Across Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  "Do you understand? It simply does not matter that you outnumber me, and that Della Lu may outgun me. Even before this regrettable little war, the success of the colony was an unlikely thing. Now you've lost much of the medical equipment the other high-techs brought. Without me, there is no chance of a successful settlement. Without me, every one of you low-techs will be dead within a century." He lowered his voice with dramatic effect. "And with me? Success of the colony is certain. Even before the war, the other high-techs could not have supplied the medical and population support that I can. But be warned. I am not a softhearted pansy like Korolev, or Fraley, or Tioulang. I have never tolerated weakness or disloyalty. You will work for me, and you will work very, very hard. But if you do, most of you will survive."

  Gerrault's gaze swept the audience. Wil had never seen such horrified fascination on people's faces. An hour ago they were trying to accept the prospect of slow extinction. Now their lives were saved... if they would be slaves. One by one, they turned their eyes from the speaker. They were silent, avoiding even each others' eyes. Gerrault nodded. "Good. Afterwards, I want to see Tioulang's staff. He failed me, but some of you were good men once. There may be a place for you in my plans.'

  He turned to the high-techs. "Your choice is simple: If you bobble out of this era, I want at least one hundred megayears free of your interference. After that, you may die as quickly or as slowly as you wish. If you stay, you give me your equipment, your our systems, and your loyalty. If the human race is to survive, it will be on my terms." He looked at Yel‚n. He was smiling again. "I told you once, slut: Sit down. "

  Yel‚n's whole body was rigid, her arms half raised. She stared right through Gerrault. For a moment, Wil was afraid she might fight. Then something broke and she sat down. She was still loyal to Marta's dream.

  "Good. If you can be sensible, perhaps the rest can." He looked up. "You will deliver system control to me now. And then I'll-"

  Della laughed and stood up. "I think not, Director. The rest may be domesticated animals, but not me. And I outgun you." Her smile, even her stance, seemed disconnected from the situation. She might have been discussing some parlor game. In its way, her manner was scarier than Gerrault's sadism; it stopped even the Director for a second.

  Then he recovered. "I know you; you're the gutless traitor who betrayed the Peace in 2048. You're the sort who bluffs and blusters but is basically spineless. You must also know me. I don't bluff about death. If you oppose me, I'll take my zygotes and med equipment, and leave you all to rot; if you pursue and destroy me, I'll make sure the zygotes die too." His voice was flat, determined.

  Della shrugged, still smiling. "No need to puff and spit, Christian dear. You don't understand quite what you're up against. You see, I believe every word you say. But I just don't care. I'm going to kill you anyway." She walked away from them. "And the first step is to get myself some maneuvering room.

  Gerrault's mouth hung open. He looked at the others. "I'll do it, I really will! It will be the end of the human race." It was almost as if he were seeking their moral support. He had been outmonstered.

  Yel‚n shouted, her voice scarcely recognizable, "Please, Della, I beg! Come back!"

  But Della Lu had disappeared over the crest of the amphi- theater. Gerrault stared after her for only a second. Once she got out of the way, suppressor fields and tremendous firepower would be brought to bear on the theater. Everyone here could be killed-and Della had convincingly demonstrated that that wouldn't bother her. Gerrault sprinted for the floor-level exit. "But I'm not bluffing. I'm not!" He stopped for an instant at the door. "If I survive, I'll return with the zygotes. It is your duty to wait for me." Then he was gone, too.

  Wil held his breath through the next seconds, praying for anticlimax. Dark shapes shot skywards, leaving thunder behind. But there was no flash of energy beams, no nukes. There was no shifting of sun in sky as might happen if they were bobbled; the combatants had moved their battle away from the amphitheater.

  For the moment they lived. The low-techs huddled in clumps; someone was weeping.

  Yel‚n's head was buried in her arms. Juan's eyes were closed, his lower lip caught between his teeth. The other high-techs were caught in less extreme poses... but they were all watching action beyond human eyes.

  Wil looked at his display flat. It was counting down the last ninety seconds. The western sky flashed incandescent, two closely spaced pulses. Tun‡ said, "They both nuked out... they're over the Indian Ocean now." His voice was distant, only a small part of his attention devoted to reporting the action to those who could not see. "Phil's got his force massed there. He has a local advantage." There was a ripple of brightness, barely perceptible, like lightning beyond mountains. "Firefight. Phil is trying to punch through Della's near-Earth cordon.... He made it." There was a scattered and uncertain cheer from the low-techs. "They're outward bound, under heavy nuke drive. Just boosted past three thousand klicks per second. They'll go through the trailing Lagrange zone." Christian Gerrault had some important baggage to pick up on his way out.

