Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Wili shut down the display and looked up at the faces—both Jonque and black—that surrounded him. “That’s not too much help for this job. Winning is going to depend on how good your spies are.”

  “They’re good enough.” It was Ebenezer’s sour-faced aide. The Ndelante Ali was a big organization, but Wili had a dark suspicion that the fellow recognized him from before. Getting home to Paul would depend on keeping his “friends” here intimidated by Naismith’s reputation and gadgets. “The Peacers like to be served by people as well as machines. The Faithful have been in the Tradetower as late as this morning. The hostages are all on the top two floors. The next two floors are empty and alarm-ridden, and below that is at least one floor full of Peace Troopers. The utility core is also occupied, and you notice there is a helicopter and fixed-wing patrol. You’d almost think they’re expecting a twentieth century armored assault, and not…”

  And not one scrawny teenager and his miniature bobble blower. Wili silently completed the other’s dour implication. He glanced at his hands: skinny maybe, but if he kept gaining weight as he had been these last weeks, he would soon be far from scrawny. And he felt like he could take on the Authority and the Jonques and the Ndelante Ali all at once. Wili grinned at the sabio. “What I’ve got is more effective than tanks and bombs. If you’re sure exactly where they are, I’ll have them out by nightfall.” He turned to the Alcalde’s man, a mild-looking old fellow who rarely spoke but got unnervingly crisp obedience from his men. “Were you able to get my equipment upstairs?”

  “Yes, sir.” Sir!

  “Let’s go, then.” They walked back into the main part of the ruin, carefully staying in the shadows and out of sight of the aircraft that droned overhead. The tenement had once been thirty meters high, with row on row of external balconies looking west. Most of the facing had long ago collapsed, and the stairwells were exposed to the sky. The Alcalde’s man was devious, though. Two of the younger Jonques had climbed an interior elevator shaft and rigged a sling to hoist the gear and their elders to the fourth-story vantage point that Wili required.

  One by one, Ndelante and Jonques ascended. Wili knew such cooperation between the blood enemies would have been a total shock to most of the Faithful. These groups fought and killed under other circumstances—and used each other to justify all sorts of sacrifices from their own peoples. Those struggles were real and deadly, but the secret cooperation was real, too. Two years earlier, Wili had chanced on that secret; it was what finally turned him against the Ndelante.

  The fourth-floor hallway creaked ominously under their feet. Outside it had been hot; in here it was like a dark oven. Through holes in the ancient linoleum, Wili could see into the wrecks of rooms and hallways below. Similar holes in the ceiling provided the hallway’s only light. One of the Jonques opened a side door and stood carefully apart as Wili and the Ndelante people entered.

  More than a half-tonne of Julian-thirty-three storage cells were racked against an interior wall. The balcony side of the room sagged precariously. Wili unpacked the processor and the bobble generator and set about connecting them to the Julians. The others squatted by the wall or in the hallway beyond. Rosas and Lu were there; Kaladze’s representatives could not be denied, though Wili had managed to persuade the Alcalde’s man to keep them—especially Della—away from the equipment, and away from the window.

  Della looked up at him and smiled a strange, friendly smile; strange because no one else was looking to be taken in by the lie. When will she make her move? Would she try to signal to her bosses, or somehow steal the equipment herself? Last night, Wili had thought long and hard about how to defeat her. He had the self-bobbling parameters all ready. Bobbling himself and the equipment would be a last resort, since the current model didn’t have much flexibility—he would be taken out of the game for about a year. More likely, one of them was going to end up very dead this day, and no wistful smile could change that.

  He dragged the generator and its power cables and camouflage bag close to the ragged edge of the balcony. Under him the decaying concrete swayed like a tiny boat. It felt as if there was only a single support spar left. Great. He centered his equipment over the imagined spar and calibrated the mass- and ranging-sensors. The next minutes would be critical. In order that the computation be feasibly simple, the generator had to be clear of obstacles. But this made their operation relatively exposed. If the Authority had had anything like Paul’s surveillance equipment, the plan would not have stood a chance.

