Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  “It’s possible the Robinsons left an equipment cache someplace where Tammy and her recruits could get it.”

  “If they did, that would be pretty good evidence they knew about the murder beforehand. Why don’t we release her, but bug her mercilessly. If she does more than talk, we’ll bobble her. Tammy and her family are the best suspects. If we keep her locked up, it’s possible we’ll never solve the murder…Do you think Yelén would go for that?”

  “Yes. That’s more or less the argument I made. She said okay if you agreed.”

  Wil’s eyebrows rose. He was both surprised and flattered. “That’s settled, then.” He looked through the window, trying to think how the conversation might be turned to the topic that was really bothering him. “You know, Della, I had a family. From what I read in GreenInc, they lived right through to the Extinction. I hate to think that Monica is right—that humankind just committed suicide. And Juan’s theories are just as obnoxious. How do you think it ended?” He hoped the camouflage hid his real interest. And it wasn’t entirely camouflage: He’d be grateful to get a nonviolent explanation for the end of civilization.

  Della smiled at the question. She seemed without suspicion. “It’s always easier to seem wise if you’re selling pessimism. That makes Juan and Monica seem smarter than they really are. The truth is…there was no Extinction.”

  “What?”

  “Something happened, but we have only circumstantial evidence what it was.”

  “Yes, but that ‘something’ killed every human outside of stasis.” He could not disguise his sarcasm.

  She shrugged. “I don’t think so. Let me give you my interpretation of the circumstantial evidence:

  “During the last two thousand years of civilization, almost every measure of progress showed exponential growth. From the nineteenth century on, this was obvious. People began extrapolating the trends. The results were absurd: vehicles traveling faster than sound by the mid-twentieth century, men on the moon a bit later. All this was achieved, yet progress continued. Simple-minded extrapolations of energy production and computer power and vehicle speeds gave meaninglessly large answers for the late twenty-first century. The more sophisticated forecasters pointed out that real growth eventually saturates; the numbers coming out of the extrapolations were just too big to be believed.”

  “Hmph. Seems to me they were right. I really don’t think 2100 was more different from 2000 than 2000 was from 1900. We had prolongevity and economical space travel, but those were in the range of conservative twentieth-century prediction.”

  “Yes, but don’t forget the 1997 war. It just about eliminated the human race. It took more than fifty years to dig out of that. After 2100 we were back on the exponential track. By 2200, all but the blind could see that something fantastic lay in our immediate future. We had practical immortality. We had the beginnings of interstellar travel. We had networks that effectively increased human intelligence—with bigger increases coming.”

  She stopped, seemed to change the subject. “Wil, have you ever wondered what became of your namesake?”

  “The original W.W.?…Say,” he said, with sudden realization, “you actually knew him, didn’t you?”

  She smiled briefly. “I met Wili Wáchendon a couple of times. He was a sickly teenager, and we were on the opposite sides of a war. But what became of him after the fall of the Peacers?”

  “Well, he invented too many things for me to remember. He spent most of his time in space. By the 2090s, you didn’t hear much about him.”

  “Right. And if you follow him in GreenInc, you’ll see the trend continued. Wili was a first-rate genius. Even then he could use an interface band better than I can now. I figure that, as time passed, he had less and less in common with people like us. His mind was somewhere else.”

  “And you think that’s what happened to all mankind eventually?”

  She nodded. “By 2200, we could increase human intelligence itself. And intelligence is the basis of all progress. My guess is that by midcentury, any goal—any goal you can state objectively, without internal contradictions—could be achieved. And what would things be like fifty years after that? There would still be goals and there would still be striving, but not what we could understand.

  “To call that time ‘the Extinction’ is absurd. It was a Singularity, a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new models are beyond our intelligence.”

  Della’s face was aglow. It was hard for Wil to believe that this was the fabrication of an “exterminator.” In the beginning at least, these had been human ideas and human dreams.

  “It’s a funny thing, Wil. I left civilization in 2202. Miguel had died just a few years earlier. That meant more to me than any Big Picture. I wanted to be alone for a while, and the Gatewood’s Star mission seemed ideal. I spent forty years there, and was bobbled out for almost twelve hundred. I fully expected that when I got back, civilization would be unintelligible.” Her smile twisted. “I was very surprised to find Earth empty. But then, what could be less intelligible than a total absence of intelligence? From the nineteenth century on, futurists wondered about the destiny of science. And now, from the other side of the Singularity, the mystery is just as deep.

  “There was no Extinction, Wil. Mankind simply graduated, and you and I and the rest missed graduation night.”

  “So three billion people just stepped into another plane. This begins to sound like religion, Della.”

  She shrugged. “Just talking about superhuman intelligence gets us into something like religion.” She grinned. “If you really want the religious version…have you met Jason Mudge? He claims that the Second Coming of Christ was sometime in the twenty-third century. The Faithful were saved, the unfaithful destroyed—and the rest of us are truant.”

  Wil smiled back; he had heard of Mudge. His notion of the Second Coming could explain things too—in one respect better than Lu’s theory. “I like your ideas better. But what’s your explanation for the physical destruction? Chanson isn’t the only person who thinks that nukes and bioweapons were used towards the end of the twenty-third.”

