Across Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Yet it would be unknown thousands of years before the bobble burst, and the men and women within could join the colony.

  As usual, the Korolevs had a plan. As usual, the low-techs had little choice but to tag along.

  "Hey, we're having a party tonight. Want to come?"

  Wil and the others looked up from their shoveling After three hours mucking around in the ash, they all looked pretty much the same. Black, white, Chinese, Indian, Aztlan - all were covered with gray ash.

  The vision that confronted them was dressed in sparkling white. Her flying platform hovered just above the long pile of ash that the low-techs had pushed into the street. She was one of the Robinson daughters. Tammy? In any case, she looked like some twentieth-century fashion plate: blond, tan, seventeen, friendly.

  Dilip Dasgupta grinned back at her. "We'd sure like to. But tonight? If we don't get this ash away from the houses before the Korolevs bobble up, we'll be stuck with it forever." Wil's back and arms were one big ache, but he had to agree. They had been doing this for two days, ever since the Korolevs announced tonight's departure. If they could get all the gray stuff pushed back from the houses before they bobbled up, it would be sluiced away by a thousand years of weather when they came back. Everyone on the street had pitched in, though with lots of grumbling-directed mostly at the Korolevs. The New Mexicans had even sent over some enlisted men with wheelbarrows and shovels. Wil wondered about that: he couldn't believe that someone like Fraley was really overcome by a spirit of cooperation. This was either honest helpfulness on the part of lower officers, or else a subtle effort to bring the other low-techs into the NM camp, future allies against the Korolevs and the Peacers.

  The Robinson girl leaned on her platform, and it drifted closer to Dasgupta. She looked up and down the street, then spoke with an air of confidentiality. "My folks like Yel‚n and Marta a lot-really. But Daddy thinks they carry some things too far. You Early Birds are going to be at our level of tech in a few decades anyway. Why should you have to slave like this?"

  She bit at a fingernail. "I really wish you could come to our party.... Hey! Why don't we do this: You keep working, say till about six. Maybe you can get it all cleaned by then, anyway. But if you can't, don't worry. My folks' robots can take care of what's left while you go get ready for the party." She smiled, then continued almost shyly. "Do you think that would be okay? Could you come then?"

  Dilip looked at his brother Rohan, then replied, deadpan, "Why, uh, yes. With that backup, I think we could make it."

  "Great! Now look. It's at our house starting around eight. So don't work past six, okay? And don't bother eating, either. We've got lots of food. The party'll go till the Witching Hour. That will leave you plenty of time to get home before the Korolevs bobble up."

  Her flier drifted sideways and climbed beyond the trees that encircled the houses. "See you!" Twelve sweaty shovel pushers watched her departure in numbed silence.

  A smile spread slowly across Dilip's wide face. He looked at his shovel, then rolled his eyes at the others. Finally he shouted, "Screw it!", threw the shovel to the ground, and jumped up and down on it.

  This provoked a heartfelt cheer from the others, the NNI corporals included. In moments, the newly liberated workers had departed for their homes.

  Only Brierson remained on the street, still looking in the direction taken by the Robinson girl. He felt as much curiosity as gratitude. Wil had done his best to know the high-techs: for all their idiosyncrasies, they'd seemed united behind the Korolevs. But no matter how friendly the disagreement, he saw now that they had factions, too. I wonder what the Robinsons are selling.

  The public area of the Robinsons' place was friendlier than the Korolevs'. Incandescent lamps hung from oaken beams The teak dance floor opened onto a buffet room, an outdoor terrace, and a darkened theater where the hosts promised some extraordinary home movies later.

  While guests were still arriving, the younger Robinson children ran noisily about the dance floor, dodging among the guests in a wild game of tag. They were tolerated, more than tolerated. They were the only children in the world.

  In some sense, almost everyone present was an exile. Some had been shanghaied, some had jumped to escape punishment (deserved and otherwise), some (like the Dasguptas) thought that stepping out of time for a couple of centuries while their investments multiplied would make them rich. On the whole, their initial jumps had been short-into the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth centuries.

