Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  “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 started 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 the 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. Yelén called the extra time the Fudge Factor. Everyone else called 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 was obvious: as advanced travelers, the Robinsons had plenty of robots. Rescue-day ash had been meticulously cleaned from the stone seats, the fountains, the trees, even the ground. The scent 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 as 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.

  “Marta, wait.” She had already stopped and turned to face him. 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?”

  At 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 off 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, we 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. “Yelén 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 Yelén. You saved us 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 an 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 premachine 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. No 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.”

  “And Monica Raines hates all mankind.”

  This time her laugh was lighter. “Yes. Poor Monica.” Marta leaned toward him and this time really did rest her head against his shoulder. Wil’s arm slipped automatically across her back. She sighed. “We’re two hundred people, just about all that’s left. And I swear we have more jealousy and scheming than twentieth-century Asia.”

  They sat in silence, her head against him, his hand resting lightly against her back. He felt the tension slowly leave her body. For Wil it was different. Oh, Virginia, what to do? Marta felt so good. It would be so easy to caress that back, to slide his hand down to her waist. Most likely there’d be a moment of embarrassed backing away. But if she responded…If she responded, they’d be adding one more set of jealousies to the brew.

  So Wil’s hand did not move. In later times, he often wondered if things might have gone differently had he not chosen the path of sanity and caution.

  He thought wildly for a moment, finally discovered a topic that was sure to break the mood. “You know I’m one of the shanghaied ones, Marta.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “The crime is a strange one, bobbling someone into the far future. It may be murder, but the court can’t know for sure. In my time, most jurisdictions had a special punishment for it.”

  Silence.

  “They’d bobble survival equipment and the trial record next to the victim. Then they’d take the bastard who created the problem and bobble him too—so he’d come out of stasis just after the victim…”

  The spell was broken. Marta pulled slowly back. She could tell what was coming. “Sometimes the courts couldn’t know the duration.”

  Wil nodded. “In my case, I’ll bet the duration was known. And I’ll bet even more that there was a conviction. There were only three suspects; I was closing in on that damn embezzler. That’s why he panicked.”

  He paused. “Did you rescue him, Marta? Did you rescue the…person…who did this to me?”

  She shook her head. Her openness deserted her when she had to lie.

  “You’ve got to tell me, Marta. I don’t need revenge”—perhaps a small lie there—“but I do need to know.”

  She shook her head again but this time replied. “We can’t, Wil. We need everyone. Can’t you see that all such crimes are meaningless now?”

  “For my own protection—”

  She got up, and after a second Wil did, too.

  “No. We’ve given him
a new face and a new name. He has no motive for harming you now, and we’ve warned him what we’ll do if he tries.”

  Brierson shrugged.

  “Hey, Wil, have I made myself another enemy?”

  “N-no. I could never be your enemy. And I want the settlement to succeed as much as you and Yelén.”

  “I know.” She raised her hand in a half-wave. “G’night, Wil.”

  “Good night.”

  She walked into the darkness, her robot protector floating close above her shoulder.

  3

  Things had changed by “next” morning. At first, the changes were what Brierson had expected.

  Gone was the drear ash and dirty sky. Dawn splashed sunlight across his bed; he could see a wedge of blue between green-leafed trees. Wil came slowly awake, something deep inside saying it was all a dream. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and stared into the brightness.

  They did it. “By God, they really did it.” He rolled out of bed and pulled on some clothes. He shouldn’t really be surprised. The Korolevs had announced their plan. Sometime in the morning hours, after the Robinson party was over and when their surveillance showed everyone safe at home, they had bobbled every building in the settlement. Through unknown centuries they bobbled forward, coming out of stasis for a few seconds every year, just long enough to check if the Peacer bobble had burst.

  Wil rushed down the stairs, past the kitchen. Breakfast could be skipped. Just to see the green and the blue and the clean sunlight made him feel like a kid at Christmas. Then he was outside, standing in the sunlight. The street was nearly gone. Almost-jacarandas had sprouted through its surface. Their lowest flowers floated a meter above his head. Spider families scampered through the leaves. The huge pile of ash that he and the Dasguptas and the others had pushed into the middle of the street was gone, washed away by a hundred—a thousand?—rainy seasons. The only sign of that long-ago pollution was around Wil’s house. A circular arc marked where the stasis field had intersected the ground. Outside was green and growing; inside was covered with gray ash, the trees and plants dying.