Marooned in RealtimeMarooned in Realtime
Vernor Vinge
 
ONE
On the day of the big rescue, Wil Brierson took a walk on the beach. Surely this 
was one afternoon when it would be totally empty.
The sky was clear, but the usual sea mist kept visibility to a few kilometers. 
The beach, the low dunes, the sea-all were closed in by faint haze that seemed 
centered on his viewpoint. Wil moped along just beyond the waves, where the 
water soaked the sand flat and cool. His ninety-kilo tread left perfect barefoot 
images trailing behind. Wil ignored the sea birds that skirled about. He walked 
head down, watching the water ooze up around his toes at every step. A humid 
breeze carried the smell of seaweed, sharp and pleasant. Every half minute the 
waves peaked and clear sea water flooded around his ankles. Except during 
storms, this was all the "surf" one ever saw oil the Inland Sea. Walking like 
this, he could almost imagine that he was back by Lake Michigan, so long ago. 
Every summer, he and Virginia had camped on the lakeshore. Almost, he could 
imagine that he was returning from a noontime stroll on sonic very muggy 
Michigan day, and that if he walked far enough he would find Virginia and Anne 
and Billy waiting impatiently around the campfire, teasing him for going off 
alone.
Almost...
Wil looked up. Thirty meters further on was the cause of all the seabird clamor. 
A tribe of fishermonkeys was playing at water's edge. The monkeys must have 
noticed him by now. In past weeks, they would have disappeared into the sea at 
the first sight of human or machine. Now they stayed ashore. As he approached, 
the younger ones waddled toward him. Wil went to one knee and they crowded 
round, their webbed fingers searching curiously at his pockets. One removed a 
data card. Wil grinned, tugged the card from the monkey's grasp. "Aha! A 
pickpocket. You're under arrest!"
"Forever the policeman, eh, Inspector?" The voice was feminine, the tone light. 
It came from somewhere over his head. Wil leaned back. A remote-controlled flier 
hung just a few meters above him.
He grinned. "Just keeping in practice. Is that you, Marta? I thought you were 
preparing for this evening's 'festivities'."
"I am. And part of the preparation is to get foolish people off the beach. The 
fireworks won't wait till night."
"What?"
"That Steve Fraley — he's making a big scene, trying to argue Yelén into 
postponing the rescue. She's decided to do it a little early, just to let Steve 
know who's boss." Marta laughed. Wil couldn't tell if her amusement was directed 
at Yelén Korolev's irritation or at Fraley. "So please to move your tail, sir. I 
have some other people to harass yet. I expect you back in town before this 
flier."
"Yes, ma'am!" Wil gave a mock salute and turned to jog back the way he had come: 
He had gone about thirty meters when a banshee shriek erupted behind him. He 
glanced over his shoulder and saw the flier diving in the other direction, 
lights flashing, sirens blaring. Against that assault, the newfound 
sophistication of the fishermonkeys dissolved. They panicked, and with the 
screaming flier between them and the sea their only choice was to grab the kids 
and scramble up into the dunes. Marta's flier followed, dropping noise bombs on 
either side of them. Flier and monkeys disappeared over the top of the sand into 
the jungle, and the noise faded. Wil wondered briefly how far Marta would have 
to chase them to get them into a safe area. He knew she was equal parts 
soft-heartedness and practicality. She'd never scare the animals away from the 
beach unless there was some chance they could make it to safe haven. Wil smiled 
to himself. He wouldn't be surprised if Marta had chosen the season and the day 
of the blow-off to minimize deaths to wildlife.
Three minutes later, Brierson was near the top of the rickety stairs that led to 
the monorail. He looked down and saw that he hadn't been the only person on the 
beach. Someone was strolling toward the base of the stairway. Over half a 
million centuries, the Korolevs had rescued or recruited quite a collection of 
weirds, but at least they all looked fairly normal. This person... was 
different. The stranger carried a variable parasol, and was naked except for a 
loincloth and shoulder purse. His skin was pale, pasty. As he started up the 
stairs, the parasol tilted back to reveal a hairless, egglike head. And Wil saw 
that the stranger might just as well be a she (or an it). The creature was short 
and slender, its movements delicate. There were faint swellings around its 
nipples.
Brierson waved hesitantly; it was good policy to meet all the new neighbors, 
especially the advanced travelers. But then it looked up at Brierson, and even 
across twenty meters those dark eyes penetrated with cold indifference. The 
small mouth twitched, but no words came. Wil swallowed and turned to continue up 
the plastic stairs. There might be some neighbors it was better to learn of 
secondhand.
 
Korolev. That was the official name of the town (as officially Named by Yelén 
Korolev). There were almost as many rival names as there were inhabitants. Wil's 
Indian friends wanted to call it Newest Delhi. The government (in irrevocable 
exile) of New Mexico wanted to call it New Albuquerque. Optimists liked Second 
Chance, pessimists Last Chance. For megalomaniacs it was the Great Urb.
Whatever its name, the town nestled in the foothills of the Indonesian Alps, 
high enough so that equatorial heat and humidity was moderated to an almost 
uniform pleasantness. Here the Korolevs and their friends had finally assembled 
the rest cued from all the ages. Almost everyone's architectural taste had been 
catered to. The New Mexican statists had a main street lined with large (mostly 
empty) buildings that Wil thought epitomized their bureaucracy. Most others from 
the twenty-first century-Wil included-lived in small groups of homes very like 
those they'd known before. The advanced travelers lived higher in the mountains.
Town Korolev was built on a scale to accommodate thousands. At the moment the 
population was less than two hundred, every living human being. They needed 
more; Yelén Korolev knew where to get one hundred more. She was determined to 
rescue them.
Steven Fraley, President of the Republic of New Mexico, was determined that 
those hundred remain unrescued. He was still arguing the case when Brierson 
arrived. "... and you don't appreciate the history of our era, madam. The 
Peacers came near to exterminating the human race. Sure, saving this group will 
get you a few more warm bodies, but you risk the survival of our whole colony, 
of the entire human race, in doing so."
Yelén Korolev looked calm, but Wil knew her well enough to recognize the signs 
of an impending explosion: there were rosy patches on her cheeks, yet her 
features were otherwise even paler than usual. She ran a hand through her blond 
hair. "Mr. Fraley, I really do know the history of your era. Remember that 
almost all of us-no matter what our present age and experience-have our 
childhoods within a couple hundred years of one another. The Peace 
Authority"-her lips twitched in a quick smile at the name —"may have started the 
general war of 1997. They may even be responsible for the terrible plagues of 
the early twenty-first century. But as governments go, they were relatively 
benign. This group in Kampuchea" -she waved toward the north —"went into stasis 
in 2048, when the Peacers were overthrown. That was before decent health care 
was available. It's entirely possible that none of the original criminals are 
present."
Fraley opened and closed his mouth, but no words came. Finally: "Haven't you 
heard of their 'Renaissance' scheme? In '48 they were ready to kill by the 
millions again. Those guys under Kampuchea probably got more hell-bombs than a 
dog has fleas. That base was their secret ace in the hole. If they hadn't 
screwed up their stasis, they'd've come out in 2100 and blown us away. And you 
probably wouldn't even have been born —"
Yelén cut into the torrent. "Hell-bombs? Popguns. Even you know that. Mr. 
Fraley, getting another hundred people into our colony will make our settlement 
just big enough to survive. Marta and I haven't spent our lives setting this up 
just to see it die like the undermanned attempts of the past. The only reason we 
postponed the founding of Korolev till megayear fifty was so we could rescue 
those Peacers when their bobble bursts."
She turned to her partner. "Is everybody accounted for?" Marta Korolev had sat 
through the argument in silence, her dark features relaxed, her eyes closed. Her 
headband put her in communication with the estate's autonomous devices. No doubt 
she had managed a half dozen fliers during the last half hour, scouring the 
countryside for any truant colonists the Korolev satellites had spotted. Now she 
opened her eyes. "Everybody's accounted for and safe. In fact" — she caught 
sight of Wil standing at the back of the amphitheater and grinned — "almost 
everyone is here on the castle grounds. I think we can provide you people with 
quite a show this afternoon." She either hadn't followed or — more likely — had 
chosen to ignore the dispute between Yelén and Fraley.
"Okay, let's get started." A rustle of anticipation passed through the audience. 
Many were from the twenty-first century, like Wil. But they'd seen enough of the 
advanced travelers to know that such a statement was more than enough signal for 
spectacular events to happen.
From his place at the top of the amphitheater, Wil had a good view to the north. 
The forests of the higher elevations fell away to a gray-green blur that was the 
equatorial jungle. Beyond that, haze obscured even the existence of the Inland 
Sea. Even on the rare, clear day when the sea mists lifted, the Kampuchean Alps 
were hidden beyond the horizon. Nevertheless, the rescue should be visible; he 
was a bit surprised that the bluish white of the northern horizon was 
undisturbed. "Things will get more exciting, I promise." Yelén's voice brought 
his eyes back to the stage. Two large displays floated behind her. They made an 
incongruous contrast with the moss and gold-encrusted temple that covered the 
land beyond the stage. Castle Korolev was typical of the flamboyance of the 
advanced residences. The underlying stonework and statuary modeled vaguely on 
Angkor Wat-had been built half a thousand years earlier, then left for mountain 
rains to wear at, for moss to cover, for trees to penetrate. Afterwards, 
construction robots hid all the subtle machinery of late twenty-second-century 
technology within the "ruins." Will respected that technology. Here was a place 
where no sparrow could fall unremarked. The owners were as safe from a quiet 
knife in the back as from a ballistic missile attack.
"As Mr. Fraley says, the Peacer bobble was supposed to be a secret. It was 
originally underground. It is much further underground now-somebody blundered. 
What was to be a fifty-year jump became something... longer. As near as we can 
figure, their bobble should burst sometime in the next few thousand years; 
they've been in stasis fifty million years. During that time, continents drifted 
and new rifts formed. Parts of Kampuchea slid deep beneath new mountains." The 
display behind her lit with a multicolored transect of the Kampuchean Alps. The 
surface crust appeared as blue, shading into yellow and orange at the greater 
depths. Right at the margin of orange and magma red was a tiny black disk-the 
Peacer bobble, afloat against the ceiling of hell.
Inside the bobble, time was stopped. Those within were as they'd been at that 
instant of a near-forgotten war when the losers decided to escape to the future. 
No force could affect a bobble's contents; no force could affect its duration - 
not the heart of a star, not the heart of a lover.
But when the bobble burst, when the stasis ended... The Peacers were about forty 
kilometers down. There would be a moment of noise and heat and pain as the magma 
swallowed them. One hundred men and women would die, and a certain endangered 
species would move one more step toward final extinction.
The Korolevs proposed to raise the bobble to the surface, where it would be safe 
for the few remaining millennia of its duration. Yelén waved at the display. 
"This was taken just before we started the operation. Here's the ongoing view."
The picture flickered. The red magma boundary had risen thousands of meters 
above the bobble. Pinheads of white light flashed in the orange and yellow that 
represented the solid crust. In the place of each of those lights, red blossomed 
and spread, almost-Wil winced at the thought-like blood from a stab wound. "Each 
of those sparkles is a hundred-megaton bomb. In the last few seconds, we've 
released more energy than all mankind's wars put together."
The red spread as the wounds coalesced into a vast hemorrhage in the bosom of 
Kampuchea. The magma was still twenty kilometers below ground level. The bombs 
were timed so there was a constant sparkling just above the highest level of 
red, bringing the melt closer and closer to the surface. At the bottom of the 
display, the Peacer bobble floated, serene and untouched. On this scale, its 
motion towards the surface was imperceptible.
Wil pulled his attention from the display and looked beyond the amphitheater. 
There was no change: the northern horizon was still haze and pale blue. The 
rescue site was fifteen hundred kilometers away, but even so, he'd expected 
something spectacular. The minutes passed. A cool breeze swept slow around the 
theater, rustling the almost-jacarandas that bounded the stage, sending the 
perfume of their large flowers across the audience. A family of spiders in one 
tree had built a for-show web in its upper branches. The web silk gleamed in 
rainbow colors against the sky.
The elapsed-time clock on the display showed almost four minutes. The Korolev 
pattern of bomb bursts was still thousands of meters short of the surface.
President Fraley rose from his seat. "Madame Korolev, please. There is still 
time to stop this. I know you've rescued all types, cranks, joyriders, 
criminals, victims. But these are monsters. " For once, Wil thought he heard 
sincerity-perhaps even fear-in the New Mexican's voice. And he might be right. 
If the rumors were true, if the Peacers had created the plagues of the early 
twenty-first century, then they were responsible for the deaths of billions. If 
they had succeeded with their Renaissance Project, they would have killed most 
of the survivors.
Yelén Korolev glanced down at Fraley but didn't reply. The New Mexican 
stiffened, then waved abruptly to his people. One hundred men and women-most in 
NM fatigues-came quickly to their feet. It was a dramatic gesture, if nothing 
else: the amphitheater would be almost empty with them gone.
"Mr. President, I suggest you and the others sit back down." (t was Marta 
Korolev. Her tone was as pleasant as ever, but the insult in the words brought a 
flush to Steve Fraley's face. He gestured angrily and turned to the stone steps 
that led from the theater.
Wil was more inclined to take her words literally: Yelén might use sarcasm and 
imperious authority, but Marta usually meant her advice only to help. He looked 
again to the north. Over the jungle slopes there was a wavering, a rippling. 
Oops. With sudden understanding, Wil slid onto a nearby bench.
The ground shock arrived an instant later. It was a soundless, rolling motion 
that took Fraley's feet right out from under him. Steve's lieutenants quickly 
helped him up, but the man was livid. He glared death at Marta, then stomped 
quickly-and carefully-up the steps. He didn't notice Wil till he was almost past 
him. The Republic of New Mexico kept a special place in its fecal pantheon for 
W. W. Brierson; having Wil witness this humiliation was the last straw. Then the 
generals hustled their President on. Those who followed glared briefly at 
Brierson, or avoided looking at him entirely.
Their departing footsteps came clearly from beyond the amphitheater. Seconds 
later they had fired up the engines on their armored personnel carriers and were 
rumbling off to their part of town. All through this, the earthquake continued. 
For someone who had grown up in Michigan, it was uncanny. The rolling, rocking 
motion was almost silent. But the birds were silent too, and the spiders on the 
for-show web motionless. From deep within the castle's stonework there was 
creaking.
On the transect, magma red had nearly reached the surface. The tiny lights that 
represented bombs flickered just below ground, and the last yellow of solid 
earth just... evaporated.
Still the nuking continued, carving a wide red sea.
And finally there was action on the northern horizon. Finally there was direct 
evidence of the cataclysm there. The pale blue was lit again and again by 
something very bright, something that punched through the haze like a sunrise 
trying to happen. Just above the flashes a band of white, almost like a second 
horizon, slowly rose. The top had been blown off the northern foothills of the 
Kampuchean Alps.
A sigh spread through the audience. Wil looked down, saw several people pointing 
upwards. Faintly purple, barely brighter than the sky, the wraith extended 
almost straight overhead from north to south. A daytime aurora?
Strange lightning flickered on the slopes below the castle. The air in the 
amphitheater was charged with static electricity, yet all was unholy silent. The 
sound of the rescue would conic loud even from fifteen hundred kilometers around 
the earth, but that sound was still an hour away, chugging across the Kampuchean 
Alps towards the Inland Sea.
And the Peacer bobble, like flotsam loosed from ice by a summer sun, was free to 
float to the surface.
TWO
Everyone agreed with Marta that the show had been impressive. Many didn't 
realize that the "show" wouldn't end with one afternoon of fireworks. The 
curtain calls would go on for some time, much more dismal than impressive.
The rescue blasting had been about a hundred times as energetic as the 
nineteenth-century Krakatoa blow-off. Billions of tonnes of ash and rock were 
pumped into the stratosphere that afternoon. The sun was a rare sight in the 
days that followed, at best a dim reddish disk through the murk. In Korolev, 
there was a heavy frost on the ground every morning. The almost-jacarandas were 
wilted and dying. Their spider families were dead or moved to burrows. Even in 
the jungles along the coast, temperatures rarely got above fourteen degrees now.
It rained most of every day-but not water: the dust was settling out. When it 
came down dry, it was like gray-brown snow, piling obscene drifts on houses and 
trees and the bodies of small animals; the New Mexicans ruined the last of their 
jetcopters learning what rock dust does to turbines. Things were even worse when 
it came down wet, a black fluid that changed the drifts to mud. It was small 
consolation that the bombs were clean, and the dust a "natural product."
Korolev robots quickly rebuilt the monorails. Wil and the Dasgupta brothers took 
a trip down to the sea.
The dunes were gone, blasted inland by the rescue-day tsunamis. The trees south 
of the dunes were laid out flat, all pointing away from the sea. There was no 
green; all was covered with ash. Even the sea had a layer of scum on it. 
Miraculously, some fishermonkeys lived. Wil saw small groups on the beach, 
grooming the ash from each other's pelts. They spent most of their time in the 
water, which was still warm.
The rescue itself was an undoubted success. The Peacer bobble now sat on the 
surface. The third day after the detonation, a Korolev flier visited the blast 
site. The pictures it sent back were striking. Gale-force winds, still laden 
with ash, drove c across gray scabland. Glowing orange-red peeked through netted 
cracks in the scab. At the center of this slowly freezing lake of rock sat a 
perfect sphere, the bobble. It floated two-thirds out of the rock. Of course, no 
nicks or scour marred its surface No trace of ash or rock adhered. In fact, it 
was all but invisible: its mirror surface reflected the scene around it, showing 
the net of glowing cracks stretching back into the haze.
A typical bobble, in an untypical place.
"All things shall pass." That was Rohan Dasgupta's favorite misquote. In a few 
months, the molten lake would freeze over, and an unprotected man could walk 
right to the side of the Peacer bobble. About the same time, the blackout and 
the mud rains would end. For a few years there would be brilliant sunsets and 
unusually cool weather. Wounded trees would recover, seedlings would replace 
those that had died. In a century or two, nature would have forgotten this 
affront, and the Peacer bobble would reflect forest green.
Yet it would be unknown thousands of years before the bobble burst, and the men 
and women within could join the colony.
As usual, the Korolevs had a plan. As usual, the low-techs had little choice but 
to tag along.
 
"Hey, we're having a party tonight. Want to come?"
Wil and the others looked up from their shoveling After three hours mucking 
around in the ash, they all looked pretty much the same. Black, white, Chinese, 
Indian, Aztlan — all were covered with gray ash.
The vision that confronted them was dressed in sparkling white. Her flying 
platform hovered just above the long pile of ash that the low-techs had pushed 
into the street. She was one of the Robinson daughters. Tammy? In any case, she 
looked like some twentieth-century fashion plate: blond, tan, seventeen, 
friendly.
Dilip Dasgupta grinned back at her. "We'd sure like to. But tonight? If we don't 
get this ash away from the houses before the Korolevs bobble up, we'll be stuck 
with it forever." Wil's back and arms were one big ache, but he had to agree. 
They had been doing this for two days, ever since the Korolevs announced 
tonight's departure. If they could get all the gray stuff pushed back from the 
houses before they bobbled up, it would be sluiced away by a thousand years of 
weather when they came back. Everyone on the street had pitched in, though with 
lots of grumbling-directed mostly at the Korolevs. The New Mexicans had even 
sent over some enlisted men with wheelbarrows and shovels. Wil wondered about 
that: he couldn't believe that someone like Fraley was really overcome by a 
spirit of cooperation. This was either honest helpfulness on the part of lower 
officers, or else a subtle effort to bring the other low-techs into the NM camp, 
future allies against the Korolevs and the Peacers.
The Robinson girl leaned on her platform, and it drifted closer to Dasgupta. She 
looked up and down the street, then spoke with an air of confidentiality. "My 
folks like Yelén and Marta a lot-really. But Daddy thinks they carry some things 
too far. You Early Birds are going to be at our level of tech in a few decades 
anyway. Why should you have to slave like this?"
She bit at a fingernail. "I really wish you could come to our party.... Hey! Why 
don't we do this: You keep working, say till about six. Maybe you can get it all 
cleaned by then, anyway. But if you can't, don't worry. My folks' robots can 
take care of what's left while you go get ready for the party." She smiled, then 
continued almost shyly. "Do you think that would be okay? Could you come then?"
Dilip looked at his brother Rohan, then replied, deadpan, "Why, uh, yes. With 
that backup, I think we could make it."
"Great! Now look. It's at our house starting around eight. So don't work past 
six, okay? And don't bother eating, either. We've got lots of food. The party'll 
go till the Witching Hour. That will leave you plenty of time to get home before 
the Korolevs bobble up."
Her flier drifted sideways and climbed beyond the trees that encircled the 
houses. "See you!" Twelve sweaty shovel pushers watched her departure in numbed 
silence.
A smile spread slowly across Dilip's wide face. He looked at his shovel, then 
rolled his eyes at the others. Finally he shouted, "Screw it!", threw the shovel 
to the ground, and jumped up and down on it.
This provoked a heartfelt cheer from the others, the NNI corporals included. In 
moments, the newly liberated workers had departed for their homes.
Only Brierson remained on the street, still looking in the direction taken by 
the Robinson girl. He felt as much curiosity as gratitude. Wil had done his best 
to know the high-techs: for all their idiosyncrasies, they'd seemed united 
behind the Korolevs. But no matter how friendly the disagreement, he saw now 
that they had factions, too. I wonder what the Robinsons are selling.
 
The public area of the Robinsons' place was friendlier than the Korolevs'. 
Incandescent lamps hung from oaken beams The teak dance floor opened onto a 
buffet room, an outdoor terrace, and a darkened theater where the hosts promised 
some extraordinary home movies later.
While guests were still arriving, the younger Robinson children ran noisily 
about the dance floor, dodging among the guests in a wild game of tag. They were 
tolerated, more than tolerated. They were the only children in the world.
In some sense, almost everyone present was an exile. Some had been shanghaied, 
some had jumped to escape punishment (deserved and otherwise), some (like the 
Dasguptas) thought that stepping out of time for a couple of centuries while 
their investments multiplied would make them rich. On the whole, their initial 
jumps had been short-into the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth 
centuries.
But somewhere in the twenty-third, the rest of humanity disappeared. The 
travelers coming out just after the Extinction found ruins. Some-the most 
frivolous, and the most hurried of the criminals-had brought nothing with them. 
These starved, or lived a few pitiful years in the decaying mausoleum that was 
Earth. The better-equipped ones-the New Mexicans, for example-had the means to 
return to stasis. They bobbled forward through the third millennium, praying to 
find civilization revived. All they found was a world sinking back to nature, 
Man's works vanishing beneath jungle and forest and sea.
Even these travelers could survive only a few years in realtime. They had no 
medical support, no way to maintain their machines or produce food. Their 
equipment would soon fail, leaving them stranded in the wilderness.
But a few, a very few, had left at the close of the twenty-second century-when 
technology gave individuals greater wealth than whole twentieth-century nations. 
These few could maintain and reproduce all but the most advanced of their tools. 
Most departed civilization with a deliberate spirit of adventure. They had the 
resources to save the less fortunate scattered through the centuries, the 
millennia, and finally the megayears that passed.
Except for the Robinsons, no one had children. That was something reserved for 
the future, when humankind's ghosts made one last try at reclaiming the race's 
existence. So the kids who played raucous tag across the dance floor were a 
greater wonder than any high-tech magic. When the Robinson daughters gathered up 
their younger siblings for bed, there was a moment of strange, sad silence.
Wil drifted through the buffet room, stopping here and there to talk with his 
new acquaintances. He was determined to know everyone eventually. Quite a goal: 
if successful, he would know every living member of the human race. The largest 
group-and for Wil the most difficult to know-were the New Mexicans Fraley 
himself was nowhere in sight, but most of his people were here. He spotted the 
corporals who had helped with the shoveling, and they introduced him to some 
others. Things were friendly till an NM officer joined the group.
Wil excused himself and moved slowly toward the dance floor. Most of the 
advanced travelers were at the party, and they were mingling. A crowd surrounded 
Juan Chanson. The archeologist was arguing his theory of the Extinction. 
"Invasion. Extermination. That's the beginning and the end of it." He spoke a 
clipped, rattling dialect of English that made his opinions seem even more 
impressive.
"But, Professor," someone-Rohan Dasgupta-objected, "my brother and I came out of 
stasis in 2465. That couldn't have been more than two centuries after the 
Extinction. Newer Delhi was in ruins. Many of the buildings had completely 
fallen in. But we saw no evidence of nuking or lasing."
"Sure. I agree. Not around Delhi. But you must realize, my boy, you saw a very 
small part of the picture, indeed. It's a great misfortune that most of those 
who returned right after the Extinction didn't have the means to study what they 
saw. I can show you pictures... LA a fifty-kilometer crater, Beijing a large 
lake. Even now, with the right equipment, you can find evidence of those blasts.
"I've spent centuries tracking down and interviewing the travelers who were 
alive in the late third millennium. Why, I even interviewed you." Chanson's eyes 
unfocused for a fraction of a second. Like most of the high-techs, he wore an 
interface band around his temples. A moment's thought could bring a flood of 
memory. "You and your brother. That was around 10000 AD, after the Korolevs 
rescued you —"
Dasgupta nodded eagerly. For him, it had been just weeks before. "Yes, they had 
moved us to Canada. I still don't know why-°.
"Safety, my boy, safety. The Laurentian Shield is a stable place for long-term 
storage, almost as good as a cometary orbit." He waved his hand dismissingly. 
"The point is, I and a few other investigators have pieced together these 
separate bits of evidence. It is tricky; twenty-third-century civilization 
maintained vast databases, but the media had decayed to uselessness within a few 
decades of the Extinction. We have fewer contemporary records from the era than 
we do from the Mayans'. But there are enough... I can show you: my 
reconstruction of the Norcross invasion graffiti, the punched vanadium tape that 
W. W. Sanchéz found on Charon. These are the death screams of the human race.
"Looking at the evidence, any reasonable person must agree the Extinction was 
the result of wholesale violence directed against populations that were somehow 
defenseless.
"Now, there are some who claim the human race simply killed itself, that we 
finally had the world-ending war people worried about in the twentieth 
century...." He glanced at Monica Raines. The pinch-faced artist smiled back 
sourly but didn't rise to the bait. Monica belonged to the "People Are No Damned 
Good" school of philosophy. The Extinction held no mysteries for her. After a 
moment, Chanson continued. "But if you really study the evidence, you'll see the 
traces of outside interference, you'll see that our race was murdered by 
something... from outside."
The woman next to Rohan gave a little gasp. "But these
.. these aliens. What became of them? Why, if they return -we're sitting ducks 
here!"
Wil stepped back from the fringes of the group and continued toward the dance 
floor. Behind him, he heard Juan Chanson's triumphant "Exactly! That is the 
practical point of my investigations. We must mount guard on the solar frontiers 
—" His words were lost in the background chatter. Wil shrugged to himself. Juan 
was one of the most approachable of the high-techs, and Wil had heard his spiel 
before. There was no question the Extinction was the central mystery of their 
lives. But rehashing the issue in casual conversation was like arguing 
theology-and depressing, to boot.
 
A dozen couples danced. On the stage, Alice Robinson and daughter Amy were 
running the music. Amy played something that looked like a guitar. Alice's 
instrument was a more conventional console. They improvised on a base of 
automatic music generators. Having two real humans out front, whose voices and 
hands were making part of the music, made the band exciting and real.
They played everything from Strauss waltzes, to the Beatles, to W. W. Arai. A 
couple of the Arai pieces Wil had never heard: they must have been written after 
his... departure. Partners changed from dance to dance. The Arai tunes brought 
more than thirty people onto the floor. Wil stayed at the edge of the floor, for 
the moment content to observe. On the other side, he saw Marta Korolev; her 
partner was not in evidence
Marta stood swaying, snapping her fingers to the music, a faint smile on her 
face. She looked a little like Virginia: her chocolate skin was almost the shade 
Wil remembered. No doubt Marta's father or mother came from America. But the 
other side of her family was clearly Chinese.
Appearance aside, there were other similarities. Marta had Virginia's outgoing 
good humor. She combined common sense with uncommon sympathy. Wil watched her 
for many minutes, trying not to seem to watch. Several of the bolder partiers — 
Dilip was first-asked her to dance. She accepted enthusiastically, and soon was 
on the floor for almost every tune. She was very good to watch. If only — 
A hand touched his shoulder and a feminine voice sounded in his ear. "Hey, Mr. 
Brierson, is it true you're a policeman?"
Wil looked into blue eyes just centimeters from his. Tammy Robinson stood on 
tiptoe to shout into his ear. Now that she had his attention, she stood down, 
which still left her a respectable 180 centimeters tall. She was dressed in the 
same spotless white as before. Her interface band looked like a bit of jewelry, 
holding back her long hair. Her grin was bounded by dimples: even her eyes 
seemed to be smiling.
Brierson grinned back. "Yes. At least, I used to be a cop."
"Oh, wow." She took his arm in hers and edged them away from the loudness. "I 
never met a policeman before. But 1 guess that's not saying a lot."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. I was born about ten megayears after the Singularity -the Extinction, 
Juan calls it. I've read and watched all about cops and criminals and soldiers, 
but till now I've never actually met any."
Wil laughed. "Well, now you can meet all three."
Tammy was abashed. "I'm sorry. I'm really not that ignorant. I know that police 
are different from criminals and soldiers. But it's so strange: they're all 
careers that can't even exist unless lots of people decide to live together."
Lots o f people. Like more than a single family. Brierson glimpsed the abyss 
that separated them.
"I think you'll like having other people around, Tammy."
She smiled and squeezed his arm. "Daddy always says that. Now I'm beginning to 
understand."
"Just think. Before you're a hundred, Korolev Town will be almost like a city. 
There could be a couple of thousand people for you to know, people more 
interesting and worthwhile than criminals."
"Ugh. We're not going to stay for that. I want to be with lots of 
people-hundreds at least. But how could you stand to be locked in one little 
corner of time?" She looked at him, seemed suddenly to realize that Brierson's 
whole life had been stuck in a single century. "Gee. How can I explain it? 
Lookwhere you come from, there was air and space travel, right?" Brierson 
nodded. "You could go anywhere you wanted. Now, suppose instead you had to spend 
your life in a house in a deep valley. Sometimes you hear stories about other 
places, but you can never climb out of the valley. Wouldn't that drive you 
crazy?
"That's how I'd feel about making a permanent stop at Korolev. We've been 
stopped for six weeks now. That's not long compared to some of our stops, but 
it's long enough for me to get the feeling: The animals aren't changing. I look 
out and the mountains just sit there." She made a little sound of frustration. 
"Oh, I can't explain it. But you'll see some of what I mean tonight. Daddy's 
going to show the video we made. It's beautiful!"
Wil smiled. Bobbles didn't change the fact that time was a one-way trip.
She saw the denial in his eyes. "You must feel like I do. Just a little? I mean, 
why did you go into stasis in the first place?" He shook his head. "Tammy, there 
are lots of people here who never asked to be bobbled.... I was shanghaied." A 
crummy embezzlement case it had been. When he thought back, it was so fresh in 
his mind, in many ways more real than the world of the last few weeks. The 
assignment had seemed as safe as houses. The need for an armed investigator had 
been a formality, required by his company's archaic regs: the amount stolen was 
just over the ten thousand gAu. But someone had been desperate or careless... or 
just plain vicious. Most jurisdictions of Wil's era counted offensive bobbling 
of more than a century as manslaughter: Wil's stasis had lasted one thousand 
centuries. Of course, Wil did not consider the crime to be the murder of one W. 
W. Brierson. The crime was much more terrible than that. The crime was the 
destruction of the world he had known, the family he loved.
Tammy's eyes grew wide as he told his story. She tried to understand, but Wil 
thought there was more wonder than sympathy in her look. He stopped short, 
embarrassed.
He was trying to think of a suitable change of subject when he noticed the pale 
figure on the far side of the dance floor. It was the person he'd seen at the 
beach. "Tammy, who's that?" He nodded in the direction of the stranger.
 
Tammy pulled her gaze away from his face and looked across the room. "Oh! She's 
weird, isn't she? She's a spacer. Can you imagine? In fifty million years, she 
could travel all over the Galaxy. We think she's more than nine thousand years 
old..And all that time alone." Tammy shivered.
Nine thousand years. That would make her the oldest human Wil had ever seen. She 
certainly looked more human tonight than on the beach. For one thing, she wore 
more clothes: a blouse and skirt that were definitely feminine. Now her skull 
was covered with short black stubble. Her face was smooth and pale. Wil guessed 
that when her hair grew out, she might look like a normal young woman-Chinese, 
probably.
A half-meter of emptiness surrounded the spacer; elsewhere the crowd was packed 
close. Many clapped and sang; there was scarcely a person who could resist 
tapping a foot or nodding in time to the music. But the spacer stood quietly, 
almost motionless, her dark eyes staring impassively into the dancers. 
Occasionally her arm or leg would twitch, as if in some broken resonance with 
the tunes.
She seemed to sense Wil's gaze. She looked back at him, her eyes expressionless, 
analytical. This woman had seen more than the Robinsons, the Korolevs — more 
than all the high-techs put together. Was it his imagination that he suddenly 
felt like a bug on a slide? The woman's lips moved, the twitching motion he 
remembered from the beach. Then it had seemed a coldly alien, almost insectile 
gesture. Now Wil had a flash of insight: after nine thousand years alone, nine 
thousand years on God knows how many worlds, would a person still remember the 
simple things - like how to smile?
"C'mon, Mr. Brierson, let's dance." Tammy Robinson's hand was insistent on his 
elbow.
 
Wil danced more that night than since he'd been dating Virginia. The Robinson 
kid just wouldn't quit. She didn't really have more stamina than Brierson. He 
kept in condition and kept his bio-age around twenty; with his large frame and 
tendency to overweight he couldn't afford to be fashionably middle-aged. But 
Tammy had the enthusiasm of a seventeen-year-old. Paint her a different color 
and she reminded him of his daughter Anne: cuddly, bright, and just a bit 
predatory when it came to the males she wanted.
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 of it 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 he 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 [?] 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 Yelén 
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 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 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. "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 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."
"And Monica Raines hates all mankind."
This time her laugh was lighter. "Yes. Poor Monica." Mama leaned toward him and 
this time really did rest her head against leis 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, Manta."
"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. Manta 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, Manta? 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 arc 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.
THREE
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 mould 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.
As Wil wandered through the young forest that the street had become, the 
wrongness of the scene gradually percolated through: Everything was alive, but 
there was not another human, not a single robot. Had everyone wakened earlier, 
say it the moment the bobbles burst?
He walked down to the Dasguptas' place. Half hidden by the brush, ash, he saw 
someone big and black heading his way-his own reflection. The Dasguptas were 
still in stasis. The trees grew right up to their bobble. Rainbow webs floated 
around it, but the surface was untouched. Neither vines nor spiders could find 
purchase on that mirrored smoothness.
Wil ran through the forest, panic rising in him. Now that he knew what to look 
for, they were easy to spot: the sun's image glinted off two, three, half a 
dozen bobbles. Only his had burst. He looked at the trees, the birds, and the 
spiders. The scene was scarcely pleasing now. How long could he live without 
civilization? The rest might come out of stasis in moments Or a hundred years, 
or a thousand; he had no way of knowing. In the meantime Wil was alone, perhaps 
the only living man on Earth.
He left the street and scrambled up a rise into older trees. t From the top, he 
should be able to see some of the estates of tire advanced travelers. The fear 
tightened at his throat. Sun and sky sat in the green of the hills; there were 
bobbles where the palaces of Juan Chanson and Phil Genet should be. He looked 
south, towards Castle Korolev.
Spires, gold and green! No bobble there!
And in the air above the castle, he saw three close-set dots: fliers, moving 
fast and straight towards him, like some old-time fighters on a strafing ran The 
trio was over him in seconds... The middle flier descended and invited him into 
its passenger cabin.
The ground fell slantingly away. He had a moment's vision of the Inland Sea, 
blue through coastal haze. There were bobbles around the advanced estates, 
around the NM quarter of town. To the west were several large ones-around the 
autofactories? Everything was in stasis except the Korolev estate. He was above 
the castle now, coming down fast. The gardens and towers looked as before, but 
an enormous circle circumscribed the estate-a subtle yet abrupt change in the 
tone of the forest's green. Like himself, the Korolevs had been in stasis up to 
the recent past. For some reason they were leaving the rest bobbled. For some 
reason they wanted private words with W. W. Brierson.
The Korolev library had no bookcases weighted down with data cartridges or 
paper-and-ink books. Data could be accessed anywhere; the library was a place to 
sit and think (with appropriate support devices) or to hold a small conference. 
The walls were lined with bolo windows showing the surrounding countryside. 
Yelén Korolev sat at the middle of a long marble table. She motioned Wil to sit 
across from her.
"Where's Manta?" Brierson asked automatically.
"Mama is... dead, Inspector Brierson." Yelén's voice was even flatter than 
usual. "Murdered."
Time seemed to stop. Manta. Dead? He had taken bullets with less physical 
sensation than those words brought. His mouth opened, but the questions wouldn't 
come. In any case, Yelén had questions of her own. "And I want to know what you 
had to do with it, Brierson."
Wil shook his head, in confusion more than denial.
She slapped the marble tabletop. "Wake up, mister! I'm talking to you. You're 
the last person who saw her alive. She rejected your advances. Did that make it 
worth killing her, Brierson? Did it?"
The insanity of the accusation brought Wil back to his senses. He stared at 
Yelén, realizing that she was in a much worse state than he. Like Manta, Yelén 
Korolev had been raised in late twenty-second-century Hainan. But Yelén had no 
trace of Chinese blood. She was descended from the Russians who had filtered out 
of Central Asia after the 1997 debacle. Her fair Slavic features were normally 
cool, occasionally showing ironic humor. Those features were as smooth as ever 
now, but the woman kept running her hand across her chin, her forefinger tracing 
again and again the edge of her lip. She was in a state of walleyed shock that 
Wil had seen only a couple of times before-and those times had been filled with 
sudden death. From the corner of his eye, he saw one of her protection robots 
float around the far side of the table-keeping her widely separated from its 
target.
"Yelén," he finally said, trying to keep his voice calm and reasonable, "till 
this moment I didn't know about Manta. I liked... respected... her more than 
anyone in the settlement. I could never harm her."
Korolev stared at him a long moment, then let out a shaky breath. The feeling of 
deadly tension lessened. "I know what you tried to do that night, Brierson. I 
know how you thought to repay our charity. I'll always hate your guts because of 
it.
.. But you're telling the truth about one thing: There's no way your any 
low-tech--could have killed Manta."
She looked through him, remembering her lost partner, or perhaps communicating 
through her headband. When she spoke again her voice was softer, almost lost. 
"You were a policeman, in a century where murder was still common. You're even 
famous. When I was a kid, I read all about you.
.. I'll do anything to get Manta's killer, Inspector."
Wil leaned forward. "What happened, Yelén?" he said quietly.
"She-she was marooned — left outside all our bobbles."
For a moment, Wil didn't understand. Then he remembered walking the deserted 
street and wondering if he was all alone, wondering how many years would pass 
before the other bobbles burst. Before, he had thought that being shanghaied 
into the future was the most terrible bobble crime. Now he saw that being 
marooned in an empty present could be just as awful.
"How long was she alone, Yelén?"
"Forty years. Just forty goddamned years. But she had no health care. She had no 
robots. She had just the clothes on her back. I'm p-proud of her. She lasted 
forty years. She survived the wilderness, the loneliness, her own aging. For 
forty years. and she almost won through. Another ten years —" Her voice broke 
and she covered her eyes. "Back up, Korolev," she said. "Just the facts.
"You know we have to move down time to when the Peacer bobble bursts. We planned 
to begin the move the night of the party. After everyone was indoors, we'd 
bobble forward in three-month steps. Every three months, the bobbles would burst 
and our sensors would take a few microseconds to check the fast-flicker autons, 
to see if the Peacers were still in stasis. If they were, we'd automatically 
bobble up for another three months. Even if we waited a hundred thousand years, 
all you'd have seen was a second or so of flickering and flashing.
"So. That was the plan. What happened was that the first jump was. a century 
long-for everyone in near-Earth space. The other advanced travelers had agreed 
to follow our programming on this. They were in stasis, too. The difference 
between three months and a century was not enough to alarm their controller 
programs. Marta was alone. Once she figured out that the flicker interval was 
more than three months, she hiked around the Inland Sea to the Peace Authority 
bobble."
That was a twenty-five-hundred-kilometer hike.
Yelén noticed the wonder on his face. "We're survivors, Inspector. We didn't 
last this long by letting difficulties stop us.
"Anyway, the area around the Peace bobble is still a vitrified plain. It took 
her decades, but she built a sign there." The window behind Yelén suddenly 
became a view from space. At that distance, the bobble was just a glint of 
sunlight with a spiky shadow. A jagged black line extended northwards from it. 
Apparently the picture was taken at local dawn, and the black strip was the 
shadow of Marta's monument. It must have been several meters high and dozens of 
kilometers long. The image lasted only seconds, the space of time Yelén imagined 
it.
"You may not know this, but we have lots of equipment at the Lagrange zones. 
Some of it is in kiloyear stasis. Some is flickering with a period of decades. 
None of it is carefully watching theound... but that line structure was enough 
to trip even a high-threshold monitor. Eventually, the robots sent a lander to 
investigate.... They were just a few years too late.
Wil forced his mind past thinking on what the lander found. Thank God Yelén's 
imagination didn't flash that on the windows.
For now-method: "How could this be done? I thought an old-time army couldn't 
match the security of your household automation."
"That's true. No low-tech could break in. At first glance, even the advanced 
travelers couldn't manage this: it's possible to outfight a high-tech-but the 
battles are abrupt and obvious. What happened here was sabotage. And I think I 
have it figured out. Somebody used our external comm to talk to the scheduling 
programs. Those weren't as secure as they should lie. Marta was cut out of the 
check roster, and a one-century total blackout was substituted for the original 
flicker scheme. The murderer was lucky: if he had tried for anything longer, it 
would have tripped all sorts of alarms."
"Could it happen again?"
"No. Whoever did it is good, Brierson. But basically they took advantage of a 
bug. That bug no longer exists. And I'm being much more careful about how my 
machines accept outside comm now."
Wil nodded. This was a century beyond him, even if his specialty had been 
forensic computing. He'd just have to take her word that there was no further 
danger-of this sort of assassination. Wil's strength was in the human side. For 
instance:
"Motive. Who would want Marta dead?"
Yelén's laugh was bitter. "My suspects." The windows of the library became a 
mosaic of the settlement's population. Some had only small pictures-all the New 
Mexicans fitted on a single panel. Others-Brierson, for instance-rated more 
space- "Almost everybody conceives some grudge against us.
But you twenty-first-century types just don't have the background to pull this 
off. No matter how attractive the notion" --she looked at Wil —"you're off the 
list." The pictures of the low-techs vanished from the windows.
The rest stood like posters against the landscape beyond. These were all the 
advanced travelers (Yelén excepted): the Robinsons, Juan Chanson, Monica Raines, 
Philippe Genet, Tunç Blumenthal, Jason Mudge-and the woman Tammy said was a 
spacer.
"The motive, Inspector Brierson? I can't afford to consider that it was anything 
less than the destruction of our settlement. One of these people wants humanity 
permanently extinct, or --more likely-wants to run their own show with the 
people we've rescued; it would probably come to the same thing."
"But why Marta? Killing her has tipped their hand without —"
"Without stopping the Korolev Plan? You don't understand, Brierson." She ran a 
hand through her blond hair and stared down at the table. "I don't think any of 
you understand You know I'm an engineer. You know I'm a hardheaded type who's 
made a lot of unpopular decisions. The plan would never have gotten this far 
without me.
"What you don't know is that Marta was the brains behind it all. Back in 
civilization, Marta was a project manager. One of the best. She had this figured 
out even before we left civilization. She could see that technology and people 
were headed into some sort of singularity in the twenty-third century. She 
really wanted to help the people who were stranded down time.... Now we have the 
settlement. To make it succeed is going to take the special genius she had. I 
know how to make the gadgets work, and I can outshoot most anyone in a clean 
fight. But it could all fall apart now, without Marta. We are so few here; there 
are so many internal jealousies.
"I think the killer knew this, too."
Wil nodded, a little surprised that Yelén realized her own failings so clearly.
"I'm going to have my hands full, Brierson. I intend to spend many decades of my 
life preparing for the time when the Peacers come out and I bring the settlement 
back. If Marta's dream is to succeed, I can't afford to use my own time hunting 
tire killer. But I want that killer, Brierson. Sometimes ... sometimes I feel a 
little crazy, I want him so bad. I'll give you Ally reasonable support in this. 
Will you take the case?" Even at fifty megayears, there was still a job for Wil 
Brier
There was one obvious thing he should demand, something he would not hesitate to 
require if he were back in civilization. He glanced at Yelén's auton, still 
hovering at the end of the table. Here... it might be better to wait for 
witnesses. Powerful ones. Finally he said, "I'll need personal transportation. 
Physical protection. Some means of publicly communicating %.\ with the entire 
settlement-I'll want their cooperation on this problem."
"Done."
"I'll also need your databases, at least where they deal with people in the 
settlement. I want to know where and when everyone originated, and exactly how 
they got bobbled past the Extinction."
Korolev's eyes narrowed. "Is this for your personal vendetta, Brierson? The past 
is dead. I'll not have you stirring up trouble with people who were once your 
enemies. Besides, the low-techs aren't suspects; there's no need for you to be 
sniffing around them."
Wil shook his head. This was just like old times: the customers deciding what 
the professional should see. "You're a high-tech, Yelén. But you're using a 
low-tech person, namely me. What makes you think the enemy doesn't have his 
accomplices?" People like Steve Fraley were the puppets now. They s earned to be 
the puppeteers. Playing Korolev against her enemy was a game the New Mexican 
President would love.
"Mph. Okay. You'll get the databases-but with your shanghai case locked out."
"And I want the sort of high-speed interface you have."
"Do you know how to use it?" Her hand brushed absently :it her headband.
"Uh, no."
"Then forget it. The modern versions are a lot easier to learn than the kind you 
had, but I grew up with one and I still can't properly visualize with it. If you 
don't start as a child, you may spend years and never get the hang of it."
"Look, Yelén. 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." Yelén was 
silent again; Wil wondered if he 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 Yelén. "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 he 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 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 Yelén's auton and tried to put 
the proper note of peremptory confidence in his voice when he said, "One other 
thing, Yelén."
"Well?"
"We need a complete copy of the diary."
"How — What diary!"
"The one Marta kept all the years she was marooned."
Yelén's mouth clamped shut as she realized he must be bluffing-and that she had 
already lost the game. Wil kept his eyes on Yelén, 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, Yelén."
"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, Yelén. 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."
Yelén'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. Yelén 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 high-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 Yelén 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 Yelén'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, Yelén'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 Yelén 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. Yelén 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 Yelén 
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 Yelén's eyes when he walked into her 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. Yelén 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 Yelén is. On the way down, Della 
Lu told me how Yelén 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 Yelén 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, Yelén 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 Yelén'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. Yelén 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 Yelén had worked so long for was ready to begin.
Thousands of tonnes of equipment were given to the low-techs, along with farms, 
factories, mines. The gifts were to individuals, supposedly based on their 
expertise back in civilization. The Dasgupta brothers received two vanloads of 
communication equipment. To Wil's amazement, they immediately traded the gear to 
an NM signal officer-for a thousand-hectare farm. And Korolev didn't object. She 
did point out which equipment was likely to fail first, and provide databases to 
those who wanted to plan for the future.
Many of the ungoverned low-techs loved it: survival with profit. Within weeks 
they had a thousand schemes for combining high-tech equipment with primitive 
production lines. Both would coexist for decades, with the failing high-tech 
restricted to a smaller and smaller role. In the end there would be a viable 
infrastructure.
The governments were not so pleased. Both Peacers and NMs were heavily armed, 
but as long as Korolev stood guard over the Inland Sea, all that 
twenty-first-century might was about as persuasive as the brass cannon on a 
courthouse lawn. Both had had time to understand the situation. They watched 
each other carefully, and united in their complaints against Korolev and the 
other high-techs. Their propaganda noted how carefully the high-techs 
coordinated the giveaway, how restricted it really was: no weapons were given, 
no bobbler technology, no aircraft, no autons, no medical equipment. "Korolev 
gives the illusion of freedom, not the reality."
The excitement of the founding came muted to Wil. He went to some of the 
parties. Sometimes he watched the Peacer or NM news. But he had little time to 
participate. He had a job, in some ways like his of long ago; he had a murderer 
to catch. Unless something seemed connected with that goal, it drifted by him, 
irrelevant.
Marta's murder was a major piece of news. Even with a civilization to build, 
people still found time to talk about it. Now that she was gone, everyone 
remembered her friendliness. Every unpopular Korolev policy was greeted with a 
sigh of "If only Marta were alive, this would be different." At first, Wil was 
at the center of the parties. But he had little to say. Besides, he was in a 
unique-and uncomfortable-position: Wil was a low-tech, but with the perks of a 
high. He could fly anywhere he wanted; the other low-techs were confined to 
Korolev-supplied "public" transportation. He had his own protection autons, 
supplied by Delia and Yelén; other low-techs watched with ill-concealed 
nervousness when those floated into view. These advantages were nontransferable, 
and it wasn't long before Wil was more shunned than sought.
One of the Korolevs' fundamental principles had already been violated: the 
settlement was physically scattered now. The Peacers had refused to move across 
the Inland Sea to Town Korolev. With dazzling impudence, they demanded that 
Yelén set them up with their own town on the north shore. That put them more 
than nine hundred kilometers from the rest of humanity-a distance more 
psychological than real, since it was a fifteen-minute flight on Yelén's new 
trans-sea shuttle. Nevertheless, it was a surprise that she yielded.
The surviving Korolev was... changed. Wil had talked to her only twice since the 
colony's return to realtime. The first time had been something of a shock. She 
looked almost the same as before, but there was a moment of nonrecognition in 
her eyes. "Ah, Brierson," she said mildly. Her only comment about Lu's providing 
him protection was to say that she would continue to do so also. Her hostility 
was muted; she'd had a long time to bury her grief.
Yelén had spent a hundred years following Marta's travels around the sea. She 
and her devices had stored and cataloged and studied everything that might bear 
on the murder. Marta's was already the most thoroughly investigated murder in 
the history of the human race. But only if this investigator is not herself the 
murderer, said a little voice in the back of Wil's head.
Yelén had done another thing with the century she stayed behind: She had tried 
to reeducate herself. "There's only one of us left, Inspector. I've tried to 
live double. I've learned everything I can about Marta's specialty. I've dreamed 
through Marta's memories of every project she managed." A shadow of doubt 
crossed her face. "I hope it's enough." The Yelén he'd known before the murder 
would not have shown such weakness.
So, armed with Marta's knowledge and trying to imitate -Marta's attitudes, Yelén 
had relented and let the Peacers establish North Shore. She'd set up the 
trans-sea flier service. She'd encouraged a couple of the high-techs-Genet and 
Blumenthal-to move their principal estates there.
And the murder investigation had truly been left to Lu and Brierson.
Though he had talked to Korolev only twice, he saw Della Lu almost every day. 
She had produced a list of suspects. She agreed with Korolev: the crime was 
completely beyond the low-techs. Of the high-techs, Yelén and the Robinsons were 
still the best suspects. (Fortunately Lu was cagey enough not to report all 
their suspicions to Yelén.)
At first, Wil thought the manner of the murder was a critical clue. He'd brought 
it up with Della early on. "If the murderer could bypass Marta's protection, why 
not kill her outright? This business of marooning her is nicely poetic, but it 
left a real possibility that she might be rescued."
Della shook her head. "You don't understand." Her face was framed with smooth 
black hair now. She'd stayed behind for nine months, the longest Yelén would 
allow. No breakthroughs resulted from the stay, but it had been long enough for 
her hair to grow out. She looked like a normal young woman now, and she could 
talk for minutes at a time without producing a jarring inanity, without getting 
that far, cold look. Lu was still the weirdest of the advanced travelers, but 
she was no longer in a class by herself. "The Korolev protection system is good. 
It's fast. It's smart. Whoever killed Marta did it with software. The killer 
found a chink in the Korolev defensive logic and very cleverly exploited it. 
Extending the stasis period to one century was not by itself life-threatening. 
Leaving Marta outside of stasis was not by itself life-threatening."
"Together they were deadly."
"True. And the defense system would have normally noticed that. I'm simplifying. 
What the killer did was more complicated. My point is, if he had tried anything 
more direct, there is no amount of clever programming that could have fooled the 
system. There was no surefire way he could murder Marta. Doing it this way gave 
the killer the best chance of success."
"Unless the killer is Yelén. I assume she could override all the system 
safeguards?"
"Yes."
But doing so would clearly show her guilt.
"Hmm. Marooning Marta left her defenseless. Why couldn't the murderer arrange an 
accident for her then? It doesn't make sense that she was allowed to live forty 
years."
Della thought a moment. "You're suggesting the killer could have bobbled 
everyone else for a century, and delayed bobbling himself?"
"Sure. A few minutes' delay would've been enough. Is that so hard?"
"By itself, it's trivial. But everyone was linked with the Korolev system for 
that jump. If anyone had delayed, it would show up in everyone's records. I'm an 
expert on autonomous systems, Wil. Yelén has shown me her system's design. It's 
a tight job, only a year older than mine. For anyone — except Yelén — to alter 
those jump records would be.. ."
"Impossible?" These systems people never changed. They could work miracles, but 
at the same time they claimed perfectly reasonable requests were impossible.
"No, maybe not impossible. If the killer had planned ahead, he might have an 
auton that didn't appear on his stasis roster. It could have been left outside 
of stasis without being noticed. But I don't see how the jump records themselves 
could be altered unless the killer had thoroughly infiltrated the Korolev 
system''
So they were dealing with a fairly impromptu act. And the queer circumstances of 
Marta's death were nothing more than a twenty- third-century version of a knife 
in the back.
SIX
Korolev had delivered Marta's diary soon after the colony returned to realtime. 
Wil's demand for it was one thing that could still bring a flare of anger to her 
face. In fact, Wil didn't really want to see the thing. But getting a copy, and 
getting Della to verify that it was undoctored, was essential. Until then, Yelén 
was logically the best suspect on his list. Now that he had the diary, it was 
easier to accept his intuition that Yelén was innocent. He set out to read 
Yelén's summaries and Della's cross-checking. If nothing showed up there, the 
diary would be a low-priority item.
Yelén had sent down an enormous amount of material. It included high-resolution 
holos of all Marta's writing. Yelén supplied a powerful overdoc; Wil could sort 
the pages by pH if he wanted. A note in the overdoc said the originals were in 
stasis, available at five days' notice.
The originals. Wil hadn't thought about it: How could you make a diary without 
even a data pad? Brief messages could be carved on the side of a tree or 
chiseled in rock, but for a diary you'd need something like paper and pen. Marta 
had been marooned for forty years, plenty of time to experiment. Her earliest 
writing was berry-juice ink on the soft insides of tree bark. She left the heavy 
pages in a rock cairn sealed with mud.
When they were recovered fifty years later, the bark had rotted and the juice 
stains were invisible. Yelén and her autons had studied the fragile remains. 
Microanalysis showed where the berry stains had been; the first chapters were 
not lost. Apparently Marta had recognized the danger: the "paper" in the later 
cairns was made from reed strips. The dark green ink was scarcely faded.
The first entries were mainly narrative. At the other end of the diary, after 
she had been decades alone, the pages were filled with drawings, essays, and 
poems. Forty years is a long time if you have to live it alone, second by 
second. Not counting recopied material, Marta wrote more than two million words 
before she died. (Yelén had supplied him with a commercial database, GreenInc. 
Wil looked at some of the items in it; the diary was as long as twenty 
noninteractive novels.) Her medium was far bulkier than old-time paper, and she 
traveled thousands of kilometers in her time. Whenever she moved, she built a 
new cairn for her writing. The first few pages in each repeated especially 
important things-directions to the previous cairns, for instance. Later, Yelén 
found every one. Nothing had been lost, though one cairn had been flooded. Even 
there, the reconstructions were nearly complete.
Wil spent an afternoon going through Yelén's synopsis and Della's corresponding 
analysis. There were no surprises.
Afterwards, Wil couldn't resist looking for references to himself. There were 
four clusters, the most recent listed first. Wil punched it up:
 
