Wil smiled back; he had heard of Mudge. His notion of the Second Coming could explain things too-in one respect better than Lu's theory. "I like your ideas better. But what's your explanation for the physical destruction? Chanson isn't the only person who thinks that nukes and bioweapons were used towards the end of the twenty-third."
Della hesitated. "That's the one thing that doesn't fit. When I returned to Earth in 3400, there was plenty of evidence of war. The craters were already overgrown, but from orbit I could see that metropolitan areas had been hit. Chanson and the Korolevs have better records; they were active all through the fourth millennium, trying to figure out what had happened, and trying to rescue short-term low-techs. It looks like a classic nuclear war, fought without bobbles. The evidence of biowarfare is much more tenuous.
"I don't know, Wil. There must be an explanation. The trends in the twenty-second century were so strong that I can't believe the race committed suicide. Maybe it was a fireworks celebration. Or maybe... do you know about survival sport?"
"That was after my time. I read about it in GreenInc."
"Physical fitness has always been a big thing in civilization. By the late twenty-second, medical care automatically maintained body fitness, so people worked on other things. Most middle-class folk had Earthside estates of several thousand hectares. There were shared estates bigger than some twentieth-century nations. Fitness came to mean the ability to survive without technology. The players were dropped naked into a wilderness-arctic, rain forest, you name it-that had been secretly picked by the judges. No technology was allowed, though medical autons kept close track of the contestants; it could get to be pretty rough. Even people who didn't compete Would often spend several weeks a year living under conditions that would be deadly to twentieth-century city-dwellers. By ?200, individuals were probably tougher than ever before. All they lacked was the bloody-mindedness of earlier times."
Wil nodded. Marta had certainly demonstrated what Lu was saying. "How does this explain the nuke war?"
"It's a little farfetched, but... imagine things just before the race fell into the Singularity. Individuals might be only slightly' superhuman, and might still be interested in the primitive. For them, nuclear war might be a game of strength and fitness."
"You're right; that does sound farfetched."
She shrugged.
"Would you say Juan is in the minority, thinking mankind was exterminated?"
"I think so; I know Yel‚n agrees with me. But remember that until very recently I didn't have much chance to talk to anyone. I was back in the Solar System for a few years around 3400. During that time, no one was out of stasis. They'd left plenty of messages, though: The Korolevs were already talking about a rendezvous at fifty megayears. Juan Chanson had an auton at L4 blatting his theories to all who would listen. It was clear to me that with the evidence at hand, they could argue forever without proving things one way or the other.
"I wanted certainty. And I thought I could have it." She made that twisted smile again.
"So that's why you went back into space."
"Yes. What had happened to us must have happened must be happening-over and over again throughout the universe. From the twentieth century on, astronomers watched for evidence of intelligence beyond the Solar System. They never saw any. We wonder about the great silence on Earth after 2300. They wondered about the silence among the stars. Their mystery is just the spacelike version of ours.
"There is a difference. In space, I can travel any direction I wish. I was sure that eventually I would find a race at the edge of the Singularity."
Listening to her, Wil felt a strange mix of fear and frustration. One way or another, this person must know where others could only speculate. Yet what she told him and the truth could be entirely different things. And the questions that might distinguish lie from truth might provoke a deadly response. "I've tried to use your databases, Della. They're very hard to understand."
"That's not surprising. Over the years, there was some nonrepairable damage; parts of my GreenInc are so messed up I don't even use them. And my personal db's... well, I've customized them quite a bit."
"Surely you want people to know what you've seen?" Yet Della had always been strangely closemouthed about her time Out There.
She hesitated. "Once I did. Now I'm not sure. There are people who don't want to know the truth.... Wil, someone fired on me when I entered the Solar System."
"What?" Brierson hoped his surprise sounded real. "Who was it?"
"I don't know. I was a thousand AUs out, and the guns were automatic. My guess is Juan Chanson. He seems to be the most paranoid about outsiders, and I was clearly hyperbolic."
Wil suddenly wondered about the "aliens" Juan said he had destroyed. How many of them had been returning spacers? Some of Juan's theories could be self-proving. "You were lucky," he said, probing gently, "to get past an ambush."
"Not lucky. I've been shot at before. Any time I'm less than a quarter light-year from a star, I'm ready to fight-usually ready to run, too."
"So there are other civilizations!"
For a long moment, Della didn't answer. Her personality shifted yet again. Expression drained from her face, and she seemed almost as cold as in their first meetings.
"Intelligent life is a rare development.
"I spent nine thousand years on this, spread across fifty million years of realtime. I averaged less than a twentieth light speed. But that was fast enough. I had time to visit the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Fornax System, besides our own galaxy. I had time to stop at tens of thousands of places, at astrophysical freaks and normal stars. I saw some strange things, mostly near deep gravity wells. Maybe it was engineering, but I couldn't prove it, even to myself.
"I found that most slow-spinning stars have planets. About ten percent of these have an Earth-type planet. And almost all such planets have life.
"If Monica Raines loves the purity of life without intelligence, she loves one of the most common things in the universe.... In all my nine thousand years, I found two intelligent races." Her eyes stared into Wil's. "Both times I was too late. The first was in Fornax. I missed them by several billion years; even their asteroid settlements were ground to dust. There were no bobbles, and it was impossible to tell if their ending had been abrupt.
"The other was a nearer thing, both in space and time: a G2 star about a third of the way around the Galaxy from here. The world was beautiful, larger than Earth, its atmosphere so dense that many plants were airborne. The race was centaur-like; I learned that much. I missed them by a couple of hundred megayears. Their databases had evaporated, but their space settlements were almost undamaged.
"They had vanished just as abruptly as humankind did from Earth. One century they were there, the next-nothing. But there were differences. For one thing, there was no sign of nuclear war. For another, the centaur-folk had started a couple of interstellar colonies. I visited them. I found evidence of growing population, of independent technological progress, and then... their own Singularities. I lived two thousand years in those systems, spread out over a half megayear. I studied them as carefully as Chanson and Sanch‚z did our solar system.
"There were bobbles in the centaur systems. Not as many as near Earth, but this was a lot longer after their Singularity. I knew if I hung around, I'd run into somebody."