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
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, Yelen 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 cliches 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
