Marooned in Realtime

others' grasp tighten. He looked higher, saw the real Milky Way slicing down from another direction.

Blumenthal chuckled. 'There wasn't much going on at the Lagrange zones in your time, was there?'

'There were habitats at L4 and L5. They were easy to see, like bright stars,' nothing like this stardust haze.

'Put enough stuff in Luna's orbit and you'll see more than just a few new stars. In my time, millions lived there. All Earth's heavy industry was there. Things were getting crowded. There's only so much thermal and chemical pollution you can dump before your factories begin to poison themselves.'

Now Wil remembered things Marta and Yelen had said. 'But it's mainly bobbles there now.'

'Yes. This light isn't caused by factories and civilization. Third-body perturbations have long since flushed the original artifacts. Now it's a handy place for short-term storage, or to park observing equipment.'

Wil stared at the pale glow. He wondered how many thousands of bobbles it took to make such a light. He knew Yelen still had much of her equipment off Earth. How many millions of tonnes were in 'short-term storage' out there? For that matter, how many travelers were still in stasis, ignoring all the messages the Korolevs had laid down across the megayears? The light was ghostly in more ways than one.

They went another couple of hundred meters eastwards. Gradually Wil's coordination returned, till he was walking without help and only an occasional wobble. His eyes were fully dark-adapted now. Light-colored flowers floated in the bushes to the side of the path, and when they nodded close the sweetish smell came stronger. He wondered if the path was natural or a piece of Korolev landscaping. He risked his balance by looking straight up. Sure enough, there was something dark against the stars. Yelen's auton — and probably Della's, too was still with them.

The path meandered southwards, to the naked rock that edged the cliffs. From below came a faint sighing, the occasional slap of water against rock. It could have been Lake Michigan on a quiet night. Now for some mosquitoes to make him feel truly at home.

Blumenthal broke the long silence. 'You were one of my childhood heroes, Wil Brierson.' There was a smile in his voice.

'What?'

'Yes. You and Sherlock Holmes. I read every novel your son wrote.'

Billy wrote... about me? GreenInc had said Billy's second career was as a novelist, but Wil hadn't had time to look at his writing.

'The adventures were fiction, even though you were the hero. He wrote 'em under the assumption that Derek Lindemann hadn't bumped you off. There were almost thirty novels; you had adventures all through the twenty-second.'

'Derek Lindemann?' Dasgupta said. 'Who... Oh, I see.

Wil nodded. 'Yeah, Rohan.' Wimpy Derek Lindemann... the Kid. 'The guy I tried to kill just now.' But for a moment his anger seemed irrelevant. Wil smiled sadly in the darkness. To think that Billy had created a synthetic life for the one that had been ended. By God, he was going to read those novels!

He glanced at the high-tech. 'Glad you enjoyed my adventures, Tunc. I assume you grew out of it. From what I hear, you were in construction.'

'True and true. But had I wished to be a policeman, it would've been hard. By the late twenty-second, most habitats had fewer than one cop per million population. It was even worse in rural areas. A deplorable scarcity of crime, it was.' Wil smiled. Blumenthal's accent was strange-almost singsong, a cross between Scottish and Amerasian. None of the other high-techs talked like this. In Wil's time, English dialect differences had been damping out; communication and travel were so fast in the Earth-Luna volume. Blumenthal had grown up in space, several days' travel time from the heartland.

'Besides, I wanted more to build things than to protect folks. At the beginning of the twenty-third, the world was changing faster than you can imagine. I'll wager there was more technical change in the first decade of the twenty-third than in all the centuries to the twenty-second. Have you noticed the differences among the advanced travelers? Monica Raines left civilization in 2195; no matter what she claims now, she bought the best equipment available. Juan Chanson left ill 2200-with a much smaller investment. Yet Juan's gear is superior in every way. His autons have spent several thousand years in realtime, and are good for at least as much more. Monica has survived sixty years and has only one surviving auton. The difference was five years' progress in sport and camping equipment. The Korolevs left a year after Chanson. They bought an immense amount of equipment, yet for about the same investment as Chanson; a single year had depreciated the 2200 models that far. Juan, Yelen, Genet-they're aware of this. But I don't think any of them understand what nine more years of progress could bring.... You know I'm the last one out?'

Wil had read that in Yelen's summaries. The difference hadn't seemed terribly important. 'You bobbled out in 2210?'

'True. Della Lu was latest before me, in 2202. We've never found anyone who lived closer to the Singularity.'

Rohan said softly, 'You should be the most powerful of all.'

'Should be, perhaps. But the fact is, I'm not one of the willing travelers. I was more than happy to live when I was. 1 never had the least inclination to hop into the future, to start a new religion or break the stock market.... I'm sorry, Rohan Dasgupta, I —'

'It's okay. My brother and I were a little too greedy. We thought 'What can go