Marooned in Realtime

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 Yelen 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