Across Realtime

EIGHTEEN

The mornings Wil devoted to research. He still had a lot of background to soak up. He wanted a basic understanding of the settlers, both low-tech and high. They all had pasts and skills; the more he knew, the less he might be surprised. At the same time, there were specific questions (suspicions) raised by his field trips and discussions with Yel‚n.

For instance: What corroboration was there for Tun‡ Blumenthal's story? Was he the victim of an accident-or a battle? Had it happened in 2210-or later, perhaps from within the Singularity itself?

It turned out there was physical evidence: Blumenthal's spacecraft. It was a small vehicle (Tun‡ called it a repair boat), massing just over three tonnes. The bow end was missing-not cut by the smooth curve of a bobble, but flash-evaporated. That hull had a million times the opacity of lead; some monstrous burst of gamma had vaporized a good hunk of it just as the boat bobbled out.

The boat's drive was "ordinary" antigravity-but in this case, it was a built-in characteristic of the hull material. The comm and life-support systems bore familiar trademarks; their mechanism was virtually unintelligible. The recycler was thirty centimeters across; there were no moving parts. It appeared to be as efficient as a planetary ecology.

Tun could explain most of this in general terms. But the detailed explanations-the theory and the specs-had been in e he boat's database. And that had been in Tun‡'s jacket, in the forward compartment. The volatilized forward compartment. The processors that remained were compatible with the Korolevs', and Yel‚n had played with them quite a bit.

At one extreme was the lattice of monoprocessors and bobblers embedded in the hull. The monos were no smarter than a twentieth-century home computer, but each was less than one angstrom unit across. Each ran a simple program loop, IE17 times a second. That program watched its processor's brothers for signs of catastrophe-and triggered an attached bobbler accordingly. Yel‚n's fighter fleet had nothing like it.

At the other extreme was the computer in Tun‡'s headband. I t was massively parallel, and as powerful as a corporate mainframe of Yel‚n's time. Marta thought that, even without its database, Tun's headband made him as important to the plan as any of the other high-techs. They had given him a good part of their advanced equipment in exchange for its use.

Brierson smiled as he read the report. There were occasional comments by Marta, but Yel‚n was the engineer and this was mainly her work. Where he could follow it at all, the tone was a mix of awe and frustration. It read as he imagined Benjamin Franklin's analysis of a jet aircraft might read. Yel‚n could study the equipment, but without Tun's explanations its purpose would have been a mystery. And even knowing the purpose and the underlying principles of operation, she couldn't see how such devices could be built or why they worked so perfectly.

Wil's grin faded. Almost two centuries separated Ben Franklin from jet planes. Less than a decade stood between Yel‚n's expertise and this "repair boat." Wil knew about the acceleration of progress. It had been a fact of his life. But even in his time, there had been limits on how fast the marketplace could absorb new developments. Even if all these inventions could be made in just nine years-what about the installed base of older equipment? What about compatibility with devices not yet upgraded? How could the world of real products be turned inside out in such a short time?

Wil looked away from the display. So there was physical evidence, but it didn't prove much except that Tun‡ had been as far beyond the high-techs as they were beyond Wil. It really was surprising that Chanson had not accused Tun‡-rescued from the sun with inexplicable equipment and a story no one could check-of being another alien. Perhaps Juan's paranoia was not as all-encompassing as it seemed.

He really should have another chat with Blumenthal.

Wil used a comm channel that Yel‚n said was private. Blumenthal was as calm and reasonable as before. "Sure, I can talk. The work I do for Yel‚n is mainly programming; very flexible hours."

"Thanks. I wanted to talk more about how you got bobbled. You said it was possible you were shanghaied...."

Blumenthal shrugged. "It is possible. Yet most likely an accident it was. You've read about my company's project?"

"Just Yel‚n's summaries."

Tun hesitated, swapped out. "Ah, yes. What she says is fair. We were running a matter/antimatter distillery. But look at the numbers. Yel‚n's stations can distill perhaps a kilo per day -enough to power a small business. We were in a different class entirely. My partners and I specialized in close solar work, less than five radii out. We had easements on most of the sun's southern hemisphere. When I... left, we were distilling one hundred thousand tonnes of matter and antimatter every second. That's enough to dim the sun, though we arranged things so the effect wasn't perceptible from the ecliptic. Even so, there were complaints. An absolute condition of our insurance was that we move it out promptly and without leakage. A few days' production would be enough to damage an unprotected solar system."

