Marooned in Realtime

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  A reader smiled. She did remember my name! Somewhere in the adventures of her next forty years she forgot, but for a while she had remembered.

 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
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  Here the diary had many pages of drawings, enhanced by Yelén’s autons to show the dyes’ original colors. These were not as skillfully drawn as those Wil had seen later in the diary—when Marta had had years of practice—but they were better than anything he could do. She had brief notes by each picture: > or >

  Wil looked carefully at the first few pages, then skipped ahead to where Marta entered the jacaranda forest.

 

  e trees and sucking the juice out of intruders.

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
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  A drawing covered the rest of the page. The creature looked like a stinkbug, but according to the overdoc it was more than ten centimeters long. Its enormous abdomen accounted for most of that size. The chitin was thick and black, laced by a network of deep grooves.

 
 
 
 
  ions my panphages saved me from.

 
 
 
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  This was Marta’s closest brush with death for many years. If there had not been good fishing in the first stream she found or if the jac forest had been any less gentle than she imagined, she would not have survived.

  The weeks passed, and then a month. Her shattered foot slowly healed. She spent nearly a year by that stream just inside the forest, returning to the jungle only occasionally—for fresh fruit, and to check on the fishers, and to hear some sounds beyond herself. It became her second major camp, the one with the cabin and the cairn. She had plenty of time to bring her diary up to date, and to scout the forest. It was not everywhere the same. There were patches of older, dying jacarandas. The spiders hung their display webs across those trees, turning the light blue and red. Most of her descriptions of the forest gave Wil the impression of unending catacombs, but this was a cathedral, the webs stained glass. Marta couldn’t remember the purpose of the display webs. She stayed for days under one of them, trying to fathom the mystery. Something sexual, she guessed: but for the spiders…or the trees? For a weird instant, Wil felt impelled to look up the answer for her; she of all people deserved to know. Then he shook his head and deliberately paged his data set.