"Hmm." He was scarcely in a position to argue. Della Lu was the only living human, perhaps the only person in history, who really knew about such things. "Okay, so she's unrealistic... or maybe she's hiding her true resources, at the Lagrange zones or in the wilderness. Can you be sure she's not playing dumb?"
"Not yet. But when she gives me access to her records, I'll run consistency checks. I have faith in my automation. Raines left civilization seven years before me. Whatever automation she took, mine is better. If she's hiding anything, I will know."
One less suspect, probably. That was a sort of progress.
They flew silently for several minutes, the blue of the Earth on one side, the sun sliding down the other. He could see one of the protection autons, a bright fleck floating against the clouds.
Perhaps he should take the afternoon off, go to the Peacer meeting at North Shore. Still, there was something about Monica Raines. "Della, how do you think Raines would feel if the settlement were a success? Would she be so indifferent to us if she thought we might do permanent damage?"
"I think she would be surprised, and very angry... and impotent."
"I wonder. Let's suppose she doesn't have the usual high-tech battle equipment. If she simply wanted to destroy the settlement, she might not need anything spectacular: perhaps a disease, something with a long incubation period."
Lu's eyes widened almost comically. He had noticed the same mannerism in Yel‚n Korolev. It had something to do with their direct data interface: When confronted with a surprising
75 question demanding heavy analysis, they seemed first startled and then dazed. Several seconds passed. "That's just barely possible. She has a bioscience background, and a small autolab would be hard to spot. The Korolevs' medical automation is good, but it's not designed for warfare...."
She smiled. "That's an interesting idea, Wil. A properly designed virus could evade the panphages and infect everyone before any symptoms appeared. Bobbling out of the area would be no defense."
"Interesting" was not the word Brierson would have used. The diseases spread after the 1997 war had killed most of the human race. Even in Wil's time, less than forty million people lived in North America. By then the terror was gone, and the world was a friendly place, but still-better bombs and bullets than bugs. He licked his lips. "I suppose we don't have to worry about it immediately. She must know how deadly the high-tech response would be. But if our settlement is too successful..."
"Yes. I've put this on my list. Now that we're aware of the possibility, it shouldn't be hard to guard against. I have exploration-duty medical equipment. It's smart and very paranoid."
"Yeah." Nothing to worry about, Wil. They had lost a murder suspect--and possibly gained a genocidal maniac.
EIGHT
Wil didn't make it to the party at North Shore.
At first, the Raines thing had him wound up, and then-well, someone had killed Marta. Most likely that someone wanted the settlement to fail. And he was no nearer cracking the case today than a week ago. Parties would have to wait.
He meshed his data set with the house archives. He could have used the house displays direct, but he felt more at ease with his portable.... Besides, it was one of the few things that had come with him through time. Its memory was an attic filled with a thousand private souvenirs; the date it displayed, 16 February 2100, was when he would be if his old life had continued.
Wil heated his lunch pack and munched absentmindedly at hot vegetables as he scanned his progress. He was behind in his reading; just another good reason to stay home this afternoon. People outside police work didn't realize how much of criminal investigation involved drawing conclusions from databases-usually public databases, at that. Wil's "reading" was the most likely source of real evidence. There was no shortage of things to look at. His house archive was far bigger than any other low-tech's. In addition to the 2201 edition of GreenInc, he had copies of parts of Korolev's and Lu's personal databases.
Wil had insisted on having his own copies. He didn't want networked stuff. He didn't want it changing mysteriously depending on the whim of the original owners. The price of such independence was a certain incoherence. His own processors had to accommodate idiosyncrasies in the structure of the imported data. With Yel‚n's databases, it wasn't too bad. They were designed both for headband use and for old-fashioned query languages. Her engineering jargon was sometimes incomprehensible, but he could get by.
Della's db's were a different story. Her copy of GreenInc was a year more recent than Yel‚n's, but a note announced that the later parts had been severely damaged during her travels. That was an understatement. Whole sections from the late twenty-second were jumbled or just plain missing. Her personal database appeared to be intact, but it used a customized headband design. His processors found it almost impossible to talk to the retrieval programs. Usually the output seemed to be allegorical hallucinations; occasionally he was blocked by the fragments of a personality simulator. Not for the first time in his life, Wil wished he could use interface headbands. They had existed in his time. If you had great native intelligence and a certain turn of imagination, they made computers a direct extension of your mind; otherwise, the bands were little more than electronic drug-tripping. Wil sighed. Yel‚n said the headbands from her era were easier to use; if only she had given him the time to learn how.
Della had nine thousand years of exploration packed away in her database. He'd had tantalizing glimpses-a world where plants floated in the sky, pictures of stars crowding close about something dark and visibly moving, a low-orbit shot of a planet green and cratered. On one planet, bathed in the glow of a giant red sun, he saw something that looked like ruins. Nowhere else had he seen any sign of intelligence. Was it so rare that all Della ever saw were ruins or fossils of ruins-of civilizations lasting a few millennia, and missed by millions of years? He hadn't yet asked her about what she'd seen. The murder was their immediate business, and until recently she'd been difficult to talk to. But now that he thought about it, she was awfully closemouthed about her travels.
His other researches were going better. He'd studied most of the high-techs. None of them-except Yel‚n and Marta had any special relationship back in civilization. The conclusion couldn't be absolute, of course. The biography companies only had so many spies. If someone was hiding something, and was also out of the public eye, then that something could stay Bidden.
Philippe Genet was one of the least documented. Wil couldn't find any reference to him before 2160, when he began advertising his services as a construction contractor. At that time, he was at least forty years old. You'd have to live like a hermit or have lots of money to go forty years and not get on a junk-mail list or have a published credit rating. There was another possibility: Perhaps Genet had been in stasis before
160. Wil had not pursued that very far; it would open a whole new tree of investigation. Between 2160 and when Genet left civilization in 2201, the trail was sparse but visible. He had not been convicted of any crimes that involved public punishment. He hadn't been seen at public events, or written anything for public scrutiny. From his advertising-and the advertising that was focused back on him-it was clear that his construction business was successful, but not so successful as to attract the attention of the trade journals. Consumer ratings of his work were solid but not spectacular; he came out low in "customer relations." In the 2190s, he followed the herd and began specializing in space construction. Nowhere could Wil find anything that might be a motive. However, with his construction background, Genet was probably one of the best armed of the travelers.