone. Once she figured out that the flicker interval was more than three months, she hiked around the Inland Sea to the Peace Authority bobble.”
That was a twenty-five-hundred-kilometer hike.
Yelén noticed the wonder on his face. “We’re survivors, Inspector. We didn’t last this long by letting difficulties stop us.
“Anyway, the area around the Peace bobble is still a vitrified plain. It took her decades, but she built a sign there.” The window behind Yelén suddenly became a view from space. At that distance, the bobble was just a glint of sunlight with a spiky shadow. A jagged black line extended northwards from it. Apparently the picture was taken at local dawn, and the black strip was the shadow of Marta’s monument. It must have been several meters high and dozens of kilometers long. The image lasted only seconds, the space of time Yelén imagined it.
“You may not know this, but we have lots of equipment at the Lagrange zones. Some of it is in kiloyear stasis. Some is flickering with a period of decades. None of it is carefully watching the ground…but that line structure was enough to trip even a high-threshold monitor. Eventually, the robots sent a lander to investigate…They were just a few years too late.”
Wil forced his mind past thinking
on what the lander found. Thank God Yelén’s imagination didn’t flash that on the windows.
For now—method: “How could this be done? I thought an old-time army couldn’t match the security of your household automation.”
“That’s true. No low-tech could break in. At first glance, even the advanced travelers couldn’t manage this: it’s possible to outfight a high-tech—but the battles are abrupt and obvious. What happened here was sabotage. And I think I have it figured out. Somebody used our external comm to talk to the scheduling programs. Those weren’t as secure as they should be. Marta was cut out of the check roster, and a one-century total blackout was substituted for the original flicker scheme. The murderer was lucky: if he had tried for anything longer, it would have tripped all sorts of alarms.”
“Could it happen again?”
“No. Whoever did it is good, Brierson. But basically they took advantage of a bug. That bug no longer exists. And I’m being much more careful about how my machines accept outside comm now.”
Wil nodded. This was a century beyond him, even if his specialty had been forensic computing. He’d just have to take her word that there was no further danger—of this sort of assassination. Wil’s strength was in the human side. For instance:
“Motive. Who would want Marta dead?”
Yelén’s laugh was bitter. “My suspects.” The windows of the library became a mosaic of the settlement’s population. Some had only small pictures—all the New Mexicans fitted on a single panel. Others—Brierson, for instance—rated more space. “Almost everybody conceives some grudge against us. But you twenty-first-century types just don’t have the background to pull this off. No matter how attractive the notion”—she looked at Wil—“you’re off the list.” The pictures of the low-techs vanished from the windows.
The rest stood like posters against the landscape beyond. These were all the advanced travelers (Yelén excepted): the Robinsons, Juan Chanson, Monica Raines, Philippe Genet, Tunç Blumenthal, Jason Mudge—and the woman Tammy said was a spacer.
“The motive, Inspector Brierson? I can’t afford to consider that it was anything less than the destruction of our settlement. One of these people wants humanity permanently extinct, or—more likely—wants to run their own show with the people we’ve rescued; it would probably come to the same thing.”
“But why Marta? Killing her has tipped their hand without—”
“Without stopping the Korolev Plan? You don’t understand, Brierson.” She ran a hand through her blond hair and stared down at the table. “I don’t think any of you understand. You know I’m an engineer. You know I’m a hardheaded type who’s made a lot of unpopular decisions. The plan would never have gotten this far without me.
“What you don’t know is that Marta was the brains behind it all. Back in civilization, Marta was a project manager. One of the best. She had this figured out even before we left civilization. She could see that technology and people were headed into some sort of singularity in the twenty-third century. She really wanted to help the people who were stranded down time…Now we have the settlement. To make it succeed is going to take the special genius she had. I know how to make the gadgets work, and I can outshoot most anyone in a clean fight. But it could all fall apart now, without Marta. We are so few here; there are so many internal jealousies.
“I think the killer knew this, too.”
Wil nodded, a little surprised that Yelén realized her own failings so clearly.
“I’m going to have my hands full, Brierson. I intend to spend many decades of my life preparing for the time when the Peacers come out and I bring the settlement back. If Marta’s dream is to succeed, I can’t afford to use my own time hunting the killer. But I want that killer, Brierson. Sometimes…sometimes I feel a little crazy, I want him so bad. I’ll give you any reasonable support in this. Will you take the case?”
Even at fifty megayears, there was still a job for Wil Brierson.
There was one obvious thing he should demand, something he would not hesitate to require if he were back in civilization. He glanced at Yelén’s auton, still hovering at the end of the table. Here…it might be better to wait for witnesses. Powerful ones. Finally he said, “I’ll need personal transportation. Physical protection. Some means of publicly communicating with the entire settlement—I’ll want their cooperation on this problem.”
