Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  The path meandered southwards, to the naked rock that edged the cliffs. From below came a faint sighing, the occasional slap of water against rock. It could have been Lake Michigan on a quiet night. Now for some mosquitoes to make him feel truly at home.

  Blumenthal broke the long silence. “You were one of my childhood heroes, Wil Brierson.” There was a smile in his voice.

  “What?”

  “Yes. You and Sherlock Holmes. I read every novel your son wrote.”

  Billy wrote…about me? GreenInc had said Billy’s second career was as a novelist, but Wil hadn’t had time to look at his writing.

  “The adventures were fiction, even though you were the hero. He wrote ’em under the assumption that Derek Lindemann hadn’t bumped you off. There were almost thirty novels; you had adventures all through the twenty-second.”

  “Derek Lindemann?” Dasgupta said. “Who…Oh, I see.”

  Wil nodded. “Yeah, Rohan.” Wimpy Derek Lindemann…the Kid. “The guy I tried to kill just now.” But for a moment his anger seemed irrelevant. Wil smiled sadly in the darkness. To think that Billy had created a synthetic life for the one that had been ended. By God, he was going to read those novels!

  He glanced at the high-tech. “Glad you enjoyed my adventures, Tunç. I assume you grew out of it. From what I hear, you were in construction.”

  “True and true. But had I wished to be a policeman, it would’ve been hard. By the late twenty-second, most habitats had fewer than one cop per million population. It was even worse in rural areas. A deplorable scarcity of crime, it was.” Wil smiled. Blumenthal’s accent was strange—almost singsong, a cross between Scottish and Amerasian. None of the other high-techs talked like this. In Wil’s time, English dialect differences had been damping out; communication and travel were so fast in the Earth-Luna volume. Blumenthal had grown up in space, several days’ travel time from the heartland.

  “Besides, I wanted more to build things than to protect folks. At the beginning of the twenty-third, the world was changing faster than you can imagine. I’ll wager there was more technical change in the first decade of the twenty-third than in all the centuries to the twenty-second. Have you noticed the differences among the advanced travelers? Monica Raines left civilization in 2195; no matter what she claims now, she bought the best equipment available. Juan Chanson left in 2200—with a much smaller investment. Yet Juan’s gear is superior in every way. His autons have spent several thousand years in realtime, and are good for at least as much more. Monica has survived sixty years and has only one surviving auton. The difference was five years’ progress in sport and camping equipment. The Korolevs left a year after Chanson. They bought an immense amount of equipment, yet for about the same investment as Chanson; a single year had depreciated the 2200 models that far. Juan, Yelén, Genet—they’re aware of this. But I don’t think any of them understand what nine more years of progress could bring…You know I’m the last one out?”

  Wil had read that in Yelén’s summaries. The difference hadn’t seemed terribly important. “You bobbled out in 2210?”

  “True. Della Lu was latest before me, in 2202. We’ve never found anyone who lived closer to the Singularity.”

  Rohan said softly, “You should be the most powerful of all.”

  “Should be, perhaps. But the fact is, I’m not one of the willing travelers. I was more than happy to live when I was. I never had the least inclination to hop into the future, to start a new religion or break the stock market…I’m sorry, Rohan Dasgupta, I—”

  “It’s okay. My brother and I were a little too greedy. We thought, ‘What can go wrong? Our investments seem safe; after a century or two, they should make us very rich. And if they don’t, well, the standard of living will be so high, even being poor we’ll live better than the rich do now.’” Rohan sighed. “We bet on the progress you speak of. We didn’t count on coming back to jungles and ruins and a world without people.” They walked several paces in silence. Finally Rohan’s curiosity got the better of him. “You were shanghaied, then, like Wil?”

  “I…don’t think so; since no one lived after me, it’s impossible to know for sure. I was in heavy construction, and accidents happen…How’s the legs, Wil Brierson?”

  “What?” The sudden change of topic took Wil by surprise. “Fine now.” There were still pins and needles, but he had no trouble with coordination.

  “Then let’s start back, okay?”

