"Kill her?" Yelén's voice was a shout.
"No!" Juan's head snapped up; the reality around him was not to be ignored. "I could never do that. I liked Marta! But I had to... quarantine her. I watched to see if she would denounce me. She never did — but then I realized I could never be sure what she might say later. I couldn't let her back.
"Please listen to me! I made mistakes; I pushed too hard to make you see the truth. But you must believe. The invaders are out there, Yelén. They'll destroy everything you and Marta dreamed of if you don't believe m —" Juan's voice became a scream. He fell heavily, lay with arms and legs twitching.
Two quick steps and Wil was kneeling by his side. Wil looked down at the agonized face; he'd had two days to prepare for this moment, to suppress the killing rage he felt every time he saw Chanson. Korolev had had no such time; he could almost feel her eyes boring death through his back. "What did you do to him, Yelén?"
"I shut him down, cut his comm links." She stepped around Wil, to look down at Chanson. "He'll recover." There was a tight smile on her face; in a way, it was scarier than her rage. "I want time to think of just revenge. I want him to understand it when it comes," Her eyes snapped up to the nearest bystanders. "Get him out of my sight." For once there was no debate; her words might as well have been electric prods. Tunç and three low-techs grabbed Chanson, carried him towards the flier that was drifting down the side of the amphitheater. Wil started after them.
"Brierson! I want to talk to you." The words were abrupt, but there was something strange in Yelén's tone. Wil came back down the steps. Yelén led him around the side of the platform — away from the crowd, which was just beginning to come out of shock. "Wil," she said quietly, "I want — I'd like to see what Marta said." What Marta said when she wasn't writing for Chanson's eyes.
Wil swallowed; even winning could be hard. He touched her shoulder. "Marta left the fifth cairn, just like I told Chanson. If we'd found it during the first few thousand years.... After fifty thousand, all we could see was that there had been a sheaf of reed paper inside. It was powder. We'll never know for sure what she wanted to tell us.... I'm sorry, Yelén."
TWENTY-SIX
It was snowing. From over the hill came shouts, occasional laughter. They were having a snowball fight.
W. W. Brierson crunched down the hillside to the edge of the pines. Strange that with the world so empty he would still want to be alone. Maybe not so strange. Their dormitory was a crowded place. No doubt there were others who'd left the snowballers, who walked beneath the pines and pretended this was a different time.
He found a big rock, clambered up, and dusted off a place: to sit. From here he could see alpine glaciers disappearing into the clouds. Wil tapped at his data set and thought. The human race had another chance. Dilip and a lot of other people really seemed to think he was responsible. Well, he'd solved the case. Without a doubt it was the biggest of his career. Even Billy Brierson had not imagined such a great adventure for his father. And the chief bad guy had been punished. Very definitely, Juan had been punished....
Yelén had honored Marta's notions about mercy; she had made that mercy the punishment itself. Juan was executed by a surfeit of life. He was marooned in realtime, without shelter or tools or friends. Yet his was a different torture than Marta's — and perhaps the more terrible. Juan was left with a medical auton. He was free to live as long as he wished.
Juan outlived three autons. He lasted ten thousand years. He kept his purpose for nearly two thousand. Wil shook his head as he surveyed the report. If anyone had known that Chanson was into Penetration and Perversion, he would have been an instant suspect — on grounds of personality alone. Wil had known only one such specialist, his company's resident spook. The man was inhumanly patient and devious, but frightened at the same time. He spent so much time in deep connect, the paranoid necessities of defense systems leaked into his perception of the everyday world. Wil could only imagine the madhouse Penetration and Perversion had become by the late twenty-second. Juan made seven attempts to pervert the auton. One involved twelve hundred years of careful observation, timing the failure of various subsystems, maneuvering the auton into a position where he might take control and get transportation to resources in near space.
Yet Chanson never really had a prayer of success. Yelén had hardwired changes to the auton. Juan had none of the software he had stolen from USAF, Inc, and he was without processor support. His glib tongue and two thousand years of effort were not enough to set him free.
As the centuries passed and he had no luck with the auton, Juan spent more and more time trying to talk to Yelén and the other high-techs who occasionally looked into realtime. He kept a journal many times longer than Marta's; he painted endless prose across the rocklands north of his home territory. None of it looked as interesting as Marta's diary. All Juan could talk of was his great message, the threat he saw in the stars. He went on spouting evidence — though after the first centuries it lost all connection with reality.
After five hundred years, his journal became at first irregular, then a decadely summary, then a dead letter. For three thousand years Juan lived without apparent goal, moving from cave to cave. He wore no clothes, he did no work. The auton protected him from local predators. When he did not hunt or farm, the auton brought him food. If the climate of the Eastern Straits had been less mild he would certainly have died. Yet to Wil it was still a miracle the man survived. Through all that time he had enough determination to keep on living. Della had been right. W. W. Brierson would not have lasted a tenth as long; a few centuries and he would have drifted into suicidal funk.
Juan drifted for three thousand years... and then his immortal paranoid soul found a new cause. It wasn't clear exactly what it was. He kept no journal; his conversations with the auton were limited to simple commands and incoherent mumbling. Yelén thought that Juan saw himself as somehow the creator of reality. He moved to the seashore. He built heavy baskets and used them to drag millions of loads of soil inland. The dredged shoreland became a maze of channels. He piled the dirt on a rectangular mound that rose steadily through the centuries. That mound reminded Wil of the earthen pyramids the American Indians had left in Illinois. It had taken hundreds of people working over decades to build those. Juan's was the work of one man over millennia. If the climate had not been exceptionally dry and mild in his era, he could not have kept ahead of simple erosion.
Juan's new vision went beyond monuments. Apparently he thought to create an intelligent race. He persuaded the auton to extend its food gathering, to beach schools of fish in the maze he constructed on the shore. Soon there were thousands of fishermonkeys living beneath his temple/pyramid. Through a perversion of its protection programs, he used the auton as an instrument of force; The best fish went to the monkeys who performed properly. The effect was small, but over centuries the fishers at the East End had a different look. The majority were like the "W. W. Brierson" that had helped Marta. They carried rocks to the base of the pyramid. They sat for hours staring up at it.
The four-thousand-year effort was not enough to bring intelligence to the fishers. Yelén's report showed some tool use. Towards the end, they built a stone skirt around the lower part of the pyramid. But they were never the race of hod[?] carriers that Chanson probably intended. It was Juan who continued to drag endless loads of dirt up to his temple, repairing erosion damage, adding ever-higher towers to the topmost platform. At its greatest, the temple covered a rectangle two hundred meters by one hundred, and the top platform was thirty meters above the plain. Its spires crowded tall and spindly all about, more like termite towers or coral than human architecture. Through those last four thousand years, Juan's daily pattern was unchanged. He worked on his new race. He hauled dirt. Each evening, he walked round and round the intricate stairs of the pyramid, till finally he stood at the top, surveying the temple slaves who gathered on the plain before him.