by Vernor Vinge
Wil groaned, slowly rising from the unpleasant dreams that haunted his mornings. Then he realized the time, and the day. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll be right down.” He rolled out of bed and staggered into the bathroom. Who had decided on this early start, anyway? Then he remembered it had been himself; something about time zones.
Even downstairs, he was still a bit foggy. He grabbed a box lunch from the kitchen. The bright colors on the package were advertising fifty million years old. When Korolev said she was providing twenty-first-century support, she meant it. The autofactories were running off the same programs as the original manufacturers. The effect was more weird than homey. He tucked the lunch into his shoulder bag along with his data set. Something in the back of his mind was saying he should take more; after all, he was going a third of the way around the world today. He shook his head. Sure, and he’d probably be back in five hours. Even the lunch was unnecessary. Wil gave final instructions to the house and stepped into the morning coolness.
It was the sort of morning that should change the ways of night owls. Green loomed high around the house, the trees glistening damply in the sun. Everything felt clean and bright, just created. Except for the birds, it was quiet. He walked across the mossy street toward Lu’s enclosed flier. Two protection devices—one from Yelén and one from Della—left their posts above his house and drifted along with him.
“Hey, Wil! Wait a minute.” Dilip Dasgupta waved from his house, fifty meters down the road. “Where are you going?”
“Calafia,” Brierson called back.
“Wow.” Rohan and Dilip were both up and dressed. They jogged down the road to him.
“This part of the murder investigation?” said Dilip.
“You look awful, Wil,” said Rohan.
Brierson ignored Rohan. “Yeah. We’re flying out to see Monica Raines.”
“Ah! A suspect.”
“No. We’re still fact-finding, Dilip. I want to talk to all the high-techs.”
“Oh.” He sounded like a football fan disappointed by his team’s hard luck. A few days earlier, the disappointment would have been tinged with fear. Everyone had been edgy then, guessing that Marta’s murder might be the prelude to a massive assault on the settlement.
“Wil, I mean it.” Rohan was not to be sidetracked. “You really looked dragged out. And it’s not just this morning, so early and all. Don’t let this case shut you off from your friends. You gotta mingle, Wil…Like, this morning we’re going on a fishing expedition off North Shore. It’s something the Peacers organized. That Genet fellow is coming along in case we run into anything too big to handle. You know, I don’t see why governments got such a bad name. Both the Peacers and the New Mexicans aren’t much different from social clubs or college fraternities. They’ve been real nice to everybody.”
“Yes, and face it, Wil, we’re starting new lives here. Most of the human race is tied up in those two groups now. There are lots of women there, lots of people you’d like to know.”
Brierson grinned, embarrassed and a bit touched. “You’re right. I should keep up with things.”
Rohan reached up to slap him on the shoulder. “Hey, if you get back in the afternoon, you might have the Lu person drop you off at North Shore. I bet there’ll still be something going.”
“Okay!” Wil turned and walked toward Lu’s aircraft. The Dasguptas were right about some things. How wrong they were about others: A smile came back to his lips as he imagined Steve Fraley’s reaction to hearing the Republic of New Mexico likened to a social club.
“Good morning, Wil.” Lu’s face was impassive. She seemed not at all impatient at the delay. “Is 1.5 g’s okay?”
“Sure, sure.” Brierson settled into a chair, not quite sure what she was talking about. At least he didn’t have to worry about her questioning his mood. Short of laughter or smiles or tears, she still seemed incapable of reading facial expressions.
He sank slowly into the seat cushions as the flier’s acceleration added a physical lassitude to his mental one. He’d been using the GreenInc database for more than the investigation of Marta’s murder. Last night he’d tracked his family to the end of the twenty-second century. He was proud of what his children had become: Anne the astronaut, Billy the cop and later the story-maker. As far as he could tell, Virginia had never remarried. The three of them had disappeared into the twenty-third century, along with his parents, his sister, and all the rest of humanity.
In 2140 and 2180 they had bobbled gifts to accompany him. GreenInc said it was the best survival equipment their money could buy. It had all been lost to the graverobbers, the scavenging travelers that existed in the first megayears after Man. Perhaps that was just as well. There would have been family video in those care packages. That would have been very hard to view.
…But all along he’d had the secret dream that Virginia might come after him herself, at least when the kids had their own families. It was strange: He would have pleaded with her not to come, yet now he felt…betrayed.
The faint whistling from beyond the windows had long faded, but the gut-tugging acceleration continued. Wil’s attention returned to the flier. He looked straight out. Cloud-speckled ocean stood like a blue wall beside them. He looked up through the transparent dome—and saw the curve of the Earth, pale blue meeting the black of space. They were hundreds of klicks up, driving forward at a steady acceleration that was nothing like the ballistic trajectories he was used to.
