Across Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  They shot forward at top speed, the engines an eerie screaming all around them. Beside Allison, Paul was gasping. Thirty kph across open terrain was rough as any air maneuver. Then they were falling, and the view ahead was filled with concrete. They flew over the edge of the ditch and crashed downward onto the floor. The restraint webbing couldn't entirely absorb the shock. For a moment Allison was in a daze, her hands freez-ing the controls into fast forward. The crawler ran up the steep far wall and teetered there an instant, as if unsure whether to proceed upward or fall on its back.

  Then they slammed down on the other side, collapsing the fence. Whatever automatic defenses lived here must be temporarily disabled.

  She ground clear of the concrete-and-steel rubble, then risked a glance at Paul. "Oh, my God." He was slumped for-ward, a wash of red spread down his face. Red was smeared on the wall in front of him. Somehow he had not tied down properly.

  Allison slowed the crawler. She twisted in her seat, saw that the boy remained comatose. "Wili! Paul's hurt!"

  A woman's voice shrieked in her ear, "You stupid bitch!"

  Will twisted, his face agonized, like someone trying to waken from a dream.

  But if he woke, if his dream died, then all their dreams would die. "Drive, Allison. Please drive," Wili's synthetic voice came cool from her earpiece. "Paul... Paul wants this more than anything." Behind her, the boy's real voice was softly moaning. And Paul moved not at all.

  Allison closed out everything but her job: They were on a surfaced street. She rammed the throttle forward, took the crawler up to seventy kph. She had only vague impressions of the buildings on either side ofthem. It looked like residen- tial housing, though more opulent than in her time. All was deserted. Coming up on a T -intersection. Over the roofs of the multistorey residences, the towers at the center of the Enclave seemed no nearer.

  Wili's voice continued, "Right at the intersection. Then left and left. Foot soldiers are coming from east. So far they think we're one of them, but I'm breaking laser con-tact... now," Allison whipped into the turn, "and they should guess what we are very soon."

  They continued so for several minutes. It was like dealing with an ordinary voice program: Turn right. Turn left. Slow down. Keep to the edge of the street.

  "Five hundred meters. Take the service alley here. They're onto us. Gunships coming. They can't locate us precisely enough to bobble. Whoever sees us is to shoot." He was silent again as Allison negotiated the alley. Still no sign of life from Paul.

  "He still lives, Allison. I can still... hear... him a little."

  Through the front periscope she had a glimpse of some-thing dark and fast cross the narrow band of sky between the houses.

  "Pull under that overhang. Stop. Throttle up to charge the cells. Thirty seconds for local conditions and I'll be ready to fire."

  The moment they were stopped, Allison was out of her harness and bending over Paul. "Now leave me. I need to think. Take Paul. Save Paul."

  She looked at the boy He still hadn't opened his eyes. He was further off than she had ever seen him.

  "But Wili -"

  His body twitched, and the synthetic voice was suddenly angry in her ear. "I need time to think, and I don't have it. Their planes are on the way. Get out. Get out!"

  Allison unbuckled Paul and removed the scalp connector. He was breathing, but his face remained slack. She cranked at the rear doors, praying that nothing had been warped by their fall into the ditch. The doors popped open and cool morning air drifted in, along with the keening of the engines.

  She ripped off her headset and struggled to get the old man's body over her shoulder. As she staggered past Wili, she noticed his lips were moving. She bent down awkwardly to listen. The boy was mumbling, "Run, run, run, run...."

  Allison did her best.

  FORTY

  No one understood the conflict as Wili did. Even when he was linked with Jill, Paul had only a secondhand view. And after Paul, there was no one who saw more than fragments of the picture. It was Wili who ran the Tinker side of the show - and to some extent the Peacer side, too. Without his direc-tions in Paul's voice, the thousands of separate operations going on all over the Earth would be so scattered in time and effect that the Authority would have little trouble keeping its own control system going.

  But Wili knew his time would end very, very soon.

