Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Marta figured out most of the spiders’ life cycle. She’d seen the enormous quantities of insect life trapped on the perimeter barriers, and she guessed at the tonnage that must be captured on the canopy. She also noticed how often the fallen leaves were fragmented, and correctly guessed that the spiders maintained caterpillar farms much as ants keep aphids. She did as much as any naturalist without tools could.

  << But the forest never made me sick, Lelya. A mystery. In fifty million years, has Evolution’s arms race drifted so far that I’m outside the range of the spider-shit toxin? I can’t believe that, since the poison seems to work on everything that moves. More likely, there’s something in my medical systems, the panphages or whatever, that’s protecting me. >>

  Wil looked up from the transcript. There was more, of course, almost two million words more.

  He stood, walked to the window, and turned off the lights. Down the street, the Dasguptas’ place was still dark. It was a clear night; the stars were a pale dust across the sky, outlining the treetops. This day seemed awfully long. Maybe it was the trip to Calafia and going through two sunsets in one day. More likely it was the diary. He knew he was going to keep reading it. He knew he was going to give it more time than the investigation justified. Damn.

  10

  For Wil Brierson, dreams had always waited at the end of sleep. In earlier times, they had waited to entertain and enlighten. Now, they lay in ambush.

  Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Wil cried and cried, but no sounds came and scarcely any tears. He was holding hands with someone, someone who didn’t speak. Everything was shades of pale blue. Her face was Virginia’s, and also Marta’s. She smiled sadly, a smile that could not deny the truth they both knew…Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. His lungs were empty, yet still he cried, forcing out the last of his breath. He could see through her now, to blue beyond. She was gone, and what he might have saved was lost forever.

  Wil woke with an abrupt gasp for breath. He had exhaled so far it hurt. He looked up at the gray ceiling and remembered an advertisement from his childhood. They’d been pushing medical monitors; something about 6:00 AM being a good time to die, that lots of people suffered sleep apnea and heart attacks just before waking—and wouldn’t everyone be safer if everyone bought automatic monitors.

  It couldn’t happen with modern medical treatment. Besides, the autons Yelén and Della had floating above the house were monitoring him. And a second besides—Wil smiled sourly to himself—the clock said 10:00 AM. He had slept nearly nine hours. He swung his bulk out of bed, feeling as if he had slept less than half that.

  He lumbered into the bathroom, washed away the strange wetness he found around his eyes. All through his career, he’d done his best to project an appearance of calm strength. It hadn’t been hard: He was built like a tank, and he was naturally a low-blood-pressure type. There were a few cases that had made him nervous, but that had been reasonable, since bullets were flying. In police work, he’d seen a fair number of people crack up. For all the publicity given cases like the Kansas Incursion, most of the violence in his era was simple domestic stuff, folks driven around the bend by job or family pressures.

  He smiled wryly at the face in the mirror. He had never imagined it could happen to him. The end of sleep was a walk down night paths now. He had a feeling things were going to get worse. Yet there was a part of him that was as analytical as always, that was following his morning dreams and daytime tension with surprised interest, taking notes at his own dismemberment.

  Downstairs, Wil threw open the windows, let the morning sounds and smells drift in. He was damned if he’d let this funk paralyze him. Later in the day, Lu was coming over. They would talk about the weapons survey, and decide who to interview next. In the meantime, there was lots of work to do. Yelén was right about studying the high-techs’ lives since the Extinction. In particular, he wanted to learn about Sánchez’s aborted settlement.

  He was barely started on this project when Juan Chanson dropped by. In person. “Wil, my boy! I was hoping we might have a chat.”

  Brierson let him in, wondering why the high-tech hadn’t called ahead. Chanson strode quickly around the living room. As usual, he was energetic to the point of twitchiness. “’Blas Spañol, Wil?” he said.

  “Sí,” Brierson replied without thinking; he could get by, anyway.

