Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Tellman’s smile remained but his face was turning a bit gray. The vehicle drew close to the middle planet, catching up to it as it swung slowly about the primary. The kid made barely perceptible adjustments in the trajectory during the closing period. Fuel status on the display showed 0.001 full. The representation of the planet and the spacecraft merged for an instant, but did not record as a collision, for the tiny dot moved quickly away, going for the far reaches of the screen.

  Around them, the other children jostled and hooted. They smelled a winner, and old Tellman was going to lose a little of the money he had been winning off them earlier in the day. Rosas and Naismith and Tellman just watched and held their breaths. With virtually no fuel left, it would be a matter of luck whether contact finally occurred.

  The reddish disk of the destination planet swam placidly along while the mock spacecraft arced higher and higher, slower and slower, their paths becoming almost tangent. The craft was accelerating now, falling into the gravity well of the destination, giving the tantalizing impression of success that always comes with a close shot. Closer and closer. And the two lights became one on the board.

  “Intercept” the display announced, and the stats streamed across the lower part of the screen. Rosas and Naismith looked at each other. The kid had done it.

  Tellman was very pale now. He looked at the bills the boy had wagered. “Sorry, kid, but I don’t have that much here right now.” He started to repeat the excuse in Spanish, but the kid erupted with an unintelligible flood of Spañolnegro abuse. Rosas looked meaningfully at Tellman. He was hired to protect customers as well as proprietors. If Tellman didn’t pay off, he could kiss his lease good-bye. The Shopping Center already got enough flak from parents whose children had lost money here. And if the kid were clever enough to press charges…?

  The proprietor finally spoke over youthful screaming. “Okay, so I’ll pay. Pago, pago…you little son of a bitch.” He pulled a handful of gAu notes out of his cash box and shoved them at the boy. “Now get out.”

  The black kid was out the door before anyone else. Rosas eyed his departure thoughtfully. Tellman went on, plaintively, talking as much to himself as anyone else. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. The little bastard has been in here all morning. I swear he had never seen a game board before. But he watched and watched. Diego Martinez had to explain it to him. He started playing. Had barely enough money. And he just got better and better. I never seen anything like it…In fact—” he brightened and looked at Mike, “in fact, I think I been set up. I betcha the kid is carrying a processor and just pretending to be young and dumb. Hey, Rosas, how about that? I should be protected. There’s some sorta con here, especially on that last game. He—”

  “—really did have a snowball’s chance, eh, Telly?” Rosas finished where the proprietor had broken off. “Yeah, I know. You had a sure win. The odds should have been a thousand to one—not the even money you gave him. But I know symbiotic processing, and there’s no way he could do it without some really expensive equipment.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Naismith nod agreement. “Still”—he rubbed his jaw and looked out into the brightness beyond the entrance—“I’d like to know more about him.”

  Naismith followed him out of the tent, while behind them Tellman sputtered. Most of the children were still visible, standing in clumps along the Tinkers’ mall.

  The mysterious winner was nowhere to be seen. And yet he should have been. The game area opened onto the central lawn which gave a clear view down all the malls. Mike spun around a couple times, puzzled. Naismith caught up with him. “I think the boy has been about two jumps ahead of us since we started watching him, Mike. Notice how he didn’t argue when Tellman gave him the boot. Your uniform must have spooked him.”

  “Yeah. Bet he ran like hell the second he got outside.”

  “I don’t know. I think he’s more subtle than that.” Naismith put a finger to his lips and motioned Rosas to follow him around the banners that lined the side of the game shop. There was not much need for stealth. The shoppers were noisy, and the loading of furniture onto several carts behind the refurbishers’ pavilion was accompanied by shouting and laughter.

  The early afternoon breeze off Vandenberg set the colored fabric billowing. Double sunlight left nothing to shadow. Still, they almost tripped over the boy, curled up under the edge of a tarp. The boy exploded like a bent spring, directly into Mike’s arms. If Rosas had been of the older generation, there would have been no contest: Ingrained respect for children and an unwillingness to damage them would have let the kid slip from his grasp. But the undersheriff was willing to play fairly rough, and for a moment there was a wild mass of swinging arms and legs. Mike saw something gleam in the boy’s hand, and then pain ripped through his arm.

