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."
NINETEEN
Then there was Marta's diary. He had started reading it as a casual cross-check on Yel‚n and Della. It had become a dark addiction, the place he spent the hours after his late-night arguments with Yel‚n, the hours after returning from his field trips.
What might have happened if Wil had been less a gentleman the night of the Robinson party? Marta was dead before he really knew her; but she looked a little like Virginia... and talked like her... and laughed like her. The diary was the only place where he could ever know her now. And so every night ended with new gloom, matched only by the dreams of morning.
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 Yel‚n 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.
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.
Wouldn't it be a joke if I were rescued by the Peacers! They thought they were making a fifty-year jump to renewed dominion. What a shock it would be to come out on an empty world, and find exactly one taxpayer left. Amusing, but I'd rather be rescued by you, Lelya....
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?)
So. This will be my base, forever till I'm rescued. I think I can make it a nice place to live, Lelya. ¯
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:
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. ¯