Across Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Jeremy had thought it would take months to learn. But for Wili, it was like suddenly remembering a skill he'd always had. Even Paul was surprised. It had taken a couple of days to calibrate the connector. At first, the sensations coming over the line had been subtle things, unrelated to their real significance. The mapping problem - the relating of sensation to meaning - was what took most people months. Jill had been a big help with that. Wili could talk to her at the same time he experimented with the signal parameters, telling her what he was seeing. Jill would then alter the output to match what Wili most expected. In a week he could communicate through the interface without opening his mouth or touching the keyboard. Another couple of days and he was transferring visual information over the channel.

  The feeling of power was born. It was like being able to add extra rooms to his imagination. When a line of reasoning became too complex, he could simply expand into the machine's space. The low point of every day was when he had to disconnect. He was so stupid then. Typing and vocal communication with Jill made him feel like a deaf-mute spelling out letters.

  And every day he learned more tricks. Most he discovered himself, though some things - like concentration enhancement and Jill-programming - Paul showed him. Jill could proceed with projects during the time when Wili was disconnected and store results in a form that read like personal memories when Wili was able to reconnect. Using the interface that way was almost as good as being connected all the time. At least, once he reconnected, it seemed he'd been "awake" all the time.

  Paul had already asked Jill to monitor the spy cameras that laced the hills around the mansion. When Wili was connected, he could watch them all himself. One hundred extra eyes.

  And Wili/Jill monitored local Tinker transmissions and the Authority's recon satellites the same way. That was where the feeling of omniscience came strongest.

  Both Tinkers and Peacers were waiting - and preparing in their own ways - for the secret of generating bobbles that Paul had promised. From Julian in the South to Seattle in the North and Norcross in the East, the Tinkers were withdrawing from view, trying to get their gear undercover and ready for whatever construction Paul might tell them was necessary. In the high tech areas of Europe and China, something similar was going on - though the Peace cops were so thick in Europe it was difficult to get away with anything there. Four of that continent's self-producing design machines had already been captured or destroyed.

  It was harder to tell what was happening in the world's great outback. There were few Tinkers there - in all Australia, for instance, there were less than ten thousand humans - but the Authority was spread correspondingly thin. The people in those regions had radios and knew of the world situation, knew that with enough trouble elsewhere they might overthrow the local garrisons.

  Except for Europe, the Authority was taking little direct action. They seemed to realize their enemy was too numerous to root out with a frontal assault. Instead the Peacers were engaged in an all-out search to find one Paul Naismith before Paul Naismith could make good on his promises to the rest of the world.

  Yes, Wili? Nothing was spoken aloud and no keys were tapped. Input/output was like imagination itself. And when Jill responded, he had a fleeting impression of the face and the smile that he would have seen in the holo if he'd been talking to her the old way. Wili could have bypassed Jill; most symbiotic programs didn't have an intermediate surrogate. But Jill was a friend. And though she occupied lots of program space, she reduced the confusion Wili still felt in dealing with the flood of input. So Wili frequently had Jill work in parallel with him, and called her when he wanted updates on the processes she supervised.

  Show me the status of the search for Paul.

  Wili's viewpoint was suddenly suspended over California. Silvery traces marked the flight paths of hundreds of aircraft. He sensed the altitude and speed of every craft. The picture was a summary of all Jill had learned monitoring the Authority's recon satellites and Tinker reports over the last twenty-four hours. The rectangular crisscross pattern was still centered over Northern California, though it was more diffuse and indecisive than on earlier days.

  Wili smiled. Sending Della Lu's bug north had worked better than he'd hoped. The Peacers had been chasing their tails up there for more than a week. The satellites weren't doing them any good. One of the first fruits of Wili's new power was discovering how to disable the comm and recon satellites. At least, they appeared disabled to the Authority. Actually, the recon satellites were still broadcasting but ac cording to an encryption scheme that must seem pure noise to the enemy. It had seemed an easy trick to Wili; once he conceived the possibility, he and Jill had implemented it in less than a day. But looking back - after having disconnected -Wili realized that it was deeper and trickier than his original method of tapping the satellites. What had taken him a winter of mind-busting effort was an afternoon's triviality now.

