by Vernor Vinge
The music swept them round and round, taking Marta Korolev in and out of his view. Marta danced only a few times with any one partner and spent considerable time off the floor, talking. This evening would leave the Korolev reputation substantially mellowed. Later, when he saw her depart for the theater, he suppressed a sigh of relief. It had been a depressing little game, watching her and watching her, and all the time pretending not to.
The lights brightened and the music faded. "It's about an hour to midnight, folks," came Don Robinson's voice. "You're welcome to dance till the Witching Hour, but I've got some pictures and ideas I'd like to share with you. If you're interested, please step down the hall."
"That's the video I was telling you about. You've got to he what Daddy has to say." Tammy led him off the floor, eve though another song was starting. The music had lost some its vibrancy. Amy and Alice Robinson had left the bandstand The rest of the evening would be uninterpreted recordings
Behind them, the crowd around the dance floor was breaking up. There had been hints through the evening that this la entertainment would be the most spectacular. Almost everyone would be in the Robinsons' theater.
As they walked down the hall, the lights above them were dim. The theater itself was awash with blue light. A four-met: globe of Earth hung above the seats. It was an effect Wil had seen before, though never on this scale. Given several satellite t views it was possible to construct a holo of the entire planet and hang its blue-green perfection before the viewer. From the entrance to the theater, the world was in quarter phase, more ing just touching the Himalayas. Moonlight glinted faintly o the Indian Ocean. The continental outlines were the family ones from the Age of Man.
Yet there was something strange about the image. It too Wil a second to realize just what: There were no clouds.
He was about to walk around the globe to the seating when lie noticed two shadows beyond the dark side. It looked like Don Robinson and Marta Korolev. Wil paused, resisting Tammy's urging that they hurry to get the best seats. The roof was rapidly filling with partygoers, but Wil guessed he was the only one who had noticed Robinson and Korolev. There w, something strange here: Korolev's bearing was tense. Every few seconds she chopped at the air between them. The shadow that was Don Robinson stood motionless, even as Korolev became more excited. Wil had the impression of short, unsatisfactory replies being given to impassioned demands. Wil couldn't he the words; either they were behind a sound screen, or they weren't talking out loud. Finally Robinson turned and walks out of sight behind the globe. Marta followed, still gesturing
Even Tammy hadn't noticed. She led Brierson to the edge of the audience area and they sat. A minute passed. Wil saw Marta emerge from beyond the sunlit hemisphere and v , behind the audience to sit near the door.
Then there was music, just loud enough to still the audience. Tammy touched Wil's hand. "Oh. Here comes Daddy."
Don Robinson suddenly appeared by the sunside hemisphere. He cast no shadow on the globe, though both shone in the synthetic sunlight. "Good evening, everyone. I thought to end our party with this little light show-and a few ideas I'm hoping you'll think about." He held up his hand and grinned disarmingly. "I promise, mostly pictures!"
His image turned to pat the surface of the globe familiarly. "All but a lucky few of us began our journey down time unprepared. That first bobbling was an accident or was intended as a single jump to what we guessed would be a friendlier future civilization. Unfortunately-as we all discovered-there is no such civilization, and many of us were stranded." Robinson's voice was friendly, smooth, the tone traditionally associated with the selling of breakfast food or religion. It irritated Wil that Robinson said "we" and "us" even when he was speaking specifically of the low-tech travelers.
"Now, there were a few who were well equipped. Some of these have worked to rescue the stranded, to bring us all together where we can freely decide humanity's new course. My family, Juan Chanson, and others did what we could-but it was the Korolevs who had the resources to bring this off. Marta Korolev is here tonight." He waved generously in her direction. "I think Marta and Yel‚n deserve a big hand." There was polite applause.
He patted the globe again. "Don't worry. I'm getting to our friend here.... One problem with all this rescuing is that most of us have spent the last fifty million years in long-term stasis, waiting for all the `principals' to be gathered for this final debate. Fifty million years is a long time to be gone; a lot has happened.