Year 38.137 Cairn #4
Lat 14.36N Long 1.01E [K-meridian]
-ask for heuristic cross-reference-
 
was the header Yelén's overdoc printed across the top of the display. Below it 
was cursive green lettering. A blinking red :arrow marked the reference:
«... and if I don't make it, dearest Lelya, please don't spend your time trying 
to solve this mystery. Live for both of us live for the project. If you insist 
do anything with it, delegate the responsibility. There was that policeman. A 
low-tech. I can't remember his name. (Oh, the millionth time I pray for in 
interface band, or even a data set!) Give him the job, and hen concentrate on 
what is important.... »
Wil sat back and wished the context searcher weren't so damned smart. She didn't 
even remember his name! He tried to tell himself that she had lived almost forty 
years beyond their acquaintance when she wrote these words. Would he remember 
her name forty years from now? (Yes!) To think of all his soul-searching, to 
think how close they seemed that last night, and how noble he had been to back 
off — when all the time he vas just another low-tech to her.
With a quick sweep of his hand, Wil cleared the other references from the 
display. Let it lie, Wil. Let it lie. He stood up, walked to the window of his 
study. He had important work to do. There was the interview with Monica Raines, 
and then with Juan Chanson. He should be researching for those.
So after a moment he returned to his desk... and jumped he display to the first 
entry in Marta's diary:
« The Journal of Marta Qih-hui Qen Korolev
! Dearest Lelya, » it began. Every entry was addressed to Lelya."
"GreenInc. Question," said Wil. "What is 'Lelya'?" He pointed to the word in the 
diary. A side display filled with the three most likely possibilities. The first 
was: "Diminutive of the name Yelena." Wil nodded to himself; that had been his 
guess. He continued reading from the central display.
« Dearest Lelya,
« It's now 181 days since everyone left-and that's the only thing I'm sure of.
« Starting this journal is something of an admission of defeat. Till now, I had 
kept careful track of time, and that seemed all that was necessary; you remember 
we had planned a flicker cycle of ninety days. Yesterday the second flicker 
should have happened — yet I saw nothing.
« So I guess I have to take the longer view. (What a mild way to say it. 
Yesterday, all I could do was cry.) I've got to have someone to "talk" to.
« And I've got a lot to say, Lelya. You know how I like to talk. The hardest 
thing is the act of writing. I don't know how civilization got started, if 
literacy involved the effort I've had to make. This bark is easy to find, but 
I'm afraid it won't age well. Have to think about that. The "ink" is easy, too. 
But the reed pen I've made leaks and blobs. And if I say something wrong, I can 
only paint out the errors. (I understand why calligraphy was such a high art.) 
It takes a long time to write even the simplest things. But I have an advantage 
now: I have lots and lots of time. All the time in the world. »
The reconstruction of the original showed awkward block letters and numerous 
scratch-outs. Wil wondered how many years it had been before she developed the 
cursive style he'd seen at the end of her diary.
« By the time you read this, you'll probably have all the explanations 
(hopefully from me direct!), but I want to tell you what I remember.
« There was the party at the Robinsons. I left early, so mad at Don that I could 
spit. They've really done us dirt, you know that? Anyway, it was past the 
Witching Hour and I was walking the forest path to the house. Fred was about 
five meters up, in front of me; I remember the moonlight glinting off his hull.»
Fred? The diary's overdoc said that was the auton with Marta that night. Wil 
hadn't realized they were personalized. You never heard them addressed by name. 
Come to think of it, that wasn't surprising; the high-techs generally talked to 
their mechanicals via headband.
« From Fred I had a good view over three octaves. There was no one close by. 
There were no autons shadowing me. It's about an hour's walk up to the house. I 
had taken longer. I wanted to be cool when I talked to you about Don's little 
game. I was almost to the great steps when it happened. Fred had no hint. There 
was a cinnamon burst of static and then he crashed to the ground. It's the most 
startled I've ever been, Lelya. Our whole lives we've had autons giving us extra 
eyes. This is the first time I can remember not having any warning of a problem.
« Ahead of me, the great steps were gone. There was my reflection staring back. 
Fred was lying at the edge of the bobble. He'd been cut in half by the stasis 
field.
« We've had some rough times, Lelya, like when we fought the graverobbers. They 
were so strong, I thought the battle might carry us past fifty megayears and 
ruin everything.
You remember how I was after that. Well, this was worse. I think I went a little 
crazy. I kept telling myself it was all a dream. (Even now, six months later, 
that sometimes seems the best explanation.) I ran along the bobble's edge. 
Things were as peaceful and silent as before, but now the ground was treacherous 
beneath my feet and branches clawed at me. I didn't have Fred to be my high 
eyes. The bobble was hundreds of meters across. It met the ground just beyond 
the great steps It didn't cut through any large trees. It was obviously the 
bobblement we'd planned for the property.
« Well, if you're reading this, you already know the rest.
The Robinsons' place was bobbled. Genet's was bobbled. It took me three days to 
hike across all of Korolev Town: everything was bobbled. It looked exactly like 
the jump we'd programmed except for two things: (1) (obviously) poor little
Marta had been left outside, and (2) all automatic equipment was in stasis.
Those first weeks, I could still hope that every ninety clays the stasis would 
flicker off while the autons checked the Peacer bobble. I couldn't imagine how 
all this had happened ( I still can't), yet it might turn out to be one of those 
stupid mistakes one can laugh about afterwards. All I had to do was stay alive 
for ninety days.
« There's damn little outside stasis, Lelya. There was no question of salvaging 
Fred. Looking at that compact pile of junk, I was surprised how little I could 
do with it-even if his power supply had been on my side of the bobble. Monica 
Raines is right about one thing: Without autons, we might as well be savages. 
They are our hands. And that's not the most horrible part: Without processor and 
db support, I'm a cripple, my mind stuck in molasses. When a question occurs to 
me, the only data is what's wedged in my own gray matter. The only eyes I see 
from are my own, fixed in space and time, seeing only a narrow band of the 
spectrum. To imagine that before our time people lived their whole lives in this 
lobotomized state! Maybe it helped that they didn't know anything better.
« But Monica is wrong about something else: I didn't just sit down and starve. 
All my time in survival sports paid off. The Robinsons had left a pile of trash 
just on our side of the property line. (That figures.) At a glance you might not 
think there was much worthwhile: a hundred kilos of botched gold fittings, an 
organic sludge pond that made me want to puke, and-get this-a dozen cutter 
blades. So what if they've lost their micrometer edge? They're still sharp 
enough to cut a hair lengthwise. They're about half a kilo each, single diamond 
crystals. I lashed them onto wood hafts. I also found some shovels on a pile of 
rock ash in town.
« I remembered the large carnivores we spotted coming in. I f they're still 
around, they're lying low. After a couple of weeks, I was beginning to feel 
safe. My traps worked, though not as well as on a sport trip; the wildlife 
hasn't recovered from the Peacer rescue. Just as we'd planned, the south gallery 
of the house was left out of stasis. (Remember how you thought it hadn't aged 
enough?) It's all naked stone, stairs and towers and halls, but it makes good 
shelter-and parts are easy to barricade.
« I didn't remember how long the lookabout would last, so I decided to hit you 
over the head with my message. I lashed a frame between the trees at the bottom 
of the great stairs. I spread bark across the framework and used wet ash to 
spell HELP in letters three meters high. There's no way it could be missed by 
the monitor on top of the library. I had the sign done a good week ahead of 
time.
« Day ninety was worse than waiting for the judge's call in arbitration. No day 
ever seemed so long. I sat right by my sign and watched my reflection in the 
bobble. Lelya, nothing happened. You aren't on a three-month flicker, or the 
monitor isn't watching. I never hated my own face as much as I did that day, 
watching it in the side of the bobble. »
Of course, Marta had not given up. The next pages described how she had built 
similar signs near the bobbles of all the advanced travelers.
« Day 180 just passed, and the bobbles still sit. I cried a lot. I miss you so. 
Survival games were fun, but not forever.
« I've got to settle down for the long haul. I'm going to make those billboards 
sturdier. I want them to last at least a hundred years. How long can I last? 
Without health care, people used to live about a century. I've kept my bio-age 
at twenty-five years, so I should have seventy-five left. Without the databases 
I can't be sure, but I bet seventy-five is a lower bound. There should be some 
residual effect from my last medical treatment, and I'm full of panphages. On 
the other land, old people were fragile, weren't they? If I have to protect 
myself and get my own food, that could be a factor.
« Okay. Let's be pessimistic. Say I can only last seventy-five years. What's my 
best chance for getting rescued?
« You can bet I've thought about that a lot, Lelya. So much depends on what 
caused this catastrophe-and all the clues are on your side of the bobble. I've 
got ideas, but without the databases I can't tell what's plausible. » She went 
on to list the string of unrelated errors that would be necessary to leave her 
outside and all the autons inside, and to change the flicker period. Sabotage 
was the only possible explanation; she knew that someone had tried to kill her.
« I'm not lying down to die. I can't think technical anymore, but I'll bet you 
still have a fairly short flicker period. Besides, we have gear lots of other 
places: at the Lagrange zones, the West End mines, the Peacer bobble. With luck, 
there will be lookabouts in the next seventy-five years. And didn't we leave 
autonomous devices in realtime in Canada? I think there's a land bridge to 
America in this era. If I can get there, maybe I could make my own rescue.
« So most of the time, I'm optimistic.
« But suppose I don't make it? Then I'm the murder victim, and some kind of 
witness, too. Even though you'll never get Fred's record of the Robinsons' 
recruiting party, you'll hear about it elsewhere. That's the only clue I have.
« Don't let them break up our settlement, Lelya. »
SEVEN
The morning of the Monica Raines interview did not begin well. Wil was still 
asleep when the house announced that Della Lu was waiting outside.
Wil groaned, slowly rising from the unpleasant dreams that haunted his mornings. 
Then he realized the time, and the day. "Sorry, sorry. I'll be right down." He 
rolled out of bed and staggered into the bathroom. Who had decided on this early 
start, anyway? Then he remembered it had been himself; something about time 
zones.
Even downstairs, he was still a bit foggy. He grabbed a box lunch from the 
kitchen. The bright colors on the package were advertising fifty million years 
old. When Korolev said she was providing twenty-first-century support, she meant 
it. The autofactories were running off the same programs as the original 
manufacturers. The effect was more weird than homey. He tucked the lunch into 
his shoulder bag along with his data set. Something in the back of his mind was 
saying he should take more; after all, he was going a third of the way around 
the world today. He shook his head. Sure, and he'd probably be back in five 
hours. Even the lunch was unnecessary. Wil gave final instructions to the house 
and stepped into the morning coolness.
It was the sort of morning that should change the ways of light owls. Green 
loomed high around the house, the trees listening damply in the sun. Everything 
felt clean and bright, just created. Except for the birds, it was quiet. He 
walked across the mossy street toward Lu's enclosed flier. Two protection 
devices-one from Yelén and one from Della — left their posts above his house and 
drifted along with him.
"Hey, Wil! Wait a minute." Dilip Dasgupta waved from his house, fifty meters 
down the road. "Where are you going?"
"Calafia," Brierson called back.
"Wow." Rohan and Dilip were both up and dressed. They jogged down the road to 
him.
"This part of the murder investigation?" said Dilip.
"You look awful, Wil," said Rohan.
Brierson ignored Rohan. "Yeah. We're flying out to see Monica Raines."
"Ah! A suspect."
"No. We're still fact-finding, Dilip. I want to talk to all the high-techs."
"Oh." He sounded like a football fan disappointed by his team's hard luck. A few 
days earlier, the disappointment would have been tinged with fear. Everyone had 
been edgy then, guessing that Marta's murder might be the prelude to a massive 
assault on the settlement.
"Wil, I mean it." Rohan was not to be sidetracked. "You really looked dragged 
out. And it's not just this morning, so early and all. Don't let this case shut 
you off from your friends. You gotta mingle, Wil.... Like, this morning we're 
going on a fishing expedition off North Shore. It's something the Peacers 
organized. That Genet fellow is coming along in case we run into anything too 
big to handle. You know, I don't see why governments got such a bad name. Both 
the Peacers and the New Mexicans aren't much different from social clubs or 
college fraternities. They've been real nice to everybody."
"Yes, and face it, Wil, we're starting new lives here. Most of the human race is 
tied up in those two groups now. There are lots of women there, lots of people 
you'd like to know."
Brierson grinned, embarrassed and a bit touched. "You're right. I should keep up 
with things."
Rohan reached up to slap him on the shoulder. "Hey, if you get back in the 
afternoon, you might have the Lu person drop you off at North Shore. I bet 
there'll still be something going."
"Okay!" Wil turned and walked toward Lu's aircraft. The Dasguptas were right 
about some things. How wrong they were about others: A smile came back to his 
lips as he imagined Steve Fraley's reaction to hearing the Republic of New 
Mexico likened to a social club.
"Good morning, Wil." Lu's face was impassive. She seemed not at all impatient at 
the delay. "Is 1.5 g's okay?"
"Sure, sure." Brierson settled into a chair, not quite sure what she was talking 
about. At least he didn't have to worry about her questioning his mood. Short of 
laughter or smiles or tears, she still seemed incapable of reading facial 
expressions.
He sank slowly into the seat cushions as the flier's acceleration added a 
physical lassitude to his mental one. He'd been using the GreenInc database for 
more than the investigation of Marta's murder. Last night he'd tracked his 
family to the end of the twenty-second century. He was proud of what his 
children had become: Anne the astronaut, Billy the cop and later the 
story-maker. As far as he could tell, Virginia had never remarried. The three of 
them had disappeared into the twenty-third century, along with his parents, his 
sister, and all the rest of humanity.
In 2140 and 2180 they had bobbled gifts to accompany him. GreenInc said it was 
the best survival equipment their money could buy. It had all been lost to the 
graverobbers, the scavenging travelers that existed in the first megayears after 
Man. Perhaps that was just as well. There would have been family video in those 
care packages. That would have been very hard to view.
... But all along he'd had the secret dream that Virginia might come after him 
herself, at least when the kids had their own families. It was strange: He would 
have pleaded with her not to come, yet now he felt... betrayed.
The faint whistling from beyond the windows had long faded, but the gut-tugging 
acceleration continued. Wil's attention returned to the flier. He looked 
straight out. Cloud-speckled ocean stood like a blue wall beside them. He looked 
up through the transparent dome-and saw the curve of the Earth, pale blue 
meeting the black of space. They were hundreds of klicks up, driving forward at 
a steady acceleration that was nothing like the ballistic trajectories he was 
used to.
"How long?" he managed to say.
"It is slow, isn't it?" Della said. "Now that the settlement is founded, Yelén 
doesn't want us to use nukes in near space. At this acceleration, it'll be 
another half hour to North America."
An island chain trundled rapidly across his field of view. Much nearer, he saw 
the autons that protected him at home; the two flew formation with Della's 
craft.
"I still don't understand why you want to go out of your way to interview Ms. 
Raines. How is she special?"
Wil shrugged. "I like to do the reluctant ones first. She's not interested in 
coming back in person, and I want these interviews to be face to face."
Della said, "That's wise. Most of us could do almost anything on a holo 
channel.... But she's one of the least powerful of the high-techs. I can't 
imagine her as the killer."
A few minutes later, Della turned the flier over. It was a skew turn that for a 
moment had them accelerating straight down into the Pacific. Wil was glad there 
had not been time for breakfast. When they entered the atmosphere off the west 
coast of Calafia, they were moving barely fast enough to put a glow in the 
flier's hull.
Calafia. It was one of the Korolevs' more appropriate namings. In Wil's time, 
one of the clichés of regional insult was the prediction that California would 
one day fall into the sea. It never happened. Instead, California had put to 
sea, sliding along the San Andreas Fault, earthquake by earthquake, millennium 
after millennium-till the southwest coast of North America became a 
fifteen-hundred-kilometer island. It was indeed Calafia, the vast, narrow island 
that Spanish mariners had (prematurely) identified fifty million years earlier.
Della covered the last few hundred kilometers in a low approach. The beach 
passed quickly beneath. North and south, for as far as he could see, breakers 
marched on perfect sand. Nowhere was there town or road. The world was in an 
interglacial period now, much as in the Age of Man. That coastline really did 
look like California's. It didn't raise the same nostalgia as Michigan might, 
but he felt his throat tighten nevertheless. He and Virginia had often visited 
southern California in the 2090s, after the disgovernance of Aztlan.
They scudded over hills mantled with evergreens. Afternoon sunlight cast 
everything in jagged relief. Beyond the hills, the vegetation was sere and 
grayish green. Beyond that was prairie and the Calafia straits.
"Okay. So what dumb questions do you want to ask?" Monica Raines did not look 
back as she led them down to her — blind, she called it. Wil and Della hurried 
after her. He was not put off by the artist's brusqueness. In the past, she'd 
made no secret of her dislike for the Korolevs and their plans.
The wood stairs descended through tree-shrouded dimness. The smell of mesquite 
hung in the air. At the bottom, invisible among vines and branches, was a small 
cabin. Its floor was deeply carpeted, with pillows scattered about. One side of 
the room had no wall, but overlooked the beginning of the plainsland. A battery 
of equipment-optics?-was mounted at the edge of this open side.
"I'd appreciate it if you'd keep your voices down," said Monica. "We're less 
than one hundred meters from the starter nest." She fiddled with the equipment; 
she was not wearing a headband. A display flat lit with the picture of two... 
vultures? They strutted around a small pile of stones and brush. The picture was 
wavery with heat shimmers. Wil sighted over the optics: Sure enough, he could 
just make out two birds in the valley below the blind.
"Why use a telescope?" Lu asked softly. "With tracer cameras, you could —"
"Yeah, I use them, too. Gimme remotes," she said to the thin air. Several other 
displays came to life. The pictures were dim even in the darkened room. "I don't 
like to scatter tracers all around; they mess up the environment. Besides, I 
don't have any good ones left." She jerked a thumb at the main display. "If 
you're lucky, these dragon birds are gonna give you a real show."
Dragon birds? Wil looked again at the misshapen bodies, the featherless heads 
and necks. They still looked like vultures to him. The dun-colored creatures 
strutted round and round the pile, occasionally puffing out their chests. Off to 
one side, he saw a smaller one, sitting and watching. The strangest thing about 
them was the bladelike ridge that ran across the top of their beaks.
Monica sat cross-legged on the floor. Wil sat down more awkwardly and punched up 
some notes on his data set. Della Lu remained standing, drifting around the 
room, looking at the pictures on the wall. They were famous pictures: Death on a 
Bicycle, Death Visits the Amusement Park.... They'd been a fad in the 2050s, at 
the time of the longevity breakthrough, when people realized that but for 
accidents or violence, they could live forever. Death was suddenly a pleasant 
old man, freed from his longtime burden. He rolled awkwardly along on his first 
bicycle ride, his scythe sticking up like a flag. Children ran beside him, 
smiling and laughing. Wil remembered the pictures well; he'd been a kid himself 
then. But here, fifty million years after the extinction of the human race, they 
seemed more macabre than cute.
Wil pulled his attention back to Monica Raines. "You know that Yelén Korolev has 
commissioned Ms. Lu and me to investigate the murder. Basically, I'm to provide 
the old-fashioned nosing around-like in the detective stories-and Della Lu is 
doing the high-tech analysis. It may seem frivolous, but this is the way I've 
always operated: I want to talk to you face to face, get your thoughts about the 
crime." And try to find out what you had to do with it, he didn't say; Wil's 
approach was as nonthreatening and casual as possible. "This is all voluntary. 
We aren't claiming any contractual authority."
The corner of Raines' mouth turned down. "My 'thoughts about the crime,' Mr. 
Brierson, are that I had nothing to do with it. To put it in your detective 
jargon: I have no motive, as I have no interest in the Korolevs' pitiful attempt 
to resurrect mankind. I had no opportunity, as my protection equipment is much 
more limited than theirs."
"You are a high-tech, though."
"Only by the era of my origin. When I left civilization, I took the bare 
necessities for survival. I didn't bring software to build autofactories. I have 
air/space capability and some explosives, but they're the minimum needed to exit 
stasis safely." She gestured at Lu. "Your high-tech partner can verify all 
this."
Della dropped bonelessly to a cross-legged position and propped her chin on her 
hands. For an instant she looked like a young girl. "You'll give me access to 
your databases?"
"Yes."
The spacer nodded, and then her attention drifted away again. She was watching 
the picture off the telescope. The dragon birds had stopped their strutting. Now 
they were taking turns throwing small rocks into the nestlike structure between 
them. Wil had never seen anything like it. The birds would hunt about at the 
edge of the pile of stones and brush. They seemed very selective. What they 
grasped in their beaks glittered. Then, with a quick flip of the head, the 
pebble was cast into the pile. At the same time, the thrower flapped briefly 
into the air.
Raines followed Della's glance. The artist's face split with a smile less 
cynical than usual. "Notice how they face downwind when they do that."
"They're fire makers?" asked Lu.
Raines' head snapped up. "You're the spacer. You've seen things like this 
before?"
"Once. In the LMC. But they weren't... birds, exactly."
Raines was silent for a moment. Curiosity and wonder seemed to battle against 
her natural desire to remain one up on her visitors. The latter won, but she 
sounded friendlier as she continued. "Things have to be just right before 
they'll try. It's been a dry summer, and they've built their starter-pyre at the 
edge of an area that hasn't burned in decades. Notice that there's a good breeze 
blowing along the hillsides."
Lu was smiling now, too. "Yes. So that flapping reflex when they throw-that's to 
give the sparks a little help?"
"Right. It can be — oh, look, look!" There wasn't much to see. Wil had noticed a 
faint spark when the last pebble struck the rocks in the nest-the starter-pyre, 
Monica called it. Now a wisp of smoke rose from the straw that covered the 
leeward side of the pile. The vulture stayed close to the smoke, moved its wings 
in long sweeps. Its rattling call echoed up the ravine. "Nope. It didn't quite 
catch.... Sometimes the dragon's too successful, by the way. They burn like 
torches if their feathers catch fire. I think that's why the males work in 
pairs: one's a spare."
"But when the game works..." said Lu.
"When the game works, you get a nice brush fire sweeping away from the dragon 
birds."
"How do they benefit by starting fires?" asked Wil-, he already had a bad 
feeling he knew the answer.
"It makes for good eating, Mr. Brierson. These scavengers don't wait for lunch 
to drop dead on its own. A fire like this can spread faster than some animals 
can run. After it's over, there's plenty of cooked meat. Those beak ridges are 
for scraping the char off their prey. The dragons get so fat afterwards, they 
can barely waddle. A good burn marks the start of a really successful breeding 
season."
Wil felt a little sick. He'd watched nature films all the way back to the 
flat-screen Disneys, but he never could accept the talk about the beauty and 
balance of nature — when illustrated by grotesque forms of sudden death.
Things got worse. Della asked, "So they get mainly small animals?"
Raines nodded. "But there are a few interesting exceptions." She brought another 
display to life. "These pictures are from a camera about four thousand meters 
east of here." The picture jogged and bounced. Wil glimpsed shaggy creatures 
rooting through dense brush. They were built low to the ground, yet seemed 
vaguely apelike.
"Marvelous what the primates can become, isn't it? The design is so 
multipurpose, so centered. Except for one disastrous dead end, they are by far 
the most interesting of the mammals. At one time or another, I've seen them 
adapt to almost every slot available for large land animals, and more: the 
fishermonkeys are almost in the penguin slot. I'm watching them very closely; 
someday they may become exclusively water animals." Enthusiasm was bright on her 
normally saturnine features.
"You think mankind devolved into the fishermonkeys and these... things?" Wil 
pointed at the display. He couldn't keep the revulsion from his voice.
Raines sniffed. "That's absurd. And presumptuous, really. Homo sapiens was about 
the most self-deadly variation in the theme of life. The species insulated 
itself from physical stress for so long that what few individuals survived the 
destruction of technology would have been totally unable to live on their own. 
No, the present-day primates are descended from those in wilderness estates at 
the time mankind did itself in."
She laughed softly at the look on Wil's face. "You have no business making value 
judgments on the dragons, Mr. Brierson. Theirs is a beautiful variation. It's 
survived half a million years — almost as long as Man's experiment with fire. 
The starterpyres began as small piles of glitter, a kind of sexual display for 
the males. The first fires were accidental, but the adaptation has been refined 
over hundreds of thousands of years. It doesn't provide them with all their 
food, or even most of it. But it's an extra advantage. As a mating ritual, it 
even survives climatic wet spells. When summers are dry again, it is still ready 
to use.
"This is how fire was meant to be used, Mr. Brierson. The dragons have little 
impact on the average tonnage burned; they just redistribute the fires to their 
advantage. Their way is selflimiting, fitting the balance of nature. Man 
perverted fire, used it for unlimited destruction."
Every one crazier than the last, thought Wil. Monica Raines sat surrounded and 
served by the fruits of that "perversion," and all she could do was bitch. She 
sounded like something out of the twentieth century. "So you don't believe Juan 
Chanson's theory that man was exterminated by aliens?"
"There's no need for such an invention. Can't you see, Mr. Brierson? The trends 
were all there, undeniable. Mankind's systems grew more and more complicated, 
their demands more and more rapacious. I-lave you seen the mines the Korolevs 
built west of the Inland Sea? They stretch for dozens of kilometers-open pits, 
autons everywhere. By the late twenty-second century, that's the scale of 
resources demanded by a single individual. Science gave each human animal the 
presumption to act like a little god. The Earth just couldn't take it. Hell, 
I'll bet there wasn't even a war. I'll bet the whole structure collapsed under 
its own weight, leaving the rapists at the mercy of their victim-nature."
"There's the asteroid belt. Industry could be moved offplanet." In fact, Wil had 
seen the beginnings of that in his time.
"No. This was an exponential process. Moving into space just postponed the 
debacle a few decades." She rose to her knees and looked at the telescope 
display. The vultures had resumed their slow strutting about the rock pile. "Too 
bad. I don't think we'll get a fire today. They try hardest in the early 
afternoon."
"If you feel this way about humans, why are you out of stasis just now?" said 
Lu.
Wil added, "Did you think you could persuade the new settlement to behave 
more... respectfully toward nature?"
Raines made one of her turned-down smiles. "Certainly not. You haven't seen any 
propaganda from me, have you? I couldn't care less. This settlement is the 
biggest I've seen, but it will fail like all the others, and there will be peace 
on Earth once more. I, um. .. it's just a coincidence we're all out of stasis at 
the same time." She hesitated. "I-I am an artist, Ms. Lu. I use the scientist's 
tools, but with the heart of an artist. Back in civilization, I could see the 
Extinction coming: there would be no one left to rape nature, but neither would 
there be anyone to praise her handiwork.
"So I proceed down through time, averaging a year alive in each megayear, making 
my pictures, taking my notes. Sometimes I stay out for just a day, sometimes for 
a week or a month. The last few megayears, I've been very active. The social 
spiders are fascinating, and now-just in the last half million years — the 
dragon birds have appeared. It's not surprising that we all should be living at 
the same time."
There was something fishy about the explanation. A year of observing time spread 
through a million years left an awful lot of empty space. The settlement had 
only been active for a few months. The odds against meeting her seemed very 
high. Raines sat uneasily, almost fidgeting under his gaze. She was lying, but 
why? The obvious explanation was certainly an innocent one. For all her 
hostility, Monica Raines was still a human being. Even if she could not admit it 
to herself, she still needed others to share the things she did.
"But my staying is no coincidence, Mr. Brierson. I've got my pictures; I'm ready 
to go. Besides, I expect the next few centuries — the time it takes you people 
to die off-will be ugly ones I'd be long gone except for Yelén. She demands I 
stay in this era. She says she'll drop me into the sun if I bobble up. The 
bitch." Apparently Raines didn't have as much firepower as the Robinsons. Wil 
wondered if any of the other high-techs were staying under duress. "So you can 
see why I'm willing to cooperate. Get her off my back."
Despite the sour words, she was eager to talk. She showed them her video of the 
early dragon birds, back when starting fires was almost an accident. In her 
fifty-year voyage she had created archives that would have shamed the national 
libraries of the twentieth century. And Don Robinson was not the only one who 
made home movies. Monica's automation could rearrange her data into terrifying 
homotopies, where creatures caught in the blowtorch of time flowed and melted 
from one form to another. She seemed determined to show them evervthing, and 
Della Lu, at least, seemed willing to watch.
When they left the blind, deep twilight lay across the grassland. Raines 
accompanied them to the top of her little canyon. A dry, warm wind rattled 
through the chaparral; the dragon birds should have no trouble starting their 
fire if the weather stayed like this. They stood for a moment at the top of the 
ridgeline. They could see for kilometers in all directions. Bands of orange and 
red crossed the western horizon. A hint of green lay above that, then violet and 
starry blackness. Nowhere was there a single artificial light. A smell like 
honey floated in the breeze.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Raines said softly.
Untouched forever and ever. Could she really want that? "Yes, but someday 
intelligence will evolve again. Even if you're right about humanity, the world 
won't stay peaceful forever."
She didn't answer immediately. "It could happen. There are a couple of species 
that seem to be at the brink of sentience --the spiders for one." She looked 
back at him, her face lit by the twilight band. Was she blushing? Somehow, his 
question had hit home. "If it happens... well, I'll be here, right from the 
beginning of their awareness. I'm not against intelligence by itself, just the 
abuse of it. Perhaps I can nudge them away from the arrogance of my race." Like 
an elder god, leading the new creatures in the way of the right. Monica Raines 
would find people who could properly appreciate her-even if she had to help in 
their creation.
 