“How long?” he managed to say.
“It is slow, isn’t it?” Della said. “Now that the settlement is founded, Yelén doesn’t want us to use nukes in near space. At this acceleration, it’ll be another half hour to North America.”
An island chain trundled rapidly across his field of view. Much nearer, he saw the autons that protected him at home; the two flew formation with Della’s craft.
“I still don’t understand why you want to go out of your way to interview Ms. Raines. How is she special?”
Wil shrugged. “I like to do the reluctant ones first. She’s not interested in coming back in person, and I want these interviews to be face to face.”
Della said, “That’s wise. Most of us could do almost anything on a holo channel…But she’s one of the least powerful of the high-techs. I can’t imagine her as the killer.”
A few minutes later, Della turned the flier over. It was a skew turn that for a moment had them accelerating straight down into the Pacific. Wil was glad there had not been time for breakfast. When they entered the atmosphere off the west coast of Calafia, they were moving barely fast enough to put a glow in the flier’s hull.
Calafia. It was one of the Korolevs’ more appropriate namings. In Wil’s time, one of the clichés of regional insult was the prediction that California would one day fall into the sea. It never happened. Instead, California had put to sea, sliding along the San Andreas Fault, earthquake by earthquake, millennium after millennium—till the southwest coast of North America became a fifteen-hundred-kilometer island. It was indeed Calafia, the vast, narrow island that Spanish mariners had (prematurely) identified fifty million years earlier.
Della covered the last few hundred kilometers in a low approach. The beach passed quickly beneath. North and south, for as far as he could see, breakers marched on perfect sand. Nowhere was there town or road. The world was in an interglacial period now, much as in the Age of Man. That coastline really did look like California’s. It didn’t raise the same nostalgia as Michigan might, but he felt his throat tighten nevertheless. He and Virginia had often visited southern California in the 2090s, after the disgovernance of Aztlán.
They scudded over hills mantled with evergreens. Afternoon sunlight cast everything in jagged relief. Beyond the hills, the vegetation was sere and grayish green. Beyond that was prairie and the Calafia straits.
“Okay. So what dumb questions do you want to ask?” Monica Raines did not look back as she led them down to her—blind, she called it. Wil and Della hurried after her.
He was not put off by the artist’s brusqueness. In the past, she’d made no secret of her dislike for the Korolevs and their plans.
The wood stairs descended through tree-shrouded dimness. The smell of mesquite hung in the air. At the bottom, invisible among vines and branches, was a small cabin. Its floor was deeply carpeted, with pillows scattered about. One side of the room had no wall, but overlooked the beginning of the plainsland. A battery of equipment—optics?—was mounted at the edge of this open side.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your voices down,” said Monica. “We’re less than one hundred meters from the starter nest.” She fiddled with the equipment; she was not wearing a headband. A display flat lit with the picture of two…vultures? They strutted around a small pile of stones and brush. The picture was wavery with heat shimmers. Wil sighted over the optics: Sure enough, he could just make out two birds in the valley below the blind.
“Why use a telescope?” Lu asked softly. “With tracer cameras, you could—”
“Yeah, I use them, too. Gimme remotes,” she said to the thin air. Several other displays came to life. The pictures were dim even in the darkened room. “I don’t like to scatter tracers all around; they mess up the environment. Besides, I don’t have any good ones left.” She jerked a thumb at the main display. “If you’re lucky, these dragon birds are gonna give you a real show.”
Dragon birds? Wil looked again at the misshapen bodies, the featherless heads and necks. They still looked like vultures to him. The dun-colored creatures strutted round and round the pile, occasionally puffing out their chests. Off to one side, he saw a smaller one, sitting and watching. The strangest thing about them was the bladelike ridge that ran across the top of their beaks.
Monica sat cross-legged on the floor. Wil sat down more awkwardly and punched up some notes on his data set. Della Lu remained standing, drifting around the room, looking at the pictures on the wall. They were famous pictures: Death on a Bicycle, Death Visits the Amusement Park…They’d been a fad in the 2050s, at the time of the longevity breakthrough, when people realized that but for accidents or violence, they could live forever. Death was suddenly a pleasant old man, freed from his longtime burden. He rolled awkwardly along on his first bicycle ride, his scythe sticking up like a flag. Children ran beside him, smiling and laughing. Wil remembered the pictures well; he’d been a kid himself then. But here, fifty million years after the extinction of the human race, they seemed more macabre than cute.