  But somewhere in the twenty-third, the rest of humanity disappeared. The travelers coming out just after the Extinction found ruins. Some-the most frivolous, and the most hurried of the criminals-had brought nothing with them. These starved, or lived a few pitiful years in the decaying mausoleum that was Earth. The better-equipped ones-the New Mexicans, for example-had the means to return to stasis. They bobbled forward through the third millennium, praying to find civilization revived. All they found was a world sinking back to nature, Man's works vanishing beneath jungle and forest and sea.

  Even these travelers could survive only a few years in realtime. They had no medical support, no way to maintain their machines or produce food. Their equipment would soon fail, leaving them stranded in the wilderness.

  But a few, a very few, had left at the close of the twenty-second century-when technology gave individuals greater wealth than whole twentieth-century nations. These few could maintain and reproduce all but the most advanced of their tools. Most departed civilization with a deliberate spirit of adventure. They had the resources to save the less fortunate scattered through the centuries, the millennia, and finally the megayears that passed.

  Except for the Robinsons, no one had children. That was something reserved for the future, when humankind's ghosts made one last try at reclaiming the race's existence. So the kids who played raucous tag across the dance floor were a greater wonder than any high-tech magic. When the Robinson daughters gathered up their younger siblings for bed, there was a moment of strange, sad silence.

  Wil drifted through the buffet room, stopping here and there to talk with his new acquaintances. He was determined to know everyone eventually. Quite a goal: if successful, he would know every living member of the human race. The largest group-and for Wil the most difficult to know-were the New Mexicans Fraley himself was nowhere in sight, but most of his people were here. He spotted the corporals who had helped with the shoveling, and they introduced him to some others. Things were friendly till an NM officer joined the group.

  Wil excused himself and moved slowly toward the dance floor. Most of the advanced travelers were at the party, and they were mingling. A crowd surrounded Juan Chanson. The archeologist was arguing his theory of the Extinction. "Invasion. Extermination. That's the beginning and the end of it." He spoke a clipped, rattling dialect of English that made his opinions seem even more impressive.

  "But, Professor," someone-Rohan Dasgupta-objected, "my brother and I came out of stasis in 2465. That couldn't have been more than two centuries after the Extinction. Newer Delhi was in ruins. Many of the buildings had completely fallen in. But we saw no evidence of nuking or lasing."

  "Sure. I agree. Not around Delhi. But you must realize, my boy, you saw a very small part of the picture, indeed. It's a great misfortune that most of those who returned right after the Extinction didn't have the means to study what they saw. I can show you pictures... LA a fifty-kilometer crater, Beijing a large lake. Even now, with the right equipment, you can find evidence of those blasts.

  "I've spent centuries tracking down and interviewing the travelers who were alive in the late third millennium. Why, I even interviewed you." Chanson's eyes unfocused for a fraction of a second. Like most of the high-techs, he wore an interface band around his temples. A moment's thought could bring a flood of memory. "You and your brother. That was around 10000 AD, after the Korolevs rescued you-"

  Dasgupta nodded eagerly. For him, it had been just weeks before. "Yes, they had moved us to Can
ada. I still don't know why-ø.

  "Safety, my boy, safety. The Laurentian Shield is a stable place for long-term storage, almost as good as a cometary orbit." He waved his hand dismissingly. "The point is, I and a few other investigators have pieced together these separate bits of evidence. It is tricky; twenty-third-century civilization maintained vast databases, but the media had decayed to uselessness within a few decades of the Extinction. We have fewer contemporary records from the era than we do from the Mayans'. But there are enough... I can show you: my reconstruction of the Norcross invasion graffiti, the punched vanadium tape that W. W. Sanch‚z found on Charon. These are the death screams of the human race.

  "Looking at the evidence, any reasonable person must agree the Extinction was the result of wholesale violence directed against populations that were somehow defenseless.