Lu's flier drove steadily back over the Pacific. The sun rose swiftly from 
around the shoulder of the Earth. According to his data set it was barely noon 
in the Asian time zone. The bright sunlight and blue sky (which was really the 
Pacific below) made such an emotional difference. Just minutes ago all had been 
darkness and poor Monica's murky thoughts.
"Crazies," said Wil.
"What?"
"All these advanced travelers. I could go a year in police work and not meet 
anyone as strange: Yelén Korolev, who seems to be jealous of me just for liking 
her girlfriend, and who moped alone for a century after we jumped forward; cute 
little Tammy Robinson-who is old enough to be my mother-and whose object in life 
is to celebrate New Year's at the end of time; Monica Raines, who would make a 
twentieth-century ecofanatic look like a strip miner." And then there's Della 
Lu, who has lived so long she has to study to seem human at all.
He stopped short and looked guiltily at Della. She grinned knowingly at him, and 
the smile seemed to reach all the way to her eyes. Damn. There were times now 
she seemed totally aware. "What do you expect, Wil? We were all a little strange 
to begin with; the left civilization voluntarily. Since, then, we have spent 
hundreds-sometimes thousands-of years getting here. That takes a power of will 
you would call monomania."
"Not all the high-techs started out crazy. I mean... your original motive was 
short-range exploration, right?"
"By your standards it wasn't short range. I had just lost someone I cared about 
very much; I wanted to be alone. The Gatewood's Star mission was a 
twelve-hundred-year round trip. By the time I got back, I had overshot the 
Singularity — what Monica and Juan call the Extinction. That's when I left on my 
really long missions. You've missed all the reasonable high-techs, Wil. They 
settled down in the first few megayears after Man and made the best of it. 
You're left with la crud de la crud, so to speak."
She had a point. The low-techs were a lot easier to talk to. Wil had thought 
that a matter of culture similarity, but now he saw that it went deeper. The 
low-techs were people who had been shanghaied, or had short-term goals (like the 
Dasguptas and their foolish investment schemes). Even the New Mexicans, who had 
an abundance of unpleasant notions, had not spent more than a few years in 
realtime since leaving civilization.
Okay, so all the suspects were nuts. The problem was to find the nut that was 
also rotten.
"What about Raines? For all her talk of indifference, she's clearly hostile to 
the Korolevs. Perhaps she killed Marta just to speed up the 'natural process' of 
the settlement's collapse."
"I don't think so, Wil. I snooped around while we were talking with her. She has 
good bobbling equipment, and enough automation to run her observation program, 
but she's virtually defenseless. She doesn't have the depth to fool the Korolev 
scheduling programs .... In fact, she's terribly under-equipped. If she keeps 
living a year per megayear, she won't last more than a couple of hundred 
megayears before her autons begin to fail. Then she's going to find out about 
nature firsthand.... You should compliment me, Wil; I'm following your advice 
about the interviews. I didn't laugh when she started on peace and the balance 
of nature."
Brierson smiled. "Yes. You were a good cointerrogator.
... But I don't think she plans on traveling forever. Her real goal is to play 
god to the next intelligent race that evolves o» Earth."
"The next intelligent race? Then she doesn't realize how rare intelligence is. 
You may think those fire-making birds are freaks, but let me tell you something: 
Such developments are a thousand times more common than the evolution of 
intelligence. Chances are the sun will go red giant long before intelligence 
reappears on Earth."
"Hmm." He was scarcely in a position to argue. Della Lu was the only living 
human, perhaps the only person in history, who really knew about such things. 
"Okay, so she's unrealistic... or maybe she's hiding her true resources, at the 
Lagrange zones or in the wilderness. Can you be sure she's not playing dumb?"
"Not yet. But when she gives me access to her records, I'll run consistency 
checks. I have faith in my automation. Raines left civilization seven years 
before me. Whatever automation she took, mine is better. If she's hiding 
anything, I will know."
One less suspect, probably. That was a sort of progress.
They flew silently for several minutes, the blue of the Earth on one side, the 
sun sliding down the other. He could see one of the protection autons, a bright 
fleck floating against the clouds.
Perhaps he should take the afternoon off, go to the Peacer meeting at North 
Shore. Still, there was something about Monica Raines. "Della, how do you think 
Raines would feel if the settlement were a success? Would she be so indifferent 
to us if she thought we might do permanent damage?"
"I think she would be surprised, and very angry... and impotent."
"I wonder. Let's suppose she doesn't have the usual high-tech battle equipment. 
If she simply wanted to destroy the settlement, she might not need anything 
spectacular: perhaps a disease, something with a long incubation period."
Lu's eyes widened almost comically. He had noticed the same mannerism in Yelén 
Korolev. It had something to do with their direct data interface: When 
confronted with a surprising question demanding heavy analysis, they seemed 
first startled and then dazed. Several seconds passed. "That's just barely 
possible. She has a bioscience background, and a small autolab would be hard to 
spot. The Korolevs' medical automation is good, but it's not designed for 
warfare...."
She smiled. "That's an interesting idea, Wil. A properly designed virus could 
evade the panphages and infect everyone before any symptoms appeared. Bobbling 
out of the area would be no defense."
"Interesting" was not the word Brierson would have used. The diseases spread 
after the 1997 war had killed most of the human race. Even in Wil's time, less 
than forty million people lived in North America. By then the terror was gone, 
and the world was a friendly place, but still-better bombs and bullets than 
bugs. He licked his lips. "I suppose we don't have to worry about it 
immediately. She must know how deadly the high-tech response would be. But if 
our settlement is too successful..."
"Yes. I've put this on my list. Now that we're aware of the possibility, it 
shouldn't be hard to guard against. I have exploration-duty medical equipment. 
It's smart and very paranoid."
"Yeah." Nothing to worry about, Wil. They had lost a murder suspect--and 
possibly gained a genocidal maniac.
EIGHT
Wil didn't make it to the party at North Shore.
At first, the Raines thing had him wound up, and then-well, someone had killed 
Marta. Most likely that someone wanted the settlement to fail. And he was no 
nearer cracking the case today than a week ago. Parties would have to wait.
He meshed his data set with the house archives. He could have used the house 
displays direct, but he felt more at ease with his portable.... Besides, it was 
one of the few things that had come with him through time. Its memory was an 
attic filled with a thousand private souvenirs; the date it displayed, 16 
February 2100, was when he would be if his old life had continued.
Wil heated his lunch pack and munched absentmindedly at hot vegetables as he 
scanned his progress. He was behind in his reading; just another good reason to 
stay home this afternoon. People outside police work didn't realize how much of 
criminal investigation involved drawing conclusions from databases-usually 
public databases, at that. Wil's "reading" was the most likely source of real 
evidence. There was no shortage of things to look at. His house archive was far 
bigger than any other low-tech's. In addition to the 2201 edition of GreenInc, 
he had copies of parts of Korolev's and Lu's personal databases.
Wil had insisted on having his own copies. He didn't want networked stuff. He 
didn't want it changing mysteriously depending on the whim of the original 
owners. The price of such independence was a certain incoherence. His own 
processors had to accommodate idiosyncrasies in the structure of the imported 
data. With Yelén's databases, it wasn't too bad. They were designed both for 
headband use and for old-fashioned query languages. Her engineering jargon was 
sometimes incomprehensible, but he could get by.
Della's db's were a different story. Her copy of GreenInc was a year more recent 
than Yelén's, but a note announced that the later parts had been severely 
damaged during her travels. That was an understatement. Whole sections from the 
late twenty-second were jumbled or just plain missing. Her personal database 
appeared to be intact, but it used a customized headband design. His processors 
found it almost impossible to talk to the retrieval programs. Usually the output 
seemed to be allegorical hallucinations; occasionally he was blocked by the 
fragments of a personality simulator. Not for the first time in his life, Wil 
wished he could use interface headbands. They had existed in his time. If you 
had great native intelligence and a certain turn of imagination, they made 
computers a direct extension of your mind; otherwise, the bands were little more 
than electronic drug-tripping. Wil sighed. Yelén said the headbands from her era 
were easier to use; if only she had given him the time to learn how.
Della had nine thousand years of exploration packed away in her database. He'd 
had tantalizing glimpses-a world where plants floated in the sky, pictures of 
stars crowding close about something dark and visibly moving, a low-orbit shot 
of a planet green and cratered. On one planet, bathed in the glow of a giant red 
sun, he saw something that looked like ruins. Nowhere else had he seen any sign 
of intelligence. Was it so rare that all Della ever saw were ruins or fossils of 
ruins-of civilizations lasting a few millennia, and missed by millions of years? 
He hadn't yet asked her about what she'd seen. The murder was their immediate 
business, and until recently she'd been difficult to talk to. But now that he 
thought about it, she was awfully closemouthed about her travels.
His other researches were going better. He'd studied most of the high-techs. 
None of them-except Yelén and Marta had any special relationship back in 
civilization. The conclusion couldn't be absolute, of course. The biography 
companies only had so many spies. If someone was hiding something, and was also 
out of the public eye, then that something could stay Bidden.
Philippe Genet was one of the least documented. Wil couldn't find any reference 
to him before 2160, when he began advertising his services as a construction 
contractor. At that time, he was at least forty years old. You'd have to live 
like a hermit or have lots of money to go forty years and not get on a junk-mail 
list or have a published credit rating. There was another possibility: Perhaps 
Genet had been in stasis before
160. Wil had not pursued that very far; it would open a whole new tree of 
investigation. Between 2160 and when Genet left civilization in 2201, the trail 
was sparse but visible. He had not been convicted of any crimes that involved 
public punishment. He hadn't been seen at public events, or written anything for 
public scrutiny. From his advertising-and the advertising that was focused back 
on him-it was clear that his construction business was successful, but not so 
successful as to attract the attention of the trade journals. Consumer ratings 
of his work were solid but not spectacular; he came out low in "customer 
relations." In the 2190s, he followed the herd and began specializing in space 
construction. Nowhere could Wil find anything that might be a motive. However, 
with his construction background, Genet was probably one of the best armed of 
the travelers.
Genet's conservative, quiet background hardly seemed to fit jumping into the 
future. He was a must for an early interview; at the least, it would be nice to 
meet a high-tech who was not a crazy.
In terms of documentation, Della Lu was at the other extreme. Brierson should 
have recognized her name the first time he heard it, even attached to its 
present owner. That name was important in the history books of Wil's childhood. 
If not for her, the 2048 revolt against the Peace Authority would have been a 
catastrophic failure. Della had been a double agent.
Wil had just reread the history of that war. To the Peacers, Lu was a 
secret-police cop who had infiltrated the rebels. In fact, it was the other way 
around: During the rebel assault on Livermore, Della Lu was stationed at the 
heart of the Peacer command. Right under her bosses' noses, she bobbled the 
Peace's command center and herself. End of battle; end of Peace Authority. The 
rest of their forces surrendered, or bobbled themselves. The Peacers now living 
on North Shore had been a secret Asian garrison designed to take the war into 
the future; unfortunately for them, they took it a little too far into the 
future.
What Della did took guts. She had been surrounded by the people she betrayed; 
when the bobble burst she could expect little better than a quick death.
All that had happened in 2048, two years before Wil was born. He could remember, 
as a kid, reading the histories and hoping that some way would be found to save 
the brave Della Lu when the Livermore bobble finally burst. Brierson hadn't 
lived to see that rescue. He was shanghaied in 2100, just before Della came out 
of stasis. His entire life in civilization had passed in what was no time at all 
to Della Lu.
Now he could view the rescue, and follow Lu through the twenty-second century. 
From the beginning, she was a celebrity. The biographers paid their paparazzi, 
and no part of her life was free of scrutiny. How much she had changed. Oh, the 
face was the same, and the twenty-second-century Della Lu often wore her hair 
short. But there was a precision and a force to her movements then. She reminded 
Wil of a cop, even a soldier. There were also humor and happiness in the 
recordings, things the present Lu seemed to be relearning. She'd married a 
Tinker, Miguel Rosas-and here Wil recognized the model for the personality 
simulator he'd found in Della's database. In the 2150s, they'd been famous all 
over again, this time for exploring the outer Solar System. Rosas died ors their 
expedition to the Dark Companion. Della had left civilization for Gatewood's 
Star in 2202.
Wil finished lunch, letting the display roll through the bio summaries he'd 
constructed so far. It was an ironic thing, impossible before the invention of 
the bobble: Della Lu was an historical figure in his past, yet he was an 
historical figure in hers. Shed mentioned reading of him after her rescue, 
admiring someone who had "single-handedly stopped the New Mexican incursion." 
Brierson smiled sourly. He'd just been at the right place at the right time. If 
he hadn't been there, the invasion would have ended a little later, a little 
more bloodily-, it was people like Kiki van Steen and Armadillo Schwartz who 
really stopped the invasion of Kansas. All through his police career, his 
company had hyped Wil. It was good for business, and usually bad for Wil. The 
customers seemed to expect miracles when W. W. Brierson was assigned to their 
case. His reputation almost got him killed during the Kansas thing. Hell. Fifty 
million years later, that propaganda is still haunting me.
he'd been just another policeman, Yelén Korolev might never have thought to give 
him this case. What she needed was a real investigator, not an enforcement type 
who had been promoted beyond all competence.
So what if he "knew" people? It scarcely seemed to help here. He had plenty of 
suspects, plenty of motives, and no hard facts. GreenInc was big and detailed; 
there were hundreds of possibilities he should look into. But what would get him 
closer to finding Marta's killer?
Wil put his head in his hands. Virginia had always said it was healthy for a 
person to wallow in self-pity every once in a while.
"You have a call from Yelén Korolev."
"Ugh." He sat back. "Okay, house. Put her on."
The conference holo showed Yelén sitting in her library. She looked tired, but 
then she always looked tired these days. Wil restrained the impulse to brush at 
his hair; no doubt he looked equally dragged out.
"Hello, Brierson. I just talked to Della about Monica Raines You've eliminated 
her as a suspect."
"Uh, yes. But did Della tell you that Raines might be —" "Yeah, the biowar 
thing. That's.. . good thinking. You know, I told Raines I'd kill her if she 
tried to bobble out of this era. Now I wonder. If she's not a suspect in the 
murder and vet is a threat to the settlement, perhaps I should 'persuade' her to 
take a jump-at least a megayear. What do you think?"
"Hmm. I'd wait till we've studied her personal database. Lu says she can protect 
us against biological attack. In any case, I don't think Raines would try 
something unless mankind looks like a successful rerun. It's even possible she'd 
be more of a threat to humanity a million years from now."
"Yeah. I can't be absolutely sure of our own dispersion in time. I hope we're 
successfully rooted here, but —" She nodded abruptly. "Okay. That scheme is on 
hold. How's the investigation going otherwise?"
Brierson suggested Lu survey the weapon systems of the advanced travelers, and 
then outlined his own efforts with GreenInc. Korolev listened quietly. Gone was 
the blazing anger of their original confrontation. In its place was a kind of 
dogged determination.
When he finished, she didn't look pleased, but her words were mild. "You've 
spent a lot of time searching the civilized eras for clues. That's okay; after 
all, we come from there. But you should realize that the advanced 
travelers-excepting Jason Mudge-have lived most of their lives since the 
Singularity.
"At one time or another, there were about fifty of us. Physically we were 
independent, living at our own rates. But there was communication; there were 
meetings. Once it became clear that the rest of humanity was gone, all of us had 
our plans. Marta said it was a loose society, maybe a society of ghosts. And it 
got smaller and smaller. The high-techs you see now are the hard cases, 
Inspector. The overt criminals, the graverobbers, were killed thirty million 
years ago. The easygoing travelers, like Bil Sanchéz, dropped off early. People 
would stop for a few hundred years, and try to start a family or a town; you 
could have a whole world for the stopping. Most we never saw again, but then 
sometimes a group-or parts of it-would appear megayears down time. Our lives are 
threaded loosely around one another. You should be studying my personal 
databases about that, Brierson."
"Hmm. These early settlements-they all failed. Was there evidence of sabotage?" 
If Marta's murder was part of a pattern...
"That's what I want you to look for, Inspector." A little of the old scorn 
appeared. "Till now I never thought so. From the standpoint of the dropouts, 
they weren't all failures. Several couples simply wanted to live their lives 
stopped in one era. Modern health care can keep the body alive a very long time; 
we discovered other limits. Time passes, personalities change. Very few of us 
have lived more than a thousand years. Neither our minds nor our machines last 
forever. To reestablish civilization, you need the interactions of many people, 
you need a good-sized gene pool and stability over several generations of 
population growth. That's almost impossible with small groups — especially when 
everyone has bobblers and every quarrel has the potential for breaking up the 
settlement."
Yelén leaned forward abruptly. "Brierson, even if Marta's murder is not part of 
a conspiracy against the settlement even then, I-I'm not sure if I can hold 
things together."
Yelén really had changed. He had never expected her to come crying on his 
shoulder. "The low-techs won't stay in this era.
She shook her head. "They have no choice. You're familiar with the Wachendon 
suppressor field?"
"Sure. No new bobbles can be generated in a suppressor field." The invention had 
cost as many lives as it had saved, since the field made it impossible to escape 
the weapons that burn and maim.
Yelén nodded. "That's close enough. I've got most of Australasia under a 
Wachendon field. The New Mexicans and the Peacers and the rest of the low-techs 
are stuck in this era until they discover how to counter the field. That should 
take at least ten years. We hoped they'd put down roots and be willing to stay 
by then." Yelén stared at the pink marble of her library table. "And the plan 
would work, Inspector," she said softly, taking her turn at self-pity. "Marta's 
plan would work if it weren't for those goddamned statist bastards."
"Steve Fraley?"
"Not just him. The top Peacers-Kim Tioulang and his gang-are as bad. They just 
won't cooperate with me. There are one hundred and one NMs and one hundred and 
fifteen Peacers. That's better than two-thirds of the settlement. Fraley and 
Tioulang think they own their groups. The hell of it is, the rank and file seem 
to agree! It's twentieth-century insanity, but it makes them powerful beyond all 
reason. They both want to run the whole show. Have you noticed their recruiting? 
They want the rest of the low-techs to become their 'citizens.' They won't be 
satisfied till one is supreme. They may reinvent high-tech just for the 
privilege of breaking up the settlement."
"Have you talked about this with the other high-techs?"
She rubbed nervously at her chin. If only Marta were here; the words all but 
spoke themselves. "A little, but most of 'em are more confused than I. Della was 
some help; she actually was a statist once. But she's hard to talk to. Have you 
noticed? She shifts personalities like clothes, as though she's trying to find 
something that fits."
"Inspector, you don't go back quite as far as Della, but there were still 
governments in your time. Hell, you caused the collapse of one of them. How can 
this sort of primitivism be successful now?"
Brierson winced. So now he had caused the disgovernance of New Mexico, had he? 
Wil sat back and-just like in the old days-tried to come up with something that 
would satisfy the inflated expectations of his customer. "Yelén, I agree that 
governments are a form of deception-though not necessarily for the rulers, who 
usually benefit from them. Most of the citizens, most of the time, must be 
convinced that the national interest is more important than their own. To you 
this must seem like an incredible piece of mass hypnotism, backed up by the 
public disciplining of dissenters."
Yelén nodded. "And the 'mass hypnotism' is the important thing. Any time they 
want, the NM rank and file could just give Fraley the finger and walk away; he 
couldn't kill 'em all. Instead they stay, his tools."
"Yes, but in a way this gives them power, too. If they walk, where's to go? 
There are no other groups. There is no ungoverned society like in my time."
"Sure there is. The Earth is empty, and almost a third of the low-techs are 
ungovs. There's nothing to keep people front settling down to their own 
interests."
Wil shook his head, surprised at his own insight, surprised at his voicing it to 
Yelén. Before, he wouldn't have thought to argue with her. But she seemed 
sincerely interested in his opinion. "Don't you see, Yelén? There are no 
ungoverned now. There are the Peacers, the NMs-but over all the low-techs there 
is the government of Yelén Korolev."
"What? I am not a government!" Red rose in her face. "1 don't tax. I don't 
conscript. I only want to do what's right for people." Even if she was changed, 
at that moment Wil was glad for Lu's auton hovering above his house.
Wil chose his next words carefully. "That's all true. But you have two of the 
three essential attributes of government: First, the low-techs 
believe-correctly, I think-that you have the power of life and death over them. 
Second, you use that belief -however gently-to make them put your goals ahead of 
theirs."
It was pop social science from Wil's era, but it seemed to have a real effect on 
Korolev. She rubbed her chin. "So you figure that, at least subconsciously, the 
low-techs feel they have to choose sides?"
"Yes. And as the most powerful governing force, you could easily come out the 
most distrusted."
"What is your advice, then?"
"I, uh..." Wil had painted himself into a corner. Yes. Suppose I'm right. What 
then? The little settlement at fifty megayears was totally different from the 
society of Wil's time. It was entirely possible that without Korolev force, the 
handful of seeds collected here would be blown away on the winds of time. And 
separately, those seeds would never bloom.
Back in civilization, Wil had never thought much on "Great Issues." Even in 
school, he hadn't liked nitpicking arguments about religion or natural rights. 
The world made sense and seemed to respond appropriately to his actions. Since 
he had lost Virginia, everything was so terribly on its head. Could there really 
be a situation so weird that he would advocate government? He felt like a 
Victorian pushing sodomy.
Yelén gave him a lopsided grin. "You know, Marta said some of the same things. 
You don't have her training, but you seem to have her sense. My gentle 
Machiavelli didn't shrink from the consequences, though. I've got to be popular, 
yet I've still got to have my way...."
She looked at him, seemed to reach a decision. "Look, Inspector, I want you to 
mix more. Both the NMs and the Peacers have regular recruiting parties. Go to 
the next Peacer one. Listen to what they're saying. Maybe you can explain them 
to me. And maybe you can explain me to them. You were a popular person in your 
time. Tell people what you think even what you don't like about me. If they have 
to choose sides, I think I'm their best bet."
Wil nodded. First the Dasguptas and now Korolev: Was there a conspiracy to get 
W. W. Brierson back in circulation? "What about the investigation?"
Yelén was silent for a moment. "I need you for both, Brierson. I mourned Marta 
for a hundred years. I traced her around the Inland Sea a meter at a time. I've 
got records or bobble samples of everything she did and everything she wrote. 
1-1 think I'm over the rage. The most important thing in my life now is to see 
that Marta didn't die in vain. I will do anything to make the settlement 
succeed. That means finding the killer, but it also means selling my case to the 
low-techs."
NINE
That night he took another look at Marta's diary. It was a very low-priority 
item now, but he couldn't concentrate on anything more technical. Yelén had read 
the diary several times. In their literal-minded way, her autons had gone over 
the text in even more detail, and Lu's had cross-checked the analysis. Marta 
knew she had been murdered, but said again and again that she had no clues 
beyond her description of the evening of the party. According to the overdoc, 
she rarely repeated the details in later years, and when she did it was clear 
that her earlier memories were the more precise.
Now Will browsed the earliest sections. Marta had stayed near Town Korolev for 
more than a year. Though she said otherwise, it was clear she hoped for rescue 
in some small multiple of ninety days. Even if that rescue didn't come, she had 
lots of preparing to do: She planned to walk to Canada, halfway around the 
world.
« ,.. but klick for klick it barely qualifies as an intermediate survival 
course, » she wrote. « It will take years, and I may miss a lookabout back here 
at Town Korolev, but that's okay. Along the way, I'll put billboards at the West 
End mines and the Peacer bobble. Once I get your attention, give me a sign, 
Lelya: Nuke the sky for a week of nights. I'll find open ground, and wait for 
the autons. »
Marta knew the territory near Korolev. Her shelter in the realtime wing of the 
castle was secure, close to water and adequate hunting. It was a good place to 
collect her energy for the trek ahead. She experimented with the weapons and 
tools she'd known from survival sport. In the end she settled on a 
diamond-bladed pike and knife and a short bow. She kept the other diamond blades 
in reserve; she wasn't going to waste them on arrowheads. She built a travois 
from a section of Fred's hull. It was enough to do some testing. She made 
several cautious trips covering a few kilometers.
« Dearest Lelya — If I am ever to leave, I suppose it should be now. The plan is 
still to sail to our mines at West End and then head north to the Peacer bobble, 
and Canada far beyond that. Tomorrow I depart for the coast; tonight I finish 
packing. Would you believe, I have made so much equipment, I actually have 
lists; the age of data processing has arrived!
« Hope I see you before I write more. — Love, Marta. »
That was the last of the bark tablets she left at the castle. Two hundred 
kilometers along the southern coast of the sea, Yelén found the second of 
Marta's cairns, a three-meter-high pile of rock at the edge of the jacaranda 
forests. This was one of the best preserved of Marta's sites. She'd built a 
cabin there; it was still standing when Yelén studied it a century later.
Six months had passed since Marta left the castle in the mountains. She was 
still optimistic, though she had hoped to reach the mines before stopping. There 
had been problems, one of them painful and deadly. During her time at the cabin, 
Marta described her adventures since leaving the castle.
« I followed our monorail to the coast. You know I said it was a waste to build 
that thing when we were going to leave it behind anyway. Well, now I'm glad you 
listened to Genet and not me. That right-of-way cuts straight through the 
forest. 1 avoided some tricky rock climbing just by sliding the travois along 
the rail's underframe. It was like a practice hike — which I needed more than I 
realized.
« I've forgotten a lot, Lelya. I have just one poor brainful of memories now. If 
I'd known I was to be marooned, I would have loaded quite a different set. (But 
if I'd foreseen that, I probably could have avoided the whole adventure! Sigh. I 
should be glad I never offloaded our survival courses.) Anyway, my mind is full 
of our plans for the settlement, the stuff I was thinking about the night of the 
party. I have only a casual recollection of maps. I know we did lots of wildlife 
studies, and were hooked into Monica's work, too. But that's all gone. Where the 
plants are like the ones back in civilization, I recognize them.
« For the rest, I have fragments of memory that are sometimes worse than 
useless: take the spiders and their jacaranda forests. These are nothing like 
the scattered trees and isolated webs up at Town Korolev. Here the trees are 
huge, and the forests go on forever. That much was obvious from the ground, 
walking along the monorail. We had slashed through that forest, but it towered 
on either side. The brush that had grown along the path was already covered by 
matted spider webbing. Ah, if I had remembered then what I've learned since, I'd 
probably be at the mines by now!
« Instead, I wandered along beneath the rail (where for some reason the webs 
didn't come) and admired the gray silk that spread down from the jacarandas. I 
didn't dare cut through the webs to look into the forest; at that time, I was 
still scared of the spiders. They're little things, like the ones in the 
mountains, but if you look close you can see thousands of them moving in the 
webs. I was afraid they might be like army ants, ready to swarm down on whoever 
jiggled their silk. Eventually, I found a break in the shroud where I could step 
through without touching the threads.... Lelya, it's a different world in there, 
quieter and more peaceful than the deepest redwood grove. Dim green light is 
everywhere-the really thick webs are at the fringes of the forests. (And of 
course I didn't find the explanation for that till later.) There's no 
underbrush, no animals-only a musty smell and a greenish haze in the air. (I'll 
bet you're laughing at me now, because you already know what made that smell,) 
Anyway, I was impressed. It's like a cathedral... or a tomb,
« I only spent an hour in there the first time; I was still nervous about the 
spiders. Besides, the point of this trip was to reach the sea. I still planned 
to make a raft and sail direct to the West End. Failing that, short hops along 
the coast ought to bring me to the mines faster than any overland walk. So 1 
thought.
« It was storming the day I came in sight of the shore. I knew we had wrecked 
the coast with our tsunami, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw. The jungle was 
blasted flat for kilometers back from the sea. The tree trunks were piled three 
and four deep, all pointing away from the water. I remember thinking that at 
least I would have plenty of lumber for my raft.
« I sheltered the travois and went a ways onto the coastal plain. The going was 
treacherous. Rotted vines swathed the trunks. Tree bark sloughed away under my 
weight. The topmost trunks were relatively clear, but slime slick. I crawled/ 
walked from trunk to trunk. All the while, the storm was getting worse. The last 
time I'd been to the beach was to round up Wil Brierson... »
A reader smiled. She did remember my name! Somewhere in the adventures of her 
next forty years she forgot, but for a while she had remembered.
«.. , just before we raised the Peacers. It had been a warm, misty place. Today 
was different: lightning, thunder, wind driven rain. No way was I going to get 
to water's edge this afternoon. I crawled along a tree trunk to its uptorn fan 
of roots, and peeked over. Fantasyland. There were three waterspouts out there. 
They slid back and forth, the further ones pale and translucent. The third had 
drifted inland, though it was still a couple of klicks away. Dirt and timber 
splashed up from its tip. I crawled out of the wind and listened to the roar. As 
long as it didn't get louder, I should be safe from heaven's dirty finger.
« All this raised serious questions about my plan to take a shortcut across the 
sea. No doubt this was an exceptional storm, but what about ordinary squalls? 
How common were they? The Inland Sea is a lot like the old Mediterranean. I 
thought of a guy named Odysseus oho spent half his life being blown from one 
side of that pond to the other. I wished we had taken maritime sports more 
seriously. Sailing to Catalina barely qualified us as novices; we didn't even 
make our own boat. The notion of hugging the coast didn't look good either. I 
remembered the pictures: our tsunami had smashed the whole southern coast. There 
were no beaches or harbors left on this side of the sea, just millions of tonnes 
of broken wood and mud. I would have to carry all my food even if I stayed close 
to the shore.
« So there I was, kind of discouraged and awfully wet. My schedule was in 
shambles. And that was a laugh. I have all the time in the world; that's the 
problem.
« There was a super-close lightning bolt. From the corner of my eye I saw 
something rushing me. As I turned, it dropped on my shoulder, grabbing for my 
neck. An instant later something else landed on my middle, and on my leg. I bet 
I screamed as loud as ever in my life; it was lost in the thunder.
«... They were fishermonkeys, Lelya. Three of them. They clung tight as leeches; 
one had its face buried in my middle. But they weren't biting. I sat rigid for a 
moment, ready to start smashing in all directions. The one on my leg had its 
eyes screwed shut. All three were shivering, and holding me so tight it hurt. I 
gradually relaxed, and set my hand on the fellow who had grabbed my middle. 
Through the seal-like fur, I could feel its shivering ease a little.
« They were like little children, running to Momma when the lightning got too 
bad. We sat in the lee of that root fan through the worst of the storm. They 
scarcely moved the whole time, their warm bodies stuck to my leg, belly, and 
shoulder.
« The storm gentled to an even rain, and the temperature climbed back into the 
thirties. The three didn't rush off. The-sat, looking at me solemnly. Now, even 
I don't believe that nature is full of cuddly creatures just waiting to love a 
human. I began to have some unhappy suspicions. I got up, climbed over the side 
of the trunk. The three followed, then ran a little way to one side, stopped, 
and chittered at me. I walked to them, and they ran off again, and stopped 
again. Already I was thinking of them as Hewey , Dewey and Lewey, (How did 
Disney spell those names?) Of course, fishermonkeys look nothing like ducks, 
either real or caricatured. But there was a cooperative madness about them that 
made the names inescapable.
« Our lurching game of tag went on for fifty meters. Then we came to a pile that 
had recently slipped: I could see where the trunks had turned, exposing 
unweathered wood. The three didn't try to climb these. They led me around 
them... to where a larger monkey was pinned between two trunks. It wasn't hard 
to guess what had happened. A good-sized stream flowed beneath the pile. 
Probably the four had been fishing there. When the storm came up, they hid in 
the wooden cave formed by the tree trunks. No doubt the wind and the added water 
in the stream had upset the woodpile.
« The three patted and pulled at their friend, but halfheartedly; the body 
wasn't warm. I could see that its chest was crushed. Perhaps this had been their 
mother. Or maybe it was the dominant male — Unca Donald even.
« It made me sadder than it should, Lelya. I knew our rescuing the Peacers was 
going to blow a hole in the ecosystem; I'd already done my rationalizing, cried 
my tears. But.. . I wondered how many fishermonkeys were left on the south 
shore. I bet they were scattered in small groups all through the dead jungle. 
And now this. The four of us sat for a time, consoling each other, I hope. »
 
« If sea travel was out, my options were a bit constrained. The jungle parallels 
the coast and extends inland to the two-thousand-meter level. It would take me a 
hundred years to get around the sea by hacking my way through that, with every 
stream at right angles to my line of travel. That left the jacaranda 
forests-back up where the air is cool, and the spiders spin their webs.
« Oh. I took the fishermonkeys with me. In fact, they refused to be left behind. 
I was now mother, or dominant male, or whatever. These three had all the 
mobility of penguins. During the days, they spent most of the time on the 
travois. When I stopped to rest, they'd be off-racing each other around, trying 
to tease me into the chase. Then Dewey would come to sit by me. He was the odd 
man out. Literally. Hewey was a girl and Lewey the other male. (It took a while 
to figure this out. The fishers' sexual equipment is better hidden than in the 
monkeys of our time.) It was all very platonic, but sometimes Dewey needed 
another friend.
« I can just see you, Lelya, shaking your head and muttering about sentimental 
weakness. But remember what I've said so many times: If we can survive and still 
be sentimental, life is a lot more fun. Besides, there were coldly calculated 
reasons for lugging my little friends back to the Jac forest. The fishers are 
not entirely sea creatures. The fact that they can fish from streams shows that. 
These three ate berries and roots. Plants haven't changed as much as animals 
over these fifty megayears, but some of the changes can be inconvenient. For 
instance, Dewey et al. wouldn't touch the water I got from a traveler's palm; on 
the way down, that stuff had made me sick. »
Here the diary had many pages of drawings, enhanced by Yelén's autons to show 
the dyes' original colors. These were not as skillfully drawn as those Wil had 
seen later in the diary when Marta had had years of practice-but they were 
better than anything he could do. She had brief notes by each picture: « Dewey 
wouldn't touch this when green, otherwise okay... » or « Looks like trillium; 
raises blisters like poison ivy. »
Wil looked carefully at the first few pages, then skipped ahead to where Marta 
entered the jacaranda forest.
« I was a bit frightened at first. The fishers picked up on it, edging moodily 
around on the travois and whimpering. Walking through the jac forest just seemed 
too easy. The air is wet and moist, yet not nearly so uncomfortable as in a rain 
forest. The mist I'd seen earlier is always present. The musky, choking smell is 
there, too, though you don't notice it after the first few minutes. The light 
coming through the canopy is shadowless and green. Floating down from the 
heights are occasional leaves and twigs. There are no animals; except at the 
edges of the forest, the spiders stick to the canopy. There are no trees but the 
jacs, and no vines. The ground cover is a moist carpet. In the top few 
centimeters you can see leaf fragments, perhaps little bits of spiders. Walking 
through it kicks up a murkier version of what hangs all through the air. A 
thousand meters into the forest, the only sounds you hear are those you make 
yourself. The place is beautiful, and heaven to hike through.
« But you see why I was nervous, Lelya? Just a few hundred meters downslope was 
a jungle, a thickly grown, life-gone-to-crazy-excess jungle. There had to be 
something pretty fearsome keeping all competing plants and all animal pests out 
of the jac forest. I still had visions of spider armies sweeping down the trees 
and sucking the juice out of intruders.
« I was very cautious the first few days. I walked close to the northern edge of 
the forest, close enough so I could hear the sounds of the jungle.
« It didn't take long to see that the jungle/jac border is a war zone. As you 
walk toward the border, the forest floor is broken by the corpses of ordinary 
trees. The deadwood furthest in is scarcely recognizable lumps; closer to the 
border you can see whole trees, some still standing. What had been the leafy 
parts are drowned in ancient webs. Rank on rank of mushrooms cover the wood. 
Their colors are beautiful pastels... and the fishers wouldn't touch them.
« Walk a bit further and you're out from under the jacs. Here the jungle is 
alive and fighting to stay that way. Here the spiderwebs are thickest, a tight 
dark layer across the treetops. Those webs are silver kudzu, Lelya. The critical 
battle in this war is the jungle top trying to grow past the shroud, and the 
spiders trying to lay still more silk on top. You know how fast things grow in a 
rain forest; the plants themselves play the shade-out game, growing a dozen 
centimeters in twenty-four hours. The spiders have to hustle to keep ahead. 
Since those first days, I've climbed into the jungle canopy just outside the Jac 
forest and watched. On a busy day, the top of the kudzu web almost seems to 
froth, the little buggers are pumping out so much new silk.
« Where the jungle trees are still living, you do see animals. Webs fan from 
tree to tree, black with trapped insects. For larger animals, the silk is no 
barrier. Snakes, lizards, catlike predators-I've seen them all in the 
thirty-meter-wide band that the spiders' kudzu shades. But they don't have dens 
there. They are fleeing, or chasing, or very sick. There are no monsters to 
scare them back; they just don't like to stay. By now I had some theories, but 
it was almost a week before I knew for sure.
« Once or twice a day, we walked to the jungle's edge. There I did some easy 
hunting and we ate the berries the fishers liked. At night, we slept several 
hundred meters into the jacs, farther than any other animals dared come. And as 
long as I stayed far enough inside the forest, we made very good time. Even old 
jac trunks molder quickly away and the ubiquitous mulch smooths out most ground 
irregularities. The only obstacles were the many streams that crossed our path. 
Down in the jungle, the brush along these streams would have been virtually 
impassable. Here, the mulch extended right to the water's edge. The water itself 
was clear, though where a stream broadened and the water slowed, there was 
greenish scum on the surface. There were fish.
« Ordinarily, I don't mind drinking from a stream, even in the tropics. Any 
blood or gut parasites are just a tasty meal for my panphages. Here I was more 
careful. The first one we came to, I hung back and watched my committee of 
experts. They sniffed around, took a drink or two, and jumped in. A few seconds 
later they had their dinner. From then on, I didn't hesitate to ford the 
streams, floating the travois ahead of me.
« But by the fifth day, Hewey was beginning to drag. She didn't come off the 
travois to play. Dewey and Lewey patted and groomed her, but she would not be 
jollied. By the next afternoon, they were equally droopy. There were sniffles 
and tiny coughs. It was about what I had expected. Now for the important 
questions:
« I found a campsite on the jungle side of the border. It was hell compared to 
the comfort we'd enjoyed in the jacs, but it was defensible and at the edge of a 
lake. By then the three were so weak I had to fish and forage for them.
« I watched them for a week, trying to analyze the odds, trying to guess what 
once I could have remembered in an instant. It was the greenish mist, I was 
sure. The stuff floated down endlessly from the top of the jacarandas. Other 
stuff came down too, but most of it was identifiable-leaves, bits of spider, 
things that might have been caterpillar parts. I had a fair estimate of the 
spider biomass; the jac tops were actually bowed down in places. The green 
mist... it was spider shit. That by itself was no big deal. The thing is, if you 
lived in the forest, you breathed a lot of it. Almost anything that fine would 
eventually cause health problems. It was clear now the spiders had gone a step 
further. There was something downright poisonous in that haze. Mycotoxins? The 
word pops to mind, but damn it, I have nowhere to remember more. It had to be 
more than an irritant. Apparently nothing had evolved a defense. Yet it wasn't 
super fast-acting. The fishers had lasted several days. The big question was, 
how fast would it affect a larger animal (such as yours truly)? And was recovery 
a simple matter of leaving the forest?
« I got the answer to the second question in a couple of days. All three came 
out of their funk. Eventually they were fishing and rowdying as enthusiastically 
as ever. So I had the old decision to make, this time with a bit more 
information: Should I hike through the jac forest as far and fast as I was able? 
Or should I hack my way crosswise through a thousand klicks of jungle? My guinea 
pigs looked as good as new; I decided to continue with the forest route, till I 
had symptoms.
« It would mean leaving Dewey and Hewey and Lewey. I hoped I was leaving them 
better off than when I found them. That pond was alive with fish, as good as 
anything back in civilization. The fishermonkeys were quick to rush into the 
water at the first hint of land predators. The only threat from the water was 
something large and croc-like that didn't look very fast. It wasn't precisely 
like the jungle they had once known by the seashore, but I would stay long 
enough to build them a sanctuary.
« I ignored the fact that my survival craft was from a different era. For once, 
being sentimental was deadly.
« The morning of the seventh day, it was obvious that something big had died 
nearby. The moist air always carried the scents of life and death, but a heavy 
overtone of putrefaction had been added. Hewey and Lewey ignored it, were busy 
chasing each other around the water's edge. Dewey was not in sight. Usually when 
the others squeezed him out he came to me; sometimes he just went off to sulk. I 
called to him. No answer. I'd seen him an hour earlier, so it couldn't be his 
demise the breeze announced.
« I was just getting worried when Dewey raced out of the hushes, chittering 
gleefully. He held a huge black beetle between his hands. »
A drawing covered the rest of the page. The creature looked like a stinkbug, but 
according to the overdoc it was more than ten centimeters long..Its enormous 
abdomen accounted for most of that size. The chitin was thick and black, laced 
by a network of deep grooves.
« Dewey ran right up to Hewey, brushing Lewey aside. For once he had an offering 
that might give him precedence. And Hewey was impressed. She poked at the 
armored ball, jumped back in surprise when the bug gave a whistling tweet. In 
seconds they were rolling it back and forth between them, entranced by the 
teakettle noises and acrid bursts of steam that came from the thing.
« I was as curious too. As I started toward them, Dewey grabbed the beetle to 
hold it up to me. Suddenly he screamed and tossed the bug toward me. It struck 
the top of my right foot — and exploded.
« I didn't know such pain could exist, Lelya. Even worse, I couldn't turn it 
off. I don't think I lost consciousness, but for a while the world beyond that 
pain scarcely existed. Finally I came back far enough to feel the wetness that 
flowed from the wound. The small bones in my foot were shattered. Chitin 
fragments had cut deep into my foot and lower leg. Dewey was bleeding too-but 
his wound was a nick compared to mine.
« I've named them grenade beetles. I know now they're a carrion eater — with a 
defense worthy of a twenty-first-century armadillo. When hassled, their 
metabolism becomes an acidulous pressure cooker. They don't want to die; they 
give plenty of warning. No creature from this region would deliberately give 
them any trouble. But if goaded to the bursting point, their death is an 
explosion that will kill any small attacker outright, and bring lingering death 
to most larger ones.
« I don't remember much of the next few days, Lelya. I had to cause myself even 
greater pain trying to set the bones of my foot. It hurt almost as much to pick 
out the fragments of chitin. They smelled of rot, of the corpse that beetle had 
been into. God only knows what infections my panphages saved me from.
« The fishermonkeys tried to help. They brought berries and fish. I improved. I 
could crawl, even walk with a makeshift crutch — though it hurt like hell.
« Other creatures knew I was hurt. Various things nosed about my shelter, but 
were chased off by the fishers. I woke one morning to loud fishermonkey 
screeching. Something big shuffled by, and the monkey's cry ended in a horrible 
squeak.
« That afternoon, Hewey and Lewey were back, but I never saw Dewey again.
« A jungle does not tolerate convalescents. Unless I could get back to the jac 
forest, I would be dead very soon. And if the remaining fishers were half as 
loyal as Dewey, they would be dead, too. That evening, I put the berries and 
freshest fish onto my travois. Meter by meter, I dragged it back to the jac 
forest. Hewey and Lewey followed me partway in. Even their foolish penguin walk 
was enough to keep up. But they feared the forest now, or maybe they weren't as 
crazy as Dewey, for eventually they fell behind. I still remember their calling 
after me. »
This was Marta's closest brush with death for many years. If there had not been 
good fishing in the first stream she found or if the jac forest had been any 
less gentle than she imagined, she would not have survived.
The weeks passed, and then a month. Her shattered foot slowly healed. She spent 
nearly a year by that stream just inside the forest, returning to the jungle 
only occasionally-for fresh fruit, and to check on the fishers, and to hear some 
sounds beyond herself. It became her second major camp, the one with the cabin 
and the cairn. She had plenty of time to bring her diary up to date, and to 
scout the forest. It was not everywhere the same. There were patches of older, 
dying jacarandas. The spiders hung their display webs across those trees, 
turning the light blue and red. Most of her descriptions of the forest gave Wil 
the impression of unending catacombs, but this was a cathedral, the webs stained 
glass. Marta couldn't remember the purpose of the display webs. She stayed for 
days under one of them, trying to fathom the mystery. Something sexual, she 
guessed: but for the spiders ... or the trees? For a weird instant, Wil felt 
impelled to look up the answer for her; she of all people deserved to know. Then 
he shook his head and deliberately paged his data set.
Marta figured out most of the spiders' life cycle. She'd seen the enormous 
quantities of insect life trapped on the perimeter barriers, and she guessed at 
the tonnage that must be captured on the canopy. She also noticed how often the 
fallen leaves were fragmented, and correctly guessed that the spiders maintained 
caterpillar farms much as ants keep aphids. She did as much as any naturalist 
without tools could.
« But the forest never made me sick, Lelya. A mystery. In fifty million years, 
has Evolution's arms race drifted so far that I'm outside the range of the 
spider-shit toxin? I can't believe that, since the poison seems to work on 
everything that moves. More likely, there's something in my medical systems, the 
panphages or whatever, that's protecting me. »
Wil looked up from the transcript. There was more, of course, almost two million 
words more.
He stood, walked to the window, and turned off the lights. Down the street, the 
Dasguptas' place was still dark. It was a clear night; the stars were a pale 
dust across the sky, outlining the treetops. This day seemed awfully long. Maybe 
it was the trip to Calafia and going through two sunsets in one day. More likely 
it was the diary. He knew he was going to keep reading it. He knew he was going 
to give it more time than the Investigation justified. Damn.
TEN
For Wil Brierson, dreams had always waited at the end of sleep. In earlier 
times, they had waited to entertain and enlighten. Now, they lay in ambush.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Wil cried and cried, but no sounds came and scarcely 
any tears. He was holding hands with someone, someone who didn't speak. 
Everything was shades of pale blue. Her face was Virginia's, and also Marta's. 
She smiled sadly, a smile that could not deny the truth they both knew. ... 
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. His lungs were empty, yet still he cried, forcing out 
the last of his breath. He could see through her now, to blue beyond. She was 
gone, and what he might have saved was lost forever.
 
