by Vernor Vinge
Yelén had spent a hundred years following Marta’s travels around the sea. She and her devices had stored and cataloged and studied everything that might bear on the murder. Marta’s was already the most thoroughly investigated murder in the history of the human race. But only if this investigator is not herself the murderer, said a little voice in the back of Wil’s head.
Yelén had done another thing with the century she stayed behind: She had tried to reeducate herself. “There’s only one of us left, Inspector. I’ve tried to live double. I’ve learned everything I can about Marta’s specialty. I’ve dreamed through Marta’s memories of every project she managed.” A shadow of doubt crossed her face. “I hope it’s enough.” The Yelén he’d known before the murder would not have shown such weakness.
So, armed with Marta’s knowledge and trying to imitate Marta’s attitudes, Yelén had relented and let the Peacers establish North Shore. She’d set up the trans-sea flier service. She’d encouraged a couple of the high-techs—Genet and Blumenthal—to move their principal estates there.
And the murder investigation had truly been left to Lu and Brierson.
Though he had talked to Korolev only twice, he saw Della Lu almost every day. She had produced a list of suspects. She agreed with Korolev: the crime was completely beyond the low-techs. Of the high-techs, Yelén and the Robinsons were still the best suspects. (Fortunately Lu was cagey enough not to report all their suspicions to Yelén.)
At first, Wil thought the manner of the murder was a critical clue. He’d brought it up with Della early on. “If the murderer could bypass Marta’s protection, why not kill her outright? This business of marooning her is nicely poetic, but it left a real possibility that she might be rescued.”
Della shook her head. “You don’t understand.” Her face was framed with smooth black hair now. She’d stayed behind for nine months, the longest Yelén would allow. No breakthroughs resulted from the stay, but it had been long enough for her hair to grow out. She looked like a normal young woman now, and she could talk for minutes at a time without producing a jarring inanity, without getting that far, cold look. Lu was still the weirdest of the advanced travelers, but she was no longer in a class by herself. “The Korolev protection system is good. It’s fast. It’s smart. Whoever killed Marta did it with software. The killer found a chink in the Korolev defensive logic and very cleverly exploited it. Extending the stasis period to one century was not by itself life-threatening. Leaving Marta outside of stasis was not by itself life-threatening.”
“Together they were deadly.”
“True. And the defense system would have normally noticed that. I’m simplifying. What the killer did was more complicated. My point is, if he had tried anything more direct, there is no amount of clever programming that could have fooled the system. There was no surefire way he could murder Marta. Doing it this way gave the killer the best chance of success.”
“Unless the killer is Yelén. I assume she could override all the system safeguards?”
“Yes.”
But doing so would clearly show her guilt.
“Hmm. Marooning Marta left her defenseless. Why couldn’t the murderer arrange an accident for her then? It doesn’t make sense that she was allowed to live forty years.”
Della thought a moment. “You’re suggesting the killer could have bobbled everyone else for a century, and delayed bobbling himself?”
“Sure. A few minutes’ delay would’ve been enough. Is that so hard?”
“By itself, it’s trivial. But everyone was linked with the Korolev system for that jump. If anyone had delayed, it would show up in everyone’s records. I’m an expert on autonomous systems, Wil. Yelén has shown me her system’s design. It’s a tight job, only a year older than mine. For anyone—except Yelén—to alter those jump records would be…”
“Impossible?” These systems people never changed. They could work miracles, but at the same time they claimed perfectly reasonable requests were impossible.
“No, maybe not impossible. If the killer had planned ahead, he might have an auton that didn’t appear on his stasis roster. It could have been left outside of stasis without being noticed. But I don’t see how the jump records themselves could be altered unless the killer had thoroughly infiltrated the Korolev system.”
So they were dealing with a fairly impromptu act. And the queer circumstances of Marta’s death were nothing more than a twenty-third-century version of a knife in the back.
6
Korolev had delivered Marta’s diary soon after the colony returned to realtime. Wil’s demand for it was one thing that could still bring a flare of anger to her face. In fact, Wil didn’t really want to see the thing. But getting a copy, and getting Della to verify that it was undoctored, was essential. Until then, Yelén was logically the best suspect on his list. Now that he had the diary, it was easier to accept his intuition that Yelén was innocent. He set out to read Yelén’s summaries and Della’s cross-checking. If nothing showed up there, the diary would be a low-priority item.
Yelén had sent down an enormous amount of material. It included high-resolution bolos of all Marta’s writing. Yelén supplied a powerful overdoc; Wil could sort the pages by pH if he wanted. A note in the overdoc said the originals were in stasis, available at five days’ notice.
The originals. Wil hadn’t thought about it: How could you make a diary without even a data pad? Brief messages could be carved on the side of a tree or chiseled in rock, but for a diary you’d need something like paper and pen. Marta had been marooned for forty years, plenty of time to experiment. Her earliest writing was berry-juice ink on the soft insides of tree bark. She left the heavy pages in a rock cairn sealed with mud. When they were recovered fifty years later, the bark had rotted and the juice stains were invisible. Yelén and her autons had studied the fragile remains. Microanalysis showed where the berry stains had been; the first chapters were not lost. Apparently Marta had recognized the danger: the “paper” in the later cairns was made from reed strips. The dark green ink was scarcely faded.