“Done.”
“I’ll also need your databases, at least where they deal with people in the settlement. I want to know where and when everyone originated, and exactly how they got bobbled past the Extinction.”
Korolev’s eyes narrowed. “Is this for your personal vendetta, Brierson? The past is dead. I’ll not have you stirring up trouble with people who were once your enemies. Besides, the low-techs aren’t suspects; there’s no need for you to be sniffing around them.”
Wil shook his head. This was just like old times: the customers deciding what the professional should see. “You’re a high-tech, Yelén. But you’re using a low-tech person, namely me. What makes you think the enemy doesn’t have his accomplices?” People like Steve Fraley were the puppets now. They yearned to be the puppeteers. Playing Korolev against her enemy was a game the New Mexican President would love.
“Mph. Okay. You’ll get the databases—but with your shanghai case locked out.”
“And I want the sort of high-speed interface you have.”
“Do you know how to use it?” Her hand brushed absently at her headband.
“Uh, no.”
“Then forget it. The modern versions are a lot easier to learn than the kind you had, but I grew up with one and I still can’t properly visualize with it. If you don’t start as a child, you may spend years and never get the hang of it.”
“Look, Yelén. Time is the one thing we’ve got. It’s God knows how many thousands of years till the Peacers come out and you restart the settlement. Even if it took me fifty years to learn, it wouldn’t interfere.”
“Time is something you don’t have, mister. If you spend a century tooling up for this job, you’ll lose the viewpoint that’s your value to me.”
She had a point. He remembered how Marta had misunderstood the effect of Robinson’s sales pitch.
“Sure,” she continued, “there are high-tech angles to the murder. Maybe they’re the most important angles. But I’ve already got expert help in that department.”
“Oh? Someone you can trust among the high-techs?” He waved at the mug shots on the walls.
Korolev smiled thinly. “Someone I can distrust less than the others. Never forget, Brierson, my devices will be watching all of you.” She thought for a moment. “I was hoping she’d be back in time for this meeting. She’s the least likely to have a motive. In all the megayears, she’s never been tangled in our little schemes. You two will work together. I think you’ll find your skills complementary. She knows technology, but she’s a little…strange.” Yelén was silent again; Wil wondered if he would ever get used to this silent communion between human and machines.
There was movement at the corner of his vision. Wil turned and saw that a third person sat by the table. It was the spacer woman. He hadn’t heard a door opening or footsteps…Then he noticed that she sat back from the table, and her seat was angled slightly off true. The holo was better than any he’d seen before.
She nodded solemnly at Yelén. “Ms. Korolev. I’m still in high orbit, but we can talk if you wish.”
“Good. I wanted to introduce you to your partner.” She smiled at some private joke. “Ms. Lu, this is Wil Brierson. Inspector Brierson, Della Lu.”
He’d heard that name before but couldn’t remember just where. The short Asian looked much as she had at the party. He guessed she hadn’t been out of stasis for more than a few days: her hair was the same dark fuzz as before.
Lu stared at Korolev for several seconds after she made the introduction, then turned to look at Brierson. If the delay were not a mannerism, she must be out beyond the moon. �
��I’ve read good things about you, Inspector,” she said and made a smile that didn’t involve her eyes. She spoke carefully, each word an isolated thing, but otherwise her English was much like Wil’s North American dialect.
Before Brierson could reply, Korolev said, “What of our prime suspects, Ms. Lu?”
Another four-beat pause. “The Robinsons refused to stop.” The library windows showed a view from space. In one direction, Wil could see a bright blue disk and a fainter, gray one—the Earth and the moon. Through the window behind Lu hung a bobble, sun and Earth and moon reflected in its surface. The sphere was surrounded by a spidery metal structure, swollen here and there into more solid structures. Dozens of tiny silver balls moved in slow orbit about the central one. Every few seconds the bobbles vanished, replaced by a much larger one that contained even the spidery superstructure. There was a flash of light, and then the scene returned to its first phase.
“By the time I caught up with them, they were off antigravity and using impulse boost. Their flicker rate was constant. It was easy to pace them.”
Quack, quack. For a moment, Wil was totally lost. Then he realized he was seeing a nuke drive, very close up. The idea was so simple that it had been used even in his time: Just eject a bomb, then go into stasis for a few seconds while it detonates and gives you a big push. When you came out of stasis, drop off another bomb and repeat the process. Of course, it was deadly to bystanders. To get these pictures, Della Lu must have matched the Robinsons’ bobble cycle exactly, and used her own bombs to keep up.
“Notice that when the drive bobble bursts, they immediately generate a smaller one just inside their defense frame. A battle would have taken several thousand years of outside time to resolve.”
