Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Juan was trembling. He looked up at Yelén. She stared back for a second, then looked at Wil. She wasn’t convinced. “Yelén,” Wil said, keeping his voice level, “don’t you remember? The day Mudge was killed, he claimed Chanson had been a religionist.”

  Yelén shook her head. That memory was three days gone.

  Finally Chanson spoke aloud. “Don’t you see how you’ve deluded yourself, Wil? The evidence is all around you. Why do you think Lu’s record of civilization was jumbled? Because she was never there! At best those records are secondhand, filled with evidence she would use against me or whoever else was a threat. Wil, please. I may be wrong about the details, but whatever the Lu creature is, she’s proved she would sacrifice us all for her schemes. No matter what she’s done to you, you must be able to see that.”

  Monica’s laugh was almost a cackle. “What a pretty bind you’re in, Brierson. The facts explain either theory perfectly. And Della Lu is chasing off into interstellar space.”

  Wil pretended to give her comment serious consideration; he needed time to think. Finally he shook his head and continued as calmly as before. “Even if you don’t believe me, there are data Juan never thought to alter. Marta’s diary, for instance…I know, Yelén, you studied that for a hundred years, and you knew Marta far better than I. But Marta knew she wasn’t marooned by simple sabotage. She knew the enemy saw what she left in the cairns, and could destroy any of it. Even worse, if she slipped a message past the enemy, and you understood it, the act of understanding might itself trigger an attack.

  “But I am a low-tech, outside all this automation. Marta got my attention with the one incident that only she and I could know. Yelén, after the Robinson party…I didn’t—I never tried to take advantage of Marta.” He looked into Yelén’s face, willing belief there.

  When there was no response, he continued. “The last years of her life, Marta played a terrible double game. She told us the story of survival and courage and defeat, and at the same time she left clues she hoped would point me at Juan. They were subtle. She named her fishermonkey friends after people in our settlement. There was always a Juan Chanson, a solitary creature that delighted in watching her. Marta’s last day alive, she mentioned that he was still out there, watching. She knew she was being stalked, and by the real Juan Chanson.”

  Juan slapped the bench. “God damn it, man! You can find any message if the coding scheme is nutty enough.”

  “Unfortunately, you’re right. And if that’s all she could do, this might be a stalemate, Juan. But for all her misfortunes, Marta had some good luck, too. One of her fishermonkeys was a freak, bigger and brighter than any fisher we’ve seen. He followed her around, tried to imitate her cairn-building. It wasn’t much, but she had an ally in realtime.” He smiled wanly. “She named him W. W. Brierson. He got lots of practice building cairns, always in the same position relative to Peace Lake. In the end, she took him north and left him in a normal forest beyond the glazed zone. I don’t know how close you were monitoring, Juan, but you missed what that animal took with him, you missed the cairn he built, where Marta never went.”

  Juan’s eyes darted to Yelén, then back to Wil, but he said nothing.

  “You’ve known about that cairn for four days, ever since I told Yelén. You were willing to show your full power—and kill half the human race—to prevent me from getting it.” Wil stepped off the platform and walked slowly toward the little man. “Well, Juan, you didn’t succeed. I’ve seen what Marta had to say when she didn’t have to write in parables. Everyone else is free to see it, too. And no matter what conspiracies you blame on Della Lu, I suspect the physical evidence will convince Yelén and her lab autons.”

  Yelén had backed away from Chanson. Tunç’s mouth was compressed into a thin line. Even without a confession, I may be able to win, thought Wil.

  Juan looked around, then back at Wil. “Please. You’re reading this all wrong. I didn’t kill Marta. I want the settlement to succeed. And I’ve sacrificed more than any of you to preserve it; if I hadn’t, none of us would have survived to fifty megayears. But now that’s made me look like the guilty one. I’ve got to convince you…

  “Look. Wil. You’re right about Mudge and me; I should never have tried to cover that up. I’m embarrassed I ever believed his chiliastic garbage. But I was young, and my nightmares followed me home from work. I needed to believe in something. I gave up my job, everything, for his promises.