  "Now, there are some who claim the human race simply killed itself, that we finally had the world-ending war people worried about in the twentieth century...." He glanced at Monica Raines. The pinch-faced artist smiled back sourly but didn't rise to the bait. Monica belonged to the "People Are No Damned Good" school of philosophy. The Extinction held no mysteries for her. After a moment, Chanson continued. "But if you really study the evidence, you'll see the traces of outside interference, you'll see that our race was murdered by something... from outside."

  The woman next to Rohan gave a little gasp. "But these

  .. these aliens. What became of them? Why, if they return -we're sitting ducks here!"

  Wil stepped back from the fringes of the group and continued toward the dance floor. Behind him, he heard Juan Chanson's triumphant "Exactly! That is the practical point of my investigations. We must mount guard on the solar frontiers-" His words were lost in the background chatter. Wil shrugged to himself. Juan was one of the most approachable of the high-techs, and Wil had heard his spiel before. There was no question the Extinction was the central mystery of their lives. But rehashing the issue in casual conversation was like arguing theology-and depressing, to boot.

  A dozen couples danced. On the stage, Alice Robinson and daughter Amy were running the music. Amy played something that looked like a guitar. Alice's instrument was a more conventional console. They improvised on a base of automatic music generators. Having two real humans out front, whose voices and hands were making part of the music, made the band exciting and real.

  They played everything from Strauss waltzes, to the Beatles, to W. W. Arai. A couple of the Arai pieces Wil had never heard: they must have been written after his... departure. Partners changed from dance to dance. The Arai tunes brought more than thirty people onto the floor. Wil stayed at the edge of the floor, for the moment content to observe. On the other side, he saw Marta Korolev; her partner was not in evidence

  Marta stood swaying, snapping her fingers to the music, a faint smile on her face. She looked a little like Virginia: her chocolate skin was almost the shade Wil remembered. No doubt Marta's father or mother came from America. But the other side of her family was clearly Chinese.

  Appearance aside, there were other similarities. Marta had Virginia's outgoing good humor. She combined common sense with uncommon sympathy. Wil watched her for many minutes, trying not to seem to watch. Several of the bolder partiers -Dilip was first-asked her to dance. She accepted enthusiastically, and soon was on the floor for almost every tune. She was very good to watch. If only

  A hand touched his shoulder and a feminine voice sounded in his ear. "Hey, Mr. Brierson, is it true you're a policeman?"

  Wil looked into blue eyes just centimeters from his. Tammy Robinson stood on tiptoe to shout into his ear. Now that she had his attention, she stood down, which still left her a respectable 180 centimeters tall. She was dressed in the same spotless white as before. Her interface band looked like a bit of jewelry, holding back her long hair. Her grin was bounded by dimples: even her eyes seemed to be smiling.

  Brierson grinned back. "Yes. At least, I used to be a cop."

  "Oh, wow." She took his arm in hers and edged them away from the loudness. "I never met a policeman before. But 1 guess that's not saying a lot."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah. I was born about ten megayears after the Singularity -the Extinction, Juan calls it. I've read and watched all about

  17 cops and criminals and soldiers, but till now I've never actually met any."

  Wil laughed. "Well, now you can meet all three."

  Tammy was abashed. "I'm sorry. I'm really not that igno-rant. I know that police are different from criminals and sol-diers. But it's so strange: they're all careers that can't even exist unless lots of people decide to live together."

  Lots o f people. Like more than a single family. Brierson glimpsed the abyss that separated them.

  "1 think you'll like having other people around, Tammy."

  She smiled and squeezed his arm. "Daddy always says that. Now I'm beginning to understand."

  "Just think. Before you're a hundred, Korolev Town will be almost like a city. There could be a couple of thousand people for you to know, people more interesting and worthwhile than criminals."

