Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  She looked at Paul. “This is what you asked me to look for, Paul. Remember? I don’t think you ever guessed just how good our gear really was.”

  “You mean, those gray things are old Avery’s test projections?”

  She nodded. “Of course, I didn’t know what to make of them at the time. They’re about five hundred meters down. Your employers were very cautious.”

  Wili looked from Allison to Paul and back, bewilderment growing. “But what is it that we are seeing?”

  “We are seeing straight through the Earth. There’s a type of light that shines from some parts of the sky. It can pass through almost anything.”

  “Like x-rays?” Mike said doubtfully.

  “Something like x-rays.” There was no point in talking about massy neutrinos and sticky detectors. They were just words to her, anyway. She could use the gear, and she understood the front-end engineering, but that was all. “The white background is a ‘bright’ region of the sky—seen straight through the Earth. Those three gray things are the silhouettes of bobbles far underground.”

  “So they’re the only things that are opaque to this magic light,” Mike said. “It looks like a good bobble hunter, Allison, but what good was it for anything else?” If you could see through literally everything, then you could see nothing.

  “Oh, there is a very small amount of attenuation. This picture is from a single ‘exposure,’ without any preprocessing. I was astounded to see anything on it. Normally, we’d take a continuous stream of exposures, through varying chords of the Earth’s crust, then compute a picture of the target area. The math is pretty much like medical tomography.” She keyed another command string. “Here’s a sixty-meter map I built from all our observations.”

  Now the display showed intricate detail: A pink surface map of 1997 Livermore lay over the green, blue, and red representation of subsurface densities. Tunnels and other underground installations were obvious lines and rectangles in the picture.

  Wili made an involuntary ahing sound.

  “So if we can figure out which of those things is the secret generator…” said Mike.

  “I think I can narrow it down quite a bit.” Paul stared intently at the display, already trying to identify function in the shapes.

  “No need,” said Allison. “We did a lot of analysis right on the sortie craft. I’ve got a database on the disk; I can subtract out everything the Air Force knew about.” She typed the commands.

  “And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for.” There was an edge of triumph in the flippancy. The rectangles dimmed—all but one on the southwest side of the Livermore Valley.

  “You did it, Allison!” Paul stood back from the display and grabbed her hands. For an instant she thought he would dance her around the room. But after an awkward moment, he just squeezed her hands.

  As he turned back to the display, she asked, “But can we be sure it’s still there? If the Peacers know about this scanning technique—”

  “They don’t. I’m sure of it,” said Wili.

  Paul laughed. “We can do it, Mike! We can do it. Lord, I’m glad you all had the sense to push. I’d have sat here and let the whole thing die.”

  Suddenly the other three were all talking at once.

  “Look. I see answers to your objections, and I have a feeling that once we start to take it seriously we can find even better answers. First off, it’s not impossible to get ourselves and some equipment up there. One horse-drawn wagon is probably enough. Using back roads, and our ‘invisibility,’ we should be able to get at least to Fremont.”

  “And then?” said Allison.

  “There are surviving Tinkers in the Bay Area. We all attack, throw in everything we have. If we do it right, they won’t guess we control their comm and recon until we have our bobbler right on top of them.”

  Mike was grinning now, talking across the conversation at Wili. Allison raised her voice over the others’. “Paul, this has more holes than—”

  “Sure, sure. But it’s a start.” The old man waved his hand airily, as if only trivial details remained. It was a typical Paulish gesture, something she remembered from the first day she met him. The “details” were usually nontrivial, but it was surprising how often his harebrained schemes worked anyway.

  33

  “Eat Vandenberg Bananas. They Can’t Be Beat.” The banner was painted in yellow on a purple background. The letters were shaped as though built out of little bananas. Allison said it was the most asinine thing she had ever seen. Below the slogan, smaller letters spelled, “Andrews Farms, Santa Maria.”

  The signs were draped along the sides of their wagons. A light plastic shell was mounted above the green cargo. At every stop Allison and Paul carefully refilled the evap coolers that hung between the shell and the bananas. The two banana wagons were among the largest horse-drawn vehicles on the highway.

