Marooned in Realtime

FOURTEEN

From North Shore to Town Korolev was about a thousand kilometers, most of it over the Inland Sea. Yelén didn't stint with the shuttle service between the two points. The two halves of the settlement were physically separate, but she was determined to make them close in every other way. When Wil left the picnic, there were three fliers waiting for southbound passengers. He ended up in one that was empty except for the Dasgupta brothers.

The agrav rose with the familiar silent acceleration that never became intense-and never ceased. The trip would take about fifteen minutes. Below them, the picnic fires dwindled, seemed to tilt sideways. The loudest sound was a distant scream of wind. It grew, then dwindled to nothing. The interior lighting turned the night beyond the windows into undetailed darkness. Except for the constant acceleration, they might have been sitting in an ordinary office waiting room.

They were going home ahead of most people. Wil was surprised to see Dilip leaving early. He remembered what the guy had been up to that afternoon. "What became of Gail Parker, Dilip? I thought..." Wil's voice trailed off as he remembered the unhappy caucus he'd stumbled onto.

The older Dasgupta shrugged, his normally rakish air deflated. "She... she didn't want to play. She was polite enough, but you know how things are. Every week the girls are a bit harder to get along with. I guess we've all got some hard decisions to make."

Wil changed the subject. "Either of you know who brought the glowball?"

Rohan grinned. No doubt he was pleased by what he thought an innocuous topic. "Wasn't that something? I've seen glowballs before, but nothing like that. Didn't Tunç Blumenthal bring it?"

Dilip shook his head. "I was there from the beginning. It was Fraley's people. I saw them get off the shuttle with it. Tunç didn't come along till they had played a couple of games."

Just as Phil Genet claimed.

Still under acceleration, the shuttle did a slow turn, the only evidence being a faint queasiness in the passengers' guts. Now they were flying tailfirst into the darkness. They were halfway home.

Wil settled back in his seat, let his mind wander back over the day. Detective work had been easier in civilization. There, most things were what they seemed. You had your employers, their clients, collateral services. In most cases, these were people you had worked with for years; you knew who you could trust. Here, it was paranoid heaven. Except for Lindemann, he knew no one from before. Virtually all the high-techs were twisted creatures. Chanson, Korolev, Raines, Lu-they had all lived longer than he, some for thousands of years. They were all screwier than the types he was used to dealing with. And Genet. Genet was not so strange; Wil had known a few like him. There were lots of mysteries about Genet's life in civilization, but one thing was clear as crystal after tonight: Phil Genet was a people-owner, barely under control. Whether or not he had killed anyone, murder was in his moral range.

On the other hand, Blumenthal seemed to be a genuinely nice guy. He was an involuntary traveler like Wil, but without the Lindemann burden.

Brierson suppressed a smile. In the standard mystery plot, such all-around niceness would be a sure sign of guilt. In the real world, things rarely worked that way.... Damn. In this real world, almost anything could be true. Okay, what grounds could there be for suspecting Blumenthal? Motive? Certainly none was visible. In fact, very little was known about Blumenthal. The 2201 GreenInc listed him as ten years old, a child employee in a family-owned mining company. There was scarcely more information about the company. It was small, operating mainly in the comet cloud. Wil had less hard information on Blumenthal than on any other high-tech, Genet excepted. As the last human to leave civilization, there had been no one to write Tunç's biography. It was only Tunç's word that he'd been bobbled in 2210. It could have been later, perhaps from the heart of the Singularity. He claimed an industrial accident had blown him into the sun. Come to think of it, what corroboration could there be for that either? And if it wasn't an accident, then most likely he was the loser in a battle of nukes and bobbles, where the victors wanted the vanquished permanently dead.

Wil suddenly wondered where Tunç stood on Chanson's list of potential aliens.

Scattered streetlamps shone friendly through the trees, and then the flier was on the ground. Wil and the Dasguptas piled out, feeling light-headed in the sudden return to one gravity.

They had landed on the street that ran past their homes. Wil said good night to Rohan and Dilip and walked slowly up the street toward his place. He couldn't remember when so many things, both physical and mental, had been jammed into one afternoon. The residual effects of the stun added overwhelming fatigue to it all. He glanced upwards but saw only leaves, backlit by a streetlamp. No doubt the autons were still up there, hidden behind the trees.

Such an innocuous thing, the glowball. And the explanation might be innocuous, too: Maybe Yelén had simply given it to the NMs, or maybe they'd swiped it themselves. Surely it was a trivial item in a high-tech's inventory. The fact that she hadn't demanded a late-night session was a good sign. After he dot a good sleep, he might be able to laugh at Genet.

Wil walked along the edge of his lot. He reached the gate.. and stopped cold. Crude letters were spraygunned across the gate and surrounding wall. They spelled the words LO TECH DONT MEAN NO TECH. The message had scarcely registered on his mind when white light drenched the scene. Yelén's auton had dropped to man-height beside Wil. Its spotlight fanned across the gateway.

Brierson stepped close to the wall. The paint was still wet. I t glittered in the light. He stared numbly at the lettering.

Polka-dot paint, green on purple. The bright green disks were perfectly formed, even where the paint had dribbled ;downwards. It was the sort of thing you see often enough on data sets-and never in the real world.

Yelén's voice came from the auton. "Take a good look. Brierson. Then come inside; we've got to talk."