"That's what I want to share with you tonight. Alice and the kids and I were among the fortunate. We have advanced bobblers and plenty of autonomous devices. We've been out of stasis hundreds of times. We've been able to live and grow along with the Earth. The pictures I'm going to show you tonight are t lie 'lion -is movies,' if you will, of our trip to the present.
"I'm going to start with the big picture-the Earth from space. The image you see here is really a composite-I've averaged out the cloud cover. It was recorded early in the fourth millennium, just after the Age of Man. This is our starting point.
"Let's begin the journey." Robinson vanished and they had an unobstructed view of the globe. Now Wil noticed a gray haze that seemed to waver around the polar ice cap. "We're moving forward about half a megayear per minute. The camera satellites were programmed to take pictures at the same local time every year. At this rate, even climate cycles are visible only as a softening of picture definition." The gray haze-it must be the edge of the Antarctic ice pack! Wil looked more carefully at Asia. There was a blurring, a fantastically rapid mottling of greens and tans. Droughts and wetness. Forest and jungle battling savanna and desert. In the north, white flickered like lightning. Suddenly the glaring whiteness flashed southwards. It surged and retreated, again, again. In less than a quarter of a minute it was gone back to the northern horizon. Except for shimmering whiteness in the Himalayas, the greens and tans lived once more across Asia. "We had a pretty good ice age there," Robinson explained. "It lasted more than one hundred thousand years.... We're beyond the immediate neighborhood of Man now. I'm going to speed us up... to five megayears per minute."
Wil glanced at Marta Korolev. She was watching the show, but her face held an uncharacteristic look of displeasure. Her hands were clenched into fists.
Tammy Robinson leaned from her seat to whisper, "This is where it really gets good, Mr. Brierson!"
Wil turned back to the display, but his attention was split between the view and the mystery of Marta's anger.
Five million years every minute. Glacier and desert and forest and jungle blended. One color or another might fleetingly dominate the pastel haze, but the overall impression was stable and soothing. Only now... only now the continents themselves were moving! A murmur passed around the room as the audience realized what they were seeing. Australia had moved north, sliding into the eastern islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Mountains puckered along the collision. This part of the world was near the sunrise line. Low sunlight cast the new mountains in relief.
There was sound, too. From the surface of the globe, Wil heard something that reminded him of wood surfaces squeaking wetly across each other. A sound like crumpling paper accompanied the birth of the Indonesian Alps. "Those noises are real, friends," said Don Robinson. "We kept a system of seismophones on the surface. What you're hearing are long-term averages of seismic action. It took thousands of major earthquakes to make every second of those sounds."
As he spoke, Australia and Indonesia merged, the combination continuing its slide northwards, turning slightly as it came. Already the form of the Inland Sea could be discerned. "No one predicted what happened next," continued Robinson's travelogue. "There! Notice the rift spreading through Kampuchea, breaking the Asian plate." A string of narrow lakes appeared across Southeast Asia. "In a moment, we'll see the new platelet reverse direction and ram back into China-to build the Kampuchean Alps."
From the corner of his eye, Brierson saw Marta heading for the door. What is going on here? He st
arted to get up, found that Tammy's arm was still around his.
"Wait. Why are you going, Mr. Brierson?" she whispered, starting to get up.
"I've got to check on something, Tammy."
"But-" She seemed to realize that extended discussion would detract from her father's show. She sat down, looking puzzled and a little hurt.
"Sorry, Tam," Wil whispered. He headed for the door Behind him, continents crashed.
The Witching Hour. The time between midnight and the start of the next day. It was more like seventy-five minutes than an hour. Since the Age of Man, the Earth's rotation had slowed. Now, at fifty megayears, the day was a little over twenty-five hours long. Rather than change the definition of
-he second or the hour, the Korolevs had decreed (just another of their decrees) that the standard day should consist of twenty-four hours plus whatever time it took to complete one rotation. Yel‚n called the extra time the Fudge Factor. Everyone else ailed it the Witching Hour.
