Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  …and Wil really did. Jason Mudge needed people. But somewhere in his past, the little man had concluded that the only way to get others’ attention was with the cosmically important. And the harder he tried to explain, the more hostile was his audience—until it was a triumph to have an audience at all. If there was anything to the Brierson intuition, Yelén was right: Jason Mudge should come off the suspect list.

  It might seem a small thing, the twenty-five-hour day. But that extra hour and bit was one of the nicest things about the new world. Almost everyone felt it. For the first time in their lives, there seemed to be enough time in the day to get things done, enough time to reflect. Surely, everyone agreed, they would soon adjust, and the days would be just as crowded as always. Yet the weeks passed and the effect persisted.

  The picnic stretched through the long afternoon, lost much of the intentness that followed Tioulang’s speech. Attention shifted to the volleyball nets on the north side of the lawn. For many, it was a mindless, pleasurable time.

  It should have been so for Wil Brierson; he had always enjoyed such things. Today, the longer he stayed, the more uncomfortable he became. The reason? If all the human race was here, then the person who had shanghaied him was, too. Somewhere within two hundred meters was the cause of all his pain. Beforehand, he’d thought he could ignore that fact; he’d been faintly amused at the Korolev fears he might launch a vendetta against the shanghaier.

  How little he knew himself. Wil found himself watching the other players, trying to find a face from the past. He muffed easy shots; worse, he crashed into a smaller player. Considering Brierson’s ninety kilos, that was a distinct breach of etiquette.

  After that, he stood on the sidelines. Did he really know what he was looking for? The embezzlement case had been so simple; a blind man could have tagged the culprit. Three suspects there had been: the Kid, the Executive, and the Janitor—that was how he’d thought of them. And given a few more days, he’d have had an arrest. Brierson’s great mistake was to underestimate the crook’s panic. Only trivial amounts had been stolen; what kind of crazyman would bobble the investigating officer, and guarantee a terrible punishment?

  The Kid, the Exec, the Janitor. Wil wasn’t even sure of their names just now, but he remembered their faces so clearly. No doubt, the Korolevs had disguised the fellow, but Wil was sure that given time he could see through such.

  This is insane. He’d all but promised Yelén—and Marta before her—that he wouldn’t go after the shanghaier. And what could he do if he found the bastard? If anything, life would be more unpleasant than before…Still, his eyes wandered, thirty years of police skill in harness to his pain. Wil left the games and began a circuit of the grounds. More than half the picnickers were not involved with the volleyball. He moved with apparent aimlessness but kept track of everything in his field of vision, watching for any sign of evasion. Nothing.

  After walking around the field, Brierson moved from group to group. His approach was relaxed, cheerful. In the old days, this appearance had almost always been genuine, even when he was on the job. Now it was a double deception. Somewhere above him, Yelén was watching his every move…She should be pleased. He appeared to be doing exactly what she wanted of him: in the course of two hours, he interviewed about half the ungovs—all without giving the appearance of official scrutiny. He learned a lot. For instance, there were many people who saw through the governments’ line. Good news for Yelén.

  At the same time, Wil’s private project continued. After ten or fifteen minutes of chatting, Wil could be sure that yet one more was not his quarry. He kept track of the faces and the names. Something inside him took pleasure in so thoroughly fooling Yelén.

  The shanghaier was almost certainly a loner. How would such a type hide himself? Wil didn’t know. He did discover that almost no one was really alone now. Faced with an empty Earth, people were hanging together, trying to help those who hurt the most. And he could see terrible grief in many, often hidden behind cheerfulness. The basket cases were the folks who had been out of stasis only a month or two; for them, the loss was so painfully fresh. Surely there had been some outright psychiatric breakdowns; what was Yelén doing about those? Hmm. It was entirely possible the shanghaier wasn’t here. No matter. When he got home, he would match the people he’d met with the settlement lists. The holes would stand out. After the next party or the next, he’d have a good idea who he was after.

