Marooned in Realtime

'There was no Extinction, Wil. Mankind simply graduated, and you and I and the rest missed graduation night.'

'So three billion people just stepped into another plane. This begins to sound like religion, Della.'

She shrugged. 'Just talking about superhuman intelligence gets us into something like religion.' She grinned. 'If you really want the religious version... have you met Jason Mudge? He claims that the Second Coming of Christ was sometime in the twenty-third century. The Faithful were saved, the unfaithful destroyed-and the rest of us are truant.'

Wil smiled back; he had heard of Mudge. His notion of the Second Coming could explain things too — in one respect better than Lu's theory. 'I like your ideas better. But what's your explanation for the physical destruction? Chanson isn't the only person who thinks that nukes and bioweapons were used towards the end of the twenty-third.'

Della hesitated. 'That's the one thing that doesn't fit. When I returned to Earth in 3400, there was plenty of evidence of war. The craters were already overgrown, but from orbit I could see that metropolitan areas had been hit. Chanson and the Korolevs have better records; they were active all through the fourth millennium, trying to figure out what had happened, and trying to rescue short-term low-techs. It looks like a classic nuclear war, fought without bobbles. The evidence of biowarfare is much more tenuous.

'I don't know, Wil. There must be an explanation. The trends in the twenty-second century were so strong that I can't believe the race committed suicide. Maybe it was a fireworks celebration. Or maybe... do you know about survival sport?'

'That was after my time. I read about it in GreenInc.'

'Physical fitness has always been a big thing in civilization. By the late twenty-second, medical care automatically maintained body fitness, so people worked on other things. Most middle-class folk had Earthside estates of several thousand hectares. There were shared estates bigger than some twentieth-century nations. Fitness came to mean the ability to survive without technology. The players were dropped naked into a wilderness-arctic, rain forest, you name it-that had been secretly picked by the judges. No technology was allowed, though medical autons kept close track of the contestants; it could get to be pretty rough. Even people who didn't compete would often spend several weeks a year living under conditions that would be deadly to twentieth-century city-dwellers. By 2200, individuals were probably tougher than ever before. All they lacked was the bloody-mindedness of earlier times.'

Wil nodded. Marta had certainly demonstrated what Lu was saying. 'How does this explain the nuke war?'

'It's a little farfetched, but... imagine things just before the race fell into the Singularity. Individuals might be only slightly' superhuman, and might still be interested in the primitive. For them, nuclear war might be a game of strength and fitness.'

'You're right; that does sound farfetched.'

She shrugged.

'Would you say Juan is in the minority, thinking mankind was exterminated?'

'I think so; I know Yelen agrees with me. But remember that until very recently I didn't have much chance to talk to anyone. I was back in the Solar System for a few years around 3400. During that time, no one was out of stasis. They'd left plenty of messages, though: The Korolevs were already talking about a rendezvous at fifty megayears. Juan Chanson had an auton at L4 blatting his theories to all who would listen. It was clear to me that with the evidence at hand, they could argue forever without proving things one way or the other.

'I wanted certainty. And I thought I could have it.' She made that twisted smile again.

'So that's why you went back into space.'

'Yes. What had happened to us must have happened must be happening-over and over again throughout the universe. From the twentieth century on, astronomers watched for evidence of intelligence beyond the Solar System. They never saw any. We wonder about the great silence on Earth after 2300. They wondered about the silence among the stars. Their mystery is just the spacelike version of ours.

'There is a difference. In space, I can travel any direction I wish. I was sure that eventually I would find a race at the edge of the Singularity.'

Listening to her, Wil felt a strange mix of fear and frustration. One way or another, this person must know where others could only speculate. Yet what she told him and the truth could be entirely different things. And the questions that might distinguish lie from truth might provoke a deadly response. 'I've tried to use your databases, Della. They're very hard to understand.'

'That's not surprising. Over the years, there was some nonrepairable damage; parts of my GreenInc are so messed up I don't even use them. And my personal db's... well, I've customized them quite a bit.'

'Surely you want people to know what you've seen?' Yet Della had always been strangely closemouthed about her time Out There.

She hesitated. 'Once I did. Now I'm not sure. There are people who don't want to know the truth.... Wil, someone fired on me when I entered the Solar System.'

'What?' Brierson hoped his surprise sounded real. 'Who was it?'

'I don't know. I was a thousand AUs out, and the guns were automatic. My guess is Juan Chanson. He seems to be the most paranoid about outsiders, and I was clearly hyperbolic.'