Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Directly below his viewpoint, a forested marsh extended right up to Old 101. The highway had been washed out and rebuilt many times, till it was little more than a timber bridge over the marshlands. He would have his choice of any of a hundred places to cross under.

  It was farther away than it looked. By the time they were halfway there, the eastern sky was brightly lit, and Elmir seemed to have more faith in what he was doing.

  He chose a lightly traveled path through the wet and started under the highway. Still he wondered what Lu and Rosas had planned. If they couldn’t get a message out, then who could? Who knew where to look for Naismith and was also outside of Red Arrow Farm? Sudden understanding froze him in his tracks; Elmir’s soft nose knocked him to his knees, but he scarcely noticed. Of course! Poor stupid little Wili, always ready to give his enemies a helping hand.

  Wili got to his feet and walked back along Elmir, looking carefully for unwanted baggage. He ran his hand along the underside of her belly, and on the cinch found what he was looking for: The transmitter was large, almost two centimeters across. No doubt it had some sort of timer so it hadn’t begun radiating back where the Kaladzes would have been sure to notice. He weighed the device with his hand. It was awfully big, probably an Authority bug. But Rosas could have supplied something more subtle. He went back to the horse and inspected her and her gear again, much more carefully. Then he took off his own clothes and did the same for them. The early morning air was chill, and muck oozed up between his toes. It felt great.

  He looked very carefully, but found nothing more, which left him with nagging doubts. If it had just been Lu, he could understand…

  And there was still the question of what to do with the bug he had found. He got dressed and started to lead Elmir out from under the roadway. In the distance a rumbling grew louder and louder. The timbers began shaking, showering them with little globs of mud. Finally the land freighter passed directly overhead, and Wili wondered how the wooden trestle structure could take it.

  It gave him an idea, though. There was that truckers’ camp to the south, maybe just a couple of kilometers away. If he tied Elmir up here, he could probably make it in less than an hour. Not just Authority freighters used the stop. Ordinary truckers, with their big wagons and horse teams, would be there, too. It should be easy to sneak up early in the twilight and give one of those wagons a fifty-gram hitchhiker.

  Wili chuckled out loud. So much for Missy Lu and Rosas. With a little luck, he’d have the Authority thinking Naismith was hiding in Seattle!

  22

  She was trapped in some sort of gothic novel. And that was the least of her problems.

  Allison Parker sat on an outcropping and looked off to the north. This far from the Dome the weather was as before, with maybe a bit more rain. If she looked neither right nor left, she could imagine that she was simply on a camping trip, taking her ease in the late morning coolness. Here she could imagine that Angus Quiller and Fred Torres were still alive, and that when she got back to Vandenberg, Paul Hoehler might be down from Livermore for a date.

  But a glance to the left and she would see her rescuer’s mansion, buried dark and deep in the trees. Even by day, there seemed something gloomy and alien about the building. Perhaps it was the owner. The old man, Naismith, seemed so furtive, so apparently gentle, yet still hiding some terrible secret or desire. And as in any gothic, his servants—themselves in their fifties—were equally furtive and closemouthed.

  Of course, a lot of mysteries had been solved these last days, the greatest the first night. When she had brought the old man in, the servants had been very surprised. All they would say was that the “master will explain all that needs explaining.” “The master” was nearly unconscious at the time, so that was little help. Otherwise they had treated her well, feeding her and giving her clean, though ill-fitting clothes. Her bedroom was almost a dormer, its windows half in and half out of the roof. The furniture was simple but elegant; the oiled burl dresser alone would have been worth thousands back…where she came from. She had sat on the bright patchwork quilt and thought darkly that there better be some explanations coming in the morning, or she was going to leg it back to the coast, unfriendly armies or no.

  The huge house had been still and dead as the twilight deepened. Faint but clear against the silence, Allison could hear the sounds of applause and an audience laughing. It took her a second to realize that someone had turned on a television—though she hadn’t seen a set during the day. Ha! Fifteen minutes of programming would tell her as much about this new universe as a month of talking to “Bill” and “Irma.” She slid open her bedroom door and listened to the tiny, bright sounds.

  The program was weirdly familiar, conjuring up memories of a time when she was barely tall enough to reach the on switch of her mother’s TV. “Saturday Night”? It was either that or something very similar. She listened a few moments more, heard references to actors, politicians who had died before she ever entered college. She walked down the stairs, and sat with the Moraleses through an evening of old TV shows.

  They hadn’t objected, and as the days passed they’d opened up about some things. This was the future, about a half-century forward of her present. They told her of the war and the plagues that ended her world, and the force fields, the “bobbles,” that birthed the new one.

  But while some things were explained, others became mysteries in themselves. The old man didn’t socialize, though the Moraleses said that he was recovered. The house was big and there were many rooms whose doors stayed closed. He—and whoever else was in the house besides the servants—was avoiding her. Eerie. She wasn’t welcome here. The Morales were not unfriendly and had let her take a good share of the chores, but behind them she sensed the old man wishing she would go away. At the same time, they couldn’t afford to have her go. They feared the occupying armies, the “Peace Authority,” as much as she did; if she were captured, their hiding place would be found. So they continued to be her uneasy hosts.

  She had seen the old man scarcely a handful of times since the first afternoon, and never to talk to. He was in the mansion though. She heard his voice behind closed doors, sometimes talking with a woman—not Irma Morales. That female voice was strangely familiar.

  God, what I wouldn’t give for a friendly face right now. Someone to talk to. Angus, Fred, Paul Hoehler.

  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 insubstantial 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 projected 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 attentively 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 stoo
d 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 somehow 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.

  23

  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 door 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 had 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 space-flight.”

  For a long moment there was only the sighing of the air-conditioning. 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-Aztlán 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.”