  Wili wet his finger and held it into the air. Even here, almost out of doors, the day was stifling. The westerly breeze barely cooled his finger. “How hot is it?” he asked unnecessarily; it was obviously hot enough.

  “Outside air temperature is almost thirty-seven. That’s about as hot as it ever gets in LA, and it’s the high for today.”

  Wili nodded. Perfect. He rechecked the center and radius coordinates, started the generator’s processor, and then crawled back to the others by the inner wall. “It takes about five minutes. Generating a large bobble from two thousand meters is almost too much for this processor.”

  “So”—Ebenezer’s man gave him a sour smile—“you are going to bobble something. Are you ready to share the secret of just what? Or are we simply to watch and learn?”

  On the far side of the room, the Alcalde’s man was silent, but Wili sensed his attention. Neither they nor their bosses could imagine the bobble’s being used as anything but an offensive weapon. They were lacking one critical fact, a fact that would become known to all—including the Authority—very soon.

  Wili glanced at his watch: two minutes to go. There was no way he could imagine Della preventing the rescue now. And he had some quick explaining to do, or else—when his allies saw what he had done—he might have deadly problems. “Okay,” he said finally. “In ninety seconds, my gadget is going to throw a bobble around the top floors of the Tradetower.”

  “What?” The question came from four mouths, in two languages. The Alcalde’s man, so mild and respectful, was suddenly at his throat. He held up his hand briefly as his men started toward the equipment on the balcony. His other hand pressed against Wili’s windpipe, just short of pain, and Wili realized that he had seconds to convince him not to topple the generator into the street. “The bobble will…pop…later…Time…stops inside,” choked Wili. The pressure on his throat eased; the goons edged back from the balcony. Wili saw Jonque and sabio trade glances. There would have to be a lot more explanations later, but for now they would cooperate.

  A sudden, loud click marked the discharge of the Julians. All eyes looked westward through the opening that once held a sliding glass door. Faint “ah”s escaped from several pairs of lips.

  The top of the Tradetower was in shadow, surmounted and dwarfed by a four-hundred-meter sphere.

  “The building, it must collapse,” someone said. But it didn’t. The bobble was only as massive as what it enclosed, and that was mostly empty air. There was a long moment of complete silence, broken only by the far, tiny wailing of sirens. Wili had known what to expect, but even so it took an effort to tear his attention from the sky and surreptitiously survey the others.

  Lu was staring wide-eyed as any; even her schemes were momentarily submerged. But Rosas: The undersheriff looked back into Wili’s gaze, a different kind of wonder on his face, the wonder of a man who suddenly discovers that some of his guilt is just a bad dream. Wili nodded faintly at him. Yes, Jeremy is still alive, or at least will someday live again. You did not murder him, Mike.

  In the sky around the Tradetower, the helicopters swept in close to the silver curve of the bobble. From further up they could hear the whine of the fixed-wing patrol spreading in greater and greater circles around the Enclave. They had stepped on a hornets’ nest and now those hornets were doing their best to decide what had happened and to deal with the enemy. Finally, the Jonque chief turned to the Ndelante sabio. “Can your people get us out from under all this?”

 
; The black cocked his head, listening to his earphone, then replied, “Not till dark. We’ve got a tunnel head about two hundred meters from here, but the way they’re patrolling, we probably couldn’t make it. Right after sunset, before things cool off enough for their heat eyes to work good, that’ll be the best time to sneak back. Till then we should stay away from windows and keep quiet. The last few months they’ve improved. Their snooper gear is almost as good as ours now.”

  The lot of them—blacks, Jonques, and Lu—moved carefully back into the hallway. Wili left his equipment sitting near the edge of the balcony; it was too risky to retrieve it just now. Fortunately, its camouflage bag resembled the nondescript rubble that surrounded it.

  Wili sat with his back against the door. No one was going to get to the generator without his knowing it.

