Across Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Allison slid down from her rocky vantage point and paced angrily into the sunlight. On the coast, morning clouds still hung over the lowlands. The silver arch of the force field that enclosed Vandenberg and Lompoc seemed to float halfway up the sky. No structure could possibly be so big. Even mountains had the decency to introduce themselves with foothills and highlands. The Vandenberg Bobble simply rose, sheer and in-substantial as a dream. So that glistening hemisphere contained much of her old world, her old friends. They were trapped in timelessness in there, just as she and Angus and Fred had been trapped in the bobble around the sortie craft. And one day the Vandenberg bobble would burst....

  Somewhere in the trees beyond her vision there was a cawing; a crow ascended above the pines, circled down at another point. Over the whine of insects, Allison heard padded clopping. A horse was coming up the narrow trail that went past her rock pile. Allison moved back into the shadows and watched.

  Three minutes passed and a lone horseman came into view: It was a black male, so spindly it was hard to guess his age, except to say that he was young. He was dressed in dark greens, almost a camouflage outfit and his hair was short and unbraided. He looked tired, but his eyes swept atten-tively back and forth across the trail ahead of him. The brown eyes flickered across her.

  "Jill! How did you get so far from the veranda?" The words were spoken with a heavy Spanish accent; at this point it was an incongruity beneath Allison's notice. A broad grin split the boy's face as he slid off the horse and scrambled across the rocks toward her. "Naismith says that-" the words came to an abrupt halt along with the boy himself. He stood an arm's-length away, his jaw sagging in disbelief. `Jill? Is that really you?" He swung his hand in a flat arc toward Allison's midsection. The gesture was too slow to be a blow, but she wasn't taking any chances. She grabbed his wrist.

  The boy actually squeaked - but with surprise, not pain. It was as if he could not believe she had actually touched him.

  She marched him back to the trail, and they started toward the house. She had his arm behind his back now. The boy did not struggle, though he didn't seem intimidated either. There was more shock and surprise in his eyes than fear.

  Now that it was the other guy who was at a disadvantage, maybe she could get some answers. "'you, Naismith, none of you have ever seen me before, yet you all seem to know me. I want to know why." She bent his arm a bit more, though not enough to hurt. The violence was in her voice.

  "But, but I have seen you." He paused an instant, then rushed on. "In pictures, I mean."

  It might not be the whole truth, but... Perhaps it was like those fantasies Angus used to read. Perhaps she was some-how important, and the world had been waiting for them to come out of stasis. In that case their pictures might be widely distributed.

  They walked a dozen steps along the soft, needle-covered path. No, there was something more. These people acted as if they had known her as a person. Was that possible? Not for the boy, but Bill and Irma and certainly Naismith were old enough that she might have known them...before. She tried to imagine those faces fifty years younger. The servants couldn't have been more than children. The old man, he would have been around her own age.

  She let the boy lead the way. She was more holding his hand than twisting his arm now; her mind was far away, thinking of the single tombstone with her name, thinking how much someone must have cared. They walked past the front of the house, descended the grade that led to a below-ground-level entrance. The door there was open, perhaps to let in the cool smells of morning. Naismith sat with his back to them, his attention all focused on the equipment he was playing with. Still holding his horse's reins, the boy leaned past the doorway and said, "Paul?"

  Allison looked past the old man's shoulder at the screen he was watching: a horse and a boy and a woman stood looking through a doorway at an old man watching a screen that.... Allison echoed the boy, but in a tone softer, sadder, more questioning. "Paul?"

  The old man, who just last month had been young, turned at last to meet her.

  TWENTY-THREE

  There were few places on Earth that were busier or more populous than they had been before the War. Livermore was such a place. At its pre-War zenith, there had been the city and the clusters of commercial and federal labs scattered through the rolling hills. Those had been boom times, with the old Livermore Energy Laboratories managing dozens of major enterprises and a dozen-dozen contract operations from their square-mile reservation just outside of town. And one of those operations, unknown to the rest, had been the key to the future. Its manager, Hamilton Avery's father, had been clever enough to see what could be done with a certain staff scientist's invention, and had changed the course of history.

