Marooned in Realtime

compared to the blue around the courts.

Wil had talked with most of the ungovs and perhaps twenty Peacers. Not an enormous group, but then he'd had to move slowly-to fool Yelen and to assure that he wasn't fooled by any disguise.

Darkness released him from the terrible compulsion; there was no point to an interview unless he was confident of the results. He wandered back towards the courts, relief verging on elation. Even his feeling of shame at deceiving Yelen was gone. In spite of himself, he had done good work for her this day. He'd seen issues and attitudes that she had never mentioned.

For instance:

There were people sitting away from the lights. Their talk was low and intense. He was almost back to the courts when he came on a large group-almost thirty people, all women. By the light of the nearest bonfire, he recognized Gail Parker and a few others. There were both ungovs and NMs here, maybe a few Peacers. Wil paused, and Parker looked up. Her gaze had none of its earlier friendliness. He drifted away, aware of several pairs of eyes following his retreat.

fie knew the shape of their discussions. People like Kim Tioulang could make grandiose talk about reestablishing the human race. But that reestablishment demanded tremendous birth rates, for at least a century. Without womb tanks and postnatal automation, the job would fall on the women. It meant creating a serf class, but not the one Tioulang was so eager to warn against. These serfs might be beloved and cherished — and might believe in the rightness of it all as much as anyone — but they would carry the heavy burden. It had happened before. The plagues of the early twenty-first century had killed most of the race, and left many of the survivors sterile. The women of that period had a very restricted role, very different from women before or after. Wil's parents had grown up in that time: The only serious fights he could remember between them involved his mother's efforts to start her own business.

A motherhood serfdom would be much harder to establish this time around. These people were not coming back from plagues and a terrible war. Except for the Peacers, they were from the late twenty-first and the twenty-second. The women were highly trained, most with more than one career. As often as not, they were the bosses. As often as not, they initiated romance. Many of those from the twenty-second were sixty or seventy years old, no matter how young and lush their bodies. They were not people you could push around.

... And yet, and yet Gail and the others could see final extinction waiting irrevocably in the very near future... unless they made some terrible sacrifices. He understood their intent discussion and Gail's unfriendly stare. Which sacrifices to make, which to decline. What to demand, what to accept. Wil was glad he wasn't welcome in their councils.

Something moon-bright rose into the air ahead of him, quickly fell back. Wil looked up and broke into a trot, forcing the problem from his mind. The light rose again, sweeping fast-moving shadows across the lawn. Someone had brought a glowball! A crowd had already gathered along three sides of the volleyball court, blocking his view. Brierson edged around till he could see the play.

Wil found himself grinning stupidly. Glowballs were something new, just a couple of months old... at the time he was shanghaied. It might be old hat to some, but it was a complete novelty to the Peacers and even to the NMs. The ball had the same size and feel as a regulation volleyball-but its surface was brightly aglow. The teams were playing by this light alone, and Wil knew the first few games would be comic relief. If you kept your eye on the ball, then little else was bright enough to see The ball became the center of the universe, a sphere that seemed to swell and shrink while everything else swung around it. After a few moments, you couldn't find your teammates--or even the ground. The NM and Peacer players spent almost as much time on their butts as standing. Laughter swept the far side of the court as three spectators fell down. This ball was better than the others Wil had seen. Whenever it touched out-of-bounds, it chimed and the light changed to yellow. That was as an impressive trick.

Not everyone had problems. No doubt Tunc Blumenthal had always played with glowballs. In any case, Wil knew that Tunc's biggest problem was playing down to everyone else's level. The high-tech massed as much as Wil, but stood over two meters tall. He had the speed and coordination of a professional. Yet, when he held back and let others dominate the play, he didn't seem condescending. Tunc was the only high-tech who really mixed with the lows.

After a time, all players learned the proper strategy: less and less did they watch the ball directly. They watched each other.lost important, they watched the shadows. With the glowball, those shadows were twisting, shifting fingers-showing, where the ball was and where it was going.

The games went quickly, but there was only one ball and many wanted to play. Wil gave up any immediate plans to get on the court. He wandered around the edge of the crowd, watching the shadows flick back and forth, highlighting a face for an instant, then plunging it into darkness. It was fun to sec adults as fascinated as kids.

One face stopped him short: Kim Tioulang stood at the outskirts of the crowd, less than five meters from Brierson. He vas alone. He might be a boss, but apparently he didn't -iced a herd of 'aides' like Steve Fraley. The man was short, his face in shadow except when a high shot washed him in a quick down-and-up of light. His concentration was intense, but his expressionless gaze contained no hint of pleasure.

The man was strikingly frail. He was something that did not exist in Wil's time-except by suicidal choice or metabolic accident. Kim Tioulang's body was old; it was in the final stages of the degeneration which, before the mid-twenty-first, had limited life spans to less than a century.

There were so many different ways to think of time now. Kim had lived less than eighty years. He was young by comparison with the 'teenagers' from the twenty-second. He had nothing on Yelen's three hundred years of realtime experience or the mind-destroying stretch of Della's nine thousand. Yet, in some ways, Tioulang was a more extreme case than either Korolev or Lu.