  “Buen,” the archeologist continued in Spañolnegro. “I really get tired of English, you know. Never can get just the right word. I’ll wager some people think me a fool because of it.”

  Wil nodded at the rush of words. In Spañolnegro, Chanson talked even faster than in English. It was an impressive—and nearly unintelligible—achievement.

  Chanson stopped his nervous tour of the living room. He jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “I suppose our high-tech friends are taking in every word?”

  “Uh, no. They’re monitoring body function, but I would have to call for help before our words would be interpreted.” And I asked Lu to make sure Yelén did no eavesdropping.

  Chanson smiled knowingly. “So they tell you, no doubt.” He placed a gray oblong on the table; a red light blinked at one end. “Now the promises are true. Whatever we say goes unrecorded.” He waved for Brierson to be seated.

  “We’ve talked about the Extinction, have we not?”

  “Sí,” Several times.

  Chanson waved his hand. “Of course. I talk to everybody about it. Yet how many believe? Fifty million years ago, the human race was murdered, Wil. Isn’t that important to you?”

  Brierson sat back. This would shoot the morning. “Juan, the Extinction is very important to me.” Was it really? Wil had been shanghaied more than a century before it. To his heart, that was when Virginia and Anne and W. W. Jr. had died—even if the biographies said they lived into the twenty-third century. He had been shanghaied across a hundred thousand years; that was many times longer than all recorded history. Now he lived at fifty megayears. Even without the capital-e Extinction, this was so deep in the future that no one could expect the human race to still exist. “But most high-techs don’t think there was an alien invasion. Alice Robinson said the race died out over the whole twenty-third century, and that there weren’t signs of violence until very late. Besides, if there were an invasion, you’d think we’d have all sorts of refugees from the twenty-third. Instead we have nobody—except the last of you high-techs from 2201 and 2202.”

  Chanson sniffed. “The Robinsons are fools. They fit the facts to their rosy preconceptions. I’ve spent thousands of years of my life piecing this together, Wil. I’ve mapped every square centimeter of Earth and Luna with every diagnostic known to man. Bil Sánchez did the same for the rest of the Solar System. I’ve interviewed the rescued low-techs. Most of the high-techs think I’m a crank, I’ve so thoroughly abused their hospitality. There’s a lot I don’t understand about the aliens—but there’s a lot that I do. There are no refugees from the twenty-third because the invaders could jam bobble generators; they had some superpowerful version of the Wáchendon suppressor. The extermination was not like twentieth-century nuclear war, over in a matter of weeks. I’ve dated the Norcross graffiti at 2230. Apparently, the aliens were using specifically antihuman weapons early in the war. On the other hand, the vanadium tape Billy Sánchez found on Charon appears to be from late in the century. It ties in with the new craters there and in the asteroids. At the end, the aliens dug out the deep resistance with nukes.”

  “I don’t know, Juan. It’s so far in the past now—how can we prove or disprove anyone’s theories? What’s important is to make sure our settlement succeeds and humanity has another chance.”

  Chanson leaned across the table, even more intense than before. “Exactly. But don’t you see? The aliens had bobblers, too. What destroyed civilization threatens to destroy us now.”

  “After fifty million years? What could be the motive?”

  “I don’t know. There are limits to physical investigation, no matter how patient. But I think i
t was a close thing back in the twenty-third. The aliens pulled out all the stops at the end, and it was barely enough. After the war, they were very weak—perhaps on the edge of extinction themselves. They were gone from the Solar System for millions of years. But make no mistake, Wil. They have not forgotten us.”

  “You expect another invasion.”

  “That’s what I’ve always feared, but I’m beginning to feel otherwise. There are too few of them; their game is stealth now. They aim to divide and destroy. Marta’s murder was only the beginning.”

  “What?”

  Chanson flashed a quick, angry smile. “The game is not so academic now, is it, my boy? Think on it: With that murder, they crippled us. Marta was the brains behind the Korolev plan.”