  Mike and the Santa Maria Tinkers had rigged a hidden chamber in the middle of each wagon. The front wagon carried the bobbler and the storage cells; the other contained Wili, Mike, and most of the electronics.

  Wili sat at the front of the cramped chamber and tried to see through the gap in the false cargo. No air was ducted from the coolers while they were stopped. Without it, the heat of the ripening bananas and the summer days could be a killer. Behind him, he felt Mike stir restlessly. They both spent the hottest part of the afternoons trying to nap. They weren’t very successful; it was just too hot. Wili suspected they must stink so bad by now that the Peacers would smell them inside.

  Paul’s stooped figure passed through Wili’s narrow field of view. His disguise was pretty good; he didn’t look anything like the blurred pictures the Peacers were circulating. A second later he saw Allison—in farmer’s-daughter costume—walk by. There was a slight shifting of the load and the monotonous clopclopclop of the team resumed. They pulled out of the rest stop, past a weigh station moldering toward total ruin.

  Wili pressed his face against the opening, both for the air and the view. They were hundreds of kilometers from Los Angeles; he had expected something more exciting. After all, the area around Vandenberg was almost a jungle. But no. Except for a misty stretch just after Salinas, everything stayed dry and hot. Through the hole in the bananas, he could see the ground rising gently ahead of them, sometimes golden grass, sometimes covered with chaparral. It looked just like the Basin, except that the ruins were sparse and only occasional. Mike said there were other differences, but he had a better eye for plants.

  Just then a Peace Authority freighter zipped by in the fast lane. Its roar was surmounted by an arrogant horn blast. The banana wagon rocked in the wash and Wili got a faceful of dust. He sighed and lay back. Five days they had been on the road now. The worst of it was that, inside the wagon, he was out of touch; they couldn’t disguise the antennas well enough to permit a link to the satellite net. And they didn’t have enough power for Jill to run all the time. The only processors he could use were very primitive.

  Every afternoon was like this: hotter and hotter till they couldn’t even pretend to sleep, till they started grumping at each other. He almost wished they would have some problems.

  This afternoon he might get that almost-wish. This afternoon they would reach Mission Pass and Livermore Valley.

  The nights were very different. At twilight Paul and Allison would turn the wagons off Old 101 and drive the tired teams at least five kilometers into the hills. Wili and Mike came out of their hole, and Wili established communication with the satellite net. It was like suddenly coming awake to be back in connection with Jill and the net. They never had trouble finding the local Tinkers’ cache. There were always food and fodder and freshly charged storage cells hidden near a spring or well. He and Paul used those power cells to survey the world through satellite eyes, to coordinate with the Tinkers in the Bay Area and China. They must all be ready at the same time.

  The previous night the four of them had held their last council of war.

  S
ome things that Allison and Mike had worried about turned out to be no problems at all. For instance, the Peacers could have set checkpoints hundreds of kilometers out along all highways leading to Livermore. They hadn’t done so. The Authority obviously suspected an attack on their main base, but they were concentrating their firepower closer in. And their reserve force was chasing Wili’s phantoms in the Great Valley. Now that the Authority had wiped away all public Tinkering, there was nothing obvious for them to look for. They couldn’t harass every produce wagon or labor convoy on the coast.

  But there were other problems that wouldn’t go away. The previous night had been their last chance to look at those from a distance. “Anything after tonight, we’re going to have to play by ear,” Mike had said, stretching luxuriously in the open freedom of the evening.

  Paul grunted at this. The old man sat facing them, his back to the valley. His wide farmer hat drooped down at the sides. “Easy for you to say, Mike. You’re an action type. I’ve never been able to ad lib. I get everything worked out in advance. If something really unexpected happens I’m just no good at real-time flexibility.” It made Wili sad to hear him say this. Paul was becoming indecisive again. Every night, he seemed a little more tired.