  From the crawler's recon camera, he watched Paul and Al-lison moving away, into the managerial residences. Their footsteps came fainter in his exterior microphones. Would he ever know if Paul survived?

  Through the narrow gap between the sides of the alley a Peacer satellite floated beyond the blue sky. One reason he had chosen this parking spot was to have that line of sight. In ninety seconds, the radio star would slide behind carven wooden eaves. He would lose it, and thus its relay to synchronous altitude, and thus his control of things worldwide. He would be deaf, dumb, and blind. But ninety seconds from now, it wouldn't matter; he and all the other Tinkers would win or lose in sixty.

  The whole system had spasmed when Paul was knocked out. Jill had stopped responding. For several minutes, Wili had struggled with all the high-level computations. Now Jill was coming back on line; she was almost finished with the local state computations. The capacitors would be fully charged seconds after that. Wili surveyed the world one last time:

  From orbit he saw golden morning spread across North-ern California. Livermore Valley sparkled with a false dew that was really dozens - hundreds - of bobbles. Unaided humans would need many versions of this picture to under-stand what Wili saw at once.

  There were ground troops a couple of thousand meters east of him. They had fanned out, obviously didn't know where he was. The tricky course he had given Allison would keep him safe from them for at least five minutes.

  Jets had been diverted from the north side of the Valley. He watched them crawl across the landscape at nearly four hundred meters per second. They were the real threat. They could see him before the capacitors were charged. There was no way to divert them or to trick them. The pilots had been in-structed to use their own eyes, to find the crawler, and to destroy it. Even if they failed in the last, they would report an accurate position -and the Livermore bobbler would get him.

  He burst-transmitted a last message to the Tinker teams in the Valley: Paul's voice announced the imminent bobbling and assigned new missions. Because of Wili's deceptions, their casualties had been light; that might change now. He told them what he had learned about Renaissance and redirected them against the missile sites he had detected. He wondered fleetingly how many would feel betrayed to learn of Renaissance, would wish that he - Paul -would stop the assault. But if Paul were really here, if Paul could think as fast as Wili, he'd've done the same.

  He must end the Peace so quickly that Renaissance died, too.

  Wili passed from one satellite to another, till he was look-ing down on Beijing at midnight. Without Wili's close supervision, the fighting had been bloodier: There were bobbles scattered through the ruins of the old city, but there were bodies, too, bodies that would not live again. The Chinese Tinkers had to get in very close; they did not have a powerful bobbler or the Wili/Jill processor. Even so, they might win. Wili had guided three teams to less than one thousand meters of the Beijing bobbler. He sent his last ad-vice, showing them a transient gap in the defense.

  Messages sent or automatically sending. Now there was only his own mission. The mission all else depended on.

  From high above, Wili saw an aircraft sweep south over the alley. (Its boom crashed around the carrier, but Wili's own senses were locked out and he barely felt it.) The pilot must have seen him. How long till the follow-up bomb run?

  The Authority's great bobbler was four thousand meters north of him. He and Jill had made a deadly minimax decision in deciding on that range. He "looked at" the capacitors. They were still ten seconds from the overcharge he needed. Ten seconds? The charge rate was declining as charge approached the necessary
level. Their haywired in-terface to the crawler's electrical generator was failing. Extrapolation along the failure curve: thirty seconds to charge.

  The other aircraft had been alerted. Wili saw courses change. More extrapolation: It would be very, very close. He could save himself by self-bobbling, the simplest of all generations. He could save himself and lose the war.

  Wili watched in an omniscient daze, watched from above as death crept down on the tiny crawler.

  Something itched. Something demanded attention. He relaxed his hold, let resources be diverted... and fill's image floated up.

  Wili! Go! You can still go! Jill flooded him with a last burst of data, showing that all processes would proceed automatically to completion. Then she cut him off.

  And Wili was alone in the crawler. He looked around, vision blurred, suddenly aware of sweat and diesel fuel and turbine noise. He groped for his harness release, then rolled off onto the floor. He barely felt the scalp connector tear free. He came to his feet and blundered out the rear doors into the sunlight.