  “You claim they’re here among us? I should think you high-techs can monitor things coming into the system.”

  “Certainly, though the others don’t bother. One of the safest places for long-term storage is on cometary orbits. Such bobbles return every hundred thousand years or so. Only I seem to realize that a few more return than go out. At least half my time has been spent building a surveillance net. Over the megayears I intercepted three coming in with substantial hyperbolic excess. Two came out of stasis in the inner Solar System, surrounded by my forces. They came out shooting, Wil.”

  “Did they use the super Wáchendon suppressor?”

  “No. I think their surviving equipment is scarcely better than ours. With my superior position, I managed to destroy both of them.”

  Wil looked at the little man with new respect. Like all the high-techs, he was a monomaniac; anyone who pursued one objective for centuries would be. His conclusions had been ridiculed by most of the others, yet he stuck by them and had done his best to protect the others from a threat only he could see. If Chanson was right…Wil’s mouth was suddenly dry. He could see where this was leading. “What about the third one, Juan?” he said quietly.

  Again that angry smile. “That one was much more recent, much more clever. It did a lookabout before I was in position. I was outmaneuvered. By the time I got back to Earth, it was already here, claiming to be human—claiming to be Della Lu, long-lost spacer. Your partner is a monster, my boy.”

  Wil tried not to think about the firepower that floated over their heads. “Is there any solid evidence? Della Lu was a real person.”

  Chanson laughed. “They’re weak now. Subterfuge may be all that’s left them—and surely they have copies of GreenInc. Did you see this ‘Della Lu’ right after she arrived? It would be a joke to call that thing human. The claim she’s so old that normal human attributes have faded is nonsense. I’m more than two thousand years old, and my behavior is perfectly normal.”

  “But she was alone all that time.” Wil’s words defended her, but he was remembering the encounter on the beach, Lu’s insectile manner, her cold stare. “Surely a medical exam would settle this.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I have reason to think the exterminators are of nearly human structure. If their life sciences are as good as ours, they could rearrange their innards to human standards. As for subtle chemical tests—our ignorance of them and their technology is simply too great to risk accepting negative evidence as proof.”

  “Who else have you told?”

  “Yelén. Philippe. You can be sure I’m making no public accusations. The Lu creature knows someone attacked her coming in, but I don’t think she knows who. She may even think it was an automatic action. Even if she’s alone, she is terribly dangerous, Wil. We can’t afford to move against her until all the high-techs are willing to act together. I pray this will happen before she destroys the settlement.

  “I don’t know if Philippe believes me, but I think he’d act if the rest could be won over. As for Yelén, well…I already said she was the lesser of the Korolevs. She’s done some passive testing and can’t believe the enemy could make such a good counterfeit. She’s totally unimpressed by Lu’s erratic behavior. Basically, Yelén has no imagination.

  “You may be the key, Wil. You see Lu every day. Sooner or later she is going to slip, and you will know that what I say is true. It is vitally important you prepare yourself for that moment. With luck, it will be something small, something you can pretend to ignore. If you can cover your knowledge, she may let you live.

  “And if she lets you live, then maybe we can convince Yelén.”

  And if she doesn’t let me live, no doubt that will be evidence too. One way or another, Chanson had a use for him.

  11

  Della Lu arrived in early afternoon. Wil stepped outside to watch her land. The autons supplied by Yelén and Della were faithfully keeping station several hundred meters above the house. He wondered what a battle between those two machines would be like, and whether he could survive it. Before, he’d been grateful for Lu’s protection against Yelén. Now it worked both ways. Brierson kept his face placid as the spacer walked toward him.

  “Hi, Wil.” Even with his recollection of the early Della, it was hard now to believe that Chanson could be right. Lu wore a pink blouse and belled pants. Her hair was cut in bangs that swayed girlishly as she walked. Her smile seemed natural and spontaneous.