  Of course, none of these tricks would have helped if Paul had not been very cautious all these years; he and Bill Morales had traveled great distances to shop at towns farther up the coast. Many Tinkers thought his hideout was in Northern California or even Oregon. As long as the Peacers didn't pick up any of the few people who had actually visited here-say at the NCC meeting-they might be safe.

  Wili frowned. There was still the greatest threat. Miguel Rosas probably did not know the location, though he must suspect it was in Middle California. But Wili was sure Colonel Kaladze knew. It could only be a matter of time before Mike and the Lu woman ferreted out the secret. If subtlety were unsuccessful, then Lu would no doubt call in the Peace goons and try to beat it out of him. Are they still on the farm?

  Yes. And there have been no outgoing calls from them. However, the Colonel's ten-day promise lapses tomorrow. Then Kaladze would no doubt let Lu call her "family" in San Francisco. But if she hadn't called in the army already, she must not have anything critical to report to her bosses.

  Wili had not told Paul what he knew of Mike and Lu. Perhaps he should. But after trying to tell Kaladze.... Instead he'd been trying to identify Della Lu with independent evidence. More than ten percent of Jill's time was spent in the effort. So far she had nothing definite. The story about relatives in the Bay Area appeared to be true. If he had some way of tapping Peacer communication or records, things would be different. He saw now he should have disabled their recon satellites alone. If their comsats were usable, it would give them some advantage - but perhaps he could eventually break into their high crypto channels. As it was, he knew very little about what went on inside the Authority.

  ...and sometimes, he really wondered if Colonel Kaladze might be right. Wili had been half-delirious that morning on the boat; Mike and Della had been several meters away. Was it possible he'd misinterpreted what he heard? Was it possible they were innocent after all? No! By the One True God, he had heard what he had heard. Kaladze hadn't been there.

  TWENTY FIVE

  Sunlight still lay on the hills, but the lowlands and Lake Lompoc were shrouded in blue shadows. Paul sat on his veranda and listened to the news that Wili's electronic spies brought in from all over the world.

  There was a small cough and Naismith looked up. For an instant he thought it was Allison standing there. Then he noticed how carefully she stood between him and the holo surface built into the wall. If he moved more than a few centimeters, parts of the image would be cut off: This was only Jill.

  "Hi." He motioned for her to come and sit. She stepped forward, careful to generate those little moving sounds that made her projection seem more real, and sat in the image of a chair. Paul watched her face as she approached. There really were differences, he realized. Allison was very pretty, but he had made Jill's face beautiful. And of course the personalities were subtly different, too. It could not have been otherwise considering that he had done his design from memories forty-five years stale (or embellished), and considering that the design had grown by itself in response to his reactions. The real Allison was more ou
tgoing, more impatient. And Allison's mere presence seemed to be changing Jill. The interface program had been much quieter these last days.

  He smiled at her, "You've got the new bobble theory all worked out?"

  She grinned back and was more like Allison than ever. "Your theory. I do nothing but crunch away-"

  "I set up the theory. It would take a hundred lifetimes for me to do the symbolic math and see the theory's significance." It was a game they - he - had played many times before. The back and forth had always made Jill seem so real. "What have you got?"

  "Everything seems consistent. There are a lot of things that were barred under your old theory, that are still impossible: It's still impossible to burst a bobble before its time. It's impossible to generate a bobble around an existing one. On the other hand - in theory at least- it should be possible to balk an enemy bobbler."

