Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Wili felt a chill that was not in the afternoon air. Jeremy’s stories of Russian bandits were a bit pale compared to what he had seen with the Ndelante Ali, but they were bad enough. “Can you call ahead, Paul?”

  Naismith shrugged. “I don’t want to broadcast; they might jump on us immediately. Jeremy’s people are the nearest folks who could help, and even on a fast horse that’s a couple hours. We’re going to have to handle most of this ourselves.”

  Wili glared at Jeremy, whose distant relatives—the ones he had been bragging about all day—were apparently out to ambush them. The boy’s wide face was pale. “But I was mostly farking you. No one has actually seen one of the outlaw bands down this far in…well, in ages.”

  “I know,” Naismith muttered agreement. “Still, it’s a fact we’re being crowded from behind.” He looked at Berta, as if wondering if there was any way the three of them might outrun ten men on foot. “How good is that cannon you carry, Jeremy?”

  The boy raised the weapon. Except for its elaborate telescopic sight and chopped barrel, it looked pretty ordinary to Wili: a typical New Mexico autorifle, heavy and simple. The clip probably carried ten 8-mm rounds. With the barrel cut down, it wouldn’t be much more accurate than a pistol. Wili had successfully dodged such fire from a distance of one hundred meters. Jeremy patted the rifle, apparently ignorant of all this, “Really hot stuff, sir. It’s smart.”

  “And the ammunition?”

  “That too. One clip anyway.”

  Naismith smiled a jagged smile. “’Kolya really coddles you youngsters—but I’m glad of it. Okay.” He seemed to reach a decision. “It’s going to depend on you, Jeremy. I didn’t bring anything that heavy…An hour walk from here is a trail that goes south. We should be able to reach it by twilight. A half hour along that path is a bobble. I know there’s a clear line of sight from there to your farm. And the bobble should confuse our ‘friends,’ assuming they aren’t familiar with the land this close to the coast.”

  New surprise showed on Jeremy’s face. “Sure. We know about that bobble, but how did you? It’s real small.”

  “Never you mind. I go for hikes, too. Let’s just hope they let us get there.”

  They proceeded down the road, even Jeremy’s tongue momentarily stilled. The sun was straight ahead. It would set behind Vandenberg. Its reflection in the Dome edged higher and higher, as if to touch the true sun at the moment of sunset. The air was warmer and the green of the trees more intense than in any normal sunset. Wili could hear no evidence of the men his friends said were pursuing.

  Finally the two suns kissed. The true disk slipped behind the Dome into eclipse. For several minutes, Wili thought he saw a ghostly light hanging over the Dome above the point of the sun’s setting.

  “I’ve noticed that, too,” Naismith replied to Wili’s unspoken question. “I think it’s the corona, the glow around the sun that’s ordinarily invisible. That’s the only explanation I can think of, anyway.”

  The pale light slowly disappeared, leaving a sky that went from orange to green to deepest blue. Naismith urged Berta to a slightly faster walk and the two boys swung onto the back of the cart. Jeremy slipped a new clip into his rifle and settled down to cover the road.

  Finally they reached the cutoff. The path was as small as any Jeremy had pointed to during the day, too narrow for the cart. Naismith carefully climbed down and unhitched Berta, then distributed various pieces of equipment to the boys.

  “Come on. I’ve left enough on the cart to satisfy them…I hope.” They set off southward with Berta. The trail narrowed till Wili wondered if Paul was lost. Far behind them, he heard an occasional branch snap, and now even the sound of voices. He and Jeremy looked at each other. “They’re loud enough,” the boy muttered. Naismith didn’t say anything, just switched Berta to move a bit faster. If the bandits weren’t satisfied with the wagon, the three of them would have to make a stand, and evidently he wanted that to be further on.

  The sounds of their pursuers were louder now, surely past the wagon. Paul guided Berta to the side. For a moment the horse looked back at them stupidly. Then Naismith seemed to say something in its ear and the animal moved off quickly into the shadows. It was still not really dark. Wili thought he could see green in the treetops, and the sky held only a few bright stars.