  “Hi, Della.” He grinned back with a smile he hoped seemed just as natural and spontaneous. She entered the house ahead of him.

  “Yelén and I have a disagreement we’d like you to…” She stopped talking and her body tensed. She sidled around the living-room table, her eyes flicking across its surface. Abruptly something round and silver gleamed there. She picked it up. “Did you know you were bugged?”

  “No!” Wil walked to the table. A spherical notch about a centimeter across had been cut from it. The notch was where Chanson had set his bug stomper.

  She held up the silver sphere—an exact match for the notch—and said, “Sorry to nick your table. I wanted to bobble it first thing. Some bugs bite when they are discovered.”

  Wil looked at his face reflected perfect and tiny in the ball. It could contain anything. “How did you spot it?”

  She shrugged. “It was too small for my auton to see. I’ve got some built-in enhancements.” She tapped her head. “I’m a little more capable than an ordinary human. I can see into the UV and IR, for instance…Most of the high-techs don’t bother with such improvements, but they can be useful sometimes.”

  Hmm. Wil had lived several years with medical electronics jammed inside his skull; he hadn’t liked it one bit.

  Della walked across the room and sat on the arm of one of his easy chairs. She swung her feet onto the seat and braced her chin on her hands. The childlike mannerisms were a strange contrast to her words. “My auton says Juan Chanson was your last visitor. Did he get near the table?”

  “Yes. That’s where we were sitting.”

  “Hmm. It was a dumb trick, ran a high risk of detection. What did he want, anyway?”

  Wil was ready for the question. His response was prompt but casual. “He rambled, as usual. He’s discovered I speak Spañolnegro. I’m afraid I’ll be his favorite audience from now on.”

  “I think there’s more to it than that. I haven’t been able to get an appointment for us to interview him. He won’t say no, but he has endless excuses. Philippe Genet is the only other person who seems to be avoiding us. We should put these people at the top of our interview list.”

  She was doing a better job of proving Juan’s case than Juan himself. “Let me think about it…What was it you and Yelén wanted to know?”

  “Oh, that. Yelén wants to keep Tammy bobbled for a century or so, till the low-techs are ‘firmly rooted.’”

  “And you don’t.”

  “No. I have several reasons. I promised the Robinsons Tammy would be safe. That’s why I refuse to turn her over to Yelén. But I also promised them that Tammy would be given a chance to clear the family name. She claims that means she should be free to operate in the present.”

  “I’ll bet Don Robinson couldn’t care less about his good name. Th
ings are too hot for the family, but he still wants recruits. If Tammy is bobbled she won’t be doing any recruiting.”

  “Yes. Those are almost Yelén’s words.” Della moved off the chair arm and sat like an adult. She steepled her hands and stared at them a moment. “When I was very young—even younger than you—I was a Peacer cop. I don’t know if you understand what that means. The Peace Authority was a government, no matter what its claims. As a government cop, my morality was very different from yours. The long-range goals of the Authority were the basis of that morality. My own interests and the interests of others were secondary—though I truly believed that survival depended on achieving the Authority’s goals. The history books talk mostly about how I stopped Project Renaissance and brought down the Peacers, but I also did some…pretty rough things for the Authority; look up my management of the Mongolian Campaign.

  “That youngest version of Della Lu would have no problem here: leaving Tammy free is a risk—a very small risk—to the goal of a successful colony. That Della Lu would not hesitate to bobble her, perhaps even execute her, to avoid that risk.

  “But I grew out of that.” Her steepled hands collapsed, and her expression softened. “For a hundred years I lived in a civilization where individuals set their own goals and guarded their own welfare. That Della Lu sees what Tammy is going through. That Della Lu believes in keeping promises made.”

  Wil forced himself to think on the question. “I believe in abiding by contracts, too, though I’m not quite sure what was agreed to here. I’m inclined to release Tammy. Let her proselytize, but without her headband. I doubt she remembers enough technology to make any difference.”