  The sun slowly fell, a straight-down path that seemed faintly unreal to someone raised in midlatitudes. Shadows deepened. The green of lawn and hillsides was subtly changed by the reddening light; more than ever, the land looked like a fantasist’s painting. The sky turned to gold and then to red. As twilight passed quickly into night, light panels came on by two of the volleyball courts. There were several bonfires—cheerful yellow light compared to the blue around the courts.

  Wil had talked with most of the ungovs and perhaps twenty Peacers. Not an enormous group, but then he’d had to move slowly—to fool Yelén and to assure that he wasn’t fooled by any disguise.

  Darkness released him from the terrible compulsion; there was no point to an interview unless he was confident of the results. He wandered back towards the courts, relief verging on elation. Even his feeling of shame at deceiving Yelén was gone. In spite of himself, he had done good work for her this day. He’d seen issues and attitudes that she had never mentioned.

  For instance:

  There were people sitting away from the lights. Their talk was low and intense. He was almost back to the courts when he came on a large group—almost thirty people, all women. By the light of the nearest bonfire, he recognized Gail Parker and a few others. There were both ungovs and NMs here, maybe a few Peacers. Wil paused, and Parker looked up. Her gaze had none of its earlier friendliness. He drifted away, aware of several pairs of eyes following his retreat.

  He knew the shape of their discussions. People like Kim Tioulang could make grandiose talk about reestablishing the human race. But that reestablishment demanded tremendous birth rates, for at least a century. Without womb tanks and postnatal automation, the job would fall on the women. It meant creating a serf class, but not the one Tioulang was so eager to warn against. These serfs might be beloved and cherished—and might believe in the rightness of it all as much as anyone—but they would carry the heavy burden. It had happened before. The plagues of the early twenty-first century had killed most of the race, and left many of the survivors sterile. The women of that period had a very restricted role, very different from women before or after. Wil’s parents had grown up in that time: The only serious fights he could remember between them involved his mother’s efforts to start her own business.

  A motherhood serfdom would be much harder to establish this time around. These people were not coming back from plagues and a terrible war. Except for the Peacers, they were from the late twenty-first and the twenty-second. The women were highly trained, most with more than one career. As often as not, they were the bosses. As often as not, they initiated romance. Many of those from the twenty-second were sixty or seventy years old, no matter how young and lush their bodies. They were not people you could push around.

  …And yet, and yet Gail and the others could see final extinction waiting irrevocably in the very near future…unless they made some terrible sacrifices. He understood their intent discussion and Gail’s unfriendly stare. Which sacrifices to make, which to decline. What to demand, what to accept. Wil was glad he wasn’t welcome in their councils.

  Something moon-bright rose into the air ahead of him, quickly fell back. Wil looked up and broke into a trot, forcing the problem from his mind. The light rose again, sweeping fast-moving shadows across the lawn. Someone had brought a glowball! A crowd had already gathered along three sides of the volleyball court, blocking his view. Brierson edged around till he could see the play.

  Wil found himself grinning stupidly. Glowballs were something new, just a couple of months old…at the time
he was shanghaied. It might be old hat to some, but it was a complete novelty to the Peacers and even to the NMs. The ball had the same size and feel as a regulation volleyball—but its surface was brightly aglow. The teams were playing by this light alone, and Wil knew the first few games would be comic relief. If you kept your eye on the ball, then little else was bright enough to see. The ball became the center of the universe, a sphere that seemed to swell and shrink while everything else swung around it. After a few moments, you couldn’t find your teammates—or even the ground. The NM and Peacer players spent almost as much time on their butts as standing. Laughter swept the far side of the court as three spectators fell down. This ball was better than the others Wil had seen. Whenever it touched out-of-bounds, it chimed and the light changed to yellow. That was an impressive trick.