  He didn't hear the jets' approach.

  Paul moaned. Allison couldn't tell if he was trying to say something or was simply responding to the rough handling. She got under his weight and stagger-ran across the alley toward a stone-walled patio. The gate was open; there was no lock. Allison kicked aside a child's tricycle and laid Paul down behind the waist-high wall. Should be safe from shrapnel here, except-she glanced over her shoulder at the glass wall that stretched across the interior side of the patio. Beyond was carpeting, elegant furniture. That glass could come showering down if the building got hit. She started to pull Paul behind the marble table that dominated the patio.

  "No! Wili. Did he make it?" He struggled weakly against her hands.

  The sky to the north showed patches of smoke, smudged exhaust trails, a vagrant floating bobble where someone had missed a target-but that was all. Wili had not acted; the crawler sat motionless, its engines screaming. Somewhere else she heard treads.

  The boom was like a wall of sound smashing over them. Windows on both sides of the street flew inward. Allison had a flickering impression of the aircraft as it swept over the street. Her attention jerked back to the sky, scanned. A dark gnat hung there, surrounded by the dirty aureole of its exhaust. There was no sound from this follow-up craft; it was coming straight in. The length of the street - and the crawler - would be visible to it. She watched it a moment, then dived to the tiled patio deck next to Paul.

  Scarcely time to swear, and the ground smashed up into them.

  Allison didn't lose consciousness, but for a long moment she didn't really know where she was. A girl in a gingham dress leaned over an old man, seeing red spread across a beautiful tile floor.

  A million garbage cans dropped and rattled around her.

  Allison touched her face, felt dust and untorn skin. The blood wasn't hers.

  How bad was he hurt?

  The old man looked up at her. He brushed her hands away with some last manic strength. "Allison. Did we win... please? After all these years, to get that bastard Avery." His speech slurred into mumbling.

  Allison came to her knees and looked over the wall. The street was in ruins, riddled with flying debris. The crawler had been hit, its front end destroyed. Fire spread crackling from what was left of its fuel. Under the treads something else burned green and violent. And the sky to the north...

  ...was as empty as before. No bobble stood where she knew the Peace generator was hidden. The battle might yet go on for hours, but Allison knew that they had lost. She looked down at the old man and tried to smile. "It's there, Paul. You won."

  FORTY-ONE

  "We got one of them, sir. Ground troops have brought in three survivors. They're-"

  "From the nearer one? Where is that second crawler?" Hamilton Avery leaned over the console, his hands pale against the base of the keyboard.

  "We don't know, sir. We have three thousand men on foot in that area. We'll have it in a matter of minutes, even if tac air doesn't get it first. About the three we picked

  Avery angrily cut the connection. He sat down abruptly, chewed at his lip. "He's getting closer, I know it. Everything we do seems a victory, but is really a defeat." He clenched his fists, and Della could imagine him screaming to himself What can we do? She had seen administrators go over the edge in Mongolia, frozen into inaction or suicidal overreaction. The difference was that she had been the boss in Mongolia. Here...

  Avery opened his fists with visible effort. "Very well. What is the status of Beijing? Is the enemy any closer than before?"

  General Maitland spoke to his terminal. He looked at the response in silence. Then, "Director, we have lost comm with them. The recon birds show the Beijing generator has been bobbled...." He paused as though waiting for some explosion from his boss. But Avery was composed again. Only the faint glassiness of his stare admitted his terror.

  " - and of course that could be faked, too," Avery said quietly. "Try for direct radio confirmation... from someone known to us." Maitland nodded, started to turn away. "And, General. Begin the computations to bobble us up." He absentedly caressed the Renaissance trigger that sat on the table before him. "I can tell you the coordinates."

  Maitland relayed the order to try for shortwave communication with Beijing. But he personally entered the coordinates as Avery spoke them. As Maitland set up the rest of the program, Della eased into a chair behind the Director. "Sir, there is no need for this."

