Across Realtime

One of the Korolevs' fundamental principles had already been violated: the settlement was physically scattered now. The Peacers had refused to move across the Inland Sea to Town Korolev. With dazzling impudence, they demanded that

Yel‚n set them up with their own town on the north shore. That put them more than nine hundred kilometers from the rest of humanity-a distance more psychological than real, since it was a fifteen-minute flight on Yel‚n's new trans-sea shuttle. Nevertheless, it was a surprise that she yielded.

The surviving Korolev was... changed. Wil had talked to her only twice since the colony's return to realtime. The first time had been something of a shock. She looked almost the same as before, but there was a moment of nonrecognition in her eyes. "Ah, Brierson," she said mildly. Her only comment about Lu's providing him protection was to say that she would continue to do so also. Her hostility was muted; she'd had a long time to bury her grief.

Yel‚n had spent a hundred years following Marta's travels around the sea. She and her devices had stored and cataloged and studied everything that might bear on the murder. Marta's was already the most thoroughly investigated murder in the history of the human race. But only if this investigator is not herself the murderer, said a little voice in the back of Wil's head.

Yel‚n had done another thing with the century she stayed behind: She had tried to reeducate herself. "There's only one of us left, Inspector. I've tried to live double. I've learned everything I can about Marta's specialty. I've dreamed through Marta's memories of every project she managed." A shadow of doubt crossed her face. "I hope it's enough." The Yel‚n he'd known before the murder would not have shown such weakness.

So, armed with Marta's knowledge and trying to imitate -Marta's attitudes, Yel‚n had relented and let the Peacers establish North Shore. She'd set up the trans-sea flier service. She'd encouraged a couple of the high-techs-Genet and Blumenthal-to move their principal estates there.

And the murder investigation had truly been left to Lu and Brierson.

Though he had talked to Korolev only twice, he saw Della Lu almost every day. She had produced a list of suspects. She agreed with Korolev: the crime was completely beyond the low-techs. Of the high-techs, Yel‚n and the Robinsons were still the best suspects. (Fortunately Lu was cagey enough not to report all their suspicions to Yel‚n.)

At first, Wil thought the ma

Della shook her head. "You don't understand." Her face was framed with smooth black hair now. She'd stayed behind for rime months, the longest Yel‚n would allow. No breakthroughs resulted from the stay, but it had been long enough for her hair to grow out. She looked like a normal young woman now, and she could talk for minutes at a time without producing a jarring inanity, without getting that far, cold look. Lu was still the weirdest of the advanced travelers, but she was no longer in a class by herself. "The Korolev protection system is good. It's fast. It's smart. Whoever killed Marta did it with software. The killer found a chink in the Korolev defensive logic and very cleverly exploited it. Extending the stasis period to one century was not by itself life-threatening. Leaving Marta outside of stasis was not by itself life-threatening."

"Together they were deadly."

"True. And the defense system would have normally noticed that. I'm simplifying. What the killer did was more complicated. My point is, if he had tried anything more direct, there is no amount of clever programming that could have fooled the system. There was no surefire way he could murder Marta. Doing it this way gave the killer the best chance of success."

"Unless the killer is Yel‚n. I assume she could override all the system safeguards?"

"Yes."

But doing so would clearly show her guilt.

"Hmm. Marooning Marta left her defenseless. Why couldn't the murderer arrange an accident for her then? It doesn't make sense that she was allowed to live forty years."

Della thought a moment. "You're suggesting the killer could have bobbled everyone else for a century, and delayed bobbling himself?"

"Sure. A few minutes' delay would've been enough. Is that so hard?"

"By itself, it's trivial. But everyone was linked with the Korolev system for that jump. If anyone had delayed, it would show up in everyone's records. I'm an expert on autonomous systems, Wil. Yel‚n has shown me her system's design. It's a tight job, only a year older than mine. For anyone-except Yel‚n-to alter those jump records would be..."

"Impossible?" These systems people never changed. They could work miracles, but at the same time they claimed perfectly reasonable requests were impossible.

"No, maybe not impossible. If the killer had pla

So they were dealing with a fairly impromptu act. And the queer circumstances of Marta's death were nothing more than a twenty- third-century version of a knife in the back.

SIX

Korolev had delivered Marta's diary soon after the colony returned to realtime. Wil's demand for it was one thing that could still bring a flare of anger to her face. In fact, Wil didn't really want to see the thing. But getting a copy, and getting Della to verify that it was undoctored, was essential. Until then, Yel‚n was logically the best suspect on his list. Now that he had the diary, it was easier to accept his intuition that Yel‚n was i

Yel‚n had sent down an enormous amount of material. It included high-resolution holos of all Marta's writing. Yel‚n supplied a powerful overdoc; Wil could sort the pages by pH if he wanted. A note in the overdoc said the originals were in stasis, available at five days' notice.

The originals. Wil hadn't thought about it: How could you make a diary without even a data pad? Brief messages could be carved on the side of a tree or chiseled in rock, but for a diary you'd need something like paper and pen. Marta had been marooned for forty years, plenty of time to experiment. Her earliest writing was berry-juice ink on the soft insides of tree bark. She left the heavy pages in a rock cairn sealed with mud.

When they were recovered fifty years later, the bark had rotted and the juice stains were invisible. Yel‚n and her autons had studied the fragile remains. Microanalysis showed where the berry stains had been; the first chapters were not lost. Apparently Marta had recognized the danger: the "paper" in the later cairns was made from reed strips. The dark green ink was scarcely faded.

The first entries were mainly narrative. At the other end of the diary, after she had been decades alone, the pages were filled with drawings, essays, and poems. Forty years is a long time if you have to live it alone, second by second. Not counting recopied material, Marta wrote more than two million words before she died. (Yel‚n had supplied him with a commercial database, GreenInc. Wil looked at some of the items in it; the diary was as long as twenty noninteractive novels.) Her medium was far bulkier than old-time paper, and she traveled thousands of kilometers in her time. Whenever she moved, she built a new cairn for her writing. The first few pages in each repeated especially important things-directions to the previous cairns, for instance. Later, Yel‚n found every one. Nothing had been lost, though one cairn had been flooded. Even there, the reconstructions were nearly complete.