Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

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  Marta spent most of her last year in the cabin. Outside, her garden went to weeds. There were edible roots and vegetables still, but they were scattered around. Getting out to gather them was an expedition as challenging as a hundred-kilometer walk had been before. The near-dogs grew bolder; they circled just outside the diamond tip of her pike, darted occasionally inwards. Marta had several pelts to prove that she was still the faster. But it could not last. She was eating poorly. That made it harder for her to gather food…A downward spiral.

  Wil paged the display and found himself looking at ordinary typescript. He felt his stomach drop. Was this the end? An ordinary entry and then…nothing? He forced his eyes through the words. It was a commentary from Yelén: Marta had not intended the next page to be seen. Her words had been rubbed out, then overwritten by a later diary entry. “You said you’d walk if you didn’t see everything, Brierson. Well, here it is. Damn you.” He could almost hear the bitterness in Yelén’s words. He looked down the page.

  << Oh God Yelen help me. If you ever lovd me save me now. I am dying dying. I dont want to die. Oh please please pleas >>

  He paged again, and was looking at Marta’s familiar script. If anything, the letters were more finely drawn than usual. He imagined her in the dark cabin, patiently rubbing away the words of her despair, then overwriting them, cool and analytical. Wil wiped his face and tried not to breathe. A deep breath would start him sobbing. He read Marta’s final entry.

  << Dearest Lelya,

  << I suppose there must be an end to optimism, at least locally. I’ve been holed up in my cabin for ten days now. There is water in the cistern, but I’m out of food. Damn dogthings; without them, I could have lasted another twenty years. They cut me up pretty bad the last time I was out. For a while, I thought to make a grand stand, give them a last taste of my diamonds. I’ve changed my mind about that; last week I saw them take on a grazer. Yes, one of those: bigger than I am, with a horn almost as effective as my pike. I couldn’t see all of it, just when they were in view from my windows, but…At first it looked like they were playing. They nipped at it, sending it scurrying round and round. But I could see the blood. Finally, it weakened, tripped.

  << I never noticed this when they got smaller animals, but the dogs don’t deliberately kill their prey. They just eat them alive, usually from the guts out. That grazer was big; it took a while to die.

  << So. I’m staying inside. “Forever until you rescue me” was how I used to say it. I guess I don’t expect a rescue anymore. With lookabouts scheduled every few decades (at best), the odds are against one happening in the next few days.

  << I figure it’s been about forty years since I was marooned. It seems so much longer, longer than all the rest of my life. Nature’s kindly way of stretching mortals’ meager rations? I remember my fisher friends better than most of my human ones. I can see the lake through one window. If they looked, they could see me up here. They rarely look. I don’t think most of them remember me. It’s been three years since they were driven away from the cabin. That’s almost a fisher generation. The only one I think remembers is my last Juan Chanson. This one’s not as loud as my earlier Juans. Mainly, he sits around, taking in the sun…I just looked out the window. He’s there now; I do think he remembers. >>

  The handwriting changed. Wil wondered how many hours—or days—had passed from one paragraph to the next. The new lines were crossed out, but Yelén’s magic made them clear:

  << I just remembered a strange word: taphonomy. Once upon a time, I could be an expert in a field just by remembering its name. Now…all I know…it’s the study of death sites, no? A crumple of bones is all these mortal creatures leave…and I know that bones get swept away so fast. Not mine, though. Mine stay indoors. I’ll be here a long time, my writing longer…Sorry. >>

  She didn’t have the energy to erase the words. There was a gap, and her writing became regular, each letter carefully printed.

  << I have the feeling I’m saying things I’ve written you before, contingencies that now are certainties. I hope you get all my earlier writing. I tried to put all the details there, Lelya. I want you to have something to work for, dear. Our plan can still succeed. When it does, our dreams live.

  << You are for all time my dearest friend, Lelya. >>

  Marta did not finish the entry with her usual sign-off. Perhaps she thought to write more later. Further down, there was a pattern of disconnected lines. Through an exercise of imagination, one might see them as the block letters L O V.

  That was all.

  It didn’t matter; Wil wasn’t reading anymore. He lay with his face in his arms, sobbing on empty lungs. This was the daytime version of the dream in blue; he could never wake from this.

  Seconds passed. The blue changed to rage, and Wil was on his feet. Someone had done this to Marta. W. W. Brierson had been shanghaied, separated from his family and his world, thrown into a new one. But Derek Lindemann’s crime was a peccadillo, laughable, hardly worth Wil’s attention. Compared to what was done to Marta. Someone had taken her from her friends, her love, and then squeezed the life from her, year by year, drop by drop.

  Someone must die for this. Wil stumbled across the room, searching. In the back of his mind, a rational fragment watched in wonder that his feelings could run so deep, that he could truly run amok. Then even the fragment was swallowed up.