  Not everyone had problems. No doubt Tunç Blumenthal had always played with glowballs. In any case, Wil knew that Tunç’s biggest problem was playing down to everyone else’s level. The high-tech massed as much as Wil, but stood over two meters tall. He had the speed and coordination of a professional. Yet, when he held back and let others dominate the play, he didn’t seem condescending. Tunç was the only high-tech who really mixed with the lows.

  After a time, all players learned the proper strategy: less and less did they watch the ball directly. They watched each other. Most important, they watched the shadows. With the glowball, those shadows were twisting, shifting fingers—showing where the ball was and where it was going.

  The games went quickly, but there was only one ball and many wanted to play. Wil gave up any immediate plans to get on the court. He wandered around the edge of the crowd, watching the shadows flick back and forth, highlighting a face for an instant, then plunging it into darkness. It was fun to see adults as fascinated as kids.

  One face stopped him short: Kim Tioulang stood at the outskirts of the crowd, less than five meters from Brierson. He was alone. He might be a boss, but apparently he didn’t need a herd of “aides” like Steve Fraley. The man was short, his face in shadow except when a high shot washed him in a quick down-and-up of light. His concentration was intense, but his expressionless gaze contained no hint of pleasure.

  The man was strikingly frail. He was something that did not exist in Wil’s time—except by suicidal choice or metabolic accident. Kim Tioulang’s body was old; it was in the final stages of the degeneration which, before the mid-twenty-first, had limited life spans to less than a century.

  There were so many different ways to think of time now. Kim had lived less than eighty years. He was young by comparison with the “teenagers” from the twenty-second. He had nothing on Yelén’s three hundred years of realtime experience or the mind-destroying stretch of Della’s nine thousand. Yet, in some ways, Tioulang was a more extreme case than either Korolev or Lu.

  Brierson had read the GreenInc summary on the man. Kim Tioulang was born in 1967. That was two years before Man began the conquest of space, thirty years before the war and the plagues, at least fifty years before Della Lu was born. In a perverse sense, he was the oldest living human.

  Tioulang had been born in Kampuchea, in the middle of one of the regional wars that pocked the late twentieth. Though limited in space and time, some of those wars were as horrible as what followed the 1997 collapse. Tioulang’s childhood was drenched in death—and unlike the twenty-first-century plagues, where the murderers were faceless ambiguities, death in Kampuchea came person to person via bullets and backings and deliberate starvation. GreenInc said the rest of Tioulang’s family disappeared in the maelstrom…and little Kim ended up in the USA. He was a bright kid; by 1997 he was finishing a doctorate in physics. And working for the organization that overthrew the governments and became the Peace Authority.

  From there, GreenInc had little but Peacer news stories and historical inference to document Tioulang’s life. No one knew if Tioulang had anything to do with starting the plagues. (For that matter, there was no absolute proof the Peace had started them.) By 2010, the man was Director for Asia. He’d kept his third of the planet in line. He had a better reputation than the other Directors; he was no Christian Gerrault, “Butcher of Eurafrica.” Except during the Mongolian insurrection, he managed to avoid large-scale bloodshed. He remained in power right up to the fall of the Peace in 2048—and that fall was for Tioulang less than four months past.

  And so, even though Kim Tioulang predated the rest of living humanity by scant decades, his background put him in a class by himself. He was the only one who had grown up in a world where humans routinely killed other humans. He was the only one who had ruled, and killed to stay in power. Next to him, Steve Fraley was a high-school class president.

  An arcing shot lifted the glowball above the crowd, putting Tioulang’s face back in the light—and Wil saw that the Peacer was staring at him. The other smiled faintly, then stepped back from the crowd to stand beside Brierson. Up close, Wil saw that his face was mottled, pocked. Could old age alone do that?

  “You’re Brierson, the one who works for Korolev?” His voice was just loud enough to be heard over the laughs and shouting. Light danced back and forth around them.

  Wil bridled, then decided he wasn’t being accused of betraying the low-techs. “I’m investigating Marta Korolev’s murder.”

