Across Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  "Look, Yel‚n. Time is the one thing we've got. It's God knows how many thousands of years till the Peacers come out and you restart the settlement. Even if it took me fifty years to learn, it wouldn't interfere."

  "Time is something you don't have, mister. If you spend a century tooling up for this job, you'll lose the viewpoint that's your value to me."

  She had a point. He remembered how Marta had misunderstood the effect of Robinson's sales pitch.

  "Sure," she continued, "there are high-tech angles to the murder. Maybe they're the most important angles. But I've already got expert help in that department."

  "Oh? Someone you can trust among the high-techs?" He waved at the mug shots on the walls.

  Korolev smiled thinly. "Someone I can distrust less than the others. Never forget, Brierson, my devices will be watching all of you." She thought for a moment. "I was hoping she'd be back in time for this meeting. She's the least likely to have a motive. In all the megayears, she's never been tangled in our little schemes. You two will work together. I think you'll find your skills complementary. She knows technology, but she's little... strange." Yel‚n was silent again; Wil wondered if lie would ever get used to this silent communion between human and machines.

  There was movement at the corner of his vision. Wil turned and saw that a third person sat by the table. It was the spacer woman. He hadn't heard a door opening or footsteps.... Then he noticed that she sat back from the table, and her seat was angled slightly off true. The holo was better than any he'd seen before.

  She nodded solemnly at Yel‚n. "Ms. Korolev. I'm still III high orbit, but we can talk if you wish."

  "Good. I wanted to introduce you to your partner." She smiled at some private joke. "Ms. Lu, this is Wil Brierson. Inspector Brierson, Della Lu."

  He'd heard that name before but couldn't remember just ,1 here. The short Asian looked much as she had at the party. He guessed she hadn't been out of stasis for more than a few clays: her hair was the same dark fuzz as before.

  Lu stared at Korolev for several seconds after she made the introduction, then turned to look at Brierson. If the delay were not a mannerism, she must be out beyond the moon. "I've read food things about you, Inspector," she said and made a smile that didn't involve her eyes. She spoke carefully, each word an isolated thing, but otherwise her English was much like Wil's 'forth American dialect.

  Before Brierson could reply, Korolev said, "What of our prime suspects, Ms. Lu?"

  Another four-beat pause. "The Robinsons refused to stop." The library windows showed a view from space. In one direction Wil could see a bright blue disk and a fainter, gray one -the Earth and the moon. Through the window behind Lu hung a bobble, sun and Earth and moon reflected in its surface. The sphere was surrounded by a spidery metal structure, swollen here and there into more solid structures. Dozens of tiny silver balls moved in slow orbit about the central one Every few seconds the bobbles vanished, replaced by a much larger one that contained even the spidery superstructure. There was a flash of light, and then the scene returned to its first phase.

  "By the time I caught up with them, they were off antigravity and using impulse boost. Their flicker rate was constant. It was easy to pace them."

  Quack, quack. For a moment, Wil was totally lost. Then lie realized he was seeing a nuke drive, very close up. The idea was so simple that it had been used even in his time: Just eject a bomb, then go into stasis for a few seconds while it detonates and gives you a big push. When you came out of stasis, drop off another bomb and repeat the process. Of course, it was deadly to bystanders. To get these pictures, Della Lu must have c snatched the Robinsons' bobble cycle exactly, and used her own bombs to keep up.

  "Notice that when the drive bobble bursts, they immediately generate a smaller one just inside their defensive frame. A

  41 battle would have taken several thousand years of outside time to resolve."

  Objects in stasis had absolute protection against the outside world. But bobbles eventually burst: if the duration was short, your enemy would still be waiting, ready to shoot; if the duration was long, your enemy might drop your bobble into the sun -and absolute protection would end in absolute catastrophe. Apparently the advanced travelers used a hierarchy of autonomous fighters, flickering in and out of realtime. While in realtime, their processors decided on the duration of the next embobblement. The shortest-period devices stayed in sync with longer-period ones, relaying conclusions up a chain of command. At the top, the travelers' command bobble might have a relatively long period.