Wil walked through the Witching Hour, looking for some sign of Marta Korolev. He was still on the Robinson estate, that.vas obvious: as advanced travelers, the Robinsons had plenty of robots. Rescue-day ash had been meticulously cleaned from he stone seats, the fountains, the trees, even the ground. The.cent of almost-jacarandas floated in the cool night breeze.
Even without the tiny lights that floated along the paths, Wil could have found his way without difficulty. For the first time since the blow-off, the night was clear-well, not really clear, but he could see the moon. Its wan light was only faintly reddened by stratospheric ash. The old girl looked pretty much is she had in Wil's time, though the stains of industrial pollution were gone. Rohan Dasgupta claimed the moon was a little farther out now, that there would never again be a total eclipse of the sun. The difference was not enough for Wil to see.
The reddish silver light fell bright across the Robinsons' gardens, but Marta was nowhere in sight. Wil stopped, let his breath out, and listened. There were footsteps. He jogged in their direction and caught up with Korolev still inside the estate.
"Mama, wait." She had already stopped and turned to face film. Something dark and massive floated a few meters above her. Wil glanced at it and slowed to a walk. These autonomous devices still made him uneasy. They hadn't existed in his time. and no matter how often he was told they were safe, it was still unnerving to think of the firepower they controlled-independent of the direct commands of their masters. With her protector floating nearby, Marta was almost as safe as back in Castle Korolev.
Now that he'd caught up with her, he didn't know quite what to say. "What's the matter, Marta? I mean, is anything wrong?"
:fit first, he thought she would not answer. She stood with balled fists. The moonlight showed tear streaks on her face. She slumped and brought her hands up to her temples. "That b-bastard Robinson. That slimy bastard!" The words were choked.
Wil stepped closer. The protection device moved forward, keeping him in clear view. "What happened?"
"You want to know? I'll tell you... but let's sit down. I-I don't think I can stand much longer. I'm s-so mad. " She walked to a nearby bench and sat. Wil lowered his bulk beside her, then started. To the hand, the bench felt like stone, but it yielded to main body weight like a cushion.
Marta put a hand on his arm, and for an instant he thought she might touch her head to his shoulder. The world was a very empty place now, and Marta reminded him so much of things lost.... But coming between the Korolevs was probably the single most boorish, the single most dangerous, thing he could do. Wil said abruptly, "This may not be the best place to talk." He waved at the fountain and the carefully tended trees. "I'll bet the Robinsons monitor the whole estate."
"Hah! We're screened." Marta moved her hand from his arm. "Besides, Don knows what I think of him.
"All these years, they've pretended to support our plan. We helped them, gave them factory designs that didn't exist when they left civilization. All the time, they were just waiting-taking their pretty pictures-while we did all the work, bringing what was left of the human race to one place and time
"And now that we have everyone together, now that we need everyone's cooperation, now they start sweet-talking people away from us. Well, I'll tell you, Wil. Our settlement is humankind's last chance. I'll do anything, anything, to protect it." Marta had always seemed so cheerful, optimistic. That made her fury even more striking. But the one did not make hypocrisy of the other. Marta was like a mother cat, suddenly ferocious and deadly in protecting her kittens.
"So the Robinsons want to break up the town? Do they want their own colony?"
Marta nodded. "But not like you think. Those lunatics want to continue down time, sightseeing their way into eternity. Robinson figures if he can persuade most of us to come along, he'll have a stable system. He calls it a `timelike urbanization.' For the next few billion years, his colony would spend about a month per megayear outside of stasis. As the sun goes old main sequence, they'll move into space and bobble through longer and longer jumps. He literally wants to follow the evolution of the whole goddamned universe!"
Brierson remembered Tammy Robinson's impatience with living at the same rate as the universe. She'd been campaigning for the scheme her father must now be selling to the audience back in the theater.
Wil shook his head and chuckled. "Sorry. I'm not laughing at you, Marta. It's just that compared to the things you should be worrying about, this is ludicrous.