  Something hit him. A wall. Wil struck back, felt satisfying pain shooting through his fist. As he pulled his arm from the wall, he noticed motion in the next room. He ran towards the figure, and it towards him. He struck and struck. Glass flew in all directions.

  Then he was in sunlight, and on his knees. Wil felt a penetrating coldness in the back of his neck. He sighed and sat down. He was on the street, surrounded by broken glass and what looked like parts of his living-room walls. He looked up. Yelén and Della were standing just beyond the pile of debris. He hadn’t seen them in person and together for weeks. It must be something important. “What happened?” Funny. His throat hurt, as though he’d been shouting.

  Yelén stepped over a fallen timber and bent to look at him. Behind her, Wil saw two large fliers. At least six autons hung in the air above the women. “That’s what we would like to know, Inspector. Were you attacked? Our guards heard screaming and the sounds of a fight.”

  …and every so often he gave a great screeching display, rushing about and slapping his sides. Marta had named her fishers well. Wil looked at his bloody hands. The tranq Yelén had used on him was fast-acting stuff. He could think and remember, but emotions were distant, muted things. “I, I was reading the end of Marta’s diary. Got carried away.”

  “Oh.” Korolev’s pale lips tightened. How could she be so cool? Surely she had gone through this, too. Then Wil remembered the century Yelén had spent alone with the diary and the cairns. Her harshness would be easier to understand in the future.

  Della walked closer, her boots crunching on broken glass. Lu’s outfit was dead black, like something from a twentieth-century police state. Her arms were folded across her chest. Her dark eyes were calm and distant. No doubt her current personality matched her clothes. “Yes. The diary. It’s a depressing document. Perhaps you should choose other leisure-time reading.”

  The remark should have done something to his blood pressure, but Wil felt nothing.

  Yelén was more explicit. “I don’t know why you insist on mucking around in Marta’s personal life, Brierson. She said everything she knew about the case right at the beginning. The rest is none of your damned business.” She glanced at his hands, and a small robot swooped down. Wil felt something cold and soft work between his fingers. Yelén sighed. “Okay. I guess I understand; we are that much alike. And I still need you…Take a couple of days off. Get yourself together.” She started back to her flier.

  “Uh, Yelén,” said Della. “Are we going to leave him here alone?”

  “Of course not. I’m wasting three extra autons on him.”

  “I
mean, when the GriefStop wears off, Brierson may be very distressed.” Something flickered in her eyes. She looked momentarily puzzled, searching through nine thousand years of memories—perhaps more important, nine thousand years of viewpoints. “When a person is like that, don’t they need someone to help them…someone to, uh, hug them?”

  “Hey, don’t look at me!”

  “Right.” Her eyes were calm again. “It was just a thought.” The two departed.

  Wil watched their fliers disappear over the trees. Around him, broken glass was being vacuumed up, the torn walls removed. Already his hands felt warm and comfortable. He sat in the roadway, at peace. Eventually he would get hungry and go inside.

  20

  After supper, Wil sat for a long time in the ruins of his living room. He was directly responsible for very little of the destruction: He had punched bloody holes in one wall and demolished a mirror. The guard autons had let that go on for perhaps fifteen seconds before deciding it was a threat to his safety. Then they bobbled him: The walls near the mirror were cut by a clean, curving line. A smooth depression dipped thirty centimeters below the floor, into the foundation. Even the bobbling had not caused the worst damage. That happened when Yelén and Della cut the bobble out of the house. Apparently they wanted their equipment to have a direct view when it burst. He looked at the wall clock. It was the same day as before; they’d kept him on ice just long enough to get him out of the house.

  If Wil’s sense of humor had been enabled, he might have smiled. All this supported Yelén’s claim that the house was not infested by her equipment. The best the protection autons could do was bobble everything and call for help.

  Things were different now. From where he sat, Wil saw several robots foaming a temporary wall. Beside his chair sat a medical auton, about as animated as a garbage can. Somewhere it had hands; they’d been a big help with supper.

  He watched the reconstruction with interest, even turned on the room lights when night came. This GriefStop was great stuff. Simple drives like hunger weren’t affected. He felt as alert and coordinated as usual. He was simply beyond the reach of emotion; yet, strangely, it was easy to imagine how things would affect him without the drug. And that knowledge did make for some weak motivation. For instance, he hoped the Dasguptas would not stop by on their way home. He guessed that explanations would be difficult.

  Wil stood and walked to his reading table. The auton glided silently after him. Something smaller floated up from the mantel. He sat down, suddenly guessing that GriefStop had never been a hit on the recreational drug market. There were side effects: Everything moved a little bit slow. Sounds came low-pitched, drawn out. It wasn’t enough to panic him (he doubted if anything could do that just now), but reality had a faint edge of waking nightmare. His silent visitors intensified the feeling…Ah well, paranoia was the name of the game.