  And so when the old world had disappeared behind silver bobbles, and burned beneath nuclear fireballs, and later withered in the war plagues - Livermore had grown. First from all over the continent and then from all over the planet, the new rulers had brought their best and brightest here. Except for a brief lapse during the worst of the plague years, that growth had been near-exponential. And Peace had ruled the new world.

  The heart of Authority power covered a thousand square kilometers, along a band that stretched westward toward the tiny bay towns of Berkeley and Oakland. Even the Beijing and the Paris Enclaves had nothing to compare with Livermore. Hamilton Avery had wanted an Eden here. He had had forty years and the wealth and genius of the planet to make one.

  But still at the heart of the heart there was the Square Mile, the original federal labs, their century-old University of California architecture preserved amidst the sweep of one-thousand meter bobbles, obsidian towers, and forested parks.

  If the three of us are to meet, thought Avery, what more appropriate place than here? He had left his usual retinue on the greensward which edged the Square Mile. He and a single aide walked down the aged concrete sidewalk toward the gray building with the high narrow windows that had once held central offices.

  Away from the carefully irrigated lawns and ornamental forests, the air was hot, more like the natural summer weather of the Livermore Valley. Already Avery's plain white shirt was sticking to his back.

  Inside, the air-conditioning was loud and old-fashioned, but effective enough. He walked down ancient linoleum flooring his footsteps echoing in the past. His aide opened the conference room's doors before him and Hamilton Avery stepped forward to meet-or confront-his peers.

  "Gentlemen." He reached across the conference table to shake first Kim Tioulang's hand, then Christian Gerrault's. The two were not happy; Avery had kept them waiting. And the hell of it is, I didn't mean to. Crisis had piled on top of crisis these last few hours, to the point that even a lifetime of political and diplomatic savvy was doing him no good.

  Christian Gerrault, on the other hand, never had had much time for diplomacy. His piggish eyes were even more recessed in his fat face than they seemed on the video. Or perhaps it was simply that he was angry: "You have a very great deal of explaining to do, monsieur. We are not your servants, to be summoned from halfway around the world."

  Then why are you here, you fat fool? But out loud he said, "Christian - Monsieur le Directeur - it is precisely because we are the men who count that we must meet here today."

  Gerrault threw up a meaty arm. "Pah! The television was always good enough before."

  "The `television,' monsieur, no longer works." The Central African looked disbelieving, but Avery knew Gerrault's people in Paris were clever enough to verify that the Atlantic comsat had been out of action for more than twenty-four hours. It had not been a gradual or partial failure, but an abrupt, total cessation of relayed communication.

  But Gerrault simply shrugged, and his three bodyguards moved uneasily behind him. Avery shifted his gaze to Tioulang. The elderly Cambodian, Director for Asia, was not nearly so upset. K.T was one of the originals: He had been a graduate student at Livermore before the War. He and Hamilton and some hundred others picked by Avery's father had been the
founders of the new world. There were very few of them left now. Every year they must select a few more successors. Gerrault was the first director from outside the original group. Is this the future? He saw the same question in Tioulang's eyes. Christian was much more capable than he acted, but every year his jewels, his harems, his... excesses, became harder to ignore. After the old ones were gone, would he proclaim himself an emperor - or simply a god?

  "K.T, Christian, you've been getting my reports. You know we have what amounts to an insurrection here. Even so, I haven't told you everything. Things have happened that you simply won't believe."

  "That is entirely possible," said Gerrault.

  Avery ignored the interruption. "Gentlemen, our enemy has spaceflight."

  For a long moment there was only the sighing of the airconditioning. Gerrault's sarcasm had evaporated, and it was Tioulang who raised protest. "But Hamilton, the industrial base that requires! The Peace itself has only a small, unmanned program. We saw to it that all the big launch complexes were lost during the War." He realized he was rattling on with the obvious and waited for Avery to continue.