The first entries were mainly narrative. At the other end of the diary, after she had been decades alone, the pages were filled with drawings, essays, and poems. Forty years is a long time if you have to live it alone, second by second. Not counting recopied material, Marta wrote more than two million words before she died. (Yelén had supplied him with a commercial database, Green Inc. Wil looked at some of the items in it; the diary was as long as twenty noninteractive novels.) Her medium was far bulkier than old-time paper, and she traveled thousands of kilometers in her time. Whenever she moved, she built a new cairn for her writing. The first few pages in each repeated especially important things—directions to the previous cairns, for instance. Later, Yelén found every one. Nothing had been lost, though one cairn had been flooded. Even there, the reconstructions were nearly complete.
Wil spent an afternoon going through Yelén’s synopsis and Della’s corresponding analysis. There were no surprises.
Afterwards, Wil couldn’t resist looking for references to himself. There were four clusters, the most recent listed first. Wil punched it up:
Year 38.137 Cairn #4
Lat 14.36N Long 1.01E [K-meridian]
—ask for heuristic cross-reference—
was the header Yelén’s overdoc printed across the top of the display. Below it was cursive green lettering. A blinking red arrow marked the reference:
<<…and if I don’t make it, dearest Lelya, please don’t spend your time trying to solve this mystery. Live for both of us; live for the project. If you must do anything with it, delegate the responsibility. There was that policeman. A low-tech. I can’t remember his name. (Oh, the millionth time I pray for an interface band, or even a data set!) Give him the job, and then concentrate on what is important…>>
Wil sat back and wished the context searcher weren’t so damned smart. She didn’t even remember his name! He tried to tell himself that she had lived almost forty years beyond thei
r acquaintance when she wrote these words. Would he remember her name forty years from now? (Yes!) To think of all his soul-searching, to think how close they seemed that last night, and how noble he had been to back off—when all the time he was just another low-tech to her.
With a quick sweep of his hand, Wil cleared the other references from the display. Let it lie, Wil. Let it lie. He stood up, walked to the window of his study. He had important work to do. There was the interview with Monica Raines, and then with Juan Chanson. He should be researching for those.
So after a moment he returned to his desk…and jumped the display to the first entry in Marta’s diary:
<< The Journal of Marta Qih-hui Qen Korolev
Dearest Lelya, >> it began. Every entry was addressed to “Lelya.”
“GreenInc. Question,” said Wil. “What is ‘Lelya’?” He pointed to the word in the diary. A side display filled with the three most likely possibilities. The first was: “Diminutive of the name Yeléna.” Wil nodded to himself; that had been his guess. He continued reading from the central display.
<< Dearest Lelya,
<< It’s now 181 days since everyone left—and that’s the only thing I’m sure of.
<< Starting this journal is something of an admission of defeat. Till now, I had kept careful track of time, and that seemed all that was necessary; you remember we had planned a flicker cycle of ninety days. Yesterday the second flicker should have happened—yet I saw nothing.
<< So I guess I have to take the longer view. (What a mild way to say it. Yesterday, all I could do was cry.) I’ve got to have someone to “talk” to.
<< And I’ve got a lot to say, Lelya. You know how I like to talk. The hardest thing is the act of writing. I don’t know how civilization got started, if literacy involved the effort I’ve had to make. This bark is easy to find, but I’m afraid it won’t age well. Have to think about that. The “ink” is easy, too. But the reed pen I’ve made leaks and blobs. And if I say something wrong, I can only paint out the errors. (I understand why calligraphy was such a high art.) It takes a long time to write even the simplest things. But I have an advantage now: I have lots and lots of time. All the time in the world. >>
The reconstruction of the original showed awkward block letters and numerous scratch-outs. Wil wondered how many years it had been before she developed the cursive style he’d seen at the end of her diary.
<< By the time you read this, you’ll probably have all the explanations (hopefully from me direct!), but I want to tell you what I remember.
<< There was the party at the Robinsons. I left early, so mad at Don that I could spit. They’ve really done us dirt, you know that? Anyway, it was past the Witching Hour and I was walking the forest path to the house. Fred was about five meters up, in front of me; I remember the moonlight glinting off his hull. >>
Fred? The diary’s overdoc said that was the auton with Marta that night. Wil hadn’t realized they were personalized. You never heard them addressed by name. Come to think of it, that wasn’t surprising; the high-techs generally talked to their mechanicals via headband.
<< From Fred I had a good view over three octaves. There was no one close by. There were no autons shadowing me. It’s about an hour’s walk up to the house. I had taken longer. I wanted to be cool when I talked to you about Don’s little game. I was almost to the great steps when it happened. Fred had no hint. There was a cinnamon burst of static and then he crashed to the ground. It’s the most startled I’ve ever been, Lelya. Our whole lives we’ve had autons giving us extra eyes. This is the first time I can remember not having any warning of a problem.
