Marooned in Realtime

Wil suddenly wondered about the 'aliens' Juan said he had destroyed. How many of them had been returning spacers? Some of Juan's theories could be self-proving. 'You were lucky,' he said, probing gently, 'to get past an ambush.'

'Not lucky. I've been shot at before. Any time I'm less than a quarter light-year from a star, I'm ready to fight-usually ready to run, too.'

'So there are other civilizations!'

For a long moment, Della didn't answer. Her personality shifted yet again. Expression drained from her face, and she seemed almost as cold as in their first meetings.

'Intelligent life is a rare development.'

'I spent nine thousand years on this, spread across fifty million years of realtime. I averaged less than a twentieth light speed. But that was fast enough. I had time to visit the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Fornax System, besides our own galaxy. I had time to stop at tens of thousands of places, at astrophysical freaks and normal stars. I saw some strange things, mostly near deep gravity wells. Maybe it was engineering, but I couldn't prove it, even to myself.

'I found that most slow-spinning stars have planets. About ten percent of these have an Earth-type planet. And almost all such planets have life.

'If Monica Raines loves the purity of life without intelligence, she loves one of the most common things in the universe.... In all my nine thousand years, I found two intelligent races.' Her eyes stared into Wil's. 'Both times I was too late. The first was in Fornax. I missed them by several billion years; even their asteroid settlements were ground to dust. There were no bobbles, and it was impossible to tell if their ending had been abrupt.

'The other was a nearer thing, both in space and time: a G2 star about a third of the way around the Galaxy from here. The world was beautiful, larger than Earth, its atmosphere so dense that many plants were airborne. The race was centaur-like; I learned that much. I missed them by a couple of hundred megayears. Their databases had evaporated, but their space settlements were almost undamaged.

'They had vanished just as abruptly as humankind did from Earth. One century they were there, the next-nothing. But there were differences. For one thing, there was no sign of nuclear war. For another, the centaur-folk had started a couple of interstellar colonies. I visited them. I found evidence of growing population, of independent technological progress, and then... their own Singularities. I lived two thousand years in those systems, spread out over a half megayear. I studied them as carefully as Chanson and Sanchez did our solar system.

'There were bobbles in the centaur systems. Not as many as near Earth, but this was a lot longer after their Singularity. I knew if I hung around, I'd run into somebody.'

'Did you?'

Della nodded. 'But what sort of person would you expect two hundred megayears after civilization?... The centaur came out shooting. I nuked out; I ran fifty light-years, past where the centaur had any interest. Then, over the next million years, I sneaked back. Sure enough, he was back in stasis, depending on occasional lookabouts and his autons for protection. I left plenty of robot transmitters, some with autons. If he gave them half a chance, they would teach him my language and convince him I was peaceful ....

'His realtime forces attacked the minute they heard my transmissions. I lost half my auton defense holding them off. I almost lost my life; that's where my db's were damaged. A thousand years later, the centaur himself came out of stasis. Then all his forces attacked. Our machines fought another thousand years. The centaur stayed out of stasis the whole time. I learned a lot. He was willing to talk even if he had forgotten how to listen.

'He was alone, had been the last twenty thousand years of his life. Once upon a time, he'd been no nuttier than most of us, but those twenty thousand years had burned the soul from him.' She was silent for a moment-thinking on what nine thousand years could do? 'He was caught on behavior tracks he could never — could never want to — break. He thought of his solar system as a mausoleum, to be protected from desecration. One by one, he had destroyed the last centaurs as they came out of stasis. He had fought at least four travelers from outside his system. God knows who they were-centaur spacers, or 'Della Lus' of other races.

'But, like us, he couldn't replace his autons. He had lost most of them when I found him; I wouldn't have stood a chance a hundred megayears earlier. I suppose, if I had stayed long enough, I could have beaten him. The price would have been my living more thousands of years; the price would have been my soul. In the end, I decided to let him be.' She was silent for a long while, the coldness slowly departing from her face, to be replaced by... tears? Were they for the last centaur — or for the millennia she had spent, never finding more than the mystery she began with?

'Nine thousand years... was not enough. Artifacts from beyond the Singularity are so vast that doubters can easily deny them. And the pattern of progress followed by vanishment call be twisted to any explanation — especially on Earth, where there are signs of war.'

There was a difference between Della's propaganda and the others', Wil realized. She was the only one who seemed plagued by uncertainty, by any continuing need for proof. It was hard to believe that such an ambiguous, doubt-ridden story could be an alien cover. Hell, she seemed more human than Chanson.

Della smiled but did not brush the wetness from her lashes. 'In the end, there is only one way to know for a fact what the Singularity is. You have to be there when it happens.... The Korolevs have brought together everybody that's left. I think we have enough people. It may take a couple of centuries, but if we can restart civilization we will make our own Singularity.

'And this time, I won't miss graduation night.'