Yelén 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.
Yelén 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 Yelén 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, Yelén 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, Yelén and the Robinsons were still the best suspects. (Fortunately Lu was cagey enough not to report all their suspicions to Yelén.)
At first, Wil thought the manner of the murder was a critical clue. He’d brought it up with Della early on. “If the murderer could bypass Marta’s protection, why not kill her outright? This business of marooning her is nicely poetic, but it left a real possibility that she might be rescued.”
Della shook her head. “You don’t understand.” Her face was framed with smooth black hair now. She’d stayed behind for nine months, the longest Yelén 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 Yelén. 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. Yelén has shown me her system’s design. It’s a tight job, only a year older than mine. For anyone—except Yelén—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 planned ahead, he might have an auton that didn’t appear on his stasis roster. It could have been left outside of stasis without being noticed. But I don’t see how the jump records themselves could be altered unless the killer had thoroughly infiltrated the Korolev system.”
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.
6
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, Yelén was logically the best suspect on his list. Now that he had the diary, it was easier to accept his intuition that Yelén was innocent. He set out to read Yelén’s summaries and Della’s cross-checking. If nothing showed up there, the diary would be a low-priority item.
Yelén had sent down an enormous amount of material. It included high-resolution bolos of all Marta’s writing. Yelén 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. Yelén 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. (Yelén had supplied him with a commercial database, Green Inc. 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, Yelén found every one. Nothing had been lost, though one cairn had been flooded. Even there, the reconstructions were nearly complete.
Wil spent an afternoon going through Yelén’s synopsis and Della’s corresponding analysis. There were no surprises.
Afterwards, Wil couldn’t resist looking for references to himself. There were four clusters, the most recent listed first. Wil punched it up:
Year 38.137 Cairn #4
Lat 14.36N Long 1.01E [K-meridian]
—ask for heuristic cross-reference—
was the header Yelén’s overdoc printed across the top of the display. Below it was cursive green lettering. A blinking red arrow marked the reference:
>
Wil sat back and wished the context searcher weren’t so damned smart. She didn’t even remember his name! He tried to tell himself that she had lived almost forty years beyond thei
r acquaintance when she wrote these words. Would he remember her name forty years from now? (Yes!) To think of all his soul-searching, to think how close they seemed that last night, and how noble he had been to back off—when all the time he was just another low-tech to her.
With a quick sweep of his hand, Wil cleared the other references from the display. Let it lie, Wil. Let it lie. He stood up, walked to the window of his study. He had important work to do. There was the interview with Monica Raines, and then with Juan Chanson. He should be researching for those.
So after a moment he returned to his desk…and jumped the display to the first entry in Marta’s diary:
Dearest Lelya, >> it began. Every entry was addressed to “Lelya.”
“GreenInc. Question,” said Wil. “What is ‘Lelya’?” He pointed to the word in the diary. A side display filled with the three most likely possibilities. The first was: “Diminutive of the name Yeléna.” Wil nodded to himself; that had been his guess. He continued reading from the central display.
>
The reconstruction of the original showed awkward block letters and numerous scratch-outs. Wil wondered how many years it had been before she developed the cursive style he’d seen at the end of her diary.
>
Fred? The diary’s overdoc said that was the auton with Marta that night. Wil hadn’t realized they were personalized. You never heard them addressed by name. Come to think of it, that wasn’t surprising; the high-techs generally talked to their mechanicals via headband.
>
Of course, Marta had not given up. The next pages described how she had built similar signs near the bobbles of all the advanced travelers.
long haul. I’m going to make those billboards sturdier. I want them to last at least a hundred years. How long can I last? Without health care, people used to live about a century. I’ve kept my bio-age at twenty-five years, so I should have seventy-five left. Without the databases I can’t be sure, but I bet seventy-five is a lower bound. There should be some residual effect from my last medical treatment, and I’m full of panphages. On the other hand, old people were fragile, weren’t they? If I have to protect myself and get my own food, that could be a factor.
> She went on to list the string of unrelated errors that would be necessary to leave her outside and all the autons inside, and to change the flicker period. Sabotage was the only possible explanation; she knew that someone had tried to kill her.
>
7
The morning of the Monica Raines interview did not begin well. Wil was still asleep when the house announced that Della Lu was waiting outside.