"Yel‚n's summary said you were shipping to the Dark Companion?" Like a lot of Yel‚n's commentary, the rest of that report had been technical, unintelligible without a headband.

"True!" Tun‡'s face came alight. "Such a fine idea it was. Our parent company liked big construction projects. Originally, they wanted to stellate Jupiter, but they couldn't buy the necessary options. Then we came along with a much bigger project. We were going to implode the Dark Companion, fashion of it a small Tipler cylinder." He noticed Wil's blank expression. "A naked black hole, Wil! A space warp! A gate for faster-than-light travel! Of course the Dark Companion is so small that the aperture would be only a few meters wide, and have tidal strains above 1 E 13 g's per meter-but with bobbles it might be usable. If not, there were plans to probe through it to the galactic core, and siphon back the power to widen it."

Tun‡ paused, some of his enthusiasm gone. "That was the plan, anyway. In fact, the distillery was almost too much for us. We were on site for days at a time. It gets on your nerves after a while, knowing that beyond all the shielding, the sun is stretched from horizon to horizon. But we had to stay; we couldn't tolerate transmission delays. It took all of us linked to our mainframe to keep the brew stable.

"We had stability, but we weren't shipping quite everything out. Something near a tonne per second began accumulating over the south pole. We needed a quick fix or we'd lose performance bonuses. I took the repair boat across to work on it. The problem was just ten thousand kilometers from our station -a thirty-millisecond time lag. Intellect nets run fine with that much lag, but this was process control; we were taking a chance. We'd accumulated a two-hundred-thousand-tonne backlog by then. It was all in flicker storage-a slowly exploding bomb. I had to repackage it and boost it out."

Tun‡ shrugged. "That's the last I remember. Somehow, we lost control; part of that backlog recombined. My boat bobbled up. Now, I was on the sun side of the brew. The blast rammed me straight into Sol. There was no way my partners could save me.

Bobbled into the sun. It was almost high-tech slang for certain death. "How could you ever escape?"

Blumenthal smiled. "You haven't read about that? There is no way in heaven I could have. On the sun, the only way you can survive is to stay in stasis. My initial bobbling was only for a few seconds. When it lapsed, the fail-safe did a quick lookabout, saw where we were heading, and rebobbled-sixty-four thousand years. That was `effective infinity' to its pinhead program.

"I've done some simulations since. I hit the surface fast enough to penetrate thousands of kilometers. The bobble spent a few years following convection currents around inside. It wasn't as dense as the inner sunstuff. Eventually I percolated back to near the surface. Then, every time the bobble floated over a blow-off, it was boosted tens of thousands of kilometers up.... For thirty thousand years a damn volleyball I was, flying up to the corona, falling back through the photosphere, floating around awhile, then getting thrown up again.

"That's where I was through the Singularity and during the time the short-term travelers were being rescued. That's where I would have died if it hadn't been for Bil S nchez." He paused. "You never knew Bil. He dropped out, died about twenty million years ago. He was a nut about Juan Chanson's extermination theory. Most of Chanson's proof is on Earth; W. W. Sanch‚z traveled all over the Solar System looking for evidence. He dug up things Chanson never guessed at.

"One thing Bil did was scan for bobbles. He was convinced that sooner or later he'd find one containing somebody or some machine that had escaped the `Extinction.' When he spotted my bobble in the sun, he thought he'd hit the jackpot. Their latest records-from 2201-didn't show any such bobbling. It was just the weird place you might expect to find a survivor; even the exterminators couldn't have reached someone down there.

"But Bil Sanch‚z was patient. He noticed that every few thousand years, a really big solar flare would blast me way up. He and the Korolevs diverted a comet, stored it off Mercury. The next time I was boosted off the surface, they were ready: They dropped the comet into a sun-grazing orbit. It picked me off at the top of my bounce. Fortunately, the snowball didn't break up and my bobble stuck on its surface; we swung around the sun, up into the cool. From there, the situation was much like their other rescues. Thirty thousand years later, I was back in realtime."

"Tun‡, you lived closer to the Extinction than anyone else. What do you think caused it?"