  "So they got away?" Hidden by time and interstellar depths.

  Pause, pause, pause, pause. "Not entirely. They claimed innocence, and left a spokesman to demonstrate their good faith." One of the windows brightened into a picture of Tammy Robinson. She looked even paler than usual. Wil felt a flash of anger at Don Robinson. Clever it might be, but what sort of person leaves his teenage kid to face a murder investigation? Lu continued. "I have her with me. We should be landing in sixty minutes."

  "Good. Ms. Lu, I would like you and Brierson to interview her then." Beyond the windows, forests replaced the black and bright of space. "I want you to get her story before you and Brierson leave for the restart of Town Korolev."

  Wil glanced at the spacer. She was strange, but apparently capable. And she was as powerful a witness as he could get. He ignored Yel‚n's auton and tried to put the proper note of peremptory confidence in his voice when he said, "One other thing, Yel‚n."

  "Well?"

  "We need a complete copy of the diary."

  "How- What diary!"

  "The one Marta kept all the years she was marooned."

  Yel‚n's mouth clamped shut as she realized he must be bluffing-and that she had already lost the game. Wil kept his eyes on Yel‚n, but he noticed the auton rise: there was more than one bluff to play here.

  "It's none of your business, Brierson. I've read it: Marta had no idea who marooned her."

  "I want it, Yel‚n."

  "Well, you can just stick it!" She half-rose from her seat, then sat. "You're the last person I want pawing through Marta's private-" She turned to Lu. "Maybe I could show parts of it to you."

  Wil didn't let the spacer reply. "No. Where I come from, concealment of evidence was usually a crime, Yel‚n. That's meaningless here, but if you don't give me the diary-all of it, and everything associated with it-I'll drop the case, and I'll ask Lu to drop the case."

  Yel‚n's fists were clenched. She started to speak, stopped. A faint tremor shook her face. Finally: "Okay. You'll have it. Now get out of my sight,"

  FOUR

  Tammy Robinson was a very frightened young woman; Wil didn't need police experience to see that. She paced back and forth across the room, hysteria sparking from the high edge in her voice. "How can you keep me in this cell? It's a dungeon!"

  The walls were unadorned, off-white. But Wil could see doors opening onto a bedroom, a kitchen. There were stairs, perhaps to a study. Her quarters covered about 150 square meters - a little cramped by Wil's standards, but scarcely a punishing confinement. He stepped away from Della Lu and put his hand on Tammy's shoulder. "These are ship's quarters, Tam. Della Lu never expected to have passengers." That was only a guess, but it felt right. Lu's holdings were compact, built both vertically and horizontally. All the advanced travelers could take their households into space-but Lu's was designed to stay there, to be a home even in solar systems without planets. "You are in custody, but once we get to Town Korolev, you'll get better housing."

  Della Lu tilted her head to one side. "Yes. Yel‚n Korolev is going to take care of you then. She has much better-"

  "No!" It was almost a scream. Tammy's eyes showed white all around the irises. "I surrendered to you, Della Lu. And in good faith. I won't tell you anything if you... Korolev will-" She put her hand over her mouth and collapsed on a nearby sofa.

  Wil sat down beside her as Della Lu pulled up a chair to sit facing them. Lu's black pants and hig
h-collared jacket looked military, but she sat on the edge of her chair and watched Tammy's consternation with childlike curiosity. Wil cast a meaningful look in her direction (as if that would do any good) before continuing. "Tammy, there's no way we'll let Yel‚n get at you."

  Tammy was upset, but no fool. She looked past Wil at the spacer. "Is that a promise, Della Lu?"

  Lu gave an odd chuckle, but this time she didn't blow it "Yes. And it's a promise I can keep."

  They stared at each other a silent moment. Then the girl shuddered, her whole body relaxing. "Okay. I'll talk. Of course I'll talk. That's the whole reason I stayed behind: to clear in, family's name."

  "You know what's happened to Marta?"

  "I've heard Yel‚n's accusations. When we came out of that strange, overlong bobblement, she was all over the comm links. She said poor Marta got marooned in the present... that she died there." Frank horror showed on Tammy's face.