  Rosas fell to his knees as the boy, still clutching the knife, pulled loose and sprinted away. He was vaguely conscious of red spreading through the tan fabric of his left sleeve. He narrowed his eyes against the pain and drew his service stunner.

  “No!” Naismith’s shout was a reflex born of having grown up with slug guns and later having lived through the first era in history when life was truly sacred.

  The kid went down and lay twitching in the grass. Mike holstered his pistol and struggled to his feet, his right hand clutching at the wound. It looked superficial, but it hurt like hell. “Call Seymour,” Mike grated at the old man. “We’re going to have to carry that little bastard to the station.”

  2

  The Santa Ynez Police Company was the largest protection service south of San Jose. After all, Santa Ynez was the first town north of Santa Barbara and the Aztlán border. Sheriff Seymour Wentz had three full-time deputies and contracts with eighty percent of the locals. That amounted to almost four thousand customers.

  Wentz’s office was perched on a good-sized hill overlooking Old 101. From it one could follow the movements of Peace Authority freighters for several kilometers north and south. Right now, no one but Paul Naismith was admiring the view. Miguel Rosas watched gloomily as Seymour spent half an hour on the phone to Santa Barbara, and then even managed to patch through to the ghetto in Pasadena. As Mike expected, no one south of the border could help. The rulers of Aztlán spent their gold trying to prevent “illegal labor emigration” from Los Angeles but never wasted time tracking the people who made it. The sabio in Pasadena seemed initially excited by the description, then froze up and denied any interest in the boy. The only other lead was with a contract labor gang that had passed through Santa Ynez earlier in the week, heading for the cacao farms near Santa Maria. Sy had some success with that. One Larry Faulk, labor contract agent, was persuaded to talk to them. The nattily dressed agent was not happy to see them.

  “Certainly, Sheriff, I recognize the runt. Name is Wili Wáchendon.” He spelled it out. The “w”s sounded like a hybrid of “w” with “v” and “b.” Such was the evolution of Spañolnegro. “He missed my crew’s departure yesterday, and I can’t say that I or anyone else up here is sorry.”

  “Look, Mr. Faulk. This child has clearly been mistreated by your people.” He waved over his shoulder at where the kid—Wili—lay in his cell. Unconscious, he looked even more starved and pathetic than he had in motion.

  “Ha!” came Faulk’s reply over the fiber. “I notice you have the punk locked up; and I also see your deputy has his arm bandaged.” He pointed at Rosas, who stared back almost sullenly. “I’ll bet little Wili has been practicing his people-carving hobby. Sheriff, Wili Wáchendon may have had a hard time someplace; I think he’s on the run from the Ndelante Ali. But I never roughed him up. You know how labor contractors work. Maybe it was different in the good old days, but now we are agents, we get ten percent, and our crews can dump on us any time they please. At the wages they get, they’re always shifting around, bidding for new contracts, squeezing for money. I have to be damn popular and effective or they would get someone else.

  “This kid has been worthless from the beginning. H
e’s always looked half-starved; I think he’s a sicker. How he got from LA to the border is…” His next words were drowned out by a freighter whizzing along the highway beneath the station. Mike glanced out the window at the behemoth diesel as it moved off southward carrying liquified natural gas to the Peace Authority Enclave in Los Angeles. “…took him because he claimed he could run my books. Now, the little bas—the kid may know something about accounting. But he’s a lazy thief, too. And I can prove it. If your company hassles me about this when I come back through Santa Ynez, I’ll sue you into oblivion.”

  There were a couple more verbal go-arounds, and then Sheriff Wentz rang off. He turned in his chair. “You know, Mike, I think he’s telling the truth. We don’t see it so much in the new generation, but children like your Sally and Arta—”

  Mike nodded glumly and hoped Sy wouldn’t pursue it. His Sally and Arta, his little sisters. Dead years ago. They had been twins, five years younger than he, born when his parents had lived in Phoenix. They had made it to California with him, but they had always been sick. They both died before they were twenty and never looked to be older than ten. Mike knew who had caused that bit of hell. It was something he never spoke of.