Wil woke with an abrupt gasp for breath. He had exhaled so far it hurt. He 
looked up at the gray ceiling and remembered an advertisement from his 
childhood. They'd been pushing medical monitors; something about 6:00 AM being a 
good time to die, that lots of people suffered sleep apnea and heart attacks 
just before waking-and wouldn't everyone be safer if everyone bought automatic 
monitors.
It couldn't happen with modern medical treatment. Besides, the autons Yelén and 
Della had floating above the house were monitoring him. And a second besides — 
Wil smiled sourly to himself — the clock said 10:00 AM. He had slept nearly nine 
hours. He swung his bulk out of bed, feeling as if he had slept less than half 
that.
He lumbered into the bathroom, washed away the strange wetness he found around 
his eyes. All through his career, he'd done his best to project an appearance of 
calm strength. It hadn't been hard: He was built like a tank, and he was 
naturally a low-blood-pressure type. There were a few cases that had made him 
nervous, but that had been reasonable, since bullets were flying. In police 
work, he'd seen a fair number of people crack up. For all the publicity given 
cases like the Kansas Incursion, most of the violence in his era was simple 
domestic stuff, folks driven around the bend by job or family pressures.
He smiled wryly at the face in the mirror. He had never imagined it could happen 
to him. The end of sleep was a walk down night paths now. He had a feeling 
things were going to get worse. Yet there was a part of him that was as 
analytical as always, that was following his morning dreams and daytime tension 
with surprised interest, taking notes at his own dismemberment.
Downstairs, Wil threw open the windows, let the morning sounds and smells drift 
in. He was damned if he'd let this funk paralyze him. Later in the day, Lu was 
coming over. They would talk about the weapons survey, and decide who to 
interview next. In the meantime, there was lots of work to do. Yelén was right 
about studying the high-techs' lives since the Extinction. In particular, he 
wanted to learn about Sanchéz's aborted settlement.
He was barely started on this project when Juan Chanson dropped by. In person. 
"Wil, my boy! I was hoping we might have a chat."
Brierson let him in, wondering why the high-tech hadn't called ahead. Chanson 
strode quickly around the living room. As usual, he was energetic to the point 
of twitchiness. "'alas Spanol, Wil?" he said.
"Sí," Brierson replied without thinking; he could get by, anyway.
"Buen, " the archeologist continued in Spanolnegro. "I really get tired of 
English, you know. Never can get just the right word. I'll wager some people 
think me a fool because of it."
Wil nodded at the rush of words. In Spanolnegro, Chanson talked even faster than 
in English. It was an impressive — and nearly unintelligible — achievement.
Chanson stopped his nervous tour of the living room. He jerked a thumb at the 
ceiling. "I suppose our high-tech friends are taking in every word?"
"Uh, no. They're monitoring body function, but I would have to call for help 
before our words would be interpreted." And I asked Lu to make sure Yelén did no 
eavesdropping.
Chanson smiled knowingly. "So they tell you, no doubt." He placed a gray oblong 
on the table; a red light blinked at one end. "Now the promises are true. 
Whatever we say goes unrecorded." He waved for Brierson to be seated.
"We've talked about the Extinction, have we not?"
"Sí. " Several times.
Chanson waved his hand. "Of course. I talk to everybody about it. Yet how many 
believe? Fifty million years ago, the human race was murdered, Wil. Isn't that 
important to you?"
Brierson sat back. This would shoot the morning. "Juan, the Extinction is very 
important to me." Was it really? Wil had been shanghaied more than a century 
before it. To his heart, that was when Virginia and Anne and W. W. Jr. had 
died-even if the biographies said they lived into the twenty-third century. He 
had been shanghaied across a hundred thousand years; that was many times longer 
than all recorded history. Now he lived at fifty megayears. Even without the 
capital-e Extinction, this was so deep in the future that no one could expect 
the human race to still exist. "But most high-techs don't think there was an 
alien invasion. Alice Robinson said the race died out over the whole 
twenty-third century, and that there weren't signs of violence until very late. 
Besides, if there were an invasion, you'd think we'd have all sorts of refugees 
from the twenty-third. Instead we have nobody-except the last of you high-techs 
from 2201 and 2202."
Chanson sniffed, "The Robinsons are fools. They fit the facts to their rosy 
preconceptions. I've spent thousands of years of my life piecing this together, 
Wil. I've mapped every square centimeter of Earth and Luna with every diagnostic 
known to man. Bil Sanchéz did the same for the rest of the Solar System I've 
interviewed the rescued low-techs. Most of the high-tech think I'm a crank, I've 
so thoroughly abused their hospitality There's a lot I don't understand about 
the aliens-but there's a lot that I do. There are no refugees from the 
twenty-third because the invaders could jam bobble generators; they had some 
superpowerful version of the Wachendon suppressor The extermination was not like 
twentieth-century nuclear war over in a matter of weeks. I've dated the Norcross 
graffiti a 2230. Apparently, the aliens were using specifically antihuman 
weapons early in the war. On the other hand, the vanadium tape Billy Sanchéz 
found on Charon appears to be from late in the century. It ties in with the new 
craters there and in the asteroids. At the end, the aliens dug out the deep 
resistance with nukes."
"I don't know, Juan. It's so far in the past now — how can we prove or disprove 
anyone's theories? What's important is t, make sure our settlement succeeds and 
humanity has another chance."
Chanson leaned across the table, even more intense than before. "Exactly. But 
don't you see? The aliens had bobbler too. What destroyed civilization threatens 
to destroy us now"
"After fifty million years? What could be the motive?"
"I don't know. There are limits to physical investigation, no matter how 
patient. But I think it was a close thing back in the twenty-third. The aliens 
pulled out all the stops at the end, and it was barely enough. After the war, 
they were very weak — perhaps on the edge of extinction themselves. They were 
gone from the Solar System for millions of years. But make no mistake, Wil. They 
have not forgotten us."
"You expect another invasion."
"That's what I've always feared, but I'm beginning to feel otherwise. There are 
too few of them; their game is steal now. They aim to divide and destroy. 
Marta's murder was only the beginning."
"What?"
Chanson flashed a quick, angry smile. "The game is not so academic now, is it, 
my boy? Think on it: With that murder, they crippled us. Marta was the brains 
behind the Korolev plan.
"You claim they're here among us? I should think you high-techs can monitor 
things coming into the system."
"Certainly, though the others don't bother. One of the safest places for 
long-term storage is on cometary orbits. Such bobbles return every hundred 
thousand years or so. Only I seem to realize that a few more return than go out. 
At least half my time has been spent building a surveillance net. Over the 
megayears I intercepted three coming in with substantial hyperbolic excess. Two 
came out of stasis in the inner Solar System, surrounded by my forces. They came 
out shooting, Wil."
"Did they use the super Wachendon suppressor?"
"No. I think their surviving equipment is scarcely better than ours. With my 
superior position, I managed to destroy both of them."
Wil looked at the little man with new respect. Like all the high-techs, he was a 
monomaniac; anyone who pursued one objective for centuries would be. His 
conclusions had been ridiculed by most of the others, yet he stuck by them and 
had done his best to protect the others from a threat only he could see. If 
Chanson was right... Wil's mouth was suddenly dry. He could see where this was 
leading. "What about the third one, Juan?" he said quietly.
Again that angry smile. "That one was much more recent, much more clever. It did 
a lookabout before I was in position. I was outmaneuvered. By the time I got 
back to Earth, it was already here, claiming to be human-claiming to be Della 
Lu, long-lost spacer. Your partner is a monster, my boy."
Wil tried not to think about the firepower that floated over their heads. "Is 
there any solid evidence? Della Lu was a real person.
Chanson laughed. "They're weak now. Subterfuge may be all that's left them — and 
surely they have copies of GreenInc. Did you see this 'Della Lu' right after she 
arrived? It would be a joke to call that thing human. The claim she's so old 
that normal human attributes have faded is nonsense. I'm more than two thousand 
years old, and my behavior is perfectly normal."
"But she was alone all that time." Wil's words defended her, but he was 
remembering the encounter on the beach, Lu's insectile manner, her cold stare. 
"Surely a medical exam would settle this."
"Maybe. Maybe not. I have reason to think the exterminators are of nearly human 
structure. If their life sciences are as good as ours, they could rearrange 
their innards to human standards. As for subtle chemical tests-our ignorance of 
then and their technology is simply too great to risk accepting negative 
evidence as proof."
"Who else have you told?"
"Yelén. Philippe. You can be sure I'm making no public accusations. The Lu 
creature knows someone attacked her coming in, but I don't think she knows who. 
She may even think it was an automatic action. Even if she's alone, she is 
terribly dangerous, Wil. We can't afford to move against her until all the 
high-techs are willing to act together. I pray this will happen before she 
destroys the settlement.
"I don't know if Philippe believes me, but I think he'd act if the rest could be 
won over. As for Yelén, well... I already said she was the lesser of the 
Korolevs. She's done some passive testing and can't believe the enemy could make 
such a good counterfeit. She's totally unimpressed by Lu's erratic behavior. 
Basically, Yelén has no imagination.
"You may be the key, Wil. You see Lu every day. Sooner or later she is going to 
slip, and you will know that what I say is true. It is vitally important you 
prepare yourself for that moment. With luck, it will be something small, 
something you can pretend to ignore. If you can cover your knowledge, she may 
let you live.
"And if she lets you live, then maybe we can convince Yelén."
And if f she doesn't let me live, no doubt that will be evil evidence too. One 
way or another, Chanson had a use for him.
ELEVEN
Della Lu arrived in early afternoon. Wil stepped outside to watch her land. The 
autons supplied by Yelén and Della were faithfully keeping station several 
hundred meters above the house. He wondered what a battle between those two 
machines would be like, and whether he could survive it. Before, he'd been 
grateful for Lu's protection against Yelén. Now it worked both ways. Brierson 
kept his face placid as the spacer walked toward him.
"Hi, Wil." Even with his recollection of the early Della, it was hard now to 
believe that Chanson could be right. Lu wore a pink blouse and belled pants. Her 
hair was cut in bangs that swayed girlishly as she walked. Her smile seemed 
natural and spontaneous.
"Hi, Della." He grinned back with a smile he hoped seemed just as natural and 
spontaneous. She entered the house ahead of him.
"Yelén and I have a disagreement we'd like you to..." She stopped talking and 
her body tensed. She sidled around the living-room table, her eyes flicking 
across its surface. Abruptly something round and silver gleamed there. She 
picked it up. "Did you know you were bugged?"
"No!" Wil walked to the table. A spherical notch about a centimeter across had 
been cut from it. The notch was where Chanson had set his bug stomper.
She held up the silver sphere-an exact match for the notch — and said, "Sorry to 
nick your table. I wanted to bobble it first thing. Some bugs bite when they are 
discovered."
Wil looked at his face reflected perfect and tiny in the ball. It could contain 
anything. "How did you spot it?"
She shrugged. "It was too small for my auton to see. I've got some built-in 
enhancements." She tapped her head. "I'm a little more capable than an ordinary 
human. I can see into the UV and IR, for instance.... Most of the high-techs 
don't bother with such improvements, but they can be useful sometimes."
Hmm. Wil had lived several years with medical electronics jammed inside his 
skull; he hadn't liked it one bit.
Della walked across the room and sat on the arm of one of his easy chairs. She 
swung her feet onto the seat and braced her chin on her hands. The childlike 
mannerisms were a strange contrast to her words. "My auton says Juan Chanson was 
your last visitor. Did he get near the table?"
"Yes. That's where we were sitting."
"Hmm. It was a dumb trick, ran a high risk of detection. What did he want, 
anyway?"
Wil was ready for the question. His response was prompt but casual. "He rambled, 
as usual. He's discovered I speak Spanolnegro. I'm afraid I'll be his favorite 
audience from now on."
"I think there's more to it than that. I haven't been able to get an appointment 
for us to interview him. He won't say no, but he has endless excuses. Philippe 
Genet is the only other person who seems to be avoiding us. We should put these 
people at the top of our interview list."
She was doing a better job of proving Juan's case than Juan himself. "Let me 
think about it.... What was it you and Yelén wanted to know?"
"Oh, that. Yelén wants to keep Tammy bobbled for a century or so, till the 
low-techs are 'firmly rooted.' "
"And you don't."
"No. I have several reasons. I promised the Robinsons Tammy would be safe. 
That's why I refuse to turn her over to Yelén. But I also promised them that 
Tammy would be given a chance to clear the family name. She claims that means 
she should be free to operate in the present."
"I'll bet Don Robinson couldn't care less about his good name. Things are too 
hot for the family, but he still wants recruits. If Tammy is bobbled she won't 
be doing any recruiting.
"Yes. Those are almost Yelén's words." Della moved off the chair arm and sat 
like an adult. She steepled her hands and stared at them a moment. "When I was 
very young-even younger than you-I was a Peacer cop. I don't know if you 
understand what that means. The Peace Authority was a government, no matter what 
its claims. As a government cop, my morality was very different from yours. The 
long-range goals of the Authority were the basis of that morality. My own 
interests and the interests of others were secondary-though I truly believed 
that survival depended on achieving the Authority's goals. The history books 
talk mostly about how I stopped Project Renaissance and brought down the 
Peacers, but I also did some... pretty rough things for the Authority; look up 
my management of the Mongolian Campaign.
"That youngest version of Della Lu would have no problem here: leaving Tammy 
free is a risk-a very small risk-to the goal of a successful colony. That Della 
Lu would not hesitate to bobble her, perhaps even execute her, to avoid that 
risk.
"But I grew out of that." Her steepled hands collapsed, and her expression 
softened. "For a hundred years I lived in a civilization where individuals set 
their own goals and guarded their own welfare. That Della Lu sees what Tammy is 
going through. That Della Lu believes in keeping promises made."
Wil forced himself to think on the question. "I believe in abiding by contracts, 
too, though I'm not quite sure what was agreed to here. I'm inclined to release 
Tammy. Let her proselytize, but without her headband. I doubt she remembers 
enough technology to make any difference."
"It's possible the Robinsons left an equipment cache someplace where Tammy and 
her recruits could get it."
"If they did, that would be pretty good evidence they knew about the murder 
beforehand. Why don't we release her, but bug her mercilessly. If she does more 
than talk, we'll bobble her. Tammy and her family are the best suspects. If we 
keep her locked up, it's possible we'll never solve the murder... Do you think 
Yelén would go for that?"
"Yes. That's more or less the argument I made. She said okay if you agreed."
Wil's eyebrows rose. He was both surprised and flattered. "That's settled, 
then." He looked through the window, trying to think how the conversation might 
be turned to the topic that was really bothering him. "You know, Della, I had a 
family. From what I read in GreenInc, they lived right through to the 
Extinction. I hate to think that Monica is right-that humankind just committed 
suicide. And Juan's theories are just as obnoxious. How do you think it ended?" 
He hoped the camouflage hid his real interest. And it wasn't entirely 
camouflage: He'd be grateful to get a nonviolent explanation for the end of 
civilization.
Della smiled at the question. She seemed without suspicion. "It's always easier 
to seem wise if you're selling pessimism. That makes Juan and Monica seem 
smarter than they really are. The truth is... there was no Extinction."
"What?"
"Something happened, but we have only circumstantial evidence what it was."
"Yes, but that 'something' killed every human outside of stasis." He could not 
disguise his sarcasm.
She shrugged. "I don't think so. Let me give you my interpretation of the 
circumstantial evidence:
"During the last two thousand years of civilization, almost every measure of 
progress showed exponential growth. From the nineteenth century on, this was 
obvious. People began extrapolating the trends. The results were absurd: 
vehicles traveling faster than sound by the mid-twentieth century, men ors the 
moon a bit later. All this was achieved, yet progress continued. Simple-minded 
extrapolations of energy production and computer power and vehicle speeds gave 
meaninglessly large answers for the late twenty-first century. The more 
sophisticated forecasters pointed out that real growth eventually saturates; the 
numbers coming out of the extrapolations were just too big to be believed."
"Hmph. Seems to me they were right. I really don't think 2100 was more different 
from 2000 than 2000 was from 1900. We had prolongevity and economical space 
travel, but those were in the range of conservative twentieth-century 
prediction."
"Yes, but don't forget the 1997 war. It just about eliminated the human race. It 
took more than fifty years to dig out of that. After 2100 we were back on the 
exponential track. By 2200, all but the blind could see that something fantastic 
lay in our immediate future. We had practical immortality. We had the beginnings 
of interstellar travel. We had networks that effectively increased human 
intelligence — with bigger increases coming."
She stopped, seemed to change the subject. "Wil, have you ever wondered what 
became of your namesake?"
"The original W.W.?... Say," he said, with sudden realization, "you actually 
knew him, didn't you?"
She smiled briefly. "I met Wili Wachendon a couple of times. He was a sickly 
teenager, and we were on the opposite sides of a war. But what became of him 
after the fall of the Peacers?"
"Well, he invented too many things for me to remember. He spent most of his time 
in space. By the 2090s, you didn't hear much about him."
"Right. And if you follow him in GreenInc, you'll see the trend continued. Wili 
was a first-rate genius. Even then he could use an interface band better than I 
can now. I figure that, as time passed, he had less and less in common with 
people like us. His mind was somewhere else."
"And you think that's what happened to all mankind eventually?"
She nodded. "By 2200, we could increase human intelligence itself. And 
intelligence is the basis of all progress. My guess is that by midcentury, any 
goal-any goal you can state objectively, without internal contradictions — could 
be achieved. And what would things be like fifty years after that." There would 
still be goals and there would still be striving, but not what we could 
understand.
"To call that time 'the Extinction' is absurd. It was a Singularity, a place 
where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied. And those new 
models are beyond our intelligence.
Della's face was aglow. It was hard for Wil to believe that this was the 
fabrication of an "exterminator." In the beginning at least, these had been 
human ideas and human dreams.
"It's a funny thing, Wil. I left civilization in 2202. Miguel had died just a 
few years earlier. That meant more to me than any Big Picture. I wanted to be 
alone for a while, and the Gatewood's Star mission seemed ideal. I spent forty 
years there, and was bobbled out for almost twelve hundred. I fully expected 
that when I got back, civilization would be unintelligible." Her smile twisted. 
"I was very surprised to find Earth empty. But then, what could be less 
intelligible than a total absence of intelligence? From the nineteenth century 
on, futurists wondered about the destiny of science. And now, from the other 
side of the Singularity, the mystery is just as deep.
"There was no Extinction, Wil. Mankind simply graduated, and you and I and the 
rest missed graduation night."
"So three billion people just stepped into another plane. This begins to sound 
like religion, Della."
She shrugged. "Just talking about superhuman intelligence gets us into something 
like religion." She grinned. "If you really want the religious version... have 
you met Jason Mudge? He claims that the Second Coming of Christ was sometime in 
the twenty-third century. The Faithful were saved, the unfaithful destroyed-and 
the rest of us are truant."
Wil smiled back; he had heard of Mudge. His notion of the Second Coming could 
explain things too — in one respect better than Lu's theory. "I like your ideas 
better. But what's your explanation for the physical destruction? Chanson isn't 
the only person who thinks that nukes and bioweapons were used towards the end 
of the twenty-third."
Della hesitated. "That's the one thing that doesn't fit. When I returned to 
Earth in 3400, there was plenty of evidence of war. The craters were already 
overgrown, but from orbit I could see that metropolitan areas had been hit. 
Chanson and the Korolevs have better records; they were active all through the 
fourth millennium, trying to figure out what had happened, and trying to rescue 
short-term low-techs. It looks like a classic nuclear war, fought without 
bobbles. The evidence of biowarfare is much more tenuous.
"I don't know, Wil. There must be an explanation. The trends in the 
twenty-second century were so strong that I can't believe the race committed 
suicide. Maybe it was a fireworks celebration. Or maybe... do you know about 
survival sport?"
"That was after my time. I read about it in GreenInc."
"Physical fitness has always been a big thing in civilization. By the late 
twenty-second, medical care automatically maintained body fitness, so people 
worked on other things. Most middle-class folk had Earthside estates of several 
thousand hectares. There were shared estates bigger than some twentieth-century 
nations. Fitness came to mean the ability to survive without technology. The 
players were dropped naked into a wilderness-arctic, rain forest, you name 
it-that had been secretly picked by the judges. No technology was allowed, 
though medical autons kept close track of the contestants; it could get to be 
pretty rough. Even people who didn't compete would often spend several weeks a 
year living under conditions that would be deadly to twentieth-century 
city-dwellers. By 2200, individuals were probably tougher than ever before. All 
they lacked was the bloody-mindedness of earlier times."
Wil nodded. Marta had certainly demonstrated what Lu was saying. "How does this 
explain the nuke war?"
"It's a little farfetched, but... imagine things just before the race fell into 
the Singularity. Individuals might be only slightly' superhuman, and might still 
be interested in the primitive. For them, nuclear war might be a game of 
strength and fitness."
"You're right; that does sound farfetched."
She shrugged.
"Would you say Juan is in the minority, thinking mankind was exterminated?"
"I think so; I know Yelén agrees with me. But remember that until very recently 
I didn't have much chance to talk to anyone. I was back in the Solar System for 
a few years around 3400. During that time, no one was out of stasis. They'd left 
plenty of messages, though: The Korolevs were already talking about a rendezvous 
at fifty megayears. Juan Chanson had an auton at L4 blatting his theories to all 
who would listen. It was clear to me that with the evidence at hand, they could 
argue forever without proving things one way or the other.
"I wanted certainty. And I thought I could have it." She made that twisted smile 
again.
"So that's why you went back into space."
"Yes. What had happened to us must have happened must be happening-over and over 
again throughout the universe. From the twentieth century on, astronomers 
watched for evidence of intelligence beyond the Solar System. They never saw 
any. We wonder about the great silence on Earth after 2300. They wondered about 
the silence among the stars. Their mystery is just the spacelike version of 
ours.
"There is a difference. In space, I can travel any direction I wish. I was sure 
that eventually I would find a race at the edge of the Singularity."
Listening to her, Wil felt a strange mix of fear and frustration. One way or 
another, this person must know where others could only speculate. Yet what she 
told him and the truth could be entirely different things. And the questions 
that might distinguish lie from truth might provoke a deadly response. "I've 
tried to use your databases, Della. They're very hard to understand."
"That's not surprising. Over the years, there was some nonrepairable damage; 
parts of my GreenInc are so messed up I don't even use them. And my personal 
db's... well, I've customized them quite a bit."
"Surely you want people to know what you've seen?" Yet Della had always been 
strangely closemouthed about her time Out There.
She hesitated. "Once I did. Now I'm not sure. There are people who don't want to 
know the truth.... Wil, someone fired on me when I entered the Solar System."
"What?" Brierson hoped his surprise sounded real. "Who was it?"
"I don't know. I was a thousand AUs out, and the guns were automatic. My guess 
is Juan Chanson. He seems to be the most paranoid about outsiders, and I was 
clearly hyperbolic."
Wil suddenly wondered about the "aliens" Juan said he had destroyed. How many of 
them had been returning spacers? Some of Juan's theories could be self-proving. 
"You were lucky," he said, probing gently, "to get past an ambush."
"Not lucky. I've been shot at before. Any time I'm less than a quarter 
light-year from a star, I'm ready to fight-usually ready to run, too."
"So there are other civilizations!"
For a long moment, Della didn't answer. Her personality shifted yet again. 
Expression drained from her face, and she seemed almost as cold as in their 
first meetings.
"Intelligent life is a rare development."
"I spent nine thousand years on this, spread across fifty million years of 
realtime. I averaged less than a twentieth light speed. But that was fast 
enough. I had time to visit the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Fornax System, 
besides our own galaxy. I had time to stop at tens of thousands of places, at 
astrophysical freaks and normal stars. I saw some strange things, mostly near 
deep gravity wells. Maybe it was engineering, but I couldn't prove it, even to 
myself.
"I found that most slow-spinning stars have planets. About ten percent of these 
have an Earth-type planet. And almost all such planets have life.
"If Monica Raines loves the purity of life without intelligence, she loves one 
of the most common things in the universe.... In all my nine thousand years, I 
found two intelligent races." Her eyes stared into Wil's. "Both times I was too 
late. The first was in Fornax. I missed them by several billion years; even 
their asteroid settlements were ground to dust. There were no bobbles, and it 
was impossible to tell if their ending had been abrupt.
"The other was a nearer thing, both in space and time: a G2 star about a third 
of the way around the Galaxy from here. The world was beautiful, larger than 
Earth, its atmosphere so dense that many plants were airborne. The race was 
centaur-like; I learned that much. I missed them by a couple of hundred 
megayears. Their databases had evaporated, but their space settlements were 
almost undamaged.
"They had vanished just as abruptly as humankind did from Earth. One century 
they were there, the next-nothing. But there were differences. For one thing, 
there was no sign of nuclear war. For another, the centaur-folk had started a 
couple of interstellar colonies. I visited them. I found evidence of growing 
population, of independent technological progress, and then... their own 
Singularities. I lived two thousand years in those systems, spread out over a 
half megayear. I studied them as carefully as Chanson and Sanchéz did our solar 
system.
"There were bobbles in the centaur systems. Not as many as near Earth, but this 
was a lot longer after their Singularity. I knew if I hung around, I'd run into 
somebody."
"Did you?"
Della nodded. "But what sort of person would you expect two hundred megayears 
after civilization?... The centaur came out shooting. I nuked out; I ran fifty 
light-years, past where the centaur had any interest. Then, over the next 
million years, I sneaked back. Sure enough, he was back in stasis, depending on 
occasional lookabouts and his autons for protection. I left plenty of robot 
transmitters, some with autons. If he gave them half a chance, they would teach 
him my language and convince him I was peaceful ....
"His realtime forces attacked the minute they heard my transmissions. I lost 
half my auton defense holding them off. I almost lost my life; that's where my 
db's were damaged. A thousand years later, the centaur himself came out of 
stasis. Then all his forces attacked. Our machines fought another thousand 
years. The centaur stayed out of stasis the whole time. I learned a lot. He was 
willing to talk even if he had forgotten how to listen.
"He was alone, had been the last twenty thousand years of his life. Once upon a 
time, he'd been no nuttier than most of us, but those twenty thousand years had 
burned the soul from him." She was silent for a moment-thinking on what nine 
thousand years could do? "He was caught on behavior tracks he could never — 
could never want to — break. He thought of his solar system as a mausoleum, to 
be protected from desecration. One by one, he had destroyed the last centaurs as 
they came out of stasis. He had fought at least four travelers from outside his 
system. God knows who they were-centaur spacers, or 'Della Lus' of other races.
"But, like us, he couldn't replace his autons. He had lost most of them when I 
found him; I wouldn't have stood a chance a hundred megayears earlier. I 
suppose, if I had stayed long enough, I could have beaten him. The price would 
have been my living more thousands of years; the price would have been my soul. 
In the end, I decided to let him be." She was silent for a long while, the 
coldness slowly departing from her face, to be replaced by... tears? Were they 
for the last centaur — or for the millennia she had spent, never finding more 
than the mystery she began with?
"Nine thousand years... was not enough. Artifacts from beyond the Singularity 
are so vast that doubters can easily deny them. And the pattern of progress 
followed by vanishment call be twisted to any explanation — especially on Earth, 
where there are signs of war."
There was a difference between Della's propaganda and the others', Wil realized. 
She was the only one who seemed plagued by uncertainty, by any continuing need 
for proof. It was hard to believe that such an ambiguous, doubt-ridden story 
could be an alien cover. Hell, she seemed more human than Chanson.
Della smiled but did not brush the wetness from her lashes. "In the end, there 
is only one way to know for a fact what the Singularity is. You have to be there 
when it happens.... The Korolevs have brought together everybody that's left. I 
think we have enough people. It may take a couple of centuries, but if we can 
restart civilization we will make our own Singularity.
"And this time, I won't miss graduation night."
TWELVE
Wil was at the North Shore party later that week.
Virtually everyone was there, even some high-techs.
Della and Yelén were absent-and Tammy was more or less forbidden from attending 
these outings-but he saw Blumenthal and Genet. Today they looked almost like 
anyone else. Their autons hovered high, all but lost in the afternoon light. For 
the first time since taking the Korolev case, Wil didn't feel like an outsider. 
His own autons were indistinguishable from the others, and even when visible, 
the fliers seemed no more intimidating than party balloons.
There were two of these affairs each week, one at Town Korolev sponsored by New 
Mexico, the other run by the Peacers here at North Shore. Just as Rohan said, 
both groups were doing their best to glad-hand the uncommitted. Wil wondered if 
ever in history governments had been forced to tread so softly.
Clusters of people sat on blankets all across the lawn. Other folks were lining 
up at the barbecue pits. Most were dressed in shorts and tops. There was no sure 
way of telling Peacers from NMs from ungovs, though most of the blue blankets 
belonged to the Republic. Steve Fraley himself was attending. His staff seemed a 
little stiff, sitting on lawn chairs, but they were not in uniform. The top 
Peacer, Kim Tioulang, walked over and shook Steve's hand. From this distance, 
their conversation looked entirely cordial....
So Yelén figured he should mingle, observe, find out just how unpopular her 
plans were. Okay. Wil smiled faintly and leaned back on his elbows. It had been 
a matter of duty to come to this picnic, to do just what the Dasgupta 
brothers-and simple common sense-had already suggested. Now he was very glad he 
was here, and the feeling had nothing to do with duty.
In some ways, the North Shore scenery was the most spectacular he'd seen. It was 
strikingly different from the south side of the Inland Sea. Here, forty-meter 
cliffs fell straight to narrow beaches. The lawns that spread inland from the 
cliffs were as friendly as any park in civilization. A few hundred meters 
further north, the clifftop bench ended in steep hills shrouded by trees and 
flowers-climbing and climbing, till they stood faintly bluish against the sky. 
Three waterfalls streamed down from those heights. It was like something out of 
a fairy tale.
But the view was only the smallest part of Wil's pleasure. He'd seen so much 
beautiful country the last few weeks-all untouched and pristine as any 
city-hater could wish. Something in the back of his mind thought it the beauty 
of a tomb -and he a ghost come to cry for the dead. He brought his gaze back 
from the heights and looked across the crowds of picnickers. Crowds, by God! His 
smile returned, unthinking. Two hundred, three hundred people, all in one spot. 
Here he could see that they really did have a chance, that there could be 
children and a human future, and a use for beauty.
"Hey, lazybones, if you're not going to help with the food, at least give us 
room to sit down!" It was Rohan, a big grin on his face. He and Dilip were back 
from the food lines. Two women accompanied them. The four sat down, laughing 
briefly at Wil's embarrassment. Rohan's friend was a pretty Asian; she nodded 
pleasantly to him. The other woman was a stunning, dark-haired Anglo; Dilip 
really knew how to pick 'em. "Wil, this is Gail Parker. Gail's an EMC —"
"ECM," the girl corrected.
"Right, an ECM officer on Fraley's staff.
She wore thigh-length shorts, with a cotton top; he'd never have guessed she was 
an NM staffer. She stuck out her hand. "I've always wondered what you were like, 
Inspector. Ever since I was a little girl, they've been telling me about that 
big, black, badass northerner name of W. W. Brierson...." She looked him up and 
down. "You don't look so dangerous." Wil took her hand uncertainly, then noticed 
the mischievous gleam in her eyes. He'd met a number of New Mexicans since the 
failed NM invasion of the ungoverned lands. A few didn't even recognize his 
name. Many were frankly grateful, thinking he had speeded the disgovernance of 
New Mexico. Others-the die-hard statists of Fraley's stripe-hated Wil out of all 
proportion to his significance.
Gail Parker's reaction was totally unexpected... and fun. He smiled, and tried 
to match her tone. "Well, ma'am, I'm big and black, but I'm really not such a 
badass."
Gail's reply was interrupted by an immensely loud voice echoing across the 
picnic grounds. "FRIENDS —" There was a pause. Then the amplified voice 
continued more quietly. "Oops, that was a bit much.... Friends, may I take a few 
moments of your time."
Rohan's friend said quietly, "So wonderful; a speech." Her English was heavily 
accented, but Wil thought he heard sarcasm. He had hoped that with Don 
Robinson's departure he would be spared any more "friends" speeches. He looked 
down the lawn at the speaker. It was the Peacer boss who had been talking to 
Fraley a few moments earlier. Dilip handed a carton of beer over Wil's shoulder. 
"I advise you to drink up, 'friend,' " he said. "It may be the only thing that 
saves you." Wil nodded solemnly and broke the seal on the carton.
The spindly Peacer continued. "This is the third week we of the Peace have 
hosted a party. If you have been to the others, you know we have a message to 
get across, but we haven't bothered you with speeches. Well, by now we hope 
we've 'sucked you in' enough so you'll give me a hearing." He laughed nervously, 
and there were responding chuckles from the audience, almost out of sympathy. 
Wil chugged some beer and watched the speaker narrowly. He'd bet anything the 
guy really was nervous and shy-not used to haranguing the masses. But Wil had 
read up on Tioulang. From 2010 till the fall of the Peace Authority in 2048, Kim 
Tioulang had been the Director for Asia. He had ruled a third of the planet. So 
maybe his diffidence reflected nothing more than the fact that if you're a 
big-enough dictator, you don't have to impress anyone with your manner.
"Incidentally, I warned President Fraley of my intention to propagandize this 
afternoon, and offered him the 'floor' ill rebuttal. He graciously declined the 
offer."
Fraley stood up and made a megaphone of his hands. "I'll get you all at our 
party." There was laughter, and Wil felt the corners of his mouth turn down. He 
knew Fraley was a martinet; it was annoying to see the man behave with any 
grace.
Tioulang turned back to the mass of picnickers. "Okay. What am I trying to 
convince you of? To join the Peace. Failing that, to show solidarity with the 
interests of the low-techs-as represented by the Peace and the Republic of New 
Mexico.... Why do I ask this? The Peace Authority came and went before many of 
you were born-and the stories you've heard about it are the usual ones that 
history's winners lay ors the losers. But I can tell you one thing: The Peace 
Authority has always stood for the survival of humanity, and the welfare of 
human beings everywhere."
The Peacer's voice went soft. "Ladies and gentlemen, one thing is beyond 
argument: What we do during the next few years will determine if the human race 
lives or dies. It depends on us. For the sake of humanity, we can't afford to 
follow blindly after Korolev or any high-tech-Don't mistake me: I admire Korolev 
and the others. I am deeply grateful to them. They gave the race a second 
chance. And the Korolev scheme seems very simple, very generous. By running her 
factories way over redline, Yelén has promised to keep us at a moderate standard 
of living for a few decades." Tioulang gestured at the beer freezers and the 
barbecue pits, acknowledging their provenance. "She tells us that this will 
wreck her equipment centuries before it would otherwise break down. As the years 
pass, first one and then another of her systems will fail. And we will be left 
dependent on whatever resources we have developed. "So we have a few decades to 
make it... or fade into savagery. Korolev and the others have provided us with 
tools and the databases to create our own means of production. I think we all 
understand the challenge. I shook some hands this afternoon. I noticed calluses 
that weren't there earlier. I talked to people that have been working twelve-, 
fifteen-hour days. Before long, these little meetings will be our only break 
from the struggle."
Tioulang paused a moment, and the Asian girl laughed softly. "Here it comes, 
everybody."
"To this point, no sane person can have disagreement. But what the Peace 
Authority-and our friends of the Republic
do resist is Yelén Korolev's method. Hers is the age-old story of the absentee 
landlord, the queen in the castle and the serfs in the fields. By some scheme 
that is never revealed, she parcels out data and equipment to individuals-never 
to organizations. The only way individuals can make sense of such a hopeless 
jumble is by following Korolev directions ... by developing the habit of 
serfdom."
Wil set the beer down. The Peacer had one hundred percent of his attention now. 
Certainly Yelén was listening to the spiel, but would she understand Tioulang's 
point? Probably not; it was something new to Wil, and he'd thought he 
appreciated all the reasons for resenting Korolev. Tioulang's interpretation was 
a subtle-perhaps even an unconscious-distortion of Marta's plan. Yelén gave 
tools and production equipment to individuals, according to what hobbies or 
occupations they had had back in civilization. If those individuals chose to 
turn the gear over to the Peace or the Republic, that was their business; 
certainly Yelén had not forbidden such transfers.
In fact, she hadn't given any orders about how to use the gifts. She had simply 
made her production databases and planning programs public. Anyone could use 
those data and programs to make deals and coordinate development. The ones who 
coordinated best would certainly come out ahead, but it was scarcely a 
"jumble"... except perhaps to statists. Wil looked across the picnickers. He 
couldn't imagine the ungoverned being taken in by Tioulang's argument. Marta's 
plan was about as close to "business as usual" as you could come under the 
present circumstances, but it was alien weirdness to the Peacers and most of the 
NMs. That difference in perception might be enough to bring everything down.
Kim Tioulang was also watching the audience, waiting to see if his point had 
sunk in. "I don't think any of us want to be serfs, but how can we prevent it, 
given Korolev's overwhelming technical superiority?... I have a secret for you. 
The high-techs need us more than we need them. Without any high-techs at all, 
the human race would still have a chance. We have-we are-the one thing that is 
really needed: people. Between the Peace, the Republic, and the, uh, 
unaffiliated, we low-techs are almost three hundred human beings. That's more 
than in any settlement since the Extinction. Our biologists tell us it is 
enough-just barely enough-genetic diversity to restart the human race. Without 
our numbers, the high-techs are doomed. And they know it.
"So the most important thing is that we hang together. We are in a position to 
reinvent democracy and the rule of the majority."
Behind Wil, Gail Parker said, "God, what a hypocrite. The Peace never had any 
interest in elections when they were in the saddle."
"If I've convinced you of the need for unity-and frankly, the need is so obvious 
that I don't need much persuasiveness there-there is still the question of why 
the Peace is a better bet for you than the Republic.
"Think about it. The human race has been at the brink before. In the early part 
of the twenty-first century, plagues destroyed billions. Then, as now, 
technology remained widely available. Then, as now, the problem was the 
depopulation of the Earth. In all humility, my friends, the Peace Authority has 
more experience in solving our present problem than any group in history. We 
brought the human race back from the brink. Whatever else may be said of the 
Peace, we are the acknowledged experts in these matters...."
Tioulang shrugged diffidently. "That's really all I had to say. These are 
important things to think about. Whatever your decisions, I hope you'll think 
about them carefully. My people and I are happy to take any questions, but let's 
do it one on one." He cut the amplifier.
There was a buzz of conversation. A fair-sized crowd followed Tioulang back to 
his pavilion by the beer locker. Wil shook his head. The guy had made some 
points. But people didn't believe everything he said. Just behind Wil, Gail 
Parker was giving the Dasguptas a quick rehash of history. The Peace Authority 
was the great devil of the early twenty-first century, and Wil had lived near 
enough to that era to know that their reputation could not be entirely a smear. 
Tioulang's diffident, friendly manner might soften the harsh outlines of 
history, but few were going to buy his view of the Peace.
What some did buy-Wil realized unhappily as he listened to nearby ungovs-was 
Tioulang's overall viewpoint. They accepted his claim that Korolev's policies 
were designed to keep them down. They seemed to agree that "solidarity" was 
their great weapon against the "queen on the hill." And the Peacer's call for a 
reestablishment of democracy was especially popular. Wil could understand the 
NMs buying that; majority rule was the heart of their system. But what if the 
majority decided that everyone with dark skin should work for free? Or that 
Kansas should be invaded? He couldn't believe the ungoverned would accept such a 
notion. But some appeared to. This was a matter of survival, and the will of the 
majority was working in their favor. How quickly cracks the -,,eneer of 
civilization.
Brierson rolled to his feet. "I'm getting some food. Need anything more?"
Dilip looked up from the discussion with Parker. "Er, no. We're stocked."
"Okay. Be back in a little while." Wil wandered down the lawn, treading 
carefully around blankets and people. There seemed the same discouraging set of 
responses: the Peacers enthusiastic, NMs distrustful but recognizing the "basic 
wisdom" of Tioulang's speech, the ungovs of mixed opinions.
He reached the food, began filling a couple of dates. One good thing about all 
this deep philosophical debate: He didn't have to wait in line.
The voice behind him was a sardonic bass. "That Tioulang is really a clown, 
isn't he?"
Wil turned. An ally!
The speaker was a brown-haired Anglo, dressed in a heavy — and none too 
clean-robe. At one meter seventy, he was short enough so Wil could see the 
shaved patch on the top of his skull. The fellow had a permanent grin pasted on 
his face.
"Hello, Jason." Brierson tried to keep the irritation out of his voice. Of all 
the people here, that the only one to echo his thoughts was Jason Mudge, the 
cheated chiliast and professional crank! It was too much. Wil continued down the 
food line, piling his plates precariously high. Jason followed, not taking 
anything to eat, but bombarding Wil with the Mudge analysis of Tioulang's 
lunacy: Tioulang totally misunderstood Man's crisis. Tioulang was taking 
humanity back from the Faith. The Peacers and the NMs and the Korolevs — in 
fact, everybody-had closed their eyes to the possibility of redemption and the 
perils of further dis-Belief.
Wil grunted occasionally at the other's words, but avoided any meaningful 
response. Reaching the end of the line, he realized there was no way to get all 
this food across the lawn without slopping; he'd have to scarf some of it right 
here. He set the plates down and attacked one of the hot dogs.
Mudge circled closer, thinking Brierson had stopped to listen. Once his spiel 
began, he was a nonstop talker. Right now, his voice was "powered down." 
Earlier, he'd stood on the high ground north of the lawn and harangued them for 
a quarter hour. His voice had boomed across the picnic grounds, as loud as 
Tioulang's had been with amplification. Even at that volume, he'd spoken as fast 
as now, every word standing in block capitals. His message was very simple, 
though repeated again and again with different words: Present-day humans were 
Truants from the Second Coming of the Lord. (That Second Coming was presumably 
the Extinction.) He, Jason Mudge, was the prophet of the Third and Final Coming. 
,All must repent, take the robes of the Forgiven, and await the Salvation that 
was soon to come.
At first, the harangue had been amusing. Someone shouted that with all these 
Comings, Mudge must not only be a prophet, but the Lord's Sexual Athlete as 
well. Such taunts only increased Jason's zeal; he would talk till the Crack of 
Doom if there remained any unrepentant. Finally, the Dasgupta brothers walked up 
from the lawn and had a brief chat with the prophet. That had been the end of 
the speechifying. Afterwards, Will had asked them about it. Rohan had smiled 
shyly and replied, "We told him we'd throw him over the cliffs if he continued 
shouting at us." Knowing Dilip and Rohan, the threat was completely incredible. 
However, it worked on Mudge; he was a prophet who could not afford to become a 
martyr.
So now Jason toured the picnic grounds, looking for stragglers and other targets 
of opportunity. And W. W. Brierson was the current victim. Wil munched a curried 
egg roll and eyed the other man. Perhaps this wasn't entirely wasted time. Della 
and Yelén had lost all interest in Mudge, but this was the first time Wil had 
seen him up close.
Strictly speaking, Jason Mudge was a high-tech. He had left civilization in 
2200. The GreenInc database showed him as a (very) obscure religious nut, who 
proclaimed that the Second Coming of Christ would occur at the end of the next 
century. Apparently ridicule is a constant of history: Mudge couldn't take the 
pressure, and bobbled through to 2299, thinking to come out during the final 
throes of the world of sin. Alas, 2299 was after the Singularity; Mudge arrived 
on an empty planet. As he would willingly-and at great length-explain, he had 
erred in his biblical computations. The Second Coming had ill fact occurred in 
2250. Furthermore, his errors were fated, as punishment for his arrogance in 
trying to "skip ahead to the good part." But the Lord in His infinite compassion 
had given Jason one more chance. As the prophet who had missed the Second 
Coming, Jason Mudge was the perfect shepherd for the lost flock that would be 
saved at the Third.
So much for religion. GreenInc had shown another side of the man. Up until 2197, 
he had worked as a systems programmer. When Wil noticed that, Mudge's name had 
moved several notches up the suspect list. Here was a certified nut who could 
reasonably want to see the Korolev effort fail. And the nut's specialty involved 
the sort of skills needed to sabotage the hobble fail-safes and maroon Marta.
Yelén was not so suspicious of him. She had said that by the late twenty-second 
century, most occupations involved systems. And with prolongevity, many people 
had several specialties. Mudge's path had crossed the Korolevs' several times 
since the Age of Man. The encounters were always the same: Mudge needed help. Of 
all the high-techs who had left civilization voluntarily, he was the most poorly 
equipped: He had a flier but no space capability. He owned no autons. His 
databases consisted of a couple of religion cartridges.
Yet he was still on Wil's list. It was a bit implausible that anyone would go 
this far to disguise his abilities, but Mudge might have something cached away. 
He had asked Yelén to put Mudge under surveillance, to see if he was 
communicating with hidden autons.
Now Wil had a chance to apply the "legendary Brierson savvy" firsthand. Watching 
Mudge, Wil realized the little man required virtually no feedback. As long as 
Wil was standing
ere facing him, the harangue would continue. No doubt he rarely talked to anyone 
who gave more. Could he respond at all once he got rolling? Let's see. Wil 
raised his hand and injected a random comment. "But we don't need supernatural 
explanations, Jason. Why, Juan Chanson says invaders caused the Extinction."
The Mudge diatribe continued for almost a second before tie noticed there had 
been some real interaction. His mouth hung open for an instant, and then-he 
laughed. "That backslider? I don't see why you people believe anything he says. 
He has fallen from the Way of Christ, into the toils of science." The last was a 
dirty word in Jason's mouth. He shook his head, and his smile came back broader 
than ever. "But your question shows something. Indeed we must consider that —" 
The last prophet moved closer and launched still another attempt to make him 
understand...
... and Wil really did. Jason Mudge needed people. But somewhere in his past, 
the little man had concluded that the only way to get others' attention was with 
the cosmically important. And the harder he tried to explain, the more hostile 
was his audience — until it was a triumph to have an audience at all. If there 
was anything to the Brierson intuition, Yelén was right Jason Mudge should come 
off the suspect list.
 