  "That's right. Someone sabotaged the Korolev jump program. It lasted a century instead of three months, and left Marta outside of stasis."

  "And my dad's the chief suspect?" Incredulously.

  Wil nodded. "I saw your father arguing with Marta, Tam. And later she told me how your family wants the people of Town Korolev to join you.... Your plans would benefit if the settlement failed."

  "Sure. But we're not some gang of twentieth-century thugs. Wil. We know we have something more attractive than the Korolev's' rehash of civilization. It'll take the average person a while to see this, but given a fair chance they'll come with us. Instead, Yel‚n's forced us to run for our lives."

  "You don't think Marta's been killed?" said Lu.

  Tammy shrugged. "No. That would be hard to fake, especially if you"-she was looking at Della-"insist on studying the remains. I think Marta was murdered-and I think Yel‚n is the murderer. All the talk about outside sabotage is just short of ridiculous."

  This was certainly Wil's biggest worry. In his time, domestic violence was a leading cause of death. Yel‚n seemed the most powerful of the high-techs. If she were the villain, life might be short for successful investigators. But aloud: "She's truly broken up over losing Marta. If she's faking, she's very good at it."

  Tammy's response was quick. "I don't think she's faking it. I think she killed Marta for some crazy personal reason, and terribly regrets the necessity. But now that it's done, she's going to use it to destroy all opposition to the great Korolev plan."

  "Um." He, W. W. Brierson, might be the cause of Marta's death. Suppose Yel‚n conceived that she was losing her love to another. For some disturbed souls, such a loss was logically equivalent to the death of the beloved. They could murder and then honestly blame the loss on others.... Wil remembered the irrational hatred in Yel‚n's eyes when he walked into leer library.

  He looked at Tammy with new respect. She'd never seemed this bright before. In fact... he felt just a little bit manipulated. For all her terror, the girl was a very cool character. "Tammy," he said quietly, "just how old are you, really?"

  "I-'The tear-streaked adolescent face froze for a second. Then: "I've lived ninety years, Wil."

  Forty years longer than I. Some daughter figure.

  "B-but that's not a secret." New tears filled her eyes. "I'd've told anyone who asked. A-and I'm not faking my personality. I try to keep a fresh, open mind. We're going to live a long time, and Daddy says it helps if we grow up slowly, if we don't freeze into adult mind-sets like they did in the old days."

  The Lu creature gave one of her strange little laughs. "That depends on how long you plan to live," she said to no one in particular.

  Brierson suddenly realized that it was wishful thinking to regard himself an expert on human nature. Once he had been: now that expertise might be as obsolete as the rest of his knowledge. When he left civilization, life-prolonging medicine had been just a few decades old. At that time, Tammy's deception would have been almost impossible. Yel‚n Korolev had had about two hundred years to teach herself to lie. Della Lu was so disconnected from humanity, it was hard to make sense of her at all. How could he judge what such people said?

  Might as well continue the sympathetic role. He patted Tammy's hand. "Okay, Tam. I'm glad you told us."

  She smiled halfheartedly. "Don't you see, Wil? My dad's a suspect because we disagreed with Marta. We left to protect the family; my staying behind shows we're not running from an investigation.... But Yel‚n is. On the way down, Della Lu told me how Yel‚n wants you back in stasis right away. She'll be left all alone at the scene of the crime. By the time you two come out, the evidence will be tens of thousands years stale-heck, what evidence there is will've been manufactured by her.

  "Now, I brought the family records for the weeks before our party. You and Della Lu should study them. They may be dull, but at least they're the truth."

  Wil nodded. It was obvious the Robinsons had their story together. He let the interview go on another fifteen minutes, until Tammy seemed calm and almost relaxed. Lu spoke occasionally, her interjections sometimes perceptive, more often obscure. It was evident that-in itself-clearing the family l name me was of little importance to the Robinsons. When they were headed, present opinion would be less than dust. But the family still wanted recruits. Tammy's parents were convinced that the people of Town Korolev would eventually realize that settling in the present was a dead end, and that time itself was 11 the proper place for humanity. It might take a few decades, but ;f Tammy could survive the murder investigation, she would be f re e to wait and persuade. And eventually she would catch up With her family. Her parents had set a number of rendezvous in the megayears to come. Their exact locations were something she refused to reveal.

