Of course Marta found the West End mines bobbled. She stayed a few months, and left some billboards. It was not safe country. Packs of doglike creatures roamed. At one point she was trapped, had to start a grass fire and play mirror tag with the dogs among the bobbles. Wil read that part several times; it made him want to laugh and cry in the same breath. For Marta, it was just part of staying alive. She moved northwards into the foothills of the Kampuchean Alps. That was where Yelen found her third cairn.
Marta reached the Peacer bobble two years after she was marooned. She had walked and sailed around the Inland Sea to do it. The last six hundred kilometers had been a climb over the Kampuchean Alps. She was still an optimist, yet her words were sometimes tinged with self-mockery. She had started out to walk halfway around the world, and ended up less than two thousand kilometers north of where she started. Despite her year's layover, the shattered bones in her foot had not healed perfectly. Till she was rescued (her usual phrasing) she would walk with a limp. At the end of a long day's walk she was in some pain.
But she had plans. The Peacer bobble was at the center of a vitrified plain 150 kilometers across. Even now, not much life had returned. Her first walk in, she carried all her food on the travois.
T The bobble isn't super large, maybe three hundred meters across. But its setting is spectacular, Lelya; I had not remembered the details. It's in a small lake bordered by uniform cliffs. Concentrically around those cliffs are rings of ridges. I climbed to the edge of the cliffs and looked across at the bobble. My reflection looked back and we waved at each other. With its moat and the ringwall, it looks like a jewel in a setting. Equally spaced along the wall are five smaller gems -the bobbles around our lookout equipment. Whoever-whatever-marooned me has locked them up, too. But for how long? Those five were supposed to have a very high flicker rate. I still can't believe anyone could subvert our control systems for a jump of longer than a few decades.
T Wouldn't it be a joke if I were rescued by the
T The jewel's setting is cracked in places. There's a waterfall coming into the lake on the south side. The water exits through a break in the north wall. It's very clear; I can see fish in the lake. There are places where the cliff has collapsed. It looks like it could make decent soil. This is probably the most habitable spot in the whole destruction zone. If I have to stop, Lelya, I think this is really the best place it could happen. It's the most likely to be monitored; it's at the center of a glazed flatland that should be easy to mark up. (Do you think our L5 autons would respond to KILROY IS HERE written in letters <1 kilometer long?)
T So. This will be my base, forever till I'm rescued. I think I can make it a nice place to live, Lelya. t
And Marta did. Through the first ten years she made steady improvements. Five times she trekked out of the glazed zone, sometimes for necessities like seed and wood, later to import some friends: she hiked three hundred kilometers north, to a large lake. There were fishermonkeys on that lake. She understood their matriarchal scheme now. It wasn't hard to find displaced trios wandering the shores, looking for something bigger than they that walked on two legs. The fishers loved the ringlake. By year twelve, there were so many that some left every year down the river.
From her cabin high on the ringwall she watched them by the hour:
T Back and forth in water and bobble there are reflections of the ringwall and my cabin and our bobbled monitors. The fishers love to play with their reflections. Often they swim against its surface. I'll bet they feel the reflected body heat, even through their pelts. I wonder what mythology they have about the kingdom beyond the mirror.... Yes, Lelya. Sentiment is one thing, fantasy another. But, you know, my fishers are smarter than chimpanzees. If I'd seen them before we left civilization, I'd have bet they would evolve human intelligence. Sigh. After all our travels, I know better. In the short term, the marine adaptation is more profitable. Another five megayears, they'll be as agile as penguins-and not much brighter. t
Marta gave names to the friendliest, and the weirdest. There was always a Hewey and a Dewey and a Lewey. Others she named after humans. Wil found himself chuckling. Over the years, there were several Juan Chansons and Jason Mudges-usually the most compulsive chitterers. There was also a succession of Della Lus — all small, pale, shy. And there was even one W. W. Brierson. Wil read that page twice, a trembling smile on his lips. Wil the fishermonkey was black-furred and large, even bigger than a dominant female. He could have run the whole show, but kept mostly to himself and watched everyone else. Every so often his reserve broke and he gave a great screeching display, rushing along the edge of the ringwall and slapping his sides. Like the first Dewey, he was odd man out, and especially friendly to Marta. He spent more time with her than any of them. They all played at imitating her, but he was the most successful. She actually got some useful work out of him, pulling small bundles. His most impressive game was the building of miniature versions of the pyramidal cairn Marta used to store the completed portion of her diary. Marta never said he was her favorite, yet she did seem fond of him. He disappeared on her last big expedition, around year fifteen.
T I'll never name one of my little friends after you, Lelya. The fishers live only ten or fifteen years. It's always sad when they go. I don't want to go through that with a fisher named Yelen. t
As the years passed, Marta concentrated on the diary. This was where the words piled into the millions. She had lots of advice for Yelen. There were some interesting revelations: It had been Phil Genet who persuaded Yelen to raise the Peacer bobble while the NMs were in realtime. It had been Phil Genet who was behind the ash-shoveling incident. Genet consistently argued that the key to success lay in the explicit intimidation of the low-techs. Marta begged Yelen not to take his advice again. T We will be hated enough, feared enough, even if we act like saints. t
In the middle decades, her writing was scarcely a diary at all, but a collection of essays and stories, poems and whimsy. She spent at least as much time with her sketches and paintings. There were dozens of paintings of the ringlake and bobble, under every