  "Hmm... " Simply carrying a small bobble was a kind of defense against bobble attack - a very risky defense, once noticed: It would force the attacker to project smaller bobbles, or off-center ones, trying to find a volume that wasn't 'banned.' A device that could prevent bobbles from being formed nearby would be a tremendous improvement, and Naismith had guessed the new theory might allow such, but...

  "Betcha that last will be an engineering impossibility for a long time. We should concentrate on making a low-power bobbler. That looks hard enough."

  "Yes. Wili's right on schedule with that."

  Jill's image suddenly froze, then flicked out of existence. Naismith heard the veranda door slide open. "Hi, Paul," came Allison's voice. She walked up the steps. "You out here by yourself?"

  "...Yes. Just thinking."

  She walked to the edge of the veranda and looked westward. These last weeks, every day had brought more change in Paul's life and in the world beyond the mountains than a normal year. Yet for Allison, it was different. Her world had turned inside out in the space of an hour. He knew the present rate of change was agonizingly slow for her. She paced the stone flags, stopping occasionally to glare off into the sunset at the Vandenberg Bobble.

  Allison. Allison. Few old men had dreams come quite so stunningly true. She was so young; her energy seemed to flash about her in every stride, in every quick movement of her arms. In some ways the memories of Allison lost were less hurtful than the present reality. Still, he was glad he had not succeeded in disguising what became of Paul Hoehler.

  Allison suddenly looked back at him, and smiled. "Sorry about the pacing."

  "No problem. I...."

  She waved toward the west. The air was so clear that-except for the lake and the coastline reflected in its base - the Dome was almost invisible. "When will it burst, Paul? There were three thousand of us there the day I left. They had guns, aircraft. When will they come out?"

  A month ago he would not have thought of the question. Two weeks ago he couldn't have answered. In those weeks a theory had been trashed and his new theory born. It was totally untested, but soon, soon that would change. "Uh. My answer's still guessing Allison: The Authority technique, the only way I could think of then, is a brute force method. With it, the lifetime is about fifty years. So now I can represent radius or mass as a perturbation series about a fifty-year decay time. The smallest bobbles the Authority made were about ten meters across. They burst first. Your sortie craft was trapped in a thirty-meter bobble; it decayed a little later." Paul realized he was wandering and tried to force his answer into the mold she must want. He thought a moment. "Vandenberg ought to last fifty-five years."

  "Five more years. Damn it." She walked back across the veranda. "I guess you'll have to win without them. I was wondering why you hadn't told your friends about me you haven't even told them that time stops inside the bobbles. I thought maybe you expected to surprise the Peacers with their long-dead victims suddenly alive."

  "You're close. You, me, Wili, and the Moraleses are the only ones who know. The Authority hasn't guessed - Wili says they've carted your orbiter up to Livermore as if it were full of clues. No doubt the fools think they've stumbled on some new conspiracy.... But then, I guess it's not so stupid. I'll bet you didn't have any paper records aboard the orbiter."

  "Right. Even our notepads were display flats. We could trash everything in seconds if we fell among unfriendlies. The fire would leave them with nothing but slagged optical memory. And if they don't have the old fingerprint archives, they're not going to identify Fred or Angus."

  "Anyway, I've told the Tinkers to be ready, that I'm going to tell them how to make bobble generators. Even then, I may not say anything about the stasis effect. That's some thing that could give us a real edge, but only if we use the knowledge at the right time. I don't want some leak to blow it...

  Allison turned as if to pace back to the edge of the veranda, then noticed the display that Paul had been studying. Her hand rested lightly on his shoulder as she leaned over to look at the displays. "Looks like a recon pattern," she said.

  "Yes. Wili and Jill synthesized it from the satellites we're tapping. This shows where Authority aircraft have been searching."

  "For you."

  "Probably" He touched the keyboard at the margin of the flat, and the last few days' activity were displayed.