  From in here, the sounds of the Enclave were fainter, but soon he heard something ominous and new: the rattle and growl of tracked vehicles.

  After they were settled and lookouts were posted at the nearest peepholes, the sabio sat beside Wili and smiled. “And now, young friend, we have hours to sit, time for you to tell us just what you meant when you said that the bobble will burst, and that time stops inside.” He spoke quietly, and—considering the present situation—it was a reasonable question. But Wili recognized the tone. On the other side of the hallway, the Alcalde’s man leaned forward to listen. There was just enough light in the musty hallway for Wili to see the faint smile on Lu’s face.

  He must mix truth and lies just right. It would be a long afternoon.

  28

  The hallway was brighter now. As the sun set, its light came nearly horizontally through the rips near the ceiling and splashed bloody light down upon them. The air patrols had spread over a vast area, and the nearest tanks were several thousand meters away; Ebenezer’s man had coordinated a series of clever decoy operations—the sort of thing Wili had seen done several times against the Jonques.

  “¡Del Nico Dio!” It was almost a shriek. The lookout at the end of the hall jumped down from his perch. “It’s happening. Just as he said. It’s flying!”

  Ebenezer’s sabio made angry shushing motions, but the group moved quickly to the opening, the sabio and chief Jonque forcing their way to the front. Wili crawled between them and looked through one of the smaller chinks in the plaster and concrete: The evening haze was red. The sun sat half-dissolved in the deeper red beyond the Enclave towers.

  And hanging just above the skyline was a vast new moon, a dark sphere edged by a crescent of red: The bobble had risen off the top of the Tradetower and was slowly drifting with the evening breeze toward the west.

  “Mother of God,” the Alcalde’s man whispered to himself. Even with understanding, this was hard to grasp. The bobble, with its cargo of afternoon air, was lighter than the evening air around it, the largest hot-air balloon in history. And sailing into the sunset with it went the Tinker hostages. The noise of aircraft came louder, as the hornets returned to their nest and buzzed around this latest development. One of the insects strayed too close to the vast smooth arc. Its rotor shattered; the helicopter fell away, turning and turning.

  The sabio glanced down at Wili. “You’re sure it will come inland?”

  “Yes. Uh, Naismith studied the wind patterns very carefully. It’s just a matter of time—weeks at most—before it grounds in the mountains. The Authority will know soon enough—along with the rest of the world—the secret of the bobbles, but they won’t know just when this one will burst. If the bobble ends up far enough away, the other problems we are going to cause them will be so big they won’t post a permanent force around it. Then, when it finally bursts…”

  “I know, I know. When it finally bursts we’re there to rescue them. But ten years is long to sleep.”

  It would actually be one year. That had been one of Wili’s little lies. If Lu and the Peacers didn’t know the potential for short-lived bobbles, then—

  It suddenly occurred to him that Della Lu was no longer in his sight. He turned quickly from the wall and looked down the hallway. But she and Rosas were still there, sitting next to a couple of Jonque goons who had not joined the crush at the peephole. “Look, I think we should try to make it back to the tunnel now. The Peacers have plenty of new problems, and it’s pretty dark down in the street.”

  Ebenezer’s man smiled. “Now, what would you know about evading armed men in the Basin?” More than ever Wili was sure the sabio recognized him, but for now the other was not going to make anything of it. He turned to the Jonque chief. “The boy’s probably right.”

  Wili retrieved the generator, and one by one they descended via the rope sling to the ruined garages below the apartment house. The last man slipped the rope from its mooring. The blacks spent several minutes removing all ground-level signs of their presence. The Ndelante were careful and skilled. There were ways of covering tracks in the ruins, even of restoring the patina of dust in ancient rooms. For forty years the depths of the LA Basin had been the ultimate fortress of the Ndelante; they knew their own turf.