  They walked away from the cliffs, past the sweet blossoms. The campfires were invisible behind several ridgelines; they had come almost a thousand meters. They walked most of the way back with scarcely a word. Even Rohan was silent.

  Wil’s rage had cooled, leaving only ashes, sadness. He wondered what would happen the next time he saw Derek Lindemann. He remembered the abject terror on Lindemann’s face. The disguise had been a good one. If Phil Genet hadn’t pointed Wil right at the Kid, it might have been weeks before he nailed him. Lindemann had been seventeen, a gawky Anglo; now he looked fifty, a somewhat pudgy Asian. Clearly there had been cosmetic surgery. As for his age…well, when Yelén and Marta decided to do something, they could be brutally direct. Somewhere in the millions of years that Wil and the others spent bobbled, Derek Lindemann had lived thirty years of realtime without medical support. Perhaps the Korolevs had been out of stasis then, perhaps not; the autons that attended their bobble farm on the Canadian Shield would have been competent to provide for him. Thirty years the Kid lived essentially alone. Thirty years inward turning. The Lindemann that Wil knew had been a wimp. No doubt his embezzling was petty revenge against his relatives in the company. No doubt he bobbled Brierson out of naive panic. And for thirty years the Kid had lived with the fear that one day W. W. Brierson would recognize him.

  “Thanks for…talking to me. I-I’m not usually like this.” That was true, and perhaps the most unnerving part of the whole day. In thirty years of police work, he’d never blown up. Perhaps that wasn’t surprising; knocking customers around was a quick way to get fired. But in Wil’s case, being cool had come easy. He was truly the low-pressure type he seemed. How often he had been the calm one who talked others down from the high ledges of panic and rage. He’d never been the kind who went from anger to anger. In the last weeks, all that had changed, yet…“You’ve both lost as much as I, haven’t you?” He thought back to all the people he had talked to this afternoon, and shame replaced his embarrassment. Maybe ol’ W. W. Brierson had always been unflappable because he never had any real problems. When the crunch came, he was the weakest of all.

  “It’s okay,” Blumenthal said. “There have been fights before. Some people are hurting more than others. And for each of us, some days are worse than others.”

  “Besides, you’re special, Wil,” said Rohan.

  “Huh?”

  “The rest of us have our hands full rebuilding civilization. Korolev is giving us enormous amounts of equipment. It needs lots of supervision; there’s not enough automatic stuff to go around. We’re working as hard as anyone in the twentieth century. I think most of the high-techs are, too. I know Tunç is.

  “But you, Wil, what is your job? You work just as hard as any of us—but doing what? Trying to figure out who killed Marta. I’ll bet that’s fun. You have to spend all your time, off by yourself, thinking about things that have been lost. Even the laziest low-tech isn’t in that bind. If someone wanted to drive you crazy, they couldn’t have invented a better job for you.”

  Wil found himself smiling. He remembered the times Rohan had tried to get him to these picnics. “Your prescription?” he asked lightly.

  “Well…” Rohan was suddenly diffident. “You could get off the case. But I hope you won’t. We all want to know what happened to Marta. I liked her the most of all the high-techs. And her murder might be part of something that could kill the rest of us…I think the important thing is that you realize what the problem is. You’re not falling apart. You’re just under more pressure than most of us.
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  “Also, there’s no point in working on it all the time, is there? I’ll bet you spend hours staring into blind alleys. Spend more time with the rest of humanity. Ha! You might even find some clues here!”

  Wil thought back over the last two hours. On Rohan’s last point there was no possible disagreement.

  14

  From North Shore to Town Korolev was about a thousand kilometers, most of it over the Inland Sea. Yelén didn’t stint with the shuttle service between the two points. The two halves of the settlement were physically separate, but she was determined to make them close in every other way. When Wil left the picnic, there were three fliers waiting for southbound passengers. He ended up in one that was empty except for the Dasgupta brothers.

