"Mama is... dead, Inspector Brierson." Yel‚n's voice was even flatter than usual. "Murdered."
Time seemed to stop. Manta. Dead? He had taken bullets with less physical sensation than those words brought. His mouth opened, but the questions wouldn't come. In any case, Yel‚n had questions of her own. "And I want to know what you had to do with it, Brierson."
Wil shook his head, in confusion more than denial.
She slapped the marble tabletop. "Wake up, mister! I'm talking to you. You're the last person who saw her alive. She rejected your advances. Did that make it worth killing her, Brierson? Did it?"
The insanity of the accusation brought Wil back to his senses. He stared at Yel‚n, realizing that she was in a much worse state than he. Like Manta, Yel‚n Korolev had been raised in late twenty-second-century Hainan. But Yel‚n had no trace of Chinese blood. She was descended from the Russians who had filtered out of Central Asia after the 1997 debacle. Her fair Slavic features were normally cool, occasionally showing ironic humor. Those features were as smooth as ever now, but the woman kept running her hand across her chin, her forefinger tracing again and again the edge of her lip. She was in a state of walleyed shock that Wil had seen only a couple of times before-and those times had been filled with sudden death. From the corner of his eye, he saw one of her protection robots float around the far side of the table-keeping her widely separated from its target.
"Yel‚n," he finally said, trying to keep his voice calm and reasonable, "till this moment I didn't know about Manta. I liked... respected... her more than anyone in the settlement. I could never harm her."
Korolev stared at him a long moment, then let out a shaky breath. The feeling of deadly tension lessened. "I know what you tried to do that night, Brierson. I know how you thought to repay our charity. I'll always hate your guts because of it.
.. But you're telling the truth about one thing: There's no way your any low-tech--could have killed Manta."
She looked through him, remembering her lost partner, or perhaps communicating through her headband. When she spoke again her voice was softer, almost lost. "You were a policeman, in a century where murder was still common. You're even famous. When I was a kid, I read all about you.
.. I'll do anything to get Manta's killer, Inspector."
Wil leaned forward. "What happened, Yel‚n?" he said quietly.
"She-she was marooned-left outside all our bobbles."
For a moment, Wil didn't understand. Then he remembered walking the deserted street and wondering if he was all :lone, wondering how many years would pass before the other bobbles burst. Before, he had thought that being shanghaied into the future was the most terrible bobble crime. Now he saw that being marooned in an empty present could be just as awful.
"How long was she alone, Yel‚n?"
"Forty years. Just forty goddamned years. But she had no health care. She had no robots. She had just the clothes on her back. I'm p-proud of her. She lasted forty years. She survived the wilderness, the loneliness, her own aging. For forty years. :end she almost won through. Another ten years-" Her voice broke and she covered her eyes. "Back up, Korolev," she said. "Just the facts.
"You know we have to move down time to when the Peacer bobble bursts. We planned to begin the move the night of the party. After everyone was indoors, we'd bobble forward in three-month steps. Every three months, the bobbles would burst and our sensors would take a few microseconds to check the fast-flicker autons, to see if the Peacers were still in stasis. If they were, we'd automatically bobble up for another three months. Even if we waited a hundred thousand years, all you'd have seen was a second or so of flickering and flashing.
"So. That was the plan. What happened was that the first jump was. a century long-for everyone in near-Earth space. The other advanced travelers had agreed to follow our programming on this. They were in stasis, too. The difference between three months and a century was not enough to alarm their controller programs. Marta was alone. Once she figured out that the flicker interval was more than three months, she hiked around the Inland Sea to the Peace Authority bobble."
That was a twenty-five-hundred-kilometer hike.
Yel‚n noticed the wonder on his face. "We're survivors, Inspector. We didn't last this long by letting difficulties stop us.
"Anyway, the area around the Peace bobble is still a vitrified plain. It took her decades, but she built a sign there." The window behind Yel‚n suddenly became a view from space. At that distance, the bobble was just a glint of sunlight with a spiky shadow. A jagged black line extended northwards from it. Apparently the picture was taken at local dawn, and the black strip was the shadow of Marta's monument. It must have been several meters high and dozens of kilometers long. The image lasted only seconds, the space of time Yel‚n imagined it.
"You may not know this, but we have lots of equipment at tine Lagrange zones. Some of it is in kiloyear stasis. Some is flickering with a period of decades. None of it is carefully watching theound... but that line structure was enough to trip even a high-threshold monitor. Eventually, the robots sent a lander to investigate.... They were just a few years too late.
Wil forced his mind past thinking on what the lander found. Thank God Yel‚n's imagination didn't flash that on the windows.
For now-method: "How could this be done? I thought an old-time army couldn't match the security of your household automation."
"That's true. No low-tech could break in. At first glance, even the advanced travelers couldn't manage this: it's possible to outfight a high-tech-but the battles are abrupt and obvious. What happened here was sabotage. And I think I have it figured out. Somebody used our external comm to talk to the scheduling programs. Those weren't as secure as they should lie. Marta was cut out of the check roster, and a one-century total blackout was substituted for the original flicker scheme. The murderer was lucky: if he had tried for anything longer, it would have tripped all sorts of alarms."
"Could it happen again?"
"No. Whoever did it is good, Brierson. But basically they took advantage of a bug. That bug no longer exists. And I'm being much more careful about how my machines accept outside comm now."
Wil nodded. This was a century beyond him, even if his specialty had been forensic computing. He'd just have to take her word that there was no further danger-of this sort of assassination. Wil's strength was in the human side. For instance:
"Motive. Who would want Marta dead?"
Yel‚n's laugh was bitter. "My suspects." The windows of the library became a mosaic of the settlement's population. Some had only small pictures-all the New Mexicans fitted on a single panel. Others-Brierson, for instance-rated more space- "Almost everybody conceives some grudge against us.
But you twenty-first-century types just don't have the background to pull this off. No matter how attractive the notion" --she looked at Wil-"you're off the list." The pictures of the low-techs vanished from the windows.
The rest stood like posters against the landscape beyond. These were all the advanced travelers (Yel‚n excepted): the Robinsons, Juan Chanson, Monica Raines, Philippe Genet, Tun‡ Blumenthal, Jason Mudge-and the woman Tammy said was a spacer.
"The motive, Inspector Brierson? I can't afford to consider that it was anything less than the destruction of our settlement. One of these people wants humanity permanently extinct, or --more likely-wants to run their own show with the people we've rescued; it would probably come to the same thing."
"But why Marta? Killing her has tipped their hand without-"
"Without stopping the Korolev Plan? You don't understand, Brierson." She ran a hand through her blond hair and stared down at the table. "I don't think any of you understand You know I'm an engineer. You know I'm a hardheaded type who's made a lot of unpopular decisions. The plan would never have gotten this far without me.