  Outside, the evening cool had begun. Two of the sabio’s men moved out ahead, and another two or three brought up the rear. Several carried night scopes. It was still light enough to read by; the sky above the street was soft red with occasional patches of pastel blue. But it was darkening quickly, and the others were barely more than shadows. Wili could sense the Jonques’ uneasiness. Being caught at nightfall deep in the ruins would normally be the death of them. The high-level conniving between the Ndelante and the bosses of Aztlán did not ordinarily extend down to these streets.

  Their point men led them through piles of fallen concrete; they never actually stepped out into the open street. Wili hitched up his pack and fell back slightly, keeping Rosas and Lu ahead of him. Behind him, he could hear the Jonque chief and—much quieter—Ebenezer’s sabio.

  Out of the buzzing of aircraft, the sound of a single helicopter came louder and louder. Wili and the others froze, then crouched down in silence. The craft was closer, closer. The thwupthwupthwup of its rotors was loud enough so that they could almost feel the overpressures. It was going to pass directly over them. This sort of thing had happened every twenty minutes or so during the afternoon, and should be nothing to worry about. Wili doubted if even observers on the rooftops could have spotted them here below. But this time:

  As the copter passed over the roofline a flash of brilliant white appeared ahead of Wili. Lu! He had been worried she was smuggling some sophisticated homer, and here she was betraying them with a simple handflash!

  The helicopter passed quickly across the street. But even before its rotor tones changed and it began to circle back, Wili and most of the Ndelante were already heading for deeper hidey-holes. Seconds later, when the aircraft passed back over the street, it really was empty. Wili couldn’t see any of the others, but it sounded as if the Jonques were still rushing madly about, trying to find some way out of the jagged concrete jungle. A monstrously bright light swept back and forth along the street, throwing everything into stark blacks and whites.

  As Wili had hoped, the searchlight was followed seconds later by rocket fire. The ground rose and fell under him. Faint behind the explosions, Wili could hear shards of metal and stone snicking back and forth between concrete piles. There were screams.

  Heavy dust rose from the ruins. This was his best chance: Wili scuttled back a nearby alley, ignoring the haze and the falling rocks. Another half minute and the enemy would be able to see clearly again, but by then Wili (and probably the rest of the Ndelante) would be a hundred meters away, and moving under much greater cover than he had right here.

  An observer might think he ran in mindless panic, but in fact Wili was very careful, was watching for any sign of a Ndelante trail. For more than forty years the Ndelante had been the de facto rulers of these ruins. They used little of it for living space, but they mined most of the vast Basin, and everywhere they went they left subtle improvements—escape hatc
hes, tunnels, food caches—that weren’t apparent unless one knew their marking codes. After less than twenty meters, Wili had found a marked path, and now ran at top speed through terrain that would have seemed impassable to anyone standing more than a few meters away. Some of the others were escaping along the same path: Wili could hear at least two pairs of feet some distance behind him, one heavy Jonque feet, the others barely audible. He did not slow down; better that they catch up.

  The chopper pilot had lifted out of the space between the buildings and fired no more. No doubt the initial attack had not been to kill, but to jar his prey into the open. It was a decent strategy against any but the Ndelante.

  The pilot flew back and forth now, lobbing stun bombs. They were so far away that Wili could barely feel them. In the distance, he heard the approach of more aircraft. Some of them sounded big. Troop carriers. Wili kept running. Till the enemy actually landed, it was better to run than to search for a good hiding place. He might even be able to get out of the drop area.

  Five minutes later, Wili was nearly a kilometer away. He moved through a burned-out retail area, from cellar to cellar, each connected to the next by subtle breaks in the walls. His equipment pack had come loose and the whole thing banged painfully against him when he tried to move really fast. He stopped briefly to tighten the harness, but that only made the straps cut into his shoulders.

  In one sense he was lost: He had no idea where he was, or how to get to the pickup point the Ndelante and the Jonques had established. On the other hand, he knew which direction he should run from, and—if he saw them—he could recognize the clues that would lead to some really safe hole that the Ndelante would look into after all the fuss died down.