Marooned in Realtime

generators. Having two real humans out front, whose voices and hands were making part of the music, made the band exciting and real.

They played everything from Strauss waltzes, to the Beatles, to W. W. Arai. A couple of the Arai pieces Wil had never heard: they must have been written after his... departure. Partners changed from dance to dance. The Arai tunes brought more than thirty people onto the floor. Wil stayed at the edge of the floor, for the moment content to observe. On the other side, he saw Marta Korolev; her partner was not in evidence

Marta stood swaying, snapping her fingers to the music, a faint smile on her face. She looked a little like Virginia: her chocolate skin was almost the shade Wil remembered. No doubt Marta's father or mother came from America. But the other side of her family was clearly Chinese.

Appearance aside, there were other similarities. Marta had Virginia's outgoing good humor. She combined common sense with uncommon sympathy. Wil watched her for many minutes, trying not to seem to watch. Several of the bolder partiers — Dilip was first-asked her to dance. She accepted enthusiastically, and soon was on the floor for almost every tune. She was very good to watch. If only —

A hand touched his shoulder and a feminine voice sounded in his ear. 'Hey, Mr. Brierson, is it true you're a policeman?'

Wil looked into blue eyes just centimeters from his. Tammy Robinson stood on tiptoe to shout into his ear. Now that she had his attention, she stood down, which still left her a respectable 180 centimeters tall. She was dressed in the same spotless white as before. Her interface band looked like a bit of jewelry, holding back her long hair. Her grin was bounded by dimples: even her eyes seemed to be smiling.

Brierson grinned back. 'Yes. At least, I used to be a cop.'

'Oh, wow.' She took his arm in hers and edged them away from the loudness. 'I never met a policeman before. But 1 guess that's not saying a lot.'

'Oh?'

'Yeah. I was born about ten megayears after the Singularity -the Extinction, Juan calls it. I've read and watched all about cops and criminals and soldiers, but till now I've never actually met any.'

Wil laughed. 'Well, now you can meet all three.'

Tammy was abashed. 'I'm sorry. I'm really not that ignorant. I know that police are different from criminals and soldiers. But it's so strange: they're all careers that can't even exist unless lots of people decide to live together.'

Lots o f people. Like more than a single family. Brierson glimpsed the abyss that separated them.

'I think you'll like having other people around, Tammy.'

She smiled and squeezed his arm. 'Daddy always says that. Now I'm beginning to understand.'

'Just think. Before you're a hundred, Korolev Town will be almost like a city. There could be a couple of thousand people for you to know, people more interesting and worthwhile than criminals.'

'Ugh. We're not going to stay for that. I want to be with lots of people-hundreds at least. But how could you stand to be locked in one little corner of time?' She looked at him, seemed suddenly to realize that Brierson's whole life had been stuck in a single century. 'Gee. How can I explain it? Lookwhere you come from, there was air and space travel, right?' Brierson nodded. 'You could go anywhere you wanted. Now, suppose instead you had to spend your life in a house in a deep valley. Sometimes you hear stories about other places, but you can never climb out of the valley. Wouldn't that drive you crazy?

'That's how I'd feel about making a permanent stop at Korolev. We've been stopped for six weeks now. That's not long compared to some of our stops, but it's long enough for me to get the feeling: The animals aren't changing. I look out and the mountains just sit there.' She made a little sound of frustration. 'Oh, I can't explain it. But you'll see some of what I mean tonight. Daddy's going to show the video we made. It's beautiful!'

Wil smiled. Bobbles didn't change the fact that time was a one-way trip.

She saw the denial in his eyes. 'You must feel like I do. Just a little? I mean, why did you go into stasis in the first place?' He shook his head. 'Tammy, there are lots of people here who never asked to be bobbled.... I was shanghaied.' A crummy embezzlement case it had been. When he thought back, it was so fresh in his mind, in many ways more real than the world of the last few weeks. The assignment had seemed as safe as houses. The need for an armed investigator had been a formality, required by his company's archaic regs: the amount stolen was just over the ten thousand gAu. But someone had been desperate or careless... or just plain vicious. Most jurisdictions of Wil's era counted offensive bobbling of more than a century as manslaughter: Wil's stasis had lasted one thousand centuries. Of course, Wil did not consider the crime to be the murder of one W. W. Brierson. The crime was much more terrible than that. The crime was the destruction of the world he had known, the family he loved.

Tammy's eyes grew wide as he told his story. She tried to understand, but Wil thought there was more wonder than sympathy in her look. He stopped short, embarrassed.

He was trying to think of a suitable change of subject when he noticed the pale figure on the far side of the dance floor. It was the person he'd seen at the beach. 'Tammy, who's that?' He nodded in the direction of the stranger.

Tammy pulled her gaze away from his face and looked across the room. 'Oh! She's weird, isn't she? She's a spacer. Can you imagine? In fifty million years, she could travel all over the Galaxy. We think she's more than nine thousand years old..And all that time alone.' Tammy shivered.