  And Wil's display read 00:00:00. He looked at Juan Chanson. The man's eyes were still closed, his face a picture of concentration. A second passed. Two. Suddenly he was grinning and giving a thumbs-up sign. Christian's baggage was no longer available for pickup.

  For a moment Wil and Juan grinned stupidly at each other. There was no one else to notice. "Five thousand kps.... Strange. Phil has stopped boosting. Della will be on top of him in... We've got another firefight. She's chewing him up.

  .. He's broken off. He's running again, pulling away from her.

  Wil spoke across the monologue. "Tell 'em, Juan."

  Chanson nodded, still smiling. Suddenly Tun‡ stopped talking. A second passed. Then he swore and started laughing. The low-techs stared at Blumenthal; all the high-techs were looking at Chanson.

  "Are you sure, Juan?" Yel‚n's voice was unsteady.

  "Yes, yes, yes! It worked perfectly. We're rid of both of them now. See. They've shifted to long-term tactics. However their fight ends, it will be thousands of years, dozens of parsecs from here." Brierson had a sudden, terrible vision of Della pursuing Gerrault into the depths forever.

  Fraley's voice cut across Chanson's. "What in hell are you talking about? Gerrault has the med equipment and the zygotes. If he's gone, they're gone-and we're dead!"

  "No! It's all right. We, I-" He was dancing from one foot to the other, frustrated by the slowness of spoken language. "Wil! Explain what we did."

  Brierson pulled his imagination back to Earth and looked across the low-techs. "Juan managed to separate the med equipment from Gerrault," he said quietly. "It's sitting up there in the trailing Lagrange zone, waiting to be picked up." He glanced at Chanson. "You've transferred control to Yel‚n?"

  "Yes. I really don't have much space capability left."

  Wil felt his shoulders slowly relax; relief was beginning to percolate through him. "I've suspected `Genet' almost from the beginning; he knew it, and he didn't care. But during our war, all the high-tech systems were taken over to fight Della. Juan-or any of the others-can tell you what it was like. They were not completely cut out of their systems; they had just lost control. In any battle, a lot of information is flowing between nodes. In this one, things were especially chaotic. In places, data security failed; irrelevant information leaked across. Part of what passed through Juan's node was the specs on Gerrault's med system. Juan saw what Gerrault had, where it was, and the exact lookabout timings of the bobbles that protected Gerrault's zygotes and inner defenses."

  He paused. "This meeting was a setup. I-I'm sorry about keeping you all in the dark. There were only certain times when an attack could succeed-and then only if Gerrault had moved most of his defenses away from the trailing Lagrange."

  "Yes," said Juan, his excitement reduced to manageable proportions, "this meeting was necessary, but it was the riskiest part of the whole affair. If we trumped him while he was still here, Gerrau
lt might have done something foolish, deadly. Somehow we had to trick him into running without shooting at us first. So Wil told the story you heard, and we played our two greatest enemies against each other." He looked up at Brierson. "Thanks for trusting me, my boy. We'll never know exactly what drove the Lu creature. Maybe she really was human; maybe all her years alone just turned her mind into something alien. But I knew she couldn't resist if you told her the right lies about the zygote bank; she'll chase Gerrault to the end of space-time to destroy it."

  Now there really was cheering. Some of the cheerers were a bit exhausted, perhaps: their future had been bounced around like a volleyball these last few minutes. But now: "Now we can make it!" Yel‚n shouted. Peacers, Ungovs, NMs were embracing. Dilip and a crowd of low-techs came down to the podium to shake Wil's hand. Even the high-tech reserve was broken. Juan and Tung were in the middle of the crowd. Tammy and Yel‚n stood less than a meter apart, grinning at each other Only Monica Raines had not left her seat; as usual, her smile was turned down at one corner. But Wil thought it was not so much disappointment at their salvation as envy that everyone else could be so happy.

  Wil suddenly realized that he could leave it at this. Perhaps the settlement was saved. Certainly, if he went ahead with the rest of his plan, the danger to himself could be greater than everything up to now.

  It was a thought, never a real choice. He owed some people too much to back down now.

  Wil broke from the crowd and returned to the podium. He turned up the amplification "Yel‚n. Everybody." The laughter and shouting diminished. Gail Parker jumped on a bench and cried, "Yay, Wili! Speech! Speech! Wili for President!" This provoked even more laughter; Gail always did have a sharp sense of the ridiculous. Wil raised his hands, and the uproar subsided again. "There are still some things we must settle."