  “We came out of stasis in 2295, just before Mudge’s numerology said Christ would put on the Big Show. There was nothing but ruins, a civilization destroyed, a race exterminated. Mudge reviewed his mumbo-jumbo and concluded that we had overshot, that Christ had come and gone. The stupid jerk! He just could not accept what we saw around us. Something had visited the Solar System in the mid-twenty-third, but it hadn’t been holy. The evidence of alien invasion was everywhere. Mudge had arrived with scarcely more than sackcloth and ashes. I’d brought plenty of equipment. I could do analysis, back up my claims. I had the power to save what humans were still in stasis.

  “Yelén, right from then my goal was the same as yours. Even while you high-techs were still in stasis, I was planning for it. The only difference was that I knew about the aliens. But I couldn’t convince Mudge of them. In fact, the signs were so subtle, I began to wonder if anyone else would believe me.” Chanson came to his feet, his talk speeding up. “Unless we guarded against the invaders, all the goodwill in the world could not resurrect the human race. I had to do something. I—I enhanced some of the evidence. I nuked a few ruins. Surely, not even a blind man could ignore that!” He looked at Yelén and Tammy accusingly. “Yet when you returned to realtime, you weren’t convinced. You couldn’t accept even the clearest evidence…I tried. I tried. Over the next two thousand years I traveled all over the Solar System, discovering the signs of the invasion, emphasizing them so even idiots could not miss them.

  “In the end, I had a little success. W. W. Sánchez had the patience to look at the facts, the open-mindedness to believe. We persuaded the rest of you to be a bit more cautious. But the burden of vigilance still rested on me. No one else was willing to put sentries in far solar space. Over the years, I destroyed two alien probes—and still Sánchez was the only one who was convinced.” Juan was staring through Wil; he might have been talking to himself. “I really liked Bil Sánchez. I wish he hadn’t dropped out; his settlement was just too small to succeed. I visited him there several times. It was a long, idyllic, downhill slide. Bil wanted to do research, but all he had was that punched tape he’d found on Charon. He was obsessed with it; the last time I saw him he even claimed it was a fake.” A faintly troubled look passed across Juan’s face. “Well, that settlement was too small to survive, anyway.”

  Yelén’s eyes were wide, white showing all around the irises; her whole body had gone rigid. Chanson could not notice, but sudden death was in the air.

  Wil stepped into Yelén’s line of sight; his voice was a calm echo of Chanson’s distant tone. “What about Marta, Juan?”

  “Marta?” Juan almost looked at him. “Marta always had an open mind. She granted the possibility of an alien threat. I think Lu’s arrival scared her; the creature was so obviously inhuman. Marta talked to Lu, got access to some of her databases. And then—and then”—tears started in his eyes—“she started asking the db about Mudge.” How much had Marta suspected? At the time, probably nothing; most of the jumbled references to Mudge had no connection with Chanson. It was tragic bad luck she started so close to Juan’s secret. “I should never have lied about my past, but now it was too late. Marta could destroy all I had worked for. The colony would be left defenseless. I had to, I had to—”

  “Kill her?” Yelén’s voice was a shout.

  “No!” Juan’s head snapped up; the reality around him was not to be ignored. “I could never do that. I liked Marta! But I had to…quarantine her. I watched to see if she would denounce me. She never did—but then I realized I could nev
er be sure what she might say later. I couldn’t let her back.

  “Please listen to me! I made mistakes; I pushed too hard to make you see the truth. But you must believe. The invaders are out there, Yelén. They’ll destroy everything you and Marta dreamed of if you don’t believe m—” Juan’s voice became a scream. He fell heavily, lay with arms and legs twitching.

  Two quick steps and Wil was kneeling by his side. Wil looked down at the agonized face; he’d had two days to prepare for this moment, to suppress the killing rage he felt every time he saw Chanson. Korolev had had no such time; he could almost feel her eyes boring death through his back. “What did you do to him, Yelén?”

