Marooned in Realtime

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, Yelen was logically the best suspect on his list. Now that he had the diary, it was easier to accept his intuition that Yelen was innocent. He set out to read Yelen's summaries and Della's cross-checking. If nothing showed up there, the diary would be a low-priority item.

Yelen had sent down an enormous amount of material. It included high-resolution holos of all Marta's writing. Yelen 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. Yelen 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. (Yelen 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, Yelen 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 Yelen'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 Yelen's overdoc printed across the top of the display. Below it was cursive green lettering. A blinking red :arrow marked the reference:

T... 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.... t

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:

T The Journal of Marta Qih-hui Qen Korolev

! Dearest Lelya, t 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.

T Dearest Lelya,

T It's now 181 days since everyone left-and that's the only thing I'm sure of.

T 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.

T 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.

T 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. t

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