  Yel‚n looked at him, her face relaxed yet puzzled. "Sure, Wil. I think we can put a lot of things right, now. But-"

  "That's not what I mean, Yel‚n. I still haven't done what you hired me for.... I still haven't produced Marta's murderer."

  The talk and laughter guttered to a stop. The loudest sounds were the birds stealing from the spiders beyond the amphitheater Where the faces didn't show blank surprise, Wil could see the fear returning. "But, Wil," Juan said finally, "we got Gerrault....

  "Yes. We got him. There's no fakery in that, nor in the equipment we rescued. But Christian Gerrault did not kill Marta, and he didn't take over the high-tech computer systems. Did you notice that he never admitted to either? He was as much a victim of the takeover as any. Finding the systems saboteur was one of the `loose ends' he intended to clear up."

  Juan waved his hands, his speech coming faster than ever. "Semantics. He explicitly admitted to taking over the low-techs' military systems."

  Wil shook his head. "No, Juan. Only the Peacers'. All the time we thought one high-tech was stirring up both sides, when actually Gerrault was behind the Peace and you were manipulating the NMs."

  The words were spoken and Wil still lived.

  The little man swallowed. "Please, my boy, after everything I've done to help, how can you say this?... I know! You think only a systems penetrator could know about Gerrault's med equipment." He looked imploringly at Yel‚n and Tammy. "Tell him. Things like that happen in battle, especially when penetration-"

  "Sure," Yel‚n said. "It may seem a farfetched explanation to someone from your era, Wil, but leak-across can really happen." Tun‡ and Tammy were nodding agreement.

  "It doesn't matter." There was no doubt in Wil's face or voice. "I knew that Juan was Marta's killer before he ever came to me about Gerrault." But can I convince the rest o f you?

  Chanson's hands balled into fists. He backed into a bench and sat down abruptly. "Do I have to take this?" he cried to Yel‚n.

  Korolev set her hand on his shoulder. "Let the Inspector have his say." When she looked at Wil, her face had the angry ambivalence he knew so well. Together, Wil and Juan had just saved the colony. But she had known Chanson through decades of their lives; Wil was the low-tech that her Marta had damned and praised. There was no telling how long her patience would last.

  Brierson stepped around the podium. "At first, it seemed that almost any high-tech could have marooned Marta: There were bugs in the Korolev system that made it easy to sabotage a single bobbling sequence. With those bugs repaired, Yel‚n and the others thought their systems were secure. Our war showed how terribly wrong they were. For twelve hours, the enemy had complete control of all the systems-except Della's....

  "This told me several things. In my time, it was no trivial thing to grab an entire system. Unless the system were perverted to begin with, it took expert, tedious effort to insert all the traps that would make a grab possible. Whoever did this needed years of visitor status on the high-techs' systems. The enemy never had a chance at Della; she was gone from the Solar System since just after the Singularity."

  He looked across his audience. The low-techs hung on every word. It was harder to tell about the others. Tammy wasn't even looking at him. Wil could only imagine the analysis and conversations that were going on in parallel with his words.

  "So. An expert, using expert tools, must be behind this. But Yel‚n's GreenInc shows that none of the high-techs have such a background."

  Tun‡ interrupted, "Which only means the killer rewrote history to protect himself."

  "Right. It needn't have been much, just a fact here and there. Over the years, the killer could manage it. Della's A's are the only ones that might contain the truth. I spent a lot of time with them after we were rescued. Unfortunately, her general database for the late twenty-second is badly jumbled, so badly that Della herself didn't use it. But after the battle, I knew what to look for. Eventually I found an opening: Jason Mudge. Mudge was just the religious fanatic we knew, though toward the end of the twenty-second he actually had some disciples. Only one of them had sufficient faith to follow him into stasis. That was Juan Chanson. Juan was a wealthy man, probably Mudge's biggest catch." Wil looked at Chanson. "You gave up a lot to follow a religious dream, Juan. Della's db's show you were head of Penetration and Perversion at USAF, Inc." In Wil's time, USAF had been the largest weapons-maker in North America; it had grown from there. "I don't doubt that when Juan left, he took the latest software his division had invented. We were up against industrial-strength sabotage."

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

  Yel‚n 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, Yel‚n, 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 inci
dent that only she and I could know. Yel‚n, after the Robinson party... I didn't-I never tried to take advantage of Marta." He looked into Yel‚n'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 ere 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 Yel‚n, then back to Wil, but he said nothing.

  "You've known about that cairn for four days, ever since I told Yel‚n. 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 Yel‚n and her lab autons."