  The agrav rose with the familiar silent acceleration that never became intense—and never ceased. The trip would take about fifteen minutes. Below them, the picnic fires dwindled, seemed to tilt sideways. The loudest sound was a distant scream of wind. It grew, then dwindled to nothing. The interior lighting turned the night beyond the windows into undetailed darkness. Except for the constant acceleration, they might have been sitting in an ordinary office waiting room.

  They were going home ahead of most people. Wil was surprised to see Dilip leaving early. He remembered what the guy had been up to that afternoon. “What became of Gail Parker, Dilip? I thought…” Wil’s voice trailed off as he remembered the unhappy caucus he’d stumbled onto.

  The older Dasgupta shrugged, his normally rakish air deflated. “She…she didn’t want to play. She was polite enough, but you know how things are. Every week the girls are a bit harder to get along with. I guess we’ve all got some hard decisions to make.”

  Wil changed the subject. “Either of you know who brought the glowball?”

  Rohan grinned. No doubt he was pleased by what he thought an innocuous topic. “Wasn’t that something? I’ve seen glowballs before, but nothing like that. Didn’t Tunç Blumenthal bring it?”

  Dilip shook his head. “I was there from the beginning. It was Fraley’s people. I saw them get off the shuttle with it. Tunç didn’t come along till they had played a couple of games.”

  Just as Phil Genet claimed.

  Still under acceleration, the shuttle did a slow turn, the only evidence being a faint queasiness in the passengers’ guts. Now they were flying tailfirst into the darkness. They were halfway home.

  Wil settled back in his seat, let his mind wander back over the day. Detective work had been easier in civilization. There, most things were what they seemed. You had your employers, their clients, collateral services. In most cases, these were people you had worked with for years; you knew who you could trust. Here, it was paranoid heaven. Except for Lindemann, he knew no one from before. Virtually all the high-techs were twisted creatures. Chanson, Korolev, Raines, Lu—they had all lived longer than he, some for thousands of years. They were all screwier than the types he was used to dealing with. And Genet. Genet was not so strange; Wil had known a few like him. There were lots of mysteries about Genet’s life in civilization, but one thing was clear as crystal after tonight: Phil Genet was a people-owner, barely under control. Whether or not he had killed anyone, murder was in his moral range.

  On the other hand, Blumenthal seemed to be a genuinely nice guy. He was an involuntary traveler like Wil, but without the Lindemann burden.

  Brierson suppressed a smile. In the standard mystery plot, such all-around niceness would be a sure sign of guilt. In the real world, things rarely worked that way…Damn. In this real world, almost anything could be true. Okay, what grounds could there be for suspecting Blumenthal? Motive? Certainly none was visible. In fact, very little was known about Blumenthal. The 2201 GreenInc listed him as ten years old, a child employee in a family-owned mining company. There was scarcely more information about the company. It was small, operating mainly in the comet cloud. Wil had less hard information on Blumenthal than on any other high-tech, Genet excepted. As the last human to leave civilization, there had been no one to write Tunç’s biography. It was only Tunç’s word that he’d been bobbled in 2210. It could have been later, perhaps from the heart of the Singularity. He claimed an industrial accident had blown him into the sun. Come to think of it, what corroboration could there be for that either? And if it wasn’t an accident, then most likely he was the loser in a battle of nukes and bobbles, where the victors wanted the vanquished permanently dead.

  Wil suddenly wondered where Tunç stood on Chanson’s list of potential aliens.

  Scattered streetlamps shone friendly through the trees, and then the flier was on the ground. Wil and the Dasguptas piled out, feeling light-headed in the sudden return to one gravity.

  They had landed on the street that ran past their homes. Wil said good night to Rohan and Dilip and walked slowly up the street toward his place. He couldn’t remember when so many things, both physical and mental, had been jammed into one afternoon. The residual effects of the stun added overwhelming fatigue to it all. He glanced upwards but saw only leaves, backlit by a streetlamp. No doubt the autons were still up there, hidden behind the trees.

