Yelén 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, Yelén, 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. Yelén, after the Robinson party... I didn't — I never tried to take advantage of Marta." He looked into Yelén'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."
Juan's eyes darted to Yelén, then back to Wil, but he said nothing.
"You've known about that cairn for four days, ever since I told Yelén. You were willing to show your full power — and kill half the human race — to prevent me from getting it." Wil stepped off the platform and walked slowly toward the little man. "Well, Juan, you didn't succeed. I've seen what Marta had to say when she didn't have to write in parables. Everyone else is free to see it, too. And no matter what conspiracies you blame on Della Lu, I suspect the physical evidence will convince Yelén and her lab autons."
Yelén had backed away from Chanson. Tunç's mouth was compressed into a thin line. Even without a confession, I may be able to win, thought Wil.
Juan looked around, then back at Wil. "Please. You're reading this all wrong. I didn't kill Marta. I want the settlement to succeed. And I've sacrificed more than any of you to preserve it; if I hadn't, none of us would have survived to fifty megayears. But now that's made me look like the guilty one I've got to convince you....
"Look. Wil. You're right about Mudge and me; I should never have tried to cover that up. I'm embarrassed I ever believed his chiliastic garbage. But I was young, and my nightmares followed me home from work. I needed to believe in something. I gave up my job, everything, for his promises.
"We came out of stasis in 2295, just before Mudge's numerology said Christ would put on the Big Show. There was nothing but ruins, a civilization destroyed, a race exterminated. Mudge reviewed his mumbo-jumbo and concluded that we had overshot, that Christ had come and gone. The stupid jerk! He just could not accept what we saw around us. Something had visited the Solar System in the mid-twenty-third, but it hadn't been holy. The evidence of alien invasion was everywhere. Mudge had arrived with scarcely more than sackcloth and ashes. I'd brought plenty of equipment. I could do analysis, back up my claims. I had the power to save what humans were still in stasis.
"Yelén, right from then my goal was the same as yours. Even while you high-techs were still in stasis, I was planning for it. The only difference was that I knew about the aliens. But I couldn't convince Mudge of them. In fact, the signs were so subtle, I began to wonder if anyone else would believe me." Chanson came to his feet, his talk speeding up. "Unless we guarded against the invaders, all the goodwill in the world could not resurrect the human race. I had to do something. I — I enhanced some of the evidence. I nuked a few ruins. Surely, not even a blind man could ignore that!" He looked at Yelén and Tammy accusingly. "Yet when you returned to realtime, you weren't convinced. You couldn't accept even the clearest evidence.... I tried. I tried. Over the next two thousand years I traveled all over the Solar System, discovering the signs of the invasion, emphasizing them so even idiots could not miss them."
"In the end, I had a little success. W. W. Sanchéz had the patience to look at the facts, the open-mindedness to believe. We persuaded the rest of you to be a bit more cautious. But the burden of vigilance still rested on me. No one else was willing to put sentries in far solar space. Over the years, I destroyed two alien probes — and still Sánchez was the only one who was convinced." Juan was staring through Wil; he might have been talking to himself. "I really liked Bil Sanchéz. I wish he hadn't dropped out; his settlement was just too small to succeed. I visited him there several times. It was a long, idyllic, downhill slide. Bil wanted to do research, but all he had was that punched tape he'd found on Charon. He was obsessed with it; the last time I saw him he even claimed it was a fake." A faintly troubled look passed across Juan's face. "Well, that settlement was too small to survive, anyway."
Yelén's eyes were wide, white showing all around the irises; her whole body had gone rigid. Chanson could not notice, but sudden death was in the air.
Wil stepped into Yelén's line of sight; his voice was a calm echo of Chanson's distant tone. "What about Marta, Juan?"
"Marta?" Juan almost looked at him. "Marta always had an open mind. She granted the possibility of an alien threat. I think Lu's arrival scared her; the creature was so obviously inhuman. Marta talked to Lu, got access to some of her databases. And then — and then "- tears started in his eyes —"she started asking the db about Mudge." How much had Marta suspected? At the time, probably nothing; most of the jumbled references to Mudge had no connection with Chanson. It was tragic bad luck she started so close to Juan's secret. "I should never have lied about my past, but now it was too late. Marta could destroy all I had worked for. The colony would be left defenseless. I had to, I had to —"