  They headed into a deep and narrow ravine, an apparent cul-de-sac. Wili looked ahead and saw—three figures coming toward them out of a brightly lit tunnel! He bolted up the side of the ravine, but Jeremy grabbed his jacket and pointed silently toward the strange figures: Now one of them was holding another and pointing. Reflections. That’s what he was seeing. Down there at the back of the ravine, a giant curved mirror showed Jeremy and Naismith and himself silhouetted against the evening sky.

  Very quietly, they slid down through the underbrush to the base of the mirror, then began climbing around its sides. Wili couldn’t resist: Here at last was a bobble. It was much smaller than Vandenberg, but a bobble nevertheless. He paused and reached out to touch the silvery surface—then snatched his hand back in shock. Even in the cool evening air, the mirror was warm as blood. He peered closer, saw the dark image of his head swell before him. There was not a nick, not a scratch in that surface. Up close, it was as perfect as Vandenberg appeared from a distance, as transcendentally perfect as mathematics itself. Then Jeremy’s hand closed again on his jacket and he was dragged upward around the sphere.

  The forest floor was level with the top. A large tree grew at the edge of the soil, its roots almost like tentacles around the top of the sphere. Wili hunkered down between the roots and looked back along the ravine. Naismith watched a dim display while Jeremy slid forward and panned the approaches through his rifle sight. From their vantage Wili could see that the ravine was an elongated crater, with the bobble—which was about thirty meters across—forming the south end. The history seemed obvious: Somehow, this bobble had fallen out of the sky, carving a groove in the hills before finally coming to rest. The trees above it had grown in the decades since the War. Given another century, the sphere might be completely buried.

  For a moment they sat breathless. A cicada started buzzing, the noise so loud he wondered if they would even hear their pursuers. “They may not fall for this.” Naismith spoke almost to himself. “Jeremy, I want you to scatter these around behind us as far as you can in five minutes.” He handed the boy something, probably tiny cameras like those around the manor. Jeremy hesitated, and Naismith said, “Don’t worry, we won’t be needing your rifle for at least that long. If they try to come up behind us, I want to know about it.”

  The vague shadow that was Jeremy Kaladze nodded and crawled off into the darkness. Naismith turned to Wili and pressed a coherent transmitter into his hands. “Try to get this as far up as you can.” He gestured at the conifer among whose roots they crouched.

  Wili moved out more quietly than the other boy. This had been Wili’s specialty, though in the Los Angeles Basin there were more ruins than forests. The muck of the forest floor quickly soaked his legs and sleeves, but he kept close to the ground. As he oozed up to the base of the tree, he struck his knee against something hard and artificial. He stopped and felt out the obstacle: an ancient stone cross, a Christian cemetery cross really. Something limp and fragrant lay in the needle mulch beside it—flowers?

  Then he was climbing swiftly up the tree. The branches were so regularly spaced they might as well have been stair steps. He was soon out of breath. He was just out of condition; at least he hoped that was the explanation.

  The tree trunk narrowed and began to sway in response to his movement. He was above the nearby trees, pointed, dark forms all around him. He was really not very high up; almost all the trees in the rain forest were young.

  Jupiter and Venus blazed like lanterns, and the stars were out. Only a faint yellow glow showed over Vandenberg and the western horizon. He could see all the way to the base of the Dome; this was high enough. Wili fastened the emitter so it woul
d have a clear line of sight to the west. Then he paused a moment, letting the evening breeze turn his pants and sleeves cold on his skin. There were no lights anywhere. Help was very far away.

  They would have to depend on Naismith’s gadgets and Jeremy’s inexperienced trigger finger.

  He almost slid down the tree and was back at Naismith’s side soon after that. The old man scarcely seemed to notice his arrival, so intent was he on the little display. “Jeremy?” Wili whispered.

  “He’s okay. Still laying out the cameras.” Paul was looking through first one and then another of the little devices. The pictures were terribly faint, but recognizable. Wili wondered how long his batteries would last. “Fact is, our friends are coming in along the path we left for them.” In the display, evidently from some camera Paul had dropped along the way, Wili could see an occasional booted foot.

  “How long?”

