Marooned in Realtime

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: Yelen 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 ot 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.'