Vernor Vinge - Across Realtime

Yel‚n looked at him, her face relaxed yet puzzled. "Sure, Wil. I think we can put a lot of things right, now. But-"

"That's not what I mean, Yel‚n. I still haven't done what you hired me for.... I still haven't produced Marta's murderer."

The talk and laughter guttered to a stop. The loudest sounds were the birds stealing from the spiders beyond the amphitheater Where the faces didn't show blank surprise, Wil could see the fear returning. "But, Wil," Juan said finally, "we got Gerrault....

"Yes. We got him. There's no fakery in that, nor in the equipment we rescued. But Christian Gerrault did not kill Marta, and he didn't take over the high-tech computer systems. Did you notice that he never admitted to either? He was as much a victim of the takeover as any. Finding the systems saboteur was one of the `loose ends' he intended to clear up."

Juan waved his hands, his speech coming faster than ever. "Semantics. He explicitly admitted to taking over the low-techs' military systems."

Wil shook his head. "No, Juan. Only the Peacers'. All the time we thought one high-tech was stirring up both sides, when actually Gerrault was behind the Peace and you were manipulating the NMs."

The words were spoken and Wil still lived.

The little man swallowed. "Please, my boy, after everything I've done to help, how can you say this?... I know! You think only a systems penetrator could know about Gerrault's med equipment." He looked imploringly at Yel‚n and Tammy. "Tell him. Things like that happen in battle, especially when penetration-"

"Sure," Yel‚n said. "It may seem a farfetched explanation to someone from your era, Wil, but leak-across can really happen." Tun‡ and Tammy were nodding agreement.

"It doesn't matter." There was no doubt in Wil's face or voice. "I knew that Juan was Marta's killer before he ever came to me about Gerrault." But can I convince the rest o f you?

Chanson's hands balled into fists. He backed into a bench and sat down abruptly. "Do I have to take this?" he cried to Yel‚n.

Korolev set her hand on his shoulder. "Let the Inspector have his say." When she looked at Wil, her face had the angry ambivalence he knew so well. Together, Wil and Juan had just saved the colony. But she had known Chanson through decades of their lives; Wil was the low-tech that her Marta had damned and praised. There was no telling how long her patience would last.

Brierson stepped around the podium. "At first, it seemed that almost any high-tech could have marooned Marta: There were bugs in the Korolev system that made it easy to sabotage a single bobbling sequence. With those bugs repaired, Yel‚n and the others thought their systems were secure. Our war showed how terribly wrong they were. For twelve hours, the enemy had complete control of all the systems-except Della's....

"This told me several things. In my time, it was no trivial thing to grab an entire system. Unless the system were perverted to begin with, it took expert, tedious effort to insert all the traps that would make a grab possible. Whoever did this needed years of visitor status on the high-techs' systems. The enemy never had a chance at Della; she was gone from the Solar System since just after the Singularity."

He looked across his audience. The low-techs hung on every word. It was harder to tell about the others. Tammy wasn't even looking at him. Wil could only imagine the analysis and conversations that were going on in parallel with his words.

"So. An expert, using expert tools, must be behind this. But Yel‚n's GreenInc shows that none of the high-techs have such a background."

Tun‡ interrupted, "Which only means the killer rewrote history to protect himself."

"Right. It needn't have been much, just a fact here and there. Over the years, the killer could manage it. Della's A's are the only ones that might contain the truth. I spent a lot of time with them after we were rescued. Unfortunately, her general database for the late twenty-second is badly jumbled, so badly that Della herself didn't use it. But after the battle, I knew what to look for. Eventually I found an opening: Jason Mudge. Mudge was just the religious fanatic we knew, though toward the end of the twenty-second he actually had some disciples. Only one of them had sufficient faith to follow him into stasis. That was Juan Chanson. Juan was a wealthy man, probably Mudge's biggest catch." Wil looked at Chanson. "You gave up a lot to follow a religious dream, Juan. Della's db's show you were head of Penetration and Perversion at USAF, Inc." In Wil's time, USAF had been the largest weapons-maker in North America; it had grown from there. "I don't doubt that when Juan left, he took the latest software his division had invented. We were up against industrial-strength sabotage."

Juan was trembling. He looked up at Yel‚n. She stared back for a second, then looked at Wil. She wasn't convinced. "Yel‚n," Wil said, keeping his voice level, "don't you remember? The day Mudge was killed, he claimed Chanson had been a religionist."

Yel‚n shook her head. That memory was three days gone.

Finally Chanson spoke aloud. "Don't you see how you've deluded yourself, Wil? The evidence is all around you. Why do you think Lu's record of civilization was jumbled? Because she was never there! At best those records are secondhand ', filled with evidence she would use against me or whoever else was a threat. Wil, please. I may be wrong about the details, but whatever the Lu creature is, she's proved she would sacrifice us all for her schemes. No matter what she's done to you, you must be able to see that."

Monica's laugh was almost a cackle. "What a pretty bind you're in, Brierson. The facts explain either theory perfectly. And Della Lu is chasing off into interstellar space."

Wil pretended to give her comment serious consideration; he needed time to think. Finally he shook his head and continued as calmly as before. "Even if you don't believe me, there are data Juan never thought to alter. Marta's diary, for instance.... I know, Yel‚n, you studied that for a hundred years, and you knew Marta far better than I. But Marta knew she wasn't marooned by simple sabotage. She knew the enemy saw what she left in the cairns, and could destroy any of it. Even worse, if she slipped a message past the enemy, and you understood it, the act of understanding might itself trigger an attack.

"But I am a low-tech, outside all this automation. Marta got my attention with the one incident that only she and I could know. Yel‚n, after the Robinson party... I didn't-I never tried to take advantage of Marta." He looked into Yel‚n's face, willing belief there.

When there was no response, he continued. "The last years of her life, Marta played a terrible double game. She told us the story of survival and courage and defeat, and at the same time she left clues she hoped would point me at Juan. They were ere subtle. She named her fishermonkey friends after people in our settlement. There was always a Juan Chanson, a solitary creature that delighted in watching her. Marta's last day alive, she mentioned that he was still out there, watching. She knew she was being stalked, and by the real Juan Chanson."

Juan slapped the bench. "God damn it, man! You can find any message if the coding scheme is nutty enough."

"Unfortunately, you're right. And if that's all she could do, this might be a stalemate, Juan. But for all her misfortunes, Marta had some good luck, too. One of her fishermonkeys was a freak, bigger and brighter than any fisher we've seen. He followed her around, tried to imitate her cairn-building. It wasn't much, but she had an ally in realtime." He smiled wanly. "She named him W. W. Brierson. He got lots of practice building cairns, always in the same position relative to Peace Lake. In the end, she took him north and left him in a normal forest beyond the glazed zone. I don't know how close you were monitoring, Juan, but you missed what that animal took with him, you missed the cairn he built, where Marta never went."