It might seem a small thing, the twenty-five-hour day. But that extra hour and 
bit was one of the nicest things about the new world. Almost everyone felt it. 
For the first time in their lives, there seemed to be enough time in the day to 
get things done, enough time to reflect. Surely, everyone agreed, they would 
soon adjust, and the days would be just as crowded as always. Yet the weeks 
passed and the effect persisted.
The picnic stretched through the long afternoon, lost much of the intentness 
that followed Tioulang's speech. Attention shifted to the volleyball nets on the 
north side of the lawn. For many, it was a mindless, pleasurable time.
It should have been so for Wil Brierson; he had always enjoyed such things. 
Today, the longer he stayed, the more uncomfortable he became. The reason? If 
all the human race was here, then the person who had shanghaied him was, too. 
Somewhere within two hundred meters was the cause of all his pain. Beforehand, 
he'd thought he could ignore that fact; he'd been faintly amused at the Korolev 
fears he might launch a vendetta against the shanghaier.
How little he knew himself. Wil found himself watching the other players, trying 
to find a face from the past. He muffed easy shots; worse, he crashed into a 
smaller player. Considering Brierson's ninety kilos, that was a distinct breach 
of etiquette.
After that, he stood on the sidelines. Did he really know what he was looking 
for? The embezzlement case had been so simple; a blind man could have tagged the 
culprit. Three suspects there had been: the Kid, the Executive, and the janitor 
— that was how he'd thought of them. And given a few more days, he'd have had an 
arrest. Brierson's great mistake was to underestimate the crook's panic. Only 
trivial amounts had been stolen; what kind of crazyman would bobble the 
investigating officer, and guarantee a terrible punishment?
The Kid, the Exec, the Janitor. Wil wasn't even sure of their names just now, 
but he remembered their faces so clearly. No doubt, the Korolevs had disguised 
the fellow, but Wil was sure that given time he could see through such.
This is insane. He'd all but promised Yelén-and Marta before her-that he 
wouldn't go after the shanghaier. And what could he do if he found the bastard? 
If anything, life would be more unpleasant than before.... Still, his eyes 
wandered, thirty years of police skill in harness to his pain. Wil left the 
games and began a circuit of the grounds. More than half the picnickers were not 
involved with the volleyball. He moved with apparent aimlessness but kept track 
of everything in his field of vision, watching for any sign of evasion. Nothing.
After walking around the field, Brierson moved from group to group. His approach 
was relaxed, cheerful. In the old days, this appearance had almost always been 
genuine, even when he was on the job. Now it was a double deception. Somewhere 
above him, Yelén was watching his every move.... She should be pleased. He 
appeared to be doing exactly what she wanted of him: in the course of two hours, 
he interviewed about half the ungovs-all without giving the appearance of 
official scrutiny. He learned a lot. For instance, there were many people who 
saw through the governments' line. Good news for Yelén.
At the same time, Wil's private project continued. After ten or fifteen minutes 
of chatting, Wil could be sure that yet one more was not his quarry. He kept 
track of the faces and the names. Something inside him took pleasure in so 
thoroughly fooling Yelén.
The shanghaier was almost certainly a loner. How would such a type hide himself? 
Wil didn't know. He did discover that almost no one was really alone now. Faced 
with an empty Earth, people were hanging together, trying to help those who hurt 
the most. And he could see terrible grief in many, often hidden behind 
cheerfulness. The basket cases were the folks who had been out of stasis only a 
month or two; for them, the loss was so painfully fresh. Surely there had been 
some outright psychiatric breakdowns; what was Yelén doing about those? Hmm. It 
was entirely possible the shanghaier wasn't here. No matter. When he got home, 
he would match the people he'd met with the settlement lists. The holes would 
stand out. After the next party or the next, he'd have a good idea who he was 
after.
The sun slowly fell, a straight-down path that seemed faintly unreal to someone 
raised in midlatitudes. Shadows deepened. The green of lawn and hillsides was 
subtly changed by the reddening light; more than ever, the land looked like a 
fantasist's painting. The sky turned to gold and then to red. As twilight passed 
quickly into night, light panels came on by two of the volleyball courts. There 
were several bonfires-cheerful yellow light compared to the blue around the 
courts.
Wil had talked with most of the ungovs and perhaps twenty Peacers. Not an 
enormous group, but then he'd had to move slowly-to fool Yelén and to assure 
that he wasn't fooled by any disguise.
Darkness released him from the terrible compulsion; there was no point to an 
interview unless he was confident of the results. He wandered back towards the 
courts, relief verging on elation. Even his feeling of shame at deceiving Yelén 
was gone. In spite of himself, he had done good work for her this day. He'd seen 
issues and attitudes that she had never mentioned.
For instance:
There were people sitting away from the lights. Their talk was low and intense. 
He was almost back to the courts when he came on a large group-almost thirty 
people, all women. By the light of the nearest bonfire, he recognized Gail 
Parker and a few others. There were both ungovs and NMs here, maybe a few 
Peacers. Wil paused, and Parker looked up. Her gaze had none of its earlier 
friendliness. He drifted away, aware of several pairs of eyes following his 
retreat.
fie knew the shape of their discussions. People like Kim Tioulang could make 
grandiose talk about reestablishing the human race. But that reestablishment 
demanded tremendous birth rates, for at least a century. Without womb tanks and 
postnatal automation, the job would fall on the women. It meant creating a serf 
class, but not the one Tioulang was so eager to warn against. These serfs might 
be beloved and cherished — and might believe in the rightness of it all as much 
as anyone — but they would carry the heavy burden. It had happened before. The 
plagues of the early twenty-first century had killed most of the race, and left 
many of the survivors sterile. The women of that period had a very restricted 
role, very different from women before or after. Wil's parents had grown up in 
that time: The only serious fights he could remember between them involved his 
mother's efforts to start her own business.
A motherhood serfdom would be much harder to establish this time around. These 
people were not coming back from plagues and a terrible war. Except for the 
Peacers, they were from the late twenty-first and the twenty-second. The women 
were highly trained, most with more than one career. As often as not, they were 
the bosses. As often as not, they initiated romance. Many of those from the 
twenty-second were sixty or seventy years old, no matter how young and lush 
their bodies. They were not people you could push around.
... And yet, and yet Gail and the others could see final extinction waiting 
irrevocably in the very near future... unless they made some terrible 
sacrifices. He understood their intent discussion and Gail's unfriendly stare. 
Which sacrifices to make, which to decline. What to demand, what to accept. Wil 
was glad he wasn't welcome in their councils.
Something moon-bright rose into the air ahead of him, quickly fell back. Wil 
looked up and broke into a trot, forcing the problem from his mind. The light 
rose again, sweeping fast-moving shadows across the lawn. Someone had brought a 
glowball! A crowd had already gathered along three sides of the volleyball 
court, blocking his view. Brierson edged around till he could see the play.
Wil found himself grinning stupidly. Glowballs were something new, just a couple 
of months old... at the time he was shanghaied. It might be old hat to some, but 
it was a complete novelty to the Peacers and even to the NMs. The ball had the 
same size and feel as a regulation volleyball-but its surface was brightly 
aglow. The teams were playing by this light alone, and Wil knew the first few 
games would be comic relief. If you kept your eye on the ball, then little else 
was bright enough to see The ball became the center of the universe, a sphere 
that seemed to swell and shrink while everything else swung around it. After a 
few moments, you couldn't find your teammates--or even the ground. The NM and 
Peacer players spent almost as much time on their butts as standing. Laughter 
swept the far side of the court as three spectators fell down. This ball was 
better than the others Wil had seen. Whenever it touched out-of-bounds, it 
chimed and the light changed to yellow. That was as an impressive trick.
Not everyone had problems. No doubt Tunç Blumenthal had always played with 
glowballs. In any case, Wil knew that Tunç's biggest problem was playing down to 
everyone else's level. The high-tech massed as much as Wil, but stood over two 
meters tall. He had the speed and coordination of a professional. Yet, when he 
held back and let others dominate the play, he didn't seem condescending. Tunç 
was the only high-tech who really mixed with the lows.
After a time, all players learned the proper strategy: less and less did they 
watch the ball directly. They watched each other.lost important, they watched 
the shadows. With the glowball, those shadows were twisting, shifting 
fingers-showing, where the ball was and where it was going.
The games went quickly, but there was only one ball and many wanted to play. Wil 
gave up any immediate plans to get on the court. He wandered around the edge of 
the crowd, watching the shadows flick back and forth, highlighting a face for an 
instant, then plunging it into darkness. It was fun to sec adults as fascinated 
as kids.
One face stopped him short: Kim Tioulang stood at the outskirts of the crowd, 
less than five meters from Brierson. He vas alone. He might be a boss, but 
apparently he didn't -iced a herd of "aides" like Steve Fraley. The man was 
short, his face in shadow except when a high shot washed him in a quick 
down-and-up of light. His concentration was intense, but his expressionless gaze 
contained no hint of pleasure.
The man was strikingly frail. He was something that did not exist in Wil's 
time-except by suicidal choice or metabolic accident. Kim Tioulang's body was 
old; it was in the final stages of the degeneration which, before the 
mid-twenty-first, had limited life spans to less than a century.
There were so many different ways to think of time now. Kim had lived less than 
eighty years. He was young by comparison with the "teenagers" from the 
twenty-second. He had nothing on Yelén's three hundred years of realtime 
experience or the mind-destroying stretch of Della's nine thousand. Yet, in some 
ways, Tioulang was a more extreme case than either Korolev or Lu.
Brierson had read the GreenInc summary on the man. Kim Tioulang was born in 
1967. That was two years before Man began the conquest of space, thirty years 
before the war and the plagues, at least fifty years before Della Lu was born. 
In a perverse sense, he was the oldest living human.
Tioulang had been born in Kampuchea, in the middle of one of the regional wars 
that pocked the late twentieth. Though limited in space and time, some of those 
wars were as horrible as what followed the 1997 collapse. Tioulang's childhood 
was drenched in death — and unlike the twenty-first-century plagues, where the 
murderers were faceless ambiguities, death in Kampuchea came person to person 
via bullets and backings and deliberate starvation. GreenInc said the rest of 
Tioulang's family disappeared in the maelstrom... and little Kim ended up in the 
USA. He was a bright kid; by 1997 he was finishing a doctorate in physics. And 
working for the organization that overthrew the governments and became the Peace 
Authority.
From there, GreenInc had little but Peacer news stories and historical inference 
to document Tioulang's life. No one knew if Tioulang had anything to do with 
starting the plagues. (For that matter, there was no absolute proof the Peace 
had started them.) By 2010, the man was Director for Asia. He'd kept his third 
of the planet in line. He had a better reputation than the other Directors; he 
was no Christian Gerrault, "Butcher of Eurafrica." Except during the Mongolian 
insurrection, he managed to avoid large-scale bloodshed. He remained in power 
right up to the fall of the Peace in 2048 — and that fall was for Tioulang less 
than four months past.
And so, even though Kim Tioulang predated the rest of living humanity by scant 
decades, his background put him in a class by himself. He was the only one who 
had grown up in a world where humans routinely killed other humans. He was the 
only one who had ruled, and killed to stay in power. Next to him, Steve Fraley 
was a high-school class president.
An arcing shot lifted the glowball above the crowd, putting Tioulang's face back 
in the light — and Wil saw that the Peacer was staring at him. The other smiled 
faintly, then stepped back from the crowd to stand beside Brierson. Up close, 
Wil saw that his face was mottled, pocked. Could old age alone do that?
"You're Brierson, the one who works for Korolev?" His voice was just loud enough 
to be heard over the laughs and shouting. Light danced back and forth around 
them.
Wil bridled, then decided he wasn't being accused of betraying the low-techs. 
"I'm investigating Marta Korolev's murder."
"Hmm." Tioulang folded his arms and looked away from Wil. "I've done some 
interesting reading the last few weeks, Mr. Brierson." He chuckled. "For me, 
it's like future history to see where the next hundred and fifty years took the 
world.... You know, those years turned out as well as ever I could hope. I 
always thought that without the Peace, humankind would exterminate itself.... 
And maybe it did eventually, but you went for more than a century without our 
help. I think the immortality thing must have something to do with it. Does it 
really work? You look around twenty years old —"
Brierson nodded. "But I'm fifty."
Tioulang scuffed at the lawn with his heel. His voice was almost wistful. "Yes. 
And apparently I can have it now, too. The long view — I can already see how it 
softens things, and how that's probably for the best.
"I've also read your histories of the Peace. You people make us out as monsters. 
The hell of it is, you have some of it right." He looked up at Wil, and his 
voice sharpened. "I meant what I said this afternoon. The human race is in a 
bind here; we of the Peace would make the best leaders. But I also meant it when 
I said we're willing to go with democracy; I see now it could really work.
"You are very important to us, Brierson. We know you have Korolev's ear — don't 
interrupt, please! We can talk to her whenever we wish, but we think she 
respects your opinions. If you believe what I am telling you, there is some 
chance she may too."
"Okay," said Wil. "But what is the message? You oppose Yelén's policies, want to 
run things under some government system with majority rule. What if your people 
don't win out? The NMs have a lot more in common with the ungovs and the 
high-techs than you. If we fall back to a government situation, they are more 
likely to be the leaders than you. Would you accept that?" Or grab for dower 
like you did at the end o f the twentieth?
Tioulang looked around, almost as though checking for eavesdroppers. "I expect 
we'll win, Brierson. The problems we face here are problems the Peace is 
especially well equipped to handle. Even if we don't win, we'll still be needed. 
I've talked to Steven Fraley. He may seem rough and tough to you.. , but not to 
me. He's a little bit of a fool, and likes to boss people around, but left to 
ourselves, we could get along."
"Left to yourselves?"
"That's the other thing I want to talk to you about." He shot a furtive glance 
past Wil. "There are forces at work Korolev should know about. Not everyone 
wants a peaceful solution. If a high-tech backs one faction, we —" The swinging 
light splashed over them. Tioulang's expression suddenly froze into something 
that might might have been hatred. .. or fear. "I can't talk more now. I can't 
talk." He turned and walked stiffly away.
Wil glanced in the opposite direction. There was no one special in the crowd 
there. What had spooked the Peacer? Wil drifted around the court, watching the 
game and the crowd.
Several minutes passed. The game ended. There were the usual cheerful arguments 
about who should be on the new teams. He heard Tunç Blumenthal say something 
about "trying something new" with the glowball. The random chatter lessened as 
Tunç talked to the players and they pulled down the volleyball net. When the new 
game started, Wil saw that Blumenthal had indeed tried something new.
Tunç stood at the serving line and punched the glowball across the court, over 
the heads of the other team. As it passed across the far court out-of-bounds, 
there was a flash of green light and the ball bounced as if from some unseen 
surface. It sailed up and back-and bounced downwards off an invisible ceiling. 
As it hit the ground, the glow turned to out-of-play yellow. Tune served again, 
this time to the side. The ball bounced as from a side wall, then against the 
invisible far-court wall, then off the other side. The green flashes were 
accompanied by the sounds of solid rebounds. The crowd was silent except for 
scattered gasps of surprise. Were the teams trapped in there? The idea occurred 
to several of the players simultaneously. They ran to the invisible walls, 
reached out to touch them. One fellow lost his balance and fell off the court 
"There's nothing there!"
Blumenthal gave some simple rules and they volleyed. At first it was chaos, but 
after a few minutes they were really playing the new game. It was fast, a 
strange cross between volleyball and closed-court handball. Wil couldn't imagine 
how this trick was managed, but it was spectacular. Before, the ball had moved 
in clean parabolas, broken only by the players strokes. Now it careened off 
unseen surfaces, the shadows reversing field instantly.
"Ah, Brierson! What are you doing out here, man? You should be playing. I 
watched you earlier today. You're good.
Wil turned to the voice. It was Philippe Genet and two Peacer women friends. The 
women wore open jackets an, bikini bottoms. Genet wore only shorts. The 
high-tech walked between the women, his hands inside their jackets, at they 
waists.
Wil laughed. "I'd reed lots of practice to he good with something that wild. I 
imagine you could do pretty well, though."
The other shrugged and drew the women closer. Genet was Brierson's height but 
perhaps fifteen kilos less massive, verging on gauntness. He was a black, though 
several shades paler than Wil. "Do you have any idea where that glowball came 
from, Brierson?"
"No. One of the high-techs."
"That's certain. I don't know if you realize what a clever gadget that is. Oh, 
I'll bet you twenty-first-century types had something like it: put a HI light 
and a navigation processor in a ball and you could play a simple game of night 
volley. But look at that thing, Brierson." He nodded at the glowball, caroming 
back and forth off invisible barriers. "It has its own agrav unit. Together with 
the navigation processor, it's simulating the existence of reflecting walls. I 
was in the game earlier. That ball's a Collegiate Mark 3, a whole athletic 
department. If one team is short a player, just tell the ball-and in addition to 
boundary walls, it'll simulate the extra player. You can even play solitaire 
with it, specify whatever skill level and strategy you want for the other 
players."
Interesting. Wil found his attention divided between the description and the 
high-tech himself. This was the first time he'd talked to Genet. From a 
distance, the man had seemed sullen and closemouthed, quite in keeping with the 
business profile GreenInc had on him. Now he was talkative, almost jovial... and 
even less likable. The man had the arrogance of someone who was both very 
foolish and very rich. As he talked, Genet's hands roamed across the women's 
torsos. In the shifting of light and shadow, it was like watching a stop-action 
striptease. The performance was both repellent and strange. In Brierson's time, 
many people were easygoing about sex, whether for pleasure or pay. This was 
different; Genet treated the two like... property. They were fine furniture, to 
be fondled while he talked to Brierson. And they made no objection. These two 
were a far cry from the group with Gail Parker.
Genet glanced sidelong at Wil and smiled slowly. "Yes, Brierson, the glowball is 
high-tech. Collegiate didn't market the M.3 till..." He paused, consulting some 
database. "Till 2195. So it's strange, don't you think, that the New Mexicans 
are the people who brought it to the party?"
"Obviously some high-tech gave it to them earlier." Wil spoke a bit sharply, 
distracted by the other's hands.
"Obviously. But consider the implications, Brierson. The NMs are one of the two 
largest groups here. They are absolutely necessary to the success of the Korolev 
plan. From history-my history, your personal experience-we know they're used to 
running things. The only thing that keeps them from bulldozing the rest of you 
low-techs is their technical incompetence.... Now, just suppose some high-tech 
wanted to take over from Korolev. The easiest way to destroy her plan might ire 
to back the NMs and feed them some autons and agravs and advanced bobblers. 
Korolev and the rest of us high-techs could not afford to put the NMs down; we 
need them if we are to reestablish civilization. We might just have to 
capitulate to whoever was behind the scheme."
Tioulang was trying to tell me something similar. The evening cool was suddenly 
chill. Strange that a thing as innocent as the glowball should be the first 
evidence since Marta's murder that someone was trying to take over. What did 
this do to his suspect list? Tammy Robinson might use such a bribe to recruit. 
Or maybe Chanson was right, and the force that ended civilization in the 
twenty-third was still at work. Or maybe the enemy simply desired to own, and 
was willing to risk the destruction of them all to achieve that end. He looked 
at Genet. Earlier in the day, Brierson had been upset to think they might slide 
back to governments and majority rule. Now ire remembered that more evil and 
primitive institutions were possible. Genet oozed confidence, megalomania. Wil 
was suddenly sure the other was capable of planting such a clue, pointing it 
out, and then enjoying Wil's consternation and suspicion.
Some of that suspicion must have shown on his face. Genet's smile broadened. His 
hand brushed aside one girl's jacket, flaunting his "property." Wil relaxed 
fractionally; over the years, he had dealt with some pretty unpleasant people 
Maybe this high-tech was an enemy and maybe not, but he wasn't going to get 
under Wil's skin.
"You know I'm working for Yelén on Manta's murder, Mr. Genet. What you tell me, 
I'll pass on to her. What do you suggest we do?"
Genet chuckled. "You'll 'pass it on,' will you? My dear Brierson, I don't doubt 
that every word we say is going directly to her.... But you're right. It's 
easier to pretend. And you low-techs are a good deal more congenial. Less back 
talk, anyway.
"As for what we should do: nothing overt just yet. We can't tell whether the 
glowball was a slip, or a subtle announcement of victory. I suggest we put the 
NMs under intense surveillance. If this was a slip, then it will be easy to 
prevent a takeover. Personally, I don't think the NMs have received much help 
yet; we'd see other evidence if they had." He watched the game for a few 
moments, then turned back to Wil. "You especially should be pleased by this turn 
of events, Brierson."
"I suppose so." Wil resented admitting anything to Genet. "If this is connected 
to Manta's murder, it may break the case."
"That's not what I meant. You were shanghaied, right?"
Wil gave a brief nod.
"Ever wonder what became of the fellow who bushwhacked you?" He paused, but 
Brierson couldn't even nod to that. "I'm sure dear Yelén would like this kept 
from you, but I think you deserve to know. They caught him; I've got records of 
the trial. I don't know how the skunk ever thought he could evade conviction. 
The court handed down the usual sentence: He was bobbled, timed to come out 
about a month after you. Personally, I think he deserved whatever you might do 
to him. But Manta and Yelén didn't work that way. They rescued everyone they 
could. They figured every warm body increases the colony's chances.
"Marts and Yelén made him promise to stay out of your way. Then they gave him a 
shallow disguise and turned him over to the NMs. They figured he could fade into 
the crowd there." Genet laughed. "So you see why I say this is an enjoyable 
twist of fate for you, Brierson. Putting pressure on the NMs Ms gives you a 
chance to step on the insect who put yon here." He saw the blank expression on 
Wil's face. "You thin I'm putting you on? You can check it out easily enough. 
The NM Director, President-whatever they call him-has taken a real shine to your 
friend. The twerp is on Fraley's staff now. saw them a few minutes ago, on the 
other side of this game."
Genet's gaunt face parted in a final smile. He gathered his 'property" close and 
walked into the darkness. "Check it out, Brierson. You'll get your follies yet."
Wil stood quietly for several minutes after the other left. He was looking at 
the game, but his eyes did not track the glowball anymore. Finally, he turned 
and walked along the outskirts of the crowd. The way was lit whenever the ball 
rose above the fans. That light flickered white and green and yellow, depending 
on whether the ball was live, striking a "wall," or out of play. Wil didn't 
notice the colors anymore.
Steve Fraley and his friends were sitting on the far side cat the court. Somehow 
they had persuaded the other spectators to stand clear of the sidelines, so they 
had a good view even sitting down. Wil stayed in the crowd. From here he could 
observe with little chance that Fraley would notice.
There were fifteen in the group. Most looked like staff people, though Wil 
recognized a few ungovs. Fraley sat near the middle, with a couple of his top 
aides. They spent more time talking to the ungovs than watching the game. For a 
government type, of Steve had plenty of experience with the soft sell. Twice 
back in the 2090s he'd been elected President of the Republic.
It was an impressive achievement-and an empty one: By the end of the 
twenty-first, the New Mexico government was like a beach house when the dunes 
shift. War and territorial expansion were not feasible-the failure of the Kansas 
Incursion had shown that. And the Republic couldn't compete economically with 
the ungoverned lands. The grass was truly greener on the other side of the 
fence, and with unrestricted emigration, the situation only got worse. As a 
matter of frank competition, the government repealed regulation after 
regulation. Unlike Aztlan, the Republic never formally disgoverned. But in 2097, 
the NM Congress amended the constitution over Fraley's veto-to renounce all 
mandatory taxing authority. Steve Fraley objected that what was left was not a 
government. He was obviously correct, but it didn't do him much food. What was 
left was a viable business. The Republic's police and court system didn't last; 
it simply wasn't competitive with existing companies. But the NM Congress did. 
Tourists from all over the world visited Albuquerque to pay "taxes," to vote, to 
see a real government in action. The ghost of the Republic lived for many years, 
a source of pride and profit to its citizens.
It was not enough for Steve Fraley. He used what was left of presidential 
authority to assemble the remnants of the NM military machine. With a hundred 
fellow right-thinkers he bobbled forward five hundred years-to a future where, 
it was hoped, sanity had returned.
Wil grimaced to himself. So, like all the cranks and crooks and victims who 
overshot the Singularity, Fraley and his friends ended up on the shore of a lake 
that had once been open ocean-fifty million years after Man.
Wil's eyes slid from Fraley to the aides beside him. Like many self-important 
types, these two kept their apparent age in the middle forties. Sleek and gray, 
they were the NM ideal of leadership. Wil remembered both from 
twenty-first-century news stories. Neither could be the... creature.. , he 
sought. He pushed through the crowd, closer to the open space around the NMs.
Several of those listening to Fraley's sales pitch were strangers. Wil stared at 
them, applying all the tests he had invented during the day.
Scarcely conscious of the movement, Wil edged out of the crowd. Now he could see 
all the NMs in Fraley's group. A few were paying attention to the discussions 
around Fraley; the rest were watching the game. Wil studied each one, matching 
what he saw with the Kid, the Exec, and the Janitor. There were several vague 
resemblances, but nothing certain.... He stopped, eves caught on a middle-aged 
Asian. The fellow didn't resemble any of the three, yet there was something 
strange about him. He was as old as Fraley's top advisers, yet the game had all 
his attention. And this guy didn't have the others' air of assurance. He was 
balding, faintly pudgy. Wil stared at him, trying to imagine the man with a head 
of hair, and without eyefolds or facial flab.
Make those changes, and take thirty years off his apparent age... and you'd 
have... the Kid. The nephew of the guy who was robbed. This was the thing that 
had taken Virginia from him, that had taken Billy and Anne. This was the thing 
that had destroyed Brierson's whole world... and done it just to avoid a couple 
of years of reparation surcharge.
And what can I do if I find the bastard. Something cold and awful took over 
then, and thought ceased.
Wil found himself in the open area between the volleyball court and the NMs. He 
must have shouted; everyone was looking at him. Fraley stared openmouthed. For 
an instant, he looked afraid. Then he saw where Wil was headed, and he laughed.
There was no humor in the Kid's response. His head snapped up, instant 
recognition on his face. He sprang to his feet, his hands held awkwardly before 
him — whether an inept defense or a plea for mercy was not clear. It didn't 
matter. Wil's deliberate walk had become a lumbering run. Someone with his own 
voice was screaming. The NMs in his way scattered. Wil was barely conscious of 
body-blocking one who was insufficiently agile; the fellow simply bounced off 
him.
The Kid's face held sheer terror. He backpedaled frantically, tripped; this was 
one bind he would not escape.
THIRTEEN
Something flashed in the air above Wil, and his legs went numb. He went down, 
just short of where the Kid had been standing. Even as the breath smashed out of 
him, he was trying to get back to his knees. It was no good. He snorted blood, 
and rational thought resumed. Someone had stungunned him.
Around him there was shouting and people were still backing away, unsure if his 
berserker charge might continue. The game had broken off; the glowball's light 
was steady and unmoving. Wil touched his nose; bloodied but unbroken.
When he twisted back onto his elbows, the babble quieted.
Steve Fraley walked toward him, a wide grin on his face. "My, my, Inspector. 
Getting a little carried away, aren't you? I thought you were cooler than that. 
You, of all people, should know that we can't support the old grudges." As he 
got closer, Wil had to strain to look up at his face. Wil gave up and lowered 
his head. Beyond the NM President, at the limit of the glowball's illumination, 
he saw the Kid puking on the grass.
Fraley stepped close to the fallen Brierson, his sport shoes filling most of the 
near view. Wil wondered what it would be like to get one of those shoes in the 
face-and somehow he was sure that Steve was wondering the same thing.
"President Fraley." Yelén's voice spoke from somewhere above. "I certainly agree 
with you about grudges."
"Um, yes." Fraley retreated a couple of steps. When he spoke, it sounded as if 
he were looking upwards. "Thanks for stunning him, Ms. Korolev. Perhaps it's for 
the best that this happened. I think it's time you realized who you can trust to 
behave responsibly-and who you cannot."
Yelén did not reply. Several seconds passed. There was quiet conversation around 
him. He heard footsteps approach, then Tunç Blumenthal's voice. "We just want to 
move him away from the crowd, Yelén, give him a chance to get his legs back. 
Okay?"
"Okay."
Blumenthal helped Wil roll onto his back, then picked him up under the 
shoulders. Looking around, Wil saw that Rohan Dasgupta had grabbed his legs. But 
all Wil could feel was Blumenthal's hands; his legs were still dead meat. The 
two lugged him away from the light and the crowd. It was a struggle or the 
slender Rohan. Every few steps, Wil's rear dragged on the ground, a noise 
without sensation.
Finally, it was dark all around. They set him down, his back against a large 
boulder. The courts and bonfires were pools of light clustered below them. 
Blumenthal sat on his heels beside Wil. "Soon as you feel a tingling in those 
legs, I suggest you try walking, Wil Brierson. You'll have less an ache that 
way."
Wil nodded. It was the usual advice to stungun victims, at least when the heart 
wasn't involved.
"My God, Wil, what happened?" Curiosity struggled with embarrassment in Rohan's 
voice.
Brierson took a deep breath; the embers of his rage still glowed. "You've never 
seen me blow my stack, is that it, Rohan?" The world was so empty. Everybody 
he'd cared about was gone... and in their place was an anger he had never known. 
Wil shook his head. He'd never realized what an uncomfortable thing continuing 
anger could be.
They sat in silence a minute more. Pins-and-needles prickling started up Wil's 
feet. He'd never known a stun to wear off so quickly; another high-tech 
improvement, no doubt. He rolled onto his knees. "Let's see if I can walk." He 
climbed to his feet, using Dasgupta and Blumenthal as crutches.
"There's a path over here," said Blumenthal. "Just keep walking and it'll get 
easier."
They tottered off. The path turned downwards, leaving the picnic grounds behind 
the crest of a hill. The shouts and laughter faded, and soon the loudest sounds 
were the insects. There was a sweetish smell-flowers?-that he'd never noticed 
around Town Korolev. The air was cool, downright cold on those parts of his legs 
that had regained sensation.
At first, Wil had to put all his weight on Blumenthal and Dasgupta. His legs 
seemed scarcely more than stumps, his knees now locking, now bending loose with 
no effective coordination. After fifty meters his feet could feel the pebbles in 
the path and he was doing at least part of the navigating.
The night was clear and moonless. Somehow the stars alone were enough to see 
by-or maybe it was the Milky Way? Wil looked into the sky ahead of them. The 
pale light was strangely bright. It climbed out of the east, a broad band that 
narrowed and faded halfway up the sky. East? Could the megayears change even 
that? Wil almost stumbled, felt the others' grasp tighten. He looked higher, saw 
the real Milky Way slicing down from another direction.
Blumenthal chuckled. "There wasn't much going on at the Lagrange zones in your 
time, was there?"
"There were habitats at L4 and L5. They were easy to see, like bright stars," 
nothing like this stardust haze.
"Put enough stuff in Luna's orbit and you'll see more than just a few new stars. 
In my time, millions lived there. All Earth's heavy industry was there. Things 
were getting crowded. There's only so much thermal and chemical pollution you 
can dump before your factories begin to poison themselves."
Now Wil remembered things Marta and Yelén had said. "But it's mainly bobbles 
there now."
"Yes. This light isn't caused by factories and civilization. Third-body 
perturbations have long since flushed the original artifacts. Now it's a handy 
place for short-term storage, or to park observing equipment."
Wil stared at the pale glow. He wondered how many thousands of bobbles it took 
to make such a light. He knew Yelén still had much of her equipment off Earth. 
How many millions of tonnes were in "short-term storage" out there? For that 
matter, how many travelers were still in stasis, ignoring all the messages the 
Korolevs had laid down across the megayears? The light was ghostly in more ways 
than one.
They went another couple of hundred meters eastwards. Gradually Wil's 
coordination returned, till he was walking without help and only an occasional 
wobble. His eyes were fully dark-adapted now. Light-colored flowers floated in 
the bushes to the side of the path, and when they nodded close the sweetish 
smell came stronger. He wondered if the path was natural or a piece of Korolev 
landscaping. He risked his balance by looking straight up. Sure enough, there 
was something dark against the stars. Yelén's auton — and probably Della's, too 
was still with them.
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 
ill 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. 1 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 of 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.
"Hub?"
"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 prescrip- tion?" 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..end 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.
"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.
FOURTEEN
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 dot 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. I t 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."
FIFTEEN
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 
hobble 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 hey 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 most 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. "Hog '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 f 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.
Wil looked at the remaining bolo. Yelén was in her library. Sunlight streamed 
through its fake windows. Night and day must have little meaning to Yelén; that 
made Wil feel even more tired.
Korolev diddled with something on her desk, then looked back at Wil. "Thanks for 
the compromise. I was on the verge of doing something... rash."
"You're welcome." He closed his eyes a moment, almost succumbing to stun-induced 
sleepiness.
"Yes. Now we know our worst fears are true, Inspector. Agrav glowballs. 
Polka-dot paint. These are completely trivial things compared to what we have 
already given away. But they are not on the gift inventory. It's just like Phil 
says. Marta's murderer is not done with us. Someone or something is out there, 
taking over the low-techs."
"You don't sound so sure the Robinsons are behind it."
"... No, that was partly wishful thinking. They have the clearest motive. Tammy 
would be the easiest to handle.... No. It could be almost any of the 
high-techs."
Brierson was too tired to keep his mouth shut. "Do we even know who those are?"
"What do you mean?"
"What if the murderer is masquerading as a low-tech? Maybe there's a surviving 
graverobber."
"That's absurd." But her eyes went wide, and for nearly fifteen seconds she was 
silent. "Yes, that's absurd," she repeated, with a trace less certainty. "I've 
got good records on all the rescues; we made most of them. We never saw any 
unusual equipment. Now, a masquerader might have his high-'tech gear in separate 
storage, but we'd know if he moved much of it.... I don't know if you can 
understand, Brierson: We've had total control of their stasis from the 
beginning. An advanced traveler couldn't tolerate such domination."
"Okay." But he wondered if Lu's reaction would be the same.
"Good. Now I want to get your impression of what you saw today. I watched it all 
myself, but "
Wil held up a hand. "How about waiting till tomorrow, Yelén? I'll have things 
sorted out better."
"No." The queen on the mountain wasn't angry, but she was doing to have things 
her way. "There are things I need to know right now. For instance, what do you 
think spooked Kim Tioulang?"
"I have no idea. Could you see who he was looking at when he panicked?"
"Into the crowd. I didn't have enough cameras to be more definite. My guess is 
he had lookouts posted, and one of them signaled that Mr. Bad was in the area."
Mr. Bad. Phil Genet. The connection was instantaneous, needed no supporting 
logic. "Why make a mystery of it? Give Tioulang some protection and ask him what 
he has in mind."
"I did. Now he won't talk."
"Surely you have truth drugs. Why not just bring him in and —" Wil stopped, 
suddenly ashamed. He was talking like some government policeman: "The needs of 
the State come first." He could rationalize, of course. This was a world without 
police contracts and legal systems. Till they were established, simple survival 
might justify such tactics. The argument was slippery, and Wil wondered how far 
he would slide into savagery before he found solid footing.
Yelén smiled at his embarrassment-whether from sympathy or amusement he could 
not tell. "I decided not to. Not yet, anyway. The low-techs hate me enough 
already. And it's just possible Tioulang might suicide under questioning. Some 
of the twentieth-century governments put pretty good psychblocks in their 
people. If the Peacers inherited that filthy habit... Besides, he may not know 
any more than we do: Someone is backing the NM faction."
Wil remembered Tioulang's sudden panic; the man feared someone in particular. 
"You have him protected?"
"Yes. Almost as well as you, though he doesn't know it. For the time being I 
won't risk snatching him."
"You want to know my favorite candidate for villain? Phil Genet."
Yelén leaned forward. "Why?"
"He showed up just a few minutes after Tioulang took off. The man reeks of 
evil."
"'Reeks of evil'? That's a professional opinion, is it?"
Wil rubbed his eyes. "Hey, you wanted to get my 'impressions,' remember?" But 
she was right; he wouldn't have put it that way if he'd been thinking straight.
"Phil's a sadist. I've known that for years. And I think he's worse now that 
we've got all the low-techs out of stasis — you little guys are such easy 
victims. I saw how he worked you over about Lindemann. I'm sorry about stunning 
you, Wil, but 1 can't tolerate any of the old grudges."
Wil nodded, faintly surprised. There was something near sympathy in her voice. 
In fact, he was grateful she had stunned him down. "Genet is capable of murder, 
Yelén."
"Lots of people are. What would you have done to Lindemann if... ? Look, neither 
of us likes Phil. That by itself is no big deal; I don't especially like you, 
and yet we get along. It's a matter of common interest. He helped Marta and me a 
lot. I doubt if we could have rescued the Peacers without his construction 
equipment. He's more than proved he wants the settlement to succeed."
"Maybe. But now that everyone has been brought together, perhaps your 'common 
interest' is dead. Maybe he wants to run. the whole show."
"Hmm. He knows none of us have a chance if we start shooting. You think he's 
really crazy?"
"I don't know, Yelén. Look at the recording again. I had the feeling he wasn't 
taunting just me. He knew you'd be listening. I think he was laughing at you, 
too. Like he was on the verge of some triumph, something the sadist in him 
couldn't resist hinting at."
"So you think he set up the glowball-and was laughing at us all the time he was 
'clueing you in.' " She pursed her lips. "It doesn't make sense... but I guess 
I'm paying for your intuition as much as anything else. I'll break a few more 
autons out of stasis, try to keep better tabs on Phil."
She sat back, and for a moment Wil thought she might be done with him. "Okay. I 
want to go over your other conversations." She noticed his expression. "Look, 
Inspector. I didn't ask you to socialize for your health. You're my low-tech 
point of vie". We've got a murder here, incipient civil war, and everybody's 
general dislike for me. Just about everything A saw today has a connection with 
these things. I want you reactions while they're fresh."
So they reviewed the picnic. Literally. Yelén insisted o, playing much of the 
video. She really did need help. Whether it was the centuries of living apart or 
her high-tech viewpoint , Wil didn't know, but there were many things about the 
picnic she didn't understand. She had no sympathy for the women dilemma. The 
first time they viewed the women's meeting, she made an obscure comment about 
"people having to pay for other people's mistakes." Was she referring to the 
Korolev failure to bring womb tanks?
Wil had her play the scene again, and he tried to explain Finally she became a 
little angry. "Sure they've got to make sacrifices. But don't they realize it's 
the survival of the human race that's at stake?" She waved her hand. "I can't 
believe their nature is that different from earlier centuries. When the crunch 
comes, they'll do what they must." Would the queen
 
on the mountain also do her female duty? Would she have six kids-or twelve? 
Brierson didn't voice the question. He could do without a Korolev explosion.
The sunlight streaming through Yelén's windows slowly shifted from morning to 
afternoon. The clock on Wil's data set showed it was way past the Witching Hour. 
If they kept going he'd be seeing real sunlight, through his own windows. 
Finally the analysis wound back to Wil's conversation with Jason Mudge. Korolev 
stopped him. "You can take Mudge off your list of suspects, Inspector."
Wil had been about to say the same. He simulated curiosity -Why?"
"The jerk fell off the cliffs last night, right on his point head."
Brierson lurched to wakefulness. "You mean, he's dead?
"Dead beyond all possible resuscitation, Inspector. For a his God-mongering, he 
was no teetotaler. The autopsy showed blood alcohol at 0.22 percent. He left the 
party a little befog you ran into Lindemann. Apparently he couldn't find anyone 
who'd even pretend to listen. The last I saw he was weaving along the westward 
bluffs. He got about fifteen hundred meters down the path, must have slipped 
where it comes near the cliff edge. One of my routine patrols found the body 
just after you got back here. He'd been in the water a couple of hours."
He rested his chin in his palms and slowly shook his head.
Yelén. Yelén. We've talked all through the night, and all that time your autons 
have been investigating and dissecting... and never a word that a man has died. 
"I asked you to keep an eye on him.
"Well, I decided not to. He just wasn't that important." Korolev was silent a 
moment. Something of his attitude must have penetrated. "Look, Brierson, I'm not 
happy he died. Eventually he might have dropped that 'Third Coming' garbage and 
been of some use. But face it: The man was a parasite, and having him out of the 
way is one less suspect-however farfetched."
"Okay, Yelén. It's okay."
He should have guessed the effect of his assurance. Yelén leaned forward. "Are 
you really that paranoid, Brierson? Do you think Mudge was murdered, too?"
Maybe. What might Mudge know that could make it worth silencing him? He owned 
little high-tech equipment, yet he did know systems. Maybe he'd been the 
murderer's pet vandal, now deemed a liability. Wil tried to remember what they 
had talked about, but all that came was the little guy's intent expression. Of 
course, Yelén would be willing to play the conversation back. Again and again. 
It was the last thing he wanted now. "Let our paranoias go their separate ways, 
Yelén. If I think of anything, I'll let you know."
For whatever reason, Korolev didn't push him. Fifteen minutes later she was off 
the comm.
Wil straggled up to his bedroom, relieved and disappointed to be alone at last.
SIXTEEN
As usual there was a morning dream, but not the dream in blue this time, not the 
dream of parting, of gasping sobs that emptied his lungs. This was the dream of 
the many houses. He woke again and again, always to a house that should have 
been familiar, yet wasn't. There were yards and neighbors, never quite 
understood. Sometimes he was married. Mostly he was alone; Virginia had just 
left or was at some other house. Sometimes he saw them-Virginia, Anne, Billy-and 
that was worse. Their conversations were short, about packing, a trip to be 
made. And then they were gone, leaving Wil to try to understand the purpose of 
the hidden rooms, the doors that wouldn't open.
When Wil really woke, it was with a desperate start, not the sobbing 
breathlessness of the blue dream. He felt a resentful relief, seeing the sun 
streaming past the almost-jacarandas into his bedroom. This was a house that 
didn't change from day toy day, a house he had almost accepted-even if it was 
the source for some of the dreams. He lay back for a second; sometimes he almost 
recognized the others, too; one was a mixture of this place and the winter home 
they bought in California just before... the Lindemann case. Wil smiled weakly 
at himself. These morning entertainments had greater intensity than any novel 
he'd ever played. Too bad he wasn't a fan of the tearjerkers.
He glanced at his mail. There was a short note from Lu: Tammy had agreed to a 
three-month bobblement, subject to a ten-hour flicker. Good. The other items 
were from Yelén: megabytes of analysis on the party. Ugh. She'd expect him to 
know all this the next time they talked. He sat down, browsed through the top 
nodes. There were a couple of things he was especially curious about. Mudge, for 
instance.
Wil formatted the autopsy report in Michigan State Police style. He scanned the 
lab results; the familiar forms brought back memories, strangely pleasant for 
all that they involved the uglier side of his job. Jason Mudge had been as drunk 
as Yelén said. There was no trace of any other drug. She had not been 
exaggerating about his fall, either. The little guy had struck the rocks 
headfirst. Wil ran some simulations: A headfirst landing was consistent with the 
cliff's height and Mudge's stature
assuming he tripped and fell with no effort at recovery. Every lesion, every 
trauma on poor Mudge's body was accounted for; even the scratches on his arms 
were matched to microgram specks of flesh left on bushes that grew close to the 
path.
It was all very reasonable: The man had been seen drinking, had been seen 
leaving the picnic in a drunken state. From his desperate eagerness of the 
afternoon, Wil could imagine his state of mind by evening. He had wandered down 
the path, self-pity and booze exaggerating every movement.... If it had been 
anyone else, he might have been stopped. But to approach Jason Mudge was to risk 
sermons unending.
And so he was dead, like any number of drug-related semisuicides Wil had seen. 
Still, it was interesting that the actual cause of death was so perfectly, 
instantly fatal. Even if Yelén's autons had discovered Mudge immediately after 
his fall, they could not have saved him. Except for multiple gunshot wounds and 
explosions, Wil had never seen such thorough destruction of a brain.
It might be worth going over the fellow's past once more, in particular Wil's 
last conversation with Mudge. He remembered now. There had been some strange 
comment about Juan Chanson. Wil replayed the video from Yelén's auton. Yes, he 
implied Juan had once been a chiliast, too.
Now, that was easy to check. Brierson asked Yelén's GreenInc about the 
archeologist. ... Chanson was well covered, despite his obscure specialty. As a 
kid, he had been involved with religion; both his parents had been Faithful of 
the Ndelante Ali. But by the time he reached college, whatever belief remained 
was mild and ecumenical. He was awarded a doctorate in Mayan archeology from the 
Universidad Politecnica de Ceres. Wil smiled to himself. In his time, Port Ceres 
had been a mining camp-to think that a few decades later it could support a 
university granting degrees like Chanson's!
Nowhere was there evidence of religious fanaticism or of any connection with 
Jason Mudge. In fact, there was no hint of his later preoccupation with alien 
invasions. Chanson bobbled out in 2200, and his motive was no nuttier than most: 
He thought a century or two of progress might give him the tools for a 
definitive study of the Mayan culture.
... Instead he wound up with the greatest archeological mystery of all time.
Wil sighed. So in addition to the late Mr. Mudge's other flaws, he had been 
spreading lies about his rivals.
SEVENTEEN
The next few days fell into a pattern, mostly a pleasant one: The afternoons he 
spent with one or another group of low-techs.
He saw several mines. They were still heavily automated. Many were open-pit 
affairs; fifty million years had created whole new ore beds. (The only richer 
pickings were in the asteroid belt, and one of Yelén's retrenchments was to give 
up most space activities.) The settlement's factories were like nothing that had 
existed in history, a weird combination of high-tech custom construction and the 
primitive production lines which would eventually dominate. Thanks to Gail 
Parker he even saw an NM tractor factory; he was surprised by a generally 
friendly reception.
In some ways the North Shore picnic had been misleading. Wil discovered that, 
although most people agreed with Tioulang's complaints against Korolev, few 
ungovs seriously considered giving their sovereignty to either the Peace or New 
Mexico. In fact, there had already been some quiet defections from the statist 
camps.
People were as busy as Rohan claimed. Ten-, twelve-hour days were the rule. And 
much of the remaining time was filled with scheming to maximize long-term gain. 
Most of the hightech giveaways had already been traded several times. When he 
visited the Dasguptas' farm he saw they were also making farm machinery. He told 
them about the NM factory. Rohan just smiled innocently. Dilip leaned back 
against one of his home-brew tractors and crossed his arms. "Yes, I've talked to 
Gail about that. Fraley wants to buy us out. If the price is right, maybe we'll 
let him. Heh, heh. Both NMs and Peacers are heavy in tool production. I can see 
what's going on in their tiny brains. Ten years down the road, they figure on a 
classic peasant/factory confrontation-with them on top. Poor Fraley; sometimes I 
feel sorry for him. Even if the NMs and the Peace merged, they still wouldn't 
have all the factories, or even half the mines. Yelén says her databases and 
planning software will be available for centuries. There are ungov technical 
types better than anyone Fraley has. Rohan and I know commodity trading. Hell, a 
lot of us do, and market planning, too." He smirked happily. "In the end, he'll 
lose his shirt."
Wil grinned back. Dilip Dasgupta had never lacked for self-confidence. In this 
case he might be right... as long as the NMs and the Peace couldn't use force.
 