The spacer sat back, crossed his arms. "That's what they all ask.... Ah, Wil Brierson, if I only knew! I tell them I don't know. And they go away, seeing each his own theory reflected in my story." He seemed to realize the answer was not going to satisfy. "Very well, my theories. Theory Alpha: Possible it is that mankind was exterminated. What Bil found in the Charon catacombs is hard to explain any other way. But it can't be like Juan Chanson says. Bil had it better: Anything that could bump off the intellect nets in Earth/Luna would needs be superhuman. If it's still around, no brave talk will save us. That's why Bil S nchez and his little colony dropped out. Poor man, he was frightened of what might happen to anything bigger.

"And Theory Beta: This is what Yel‚n believes, and probably Della too-though she is still so shy, I can't tell for sure. Humankind and its machines became something better, something... unknowable. And I saw things that fit with that, too.

"Ever since the Peace War there have been more or less autonomous devices. For centuries, folks had been saying that machines as smart as people were just around the corner. Most didn't realize how unimportant such a thing would be. What was needed was greater than human intelligence. Between our processors and ourselves, my era was achieving that.

"My own company was small; there were only eight of us. We were backward, rural; the rest of humanity was hundreds of light-seconds away. The larger spacing firms were better off. Their computers were correspondingly bigger, and they had thousands of people linked. I had friends at Charon Corp and Stellation Inc. They thought we were crazy to stay so isolated. And when we visited their habitats, when the comm lag got to less than a second, I could see what they meant. There was power and knowledge and joy in those companies.... And they could plan circles around us. Our only advantage was mobility.

"Yet even these corporations were fragments, a few thousand people here and there. By the beginning of the twenty-third, there were three billion people in the Earth/Luna volume. Three billion people and corresponding processing power -all less than three light-seconds apart.

"I... it was strange, talking to them. We attended a marketing conference at Luna in 2209. Even linked, we never did understand what was going on." He was quiet for a long moment. "So you see, either theory fits."

Wil was not going to let him off that easily. "But your project-you say it would have meant faster-tban-light travel. Is there any evidence what became of that?"

Tun‡ nodded. "Bil S nchez visited the Dark Companion a couple times. It's the same dead thing it always was. There's no sign it was ever modified. I think that scared him even more than what he found at Charon. I know it scares me. I doubt my accident was enough to scuttle the plan: our project would have given humanity a gate to the entire Galaxy... but it was also mankind's first piece of cosmic engineering. If it worked, we wanted to do the same to a number of stars. In the end, we might have built a small Arp object in this arm of the Galaxy. Bil thought we'd been `uppity cockroaches'-and the real owners finally stepped on us....

"But don't you be buying Theory Alpha just yet. I said the

Singularity was a mirrored thing. Theory Beta explains it just as well. In 2207, we were the hottest project at Stellation Inc.

They put everything they had into renting those easements around the sun. But after 2209, the edge was gone from their excitement. At the marketing conference at Luna, it almost seemed Stellation's backers were trying to sell our project as a frivolity."

Tun‡ stopped, smiled. "So you have my thumbnail sketch of Great Events. You can get it all, clearer said with more detail, from Yel‚n's databases." He cocked his head to one side. "Do you like listening to others so much, Wil Brierson, that you visit me first?"

Wil grinned back. "I wanted to hear you firsthand." And I still don't understand you. "I'm one of the earlier low-techs, Tun‡. I've never experienced direct connect-much less the mind links you talk about. But I know how much it hurts a high-tech to go without a headband." All through Marta's diary, that loss was a source of pain. "If I understand what you say about your time, you've lost much more. How can you be so cool?"

The faintest shadow crossed Tun‡'s face. "It's not a mystery, really. I was nineteen when I left civilization. I've lived fifty years since. I don't remember much of the time right after my rescue. Yel‚n says I was in a coma for months. They couldn't find anything wrong with my body; just no one was home.

"I told you my little company was backward, rural. That's only by comparison with our betters. There were eight of us, four women, four men. Maybe I should call it a group marriage, because it was that, too. But it was more. We spent every spare gAu on our processor system and the interfaces. When we were linked up, we were something... wonderful. But now all that's memories of memories-no more meaningful to me than to you." His voice was soft. "You know, we had a mascot: a poor, sweet girl, close to anencephalic. Even with prosthesis she was scarcely brighter than you or I. Most of the time she was happy." The expression on his face was wistful, puzzled "And most of the time, I am happy, too."