  “Hmm.” Tioulang folded his arms and looked away from Wil. “I’ve done some interesting reading the last few weeks, Mr. Brierson.” He chuckled. “For me, it’s like future history to see where the next hundred and fifty years took the world…You know, those years turned out as well as ever I could hope. I always thought that without the Peace, humankind would exterminate itself…And maybe it did eventually, but you went for more than a century without our help. I think the immortality thing must have something to do with it. Does it really work? You look around twenty years old—”

  Brierson nodded. “But I’m fifty.”

  Tioulang scuffed at the lawn with his heel. His voice was almost wistful. “Yes. And apparently I can have it now, too. The long view—I can already see how it softens things, and how that’s probably for the best.

  “I’ve also read your histories of the Peace. You people make us out as monsters. The hell of it is, you have some of it right.” He looked up at Wil, and his voice sharpened. “I meant what I said this afternoon. The human race is in a bind here; we of the Peace would make the best leaders. But I also meant it when I said we’re willing to go with democracy; I see now it could really work.

  “You are very important to us, Brierson. We know you have Korolev’s ear—don’t interrupt, please! We can talk to her whenever we wish, but we think she respects your opinions. If you believe what I am telling you, there is some chance she may too.”

  “Okay,” said Wil. “But what is the message? You oppose Yelén’s policies, want to run things under some government system with majority rule. What if your people don’t win out? The NMs have a lot more in common with the ungovs and the high-techs than you. If we fall back to a government situation, they are more likely to be the leaders than you. Would you accept that?” Or grab for power like you did at the end of the twentieth?

  Tioulang looked around, almost as though checking for eavesdroppers. “I expect we’ll win, Brierson. The problems we face here are problems the Peace is especially well equipped to handle. Even if we don’t win, we’ll still be needed. I’ve talked to Steven Fraley. He may seem rough and tough to you…but not to me. He’s a little bit of a fool, and likes to boss people around, but left to ourselves, we could get along.”

  “Left to yourselves?”

  “That’s the other thing I want to talk to you about.” He shot a furtive glance past Wil. “There are forces at work Korolev should know about. Not everyone wants a peaceful solution. If a high-tech backs one faction, we—” The swinging light splashed over them. Tioulang’s expression suddenly froze into something that might have been hatred…or fear. “I can’t talk more now. I can’t talk.” He turned and walked stiffly aw
ay.

  Wil glanced in the opposite direction. There was no one special in the crowd there. What had spooked the Peacer? Wil drifted around the court, watching the game and the crowd.

  Several minutes passed. The game ended. There were the usual cheerful arguments about who should be on the new teams. He heard Tunç Blumenthal say something about “trying something new” with the glowball. The random chatter lessened as Tunç talked to the players and they pulled down the volleyball net. When the new game started, Wil saw that Blumenthal had indeed tried something new.

  Tunç stood at the serving line and punched the glowball across the court, over the heads of the other team. As it passed across the far court out-of-bounds, there was a flash of green light and the ball bounced as if from some unseen surface. It sailed up and back—and bounced downwards off an invisible ceiling. As it hit the ground, the glow turned to out-of-play yellow. Tunç served again, this time to the side. The ball bounced as from a side wall, then against the invisible far-court wall, then off the other side. The green flashes were accompanied by the sounds of solid rebounds. The crowd was silent except for scattered gasps of surprise. Were the teams trapped in there? The idea occurred to several of the players simultaneously. They ran to the invisible walls, reached out to touch them. One fellow lost his balance and fell off the court. “There’s nothing there!”

  Blumenthal gave some simple rules and they volleyed. At first it was chaos, but after a few minutes they were really playing the new game. It was fast, a strange cross between volleyball and closed-court handball. Wil couldn’t imagine how this trick was managed, but it was spectacular. Before, the ball had moved in clean parabolas, broken only by the players’ strokes. Now it careened off unseen surfaces, the shadows reversing field instantly.