  "Ugh. We're not going to stay for that. I want to be with lots of people-hundreds at least. But how could you stand to be locked in one little corner of time?" She looked at him, seemed suddenly to realize that Brierson's whole life had been stuck in a single century. "Gee. How can I explain it? Look- where you come from, there was air and space travel, right?" Brierson nodded. "You could go anywhere you wanted. Now, suppose instead you had to spend your life in a house in a deep valley. Sometimes you hear stories about other places, but you can never climb out of the valley. Wouldn't that drive you crazy?

  "That's how I'd feel about making a permanent stop at Korolev. We've been stopped for six weeks now. That's not long compared to some of our stops, but it's long enough for me to get the feeling: The animals aren't changing. I look out and the mountains just sit there." She made a little sound of frustration. "Oh, I can't explain it. But you'll see some of what I mean tonight. Daddy's going to show the video we made. It's beautiful!"

  Wil smiled. Bobbles didn't change the fact that time was a one-way trip.

  She saw the denial in his eyes. "You must feel like I do. Just a little? I mean, why did you go into stasis in the first place?" He shook his head. "Tammy, there are lots of people here who never asked to be bobbled.... I was shanghaied." A crummy embezzlement case it had been. When he thought back, it was so fresh in his mind, in many ways more real than the world of the last few weeks. The assignment had seemed as safe as houses. The need for an armed investigator had been a formality, required by his company's archaic regs: the amount stolen was just over the ten thousand gAu. But someone had been desperate or careless... or just plain vicious. Most jurisdictions of Wil's era counted offensive bobbling of more than a century as manslaughter: Wil's stasis had lasted one thousand centuries. Of course, Wil did not consider the crime to be the murder of one W. W. Brierson. The crime was much more terrible than that. The crime was the destruction of the world he had known, the family he loved.

  Tammy's eyes grew wide as he told his story. She tried to understand, but Wil thought there was more wonder than sympathy in her look. He stopped short, embarrassed.

  He was trying to think of a suitable change of subject when he noticed the pale figure on the far side of the dance floor. It was the person he'd seen at the beach. "Tammy, who's that?" He nodded in the direction of the stranger.

  Tammy pulled her gaze away from his face and looked across the room. "Oh! She's weird, isn't she? She's a spacer. Can you imagine? In fifty million years, she could travel all over the Galaxy. We think she's more than nine thousand years old..And all that time alone." Tammy shivered.

  Nine thousand years. That would make her the oldest human Wil had ever seen. She certainly looked more human tonight than on the beach. For one thing, she wore more clothes: a blouse and skirt that were definitely feminine. Now her skull was covered with short black stubble. He
r face was smooth and pale. Wil guessed that when her hair grew out, she might look like a normal young woman-Chinese, probably.

  A half-meter of emptiness surrounded the spacer; elsewhere the crowd was packed close. Many clapped and sang; there was scarcely a person who could resist tapping a foot or nodding in time to the music. But the spacer stood quietly, almost motionless, her dark eyes staring impassively into the dancers. Occasionally her arm or leg would twitch, as if in some broken resonance with the tunes.

  She seemed to sense Wil's gaze. She looked back at him, her eyes expressionless, analytical. This woman had seen more than the Robinsons, the Korolevs - more than all the high-techs put together. Was it his imagination that he suddenly felt like a bug on a slide? The woman's lips moved, the twitching motion lie remembered from the beach. Then it had seemed a coldly alien, almost insectile gesture. Now Wil had a flash of insight: after nine thousand years alone, nine thousand years on God knows how many worlds, would a person still remember the simple things-like how to smile?

  "C'mon, Mr. Brierson, let's dance." Tammy Robinson's hand was insistent on his elbow.

  Wil danced more that night than since he'd been dating Virginia. The Robinson kid just wouldn't quit. She didn't really lave more stamina than Brierson. He kept in condition and kept his bio-age around twenty; with his large frame and tendency to overweight he couldn't afford to be fashionably middle-aged. But Tammy had the enthusiasm of a seventeen-year-old. Paint her a different color and she reminded him of his daughter Anne: cuddly, bright, and just a bit predatory when it came to the males she wanted.