  “I shut him down, cut his comm links.” She stepped around Wil, to look down at Chanson. “He’ll recover.” There was a tight smile on her face; in a way, it was scarier than her rage. “I want time to think of just revenge. I want him to understand it when it comes.” Her eyes snapped up to the nearest bystanders. “Get him out of my sight.” For once there was no debate; her words might as well have been electric prods. Tunç and three low-techs grabbed Chanson, carried him towards the flier that was drifting down the side of the amphitheater. Wil started after them.

  “Brierson! I want to talk to you.” The words were abrupt, but there was something strange in Yelén’s tone. Wil came back down the steps. Yelén led him around the side of the platform—away from the crowd, which was just beginning to come out of shock. “Wil,” she said quietly, “I want—I’d like to see what Marta said.” What Marta said when she wasn’t writing for Chanson’s eyes.

  Wil swallowed; even winning could be hard. He touched her shoulder. “Marta left the fifth cairn, just like I told Chanson. If we’d found it during the first few thousand years…After fifty thousand, all we could see was that there had been a sheaf of reed paper inside. It was powder. We’ll never know for sure what she wanted to tell us…I’m sorry, Yelén.”

  26

  It was snowing. From over the hill came shouts, occasional laughter. They were having a snowball fight.

  W. W. Brierson crunched down the hillside to the edge of the pines. Strange that with the world so empty he would still want to be alone. Maybe not so strange. Their dormitory was a crowded place. No doubt there were others who’d left the snowballers, who walked beneath the pines and pretended this was a different time.

  He found a big rock, clambered up, and dusted off a place to sit. From here he could see alpine glaciers disappearing into the clouds. Wil tapped at his data set and thought. The human race had another chance. Dilip and a lot of other people really seemed to think he was responsible. Well, he’d solved the case. Without a doubt it was the biggest of his career. Even Billy Brierson had not imagined such a great adventure for his father. And the chief bad guy had been punished. Very definitely, Juan had been punished…

  Yelén had honored Marta’s notions about mercy; she had made that mercy the punishment itself. Juan was executed by a surfeit of life. He was marooned in realtime, without shelter or tools or friends. Yet his was a different torture than Marta’s—and perhaps the more terrible. Juan was left with a medical auton. He was free to live as long as he wished.

  Juan outlived three autons. He lasted ten thousand years. He kept his purpose for nearly two thousand. Wil shook his head as he surveyed the report. If anyone had known that Chanson was into Penetration and Perversion, he would have been an instant suspect—on grounds of personality alone. Wil had known only one such specialist, his company’s resident spook. The man was inhumanly patient and devious, but frightened at the same time. He spent so much time in deep connect, the paranoid necessities of defense systems leaked into his perception of the everyday world. Wil could only imagine the madhouse Penetration and Perversion had become by the late twenty-second. Juan made seven attempts to pervert the auton. One involved twelve hundred years of careful observation, timing the failure of various subsystems, maneuvering the auton into a position where he might take control and get transportation to resources in near space.

  Yet Chanson never really had a prayer of success. Yelén had hardwired changes to the auton. Juan had none of the software he had stolen from USAF, Inc, and he was without processor support. His glib tongue and two thousand years of effort were not enough to set him free.

  As the centuries passed and he had no luck with the auton, Juan spent more and more time trying to talk to Yelén and the other high-techs who occasionally looked into realtime. He kept a journal many times longer than Marta’s; he painted endless prose across the rocklands north of his home territory. None of it looked as interesting as Marta’s diary. All Juan could talk of was his great message, the threat he saw in the stars. He went on spouting evidence—though after the first centuries it lost all connection with reality.

  After five hundred years, his journal became at first irregular, then a decadely summary, then a dead letter. For three thousand years Juan lived without apparent goal, moving from cave to cave. He wore no clothes, he did no work. The auton protected him from local predators. When he did not hunt or farm, the auton brought him food. If the climate of the Eastern Straits had been less mild he would certainly have died. Yet to Wil it was still a miracle the man survived. Through all that time he had enough determination to keep on living. Della had been right. W. W. Brierson would not have lasted a tenth as long; a few centuries and he would have drifted into suicidal funk.