  “The generation before that had it worse. But back then it was just another sort of plague and people didn’t notice especially.” The diseases, the sterility, had brought a kind of world never dreamed of by the bomb makers of the previous century. “If this Wili is like your sisters, I’d estimate he’s about fifteen. No wonder he’s brighter than he looks.”

  “It’s more than that, Boss. The kid is really smart. You should have seen what he did to Tellman’s Celest.”

  Wentz shrugged. “Whatever. Now we’ve got to decide what to do with him. I wonder whether Fred Bartlett would take him in.” This was gentle racism; the Bartletts were black.

  “Boss, he’d eat ’em alive.” Rosas patted his bandaged arm.

  “Well, hell, you think of something better, Mike. We’ve got four thousand customers. There must be someone who can help…A lost child with no one to take care of him—it’s unheard of!”

  Some child! But Mike couldn’t forget Sally and Arta. “Yeah.”

  Through this conversation, Naismith had been silent, almost ignoring the two peace officers. He seemed more interested in the view of Old 101 than what they were talking about. Now he twisted in the wooden chair to face the sheriff and his deputy. “I’ll take the kid on, Sy.”

  Rosas and Wentz looked at him in stupefied silence. Paul Naismith was considered old in a land where two-thirds of the population was past fifty. Wentz licked his lips, apparently unsure how to refuse him. “See here, Paul, you heard what Mike said. The kid practically killed him this afternoon. I know how people your, uh, age feel about children, but…”

  The old man shook his head, caught Mike with a quick glance that was neither abstracted nor feeble. “You know they’ve been after me to take on an apprentice for years, Sy. Well, I’ve decided. Besides trying to kill Mike, he played Celest like a master. The gravity-well maneuver is one I’ve never seen discovered unaided.”

  “Mike told me. It’s slick, but I see a lot of players do it. We almost all use it. Is it really that clever?”

  “Depending on your background, it’s more than clever. Isaac Newton didn’t do a lot more when he deduced elliptical orbits from the inverse square law.”

  “Look, Paul…I’m truly sorry, but even with Bill and Irma, it’s just too dangerous.”

  Mike thought about the pain in his arm. And then about the twin sisters he had once had. “Uh, Boss, could you and I have a little talk?”

  Wentz raised an eyebrow. “So…? Okay. ’Scuse us a minute, Paul.”

  There was a moment of embarrassed silence as the two left the room. Naismith rubbed his cheek with a faintly palsied hand and gazed across Highway 101 at the pale lights just coming on in the Shopping Center. So very much had changed and all the years in between were blurred now. Shopping Center? All of Santa Ynez would have been lost in the crowd at a good high-school basketball game in the 1990s. These days a county with seven thousand people was considered a thriving concern.

  It was just past sunset now, and the office was growing steadily darker. The room’s displays were vaguely glowing ghosts hovering in the near distance. Cameras from down in the shopping areas drove most of those displays. Paul could see that business was picking up there. The Tinkers and mechanics and ’furbishers had trotted out their wares, and crowds were hanging about the aerial displays. Across the room, other screens showed pale red and green, relaying infrared images from cameras purchased by Wentz’s clients.

  In the next room the two officers’ talk was a faint murmur. Naismith leaned back and pushed up his hearing aid. For a moment the sound of his lung and heart action was overpoweringly loud in his ears. Then the filters recognized the periodic noises and they were diminished, and he could hear Wentz and Rosas more clearly than any unaided human. Not many people could boast such equipment, but Naismith demanded high pay and Tinkers from Norcross to Beijing were more than happy to supply him with better-than-average prosthetics.

  Rosas’ voice came clearly: “…think Paul Naismith can take care of himself, Boss. He’s lived in the mountains for years. And the Moraleses are tough and not more than fifty-five. In the old days there were some nasty bandits and ex-military up there—”

  “Still are,” Wentz put in.