  “Five or ten minutes. Jeremy’ll be back in plenty of time.” Naismith took something out of his pack—the master for the transmitter Wili had set in the tree. He fiddled with the phase aimer and spoke softly, trying to raise the Strela farm. After long seconds, an insectlike voice answered from the device, and the old man was explaining their situation.

  “Got to sign off. Low on juice,” he finished. Behind them, Jeremy slid into place and unlimbered his rifle. “Your grandpa’s people are coming, Jeremy, but it’ll be hours. Everyone’s at the house.”

  They waited. Jeremy looked over Naismith’s shoulder for a moment. Finally he said. “Are they sons of the originals? They don’t walk like old men.”

  “I know,” said Naismith.

  Jeremy crawled to the edge of the crater. He settled into a prone position and rested his rifle on a large root. He scanned back and forth through the sight.

  The minutes passed, and Wili’s curiosity slowly increased. What was the old man planning? What was there about this bobble that could be a threat to anyone? Not that he wasn’t impressed. If they lived through to morning, he would see it by daylight and that would be one of the first joys of survival. There was something almost alive about the warmth he had felt in its surface, though now he realized it was probably just the reflected heat of his own body. He remembered what Naismith once had told him. Bobbles reflected everything; nothing could pass through, in either direction. What was within might as well be in a separate, tiny universe. Somewhere beneath their feet lay the wreckage of an aircraft or missile, embobbled by the Peace Authority when they put down the national armies of the world. Even if the crew of that aircraft could have survived the crash, they would have suffocated in short order. There were worse ways to die: Wili had always sought the ultimate hiding place, the ultimate safety. To his inner heart, the bobbles seemed to be such.

  Voices. They were not loud, but there was no attempt at secrecy. There were footsteps, the sounds of branches snapping. In Naismith’s fast-dimming display, Wili could see at least five pairs of feet. They walked past a bent and twisted tree he remembered just two hundred meters back. Wili strained his ears to make sense of their words, but it was neither English nor Spanish. Jeremy muttered, “Russian, after all!”

  Finally, the enemy came over the ridge that marked the far end of the ravine. Unsurprisingly, they were not in a single file now. Wili counted ten figures strung out against the starry sky. Almost as a man, the group froze, then dove for cover with their guns firing full automatic. The three on the bobble hugged the dirt as rounds whizzed by, thunking into the trees. Ricochets off the bobble sounded like heavy hail on a roof. Wili kept his face stuck firmly in the moist bed of forest needles and wondered how long the three of them could last.

  10

  “Gentlemen of the Peace Authority, Greater Tucson has been destroyed.” The New Mexico Air Force general slapped his riding crop against the topographical map byway of emphasis. A neat red disk had been laid over the downtown district, and paler pink showed the fallout footprint. It all looked very precise, though Hamilton Avery suspected it was more show than fact. The government in Albuquerque had communication equipment nearly on a par with the Peace but it would take aircraft or satellite recon to get a detailed report on one of their western cities this quickly: The detonation had happened less than ten hours earlier.

  The general—Avery couldn’t see his name tag, and it probably didn’t matter anyway—continued. “That’s three thousand men, women, and children immediately dead, and God knows how many hundreds to die of radiation poisoning in the months to come.” He glared across the conference table at Avery and the assistants he’d brought to give his delegation the properly important image.

  For a moment it seemed as though the officer had finished speaking, but in fact he was just catching his breath. Hamilton Avery settled back and let the blast roll over him. “You of the Peace Authority deny us aircraft, tanks. You have weakened what is left of the nation that spawned you until we must use force simply to protect our borders from states that were once friendly. But what have you given us in return?” The man’s face was getting red. The implication had been there, but the fool insisted on spelling it out: If the Peace Authority couldn’t protect the Republic from nuclear weapons, then it could scarcely be the organization it advertised itself to be. And the general claimed the Tucson blast was incontrovertible proof that some nation possessed nukes and was using them, despite the Authority and all its satellites and aircraft and bobble generators.