  Juan drifted for three thousand years…and then his immortal paranoid soul found a new cause. It wasn’t clear exactly what it was. He kept no journal; his conversations with the auton were limited to simple commands and incoherent mumbling. Yelén thought that Juan saw himself as somehow the creator of reality. He moved to the seashore. He built heavy baskets and used them to drag millions of loads of soil inland. The dredged shoreland became a maze of channels. He piled the dirt on a rectangular mound that rose steadily through the centuries. That mound reminded Wil of the earthen pyramids the American Indians had left in Illinois. It had taken hundreds of people working over decades to build those. Juan’s was the work of one man over millennia. If the climate had not been exceptionally dry and mild in his era, he could not have kept ahead of simple erosion.

  Juan’s new vision went beyond monuments. Apparently he thought to create an intelligent race. He persuaded the auton to extend its food gathering, to beach schools of fish in the maze he constructed on the shore. Soon there were thousands of fishermonkeys living beneath his temple/pyramid. Through a perversion of its protection programs, he used the auton as an instrument of force: The best fish went to the monkeys who performed properly. The effect was small, but over centuries the fishers at the East End had a different look. The majority were like the “W. W. Brierson” that had helped Marta. They carried rocks to the base of the pyramid. They sat for hours staring up at it.

  The four-thousand-year effort was not enough to bring intelligence to the fishers. Yelén’s report showed some tool use. Towards the end, they built a stone skirt around the lower part of the pyramid. But they were never the race of hod carriers that Chanson probably intended. It was Juan who continued to drag endless loads of dirt up to his temple, repairing erosion damage, adding ever-higher towers to the topmost platform. At its greatest, the temple covered a rectangle two hundred meters by one hundred, and the top platform was thirty meters above the plain. Its spires crowded tall and spindly all about, more like termite towers or coral than human architecture. Through those last four thousand years, Juan’s daily pattern was unchanged. He worked on his new race. He hauled dirt. Each evening, he walked round and round the intricate stairs of the pyramid, till finally he stood at the top, surveying the temple slaves who gathered on the plain before him.

  Wil paged through Yelén’s report. She had pictures of Juan during those last centuries. His face was blank of all expression, except at day’s end—when he always laughed, three times. His every motion was a patterned thing, a reflex. Juan had become an insect, one whose hive spread through time i
nstead of space.

  Juan had found peace. He might have lasted forever if only the world had had the same stability. But the climate of the Eastern Straits entered a period of wet and storminess. The auton was programmed to provide minimum protection. In earlier millennia that would have been enough. But now Juan was inflexible. He would not retreat to the highland caves; he would not even come down from the temple during storms. He forbade the auton to approach it during his nightly services.

  Of course, Yelén had pictures of Juan’s end. The auton was four klicks from the temple; Juan had long since destroyed all bugs. The wind-driven rain blurred and twisted the auton’s view. This was just the latest of a series of storms that were tearing down the pyramid faster than Juan could maintain it. His towers and walls were like a child’s sand castle melting in an ocean tide. Juan did not notice. He stood on the slumped platform of his temple and looked out upon the storm. Wil watched the wavery image raise its arms—just as Juan always did at day’s end, just before he gave his strange laugh. Lightning struck all around, turning the storm darkness to actinic blue, showing Juan’s slaves huddled by the thousands below him. The bolts marched across the fallen temple, striking what was left of the spires…striking Juan as he stood, arms still upraised to direct the show.

  There was little more to Yelén’s report. The fishermonkeys had been given a strong push toward intelligence. It was not enough. Biological evolution has no special tendency toward sapience; it heads blindly for local optima. In the case of the fishers, that was their dominance of the shallow waters. For a few hundred years, the race he’d bred still lived at the Eastern Straits, still brought rocks to line the stub of his pyramid, still watched through the evenings. But that was instinct without reward. In the end, they were as Juan had found them.