  Hamilton Avery smiled his old, genteel smile, but he wasn't listening to her. "Perhaps not, my dear. That is why we are checking for confirmation from Beijing." He flipped open the Renaissance box, revealing a key pad. A red light began blinking on the top. Avery fiddled with a second cover, which protected some kind of button. "Strange. When I was a child, people talked about 'pushing the button' as though there was a magic red button that could bring nuclear war. I doubt if ever power was just so concentrated... But here I have almost exactly that, Della. One big red button. We've worked hard these last few months to make it effective. You know, we really didn't have that many nukes before. We never saw how they might be necessary to preserve the Peace. But if Beijing is really gone, this will be the only way"

  He looked into Della's eyes. "It won't be so bad, my dear.

  We've been very selective. We know the areas where our enemy is concentrated; making them uninhabitable won't have any lasting effect on the race."

  To her left, Maitland had completed his preparations. The display showed the standard menu she had seen in his earlier operations. Even by Authority standards, it looked old-fashioned. Quite likely the control software was unchanged from the first years of the Authority.

  Maitland had overridden all the fail-safes. At the bottom of-the display, outsized capitals blinked:

  WARNING!

  THE ABOVE TARGETS ARE FRIENDLY

  CONTINUE?

  A simple "yes" would bobble the industrial core of the Authority into the next century.

  "We have shortwave communication with Peace forces at Beijing, Director," the voice came unseen, but it was recognizably Maitland's chief aide. "These are troops originally from the Vancouver franchise. Several of them are known to people here. At least we can verify these are really our men."

  "And?" Avery asked quietly.

  "The center of the Beijing Enclave is bobbled, sir. They can see it from where their positions. The fighting has pretty much ended. Apparently the enemy is lying low, waiting for our reaction. Your instructions are requested."

  "In a minute," Avery smiled. "General, you may proceed as planned." That minute would be more than fifty years in the future.

  "yes," the general typed. The familiar buzzing hum sounded irregularly, and one after another the locations on the list were marked as bobbled: Los Angeles Enclave, Brasilia Enclave, Redoubt 001.... It was quickly done, what no enemy could ever do. All other activity in the room ceased; they all knew. The Authority was now committed. In fact, most
of the Authority was gone from the world by that act. All that remained was this one generator, this one command center - and the hundreds of nuclear bombs that Avery's little red button would rain upon the Earth.

  Maitland set up the last target, and the console showed:

  FINAL WARNING! PROJECTION WILL SELF-ENCLOSE. CONTINUE?

  Now Hamilton Avery was punching an elaborate passcode into his red trigger box. In seconds, he would issue the command that would poison sections of continents. Then

  Maitland could bobble them into a future made safe for the "Peace."

  The shock in Delia's face must finally have registered on him. "I am not a monster, Miss Lu. I have never used more than the absolute minimum force necessary to preserve the Peace. After I launch Renaissance, we will bobble up, and then we will be in a future where the Peace can be reestablished. And though it will be an instant to us, I assure you I will always feel the guilt for the price that had to paid." He gestured at his trigger box. "It is a responsibility I take solely upon myself."

  That's damned magnanimous of you. She wondered fleetingly if hard-boiled types like Della Lu and Hamilton Avery always ended up like this - rationalizing the destruction of all they claimed to protect.

  Maybe not. Her decision had been building for weeks, ever since she had learned of Renaissance. It had dominated everything after her talk with Mike. Della glanced around the room, wished she had her side-arm: She would need it during the next few minutes. She touched her throat and said clearly, "See you later, Mike."

  There was quick understanding on Avery's face, but he didn't have a chance. With her right hand she flicked the red box down the table, out of Avery's reach. Almost simultaneously, she smashed Maitland's throat with the edge of her left. Turning, she leaned over the general's collapsing form-and typed:

  "yes"

  FORTY-TWO

  Wili moped across the lawn, his hands stuck deep in his pockets, his face turned downward. He kicked up little puffs of dust where the grass was brownest. The new tenants were lazy about watering, or else maybe the irrigation pipes were busted.