  Avery motioned his aide to lay the pictures on the table. "I know, K.T. This should be impossible. But look: A fully functional sortie craft - the type the old USAF was flying just before the War - has crashed near the California-Aztlÿn border. This isn't a model or a mockup. It was totally destroyed in a fire subsequent to its landing, but my people assure me that it had just returned from orbit."

  The two directors leaned forward to look at the holos. Tioulang said, "I take your word for this, Hamilton, but it could still be a hoax. I thought all those vehicles were accounted for, but perhaps there has been one in storage all these years. Granted, it is intimidating even as a hoax, but..."

  "As you say. But there is no evidence of the vehicle's being dragged into the area - and that's heavy forest around the crash site. We are bringing as much of the wreck as we can back here for a close look. We should be able to discover if it was made since the War or if it is a refurbished model from before. We are also putting pressure on Albuquerque to search the old archives for evidence of a secret US launch site."

  Gerrault tipped his massive form back to look at his bodyguards. Avery could imagine his suspicion. Finally the African seemed to reach a decision. He leaned forward and said quietly, "Survivors. Did you find anyone to question?"

  Avery shook his head. "There were at least two aboard. One was killed on impact. The other was killed by... one of our investigating teams. An accident." The other's face twisted, and Avery imagined the slow death Christian would have given those responsible for any such accident. Avery had dealt quickly and harshly with the incompetents involved, but he had gotten no pleasure from it. "There was no identification on the crewman, beyond an embroidered name tag. His flightsuit was old US Air Force issue."

  Tioulang steepled his fingers. "Granting the impossible, what were they up to?"

  "It looks like a reconnaissance mission. We've brought the wreck back to the labs, but there is still equipment we can't identify."

  Tioulang studied one of the aerial photos. "It probably came in from the north, maybe even overflew Livermore.

  He gave a wan smile. "History repeats. Remember that Air Force orbiter we bobbled? If they had reported what we were up to right at that critical moment... what a different world it would be today."

  Days later Avery would wonder why Tioulang's comment didn't make him guess the truth. Perhaps it was Gerrault's interruption; the younger man was not interested in reminiscence. "This then explains why our communication satellites have failed!"

  "We think so. We're trying to bring up the old radar watch we maintained through the twenties. It would help if both of you would do this, too.

  "However you cut it, it seems we have our first effective opposition in nearly thirty years. Personally, I think they have been with us a long, long time. We've always ignored these 'Tinkers,' assuming that without big energy sources their technology could be no threat to us. `Cottage industry' we called it. When I showed you how far their electronics was ahead of ours, you seemed to think they were at most a threat to my West Coast holdings.

  "Now it's clear that they have a worldwide operation in some ways equal to our own. I know there are Tinkers in Europe and China. They exist most places where there was a big electronics industry before the War. You should regard them as much a threat as I do mine."

  "Yes, and we must flush out the important ones and... " Gerrault was in his element now. Visions of torture danced in his eyes.

  "And," said Tioulang, "at the same time convince the rest of the world that the Tinkers are a direct threat to their safety. Remember that we all need goodwill. I have direct military control over most of China, but I could never keep India, Indonesia, and Japan in line if the people at the bottom didn't trust me more than their governments. There are more than twenty million people in those holdings."

  "Ali, that is your problem. You are like the grasshopper, lounging in the summer of public approval. I am the industrious ant," Gerrault looked down at his enormous torso and chuckled at the metaphor, "who has diligently worked to maintain garrisons from Oslo to Capetown. If this is `winter' coming, I'll need no public approval." His eyes narrowed. "But I do need to know more about this new enemy of ours."