"Look. Most of the low-techs are like me. It's been only weeks of objective time since I left civilization. Even the New Mexicans spent only a few years in realtime before you rescued them. We haven't lived centuries `on the road' like you advanced types. We're still hurting. More than anything, w c want to stop and rebuild."
"But Robinson is so slick."
"He's so slick you can scrape the grease off. You've been away from that kind for a long, long time. Back in civilization, we were exposed to sales pressure almost every day.... There's only one lever he has, and that's something you should be worrying about in any case."
Marta smiled wanly. "Yel‚n and I worry about so many things, Wil. You have something new for us?"
"Maybe." Wil was silent for a moment. The fountain across from their bench burbled loud. There were soft hooting sounds in trees. He hadn't expected this opportunity. Until now the Korolevs had been approachable enough, but they didn't seem to listen. "We're all grateful to you and Yel‚n. You saved u from death-or at least from life alone in an empty world. We have a chance to start the human race again.... But at the same time, a lot of low-techs resent you advanced travelers in your castles above town. They resent the fact that you make all the decisions, that you decide what you will share and what we will work at."
"I know. We haven't explained things very well. We seem omnipotent. But don't you see, Wil? We high-techs are a few people from around 2200 who brought our era's version of good-quality camping and survival gear. Sure, we can make most any consumer product of your time. But we can't reproduce the most advanced of our own devices. When those finally break, we'll be as helpless as you."
"I thought your autons were good for hundreds of years."
"Sure, if we use them for ourselves alone. Supporting an army of low-techs cuts us down to less than a century. We need each other, Wil. Apart, both groups face dead ends. Together, we have a chance. We can supply you with databases, equipment, and a good approximation to a twenty-first-century standard of living-for a few decades. As our support decays, you provide the human hands and minds and ingenuity to fill the gaps. If we can get a high birth rate, and build a twenty-first-century infrastructure, we may pull this out."
"Willing hands? Like the ash shoveling we've had to do?" He didn't mean the question to sound nasty, but it came out that way.
She touched his arm again. "No, Wil. That was dumb of us. Arrogant." She paused, her eyes searching his.
"Have you ever been ramjetting, Wil?"
"Huh? Uh, no." In general,
Wil didn't go looking for trouble.
"But it was a big sport in your time, wasn't it? Sort of like hang gliding, but a lot more exciting-especially for the purists who didn't carry bobblers. Our situation reminds me of a typical ramjet catastrophe: You're twenty thousand meters up, ramming along. All of a sudden your jet flames out. It's au interesting problem. Those little rigs didn't mass more than a few hundred kilos; they didn't carry turbines. So all you can do is dive hell down. If you can get your airspeed above Mach one, you can usually relight the ram; if not, you make a nice crater.
"Well, we're sitting pretty right now. But the underlying civilization has flamed out. We have a long way to fall. Counting the Peacers, there will be almost three hundred low-techs. With your help we ought to be able to relight at some decent level of technology-say twentieth or twenty-first century. If we can, we'll quickly climb back. If we can't, if we fall to a pre-machine age when our autons fail... we'll be just too primitive and too few to survive. So. The ash shoveling was unnecessary. But I can't disguise the fact that there will be hard times, terribly hard work."
She looked down. "I know you've heard most of this before, Wil. It's a hard package to sell, isn't it? But I thought I would have more time. I thought I could convince most of you of our goodwill.... I never counted on Don Robinson and his slick promises and good-fellowship."
Marta looked so forlorn. He reached out to pat her shoulder. o doubt Robinson had plans similar to the Korolevs', plans that would remain secret until the low-techs were safely suckered into his family's journey. "I think that most of us low-techs will see through Robinson. If you make it clear where his promises must be lies. If you can come down from the castle. Concentrate on Fraley; if Robinson convinces him, you might lose the New Mexicans. Fraley isn't dumb, but he is rigid and he lets his anger run away with him. He really does hate the Peacers." Almost as much as he hates me.
Half a minute passed. Marta gave a short, bitter laugh. "So many enemies. The Korolevs hate the Robinsons, the NMs hate the Peacers, almost everybody hates the Korolevs."