Wil pulled his attention back to Monica Raines. “You know that Yelén Korolev has commissioned Ms. Lu and me to investigate the murder. Basically, I’m to provide the old-fashioned nosing around—like in the detective stories—and Della Lu is doing the high-tech analysis. It may seem frivolous, but this is the way I’ve always operated: I want to talk to you face to face, get your thoughts about the crime.” And try to find out what you had to do with it, he didn’t say; Wil’s approach was as nonthreatening and casual as possible. “This is all voluntary. We aren’t claiming any contractual authority.”
The corner of Raines’ mouth turned down. “My ‘thoughts about the crime,’ Mr. Brierson, are that I had nothing to do with it. To put it in your detective jargon: I have no motive, as I have no interest in the Korolevs’ pitiful attempt to resurrect mankind. I had no opportunity, as my protection equipment is much more limited than theirs.”
“You are a high-tech, though.”
“Only by the era of my origin. When I left civilization, I took the bare necessities for survival. I didn’t bring software to build autofactories. I have air/space capability and some explosives, but they’re the minimum needed to exit stasis safely.” She gestured at Lu. “Your high-tech partner can verify all this.”
Della dropped bonelessly to a cross-legged position and propped her chin on her hands. For an instant she looked like a young girl. “You’ll give me access to your databases?”
“Yes.”
The spacer nodded, and then her attention drifted away again. She was watching the picture off the telescope. The dragon birds had stopped their strutting. Now they were taking turns throwing small rocks into the nestlike structure between them. Wil had never seen anything like it. The birds would hunt about at the edge of the pile of stones and brush. They seemed very selective. What they grasped in their beaks glittered. Then, with a quick flip of the head, the pebble was cast into the pile. At the same time, the thrower flapped briefly into the air.
Raines followed Della’s glance. The artist’s face split with a smile less cynical than usual. “Notice how they face downwind when they do that.”
“They’re fire makers?” asked Lu.
Raines’ head snapped up. “You’re the spacer. You’ve seen things like this before?”
“Once. In the LMC. But they weren’t…birds, exactly.”
Raines was silent for a moment. Curiosity and wonder seemed to battle against her natural desire to remain one up on her visitors. The latter won, but she sounded friendlier as she continued. “Things have to be just right before they’ll try. It’s been a dry summer, and they’ve built their starter-pyre at the edge of an area that hasn’t burned in decades. Notice that there’s a good breeze blowing along the hillsides.”
Lu was smiling now, too. “Yes. So that flapping reflex when they throw—that’s to give the sparks a little help?”
“Right. It can be—oh, look, look!” There wasn’t much to see. Wil had noticed a faint spark when the last pebble struck the rocks in the nest—the starter-pyre, Monica called it. Now a wisp of smoke rose from the straw that covered the leeward side of the pile. The vulture stayed close to the smoke, moved its wings in long sweeps. Its rattling call echoed up the ravine. “Nope. It didn’t quite catch…Sometimes the dragon’s too successful, by the way. They burn like torches if their feathers catch fire. I think that’s why the males work in pairs: one’s a spare.”
“But when the game works…” said Lu.
“When the game works, you get a nice brush fire sweeping away from the dragon birds.”
“How do they benefit by starting fires?” asked Wil; he already had a bad feeling he knew the answer.
“It makes for good eating, Mr. Brierson. These scavengers don’t wait for lunch to drop dead on its own. A fire like this can spread faster than some animals can run. After it’s over, there’s plenty of cooked meat. Those beak ridges are for scraping the char off their prey. The dragons get so fat afterwards, they can barely waddle. A good burn marks the start of a really successful breeding season.”
Wil felt a little sick. He’d watched nature films all the way back to the flat-screen Disneys, but he never could accept the talk about the beauty and balance of nature—when illustrated by grotesque forms of sudden death.
Things got worse. Della asked, “So they get mainly small animals?”
Raines nodded. “But there are a few interesting exceptions.” She brought another display to life. “These pictures are from a camera about four thousand meters east of here.” The picture jogged and bounced. Wil glimpsed shaggy creatures rooting through dense brush. They were built low to the ground, yet seemed vaguely apelike.
“Marvelous what the primates can become, isn’t it? The design is so multipurpose, so centered. Except for one disastrous dead end, they are by far the most interesting of the mammals. At one time or another, I’ve seen them adapt to almost every slot available for large land animals, and more: the fishermonkeys are almost in the penguin slot. I’m watching them very closely; someday they may become exclusively water animals.” Enthusiasm was bright on her normally saturnine features.
“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 destruct
ion 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 starter-pyres 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 self-limiting, 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. Have 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.”