  He glanced at Avery. "And I think Avery has cleverly provided us with a lever against them. I wondered why you supported their silly chess tournament in Aztlÿn why you used your aircraft to transport their teams from all over the continent. Now I know: When you raided that tournament, you arrested some of the best Tinkers in the world. Oh, no doubt, just a few of them have knowledge of the conspiracy against us, but at the same time they must have many loved ones - and some of those will know more. If, one at a time, we try the prisoners for treason against Peace... why, I think we'll find someone who is willing to talk."

  Avery nodded. He would get none of the pleasure out of the operation that Christian might. He would do only what was necessary to preserve the Peace. "And don't worry, K.T, we can do it without antagonizing the rest of our people.

  "You see, the Tinkers use a lot of x- and gamma-ray lithography; they need it for microcircuit fabrication. Now, my public affairs people have put together a story that we've discovered the Tinkers are secretly upgrading these etching lasers for use as weapons lasers like the governments had before the War."

  Tioulang smiled. "Ah. That's the sort of direct threat that should get us a lot of support. It's almost as effective as claiming they're involved in bioscience research. "

  "There." Gerrault raised his hands beneficently to his fellow directors. "We are all happy then. Your people are pacified, and we can go after the enemy with all vigor. You were right to call us, Avery; this is a matter that deserves our immediate and personal attention."

  Avery felt grim pleasure in replying, "There is another matter, Christian, at least as important. Paul Hoehler is alive."

  "The old-time mathematician you have such a fixation on? Yes, I know. You reported that in hushed and terrified tones several weeks ago."

  "One of my best agents has infiltrated the Middle California Tinkers. She reports that Hoehler has succeeded - or is near to succeeding - in building a bobble generator."

  It was the second bombshell he had laid on them, and in a way the greater. Spaceflight was one thing; several ordinary governments had had it before the War. But the bobble: For an enemy to have that was as unwelcome and incredible as hell opening a chapel. Gerrault was emphatic: "Absurd. How could one old man fall on a secret we have kept so carefully all these years?"

  "You forget, Christian, that one old man invented bobbles in the first place! For ten years after the War, he moved from laboratory to laboratory, always just ahead of us, always working on ways to bring us down. Then he disappeared so thoroughly that only I of all the originals believed he was out there somewhere plotting against us. And I was right; he has an incredible ability to survive."
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  "I'm sorry, Hamilton, but I have trouble believing, too. There is no hard evidence here, apparently just the word of a woman. I think you always have been overly distressed by Hoehler. He may have had some of the original ideas, but it was the rest of your father's team that really made the invention possible. Besides, it takes a fusion plant and some huge capacitors to power a generator. The Tinkers could never.... " Tioulang's voice trailed off as he realized that if you could hide space-launch facilities, you could certainly do the same for a fusion reactor.

  "You see?" said Avery. Tioulang hadn't been in Father's research group, couldn't realize Hoehler's polymath talent. There had been others in the project, but it had been Hoehler on all the really theoretical fronts. Of course, history was not written that way. But stark after all the years, Avery remembered the rage on Hoehler's face when he realized that in addition to inventing "the monster" (as he called it), that the development could never have been kept secret if he had not done the work of a lab full of specialists. It had been obvious the fellow was going to report them to LEL, and Father had trusted only Hamilton Avery to silence the mathematician. Avery had not succeeded in that assignment. It had been his first - and last -failure of resolve in all these years, but it was a failure that refused to be buried.

  "He's out there, K.T, he really is. And my agent is Della Lu, who did the job in Mongolia that none of your people could. What she says you can believe.... Don't you see where we are if we fail to act? If they have spaceflight and the bobble, too, then they are our superiors. They can sweep us aside as easily as we did the old-time governments."

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The sabios of the Ndelante Ali claimed the One True God knows all and sees all.

  Those powers seemed Wili's, now that he had learned to use the scalp connect. He blushed to think of all the months he had dismissed symbiotic programs as crutches for weak minds. If only Jeremy - who had finally convinced him to try - could be here to see. If only Roberto Jonque Richardson were here to be crushed.