Wil's evening debriefings with Yelén were not quite so much fun, though they 
were more congenial than the one after the North Shore picnic. Her auton 
followed him everywhere, so she usually heard and saw everything he did. 
Sometimes it seemed that she wanted to rehash every detail; finding Marta's 
murderer was a goal never far from her mind, especially now that it seemed part 
of a general sabotage scheme. But just as often she wanted his estimate of the 
low-techs' attitudes and intentions. Their conversations were a weird mix of 
social science, paranoia, and murder investigation.
Tammy had been bobbled within hours of the picnic. Since then, there had been no 
signs of high-tech interference. Either she was responsible for it (and had been 
terribly clumsy), or the glowball and paint were part of something still 
inscrutable.
Apparently the low-techs were oblivious to this latest twist. Over the last few 
weeks they had seen and used an enormous amount of equipment; most had no way of 
knowing the source or "sanctity" of what was provided. And Yelén had erased the 
polka-dot graffiti from Wil's gate. On the other hand, it was certain that some 
NMs knew of the bootlegging, enough that Tioulang's spies had gotten the news. 
Knowing the NM organization, Wil couldn't imagine any conspiracy independent of 
Steve Fraley.
Yelén dithered with the notion of seizing Fraley and his staff for 
interrogation, in the end decided against it. There was the same problem as with 
grabbing Tioulang. Besides, Marta's plan seemed to be working. The first 
phases-the giveaway, the establishment of agreements among the low-techs-were 
delicate steps that depended on everyone's confidence and goodwill. Even in the 
best of circumstances-and the last few days did seem about as good as things 
could get-the low-techs had all sorts of reasons for disliking the queen on the 
mountain.
And that was one of Korolev's main interests in pumping Brierson. She took every 
complaint that appeared on the recordings and asked for Wil's analysis. More, 
she wanted to know the problems he sensed but that went unsaid. It was one of 
the happier parts of Wil's new job, one he suspected that most of the low-techs 
understood, too.... Would his reception at the NM tractor plant have been quite 
so cordial otherwise?
Yelén was amused by Dilip Dasgupta's dealings with New Mexico: "Good for him; no 
one should be taking any crap from those atavists.
"You know what Tioulang and Fraley did when I started Mama's giveaway?" she 
continued. "They told me how they had their disagreements, but that the future 
of the race was of supreme importance; their experts had gotten together, come 
up with a 'Unity Plan.' It specified production goals, resource allocation, just 
what every damn person was going to do for the next ten years. They expected me 
to jam this piece of wisdom down everyone's throat.... Idiots. I have software 
that's spent decades crunching on these problems, and 1 can't plan at the level 
of detail these jerks pretend to. Marta would be proud of me, though; I didn't 
laugh out loud. I just smiled sweetly and said anyone who wanted to follow their 
plan was certainly welcome to, but that I couldn't dream of enforcing it. They 
were insulted even so; I guess they thought I was being sarcastic. It was after 
that that Tioulang started peddling his line about majority rule and unity 
against the queen on the mountain."
Other items were more serious, and did not amuse her at all. There were 140 
low-tech females. Since the founding of the settlement, her medical service had 
diagnosed only four pregnancies. "Two of the women requested abortions! I will 
not do abortions, Brierson! And I want every woman off contraceptive status."
They had talked around this problem before; Wil didn't know quite what to say. 
"This could just drive them into the arms of the NMs and Peacers." Come to think 
of it, this was one issue where Korolev and the governments probably saw eye to 
eye. Fraley and Tioulang might make a show of supporting reproductive freedom, 
but he couldn't imagine it as more than a short-term ploy.
The anger left Yelén's voice. She was almost pleading. "Don't they see, Wil? 
There have been settlements before. Most were just a family or two, but 
some-like Sanchéz's were around half our size. They all failed. I think ours may 
be big enough. Just barely. If the women can average ten children each over the 
next thirty years, and if their daughters can perform similarly, then we'll have 
enough people to fill the gaps left as automation fails. But if they can't, then 
the technology will fail, and we'll actually lose population. All my simulations 
show that what's left won't be a viable species. In the end, there'll be a few 
high-techs living a few more subjective centuries with what's left of their 
equipment."
Marta's vision of a flamed-out ramjet diving Earthwards passed through Wil's 
mind. "I think the low-tech women want humanity back as much as you, Yelén. But 
it takes a while to get hardened to this situation. Things were so different 
back in civilization. A man or a woman could decide where and when and whether 
—"
"Inspector, don't you think that I know that? I lived forte years in 
civilization, and I know that what we have here stinks.... But it's all we've 
got."
There was a moment's awkward silence, then: "One thing I don't understand, 
Yelén. Of all the travelers, you and Marta had the best intuition about the 
future. Why didn't..." The words slipped out before he could stop them; he 
really wasn't trying to provoke a fight. "Why didn't you think to bring along 
automatic wombs and a zygote bank?"
Korolev's face reddened, but she didn't blow up. After a second she said, "We 
did. As usual, it was Marta's idea. I made the purchase. But... I screwed up." 
She looked away from Brierson. It was the first time he'd seen shame in her 
manner. "I, I didn't test the shipment enough. The company was rated AAAA; it 
should have been safe as houses. And we were so busy those last few weeks... but 
I should have been more careful." She shook her head. "We had plenty of time 
later, on the future side of the Singularity. The equipment was junk, Brierson. 
The wombs and postnatal automation were shells, with just enough processing 
power to fake the diagnostics."
"And the zygotes?"
Yelén gave a bitter laugh. "Yes. With bobbles it should be impossible to mess 
that up, right? Wrong. The zygotes were malformed, the sort of nonviable stuff 
even Christians won't touch.
"I've studied that company through GreenInc; there's nothing that could have 
tipped us off. But after their last rating, the owners must have gutted their 
company. The behavior was criminal; when they were caught, it would take them 
decades to make reparations. Or maybe we were a one-shot fraud; maybe they knew 
I was making a long jump." She paused. The zip returned to her voice. "I wish 
they were here now. I wouldn't have to sue them; I'd just drop 'em into the sun.
"Sometimes innocent people have to pay for the mistakes of others, Inspector. 
That's how it is here. These women must start producing. Now."
Wil spread his hands. "Give them, give us some time."
"It may be hard for you to believe, but time is something we don't have a whole 
lot of. We waited fifty million years to get everyone together. But once this 
exercise is begun, there are certain deadlines. You've noticed that I haven't 
given away any medical equipment."
Wil nodded. Peacer and NM propaganda noticed it loudly. Everyone was welcome to 
use the high-techs' medical services, but, like their bobblers and fighting 
gear, their medical equipment had not been part of the giveaway.
"We have almost three hundred people here now. The high-end medical equipment is 
delicate stuff. It consumes irreplaceable materials; it wears out. This is 
already happening, Brierson, faster than a linear scale-up would predict. The 
synthesizers must constantly recalibrate to handle each individual."
There was a tightness in Wil's throat. He wondered if this was how a 
twentieth-century type might feel on being told of inoperable cancer. "How long 
do we have?"
She shrugged. "If we gave full support, and if the population did not increase, 
maybe fifty years. But the population must increase, or we won't be able to 
maintain the rest of our technology. The children will need plenty of health 
care.... Now, I don't know how long it will be before the new civilization can 
make its own medical equipment. It could take anywhere from fifty to two hundred 
years, depending on whether we have to mark time waiting for a really large 
population or can get exponential tech growth with only a few thousand people.
"No one need die of old age; I'm willing to bobble the deathbed cases. But there 
will be old age. I'm not supplying age maintenance-and, with certain exceptions, 
I will not for at least a quarter century."
Wil was a biological twenty. Once, he'd let it slide to thirty -and discovered 
that he was not a type that aged gracefully. He remembered the flab, the belly 
that swelled over his pants.
Yelén smiled at him coldly. "Aren't you going to ask me about the exceptions?"
Damn you, thought Wil.
When he didn't reply, she continued. "The trivial exception: those so foolish or 
unfortunate as to be over bio-forty right now. I'll set their clocks back once.
"The important exception: any woman, for as long as she stays pregnant." Yelén 
sat back, a look of grim satisfaction on her face. "That should supply any 
backbone that is missing."
Wil stared at her wonderingly. Just a few minutes before, Yelén had been acting 
as a civilized person might, all amused by the Peacer/NM plans for central 
control. Now she was talking about running the low-techs' personal lives.
There was a long silence. Yelén understood the point. He could tell by the way 
she tried to stare him down. Finally her gaze broke. "Damn it, Brierson, it has 
to be done. And it's moral, too. We high-techs each own our medical equipment. 
We've agreed on this action. Just how we invest our charity is surely our 
business."
They had argued the theory before. Yelén's logic was a thin thing, going a bit 
beyond what shipwreck law Wil knew. After all, the advanced travelers had 
brought the low-techs here, and would not allow them to bobble out of the era. 
More clearly than ever, he understood Yelén's reaction to Tammy. It would take 
so little to destroy the settlement. And over the next few years, disaffection 
was bound to grow.
Like it or not, Wil was working for a government. Sieg Heil.
EIGHTEEN
The mornings Wil devoted to research. He still had a lot of background to soak 
up. He wanted a basic understanding of the settlers, both low-tech and high. 
They all had pasts and skills; the more he knew, the less he might be surprised. 
At the same time, there were specific questions (suspicions) raised by his field 
trips and discussions with Yelén.
For instance: What corroboration was there for Tunç Blumenthal's story? Was he 
the victim of an accident-or a battle? Had it happened in 2210-or later, perhaps 
from within the Singularity itself?
It turned out there was physical evidence: Blumenthal's spacecraft. It was a 
small vehicle (Tunç called it a repair boat), massing just over three tonnes. 
The bow end was missing-not cut by the smooth curve of a bobble, but 
flash-evaporated. That hull had a million times the opacity of lead; some 
monstrous burst of gamma had vaporized a good hunk of it just as the boat 
bobbled out.
The boat's drive was "ordinary" antigravity-but in this case, it was a built-in 
characteristic of the hull material. The comm and life-support systems bore 
familiar trademarks; their mechanism was virtually unintelligible. The recycler 
was thirty centimeters across; there were no moving parts. It appeared to be as 
efficient as a planetary ecology.
Tun could explain most of this in general terms. But the detailed 
explanations-the theory and the specs-had been in e he boat's database. And that 
had been in Tunç's jacket, in the forward compartment. The volatilized forward 
compartment. The processors that remained were compatible with the Korolevs', 
and Yelén had played with them quite a bit.
At one extreme was the lattice of monoprocessors and bobblers embedded in the 
hull. The monos were no smarter than a twentieth-century home computer, but each 
was less than one angstrom unit across. Each ran a simple program loop, IE17 
times a second. That program watched its processor's brothers for signs of 
catastrophe-and triggered an attached bobbler accordingly. Yelén's fighter fleet 
had nothing like it.
At the other extreme was the computer in Tunç's headband. I t was massively 
parallel, and as powerful as a corporate mainframe of Yelén's time. Marta 
thought that, even without its database, Tun's headband made him as important to 
the plan as any of the other high-techs. They had given him a good part of their 
advanced equipment in exchange for its use.
Brierson smiled as he read the report. There were occasional comments by Marta, 
but Yelén was the engineer and this was mainly her work. Where he could follow 
it at all, the tone was a mix of awe and frustration. It read as he imagined 
Benjamin Franklin's analysis of a jet aircraft might read. Yelén could study the 
equipment, but without Tun's explanations its purpose would have been a mystery. 
And even knowing the purpose and the underlying principles of operation, she 
couldn't see how such devices could be built or why they worked so perfectly.
Wil's grin faded. Almost two centuries separated Ben Franklin from jet planes. 
Less than a decade stood between Yelén's expertise and this "repair boat." Wil 
knew about the acceleration of progress. It had been a fact of his life. But 
even in his time, there had been limits on how fast the marketplace could absorb 
new developments. Even if all these inventions could be made in just nine 
years-what about the installed base of older equipment? What about compatibility 
with devices not yet upgraded? How could the world of real products be turned 
inside out in such a short time?
Wil looked away from the display. So there was physical evidence, but it didn't 
prove much except that Tunç had been as far beyond the high-techs as they were 
beyond Wil. It really was surprising that Chanson had not accused Tunç-rescued 
from the sun with inexplicable equipment and a story no one could check-of being 
another alien. Perhaps Juan's paranoia was not as all-encompassing as it seemed.
He really should have another chat with Blumenthal.
Wil used a comm channel that Yelén said was private. Blumenthal was as calm and 
reasonable as before. "Sure, I can talk. The work I do for Yelén is mainly 
programming; very flexible hours."
"Thanks. I wanted to talk more about how you got bobbled. You said it was 
possible you were shanghaied...."
Blumenthal shrugged. "It is possible. Yet most likely an accident it was. You've 
read about my company's project?"
"Just Yelén's summaries."
Tun hesitated, swapped out. "Ah, yes. What she says is fair. We were running a 
matter/antimatter distillery. But look at the numbers. Yelén's stations can 
distill perhaps a kilo per day -enough to power a small business. We were in a 
different class entirely. My partners and I specialized in close solar work, 
less than five radii out. We had easements on most of the sun's southern 
hemisphere. When I... left, we were distilling one hundred thousand tonnes of 
matter and antimatter every second. That's enough to dim the sun, though we 
arranged things so the effect wasn't perceptible from the ecliptic. Even so, 
there were complaints. An absolute condition of our insurance was that we move 
it out promptly and without leakage. A few days' production would be enough to 
damage an unprotected solar system."
"Yelén's summary said you were shipping to the Dark Companion?" Like a lot of 
Yelén's commentary, the rest of that report had been technical, unintelligible 
without a headband.
"True!" Tunç's face came alight. "Such a fine idea it was. Our parent company 
liked big construction projects. Originally, they wanted to stellate Jupiter, 
but they couldn't buy the necessary options. Then we came along with a much 
bigger project. We were going to implode the Dark Companion, fashion of it a 
small Tipler cylinder." He noticed Wil's blank expression. "A naked black hole, 
Wil! A space warp! A gate for faster-than-light travel! Of course the Dark 
Companion is so small that the aperture would be only a few meters wide, and 
have tidal strains above 1 E 13 g's per meter-but with bobbles it might be 
usable. If not, there were plans to probe through it to the galactic core, and 
siphon back the power to widen it."
Tunç paused, some of his enthusiasm gone. "That was the plan, anyway. In fact, 
the distillery was almost too much for us. We were on site for days at a time. 
It gets on your nerves after a while, knowing that beyond all the shielding, the 
sun is stretched from horizon to horizon. But we had to stay; we couldn't 
tolerate transmission delays. It took all of us linked to our mainframe to keep 
the brew stable.
"We had stability, but we weren't shipping quite everything out. Something near 
a tonne per second began accumulating over the south pole. We needed a quick fix 
or we'd lose performance bonuses. I took the repair boat across to work on it. 
The problem was just ten thousand kilometers from our station -a 
thirty-millisecond time lag. Intellect nets run fine with that much lag, but 
this was process control; we were taking a chance. We'd accumulated a 
two-hundred-thousand-tonne backlog by then. It was all in flicker storage-a 
slowly exploding bomb. I had to repackage it and boost it out."
Tunç shrugged. "That's the last I remember. Somehow, we lost control; part of 
that backlog recombined. My boat bobbled up. Now, I was on the sun side of the 
brew. The blast rammed me straight into Sol. There was no way my partners could 
save me.
Bobbled into the sun. It was almost high-tech slang for certain death. "How 
could you ever escape?"
Blumenthal smiled. "You haven't read about that? There is no way in heaven I 
could have. On the sun, the only way you can survive is to stay in stasis. My 
initial bobbling was only for a few seconds. When it lapsed, the fail-safe did a 
quick lookabout, saw where we were heading, and rebobbled — sixty-four thousand 
years. That was 'effective infinity' to its pinhead program.
"I've done some simulations since. I hit the surface fast enough to penetrate 
thousands of kilometers. The bobble spent a few years following convection 
currents around inside. It wasn't as dense as the inner sunstuff. Eventually I 
percolated back to near the surface. Then, every time the bobble floated over a 
blow-off, it was boosted tens of thousands of kilometers up.... For thirty 
thousand years a damn volleyball I was, flying up to the corona, falling back 
through the photosphere, floating around awhile, then getting thrown up again.
"That's where I was through the Singularity and during the time the short-term 
travelers were being rescued. That's where I would have died if it hadn't been 
for Bil Sánchez." He paused. "You never knew Bil. He dropped out, died about 
twenty million years ago. He was a nut about Juan Chanson's extermination 
theory. Most of Chanson's proof is on Earth; W. W. Sanchéz traveled all over the 
Solar System looking for evidence. He dug up things Chanson never guessed at.
"One thing Bil did was scan for bobbles. He was convinced that sooner or later 
he'd find one containing somebody or some machine that had escaped the 
'Extinction.' When he spotted my bobble in the sun, he thought he'd hit the 
jackpot. Their latest records-from 2201 — didn't show any such bobbling. It was 
just the weird place you might expect to find a survivor; even the exterminators 
couldn't have reached someone down there.
"But Bil Sanchéz was patient. He noticed that every few thousand years, a really 
big solar flare would blast me way up. He and the Korolevs diverted a comet, 
stored it off Mercury. The next time I was boosted off the surface, they were 
ready: They dropped the comet into a sun-grazing orbit. It picked me off at the 
top of my bounce. Fortunately, the snowball didn't break up and my bobble stuck 
on its surface; we swung around the sun, up into the cool. From there, the 
situation was much like their other rescues. Thirty thousand years later, I was 
back in realtime."
"Tunç, you lived closer to the Extinction than anyone else. What do you think 
caused it?"
The spacer sat back, crossed his arms. "That's what they all ask.... Ah, Wil 
Brierson, if I only knew! I tell them I don't know. And they go away, seeing 
each his own theory reflected in my story." He seemed to realize the answer was 
not going to satisfy. "Very well, my theories. Theory Alpha: Possible it is that 
mankind was exterminated. What Bil found in the Charon catacombs is hard to 
explain any other way. But it can't be like Juan Chanson says. Bil had it 
better: Anything that could bump off the intellect nets in Earth/Luna would 
needs be superhuman. If it's still around, no brave talk will save us. That's 
why Bil Sánchez and his little colony dropped out. Poor man, he was frightened 
of what might happen to anything bigger.
"And Theory Beta: This is what Yelén believes, and probably Della too-though she 
is still so shy, I can't tell for sure. Humankind and its machines became 
something better, something... unknowable. And I saw things that fit with that, 
too.
"Ever since the Peace War there have been more or less autonomous devices. For 
centuries, folks had been saying that machines as smart as people were just 
around the corner. Most didn't realize how unimportant such a thing would be. 
What was needed was greater than human intelligence. Between our processors and 
ourselves, my era was achieving that.
"My own company was small; there were only eight of us. We were backward, rural; 
the rest of humanity was hundreds of light-seconds away. The larger spacing 
firms were better off. Their computers were correspondingly bigger, and they had 
thousands of people linked. I had friends at Charon Corp and Stellation Inc. 
They thought we were crazy to stay so isolated. And when we visited their 
habitats, when the comm lag got to less than a second, I could see what they 
meant. There was power and knowledge and joy in those companies.... And they 
could plan circles around us. Our only advantage was mobility.
"Yet even these corporations were fragments, a few thousand people here and 
there. By the beginning of the twenty-third, there were three billion people in 
the Earth/Luna volume. Three billion people and corresponding processing power — 
all less than three light-seconds apart.
"I... it was strange, talking to them. We attended a marketing conference at 
Luna in 2209. Even linked, we never did understand what was going on." He was 
quiet for a long moment. "So you see, either theory fits."
Wil was not going to let him off that easily. "But your project-you say it would 
have meant faster-tban-light travel. Is there any evidence what became of that?"
Tunç nodded. "Bil Sánchez visited the Dark Companion a couple times. It's the 
same dead thing it always was. There's no sign it was ever modified. I think 
that scared him even more than what he found at Charon. I know it scares me. I 
doubt my accident was enough to scuttle the plan: our project would have given 
humanity a gate to the entire Galaxy... but it was also mankind's first piece of 
cosmic engineering. If it worked, we wanted to do the same to a number of stars. 
In the end, we might have built a small Arp object in this arm of the Galaxy. 
Bil thought we'd been 'uppity cockroaches'-and the real owners finally stepped 
on us....
"But don't you be buying Theory Alpha just yet. I said the
Singularity was a mirrored thing. Theory Beta explains it just as well. In 2207, 
we were the hottest project at Stellation Inc.
They put everything they had into renting those easements around the sun. But 
after 2209, the edge was gone from their excitement. At the marketing conference 
at Luna, it almost seemed Stellation's backers were trying to sell our project 
as a frivolity."
Tunç stopped, smiled. "So you have my thumbnail sketch of Great Events. You can 
get it all, clearer said with more detail, from Yelén's databases." He cocked 
his head to one side. "Do you like listening to others so much, Wil Brierson, 
that you visit me first?"
Wil grinned back. "I wanted to hear you firsthand." And I still don't understand 
you. "I'm one of the earlier low-techs, Tunç. I've never experienced direct 
connect-much less the mind links you talk about. But I know how much it hurts a 
high-tech to go without a headband." All through Marta's diary, that loss was a 
source of pain. "If I understand what you say about your time, you've lost much 
more. How can you be so cool?"
The faintest shadow crossed Tunç's face. "It's not a mystery, really. I was 
nineteen when I left civilization. I've lived fifty years since. I don't 
remember much of the time right after my rescue. Yelén says I was in a coma for 
months. They couldn't find anything wrong with my body; just no one was home.
"I told you my little company was backward, rural. That's only by comparison 
with our betters. There were eight of us, four women, four men. Maybe I should 
call it a group marriage, because it was that, too. But it was more. We spent 
every spare gAu on our processor system and the interfaces. When we were linked 
up, we were something... wonderful. But now all that's memories of memories-no 
more meaningful to me than to you." His voice was soft. "You know, we had a 
mascot: a poor, sweet girl, close to anencephalic. Even with prosthesis she was 
scarcely brighter than you or I. Most of the time she was happy." The expression 
on his face was wistful, puzzled "And most of the time, I am happy, too."
NINETEEN
Then there was Marta's diary. He had started reading it as a casual cross-check 
on Yelén and Della. It had become a dark addiction, the place he spent the hours 
after his late-night arguments with Yelén, the hours after returning from his 
field trips.
What might have happened if Wil had been less a gentleman the night of the 
Robinson party? Marta was dead before he really knew her; but she looked a 
little like Virginia... and talked like her... and laughed like her. The diary 
was the only place where he could ever know her now. And so every night ended 
with new gloom, matched only by the dreams of morning.
Of course Marta found the West End mines bobbled. She stayed a few months, and 
left some billboards. It was not safe country. Packs of doglike creatures 
roamed. At one point she was trapped, had to start a grass fire and play mirror 
tag with the dogs among the bobbles. Wil read that part several times; it made 
him want to laugh and cry in the same breath. For Marta, it was just part of 
staying alive. She moved northwards into the foothills of the Kampuchean Alps. 
That was where Yelén found her third cairn.
Marta reached the Peacer bobble two years after she was marooned. She had walked 
and sailed around the Inland Sea to do it. The last six hundred kilometers had 
been a climb over the Kampuchean Alps. She was still an optimist, yet her words 
were sometimes tinged with self-mockery. She had started out to walk halfway 
around the world, and ended up less than two thousand kilometers north of where 
she started. Despite her year's layover, the shattered bones in her foot had not 
healed perfectly. Till she was rescued (her usual phrasing) she would walk with 
a limp. At the end of a long day's walk she was in some pain.
But she had plans. The Peacer bobble was at the center of a vitrified plain 150 
kilometers across. Even now, not much life had returned. Her first walk in, she 
carried all her food on the travois.
« The bobble isn't super large, maybe three hundred meters across. But its 
setting is spectacular, Lelya; I had not remembered the details. It's in a small 
lake bordered by uniform cliffs. Concentrically around those cliffs are rings of 
ridges. I climbed to the edge of the cliffs and looked across at the bobble. My 
reflection looked back and we waved at each other. With its moat and the 
ringwall, it looks like a jewel in a setting. Equally spaced along the wall are 
five smaller gems -the bobbles around our lookout equipment. 
Whoever-whatever-marooned me has locked them up, too. But for how long? Those 
five were supposed to have a very high flicker rate. I still can't believe 
anyone could subvert our control systems for a jump of longer than a few 
decades.
« Wouldn't it be a joke if I were rescued by the Peacers! They thought they were 
making a fifty-year jump to renewed dominion. What a shock it would be to come 
out on an empty world, and find exactly one taxpayer left. Amusing, but I'd 
rather be rescued by you, Lelya....
« The jewel's setting is cracked in places. There's a waterfall coming into the 
lake on the south side. The water exits through a break in the north wall. It's 
very clear; I can see fish in the lake. There are places where the cliff has 
collapsed. It looks like it could make decent soil. This is probably the most 
habitable spot in the whole destruction zone. If I have to stop, Lelya, I think 
this is really the best place it could happen. It's the most likely to be 
monitored; it's at the center of a glazed flatland that should be easy to mark 
up. (Do you think our L5 autons would respond to KILROY IS HERE written in 
letters <1 kilometer long?)
« So. This will be my base, forever till I'm rescued. I think I can make it a 
nice place to live, Lelya. »
And Marta did. Through the first ten years she made steady improvements. Five 
times she trekked out of the glazed zone, sometimes for necessities like seed 
and wood, later to import some friends: she hiked three hundred kilometers 
north, to a large lake. There were fishermonkeys on that lake. She understood 
their matriarchal scheme now. It wasn't hard to find displaced trios wandering 
the shores, looking for something bigger than they that walked on two legs. The 
fishers loved the ringlake. By year twelve, there were so many that some left 
every year down the river.
From her cabin high on the ringwall she watched them by the hour:
« Back and forth in water and bobble there are reflections of the ringwall and 
my cabin and our bobbled monitors. The fishers love to play with their 
reflections. Often they swim against its surface. I'll bet they feel the 
reflected body heat, even through their pelts. I wonder what mythology they have 
about the kingdom beyond the mirror.... Yes, Lelya. Sentiment is one thing, 
fantasy another. But, you know, my fishers are smarter than chimpanzees. If I'd 
seen them before we left civilization, I'd have bet they would evolve human 
intelligence. Sigh. After all our travels, I know better. In the short term, the 
marine adaptation is more profitable. Another five megayears, they'll be as 
agile as penguins-and not much brighter. »
Marta gave names to the friendliest, and the weirdest. There was always a Hewey 
and a Dewey and a Lewey. Others she named after humans. Wil found himself 
chuckling. Over the years, there were several Juan Chansons and Jason 
Mudges-usually the most compulsive chitterers. There was also a succession of 
Della Lus — all small, pale, shy. And there was even one W. W. Brierson. Wil 
read that page twice, a trembling smile on his lips. Wil the fishermonkey was 
black-furred and large, even bigger than a dominant female. He could have run 
the whole show, but kept mostly to himself and watched everyone else. Every so 
often his reserve broke and he gave a great screeching display, rushing along 
the edge of the ringwall and slapping his sides. Like the first Dewey, he was 
odd man out, and especially friendly to Marta. He spent more time with her than 
any of them. They all played at imitating her, but he was the most successful. 
She actually got some useful work out of him, pulling small bundles. His most 
impressive game was the building of miniature versions of the pyramidal cairn 
Marta used to store the completed portion of her diary. Marta never said he was 
her favorite, yet she did seem fond of him. He disappeared on her last big 
expedition, around year fifteen.
« I'll never name one of my little friends after you, Lelya. The fishers live 
only ten or fifteen years. It's always sad when they go. I don't want to go 
through that with a fisher named Yelén. »
As the years passed, Marta concentrated on the diary. This was where the words 
piled into the millions. She had lots of advice for Yelén. There were some 
interesting revelations: It had been Phil Genet who persuaded Yelén to raise the 
Peacer bobble while the NMs were in realtime. It had been Phil Genet who was 
behind the ash-shoveling incident. Genet consistently argued that the key to 
success lay in the explicit intimidation of the low-techs. Marta begged Yelén 
not to take his advice again. « We will be hated enough, feared enough, even if 
we act like saints. »
In the middle decades, her writing was scarcely a diary at all, but a collection 
of essays and stories, poems and whimsy. She spent at least as much time with 
her sketches and paintings. There were dozens of paintings of the ringlake and 
bobble, under every kind of lighting. There were landscapes done from sketches 
she had made on her trips. There were portraits of many of the fishers, as well 
as pictures of Marta herself. In one, the artist knelt at the edge of the 
ringlake, smiling at her own reflection as she painted it.
It came to Wil that though there were periods of depression, and physical pain, 
and occasional moments of stark terror, most of the time Marta was having a good 
time. She even said so
« If I'm rescued, all this becomes a diversion, a few decades on top of the two 
centuries I have already lived. If I'm not... well, I know you'll be back 
sometime. I want you to know that I missed you, but that there were pleasures. 
Take all the pictures and poems as my evidence and as my gift. »
It was not a gift for W. W. Brierson. He tried to read it straight through, but 
the afternoon came when he couldn't go on. Someday he would read of those happy, 
middle times. Perhaps someday he could smile and laugh with her. Just now, all 
he felt was a horrid need to follow Marta Qen Korolev through her last years. 
Even as he skipped the data set forward, he wondered at himself. Unlike Marta, 
he knew how it all ended, yet he was forcing himself to see it all again through 
Marta's eyes. Was there some crazy part of him that thought that by reading her 
words he could take some of the pain from her onto himself?
More likely, this was like his daughter Anne's reaction to The Worms Within. The 
movie had been in a festival of twentieth-century film that came with the kid's 
new data set. It turned out that part of the festival was horror movies from the 
1990s. The old USA had been at the height of its power and wealth then; for some 
perverse reason, slash-and-splash had its greatest flowering the same decade. 
Wil wondered if they would have spent so much time inventing blood and gore if 
they had known what was waiting for them just around the corner in the 
twenty-first; or maybe they feared such a future, and the gore was their way of 
knocking wood. In any case, Anne rushed out of her room after the first fifteen 
minutes, almost hysterical. They trashed the video, but she couldn't get the 
story out of her mind. Unknown to Wil and Virginia, she bought a replacement and 
every night watched a little morejust enough to make her sick again. Afterwards 
she said she kept watching it-even though it got more and more horrible -because 
there had to be something that would happen that would make up for the wounds 
she'd already suffered. Of course, there was no such redemption. The ending was 
even more imaginatively grotesque than she feared. Anne had been depressed and a 
little irrational for months afterwards.
Wil grimaced. Like daughter like father. And he didn't even have Anne's excuse; 
he knew how this one ended.
In those last years, Marta's life slowly darkened. She had completed her great 
construction, the sign that should alert any orbital monitors. It was a clever 
scheme: She had journeyed out of the glazed zone, to where a few isolated 
jacarandas grew. She gathered the spiders she found on the display webs and took 
them into the desolation. By this time she had discovered the relation of those 
webs to tree and spider reproduction. She set spiders and seeds at ten carefully 
selected sites along a line from the center of the glazed zone. Each was on a 
tiny stream: at each she had broken through the glaze and developed a real soil. 
Over the next thirty years, the spiders and their sprouts did most of the 
construction. The seedlings spread a small way down the streams, but not as much 
as ordinary plants. The spiders saw the faraway display webs of their brethren 
and thousands of seeds were deposited on the path between, each with a 
complement of arachnid paratroopers.
In the end, she had the vast green-and-silver arrow that did eventually alert an 
orbiter. But a problem came with that line of trees. They broke the glaze, made 
a bridge of soil from her base to the outside. The jacs and spiders were awesome 
defenders of their territory, but not perfect ones-especially when strung thin. 
Other plants infested the sides of their run. With those plants came herbivores.
« The little buggers have added a couple of hours' work to each day, Lelya. And 
some of my favorite fruits I can't grow at all now. »
Ten or even twenty years into the abandonment, this would have been an 
inconvenience. At thirty-five years, Marta's health was beginning to fail. 
Competing with the rabbity thieves was a slowly losing proposition for her.
« Somewhere in a cairn on the far side of the sea, I said some very foolish 
things. Didn't I figure an unaided human lived about a century? And then I said 
something about being conservative and expecting I could last only seventy-five 
years. What a laugh.
« My foot has never gotten better, Lelya. I walk with a crutch now, and not very 
fast. Most of the time, my joints hurt. It's funny what not feeling good does to 
your attitude and your notion of time. I can scarcely believe there was a day 
when I expected to walk to Canada. Or that just fifteen years ago I still hiked 
out of the glazed zone regularly. Lelya, it's a major effort to climb down to 
the lake now. I haven't done it for weeks. I may not do it again. But I have a 
rain cistern... and the fishers are always happy to visit me up here. Besides, I 
don't like to see my reflection in the lake anymore. I'm not doing any more 
self-portraits, Lelya.
« Is this what it was like for people before decent medical care? The failed 
dreams, the horizons that shrink always inwards? It must have taken guts to do 
all they did. »
Two years later:
« Today the neighborhood went to hell. I have a pack of near-dogs camped just 
over the ringwall. They look a lot like the ones at the mines, though these are 
smaller. In fact, they're kind of cute, like big puppies with pointy ears. I'd 
like to kill the lot of them. An un-Marta-like thought, granted, but they've 
driven the fishers away from my cabin. They killed Lewey. I got a couple of the 
little murderers with my pike. Since then, they've been extremely wary of me. 
Now I carry a pike and knife when I'm out of doors. »
Marta spent most of her last year in the cabin. Outside, her garden went to 
weeds. There were edible roots and vegetables still, but they were scattered 
around. Getting out to gather them was an expedition as challenging as a 
hundred-kilometer walk had been before. The near-dogs grew bolder; they circled 
just outside the diamond tip of her pike, darted occasionally inwards. Marta had 
several pelts to prove that she was still the faster. But it could not last. She 
was eating poorly. That made it harder for her to gather food.... A downward 
spiral.
Wil paged the display and found himself looking at ordinary typescript. He felt 
his stomach drop. Was this the end? An ordinary entry and then... nothing? He 
forced his eyes through the words. It was a commentary from Yelén: Marta had not 
intended the next page to be seen. Her words had been rubbed out, then 
overwritten by a later diary entry "You said you'd walk if you didn't see 
everything, Brierson. Well, here it is. Damn you." He could almost hear the 
bitterness in Yelén's words. He looked down the page.
« Oh God Yelén help me. If you ever loved me save me now. I am dying dying. I 
don't want to die. Oh please please please »
He paged again, and was looking at Marta's familiar script. If anything, the 
letters were more finely drawn than usual. He imagined her in the dark cabin, 
patiently rubbing away the words of her despair, then overwriting them, cool and 
analytical. Wil wiped his face and tried not to breathe. A deep breath would 
start him sobbing. He read Marta's final entry.
« Dearest Lelya,
« I suppose there must be an end to optimism, at least locally. I've been holed 
up in my cabin for ten days now. There is water in the cistern, but I'm out of 
food. Damn dogthings; without them, I could have lasted another twenty years. 
They cut me up pretty bad the last time I was out. For a while, I thought to 
make a grand stand, give them a last taste of my diamonds. I've changed my mind 
about that; last week I saw them take on a grazer. Yes, one of those: bigger 
than I am, with a horn almost as effective as my pike. I couldn't see all of it, 
just when they were in view from my windows, but.... At first it looked like 
they were playing. They nipped at it, sending it scurrying round and round. But 
I could see the blood. Finally, it weakened, tripped.
« I never noticed this when they got smaller animals, but the dogs don't 
deliberately kill their prey. They just eat them alive, usually from the guts 
out. That grazer was big; it took a while to die.
« So. I'm staying inside. "Forever until you rescue me" was how I used to say 
it. I guess I don't expect a rescue anymore. With lookabouts scheduled every few 
decades (at best), the odds are against one happening in the next few days.
« I figure it's been about forty years since I was marooned. It seems so much 
longer, longer than all the rest of my life. Nature's kindly way of stretching 
mortals' meager rations? I remember my fisher friends better than most of my 
human ones. I can see the lake through one window. If they looked, they could 
see me up here. They rarely look. I don't think most of them remember me. It's 
been three years since they were driven away from the cabin. That's almost a 
fisher generation The only one I think remembers is my last Juan Chanson. This 
one's not as loud as my earlier Juans. Mainly, he sits around, taking in the 
sun.... I just looked out the window. He's then now; I do think he remembers. »
The handwriting changed. Wil wondered how many hour — or days — had passed from 
one paragraph to the next. The new lines were crossed out, but Yelén's magic 
made them clear
« I just remembered a strange word: taphonomy. Once upon a time, I could be an 
expert in a field just by remembering its name. Now... all I know... it's the 
study of death sites, no? A crumple of bones is all these mortal creatures 
leave... and I know that bones get swept away so fast. Not mine. though. Mine 
stay indoors. I'll be here a long time, my writing longer.... Sorry. »
She didn't have the energy to erase the words. There was a gap, and her writing 
became regular, each letter carefully printed.
« I have the feeling I'm saying things I've written you, before, contingencies 
that now are certainties. I hope you get all my earlier writing. I tried to put 
all the details there, Lelya I want you to have something to work for, dear. Our 
plan car; still succeed. When it does, our dreams live.
« You are for all time my dearest friend, Lelya. »
Marta did not finish the entry with her usual sign-off. Perhaps she thought to 
write more later. Further down, there was a pattern of disconnected lines. 
'Through an exercise of imagination, one might see them as the block letters L 0 
V.
That was all.
It didn't matter; Wil wasn't reading anymore. He lay with his face in his arms, 
sobbing on empty lungs. This was the daytime version of the dream in blue; he 
could never wake from this.
Seconds passed. The blue changed to rage, and Wil was on his feet. Someone had 
done this to Marta W. W. Brierson had been shanghaied, separated from his family 
and his world, thrown into a new one. But Derek Lindemann's crime was a 
peccadillo, laughable, hardly worth Wil's attention. Compared to what was done 
to Marta. Someone had taken her from her friends, her love, and then squeezed 
the life from her, year by year, drop by drop.
Someone must die for this. Wil stumbled across the room, searching. In the back 
of his mind, a rational fragment watched in wonder that his feelings could run 
so deep, that he could truly run amok. Then even the fragment was swallowed up.
Something hit him. A wall. Wil struck back, felt satisfying pain shooting 
through his fist. As he pulled his arm from the wall, he noticed motion in the 
next room. He ran towards the figure, and it towards him. He struck and struck. 
Glass flew in all directions.
Then he was in sunlight, and on his knees. Wil felt a penetrating coldness in 
the back of his neck. He sighed and sat down. He was on the street, surrounded 
by broken glass and what looked like parts of his living-room walls. He looked 
up. Yelén and Delia were standing just beyond the pile of debris. He hadn't seen 
them in person and together for weeks. It must be something important. "What 
happened?" Funny. His throat hurt, as though he'd been shouting.
Yelén stepped over a fallen timber and bent to look at him. Behind her, Wil saw 
two large fliers. At least six autons hung in the air above the women. "That's 
what we would like to know, Inspector. Were you attacked? Our guards heard 
screaming and the sounds of a fight."
... and every so often he gave a great screeching display, rushing about and 
slapping his sides. Marta had named her fishers well. Wil looked at his bloody 
hands. The tranq Yelén had used on him was fast-acting stuff. He could think and 
remember, but emotions were distant, muted things. "I, I was reading the end of 
Marta's diary. Got carried away."
"Oh." Korolev's pale lips tightened. How could she be so cool? Surely she had 
gone through this, too. Then Wil remembered the century Yelén had spent alone 
with the diary and the cairns. Her harshness would be easier to understand in 
the future.
Della walked closer, her boots crunching on broken glass. Lu's outfit was dead 
black, like something from a twentieth-century police state. Her arms were 
folded across her chest. Her dark eyes were calm and distant. No doubt her 
current personality matched her clothes. "Yes. The diary. It's a depressing 
document. Perhaps you should choose other leisure-time reading."
The remark should have done something to his blood pressure, but Wil felt 
nothing.
Yelén was more explicit. "I don't know why you insist on mucking around in 
Marta's personal life, Brierson. She said everything she knew about the case 
right at the beginning. The rest is none of your damned business." She glanced 
at his hands, and a small robot swooped down. Wil felt something cold and soft 
work between his fingers. Yelén sighed. "Okay. I guess I understand; we are that 
much alike. And I still need you .... Take a couple of days off. Get yourself 
together." She started back to her flier.
"Uh, Yelén," said Della. "Are we going to leave him here alone?"
"Of course not. I'm wasting three extra autons on him."
"I mean, when the GriefStop wears off, Brierson may be very distressed." 
Something flickered in her eyes. She looked momentarily puzzled, searching 
through nine thousand years of memories-perhaps more important, nine thousand 
years of viewpoints. "When a person is like that, don't they need someone to 
help them... someone to, uh, hug them?"
"Hey, don't look at me!"
"Right." Her eyes were calm again. "It was just a thought." The two departed.
Wil watched their fliers disappear over the trees. Around him, broken glass was 
being vacuumed up, the torn walls removed. Already his hands felt warm and 
comfortable. He sat in the roadway, at peace. Eventually he would get hungry and 
go inside.
TWENTY
After supper, Wil sat for a long time in the ruins of his living room. He was 
directly responsible for very little of the destruction: He had punched bloody 
holes in one wall and demolished a mirror. The guard autons had let that go on 
for perhaps fifteen seconds before deciding it was a threat to his safety. Then 
they bobbled him: The walls near the mirror were cut by a clean, curving line. A 
smooth depression dipped thirty centimeters below the floor, into the 
foundation. Even the bobbling had not caused the worst damage. That happened 
when Yelén and Della cut the bobble out of the house. Apparently they wanted 
their equipment to have a direct view when it burst. He looked at the wall 
clock. It was the same day as before; they'd kept him on ice just long enough to 
get him out ref the house.
If Wil's sense of humor had been enabled, he might have smiled. All this 
supported Yelén's claim that the house was not infested by her equipment. The 
best the protection autons could do was bobble everything and call for help.
Things were different now. From where he sat, Wil saw several robots foaming a 
temporary wall. Beside his chair sat a medical auton, about as animated as a 
garbage can. Somewhere it had hands; they'd been a big help with supper. 
He watched the reconstruction with interest, even turned on the room lights when 
night came. This GriefStop was great stuff. Simple drives like hunger weren't 
affected. He felt as alert and coordinated as usual. He was simply beyond the 
reach of emotion; yet, strangely, it was easy to imagine how things would affect 
him without the drug. And that knowledge did make for some weak motivation. For 
instance, he hoped the Dasguptas would not stop by on their way home. He guessed 
that explanations would be difficult.
Wil stood and walked to his reading table. The auton glided silently after him. 
Something smaller floated up from the mantel. He sat down, suddenly guessing 
that GriefStop had never been a hit on the recreational drug market. There were 
side effects: Everything moved a little bit slow. Sounds came low-pitched, drawn 
out. It wasn't enough to panic him (he doubted if anything could do that just 
now), but reality had a faint edge of waking nightmare. His silent visitors 
intensified the feeling,... Ah well, paranoia was the name of the game.
He turned on his desk lamp, cut the room lights. Somehow the destruction had 
spared the desk and reading display. The last page of Marta's diary floated in 
the circle of light. He guessed that rereading that page would be very upsetting 
to his normal self-so he didn't look at it. Della was right. There ought to be 
better leisure-time activities. This day would hang his normal self low for a 
long time to come. He hoped that he wouldn't come back to the diary, to tear at 
the wounds he'd opened today. Perhaps he should erase it; the inconvenience of 
coercing another copy from Yelén might be enough to save his normal self.
Wil spoke into the darkness. "House. Delete Marta's diary." The display showed 
his command and the ideation net associated with "Marta's diary."
"The whole thing?" the house asked.
Wil's hand hovered over the commit. "Unh, no. Wait." Curiosity was a powerful 
thing with Brierson. He'd just remembered something that could force his normal 
self to go against all common sense and retrieve another copy. Better check it 
out now, then zap the diary.
When he first received the diary, he'd asked for all references to himself. 
There had been four. He had seen three; She'd mentioned calling him back from 
the beach the day of the Peacer rescue. There'd been the fisher she'd named 
after him. Then, around year thirty-eight, she'd recommended Yelén use his 
services-even though she'd forgotten his name lay then. That was the reference 
which hurt so much the first time he looked at the document. Wil guessed he 
could forgive that now; those years would have destroyed the soul of a lesser 
person, not simply blurred a few memories.
But what was the fourth reference? Wil repeated the context search. Ah. No 
wonder he had missed it. It appeared about year thirteen, tucked away in one of 
her essays on the plan. In this one, she wrote on each of the low-techs she 
remembered, citing strengths and weaknesses, trying to guess how they would 
react to the plan. In a sense it was a foolish exercise-Marta granted that much 
more elaborate analysis existed on the Korolev db's — but she hoped her "time of 
solitude" had given her new insights. Besides (unsaid), she needed to be doing 
something useful in the years that stretched before her.
« Wil Brierson. An important one. I never believed the commercial mythology, 
much less the novels his son wrote. Yet.. , since we've known him in person, 
I've concluded he may be almost as sharp as they make him out to be. At least in 
some ways. If you and I can't figure out who did this to me, he might still be 
able to.
« Brierson has a lot of respect among the low-techs. That and his general 
competence would be a real help against Steve Fraley and whoever will run the 
Peacer show. But what if he opposes our plan? That may seem ridiculous; he was 
born in a civilized era. Yet I'm not sure of the man. One thing about 
civilization, it allows the most extreme types to find a niche where they can 
live to their own and others' benefit. Here, we are temporarily beyond 
civilization; people we could abide before might now be dangerous. Wil is still 
disoriented; maybe that accounts for his behavior. But he may have a mean, 
irrational streak under his friendly exterior. I only have one piece of 
evidence, something I've been a little ashamed to tell you about:
« You know I was attracted to the guy. Well, he followed me when I stormed out 
of Don Robinson's show. Now, I wasn't trying to flirt; I was just so mad at 
Don's sneakiness, I had, to open up to someone — and you were in deep connect. 
We' talked for several minutes before I realized that the pats on my shoulder, 
the hand at my waist, were not brotherly comfort. It was my fault for letting it 
get that far, but he wouldn't take no for an answer. The guy is big; he actually 
started knocking me around. If the rest of the evening hadn't begun my great 
"adventure," the bruises he left on my chest would have had medical attention. 
You see, Lelya? Mean to beat me when I refused him. Irrational for doing it with 
Fred just five meters away. I had to suppress the auton's reflexes, or Brierson 
would have been stunned for a week. Finally, I slapped his face as hard as I 
could, and threatened him with Fred. He backed off then, and seemed genuinely 
embarrassed. »
Wil read the paragraph again and again. It hung in the circle of light from his 
desk lamp... and not one letter changed. He wondered how his normal self would 
react to Marta's words. Would he be enraged? Or simply crushed that she could 
say such a lie?
He thought for a long time, vaguely aware of the nightmare edge of the darkness 
around him. Finally he knew. The reaction would not be rage, would not be hurt. 
When he could feel again, there would be triumph: The case had cracked. For the 
first time, he knew he would get Marta's murderer.
TWENTY-ONE
Yelén gave him the promised two days off and even removed the autons from his 
house. When he walked near a window, he could see something hovering just below 
the sill. He had no doubt it would come rushing in at the smallest sign of 
erratic behavior. Wil did his best to give no such sign. He did all his research 
away from the windows; Yelén might see his return to the diary as a bad method 
of recuperating.
But now Wil wasn't reading the diary. He was using all the (feeble) automation 
at his command to study it.
When Yelén came around with her list of places to visit and low-techs to talk 
to, Wil begged off. Forty-eight hours was not enough, he said. He needed to 
rest, to avoid the case completely.
The tactic bought him a week of uninterrupted quiet-probably enough time to 
squeeze the last clues from Marta's story; almost enough time to prepare his 
strategy. The seventh day, Yelén was on the holo again. "No more excuses, 
Brierson. I've been talking to Della." The great human-relations exert? thought 
Wil. "We don't think you're doing anything to help yourself. Three times the 
Dasguptas have tried to get you out of the house; you put them off the same way 
you do me. We think your 'recuperation' is an exercise in self-pity.
"So"-she smiled coldly —"your vacation is over." A light :,teamed at the base of 
his data set. "I just sent you a record of the party Fraley threw yesterday. I 
got his speech and most )f the related conversation. As usual, I think I'm 
missing nuances. I want you to —"
Wil resisted the impulse to straighten his slumped shoulders; leis plan might as 
well begin now. "Any more evidence of Nigh-tech interference?"
"No. I would scarcely need your help to detect that. But —"
Then the rest scarcely matters. But he didn't say it out loud.
Tot yet. "Okay, Yelén. Consider me back from psych leave."
"Good."
"But before I go after this Fraley thing, I want to talk to you and Delta. 
Together."
"Jesus Christ, Brierson! I need you, but there are limits." She looked at him. 
"Okay. It'll be a couple of hours. She's beyond Luna, closing down some of my 
operations." Yelén's holo flicked off.
 