  Della hesitated. “That’s the one thing that doesn’t fit. When I returned to Earth in 3400, there was plenty of evidence of war. The craters were already overgrown, but from orbit I could see that metropolitan areas had been hit. Chanson and the Korolevs have better records; they were active all through the fourth millennium, trying to figure out what had happened, and trying to rescue short-term low-techs. It looks like a classic nuclear war, fought without bobbles. The evidence of biowarfare is much more tenuous.

  “I don’t know, Wil. There must be an explanation. The trends in the twenty-second century were so strong that I can’t believe the race committed suicide. Maybe it was a fireworks celebration. Or maybe…do you know about survival sport?”

  “That was after my time. I read about it in GreenInc.”

  “Physical fitness has always been a big thing in civilization. By the late twenty-second, medical care automatically maintained body fitness, so people worked on other things. Most middle-class folk had Earthside estates of several thousand hectares. There were shared estates bigger than some twentieth-century nations. Fitness came to mean the ability to survive without technology. The players were dropped naked into a wilderness—arctic, rain forest, you name it—that had been secretly picked by the judges. No technology was allowed, though medical autons kept close track of the contestants; it could get to be pretty rough. Even people who didn’t compete would often spend several weeks a year living under conditions that would be deadly to twentieth-century city-dwellers. By 2200, individuals were probably tougher than ever before. All they lacked was the bloody-mindedness of earlier times.”

  Wil nodded. Marta had certainly demonstrated what Lu was saying. “How does this explain the nuke war?”

  “It’s a little farfetched, but…imagine things just before the race fell into the Singularity. Individuals might be
only ‘slightly’ superhuman, and might still be interested in the primitive. For them, nuclear war might be a game of strength and fitness.”

  “You’re right; that does sound farfetched.”

  She shrugged.

  “Would you say Juan is in the minority, thinking mankind was exterminated?”

  “I think so; I know Yelén agrees with me. But remember that—until very recently—I didn’t have much chance to talk to anyone. I was back in the Solar System for a few years around 3400. During that time, no one was out of stasis. They’d left plenty of messages, though: The Korolevs were already talking about a rendezvous at fifty megayears. Juan Chanson had an auton at L4 blatting his theories to all who would listen. It was clear to me that with the evidence at hand, they could argue forever without proving things one way or the other.

  “I wanted certainty. And I thought I could have it.” She made that twisted smile again.

  “So that’s why you went back into space.”

  “Yes. What had happened to us must have happened—must be happening—over and over again throughout the universe. From the twentieth century on, astronomers watched for evidence of intelligence beyond the Solar System. They never saw any. We wonder about the great silence on Earth after 2300. They wondered about the silence among the stars. Their mystery is just the spacelike version of ours.

  “There is a difference. In space, I can travel any direction I wish. I was sure that eventually I would find a race at the edge of the Singularity.”

  Listening to her, Wil felt a strange mix of fear and frustration. One way or another, this person must know where others could only speculate. Yet what she told him and the truth could be entirely different things. And the questions that might distinguish lie from truth might provoke a deadly response. “I’ve tried to use your databases, Della. They’re very hard to understand.”

  “That’s not surprising. Over the years, there was some non-repairable damage; parts of my GreenInc are so messed up I don’t even use them. And my personal db’s…well, I’ve customized them quite a bit.”

  “Surely you want people to know what you’ve seen?” Yet Della had always been strangely closemouthed about her time Out There.

  She hesitated. “Once I did. Now I’m not sure. There are people who don’t want to know the truth…Wil, someone fired on me when I entered the Solar System.”

  “What?” Brierson hoped his surprise sounded real. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. I was a thousand AUs out, and the guns were automatic. My guess is Juan Chanson. He seems to be the most paranoid about outsiders, and I was clearly hyperbolic.”

  Wil suddenly wondered about the “aliens” Juan said he had destroyed. How many of them had been returning spacers? Some of Juan’s theories could be self-proving. “You were lucky,” he said, probing gently, “to get past an ambush.”

  “Not lucky. I’ve been shot at before. Any time I’m less than a quarter light-year from a star, I’m ready to fight—usually ready to run, too.”

  “So there are other civilizations!”

  For a long moment, Della didn’t answer. Her personality shifted yet again. Expression drained from her face, and she seemed almost as cold as in their first meetings.

  “Intelligent life is a rare development.

  “I spent nine thousand years on this, spread across fifty million years of realtime. I averaged less than a twentieth light speed. But that was fast enough. I had time to visit the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Fornax System, besides our own galaxy. I had time to stop at tens of thousands of places, at astrophysical freaks and normal stars. I saw some strange things, mostly near deep gravity wells. Maybe it was engineering, but I couldn’t prove it, even to myself.

  “I found that most slow-spinning stars have planets. About ten percent of these have an Earth-type planet. And almost all such planets have life.

  “If Monica Raines loves the purity of life without intelligence, she loves one of the most common things in the universe…In all my nine thousand years, I found two intelligent races.” Her eyes stared into Wil’s. “Both times I was too late. The first was in Fornax. I missed them by several billion years; even their asteroid settlements were ground to dust. There were no bobbles, and it was impossible to tell if their ending had been abrupt.