  "Those bums." There was no lightness in her voice. "They destroyed our country and then stole our own procedures. Those search patterns look SOP 1997 for medium level air recon. I bet your damn Peacers never had an original thought in their lives.... Hmm. Run that by again." She knelt to look closely at the daily summaries. "I think today's sorties were the last for that area, Paul. Don't be surprised if they move the search several hundred klicks in the next day or two." In some ways, Allison's knowledge was fifty years dead and useless - in other ways, it could be just what they needed.

  Paul gave a silent prayer of thanks to Hamilton Avery for having kept the heat on all these years, for having forced Paul Hoehler to disguise his identity and his location through decades when there would have otherwise been no reason to. "If they shift further north, fine. If they come all the way south. Hmm. We're well hidden, but we wouldn't last more than a couple days under that sort of scrutiny. Then... " He drew a finger across his throat and made a croaking noise.

  "No way you could put this show on the road, huh?"

  "Eventually we could. Have to start planning for it. I have an enclosed wagon. It may be big enough for the essential equipment. But right now, Allison... Look, we don't yet have anything but a lot of theories. I'm translating the physics into problems Wili can handle. With Jill, he's putting them into software as fast as he can."

  "He seems to spend his time daydreaming, Paul."

  Naismith shook his head. "Wili's the best." The boy had picked up symbiotic programming faster than Paul had ever seen, faster than he'd thought possible. The technique improved almost any programmer, but in Wili's case, it had turned a first-rank genius into something Naismith could no longer completely understand. Even when he was linked with Wili and Jill, the details of their algorithms were beyond him. It was curious, because off the symbiosis Wili was not that much brighter than the old man. Paul wondered if he could have been that good, too, if he had started young. "I think we're nearly there, Allison. Based on what we understand now, it ought to be possible to make bobbles with virtually no energy input. The actual hardware should be something Jill can prototype here."

  Allison didn't come off her knees. Her face was just centimeters from his. "That Jill program is something. Just the motion holo for the face would have swamped our best array processors.... But why make it look like me, Paul? After all those years, did I really mean so much?"

  Naismith tried to think of something flippant and diversionary, but no words came. She looked at him a second longer, and he wondered if she could see the young man trapped within.

  "Oh, Paul." Then her arms were around him, her cheek next to his.

  She held him as one would hold something very fragile, very old.

  Two days later, Wili wa
s ready.

  They waited till after dark to make the test. In spite of Paul's claims, Wili wasn't sure how big the bobble would be, and even if it did not turn out to be a monster, its mirrorlike surface would be visible for hundreds of kilometers to anyone looking in the right direction in the daytime.

  The three of them walked to the pond north of the house. Wili carried the bulky transmitter for his symb link. Near the pond's edge he set his equipment down and slipped on the scalp connector. Then he lit a candle and placed it on a large tree stump. It was a tiny spot of yellow, bright only because all else was so dark. A gray thread of smoke rose from the glow.

  "We think the bobble, it will be small, but we don't want to take chances. Jill is going to make its lower edge to snip the top of this candle. Then if we're wrong, and it is huge -"

  "Then as the night cools, the bobble will rise and be just another floater. By morning it could be many kilometers from here." Paul nodded. "Clever...."

  He and Allison backed further away, Wili following. From thirty meters, the candle was a flickering yellow star on the stump. Wili motioned them to sit; even if the bobble was super-large, its lower surface would still clear them.

  "You don't need any power source at all?" said Allison. "The Peace Authority uses fusion generators and you can do it for free?"

  "In principle, it isn't difficult-once you have the right insight, once you know what really goes on inside the bobbles. And the new process is not quite free. We're using about a thousand joules here -compared to the gigajoules of the Authority generators. The trade-off is in complexity. If you have a fusion generator backing you up, you can bobble practically anything you can locate. But if you're like us, with solar cells and small capacitors, then you must finesse it.

  "The projection needs to be supervised, and it's no ordinary process control problem. This test is about the easiest case: The target is motionless, close by, and we only want a one-meter field. Even so, it will involve- how much crunching do we need, Wili?"