It was a long two hours. This meeting was supposed to be a surprise. He wouldn't 
have forced things if he'd known Lu was not immediately available. Wil watched 
the clock; now he was stuck.
Just short of 150 minutes later, Yelén was back. "Okay, Brierson, how may we 
humor you?"
A second holo came to life, showing Della Lu. "Are you back at Town Korolev, 
Delta?" Wil asked.
There was no time lag to her reply. "No. I'm at my home, about two hundred 
klicks above you. Do you really want me on the ground?"
"Uh, no." You may be in the best possible position. "Okay, Della, Yelén. I have 
a quick question. If the answer is no, then f hope you will quickly make it 
yes.... Are you both still providing me with heavy security?"
"Sure." "Yes."
That would have to be good enough. He leaned forward and spoke slowly. "There 
are some things you should know. Most important: Marta knew who murdered her."
Silence. Yelén's impatience was blown away; she simply stared. But when she 
spoke, her voice was flat, enraged. "You stupid jerk. If she knew, why didn't 
she tell us? She had forty years to tell us." On the other holo, Della appeared 
to be swapped out. Has she already imagined the consequences?
"Because, Yelén, all through those forty years she was being watched by the 
murderer, or his autons. And she knew that, too."
Again, silence. This time it was Della who spoke. "How do you know this, Wil?" 
The distant look was gone. She was intent, neither accepting nor rejecting his 
assertions. He wondered if this were her original peace-cop personality looking 
out at him.
. "I don't think Marta herself guessed the truth during the first ten years. 
When she did, she spent the rest of her life playing a double game with the 
diary-leaving clues that would not alert the murderer, yet which could be 
understood later."
Yelén bent forward, her hands clenched. "What clues?"
"I don't want to say just yet."
"Brierson, I lived with that diary for a hundred years. For a hundred years I 
read it, analyzed it with programs you can't even imagine. And I lived with 
Marta for almost two hundred years before that. I knew every secret, every 
thought." Her voice was shaking; he hadn't seen such lethal fury in her since 
right after the murder. "You opportunistic slime. You say she left thoughts you 
could follow and I could not!"
"Yelén!" Della's interruption froze Korolev in midrage. For a moment, both women 
were silent, staring.
Yelén's hands went limp; she seemed to shrink in on herself. "Of course. I 
wasn't thinking."
Della nodded, and glanced at Wil. "Perhaps we should spell this out for you." 
She smiled. "Though I suspect you're way ahead of us. If the murderer had access 
to realtime while Marta was marooned, then there are consequences, some so 
radical that they caused us to dismiss the possibility."
"The killer did more than meddle with the length of the group jump; he did not 
even participate in it. That means the sabotage was not a shallow manipulation 
of the Korolev system; the killer must have deep penetration of the system."
Wil nodded. And who could have deeper penetration than the owner of the system?
"And if that is true, then everything that goes through Yelén's db's — including 
this conversation — may be known to the enemy. It's conceivable that her own 
weapons might be turned against us.... In your place, I'd be a bit edgy, Wil."
"Even granting Brierson's claims, the rest doesn't necessarily follow. The 
killer could have left an unlisted auton in realtime. That could be what Marta 
noticed." But the fire was gone from Yelén's voice. She didn't look up from the 
pinkish marble of her desk.
Wil said softly, "You don't really believe that, do you?"
"... No. In forty years, Marta could have outsmarted one of those, could have 
left clues that even I would recognize." She looked up at him. "Come on, 
Inspector. Get it over with. 'If the murderer could get into realtime, then why 
did she let Marta survive there?' That's the next rhetorical question, isn't it? 
And the obvious answer — 'It's just the sort of irrational thing a jealous lover 
might do.' So. I admit to being a jealous type. And I surely loved Marta. But no 
matter what either of you believes, I did not maroon her."
She was on the far side of anger. It was not quite the reaction Wil had 
expected. It really affected Yelén that her two closest colleagues —"friends" 
was still too strong a word-might think she had killed Marta. Given her general 
insensitivity to the perceptions of others, he doubted her performance was an 
act. Finally he said, "I'm not accusing you, Yelén.... You're capable of 
violence, but you have honor. I trust you." That last was a necessary 
exaggeration. "I would like some trust in return. Believe me when I say that 
Marta knew, that she left clues that you would not notice. Hell, she probably 
did it to protect you. The moment you got suspicious, the murderer would also be 
alerted. Instead, Marta tried to talk to me. I'm totally disconnected from your 
system, an inconsequential low-tech. I've had a week to think on the problem, to 
figure how to get this news to you with minimum risk of an ambush."
"Yet, for all the clues, you don't really know who the killer is.
Wil smiled. "That's right, Della. If I did, it would have been the first thing I 
said."
"You would have been safer to keep quiet, then, till you had her whole message 
figured out."
He shook his head. "Unfortunately, Marta could never risk putting solid 
information in her diary. There's nothing in any of the four cairns that will 
tell us the killer's name."
"So you've told us this just to raise our blood pressure? If she could 
communicate all you say, she sure as hell would tell us the enemy's name." Yelén 
was clearly recovering.
"She did, but not in any of the four cairns. She knew those would be 'inspected' 
before you ever saw them; only the subtlest clues would escape detection. What 
I've discovered is that there's a fifth cairn that no one, not even the 
murderer, knew about. That's where she wrote the clear truth."
"Even if you're right, that's fifty thousand years ago now. Whatever she left 
would be completely destroyed."
Wil put on his most sober expression. "I know that, Yelén, and Marta must have 
known it could be that long, too. I think she took that into account."
"So you know where it is, Wil?"
"Yes. At least to within a few kilometers. I don't want to say exactly where; I 
assume we have a silent partner in this conversation."
Della shrugged. "It's conceivable the enemy doesn't have direct bugs. He may 
have access only when certain tasks are executing."
"In any case, I suggest you keep a close watch on the airspace above all the 
places Marta visited. The murderer may have some guesses of his own now. We 
don't want to be scooped."
There was silence as Della and Yelén retreated into their systems. Then: "Okay, 
Brierson. We're set. We have heavy monitoring of the south shore, the pass Marta 
used through the Alps, and the whole area around Peacer Lake. I've given Della 
observer status on my system. She'll be running critical subsystems in parallel. 
If anybody starts playing games there, she should notice.
"Now. The important thing. Della is bringing in fighters from the Lagrange 
zones. I have a fleet I've been keeping in stasis; its next lookabout is in 
three hours. All together that should be enough to face down any opposition when 
we go treasure hunting. All you have to do is lie low for another three hours. 
Then tell us the cairn's location and we'll —"
Wil held up a hand. "Yes. Get your guns. But I'm going along."
"What? Okay, okay. You can come along."
"And I don't want to leave till tomorrow morning. I need a few more hours with 
the diary; some final things to check out."
Yelén opened her mouth, but no sound came. Della was more articulate. "Wil. 
Surely you understand the situation. We're bringing everything out to protect 
you. We'll be burning a normal year's worth of consumables every hour we stay on 
station around you. We can't do that for long; yet every minute you keep this 
secret, you stay at the top of someone's hit list-and we lose what little 
surprise we might have had. You've got to hustle."
"There are things I have to figure first. Tomorrow morning. It's the fastest I 
can make it. I'm sorry, Della."
Yelén muttered an obscenity and cut her connection. Even Della seemed startled 
by the abruptness of her departure. She looked back at Wil. "She's still 
cooperating, but she's mad as hell.... Okay. So we wait till tomorrow. But 
believe me, Wil. An active defense is expensive. Yelén and I are willing to 
spend most of what we have to get the killer, but waiting till tomorrow cuts the 
protection per unit time.... It would help if you could say how long things 
might drag out beyond that."
He pretended to think on the question. "We'll have the secret diary by tomorrow 
afternoon. If things don't blow up by then, I doubt they ever will."
"I'll be going, then." She paused. "You know, Wil, once upon a time I was a 
government cop. I think I was pretty good at power games. So. Advice from an old 
pro: Don't get in over your head."
Brierson summoned his most confident, professional look. "Everything will work 
out, Della."
After Della signed off, Wil went into the kitchen. He started to mix himself a 
drink, realized he had no business drinking just now, and scarfed some cake 
instead. Under all this pressure, it's just one bad habit or another, he told 
himself. He wandered back into the living room and looked out. In his era, 
letting a protected witness parade in front of a window would be insanity. It 
didn't matter much here, with the weapons and countermeasures the high-techs 
had.
The afternoon was clear, dry. He could hear dry rustling in the trees. Only a 
short stretch of road was visible. All the greenery didn't leave much to see. 
The only nice views were from the second floor. Still, he was getting fond of 
the place. It was a bit like the lower-class digs he and Virginia had started 
in.
He leaned out the window, looked straight up. The two autons were floating lower 
than usual. Farther up, almost lost in the haze, was something big. He tried to 
imagine the forces that must be piled up in the first few hundred klicks above 
him. He knew the firepower Della and Yelén admitted to. It far exceeded the 
combined might of all the nations in history; it was probably greater than that 
of any police service up to the mid-twenty-second. All that force was poised for 
the protection of one house, one man... more precisely, the information in one 
man's head. All things considered, it wasn't something he took much comfort in.
Wil reviewed the scenarios once more; what could happen in the next twenty-four 
hours? It would all be over by then, most likely. He was barely conscious of 
pacing into the kitchen, through the pantry, the laundry, the guest room, and 
back into the living room. He looked out the window, then repeated the traversal 
in reverse order. It was a habit that had not been popular with Virginia and the 
kids: When he was really into a case. he would wander all through the house, 
cogitating.
Ninety kilos of semiconscious cop lumbering down halls and through doorways was 
a definite safety hazard. They had threatened to hang a cowbell around his neck.
Something brought Brierson out of the depths. He looked around the laundry, 
trying to identify the strangeness. Then he realized: He'd been humming, and 
there was a silly grin on his face. He was back in his element. This was the 
biggest, most dangerous case of his life. But it was a case. And he finally had 
a handle on it. For the first time since he had been shanghaied, the doubts and 
dangers were ones he could deal with professionally. His smile widened. Back in 
the living room, he grabbed his data set and sat down. Just in case they were 
listening, he should pretend to do some research.
TWENTY-TWO
Yelén was back late that evening. "Kim Tioulang is dead."
Wil's head snapped up. Is this how it begins? "When? How?"
"Less than ten minutes ago. Three bullets in the head.... I'm sending you the 
details."
"Any evidence who —"
She grimaced, but by now she accepted that what she sent was not immediately 
part of his memory. "Nothing definite. My security at North Shore has been thin 
since we switched things around this afternoon. He sneaked out of the Peacer 
base; not even his own people noticed. It looks like he was trying to board a 
trans-sea shuttle." The only place that would take him was Town Korolev. "There 
are no witnesses. In fact, I suspect that no one was on the ground where he was 
shot. The slugs were dumb exploders, New Mexico five-millimeters." Normally 
those were pistol-fired, with a max accurate range of thirty meters; who did the 
killer think he was fooling? "The coincidence is too much to ignore, Brierson. 
You're right; the enemy must have bugs in my system."
"Yeah." For a second he wasn't listening. He was remembering the North Shore 
picnic, the withered man that had been Kim Tioulang. He was as tough as anyone 
Wil had ever met, but his wistfulness about the future had seemed real. The most 
ancient man in the world... and now he was dead. Why? What had he been trying to 
tell them? He looked up at Yelén "Since this afternoon, have you noticed 
anything special with the Peacers? Any evidence of high-tech interference?"
"No. As I said, I can't watch as closely as before. I talked to Phil Genet about 
it. He hasn't noticed anything with the Peacers, but he says NM radio traffic 
has changed during the last few hours. I'm looking into that." She paused. For 
the first time, he saw fear in her face. "These next few hours we could lose it 
all, Wil. Everything Marta ever hoped for."
"Yes. Or we could nail the enemy cold, and save her plan.... How are things set 
for tomorrow?"
His question brought back the normal Yelén. "This delay cost us the advantage of 
surprise, but it also means we're better prepared. Della has an incredible 
amount of equipment. I knew her expedition to the Dark Companion made money, but 
I never imagined she could afford all this. Almost all of it will be in position 
by tomorrow. She'll land by your place at sunup. It's all your show then.
"You're not coming?"
"No. In fact, I'm out of your inner-security zone. My equipment will handle 
peripheral issues, but... Della and I talked it over. If I-my system-is deeply 
perverted, the enemy could turn it on you."
"Hmm." He'd been counting on the dual protection; if he'd guessed wrong about 
one of them, the other would still be there. But if Yelén herself thought she 
might lose control.. . "Okay. Della seemed in pretty good form this afternoon."
"Yes. I have a theory that under stress the appropriate personality comes to the 
surface. She's driftiest after she's been by herself for a while. I'm talking to 
her right now, and she seems okay. With any luck, she'll still be wearing her 
cop personality tomorrow."
After Yelén signed off, Wil looked at the stuff she was sending over. It grew 
much faster than he could read it, and there were new developments all the time. 
Genet vas right about the NMs. They were using a new encryption scheme, one that 
Yelén couldn't break. That in itself was more of an anachronism than polka-dot 
paint or antigrav volleyballs. Under other circumstances, she would have raided 
them for it, and diplomacy be damned.... Now she was stretched so thin that all 
she could do was watch.
Tioulang's murder. The high-tech manipulation of Fraley. There was some 
fundamental aspect of the killer's motivation that Wil didn't understand. If he 
wanted to destroy the colony, he could have done that long ago. So Wil had 
concluded that the enemy wanted to rule. Now he wondered. Was the low-techs' 
survival simply a bargaining chip to the killer?
It was a long night.
Brierson was standing by his window when Della's flier came down. It was still 
twilight at ground level, but he could see sunlight on the treetops. He grabbed 
his data set and walked out of the house. His step was brisk, adrenaline-fueled.
"Wait, Will" The Dasguptas were on their front porch. He stopped, and they ran 
down the street toward him. He hoped his guardians weren't trigger-happy.
"Did you know?" Rohan began, and his brother continued. ''The Peacer boss was 
murdered last night. It looks like the N Ms did it."
"Where did you hear?" He couldn't imagine Yelén spreading the news.
"The Peacer news service. Is it true, Wil?"
Brierson nodded. "We don't know who did it, though."
"Damn!" Dilip was as upset as Wil had ever seen him. "After all the talk about 
peaceful competition, I thought the NMs and Peacers had changed their ways. If 
they start shooting, the rest of us are... Look, Wil, back in civilization this 
couldn't happen. They'd have every police service in Asia down on them. Can-can 
we count on Yelén to keep these guys out of our way?"
Wil knew that Yelén would die before she'd let the NMs and Peacers fight. But 
today, dying might not be enough. The Dasguptas saw the tip of a game that 
extended beyond their knowing-and Wil's. He looked at the brothers, saw unmet i 
red trust in their faces. What could he do?... Maybe the truth would help. "We 
think this is tied up with Marta's murder, Dilip." He jerked a thumb at Della's 
flier. "That',., what I'm checking out now. If there's shooting, I'll bet you 
see more than low-techs involved. Look. I'll get Yelén to lower he r suppressor 
field; you could bobble up for the next couple of days."
"Our equipment, too."
"Right. In any case, get people spread out and under cover. There was nothing 
more he could say, and the brothers seemed to know it.
"Okay, Wil," Rohan said quietly. "Luck to us all."
Della's flier was bigger than usual, and there were five poor, strapped around 
its midsection.
But the crew area didn't have the feel of a combat vehicle It wasn't the lack of 
control and display panels. When Wil left civilization, those were vanishing 
items. Even the older mode had provided command helmets that allowed the pilot 
to see the outside world in terms of what was important to the mission. The 
newer ones didn't need the helmets; the windows themselves were holo panels on 
artificial reality. But there were no command helmets in Della's flier, and the 
windows shower! the same version of reality that clear glass would. The floor 
way carpeted. Unwindowed sections of the wall were decorated with Della's 
strange watercolors.
As he climbed aboard, Wil gestured at the strap-on pod,; "Extra guns?"
"No. Those are defensive. There's a tonne of matter/antimatter in each one."
"Ugh." He sat down and strapped in. Defensive-like a flak: jacket made of 
plastique?
Lu pulled more than two g's getting them off the street; no simple elevator 
rides today. Half a minute passed, and she cut the drive. Up and up and up they 
fell, Wil's stomach protesting the way. They topped out around ten thousand 
meters, where she resumed one g.
It was a beautiful day. The low sun angle put the forested highlands into jagged 
relief. He couldn't see much of Town Korolev, but Yelén's castle was a shadowed 
pattern of gold and green. Northwards, clouds hid the lowlands and the sea. To 
the south, the mountains rose gray above the timberline to snow-topped peaks. 
The Indonesian Alps were the Rockies writ large.
Lu's eyes were open but unfocused. "Just want to have some maneuvering room." 
Then she looked at Wil and smiled. "Where to, boss?"
"Della, did you hear what I told the Dasguptas? Yelén should turn off her 
suppressors. Maybe a few low-techs will bobble out of this era, but she can't 
just leave everyone exposed."
"Wil, haven't you been reading your mail?"
"Unh, most of it." All night long it had been coming in, faster than he could 
keep up. He'd read all the red-tag stuff, until falling asleep an hour before 
dawn.
"We don't know the reason, but it's clear now the enemy may try to kill lots of 
low-techs. For the last sixty minutes, Yelén's been trying to remove bobble 
suppression from Australasia. She can't do it."
"Why not? It's her own equipment!" Wil felt stupid the moment he spoke.
"Yes. You could scarcely ask for better proof that her system is perverted, 
could you?" Her smile widened.
"If she can't turn them off, can you just blow them up?"
"We may decide to try that. But we don't know exactly how her defenses might 
respond. Besides, the enemy may have his own suppressor system ready to come on 
the moment Yelén's drops out."
"So no one can bobble up."
"It's a large-volume, low-intensity field, good enough to suppress any low-tech 
generators. But my bobblers can still self-enclose; my best still have some 
range."
For a moment, the purpose of this trip was forgotten. There must be some way to 
protect low-techs. Evacuate them from the suppression zone? That maneuver might 
put them in even more danger. Fly in high-power bobblers? He abruptly realize( 
that the high-techs must be giving much deeper thought that he could to the 
problem. The problem he had precipitated Face it. The only way he could 
contribute now was by succeed ing with his mission: to identify the killer. 
Della's original question was the one he should be answering. Where to? "Are: we 
certified free of eavesdroppers?" Lu nodded. "Okay. We start from Peacer Lake."
The flier boosted across the Inland Sea. But Della was no satisfied with the 
directions. "You don't know the cairn's coordinates?"
"I know what I'm looking for. We'll follow a search pattern."
"But searches could be done faster from orbit."
"Surely there are some sensors that need low, slow platforms?"
"Yes, but "
"And surely we'd want to be with such sensors to pick up the find immediately?"
"Ah!" She was smiling again, and did not ask him to point out the equipment he 
referred to.
They flew in silence for several minutes. Wil tried to see evidence of their 
escort. There was a flier ahead of them. To the right and left of their path, he 
saw two more. There was an occasional glint from beyond these, as from objects 
flying distant formation. It wasn't very impressive-until he wondered how far 
the formation extended.
"Really, Wil. No one else can listen; I'm not even recording. You can 'fess up."
Brierson looked at her questioningly, and Della continued "It's obvious you saw 
something in the diary that — for all OUR deep analysis, and all Yelén's years 
with Marta-we did not She was trying to tell us that the murderer was stalking 
her, and that the Korolev system had been deeply penetrated.... But this story 
about a fifth cairn" — she raised an eyebrow, her expression mischievous — "is 
ridiculous."
Wil pretended great interest in the ground. "NA Why 'ridiculous'?"
"In the first place, it's unlikely the killer lived every second of those forty 
years in realtime. But if he was so interested that Marta felt his presence, and 
felt the need to write with hidden meanings — then I think it's reasonable he 
had sensors watching all the time. How could Marta sneak away from her camp, 
build another cairn, and get back — all without tipping him off?
"In the second place, even if she succeeded in fooling the killer, we're still 
talking about something that happened fifty thousand years ago. Do you have any 
conception how long that is? All recorded history wasn't much over six thousand 
years. And most of that's been lost. Only an' incredible accident could preserve 
a written record across such a span."
"Yes, Yelén raised the same objection. But —"
"Right. You told her Marta had taken all that into account. I'll give you this, 
Wil. When you feel like it, you're one of the most convincing people I've ever 
seen — and I've seen some experts.... By the way, I backed you on this. I think 
Yelén is convinced; she believes Marta was all but superhuman, anyway. I 
wouldn't be surprised if the killer does, too.
"My point is, I'm on to you," Lu continued. Wil put on an expression of polite 
surprise. "You saw something in the diary that we didn't. But you don't know 
much more than what you've said — and you have no clues. Hence this wild-goose 
chase." She waved at the lands beyond the flier. "You hope you've convinced the 
killer that you will soon know his identity. You've posted us as targets, to 
flush him out." It was a prospect she appeared to enjoy.
And her theory was uncomfortably close to the truth. He had tried to create a 
situation where the enemy would be forced to attack him. What he couldn't 
understand was the activity around the low-techs. How could hurting them hide 
the killer?
Wil shrugged; he hoped, that none of this turmoil showed on his face.
Della watched him for a second, her head cocked to one side. "No response? So 
I'm still on the suspect list. If you die and I survive, then the others will be 
on to me-and together, they outgun me. You're trickier than I thought; maybe 
gutsier, too."
The morning passed, slow and tense. Della paid no attention to the view. She was 
rational enough-and perhaps even brighter than usual. But there was a cockiness 
in her manner, as if she held reality at a distance, thought it all an immensely 
interesting game. She was full of theories. It was no surprise that her number 
one suspect was Juan Chanson. "I know he fired on me. Juan is playing the role 
of racial protector. He reminds me of the centaur. I think our killer must be 
like that centaur, Wil. The creature was so trapped by his notion of racial duty 
that he killed the last survivors. We're seeing the same thing here: murders and 
preparations for more murders.''
Wil's "search pattern" took them slowly outwards from Peacer Lake. Fifty 
thousand years before, this had been vitrified wasteland. The jacaranda forests 
had won it back thousands of years since. Though this forest had not existed in 
Marta's time, it was much like the ones she had traveled. Wil was seeing the 
heaven side of the world Marta had described. To the northeast, a grayish band 
stretched along the border of the forest domain. That must be the kudzu web, 
killing the jungle and preventing invasion. On the jac side, there were 
occasional silver splotches, web attacks on non-jacs that had sprouted beyond 
the barrier. The jacarandas themselves were an endless green sea, tinged with a 
bluish foam of flowers. He knew there were vast webs there, too, but they were 
below the leaf canopy, where the spiders' domesticated caterpillars could take 
advantage of the leaves without shading them out.
Here and there bright puffs of cloud floated above it all, trailing shadow.
Marta had walked many kilometers before finding a display
web. From this altitude, they could see several at once. None was less than 
thirty meters across. They shimmered in the treetop breezes, their colors 
shifting between red and electric blue. Somewhere down there was a fossil 
streambed, the remains of a small river Marta had followed on one of her last 
expeditions out of Peacer Lake. He remembered what the land looked like then: 
kilometers of grayness, the water and wind still working to break through the 
glassy surface. She would have carried whatever food she needed.
Ahead, the forest was splattered with random patches of kudzu. Display webs were 
scattered everywhere. There was more blue and red and silver than green.
Della supplied an explanation. "Marta's plantings spread outward from her signal 
line. This is where the new forest meets the old; sort of a jac civil war."
Wil smiled at the metaphor. Apparently the two forests and their spiders were 
different enough to excite the kudzu reflex. He wondered if the display webs 
were like animal displays at territory boundaries. The colorful jumble passed 
slowly below, and they were over normal jacs again.
"We're way beyond Marta's furthest trip in this direction, Wil. You really think 
anyone's going to believe we're doing a serious search here?"
He pretended to ignore the question. "Follow this line another hundred 
kilometers, then break and head toward the lake where she got the fishers."
Thirty minutes later they were floating above a patch of brownish green water, 
more a swamp than a lake. The jacs grew right to the edge; it looked like the 
kudzu web stretched into the water. Fifty thousand years ago there had been 
ordinary woodland here.
"What's our defense situation, Della?"
"Cool, cool. Except for the suppressor thing, no enemy action. The NMs and 
Peacers have buttoned up, but they've stopped shouting accusations. We've 
discussed the threat with all the high-techs. They've agreed to keep out of the 
air for the time being, and to isolate their forces. If anyone strikes, we'll 
know his identity. The bottom line, Wil: I don't think the enemy has been 
bluffed."
There was no help for it, then. "Exactly which way is north, Della?" Damn this 
flier: no command helmet, no holos. He felt like the inmate of a rubber room.
Suddenly a red arrow labeled NORTH hovered over the forest. It looked solid, 
kilometers long; so the windows were holo displays after all. "Okay. Back off 
eastwards from lake.
Come down to a thousand meters." They slid sideways, near in free fall. Most of 
the lake was still visible. "Give me a gin around the original lake site. Mark 
it off in degrees." He studied the lake and the blue circle that now surrounded 
it. "I war to get into the forest about ten klicks from the lake on a bearing
of thirty degrees from north." They were close enough to the forest canopy that 
he could see leaves and flowers rushing by The cover looked deep and dense. "Are 
you going to have an problem finding a place to get through?"
"No problem at all." Their forward motion ceased. The were just above the 
treetops. Abruptly, the flier smashed straight down. For an instant, negative 
g's hung Wil on h harness. Sounds of destruction were sharp around them.
And then they were through. The spaces beneath were 1. by the sunlight that 
followed them through the hole they ha punched in the canopy. Beyond that light, 
all was dark an greenish. Junk was drifting down all around them. Most of was 
insubstantial. The underweb carried centuries of twigs an insect remains, 
flotsam that had not yet percolated to the surface. It was coming down all at 
once now, swinging back an. forth through the light. Some debris-branches, 
clusters c flowers-was still in the air, supported by fragments of the web More 
than anything else, Wil felt as if they had sudden? plunged into deep water. The 
flier drifted out of the light. H eyes slowly adapted to the dimness.
"We're there, Wil. Now what?"
"How well can the others monitor us down here?"
"It's complicated. Depends on what we do."
"Okay. I think the cairn is southwest of us, near the bearing we took from the 
lake. After all this time, there won't be au. surface evidence, but I'm hoping 
you can detect the rocks
"And if f you can't, I'll have to think o f something else."
"That should be easy." The flier glided around a tree. The were less than a 
meter up, moving at barely more than
walking pace. They drifted back and forth across the bearing the sunlight from 
the entrance hole was lost behind then Della's flier was five meters tall, and 
nearly that wide, yet the had no trouble negotiating the search path. He looked 
out the windows in wonder. Much of the ground was absolutely smooth, a 
gray-green down. That was the top of fifty thousand years' accumulation of 
spider dung, of leaf and chitin fragments. The abyssal ooze of the Jac forest.
The forest floor was as Marta described, but much gloomier. He wondered if she 
had really thought it beautiful, or said so to disguise a melancholy like he 
felt here.
"I-I've got something, Will" There was real surprise on Della's face. "Strong 
echoes, about thirty meters ahead." As she spoke, the flier sprinted forward, 
dodging intermediate trees. "Most of the rocks are scattered, but there is a 
central cluster. It-it could really be a cairn. My Lord, Wil, how could you 
know?"
Their flier settled on the forest floor, next to the secret that had waited 
fifty thousand years for them.
TWENTY-THREE
The door slid back. Wil stuck his head into the forest air. And jerked it back 
even more quickly. Phew: take mil dew and add a flavoring of shit. He took 
another breath, and tried not to gag. Perhaps it was the abrupt transition that 
made it seem so awful; the flier's air was full of alpine morning.
They stepped onto the forest floor. Gray-green humus lapped around their ankles. 
He was careful not to kick it up. There was enough junk in the air already.
Della walked a large circle tangent to their landing point "I've mapped all the 
rocks. They're not as big as Marta generally used, and not as well shaped. But 
backtracking their trajectories..." She was quiet for second. "... I see they 
were piled in a pyramid at one time. The core is intact, and I think there', 
something-not rocks or forest dirt-inside. What do you want to do?"
"How long would a careful dig take-say as good as a twentyfirst-century 
archeologist could do?"
"Two or three hours."
Now that they really had something, they had to protect V, — and get themselves 
off ground zero at the same time. "We could bobble the whole thing," he said.
"That would be awkward to haul around if shooting starts.
Look, Marta never left anything of importance outside the core. That's less than 
a meter across in this case. We could bobble that and be out of here in just a 
few minutes."
Wil nodded agreement, and Della continued with scarcely a pause. "Okay, it's 
done. Now stand back a couple of meters."
Dozens of reflections of Wil and Della suddenly looked up from the forest floor; 
the ground between them was covered by close-packed bobbles.
She walked back, around the field of mirrors. "Bobbles are hard to miss against 
the neutrino sky; if the enemy has decent equipment, he noticed this." Sonic 
booms came from beyond the treetops. "Don't worry. That's friendly."
The new arrivals slipped through the hole Della had made in the canopy. They 
consisted of one auton and a cloud of robots. The robots settled on the bobbles, 
rooting and pushing. The top layer came off easily, revealing more bobbles 
beneath. These were pushed aside to get at still deeper layers. On a small 
scale, Lu was using the standard open-pit mining technique. In minutes, they 
were looking into a dark, slumping hole. The bobbles were scattered on all 
sides, glowing copies of the forest canopy above.
One by one, the robots picked them up and flew away.
"Which one is... ?"
"You can't tell, can you? I hope the enemy is similarly mystified. We've 
supplied him with seventy red herrings." He noticed that not all the bobbles 
were flown directly out. One had been transferred to the auton, and one to 
Della's flier.
Della climbed aboard the flier, Wil close behind. "If our friend doesn't start 
shooting in the next few minutes, he never will. I'm taking all the bobbles to 
my home. That's a million kilometers out now. From there we can see in all 
directions, shoot in all directions; no one can get us there." She smashed 
straight through the forest's roof, kept rising at multiple g's.
Wil sank deep into the acceleration couch. All he could see was sky. He squinted 
at the sunlight and gasped, "He may not attack at all. He may still think we're 
bluffing."
She chuckled. "Don't you wish." The sky tilted, and he saw green horizon. 
"Twenty thousand meters I'm going to nuke out."
Free fall. The sky was black, except at the blue horizon They were at least one 
hundred kilometers up. It was like video cut: One instant they had been at 
aircraft altitudes, the next they were in space. Something bright and sunlike 
glowed beneath them-the detonation that had boosted them out of the atmosphere. 
He wondered fleetingly why she hadn't nuked out from ground level. A technical 
reason? Or sentiment?
The sky jerked again, the horizon acquiring a distinct curve
"Hm. I have a low-tech on the net, Wil. She wants to talk to you."
Who? "Hold off on the next nuke. Let me talk to her."
Part of one window went flat. He was looking at someone wearing NM fatigues and 
a display helmet. The space around. the figure was crammed with 
twenty-first-century communications gear.
"Wil!" The speaker cleared the face panel on her helmet It was Gail Parker. 
"Thank God! I've been trying to break out for almost an hour. Look. Fraley has 
gone nuts. We're going to attack the Peacers. He says they'll wipe us if we 
don't. He says there's no way the high-techs can prevent it. Is that true? 
What's going on?"
Brierson sat in horrified silence. What was the killer's motive, that he would 
contrive such a war? "Part of it is true, Gail It looks like someone's trying to 
wipe the entire colony. This war talk must be part of it. Is there anything you 
can do to —"
"Me?" She glanced over her shoulder, then continued in the lower voice. "God 
damn it, Wil, I'm at the center of our C and C. Sure. I could sabotage our 
entire defense system. But if the other side really does attack, then I've 
murdered my own people!
"None of us will make it otherwise, Gail. I'll try to talk sense to the Peacers. 
Do... do what you can." What would I do in her place? His mind shied away from 
Gail's choices.
Parker nodded. "I —" The picture smeared into an abstract pattern of colors. A 
screeching noise rose past audibility.
"Signal jammed," said Lu.
"Della? Can you get through to the Peacers?"
Lu shrugged. "It doesn't matter. Why do you think Parker called just then? She 
thinks she finally broke out of NM security. In fact, the enemy has taken over 
their system. Letting her through is part of a distraction."
"Distraction?"
"One we can't ignore; he's going to start 'em killing each other. I see 
ballistic traffic going both ways across the Inland Sea.... Someone's blocking 
my wideband link to Yelén."
A section of window suddenly showed Yelén's office. Korolev was standing. "Both 
sides are shooting. I've lost several autons. Both sides have high-tech backing, 
Della." Disbelief was mixed with rage and fear. Tears glinted on her face. 
"You'll have to do without my help for now; I'm going to divert my forces. I 
can't let my peo- I can't let these people die."
"It's okay, Yelén. But get the others to help you. You can't trust your system 
alone."
Korolev sat down shakily. "Right. They've agreed to bring their forces up. I'm 
starting my diversion now. There was a moment of silence. Yelén stared blankly, 
swapped out. The silence stretched... and Yelén's eyes slowly widened. In 
horror. "Oh, my God, no!" Her image vanished, and he was looking into empty sky.
Wil flinched, the motion floating him against his restraint harness. "More 
jamming?"
"No. She just stopped transmitting." There was a faint smile on Della's face. "I 
guessed this might happen. To shift her forces, she had to run control routines 
that the enemy could not start — but which he had perverted. He's finally shown 
himself in a big way: Yelén's forces are coming out for us. What she has in far 
space is moving to block our exit.
"Another minute and we'll know who we've been fighting all this time. Yelén 
can't take me alone. The killer is going to have to stand up with his own 
equipment...." Her smile broadened. "You're going to see some real shooting, 
Wil."
"I can hardly wait." He tucked his data set in the side of his acc chair.
"Oh, don't expect too much; with the naked eye, this won't be very spectacular." 
And she was humming!
Please God that this insanity does not affect her performance.
The horizon jerked once again. There was no acceleration, no sound. It was like 
botched special effects from an old-time movie. But now they were better than a 
thousand kilometers up, the Inland Sea a cloud-dotted puddle. And the Earth was 
visibly falling away from them; they were moving at dozens of klicks per second.
Surely — even without Yelén-the others could protect the low-techs from a few 
ballistic missiles? Malicious fate gave him quick answer: Three bright sparks 
glowed on the southern coast, a third of the way from West End to the Eastern 
Straits. Wil groaned.
"Those were high air bursts, at Town Korolev," said Della.
If the Dasguptas spread your warning, there may not be too many casualties." 
There was puzzlement in her voice.
"But where are Chanson and Genet and Blumenthal? Surely —"
"Surely they could prevent this?" Della finished the question. She swapped out a 
moment. Then: "Oh... wow!" Her words were almost a sigh, fiIled with endless 
wonder and surprise. She was silent a moment more. Then her eyes focused on Wil. 
"All this time, we were expecting to flush the killer into the open. Right? 
Well... we have a little problem. All the high-tech forces have turned on us."
Like a gruesome short story Wil once read: Detective locks self in room with 
suspects. Detective applies definitive test to suspects. All suspects guilty.... 
Unmarked grave for detective. Happy ending for suspects.
"We are now outgunned, Wil. This is going to be very interesting." The smile was 
almost gone from her face, replaced by a look of intense concentration. Sudden 
light and shadow flickered across the cabin. Wil looked up, saw a pattern of 
point lights glowing, fading in the blackness. "They have a lot of stuff at the 
Lagrange zones. They're bringing it down on us-while their ground-based stuff 
comes up. No way we can get to my quarters just now."
And they were back at low altitude, the horizon spread flat around them, the 
Indonesian Alps drifting by below. His restraint harness stiffened and the flier 
surged forward at multiple g's, then slammed to the side. Wil's consciousness 
faded into red dimness. Somewhere he heard Della say, "... lose realtime every 
time I nuke out. Can't afford it now." They were in free fall for almost a 
second, then more crushing acceleration, then free fall again. Brightness 
flashed all around them, lighting sea and clouds with extra suns. More 
acceleration. Things don't get this exciting when they're going right.
The horizon jerked, and acceleration reversed. Jerk, jerk. Now each translation 
of the outside world was accompanied by changed acceleration, the agrav being 
used in concert with the nukes. Della's words came in broken gasps. "Bastards." 
Around them the horizon rose, kilometers per second. Acceleration was heavy, 
spacewards. "They're past my defenders." Jerk. They were lower, hurtling 
parallel to the vast wall that was the Earth. "They're zeroed on me." Jerk. 
"Seven direct hits in —" jerk. jerk.
Jerk. Free fall again. This last had taken them high over the Pacific. All was 
blue and ocean clouds below. "We've got about a minute's breather. I regrouped 
my low forces and nuked into the middle of them. The enemy's breaking through 
right now." To the west, point suns flashed brighter and brighter. In the sky 
below, weirdness: five contrails, a dozen. The clouds grew like quick crystal, 
around threads of fire. Directed energy weapons? "We're the king piece; they're 
trying to force us out of this era."
Somewhere, Wil found his voice. Even more, it sounded calm. "No way, Della."
"Yeah... I didn't come this far to fade." Pause. "Okay. There's another way to 
protect the king piece. A bit risky, but- —"
Wil's chair suddenly came alive. The sides swung inward, bringing his arms 
across his middle. The footrest moved up, forcing his knees to near chest level. 
At the same time, the entire assembly rotated sideways, to face a similarly 
trussed Della Lu. The contraption tightened painfully, squeezing the two of them 
into a round bundle. And then
TWENTY-FOUR 
There was an instant of falling. The acceleration spiked, then stabilized at one 
g.
The chair relaxed its grip.
The sunlight was gone. The air was hot, dry. They were no longer in the flier! 
The "one-g field" was the Earth's. They were sitting on the ground.
Della was already on her feet, dismantling part of her chair. "Nice sunset, 
huh?" She nodded toward the horizon.
Sunset or sunrise. He had no sense of direction, but the heat in the air made 
him guess they were at the end of a day. The sun was squashed and reddish, its 
light coming sickly across a level plain. He suddenly felt sick himself. Was 
that disk reddened by its closeness to the horizon, or was the sun itself 
redder? "Della, just-just how long did we jump?"
She looked up from her rummaging. "About forty-five minutes. If we can live 
another five, we may be okay." She pulled a meter-long pole from the back of her 
chair, clipped a strap to it, and slung it over her shoulder. He noticed shiny 
metal where the bobble had cut the chairs away from Della's flier. That bobble 
had been scarcely more than a meter wide. No wonder he had been cramped. "We 
need to get out of sight. Help me drag this stuff over there." She pointed at a 
knoblike hill a hundred meters off.
They were standing in a shallow crater of dirt and freshly cracked rock. Wil 
took a chair in each hand and pulled; he backed quickly out of the crater, onto 
grass. Della motioned him to stop. She grabbed one of the chairs and tipped it 
over. "Drag it on the smooth side. I don't want them to see a trail." She leaned 
back against the load, dragging it quickly away across the short grass. Wil 
followed, pulling his with a one-handed grasp.
"When you've got a minute, I'd like to know what we're up to.
"Sure. Soon as we get these under cover." She turned, took the load on her 
shoulders, and all but trotted toward the stony hill. It took several minutes to 
reach it; the hill was larger and farther away than he thought. It rose over the 
grass and scrub like some ominous guardian. Except for the birds that rattled 
out as they approached, it seemed lifeless.
The ground around it was bare, grooved. The rock bulged over its base, leaving 
shallow caves along the perimeter. There was a smell of death. He saw bones in 
the shadows. Della saw them too. She slid her chair in over the bones and waved 
for Wil to do the same. "I don't like this, but we've got other hunters to worry 
about first." Once the equipment was hidden, she scrambled up the rock face to a 
small cave about four meters up. Wil followed, more awkwardly.
He looked around before sitting beside her. The indentation barely qualified as 
a cave. Nothing would surprise them from behind, though something had used it 
for dining; there were more well-gnawed bones. The cave was hidden from most of 
the sky, yet they had a good view of the ground, almost to the base of the rock.
He sat down, impatient for explanations-and suddenly was struck by the silence. 
All day the tension had grown, reaching a crescendo of violence these last few 
minutes. Now every sign of that struggle was gone. One hundred meters away, 
birds flocked around a stunted tree, their cries and flapping wings clear and 
tiny in the larger silence. Only a sliver of the sun's disk still glowed at the 
horizon. By that light, the prairie was reddish gold, broken here and there by 
the dark scrub. The breeze was a slow thing, still warm from the day. It brought 
perfume and putrescence, and left the sweat dry on his face.
He looked at Della Lu. Dark hair had fallen across her cheek. She didn't seem to 
notice. "Della?" he said quietly. "Did we lose?"
"Unh?" She looked at him, awareness coming back to her eyes. "Not yet. Maybe not 
at all if this works.... They were concentrating everything on you and me. The 
only way we could stay in this era and still survive was to disappear. I brought 
my whole inner guard toward our flier. We exploded almost all our nukes at the 
same time, and vanished as thousands of meter-sized bobbles. One of those 
bobbles contained you and me; seventy of them are from the cairn. They're 
scattered all over now-Earth surface, Earth orbit, solar orbit. Most of the 
surface ones were timed to burst minutes after impact."
"So we're lost in the turmoil."
Her smile was a ghost of earlier enthusiasm. "Right. They haven't got us yet: I 
think we brought it off. Given a few hours they could do a thorough search, but 
I'm not giving them the time. My midguard has come down, and is giving them 
plenty of other things to worry about.
"We, here, are totally defenseless, Wil. I don't even have a bobbler. The other 
side could take us out with a five-millimeter pistol — if only they knew where 
to do the shooting. I had to destroy my inner guard to get away. What's left is 
outnumbered two to one. Yet... yet I think I can win. Fifty seconds out of every 
minute, I have tight beam comm with my fleet." She patted the meter-long pole 
that lay on the ground between them. One end consisted of a ten-centimeter 
sphere. She had laid the pole so that the ball was at the cave's entrance. Wil 
looked at it more closely, saw iridescence glow and waver. It was some kind of 
coherent transmitter. Her own forces knew where they were hidden, and needed to 
keep only one unit in line of sight for Lu to run the battle.
Della's voice was distant, almost indifferent. "Whoever they are, they know how 
to pervert systems, but not so much about combat I've fought through centuries 
of realtime, with bobblers and suppressors, nukes and lasers. I have programs 
you just couldn't buy in civilization. Even without me, my system fights smarter 
than the other side's...." A chuckle. "The high-orbit stuff is dead just now. 
We're playing 'peek and shoot': 'peek' around the shoulder of the Earth, 'shoot' 
at anything with its head stuck up. Boys and girls running round and round their 
home, killing each other.... I'm winning, Wil, I really am. But we're burning it 
all. Poor Yelén. So worried that our systems might not last long enough to 
reestablish civilization. One afternoon we're destroying all we've accumulated."
"What about the low-techs?" Was there anybody left to fight for?
"Their little play-war?" She was silent for fifteen seconds, and when she spoke 
again seemed even further away. "That ended as soon as it had served the enemy's 
purpose." Perhaps only Town Korolev had been wiped. Della sat against the rear 
wall of the cave. Now she leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
Wil studied her face. How different she looked from the creature he had seen on 
the beach. And when she wasn't talking, there were no weird perspectives, no 
shifting of personalities. Her face was young and innocent, straight black hair 
still fallen across her cheek. She might have been asleep, occasional dreams 
twitching her lips and eyelids. Wil reached to brush the hair back from her 
face-and stopped. The mind in this body was looking far across space, looking 
down on Earth from all directions, was commanding one side in the largest battle 
Wil had ever known. Best to let sleeping generals lie.
He crawled along the side of the cave to the entrance. From here he could see 
the plains and part of the sky, yet was better hidden than Della.
He looked across the land. If there was any way he could help, it was by 
protecting Della from local varmints. A few of the birds had returned to the 
rock. They were the only animal life visible; maybe these bone-littered condos 
were abandoned property. Surely Della had brought handguns and first-aid gear.
He eyed the smooth shells of the acceleration chairs and wondered if he should 
ask her about them. But Della was in deep connect; even during the first attack 
she had not been concentrating like this.... Better to wait till he had a 
certifiable emergency. For now he would watch and listen.
Twilight slowly faded; a quarter moon slid down the western sky. From the track 
of the sun's setting, he guessed they were in the Northern Hemisphere, away from 
the tropics. This must be Calafia or the savanna that faced that island on the 
west coast of North America. Somehow, being oriented made Wil t eel better.
The birds had quieted. There was a buzzing he hoped was insects. It was getting 
hard to keep his eyes on the ground With the coming of night, the sky show was 
impossible to ignore. Aurora stretched from north horizon to south. The pal,. 
curtains were as bright as any he had seen, even from Alaska The battle itself 
danced slowly beyond those curtains. Some of the lights were close-set sparkles, 
like a gem visible only where its facets caught some magic light. The lights 
brightened an( dimmed, but the cluster as a whole didn't move: that must b: a 
high-orbit fight, perhaps at a Lagrange zone. For half an hour at a time, that 
was the only action visible. Then a fragment of the near-Earth battle would come 
above the horizon-the "peek and shoot" crowd. Those lights cast vivid shadows, 
each one starting brilliant white, fading to red over five or ten seconds.
Though he had no idea who was winning, Will thought h;. could follow some of the 
action. A near-Earth firefight would start with ten or twenty detonations across 
a large part of the sky. These were followed by more nukes in a smaller and 
smaller space, presumably fighting past robots towards a central auton. Even the 
laser blasts were visible now, threads of light coruscating bright or faint 
depending on how much junk was in the way. Their paths pointed into the 
contracting net a detonations. Sometimes the net shrank to nothing, the enemy 
destroyed or in long-term stasis. Other times, there was a bright flash from the 
center, or a string of flashes heading outward Escape attempts? In any case, the 
battle would then cease, or shift many degrees across the sky. Aurora flared in 
moon-bright knots on the deserted battlefield.
Even moving hundreds of kilometers per second, it took time for the fighters to 
cross the sky, time for the nuke blasts to fade through red to auroral memories. 
It was like fireworks photographed in slow motion.
The land around them was empty but for moving shadows, silent but for the insect 
buzz and occasional uneasy squawking. Only once did he hear anything caused by 
the battle. Three threads of directed energy laced across the sky from some 
fight over the horizon. The shots were very low, actually in the atmosphere. 
Even as they faded, contrails grew around them. After a minute, Wil heard faint 
thunder.
An hour passed, then two. Della had not said a word. To him, anyway. Light 
chased back and forth within the ball of her communications scepter, 
interference fringes shifting as she resighted the link.
Something started yowling. Wil's eyes swept the plain. Just now his only light 
was from the aurora: there was no near-Earth firefight going, and the high-orbit 
action was a dim flickering at the western horizon.... Ah, there they were! Gray 
shapes, a couple of hundred meters out. They were loud for their size — or 
hunkered close to the ground. The yowling spread, was traded back and forth. 
Were they fighting? Admiring the light show?
... They were getting closer, easier to see. The creatures were almost man-sized 
but stayed close to the ground. They advanced in stages-trotting forward a few 
meters, then dropping to the ground, resuming the serenade. The pack stayed 
spread out, though there were pairs and trios that ran together. It all rang a 
very unpleasant chord in Wil's memory. He came to his knees and crawled back to 
Della.
Even before he reached her, she began mumbling. "Don't look out, Wil. I have 
them worn down... but they've guessed we're on the surface. Last hour they've 
been trying to emp me out, mainly over Asia." She gave something like a chuckle. 
"Nothing like picking on the wrong continent. But they're shifting now. If I 
can't stop 'em, there'll be low-altitude nukes strung across North America. Stay 
down, don't look out.'' The yowling was even closer. When bad luck comes, it 
comes in bunches. Wil took Della by the shoulders, gently shook her. "Are there 
weapons in the ace chairs?"
Her eyes came open, dazed and wild. "Can't talk! If they, emp me —"
Wil scrambled back to the cave entrance. What was she talking about? Nothing but 
aurora lit the sky. He looked down. She must have weapons stored in those 
chairs. Climbing down would expose him to the sky for a few seconds, but once 
there he could hide under the overhang and work on the chairs. The nearest of 
the dogthings was only eighty meters out.
Wil swung onto the rock face, and — Della screamed, a tearing, full-throated 
shriek of pain. Wil's universe went blinding white, and a wave of heat swept 
over his back, burning his hands and neck. He vaulted back into the cave, rolled 
to the rear wall. The only sound was the sudden keening of the dogs.
There was a second flash, a third, fourth, fifth.... He was curled around Della 
now, shielding both their faces from the cave entrance. Each flash seemed less 
bright; the terrible, silent footsteps marched away from them. But with each 
flash, Della spasmed against him, her coughs spraying wetness across his shirt.
Finally darkness returned. His scalp tingled, and Della's hair clung to his face 
when he leaned away from her. A tiny blue spark leaped from his fingers when he 
touched the wall. Lu was moaning wordlessly; each breath ended in a choked 
cough. He turned her on her side, made sure she wasn't swallowing her tongue. 
Her breathing quieted, and the spasms subsided.
"Can you hear me, Della?"
There was a long silence, filled with the mewling of the animals outside. Then 
her breathing roughened and she mumbled something. Wil brought his ear close to 
her face ". .. fooled 'em. They won't come sniffing around here for a while... 
but I'm cut off now. .. comm link wrecked."
Beyond the cave, the whimpering continued, but now there were sounds of 
movement, too. "We've got local problems, Della. Did you bring handguns?"
She squeezed his hand. "Acc chairs. Opens off my signal... or thumbprint... 
sorry."
He eased her head to the ground and moved back to the entrance. The comm scepter 
didn't glow anymore; the sphere end was too hot to touch. He thought about the 
gear Della had in her skull and shuddered. It was a miracle she still lived.
Wil looked out. The ground was well lit: the residue of the nuke attack shone 
overhead, a line of glowing splotches that stretched to the western horizon. 
Five of the dogthings lay, writhing in the near distance. Most of the others had 
gathered in a close-packed herd. There was much whimpering, much snuffling of 
the ground, sniffing of the air. The brightness had burned their eyes out. They 
drifted toward the rock and hunkered beneath its overhang, waiting for the dark 
time to pass. Most of them would have a long wait.
Nine dogs paced along the edge of the herd, baying querulously. Wil could 
imagine their meaning; "C'mon, c'mon. What's the matter with you?" Somehow, 
these nine had been shaded from the sky; they could still see.
Maybe he could still get the guns. Wil picked up the comm scepter. It felt 
heavy, solid-if nothing else, a morningstar. He slipped over the edge of the 
rock and slid to ground level.
But not unnoticed: The howling began even before he reached the ground. Three of 
the sighted ones loped toward him. Wil backed into the overhang that hid the 
chairs. Without taking his eyes off the approaching dogthings, he reached down 
and pulled the nearest chair into the open.
Then they were on him, the lead dog diving at his ankles. Wil swung the scepter, 
and met empty air as the creature twisted away. The next one came in thigh-high 
— and caught Wil's backswing in the face. Metal crunched into bone. The creature 
didn't even yelp, just crashed and lay unmoving. The third one backed off, 
circled. Wil raised the chair on end. It was as seamless as he remembered. There 
were no buttons, latches. He slammed it hard against the rock face. The rock 
chipped; the shell was unscratched. He'd have to get it up to the cave for Della 
to touch.
The chair massed forty kilos, but there were good fingerholds on the rock face. 
He could do it — if his friends stayed intimidated. He slid the scepter through 
the restraint harness and pulled the chair onto his shoulder. He was less than 
two meters up the wall when they charged.
He really should have known better; these were like the near-dogs Marta had met 
at the West End mines. They were as big as komondors, big enough they needn't 
take no for an answer. Jaws raked and grabbed at his boots. He fell on his side. 
This was how they liked it; Wil felt an instant of sheer terror as one of them 
dived for his gut. He pulled the chair across his body, and the creature veered 
off. Wil got the next one across its neck with his scepter.
They backed off as Wil scrambled to his feet. Around the side of the rock, the 
blind ones growled and shouted. The cheerleaders.
So much for the acc chairs. He'd be lucky now to get himself back to the cave.
There was motion at the corner of his eye: He looked up. Unlike dogs, these 
creatures could climb! The animal picked its way carefully across the rock face, 
its skinny limbs splayed out in four directions. It was almost to the cave 
entrance. Della! He stepped back from the rock and threw the comm scepter as 
hard as he could. The ball end caught the creature on its spine, midway between 
shoulder and haunch. It screamed and fell, the scepter clattering down behind 
it. The creature lay on its back, its hindquarters limp, the forelegs sweeping 
in all directions. As Wil darted forward to grab the scepter, one of its clawed 
fingers raked his arm.
Wil was vaguely aware of shooting pain, of wet spreading down his sleeve. So the 
cave was not safe. Even if he could get back there, it would be hard to defend; 
there were several approaches. He risked another glance upwards. There was 
another cave still higher in the rock. The approach was bordered by sheer walls. 
He might be able to defend it.
The sighted ones circled inwards. He pushed the chair under the overhang, then 
ran to rock face, jumping high. The dogthings were close behind--only this time 
he had a free hand. He swung the scepter pact their noses then crawled upwards 
another meter. One of the creatures was climbing parallel with him. Its progress 
was slow, no more agile than a human's. Was it coming after him — or trying to 
get to Della? Wil pretended to ignore it. He paused again to swipe at those who 
harried him from below. He could hear the climber's claws on stone. It was 
sidling toward him, fingerhold to fingerhold. Still Wil ignored it. I'm an easy 
mark, I'm an easy mark.
One of the lower dogs bit into his boot. He bent, crushed its skull with the 
scepter.
He knew the other was less than a meter away now, coming down from above. 
Without turning his head, Wil jammed the scepter upwards. It hit something soft. 
For an instant man stared at dogthing, neither enjoying the experience. Its jaws 
opened in a hissing growl. Its claws were within striking distance of Wil's 
face, but the scepter was pushing against its chest, forcing it off the cliff. 
Brierson tucked his head against his arm and pushed harder. For a moment they 
were motionless, each clinging to the rock. Wil felt his hold giving way. Then 
something crashed into the dog from above, and its growl became a shriek. Its 
claws scraped desperately against stone. Resistance abruptly ceased and it fell 
past him.
But the others were still coming. As he scrambled higher, he glanced up. 
Something was looking down at him from the cave. The face was strangely 
splotched, but human. Somehow, Della had beaned the dog. He would have shouted 
thanks, but he was too busy hustling up the wall.
He hoisted himself over the cave's edge, turned, and took a poke at the dog that 
was coming up right after him. This one was lucky, or Wil was slowing down: It 
snapped its head around Wil's thrust and grabbed the shaft of the scepter. Then 
it pulled, dragging Wil half out of the cave, tearing the scepter from his 
hands. The creature fell down the cliffside, taking several comrades with it.
Wil sat for a moment, gasping. What an incompetent jerk he was. Marta had lasted 
four decades, alone, in this sort of wilderness. He and Della had been on the 
ground less than four hours. They had made all sorts of stupid mistakes, now 
losing their only weapon. More dogthings were gathering below. If he and Della 
lasted another hour, it would be a miracle.
And they wouldn't last ten minutes if they stayed in this cave. Between gasping 
breaths, he told Della about the cave further up. She was lying on her stomach, 
her head turned to one side. The dark on her face was blood. Every few seconds, 
she coughed, sending a dark spray across the stone. Her voice was soft, the 
words not completely articulated. "I can't climb anywhere, Wil. Had to belly 
crawl t'get here."
They were coming up the wall again. For a strange instant, Wil considered the 
prospect of his own demise. Everyone wonders how he'll check out. In a 
policeman's case there are obvious scenarios. Never in a million years would he 
have guessed this one-dying with Della Lu, torn to pieces by creatures that in 
human history did not exist.
The instant passed and he was moving again, doing what he could. "Then I'll 
carry you." He took her hands. "Can you grab around my neck?"
"Yeah."
"Okay." He turned, guided her arms over his shoulders. He rose to his knees. She 
held on, her body stretched along his back. He was fleetingly aware of female 
curves. She had changed more than her hair since that day at the beach.
He wiped one hand on his pants. The nick on his arm was only oozing, but there 
was enough blood to make him slippery. "Tell me if you start losing your grip." 
He crawled out of the cave onto an upward-slanting ledge. Della massed more than 
the acc chair, but she was doing her best to hang on. He had both hands free.
The ledge ended in a narrow chimney heading straight up. Somewhere behind them, 
a firefight glowed. It brought no anxiety to his mind, only gratitude. The light 
showed breaks in the rock. He stepped in one on the left side, then one on the 
right, practically walking up the slot. He could see the entrance to the upper 
cave, scarcely two meters ahead.
The dogs had made it to the first cave. He could hear them clicking along the 
ledge. If this was easy for him, it was easy for them. He looked down, saw three 
of them racing single file up the slot.
"Hold tight!" He scrambled for the top, had his arms hooked over the entrance 
the same instant the lead dog got his boot. This time, he felt teeth come 
straight through the plastic. Wil swung his leg away from the wall, the animal a 
twisting ",eight on his foot. Its forelegs clawed at his calf.
Then he had the right angle: The boot slipped from his foot. The dog made a 
frantic effort to crawl up his leg, its claws raking Wil's flesh. Then it was 
gone, crashing into its comrades below.
Wil pulled himself into the cave and lay Della on her side. His leg was a 
multiple agony. He pulled back the pants leg. There was a film of blood 
spreading from the gashes, but no spurting. He could stop the bleeding if given 
a moment's peace. He pressed down on the deepest wound, at the same time 
watching for another assault. It probably didn't matter. His fingernails and 
teeth weren't in a class with the dogs' claws and fifteen-millimeter canines.
... bad luck comes in bunches. Wil's nose was finally communicating the stench 
that hung in the cave. The other one had smelled of death, bones crusted with 
fragments of desiccated flesh; the smell here was of wet putrefaction. Something 
big and recently dead lay behind them. And something else still lived here: Wil 
heard metallic clicking.
Wil leaned forward and slipped his remaining boot onto his fist. He continued 
the motion into a quick turn that brought him up and facing into the cave. The 
distant firefight lit the cave in ambiguous shades of gray. The dead thing had 
been a near-dog. It lay like some impressionist holo-parts of the torso 
shrunken, others bloated. Things moved on the body... and in it: Enormous 
beetles studded the corpse, their round shells showing an occasional metallic 
highlight. These were the source of the clicking.
Wil scrambled across the litter of old bones. Up close, the smell stuffed the 
cave with invisible cotton, leaving no room for breathable air. It didn't 
matter. He had to get a close look at those beetles. He took a shallow breath 
and brought his head close to one of the largest. Its head was stuck into the 
corpse, the rear exposed. That armored sphere was almost fifteen centimeters 
across. Its surface was tessellated by a regular pattern of chitin plates.
He sat back, gasped for air. Was it possible? Marta's beetles were in Asia, 
fifty thousand years ago. Fifty thousand years. That was enough time for them to 
get across the land bridge
.. also enough time for them to lose their deadly talent.
He was going to find out: The dogs were yowling again. Louder than before. Not 
loud enough to cover the sound of claws on stone. Wil thrust his hands into the 
soft, dead flesh and separated the beetle from its meal. Pain stabbed through a 
finger as it bit him. He moved his grip back to the armored rear and watched the 
tiny legs wave, the mandibles click.
He heard the dogs coming along the ledge to the chimney.
Still no action from his little friend. Wil tossed the creature from hand to 
hand, then shook it. A puff of hot gas hissed between his fingers. There was a 
new smell, acrid and burning.
He took the beetle to the cave entrance and gave it another shake. The hiss got 
louder, became almost sibilant. The armored shell was almost too hot to touch. 
He kept the insect excited through another ten seconds. Then he saw a dog at the 
bottom of the slot. It looked back, then charged up the chimney, three others 
close behind. Wil gave the beetle one last shake and threw it downwards, into 
the cliff face just above the lead dog. The explosion was a sharp cracking 
sound, without a flash. The dog gave a bubbling scream and fell against the 
others. Only the trailing animal kept its footing-and it retreated from the 
chimney.
Thank you, Marta! Thank you!
 