  He turned on his desk lamp, cut the room lights. Somehow the destruction had spared the desk and reading display. The last page of Marta’s diary floated in the circle of light. He guessed that rereading that page would be very upsetting to his normal self—so he didn’t look at it. Della was right. There ought to be better leisure-time activities. This day would hang his normal self low for a long time to come. He hoped that he wouldn’t come back to the diary, to tear at the wounds he’d opened today. Perhaps he should erase it; the inconvenience of coercing another copy from Yelén might be enough to save his normal self.

  Wil spoke into the darkness. “House. Delete Marta’s diary.” The display showed his command and the ideation net associated with “Marta’s diary.”

  “The whole thing?” the house asked.

  Wil’s hand hovered over the commit. “Unh, no. Wait.” Curiosity was a powerful thing with Brierson. He’d just remembered something that could force his normal self to go against all common sense and retrieve another copy. Better check it out now, then zap the diary.

  When he first received the diary, he’d asked for all references to himself. There had been four. He had seen three: She’d mentioned calling him back from the beach the day of the Peacer rescue. There’d been the fisher she’d named after him. Then, around year thirty-eight, she’d recommended Yelén use his services—even though she’d forgotten his name by then. That was the reference which hurt so much the first time he looked at the document. Wil guessed he could forgive that now; those years would have destroyed the soul of a lesser person, not simply blurred a few memories.

  But what was the fourth reference? Wil repeated the context search. Ah. No wonder he had missed it. It appeared about year thirteen, tucked away in one of her essays on the plan. In this one, she wrote on each of the low-techs she remembered, citing strengths and weaknesses, trying to guess how they would react to the plan. In a sense it was a foolish exercise—Marta granted that much more elaborate analysis existed on the Korolev db’s—but she hoped her “time of solitude” had given her new insights. Besides (unsaid), she needed to be doing something useful in the years that stretched before her.

  <
  <
  << You know I was attracted to the guy. Well, he followed me when I stormed out of Don Robinson’s show. Now, I wasn’t trying to flirt; I was just so mad at Don’s sneakiness, I had to open up to someone—and you were in deep connect. We talked for several minutes before I realized that the pats on my shoulder, the hand at my waist, were not brotherly comfort. It was my fault for letting it get that far, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. The guy is big; he actually started knocking me around. If the rest of the evening hadn’t begun my great “adventure,” the bruises he left on my chest would have had medical attention. You see, Lelya? Mean to beat me when I refused him. Irrational for doing it with Fred just five meters away. I had to suppress the auton’s reflexes, or Brierson would have been stunned for a week. Finally, I slapped his face as hard as I could, and threatened him with Fred. He backed off then, and seemed genuinely embarrassed. >>

  Wil read the paragraph again and again. It hung in the circle of light from his desk lamp…and not one letter changed. He wondered how his normal self would react to Marta’s words. Would he be enraged? Or simply crushed that she could say such a lie?

  He thought for a long time, vaguely aware of the nightmare edge of the darkness around him. Finally he knew. The reaction would not be rage, would not be hurt. When he could feel again, there would be triumph:

  The case had cracked. For the first time, he knew he would get Marta’s murderer.

  21

  Yelén gave him the promised two days off and even removed the autons from his house. When he walked near a window, he could see something hovering just below the sill. He had no doubt it would come rushing in at the smallest sign of erratic behavior. Wil did his best to give no such sign. He did all his research away from the windows; Yelén might see his return to the diary as a bad method of recuperating.

  But now Wil wasn’t reading the diary. He was using all the (feeble) automation at his command to study it.

  When Yelén came around with her l
ist of places to visit and low-techs to talk to, Wil begged off. Forty-eight hours was not enough, he said. He needed to rest, to avoid the case completely.

  The tactic bought him a week of uninterrupted quiet—probably enough time to squeeze the last clues from Marta’s story; almost enough time to prepare his strategy. The seventh day, Yelén was on the bolo again. “No more excuses, Brierson. I’ve been talking to Della.” The great human-relations expert? thought Wil. “We don’t think you’re doing anything to help yourself. Three times the Dasguptas have tried to get you out of the house; you put them off the same way you do me. We think your ‘recuperation’ is an exercise in self-pity.

  “So”—she smiled coldly—“your vacation is over.” A light gleamed at the base of his data set. “I just sent you a record of the party Fraley threw yesterday. I got his speech and most of the related conversation. As usual, I think I’m missing nuances. I want you to—”

  Wil resisted the impulse to straighten his slumped shoulders; his plan might as well begin now. “Any more evidence of high-tech interference?”

  “No. I would scarcely need your help to detect that. But—”

  Then the rest scarcely matters. But he didn’t say it out loud. Not yet. “Okay, Yelén. Consider me back from psych leave.”

  “Good.”

  “But before I go after this Fraley thing, I want to talk to you and Della. Together.”

  “Jesus Christ, Brierson! I need you, but there are limits.” She looked at him. “Okay. It’ll be a couple of hours. She’s beyond Luna, closing down some of my operations.” Yelén’s holo flicked off.