  On the Republic’s side of the table, a few heads nodded agreement, but those individuals were far too cautious to say aloud what their scapegoat was shouting to the four walls. Hamilton pretended to listen; best to let this fellow hang himself. Avery’s subordinates followed his lead, though for some it was an effort. After three generations of undisputed rule, many Authority people took their power to be God-given. Hamilton knew better.

  He studied those seated around the general. Several were Army generals, one just back from the Colorado. The others were civilians. Hamilton knew this group. In the early years, he had thought the Republic of New Mexico was the greatest threat to the Peace in North America, and he had watched them accordingly. This was the Strategic Studies Committee. It ranked higher in the New Mexico government than the Group of Forty or the National Security Council—and, of course, higher than the cabinet. Every generation, governments seemed to breed a new inner circle out of the older, which was then used as a sop to satisfy larger numbers of less influential people. These men, together with the President, were the real power in the Republic. Their “strategic studies” extended from the Colorado to the Mississippi. New Mexico was a powerful nation. They could invent the bobble and nuclear weapons all over again if they were allowed.

  They were easy to frighten nonetheless. This Air Force general couldn’t be a full-fledged member of the group. The NMAF manned a few hot-air balloons and dreamed of the good old days. The closest they ever got to modern aircraft was a courtesy flight on an Authority plane. He was here to say things their government wanted said but did not have the courage to spit out directly.

  The old officer finally ran down, and sat down. Hamilton gathered his papers and moved to the podium. He looked mildly across at the New Mexico officials and let the silence lengthen to significance.

  It was probably a mistake to come here in person. Talking to national governments was normally done by officers two levels below him in the Peace Authority. Appearing in person could easily give these people an idea of the true importance of the incident. Nevertheless, he had wanted to see these men close up. There was an outside chance they were involved in the menace to the Peace he had discovered the last few months.

  Finally he began. “Thank you, General, uh, Halberstamm. We understand your anxiety, but wish to emphasize the Peace Authority’s long-standing promise. No nuclear weapon has exploded in nearly fifty years and none exploded yesterday in Greater Tucson.”

  The general spluttered. “Sir! The radiation! The blast! How can you say—”

  Avery raised his hand a
nd smiled for silence. There was a sense of noblesse oblige and faint menace in the action. “In a moment, General. Bear with me. It is true: There was an explosion and some radiation. But I assure you no one besides the Authority has nuclear weapons. If there were, we would deal with them by methods you all know.

  “In fact, if you consult your records, you will find that the center of the blast area coincides with the site of a ten-meter confinement sphere generated”—he pretended to consult his notes—“5 July 1997.”

  He saw various degrees of shock, but no questions broke the silence. He wondered how surprised they really were. From the beginning, he’d known there was no point in trying to cover up the source of the blast. Old Alex Schelling, the President’s science adviser, would have put two and two together correctly.

  “I know that several of you have studied the open literature on confinement,” and you, Schelling, have spent a good many thousand cautious man-hours out in the Sandia ruins, trying to duplicate the effect, “but a review is in order.

  “Confinement spheres—bobbles—are not so much force fields as they are partitions, separating the in- and outside of their surfaces into distinct universes. Gravity alone can penetrate. The Tucson bobble was originally generated around an ICBM over the arctic. It fell to earth near its target, the missile fields at Tucson. The hell bomb inside exploded harmlessly, in the universe on the far side of the bobble’s surface.

  “As you know, it takes the enormous energy output of the Authority’s generator in Livermore to create even the smallest confinement sphere. In fact, that is why the Peace Authority has banned all energy-intensive usages, to safeguard this secret of keeping the Peace. But once established you know that a bobble is stable and requires no further inputs to maintain itself.”

  “Lasting forever,” put in old Schelling. It was not quite a question.

  “That’s what we all thought, sir. But nothing lasts forever. Even black holes undergo quantum decay. Even normal matter must eventually do so, though on a time-scale beyond imagination. A decay analysis has not been done for confinement spheres until quite recently.” He nodded to an assistant who passed three heavy manuscripts across the table to the NM officials. Schelling scarcely concealed his eagerness as he flipped past the Peace Authority Secret seal—the highest classification a government official ever saw—and began reading.