<< Ahead of me, the great steps were gone. There was my reflection staring back. Fred was lying at the edge of the bobble. He’d been cut in half by the stasis field.
<< We’ve had some rough times, Lelya, like when we fought the graverobbers. They were so strong, I thought the battle might carry us past fifty megayears and ruin everything. You remember how I was after that. Well, this was worse. I think I went a little crazy. I kept telling myself it was all a dream. (Even now, six months later, that sometimes seems the best explanation.) I ran along the bobble’s edge. Things were as peaceful and silent as before, but now the ground was treacherous beneath my feet and branches clawed at me. I didn’t have Fred to be my high eyes. The bobble was hundreds of meters across. It met the ground just beyond the great steps. It didn’t cut through any large trees. It was obviously the bobblement we’d planned for the property.
<< Well, if you’re reading this, you already know the rest. The Robinsons’ place was bobbled. Genet’s was bobbled. It took me three days to hike across all of Korolev Town: everything was bobbled. It looked exactly like the jump we’d programmed except for two things: (1) (obviously) poor little Marta had been left outside, and (2) all automatic equipment was in stasis.
<< Those first weeks, I could still hope that every ninety days the stasis would flicker off while the autons checked the Peacer bobble. I couldn’t imagine how all this had happened (I still can’t), yet it might turn out to be one of those stupid mistakes one can laugh about afterwards. All I had to do was stay alive for ninety days.
<< There’s damn little outside stasis, Lelya. There was no question of salvaging Fred. Looking at that compact pile of junk, I was surprised how little I could do with it—even if his power supply had been on my side of the bobble. Monica Raines is right about one thing: Without autons, we might as well be savages. They are our hands. And that’s not the most horrible part: Without processor and db support, I’m a cripple, my mind stuck in molasses. When a question occurs to me, the only data is what’s wedged in my own gray matter. The only eyes I see from are my own, fixed in space and time, seeing only a narrow band of the spectrum. To imagine that before our time people lived their whole lives in this lobotomized state! Maybe it helped that they didn’t know anything better.
<< But Monica is wrong about something else: I didn’t just sit down and starve. All my time in survival sports paid off. The Robinsons had left a pile of trash just on our side of the property line. (That figures.) At a glance you might not think there was much worthwhile: a hundred kilos of botched gold fittings, an organic sludge pond that made me want to puke, and—get this—a dozen cutter blades. So what if they’ve lost their micrometer edge? They’re still sharp enough to cut a hair lengthwise. They’re about half a kilo each, single diamond crystals. I lashed them onto wood hafts. I also found some shovels on a pile of rock ash in town.
<< I remembered the large carnivores we spotted coming in. If they’re still around, they’re lying low. After a couple of weeks, I was beginning to feel safe. My traps worked, though not as well as on a sport trip; the wildlife hasn’t recovered from the Peacer rescue. Just as we’d planned, the south gallery of the house was left out of stasis. (Remember how you thought it hadn’t aged enough?) It’s all naked stone, stairs and towers and halls, but it makes good shelter—and parts are easy to barricade.
<< I didn’t remember how long the lookabout would last, so I decided to hit you over the head with my message. I lashed a frame between the trees at the bottom of the great stairs. I spread bark across the framework and used wet ash to spell HELP in letters three meters high. There’s no way it could be missed by the monitor on top of the library. I had the sign done a good week ahead of time.
<< Day ninety was worse than waiting for the judge’s call in arbitration. No day ever seemed so long. I sat right by my sign and watched my reflection in the bobble. Lelya, nothing happened. You aren’t on a three-month flicker, or the monitor isn’t watching. I never hated my own face as much as I did that day, watching it in the side of the bobble. >>
Of course, Marta had not given up. The next pages described how she had built similar signs near the bobbles of all the advanced travelers.
<< Day 180 just passed, and the bobbles still sit. I cried a lot. I miss you so. Survival games were fun, but not forever.
<< I’ve got to settle down for the
long haul. I’m going to make those billboards sturdier. I want them to last at least a hundred years. How long can I last? Without health care, people used to live about a century. I’ve kept my bio-age at twenty-five years, so I should have seventy-five left. Without the databases I can’t be sure, but I bet seventy-five is a lower bound. There should be some residual effect from my last medical treatment, and I’m full of panphages. On the other hand, old people were fragile, weren’t they? If I have to protect myself and get my own food, that could be a factor.
<< Okay. Let’s be pessimistic. Say I can only last seventy-five years. What’s my best chance for getting rescued?
<
<< I’m not lying down to die. I can’t think technical anymore, but I’ll bet you still have a fairly short flicker period. Besides, we have gear lots of other places: at the Lagrange zones, the West End mines, the Peacer bobble. With luck, there will be lookabouts in the next seventy-five years. And didn’t we leave autonomous devices in realtime in Canada? I think there’s a land bridge to America in this era. If I can get there, maybe I could make my own rescue.
<< So most of the time, I’m optimistic.
<
<< Don’t let them break up our settlement, Lelya. >>
7
The morning of the Monica Raines interview did not begin well. Wil was still asleep when the house announced that Della Lu was waiting outside.