  “Nothing like when there were still a lot of weapons floating around. Naismith was old even when they were going strong, and he survived. I’ve heard about his place. He has gadgets we won’t see for years. He isn’t called the Tinker wizard for nothing. I—”

  The rest was blotted out by a loud creaking that rose to near painful intensity in Naismith’s ear, then faded as the filters damped out the amplification. Naismith looked wildly around, then sheepishly realized it was a microquake. They happened all the time this near Vandenberg. Most were barely noticeable—unless one used special amplification, as Paul was now. The roar had been a slight creaking of wall timbers. It passed…and he could hear the two peace officers once more.

  “…what he said about needing an apprentice is true, Boss. It hasn’t been just us in Middle California who’ve been after him. I know people in Medford and Norcross who are scared witless he’ll die without leaving a successor. He’s hands-down the best algorithms man in North America—I’d say in the world except I want to be conservative. You know that comm gear you have back in the control room? I know it’s close to your heart, your precious toy and mine. Well, the bandwidth compression that makes possible all those nice color pictures coming over the fiber and the microwave would be plain impossible without the tricks he’s sold the Tinkers. And that’s not all—”

  “All right!” Wentz laughed. “I can tell you took it serious when I told you to specialize on our high tech clients. I know Middle California would be a backwater without him, but—”

  “And it will be again, once he’s gone, unless he can find an apprentice. They’ve been trying for years to get him to take on some students, or even to teach classes like before the Crash, but he’s refused. And I think he’s right. Unless you are terribly creative to begin with, there’s no way you can make new algorithms. I think he’s been waiting—not taking anyone on—and watching. I think today he found his apprentice. The kid’s mean…he’d kill. And I don’t know what he really wants besides money. But he has one thing that all the good intentions and motivation in the world can’t get us, and that’s brains. You should have seen him on the Celest, Boss…”

  The argument—or lecture—went on for several more minutes, but the outcome was predictable. The wizard of the Tinkers had at long last got himself an apprentice.

  3

  Night and triple moonlight. Wili lay in the back of the buckboard, heavily bundled in blankets. The soft springs absorbed most of the bumps and lurches as the wagon passed over the tilting, broken concrete. The only sounds Wili heard were the co
ol wind through the trees, the steady clapclapclap of the horse’s rubberized shoes, its occasional snort in the darkness. They had not yet reached the great black forest that stretched north to south; it seemed like all Middle California was spread out around him. The sea fog which so often made the nights here dark was absent, and the moonlight gave the air an almost luminous blue tone. Directly west—the direction Wili faced—Santa Ynez lay frozen in the still light. Few lights were visible, but the pattern of the streets was clear, and there was a hint of orange and violet from the open square of the bazaar.

  Wili wriggled deeper in the blankets, the tingling paralysis in his limbs mostly gone now; the warmth in his arms and legs, the cold air on his face, and the vision spread below him was as good as any drug high he’d ever stolen in Pasadena. The land was beautiful, but it had not turned out to be the easy pickings he had hoped for when he had defected from the Ndelante and headed north. There were unpeopled ruins, that was true: He could see what must have been the pre-Crash location of Santa Ynez, rectangular tracings all overgrown and no lights at all.

  The ruins were bigger than the modern version of the town, but nothing like the promise of the LA Basin, where kilometer after kilometer of ruins—much of it unlooted—stretched as far as a man could walk in a week. And if one wanted some more exciting, more profitable way of getting rich, there were the Jonque mansions in the hills above the Basin. From those high vantage points, Los Angeles had its own fairyland aspect: Horizon to horizon had sparkled with little fires that marked towns in the ruins. Here and there glowed the incandescent lights of Jonque outposts. And at the center, a luminous, crystal growth, stood the towers of the Peace Authority Enclave. Wili sighed. That had all been before his world in the Ndelante Ali had fallen apart, before he discovered Old Ebenezer’s con…If ever he returned, it would be a contest between the Ndelante and the Jonques over who’d skin him first.