There were two more attacks during the next hour. They were easily beaten back. 
Wil kept a couple of grenade beetles close to the edge of the cave, at least one 
near the bursting point. How near the bursting point he didn't know, and in the 
end he feared the beetles more than the dogs. During the last attack, he blew 
four dogs off the rock-and got his own ear ripped by a piece of chitinous 
shrapnel.
After that, they stopped coming. Maybe he had killed all the sighted ones; maybe 
they had wised up. He could still hear the blind ones, down beneath the 
overhang. The bowling, had sounded sinister; now it seemed mournful, frightened.
The space battle had wound down, too. The aurora was as bright as ever, but 
there were no big firefights. Even isolated flashes were rare. The most 
spectacular sight was an occasional piece of junk progressing stately across the 
sky, slowly disintegrating into glowing debris as it fell through the 
atmosphere.
When the dogs stopped coming, Wil sat beside Della. The emp attack had blown the 
electronics in her skull. Moving her head caused dizziness and intense pain. 
Most of the time, she lay silent or softly moaning. Sometimes she was lucid: 
Though she was totally cut off from her autons, she guessed that her side was 
winning, that it had slowly ground down the other high-techs. And some of the 
time she was delirious, or wearing one of her weirder personalities, or both. 
After a half-hour silence, she coughed into her hand and stared at the new blood 
splattered on the dried. "I could die now. I could really die." There was wonder 
in her voice, and fascination. "Nine thousand years I have lived. There aren't 
many people who could do that." Her eyes focused on Wil. "You couldn't. You're 
too wrapped up in the people around you. You like them too much."
Wil brushed the hair from her face. When she winced, he moved his hand to her 
shoulder. "So I'm a pussycat?" he said.
"... No. A civilized person, who can rise to the occasion.... But it takes more 
than that to live as long as I. You need single-mindedness, the ability to 
ignore your limitations. Nine thousand years. Even with augmentation, I'm like a 
flatworm attending the opera. A hundred responses a planarian has? And then what 
does it do with the rest of the show? When I'm connected, I can remember it all, 
but where is the original me? .. I've drifted through everything this mind can 
be. I've run out of happy endings... and sad ones, too." There was a long 
silence. "I wonder why I'm crying."
"Maybe there's something left to see. What brought you this far?"
"Stubbornness, and... I wanted to know... what happened. I wanted to see into 
the Singularity."
He patted her shoulder. "That still may be. Stick around."
She gave a small smile, and her hand fell against him. "Okay. You were always 
good for me, Mike."
Mike? She was delirious.
The lasers and nukes had been gone for hours. The aurora was fading with the 
morning twilight. Della had not spoken again. The rotting dogthing brought 
warmth (and by now Wil had no sense of smell whatsoever, but the night was cold, 
less than ten degrees. Wil had moved her next to the creature and covered her 
with his jacket and shirt. She no longer coughed or moaned. Her breathing was 
shallow and rapid. Wil lay beside her, shivering and almost grateful to be 
covered with dogthing gore, dried blood, and general filth. Behind them, the 
beetles continued their clicking progress through the corpse.
From the sound of Della's breathing, he doubted she could last many more hours. 
And after the night, he had a good idea of his own wilderness longevity.
He couldn't really believe that Della's forces had won. If they had, why no 
rescue? If they hadn't, the enemy might never discover where they were hidden — 
might never even care. And he would never know who was behind the destruction of 
the last human settlement.
Twilight brightened towards day. Wil crept to the cave entrance. The aurora was 
gone, blotted out by the blue of morning. From here he wouldn't see the sunrise, 
but he knew it hadn't happened yet; there were no shadows. All colors were 
pastels: the blue in the sky, the pale green of the grassland, the darker green 
in the trees. For a time nothing moved. Cool, peaceful silence.
On the ground, the dogthings rousted themselves. By twos and threes they walked 
onto the plain, smelling morning but not able to see it. The sighted ones ran 
out ahead, then circled back, trying to get the others to hustle. From a safe 
distance, and in daylight, Wil had to admit they were graceful-even 
amusing--creatures: Slender and flexible, they could run or belly crawl with 
equal ease. Their long snouts and narrow eyes gave them a perpetually crafty 
look. One of the sighted ones glanced up at Will, gave an unconvincing growl. 
More than anything, they reminded him of the frustrated coyote that had chased a 
roadrunner bird through two centuries of comic animation.
In the western sky, something glittered, metal in sunlight. Dogthings forgotten, 
Wil stared up. Nothing but blue now. Fifteen seconds passed. Three black specks 
hung where he'd seen the light. They didn't move across the sky, but slowly 
grew. A ripple of sonic booms came across the plain.
The fliers decelerated to a smooth stop a couple of meters above the grass. All 
three were unmarked, unmanned. Wil considered scrambling to the rear of the 
cave-but he didn't move. If they looked, they would find. Loser or winner, he 
was damned if he'd cower.
The three hung for a moment in silent conference. Then the nearest slid, silent 
and implacable, up the air towards Wil.
TWENTY-FIVE
For whatever it might be worth, Wil's side was the winner. He was released by 
the medics in less than an hour. His body was whole, but stiff and aching; the 
medical autons didn't waste their time on finishing touches. There were really 
serious casualties, and only a part of the medical establishment had survived 
the fight. The worst cases were simply popped into stasis. Della disappeared 
into her system, with the autons' assurance that she would be substantially well 
in forty hours.
Wil tried not to think about the disaster that spread all around them, tried not 
to think that it was his fault. He had thought the search for the cairn would 
provoke an attack — but on himself and Della, not on all humanity.
That attack had killed almost half the human race. Wil couldn't bring himself to 
ask Yelén directly, but he knew anyway: Marta's plan was dead. He had failed in 
the only way that mattered. And yet he still had a job. He still had a murderer 
to catch. It was something to work on, a barricade against grief
Although the price was higher than he had ever wished to pay, the battle had 
given him the sort of clues he'd hoped Della's system had retrieved the cairn 
bobble; its content. would be available in twenty-four hours. And there were 
other things to look at It was clear now that the enemy's only power had lain in 
his perversion of others' systems. But, at every step, they had underestimated 
that power. After Marta's murder, they thought it was a shallow penetration, the 
perversion of a bug in the Korolev system. After Wil found the clue in the 
diary, they thought the enemy had deeper penetration, but still of Korolev's 
system alone; they guessed the killer might be able to usurp parts of Yelén's 
forces. And then came the war between the low-techs. It had been a diversion, 
covering the enemy's final, most massive assault. That assault had been not on 
Korolev's system alone, but on Genet's and Chanson's and Blumenthal's and 
Raines'. Every system except Lu's had been taken over, turned to the business of 
killing Wil and Della.
But Della Lu was very hard to kill. She had fought the other systems to a 
standstill, then beaten them down. In the chaos of defeat, the original owners 
climbed out of system-metaphorical bunkers and reclaimed what was left of their 
property.
Everyone agreed it couldn't happen again. They might even be right. What 
remained of their computing systems was pitifully simple, not deep enough or 
connected enough for games of subtle perversion. Everyone agreed on something 
else: The enemy's skill with systems had been the equal of the best and biggest 
police services from the high-techs' era.
So. It was a big clue, though small compared to the price of the learning. 
Related, and at least as significant: Della Lu had been immune to the takeover. 
Wil put the two together and reached some obvious conclusions. He worked 
straight through the next twenty-four hours, studying Della's copy of GreenInc 
-especially the garbled coverage of the late twenty-second. It was tedious work. 
At one time, the document had been seriously damaged; the reconstruction could 
never be complete. Facts and dates were jumbled. Whole sections were missing. He 
could understand why Della didn't use the later coverage Wil kept at it. He knew 
what to look for... and in the end he found it.
A half-trashed db would not convince a court, but Wil was satisfied: He knew who 
killed Marta Korolev. He spent an empty, hate-full afternoon trying to figure 
how to destroy the murderer. What did it matter now? Now that the human race was 
dead.
That night, Juan Chanson dropped by Wil's new quarters. The man was subdued; he 
spoke scarcely faster than a normal person. "I've checked for bugs, my boy, but 
I want to keep this short." Chanson looked nervously around the tiny room that 
was Wil's share of the refugee dorm. "I noticed something during the battle. I 
think it can save us all." They talked for more than an hour. And when Chanson 
left, it was with the promise they would talk again in the morning.
Wil sat thinking for a long time after the other left. My God, if what Juan says 
is true. .. Juan's story made sense; it tied up all the loose ends. He noticed 
he was shivering: not just his hands, his whole body. It was a combination of 
joy and fear 
He had to talk to Della about this. It would take planning, deception, and good 
luck, but if they played their cards exactly right, the settlement still had a 
chance!
 
On the third day, the survivors gathered at Castle Korolev, in the stone 
amphitheater. It was mostly empty now. The aborted war between New Mexico and 
the Peace had killed more than one hundred low-techs. Wil looked across the 
theater. How different this was from the last meeting here. Now the low-techs 
crowded together, leaving long sweeps of bench completely empty. There were few 
uniforms, and the insignia had been ripped from most of those. Ungovs, NMs, 
Peacers sat mixed together, hard to tell apart; they all looked beaten. No one 
sat on the top benches-where you could look down through the castle's jacarandas 
at the swath of burn and glaze that had been Town Korolev.
Brierson had seen the list of dead. Still, his eyes searched across the crowd, 
as if he might somehow see the friends-and the enemy-he had lost. Derek 
Lindemann was gone. Wil was genuinely sorry about that-not so much for the man, 
but for losing the chance to prove he could face him without rage. Rohan was 
dead. Cheerful, decent Rohan. The brothers had taken Wil's warning and hidden 
beneath their farm. Hours passed. The autons left. Rohan went outside to bring 
down the last of their equipment. When the bombs fell, he was caught in the 
open.
Dilip had come to the meeting alone. Now he sat with Gail Parker, talking 
softly.
"I suppose we can begin." Yelén's voice cut across the murmur of the crowd. Only 
the amplification gave her voice force; her tone was listless. The burden she 
had carried since Marta died had finally slipped, and crushed her. "For the 
low-techs, some explanations. You fought a war three days ago. By now, you know 
you were maneuvered into fighting. It was a cover for someone to grab our 
high-tech systems and start the larger fight you've seen in near space.... Your 
war killed or maimed half the human race. Our war destroyed about ninety percent 
of our equipment." She leaned against the podium, her head down. "It's the end 
of our plan; we have neither the genetic resources nor the equipment to 
reestablish civilization.
"I don't know about the other high-tecbs, but I'm not going to bobble out. I 
have enough resources to support you all for a few years. If I spread it around, 
what's left of my medical resources should be enough to provide a 
twentieth-century level of care for many decades. After that... well, our life 
in the wilderness will be better than Marta's I guess. If we're lucky, we may 
last a century; Sánchez did, and he had fewer people."
She paused, and seemed to swallow something painful. "And you have another 
option. I-I've cut the suppressor field. You are all free to bobble out of this 
era." Her gaze moved reluctantly across the audience, to where Tammy Robinson 
sat. She sat alone, her face somber. Yelén had released her from stasis at the 
first opportunity after the battle. So far, Tammy had done nothing to take 
advantage of the debacle; her sympathy seemed genuine. On the other hand, she 
had nothing to lose by magnanimity. The wreckage of the Korolev plan was now 
hers for the taking.
Yelén continued. "I suppose that we really didn't need a meeting for me to say 
this. But even though what Marta and I hoped for is dead, I still have one goal 
before we all fade into the wilderness." She straightened, and the old fire came 
back to her voice. "I want to get the creature that killed Marta and wrecked the 
settlement! Except for some wounded low-techs, everyone is here this 
afternoon.... Odds are the killer is, too. W. W. Brierson claims he knows who 
the killer is... and can prove it. " She looked up at him, her smile a bitter 
mocking. "What would you do, ladies and gentlemen, confronted by the most famous 
cop in all civilization-telling you he had suddenly solved the case you had 
spent a hundred years thinking on? What would you do if that cop refused to 
reveal the secret except to a meeting of all concerned?... I laughed in his 
face. But then I thought, what more is there to lose? This is W. W. Brierson; in 
the novels, he solves all his cases with a flashy denouement." She bowed in his 
direction. "Your last case, Inspector. I wish you luck." She walked from the 
stage.
Wil was already on his feet, walking slowly down the curve of the amphitheater. 
Someday he would have to read Billy's novels. Had the boy really ended each by a 
confrontation with a roomful of suspects? In his real life, this was only the 
third time he had ever seen such a thing. Normally, you identified the criminal, 
then arrested him. A denouement with a roomful -in this case, an 
auditoriumful-of suspects meant that you lacked either the knowledge or the 
power to accomplish an arrest. Any competent criminal realized this, too; the 
situation was failure in the making.
And sometimes it was the best you could do. Wil was aware of the crowd's 
absolute silence, of their eyes following him down the steps. Even the 
high-techs might be given pause by his reputation. For once, he was going to use 
the hype for all it was worth.
He stepped onto the stage and put his data set on the podium. He was the only 
person who could see the two clocks on the display. At this instant they read 
00:11:32 and 00:24:52; the seconds ticked implacably downwards. He had about 
five minutes to set things up, else he would have to string the affair along for 
another twenty. Best to try for the first deadline-even that would require some 
stalling.
He looked across his audience, caught Juan's eye. None of this would have been 
possible without him. "For the moment, forget the disaster this has come to. 
What do we have? Several isolated murders, the manipulation of the governments, 
and finally the takeover of the high-techs' control systems. The murder of Marta 
Korolev and the system takeover are totally beyond the abilities of us 
low-techs. On the other hand, we know the enemy is not supernaturally powerful: 
He blew years of careful penetration in order to grab the systems. For all the 
damage he did, he wasn't able to maintain control — and now his perversions have 
been recognized and repaired." We hope.
"So. The enemy is one of the high-techs. One of these seven people." With a 
sweep of his hand he pointed at the seven. They were all in the first few rows, 
but with the exception of Blumenthal who sat at the edge of the low-techs — they 
were spread out, each an isolated human being.
Della Lu was dressed in something gray and shapeless. Her head injuries had been 
repaired, but the temporary substitute for her implants was a bulky interface 
band. She was into her weirdness act. Her eyes roamed randomly around the 
theater. Her expression flickered through various emotions, none having 
reasonable connection with the scene around her. Yet without her firepower, Wil 
knew, Philippe Genet and Monica Raines could not have been persuaded to attend.
Genet sat three rows in front of Della. For all that his attendance was coerced, 
he seemed to be enjoying himself. He leaned against the edge of the bench behind 
him, his hands resting across his middle. The smile on his face held the same 
amused arrogance Wil had seen at the North Shore picnic.
There was no pleasure in Monica Raines' narrow face. She sat with hands tightly 
clasped, her mouth turned down at one side. Before the meeting, she'd made it 
clear that things had merely turned out as she had predicted. The human race had 
zapped itself once again; she had no interest in attending the wake.
Yelén had retreated to the far end of the front bench, as far from the rest of 
humanity as one could sit. Her face was pale, the previous emotion gone. She 
watched him intently. For all her mocking, she believed him... and revenge was 
all she had left now.
Wil let the silence stretch through two beats. "For various reasons, several of 
these seven might want to destroy the settlement. Tunç Blumenthal and Della Lu 
may not even be human — Juan has warned us often enough about the exterminators. 
Monica Raines has made no secret of her hostility towards the human race. Tammy 
Robinson's family has the announced goal of breaking up the colony."
"Wil!" Tammy was on her feet, her eyes wide. "We would never kill to —" She was 
interrupted by Della Lu's quiet laughter. She looked over her shoulder and saw 
the wild look on Lu's face. She looked back at Wil, her lips trembling. "Wil, 
believe me."
Brierson waited for her to sit before he continued; the counts on his display 
flat were 00:10:11 and 00:23:31. "Evidently, a good motive is of no use in 
identifying the enemy. So let's look at the enemy's actions. Both the Peacer and 
NM governments were infiltrated. Can they tell us anything about who we're up 
against?" Wil looked across the low-techs, Peacers and NMs together. He 
recognized top staff people from both sides. Several shook their heads. Someone 
shouted, "Fraley must have known!"
The last President of the Republic sat alone. His uniform still bore insignia, 
but he was slouched forward, his elbows on his knees and his hands propping up 
his chin. "Mr. President?" Wil said softly.
Fraley looked up without raising his head. Even his hatred for Wil seemed burnt 
out. "I just don't know, Brierson. All our talks were over the comm. He used a 
synthetic voice and never sent video. He was with us almost from the beginning. 
Back then, he said he wanted to protect us from Korolev, said we were the only 
hope for stability. We got inside data, a few medical goodies. We didn't even 
see the machines that made the deliveries. Later on, he showed me that someone 
else was backing the Peacers.... From there, he owned our souls. If the Peace 
had high-tech backing, we'd be dead without our own. More and more, I was just 
his mouthpiece. In the end, he was all through our system." Now Fraley raised 
his head. There were dark rings around his eyes. When he spoke again, there was 
a strange intensity in his voice; if his old enemy could forgive him, perhaps he 
could himself. "I had no choice, Brierson. I thought if I didn't play ball, 
whoever was behind the Peace would kill us all."
A woman — Gail Parker-shouted, "So you had no choice, and the rest of us 
followed orders. And — and like good little troopers, we all cut our own 
throats!"
Wil raised his hand. "It doesn't matter, Gail. By that time, the enemy had 
complete control of your system. If you hadn't pushed the buttons, they would 
have been pushed for you." The short count on his display read 00:08:52. A map 
of the land around Castle Korolev suddenly flashed on the display, together with 
the words: "WIL: HE IS ARMED. GUNS AS ON MAP. I STILL SAY TO GO FOR IT. I'M 
READY ON THE MARK... 00:08:51."
Wil cleared the screen with a casual motion and continued talking. "It's too 
much to expect that the enemy would have given away his name.... Yet I'm sure 
Kim Tioulang had figured it out. There was some particular person he was trying 
to avoid when he talked to me at the North Shore picnic; he was trying to get to 
Town Korolev when he was murdered.
"And that raises an interesting question. Steve Fraley is a smart guy. What 
would Kim see that Steve would not? Kim went back a long way. He was one of the 
three planetary Directors of the Peace Authority. He was privy to every secret 
of that government...." Wil looked at Yelén. "We've concentrated so much on 
superscientific plots and villains, we've forgotten the Machiavellis who came 
before us."
"There's no way our enemy could be a low-tech." Yelén's words were an objection, 
but there was sudden enthusiasm in her eyes.
Wil leaned across the podium. "Perhaps not now... but originally?" He pointed at 
Lu. "Consider Della. She grew up in the early twenty-first, was a top Peace cop. 
She also lived through most of the twenty-second. And now she's probably the 
most powerful high-tech of all."
Della had been mumbling to herself. Now her dark eyes came alive. She laughed, 
as if he had made a joke. "So true. I was born when people still died of old 
age. Kim and I fought for the last empire. And we fought dirty. Someone like me 
would be a tough enemy for the likes of you."
"If it's Della, we're dead," said Yelén. And revenge is impossible.
Wil nodded. The count stood at 00:07:43. "Who else fills the requirements? 
Someone high in the Peacer command structure. Of course, GreenInc shows that 
none of you high-techs have such a past. So this hypothetical other must have 
eluded capture during the fall of the Peace, covered his tracks, and lived a new 
life through the twenty-second. It must have been a disappointing situation for 
him: the Peace forces straggling back into realtime to be mopped up piecemeal, 
hope for a new Peace dying."
00:07:10. He wasn't speaking hypothetically anymore. "In the end, our enemy saw 
there was only one chance for the resurrection of his empire: the Peacer fort 
that was bobbled in Kampuchea. That was the Authority's best-equipped redoubt. 
Like the others, it was designed to come back to realtime in about fifty years. 
But by some grotesque accident, its bobbler had generated an enormously longer 
stasis. All through the twenty-second it lay a few hundred meters below ground, 
an unremarkable battle relic. But our enemy had plans for it. Fifty million 
years: surely no other humans would exist in such a remote era. Here was a 
golden opportunity to start the Peace over, and with an empty world. So our 
Peacer accumulated equipment, medical supplies, a zygote bank, and left the 
civilization he hated."
Genet's lazy smile was broader now, showing teeth. "And who might be so high in 
the Peace Authority that Tioulang would recognize him?" Juan Chanson seemed to 
shrink in upon himself.
Wil ignored the byplay. "Kim Tioulang was Peace Director for Asia. There were 
only two other Directors. The American one was killed when Livermore returned to 
realtime in 2101. The Director for Eurafrica was —"
"Christian Gerrault," said Yelén. She was on her feet, walking slowly across the 
floor of the amphitheater, her eves never leaving Genet. "The fat slug they 
called the Butcher of Eurafrica. He disappeared. All through the twenty-second 
his enemies waited around likely bobbles, but he was never found."
Genet looked from Yelén to Wil. "I commend you, Inspector, though if you had 
taken much longer to discover my identity, I would have had to announce it 
myself. Except for a few loose ends, my success is now complete. It's important 
that you understand the situation: Survival is still possible... but only on my 
terms." He glanced at Yelén. "Sit down, woman."
00:05:29. The timing was out of Wil's hands now. He had the terrible feeling 
this had come too soon.
Gerrault/Genet looked at Yelén, who had stopped her advance but was still 
standing. "I want you all to understand what I have gone through to achieve this 
moment. You must not doubt that I will show the disobedient no mercy.
"For fifty years I lived in the pitiful anarchy you call civilization. For fifty 
years I played the game. I lightened my skin. I starved one hundred kilos off my 
normal body weight. I starved myself of the... pleasures... that are due a great 
leader. But I suppose that is what makes me Christian Gerrault, and you sheep. I 
had goals for which I was willing to sacrifice anything and anyone. My new order 
might take fifty million years to flower, but there was work to be done all 
along the way. I heard of the Korolevs and their queer plan to rescue the 
shanghaied. At first, I thought to destroy them; our plans were so much alike. 
Then I realized that they could be used. Till near the end, they would be my 
allies. The important thing was that they lack some critical element of success, 
something only I could supply." He smiled at the still-standing Yelén. "You and 
Marta had everything planned. You even brought enough med equipment and 
fertilized human eggs to ensure the colony's survival.... Have you ever wondered 
why those zygotes were nonviable?"
"You?"
Gerrault laughed at the horror in Yelén's face. "Of course. Foolish, naive 
women. I guaranteed your failure even before you left civilization. It was an 
expensive operation; I had to buy several companies to guarantee your purchase 
would be trashed. But it was worth it .... You see, my supply of zygotes and my 
medical equipment still survive. They are the only such in existence now." He 
came to his feet and turned to face the main part of his audience. His voice 
boomed across the theater, and Wil wondered that he had not been recognized 
before. True, his appearance and accent were very different from the historical 
Gerrault's. He looked more like a North American than an African, and his body 
was gaunt to the point of emaciation. But when he talked like this, the soul 
within shone through all disguise. This was the Christian Gerrault of the 
historical videos. This was the fat, swaggering Director whose megalomania had 
dominated two continents and dwarfed any rational self-interest.
"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 Yelén. He was smiling again. "I 
told you once, slut: Sit down."
Yelén'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.
Yelén shouted, her voice scarcely recognizable, "Please, Della, I beg! Come 
back!"
But Della Lu had disappeared over the crest of the amphitheater. 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.
Yelén'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. Tunç 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 Tunç 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?" Yelén'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 medequipment 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 Yelén?"
"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, Gerrault 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!" Yelén 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 Yelén 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 "Yelén. 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."
Yelén 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, Yelén. 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 Yelén and Tammy. "Tell 
him. Things like that happen in battle, especially when penetration —"
"Sure," Yelén said. "It may seem a farfetched explanation to someone from your 
era, Wil, but leak-across can really happen." Tunç 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 of 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 Yelén.
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, 
Yelén 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 Yelén's GreenInc 
shows that none of the high-techs have such a background."
Tunç 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 Yelén. She stared back for a second, then 
looked at Wil. She wasn't convinced. "Yelén," Wil said, keeping his voice level, 
"don't you remember? The day Mudge was killed, he claimed Chanson had been a 
religionist."
Yelén 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, Yelén, 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 incident that only she and I could know. Yelén, after the Robinson 
party... I didn't — I never tried to take advantage of Marta." He looked into 
Yelén'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 Yelén, then back to Wil, but he said nothing.
"You've known about that cairn for four days, ever since I told Yelén. 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 Yelén and her lab autons."
Yelén had backed away from Chanson. Tunç's mouth was compressed into a thin 
line. Even without a confession, I may be able to win, thought Wil.
Juan looked around, then back at Wil. "Please. You're reading this all wrong. I 
didn't kill Marta. I want the settlement to succeed. And I've sacrificed more 
than any of you to preserve it; if I hadn't, none of us would have survived to 
fifty megayears. But now that's made me look like the guilty one I've got to 
convince you....
"Look. Wil. You're right about Mudge and me; I should never have tried to cover 
that up. I'm embarrassed I ever believed his chiliastic garbage. But I was 
young, and my nightmares followed me home from work. I needed to believe in 
something. I gave up my job, everything, for his promises.
"We came out of stasis in 2295, just before Mudge's numerology said Christ would 
put on the Big Show. There was nothing but ruins, a civilization destroyed, a 
race exterminated. Mudge reviewed his mumbo-jumbo and concluded that we had 
overshot, that Christ had come and gone. The stupid jerk! He just could not 
accept what we saw around us. Something had visited the Solar System in the 
mid-twenty-third, but it hadn't been holy. The evidence of alien invasion was 
everywhere. Mudge had arrived with scarcely more than sackcloth and ashes. I'd 
brought plenty of equipment. I could do analysis, back up my claims. I had the 
power to save what humans were still in stasis.
"Yelén, right from then my goal was the same as yours. Even while you high-techs 
were still in stasis, I was planning for it. The only difference was that I knew 
about the aliens. But I couldn't convince Mudge of them. In fact, the signs were 
so subtle, I began to wonder if anyone else would believe me." Chanson came to 
his feet, his talk speeding up. "Unless we guarded against the invaders, all the 
goodwill in the world could not resurrect the human race. I had to do something. 
I — I enhanced some of the evidence. I nuked a few ruins. Surely, not even a 
blind man could ignore that!" He looked at Yelén and Tammy accusingly. "Yet when 
you returned to realtime, you weren't convinced. You couldn't accept even the 
clearest evidence.... I tried. I tried. Over the next two thousand years I 
traveled all over the Solar System, discovering the signs of the invasion, 
emphasizing them so even idiots could not miss them."
"In the end, I had a little success. W. W. Sanchéz had the patience to look at 
the facts, the open-mindedness to believe. We persuaded the rest of you to be a 
bit more cautious. But the burden of vigilance still rested on me. No one else 
was willing to put sentries in far solar space. Over the years, I destroyed two 
alien probes — and still Sánchez was the only one who was convinced." Juan was 
staring through Wil; he might have been talking to himself. "I really liked Bil 
Sanchéz. I wish he hadn't dropped out; his settlement was just too small to 
succeed. I visited him there several times. It was a long, idyllic, downhill 
slide. Bil wanted to do research, but all he had was that punched tape he'd 
found on Charon. He was obsessed with it; the last time I saw him he even 
claimed it was a fake." A faintly troubled look passed across Juan's face. 
"Well, that settlement was too small to survive, anyway."
Yelén's eyes were wide, white showing all around the irises; her whole body had 
gone rigid. Chanson could not notice, but sudden death was in the air.
Wil stepped into Yelén's line of sight; his voice was a calm echo of Chanson's 
distant tone. "What about Marta, Juan?"
"Marta?" Juan almost looked at him. "Marta always had an open mind. She granted 
the possibility of an alien threat. I think Lu's arrival scared her; the 
creature was so obviously inhuman. Marta talked to Lu, got access to some of her 
databases. And then — and then "- tears started in his eyes —"she started asking 
the db about Mudge." How much had Marta suspected? At the time, probably 
nothing; most of the jumbled references to Mudge had no connection with Chanson. 
It was tragic bad luck she started so close to Juan's secret. "I should never 
have lied about my past, but now it was too late. Marta could destroy all I had 
worked for. The colony would be left defenseless. I had to, I had to —"
"Kill her?" Yelén's voice was a shout.
"No!" Juan's head snapped up; the reality around him was not to be ignored. "I 
could never do that. I liked Marta! But I had to... quarantine her. I watched to 
see if she would denounce me. She never did — but then I realized I could never 
be sure what she might say later. I couldn't let her back.
"Please listen to me! I made mistakes; I pushed too hard to make you see the 
truth. But you must believe. The invaders are out there, Yelén. They'll destroy 
everything you and Marta dreamed of if you don't believe m —" Juan's voice 
became a scream. He fell heavily, lay with arms and legs twitching.
Two quick steps and Wil was kneeling by his side. Wil looked down at the 
agonized face; he'd had two days to prepare for this moment, to suppress the 
killing rage he felt every time he saw Chanson. Korolev had had no such time; he 
could almost feel her eyes boring death through his back. "What did you do to 
him, Yelén?"
"I shut him down, cut his comm links." She stepped around Wil, to look down at 
Chanson. "He'll recover." There was a tight smile on her face; in a way, it was 
scarier than her rage. "I want time to think of just revenge. I want him to 
understand it when it comes," Her eyes snapped up to the nearest bystanders. 
"Get him out of my sight." For once there was no debate; her words might as well 
have been electric prods. Tunç and three low-techs grabbed Chanson, carried him 
towards the flier that was drifting down the side of the amphitheater. Wil 
started after them.
"Brierson! I want to talk to you." The words were abrupt, but there was 
something strange in Yelén's tone. Wil came back down the steps. Yelén led him 
around the side of the platform — away from the crowd, which was just beginning 
to come out of shock. "Wil," she said quietly, "I want — I'd like to see what 
Marta said." What Marta said when she wasn't writing for Chanson's eyes.
Wil swallowed; even winning could be hard. He touched her shoulder. "Marta left 
the fifth cairn, just like I told Chanson. If we'd found it during the first few 
thousand years.... After fifty thousand, all we could see was that there had 
been a sheaf of reed paper inside. It was powder. We'll never know for sure what 
she wanted to tell us.... I'm sorry, Yelén."
TWENTY-SIX
It was snowing. From over the hill came shouts, occasional laughter. They were 
having a snowball fight.
W. W. Brierson crunched down the hillside to the edge of the pines. Strange that 
with the world so empty he would still want to be alone. Maybe not so strange. 
Their dormitory was a crowded place. No doubt there were others who'd left the 
snowballers, who walked beneath the pines and pretended this was a different 
time.
He found a big rock, clambered up, and dusted off a place: to sit. From here he 
could see alpine glaciers disappearing into the clouds. Wil tapped at his data 
set and thought. The human race had another chance. Dilip and a lot of other 
people really seemed to think he was responsible. Well, he'd solved the case. 
Without a doubt it was the biggest of his career. Even Billy Brierson had not 
imagined such a great adventure for his father. And the chief bad guy had been 
punished. Very definitely, Juan had been punished....
Yelén had honored Marta's notions about mercy; she had made that mercy the 
punishment itself. Juan was executed by a surfeit of life. He was marooned in 
realtime, without shelter or tools or friends. Yet his was a different torture 
than Marta's — and perhaps the more terrible. Juan was left with a medical 
auton. He was free to live as long as he wished.
Juan outlived three autons. He lasted ten thousand years. He kept his purpose 
for nearly two thousand. Wil shook his head as he surveyed the report. If anyone 
had known that Chanson was into Penetration and Perversion, he would have been 
an instant suspect — on grounds of personality alone. Wil had known only one 
such specialist, his company's resident spook. The man was inhumanly patient and 
devious, but frightened at the same time. He spent so much time in deep connect, 
the paranoid necessities of defense systems leaked into his perception of the 
everyday world. Wil could only imagine the madhouse Penetration and Perversion 
had become by the late twenty-second. Juan made seven attempts to pervert the 
auton. One involved twelve hundred years of careful observation, timing the 
failure of various subsystems, maneuvering the auton into a position where he 
might take control and get transportation to resources in near space.
Yet Chanson never really had a prayer of success. Yelén had hardwired changes to 
the auton. Juan had none of the software he had stolen from USAF, Inc, and he 
was without processor support. His glib tongue and two thousand years of effort 
were not enough to set him free.
As the centuries passed and he had no luck with the auton, Juan spent more and 
more time trying to talk to Yelén and the other high-techs who occasionally 
looked into realtime. He kept a journal many times longer than Marta's; he 
painted endless prose across the rocklands north of his home territory. None of 
it looked as interesting as Marta's diary. All Juan could talk of was his great 
message, the threat he saw in the stars. He went on spouting evidence — though 
after the first centuries it lost all connection with reality.
After five hundred years, his journal became at first irregular, then a decadely 
summary, then a dead letter. For three thousand years Juan lived without 
apparent goal, moving from cave to cave. He wore no clothes, he did no work. The 
auton protected him from local predators. When he did not hunt or farm, the 
auton brought him food. If the climate of the Eastern Straits had been less mild 
he would certainly have died. Yet to Wil it was still a miracle the man 
survived. Through all that time he had enough determination to keep on living. 
Della had been right. W. W. Brierson would not have lasted a tenth as long; a 
few centuries and he would have drifted into suicidal funk.
Juan drifted for three thousand years... and then his immortal paranoid soul 
found a new cause. It wasn't clear exactly what it was. He kept no journal; his 
conversations with the auton were limited to simple commands and incoherent 
mumbling. Yelén thought that Juan saw himself as somehow the creator of reality. 
He moved to the seashore. He built heavy baskets and used them to drag millions 
of loads of soil inland. The dredged shoreland became a maze of channels. He 
piled the dirt on a rectangular mound that rose steadily through the centuries. 
That mound reminded Wil of the earthen pyramids the American Indians had left in 
Illinois. It had taken hundreds of people working over decades to build those. 
Juan's was the work of one man over millennia. If the climate had not been 
exceptionally dry and mild in his era, he could not have kept ahead of simple 
erosion.
Juan's new vision went beyond monuments. Apparently he thought to create an 
intelligent race. He persuaded the auton to extend its food gathering, to beach 
schools of fish in the maze he constructed on the shore. Soon there were 
thousands of fishermonkeys living beneath his temple/pyramid. Through a 
perversion of its protection programs, he used the auton as an instrument of 
force; The best fish went to the monkeys who performed properly. The effect was 
small, but over centuries the fishers at the East End had a different look. The 
majority were like the "W. W. Brierson" that had helped Marta. They carried 
rocks to the base of the pyramid. They sat for hours staring up at it.
The four-thousand-year effort was not enough to bring intelligence to the 
fishers. Yelén's report showed some tool use. Towards the end, they built a 
stone skirt around the lower part of the pyramid. But they were never the race 
of hod[?] carriers that Chanson probably intended. It was Juan who continued to 
drag endless loads of dirt up to his temple, repairing erosion damage, adding 
ever-higher towers to the topmost platform. At its greatest, the temple covered 
a rectangle two hundred meters by one hundred, and the top platform was thirty 
meters above the plain. Its spires crowded tall and spindly all about, more like 
termite towers or coral than human architecture. Through those last four 
thousand years, Juan's daily pattern was unchanged. He worked on his new race. 
He hauled dirt. Each evening, he walked round and round the intricate stairs of 
the pyramid, till finally he stood at the top, surveying the temple slaves who 
gathered on the plain before him.
Wil paged through Yelén's report. She had pictures of Juan during those last 
centuries. His face was blank of all expression, except at day's end — when he 
always laughed, three times. His every motion was a patterned thing, a reflex. 
Juan had become an insect, one whose hive spread through time instead of space.
Juan had found peace. He might have lasted forever if only the world had had the 
same stability. But the climate of the Eastern Straits entered a period of wet 
and storminess. The auton was programmed to provide minimum protection. In 
earlier millennia that would have been enough. But now Juan was inflexible. He 
would not retreat to the highland caves; he would not even come down from the 
temple during storms. He forbade the auton to approach it during his nightly 
services.
Of course, Yelén had pictures of Juan's end. The auton was four klicks from the 
temple; Juan had long since destroyed all bugs. The wind-driven rain blurred and 
twisted the auton's view. This was just the latest of a series of storms that 
were tearing down the pyramid faster than Juan could maintain it. His towers and 
walls were like a child's sand castle melting in an ocean tide. Juan did not 
notice. He stood on the slumped platform of his temple and looked out upon the 
storm. Wil watched the wavery image raise its arms-just as Juan always did at 
day's end, just before he gave his strange laugh. Lightning struck all around, 
turning the storm darkness to actinic blue, showing Juan's slaves huddled by the 
thousands below him. The bolts marched across the fallen temple, striking what 
was left of the spires... striking Juan as he stood, arms still upraised to 
direct the show.
There was little more to Yelén's report. The fishermonkeys had been given a 
strong push toward intelligence. It was not enough. Biological evolution has no 
special tendency toward sapience; it heads blindly for local optima. In the case 
of the fishers, that was their dominance of the shallow waters. For a few 
hundred years, the race he'd bred still lived at the Eastern Straits, still 
brought rocks to line the stub of his pyramid, still watched through the 
evenings. But that was instinct without reward. In the end, they were as Juan 
had found them.
Wil cleared the display. He shivered-and not just from the cold. He would never 
forget Juan's crimes; he would never forget his long dying.
The snow had stopped. There was no more shouting from over the hill. Wil looked 
in surprise at the sunlight slanting through the trees behind him. He'd spent 
more than an hour looking at Yelén's report. Only now did he notice the cramps 
in his legs and the cold seeping up from the rock.
Wil tucked the data set under his arm and slipped off the rock. He still had 
time to enjoy the snow, the pines. It brought echoes of a winter just ten weeks 
old in his memory, the last days in Michigan before he'd flown to the coast on 
the Lindemann case. Only these snowfields were almost at the equator, and this 
world was in the middle of an ice age.
The tropics had cooled. The jacaranda forests had shifted downslope, to the edge 
of the Inland Sea. But none of the continental ice sheets had reached further 
south than latitude forty-five. The snow around the site of Town Korolev was due 
to the altitude. Yelén figured the glaciers coming off the Indonesian Alps 
wouldn't get below the four-thousand-meter level. She claimed that, as ice ages 
go, this one was average.
Wil walked a kilometer through the pines. A week before-as his body counted 
time-this had been the glazed crater of Town Korolev. So much destruction, and 
not a sign of it now. He climbed a ridgeline and watched the sunset gleaming red 
and gold across the white. Something hooted faint against the breeze. Far to the 
north he could see where the jac forests hugged the sea. It was beautiful, but 
there were good reasons to leave this era. Some of the best ore fields were 
under ice now. Why cripple the new civilization when it was weakest?... And 
there was Della. She had lots of valuable equipment. They would give her at 
least a hundred thousand years to return. 
Suddenly Wil felt very bleak. Hell. I would give her a thousand times a hundred 
thousand. But what good would it do? After that night with the dogthings, Wil 
hoped she had found herself. Without her, he could never have set up the double 
play against Chanson and Gerrault. A crooked smile came across his face. She had 
fooled both the killers into defeat. The plan was to force Gerrault to run, to 
chase him long enough to trick Juan. And it had worked! She had played the old, 
crazy Della so well. Too well. She had never returned. No one knew for sure what 
had happened; it was even conceivable she had died fighting Gerrault. More 
likely, some battle reflex had taken over. Even if the mood passed, she might 
pursue the other for unknown millennia. And if the mood didn't pass...
Wil remembered the scarcely human thing she had been when he first saw her. Even 
with her computer-supported memories and all the other enhancements, that Della 
seemed very much like what Juan Chanson had become towards the end of his 
punishment. For all her talk of being tough, Della had nothing on Juan when it 
came to single-mindedness. How much of her life would she spend on this chase? 
He was terribly afraid she had volunteered for the same fate that had been 
forced on Juan.
Wil decided he didn't like the cold at all. He glanced at his data set. It 
showed the date as 17 March 2100; he still had not reset it. Somewhere in its 
memory were notes about the stuff Virginia wanted him to bring back from the 
Coast. How much can happen in ten weeks; one must be flexible in these modern 
times. He turned away from the sunset and the silence, and headed back for the 
dormitory. He should be satisfied with this happy ending. The next few years 
would be tough, but he knew they could make it. Yelén had been friendly towards 
almost everyone the last few days. In the weeks before, she would never have 
thought of stopping in the middle of this glacial era just to give them a chance 
to look around.
The tropical twilight snapped down hard, faded quickly into night. When Wil came 
over the hill above the dorm, its lighted windows were like something out of a 
Michigan Christmas. 
Sometime early tomorrow morning, when they were snug in their beds, Santa Claus 
Yelén would bobble them up once more. Her sleigh had certainly had a bumpy 
landing, popping in and out of realtime over the last sixty thousand years. Wil 
smiled at the crazy image.
Maybe this time they could stop for keeps.
That night was the last time Wil ever had the dream in blue. In most ways it was 
like the ones before. He was lying down, all breath exhausted from his lungs. 
Goodbye, goodbye. He cried and cried, but no sounds came. She sat beside him, 
holding his hand. Her face was Virginia's, and also Marta's. She smiled sadly, a 
smile that could not deny the truth they both knew.... Goodbye, goodbye. And 
then the pattern changed. She leaned toward him, snuggled her face against his 
cheek, just as Virginia used to do. She never spoke, and he couldn't tell if the 
thought was only his, or somehow comfort from her. Someone still lives who has 
not said goodbye, someone who might like you very much.
Dearest Wil, goodbye.
Brierson woke with a start, gasping for breath. He swung his feet out of bed and 
sat for a moment. His tiny room was bright with day, but he couldn't see 
outside; the window was completely fogged over. It was very quiet; normally he 
could hear plenty of activity through the plastic walls. He got up and stepped 
out into the hall; not a soul in sight. There was noise from downstairs, though. 
That's right: There was a big meeting scheduled first thing this morning. The 
fact that Yelén was willing to meet the low-techs at the dorm was more evidence 
that she had changed; she had not even demanded his presence. His sleeping late 
was a half-conscious test of his freedom. For a while he wanted to be a 
bystander. Managing the last meeting had been a bit... traumatic.
Wil padded down the hallway to the second-floor washroom. For once, he had the 
place all to himself.
What a weird dream. Wil looked at his image in the washstand mirror. There was 
wetness around his eyes, but he was smiling. The dream in blue had always been a 
choking burden, something he must forcibly ignore. But this time it reassured 
him, even made him happy. He hummed as he washed up, his mind playing with the 
dream. Virginia had seemed so real. He could still feel her touch on his cheek. 
He knew now how much hidden anger he had felt at Virginia; he knew, because 
suddenly the anger was gone. It had cut deep that Virginia had not come after 
him. He'd told himself that she always intended to, that she was still gathering 
her resources when the Singularity overtook her. He hadn't believed the excuse; 
he'd seen what could happen to a personality over a century. But now-for no 
reason but a dream-he felt differently. Well, what if Della's explanation of the 
Singularity was correct? What if technology had transcended the intelligible? 
What if minds had found immortality by growing forever past the human horizon? 
Why, then, something that had been Virginia might still exist, might want to 
comfort him.
Wil suddenly realized he was washing his face for the second time. For a moment, 
he and his mirror image grinned sheepishly at each other, conspirators realizing 
the insanity of their scheme. If he wasn't careful, he'd be another Jason Mudge, 
complete with guardian angels and voices from beyond the grave. Still, Della 
said there was something like religion hiding at the end of her materialism.
A few minutes later he was walking down the side stairs, past the cafeteria. The 
voices from within were loud but didn't sound angry. He hesitated, then turned 
away from the door. I t might be fantasy, but he wanted to keep the mood of that 
dream as long as possible. It had been a long time since he'd started the day 
feeling so good. For the moment he really believed there was "someone who still 
lives, who might like you very much."
He walked out of the dorm, into daylight.
The building was surrounded by a perfect disk of white the snow that had been 
brought through time with their bobble. The sunburned at the snowdrifts, raising 
a sublimation fog all around him. Wil walked across the slush, through the 
brilliant mist. He stopped at the edge of the snow and started at the 
almost-jacarandas and less identifiable trees that grew all around. It was 
already a warm day. He stepped back a pace and enjoyed the cool coming off the 
snow. Except for the shape of some of the hills, the world was the same as 
before the battle. The glaciers were tamed again, lurked near faraway peaks. 
Across a ravine and a few hundred meters up a hillside, there was a separate 
plume of sublimation fog; the golden towers of Castle Korolev gleamed faint 
within it.
A shadow passed over him. "Wil!" He looked up as Tammy Robinson dropped out of 
the sky. She brought her platform to a low hover, just as she had when she came 
to invite the soot pushers to her father's party. She was even dressed in the 
same perfect white. She stood there a moment, looking down. "I wanted to see you 
again... before I go." She brought the platform all the way to earth, just 
beyond his toes. Now she was oolong[?] up at him. "Thank you, Wil. Gerrault and 
Chanson would've got us all if it hadn't been for you. Now I think we can all 
win." Her smile broadened. "Yelén has given me enough equipment to leave this 
era."
She was almost too perfect to look at. "You've given up on recruiting?"
"Nope. Yelén says I can come back in a hundred years, and any time after. With 
Gerrault's equipment and the zygotes, you can really succeed. Another century or 
two, and there'll be more people here than I could ever imagine. They won't feel 
beaten[?] the way they do now, and a good many will be bored with civilization. 
There will be dozens, maybe hundreds, who'll.. come with me. And they'll be 
people we won't have to support. That's more than Daddy ever hoped for." She 
paused a second and then said quietly, "I hope you'll come with me, Wil."
"S-some of us have to stay in realtime, or there'll be no civilization for you 
to raid, Tammy." He tried to smile.
"I know, I know. But a hundred years from now, when I come back... what about 
then?"
What about then? The Robinsons thought all mysteries could be known to those who 
watched long enough, waited long enough. But a flatworm could watch forever and 
still not understand the opera. Aloud: "Who knows how I'll feel in a hundred 
years, Tammy?" He stopped and just stared at her for a second. "But if I don't 
come with you... and if you make it to the end of time... I hope you'll remember 
me to the Creator."
Tammy flinched, then realized he wasn't mocking her "Okay. If you stay behind, I 
will." She put her hands on his shoulders and stood on tiptoe to kiss his lips. 
"See you later, Wil Brierson."
A few seconds later, Tammy was disappearing over the trees.
The one who still lives, the one who has not said goodbye? He thought not, but 
he had a hundred years to decide for sure.
Wil walked along the perimeter of the mist, intrigued by the way heat and cool 
battled at the edge of the snow. He circled the dorm and found himself staring 
at the entrance. They were still at it in there. He grinned to himself and 
started back. What the hell.
He was only partway to the entrance when the doors opened. Only one person 
stepped out. It was Yelén. She surveyed him without surprise. "Hah. I wondered 
how long you'd stay out here." As she came toward him, he looked for signs of 
anger in her pale Slavic face. She caught his eye and smiled lopsidedly. "Don't 
worry. They didn't kick me out. And I'm not leaving in a huff. It's just that 
all the dickering is a little dull; they've practically got a commodity exchange 
going in there, splitting up all the stuff that survived our fighting.... Do you 
have a minute, Wil?"
He nodded and followed her out of the chill, back the way he had come. "Have you 
thought: No matter how well things go, we'll still need police services? People 
really respect you. That's ninety percent of what made companies like Michigan 
State Police and Al's Protection Rackets successful."
Brierson shook his head. "It sounds like the game we were playing before. A lot 
of the ungovs might want to hire me, but without threats from you, I can't 
imagine the governments tolerating the competition."
"Hey, I'm not looking for a cat's-paw. The fact is, Fraley and Dasgupta are in 
there right now, colluding on a common offer for your services."
Wil felt his jaw sag. Fraley? After all the years of hatred... "Steve would 
rather die than disgovern."
"A lot of his people did die," she said quietly. "A lot of the rest aren't 
taking orders anymore. Even Fraley has changed a little. Maybe it's fear, maybe 
it's guilt. It really shook him to see how easily one high-tech swindled him and 
perverted the Republic — even worse, to learn that Chanson did it just to have a 
thirty-second diversion available when he grabbed for our systems."
Yelén laughed. "My advice is to take the job while they still think it's tough. 
After a couple of years, there'll be competition; I bet you won't be able to 
make a living off your fees."
"Hmm. You think things are going to be that tame?"
"I really do, Wil. The high-tech monsters are dead. The governments may linger 
on, but in name only. We lost a lot in the war — parts of our technology may 
fall to a nineteenth-century level — but with Gerrault's zygotes and med 
equipment, we're better off than before. The problem with the women has 
disappeared. They can have the kids they want, but they won't have to be nonstop 
baby factories. You should have seen the meeting. There are lots of serious 
couples now. Gail and Dilip asked me to marry them! 'For old times' sake.' They 
said I had been like the captain of a ship to them. What crazy, crazy people." 
She shook her head, but her smile was very proud. These might be the first 
low-techs to show gratitude for what she and Marta had done. "I'll tell you how 
confident I am: I'm not forcing anyone to stay in this era. If they have a 
bobbler, they can take off. I don't think anyone will. It's a bit too obvious 
that if we can't make it now, we never will."
"Monica might."
"That's different. But don't be too sure even with her; she's been lying to 
herself for a long time. I'm going to ask her to stay." Yelén's smile was 
gentle; two weeks ago she would have been scornful. With Gerrault and Chanson 
gone, a great weight had been lifted from her soul, and Wil could see what — 
beyond competence and loyalty — Marta had loved in her.
Yelén looked at her feet. "There's another reason I ducked , out of the meeting 
early. I wanted to apologize. After I read[?] Marta's diary, I felt like killing 
you. But I knew I needed you — Marta didn't have to tell me that. And the more I 
depended on you, the more you saw things I had not... the more I hated you.
"Now I know the truth. I'm ashamed. After working with you, I should have seen 
through Marta's trick myself." Abruptly she stuck out her hand. Brierson grasped 
it, and they shook. "Thanks, Wil."
The one who still lives, the one who has not said goodbye? No. But a friend for 
the years to come.
Behind her, a flier descended. "Time for me to get back to the house." She 
jerked a thumb at Castle Korolev.
"One last thing," she said. "If things are as slow as I think, you might want to 
diversify .... Give Della a hand."
"Della's back? H-how long? I mean —"
"She's been in solar space about a thousand years; we were waiting to find the 
best time to stop. The chase took one hundred thousand years. I don't know how 
much lifetime she spent." She didn't seem much concerned about the last issue. 
"You want to talk to her? I think you could do each other good."
"Where —"
"She was with me, at the meeting. But you don't have to go inside. You've been 
set up, Wil. Each of us — Tammy, me, Della — wanted to talk to you alone. Say 
the word, and she'll be out here."
"Okay. Yes!"
Yelén laughed. He was scarcely aware of her walking to the flier. He started 
back to the dorm. Della had made it. However many years she had lived in the 
dark, she had not died there. And even if she was the creature from before, even 
if she was like Juan Chanson at his ending, Wil could still try to help. He 
couldn't take his eyes off the doorway.
The doors opened. She was wearing a jumpsuit, midnight black, the same color as 
her short-cut hair. Her face was expressionless as she came down the steps and 
walked toward him. Then she smiled. "Hi, Wil. I'm back... to stay."
The one who still lives, the one who has not said goodbye.
AFTERWORD
The author's afterword: that's where he explains what he was trying to say with 
the previous hundred thousand words, right? Well, I'll try to avoid that. 
Basically, I have an apology and a prediction.
The apology is for the unrealistically slow rate of technological growth 
predicted. Part of that is reasonable, I suppose. A general war, like the one I 
put in 1997, can be used to postpone progress anywhere from ten years to 
forever. But what about after the recovery? I show artificial intelligence and 
intelligence amplification proceeding at what I suspect is a snail's pace. 
Sorry. I needed civilization to last long enough to hang a plot on it.
And of course it seems very unlikely that the Singularity would be a clean 
vanishing of the human race. (On the other hand, such a vanishing is the 
timelike analog of the silence we find all across the sky.)
From now to 2000 (and then 2001), the Jason Mudges will be coming out of the 
woodwork, their predictions steadily more clamorous. It's an ironic accident of 
the calendar that all this religious interest in transcendental events should be 
mixed with the objective evidence that we're falling into a technological 
singularity. So, the prediction: If we don't have that general war, then it's 
you, not Della and Wil, who will understand the Singularity in the only possible 
way-by living through it.
San Diego
1983-1985