  "You want to pace your lives, and live as long as the universe?" asked Lu.

  "At least."

  The spacer giggled. "And what will you do at the end?"

  "That depends on how it ends." Tammy's eyes lit. "Daddy thinks that all the mysteries people have ever wondered on-even the Extinction-may be revealed there. It's the ultimate rendezvous for all thinking beings. If time is cyclic, we'll bobble through to the beginning and Man will be universal."

  "And if the universe is open and dies forever?"

  "Then perhaps we and the others can change that." Tammy shrugged. "But if we can't-well, we'll still be there. We will have seen it all. Daddy says we'll raise a glass and toast the memory of all of you that went before." She was still smiling.

  And Brierson wondered if this might be the craziest of all his new acquaintances.

  Afterwards, Wil tried to plan out the investigation with Della Lu. It was not easy.

  "Was Ms. Robinson distressed at the beginning of the interview?" asked Lu.

  Wil rolled his eyes heavenward. "Yes, I believe she was."

  "Ah. I thought so, too."

  "Look, uh, Della. What Tammy says about Yel‚n makes sense. It's absurd for the cops-us-to leave the murder scene like this. Back in Michigan, we would have dropped any customer who demanded such a thing. Now, Yel‚n is right that ink, hanging around to investigate the physical evidence would be amateurish. But your equipment is as good as hers-"

  "Better."

  "-and she should be willing to let you postpone bobbling long enough to gather evidence."

  Lu was silent for a moment-talking through her headband' "1-Is. Korolev wants to be alone for emotional reasons."

  "Hmph. She has thousands of years to be alone before the Peacers come out. You should at least do an autopsy and record the physical evidence."

  "Very well. Ms. Korolev is a suspect, then?"

  Wil spread his hands. "At this stage, she and the Robinsons have to be at the top of our list. Once we start poking around, it may be easy to scratch her. Just now it would be totally unprofessional to have her do the field investigation."

  "Is Ms. Korolev friendly towards you?"

  "Huh? Not especially. What does that have to do with the investigation?"

  "Nothing. I'm trying to find a..."-
she seemed to search for the word-"a role model for talking to you."

  Wil smiled faintly, thinking back to Yel‚n's hostility. "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't model on her."

  "Okay." Unsmiling.

  If Lu were as smart with gadgets as she was dumb with people, they would make the best detective team in history. "There is something else, something very important, that I need. Yel‚n has promised me physical protection and access to leer databases. I'd like to have your protection, too-at least till we can clear her."

  "Certainly. If you wish, I'll manage your jump forward, too."

  "And I'd like access to your databases." Cross-checking Korolev couldn't hurt.

  The spacer hesitated. "Okay. But some of the information isn't very accessible."

  Wil looked around Della's cabin-command bridge? It was even smaller than Tammy's quarters, and almost as stark. A small cluster of roses grew from Della's desk; their scent filled the air. A watercolor landscape hung on the wall facing the spacer. The life tones and shadows were subtly wrong, as if the artist were clumsy... or the scene not of this Earth.

  And Brierson was putting his life in this person's hands. In this universe of strangers, he must trust some more than others, but... "How old are you, Della?"

  "I've lived nine thousand years, Mr. Brierson. I have been away... a long time. I have seen much." Her dark eyes took on that cold, far look he remembered from their first encounters. For a moment, she looked past him, perhaps at the watercolor, perhaps beyond. Then the expressionless gaze returned to his face. "1 think it's time I rejoined the human race."

  FIVE

  Some fifty thousand years later, all that was left of the only world empire in history, the Peace Authority, returned to normal time. They were welcomed by Korolev autons, and discouraged from interfering with the bobbles on the south side of the Inland Sea. They had three months to consider their new circumstances before those bobbles burst.

  What Marta and Yel‚n had worked so long for was ready to begin.