Marooned in Realtime

The conference holo showed Yelen 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 Sanchez, 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.'

Yelen 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.'

Yelen 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.

Yelen 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.' Yelen 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?