  Such an innocuous thing, the glowball. And the explanation might be innocuous, too: Maybe Yelén had simply given it to the NMs, or maybe they’d swiped it themselves. Surely it was a trivial item in a high-tech’s inventory. The fact that she hadn’t demanded a late-night session was a good sign. After he got a good sleep, he might be able to laugh at Genet.

  Wil walked along the edge of his lot. He reached the gate…and stopped cold. Crude letters were spraygunned across the gate and surrounding wall. They spelled the words LO TECH DONT MEAN NO TECH. The message had scarcely registered on his mind when white light drenched the scene. Yelén’s auton had dropped to man-height beside Wil. Its spotlight fanned across the gateway.

  Brierson stepped close to the wall. The paint was still wet. It glittered in the light. He stared numbly at the lettering.

  Polka-dot paint, green on purple. The bright green disks were perfectly formed, even where the paint had dribbled downwards. It was the sort of thing you see often enough on data sets—and never in the real world.

  Yelén’s voice came from the auton. “Take a good look, Brierson. Then come inside; we’ve got to talk.”

  15

  The lights came on even before he reached the house. Wil walked into the living room and collapsed in his favorite chair. Two conference bolos were lit: Yelén was on one, Della the other. Neither looked happy. Korolev spoke first. “I want Tammy Robinson out of our time, Inspector.”

  Wil started to shrug, Why ask me? He glanced at Della Lu, remembered that he was damn close to being arbiter in this dispute. “Why?”

  “It should be obvious now. The deal was that we would let her stay in realtime as long as she didn’t interfere. Well, it’s sure as hell clear someone is backing the NMs—and she’s the best suspect.”

  “But suspect only,” said Lu. The spacer’s face and costume were a strange contrast. She wore frilly pants and halter, the sort of outfit Wil would have expected at the picnic. Yet he hadn’t seen her there. Had she simply peeped, too shy or aloof to show up? Whatever personality matched the outfit, it scarcely fit her expression now. It was cold, determined. “I gave her my word that—”

  Yelén slapped the table in front of her. “Promises be damned! The survival of the settlement comes first, Lu. You of all people should know that. If you won’t bobble Robinson, then stand aside and let—”

  Della smiled, and suddenly she seemed a lot deadlier, a lot more determined than Korolev—with all her temper—ever had. “I will not stand aside, Yelén.”

  “Um.” Yelén sat back, perhaps remembering that Della was one of the most heavily armed of the travelers, perhaps thinking of the centuries of combat experience Lu had had with her weapons. She glanced at Brierson. “Will you talk some sense to her? We’ve got a life-and-death situation here.”

  “Maybe. But Tammy is only one suspect—and the one who is m
ost carefully watched. If she was up to something, surely you’d have direct evidence?”

  “Not necessarily. I figure I’ll need a medium recon capability for at least another century of realtime. I can’t afford a ‘no-sparrow-shall-fall’ network; I’d run out of consumables in a few months. I have kept a close watch on Robinson, but if her family stashed autons before they left, it wouldn’t take much for her to communicate with them. All she has to do is give away some trinkets, make these low-techs a bit more dissatisfied. I’ll bet she has high-performance bobblers hidden near the Inland Sea. If she can lead her little friends there, we’ll be looking at a lot of long-term bobbles—and an end to the plan.”

  If the Robinsons had prepared their departure that carefully, they were probably responsible for Marta’s murder, too. “How ’bout a compromise? Take her out of circulation for a few months.”

  “I promised her, Wil.”

  “I know. But this would be voluntary. Explain the situation to her. If she’s innocent, she’ll be as upset by all this as we are. A three-month absence won’t hurt her announced goals, and will very likely prove her innocent. If it does, then she could have a lot more freedom afterwards.”

  “What if she doesn’t agree?”

  “I really think she will, Della.” If not, then we’ll see if my integrity can stand up to Yelén as well as yours does.

  Yelén said, “I would buy a three-month bobbling—though we may go through this same argument again at the end of it.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to Tammy.” Della looked down at her frilly outfit, and a strange expression crossed her face. Embarrassment? “I’ll get back to you.” Her image vanished.