  “The other was a nearer thing, both in space and time: a G2 star about a third of the way around the Galaxy from here. The world was beautiful, larger than Earth, its atmosphere so dense that many plants were airborne. The race was centaurlike; I learned that much. I missed them by a couple of hundred megayears. Their databases had evaporated, but their space settlements were almost undamaged.

  “They had vanished just as abruptly as humankind did from Earth. One century they were there, the next—nothing. But there were differences. For one thing, there was no sign of nuclear war. For another, the centaur-folk had started a couple of interstellar colonies. I visited them. I found evidence of growing population, of independent technological progress, and then…their own Singularities. I lived two thousand years in those systems, spread out over a half megayear. I studied them as carefully as Chanson and Sánchez did our solar system.

  “There were bobbles in the centaur systems. Not as many as near Earth, but this was a lot longer after their Singularity. I knew if I hung around, I’d run into somebody.”

  “Did you?”

  Della nodded. “But what sort of person would you expect two hundred megayears after civilization?…The centaur came out shooting. I nuked out; I ran fifty light-years, past where the centaur had any interest. Then, over the next million years, I sneaked back. Sure enough, he was back in stasis, depending on occasional lookabouts and his autons for protection. I left plenty of robot transmitters, some with autons. If he gave them half a chance, they would teach him my language and convince him I was peaceful…

  “His realtime forces attacked the minute they heard my transmissions. I lost half my auton defense holding them off. I almost lost my life; that’s where my db’s were damaged. A thousand years later, the centaur himself came out of stasis. Then all his forces attacked. Our machines fought another thousand years. The centaur stayed out of stasis the whole time. I learned a lot. He was willing to talk even if he had forgotten how to listen.

  “He was alone, had been the last twenty thousand years of his life. Once upon a time, he’d been no nuttier than most of us, but those twenty thousand years had burned the soul from him.” She was silent for a moment—thinking on what nine thousand years could do? “He was caught on behavior tracks he could never—could never want to—break. He thought of his solar system as a mausoleum, to be protected from desecration. One by one, he had destroyed the last centaurs as they came out of stasis. He had fought at least four travelers from outside his system. God knows who they were—centaur spacers, or ‘Della Lus’ of other races.

  “But, like us, he couldn’t replace his autons. He had lost most of them when I found him; I wouldn’t have stood a chance a hundred megayears earlier. I suppose, if I had stayed long enough, I could have beaten him. The price would have been my living more thousands of years; the price would have been my soul. In the end, I decided to let him be.” She was silent for a long while, the coldness slowly departing from her face, to be replaced by…tears? Were they for the last centaur—or for the millennia she had spent, never finding more than the mystery she began with?

  “Nine thousand years…was not enough. Artifacts from beyond the Singularity are so vast that doubters can easily deny them. And the pattern of progress followed by vanishment can be twisted to any explanation—especially on Earth, where there are signs of war.”

  There was a difference between Della’s propaganda and the others’, Wil realized. She was the only one who seemed plagued by uncertainty, by any continuing need for proof. It was hard to believe that such an ambiguous, doubt-ridden story could be an alien cover. Hell, she seemed more human than Chanson.

  Della smiled but did not brush the we
tness from her lashes. “In the end, there is only one way to know for a fact what the Singularity is. You have to be there when it happens…The Korolevs have brought together everybody that’s left. I think we have enough people. It may take a couple of centuries, but if we can restart civilization we will make our own Singularity.

  “And this time, I won’t miss graduation night.”

  12

  Wil was at the North Shore party later that week.

  Virtually everyone was there, even some high-techs. Della and Yelén were absent—and Tammy was more or less forbidden from attending these outings—but he saw Blumenthal and Genet. Today they looked almost like anyone else. Their autons hovered high, all but lost in the afternoon light. For the first time since taking the Korolev case, Wil didn’t feel like an outsider. His own autons were indistinguishable from the others, and even when visible, the fliers seemed no more intimidating than party balloons.

  There were two of these affairs each week, one at Town Korolev sponsored by New Mexico, the other run by the Peacers here at North Shore. Just as Rohan said, both groups were doing their best to glad-hand the uncommitted. Wil wondered if ever in history governments had been forced to tread so softly.

  Clusters of people sat on blankets all across the lawn. Other folks were lining up at the barbecue pits. Most were dressed in shorts and tops. There was no sure way of telling Peacers from NMs from ungovs, though most of the blue blankets belonged to the Republic. Steve Fraley himself was attending. His staff seemed a little stiff, sitting on lawn chairs, but they were not in uniform. The top Peacer, Kim Tioulang, walked over and shook Steve’s hand. From this distance, their conversation looked entirely cordial…

  So Yelén figured he should mingle, observe, find out just how unpopular her plans were. Okay. Wil smiled faintly and leaned back on his elbows. It had been a matter of duty to come to this picnic, to do just what the Dasgupta brothers—and simple common sense—had already suggested. Now he was very glad he was here, and the feeling had nothing to do with duty.