  Allison Parker returned from settling the horses and sat down at the fourth corner of their little circle. She took off her bonnet. Her pale hair glinted in the light of their tiny campfire. “Well then, what are the problems we have to solve? You have the Bay Area Tinkers, what’s left of them, all prepared to stage a diversion. You know exactly where the Peacer bobble generator is hidden. You have control of the enemy’s communication and intelligence net—that alone is a greater advantage than most generals ever have.”

  Her voice was firm, matter-of-fact. It gave support by making concrete points rather than comforting noises, Wili thought.

  There was a long silence. A few meters away they could hear the horses munching. Something fluttered through the darkness over their heads. Finally Allison continued. “Or is there doubt that you do control their communications? Do they really trust their satellite system?”

  “Oh, they do. The Authority is spread very thin. About the only innovative thing they’ve ever done was to establish the old Chinese launch site at Shuangcheng. They have close and far reconnaissance from their satellites, as well as communications—both voice and computer.” Wili nodded in agreement. He followed the discussion with only a fraction of his mind. The rest was off managing and updating the hundreds of ruses that must fit together to maintain their great deception. In particular, the faked Tinker movements in the Great Valley had to be wound down, but carefully so that the enemy would not realize they had put thousands of men there for no reason.

  “And Wili says they don’t seem to trust anything that comes over ground links,” Paul continued. “Somehow they have the idea that if a machine is thousands of kilometers off in space, then it should be immune to meddling.” He laughed shortly. “In their own way, those old bastards are as inflexible as I. Oh, they’ll follow the ring in their nose, until the contradictions get too thick. By then we must have won.

  “…But there are so many, many things we have to get straight before that can happen.” The sound of helplessness was back in his voice.

  Mike sat up. “Okay. Let’s take the hardest: how to get from their front door to the bobble generator.”

  “Front door? Oh, you mean the garrison on Mission Pass. Yes, that’s the hardest question. They’ve strengthened that garrison enormously during the last week.”

  “Ha. If they’re like most organizations, that’ll just make them more confused—at least for a while. Look, Paul. By the time we arrive there, the Bay Area Tinkers should be attacking. You told me that some of them have maneuvered north and east of Livermore. They have bobble generators. In that sort of confusion there ought to be lots of ways to get our heavy-duty bobbler in close.”

  Wili smiled in the dark. Just a few days ago, it had been Rosas who’d been down on the plan. Now that they were close, though…

  “Then name a few.”

  “Hell, we could go in just like we are—as banana vendors. We know they import the things.”

  Paul snorted. “Not in the middle of a war.”

  “Maybe. But we can control the moment the real fighting begins. Going in as we are would be a long shot, I admit, but if you don’t want to improvise completely, you should be thinking about various ways things could happen. For instance, we might bobble the Pass and have our people grab the armor that’s left and come down into the Livermore Valley on it with Wili covering for us. I know you’ve thought about that—all day I have to sit on those adapter cables you brought.

  “Paul,” he continued more quietly, “you’ve been the inspiration of several thousand people these last two weeks. These guys have their necks stuck way out. We’re all willing to risk everything. But we need you more than ever now.”

  “Or put less diplomatically—I got us all into this pickle, so I can’t give up on it now.”

  “Something like that.”

  “…Okay.” Paul was silent for a moment. “Maybe we could arrange it so that…” He was quiet again and Wili realized that the old Paul had reasserted himself—was trying to, anyway. “Mike, do you have any idea where this Lu person is now?”

  “No.” The undersheriff’s voice was suddenly tight. “But she’s important to them, Paul. I know that much. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were at Livermore.”

  “Maybe you could talk to her. You know, pretend you’re interested in betraying the Tinker forces we’ve lined up here.”

  “No! What I did had nothing to do with hurting…” His voice scaled down, and he continued more calmly. “I mean, I don’t see what good it would do. She’s too smart to believe anything like that.”

  Wili looked up through the branches of the dry oak that spread over their campsite. The stars should have been beautiful through those branches. Somehow they were more like tiny gleams in a dark-socketed skull. Even if he were never denounced, could poor Mike ever silence his internal inquisitor?

  “Still, as you said about the other, it’s something to think about.” Paul shook his head sharply and rubbed his temples. “I am so tired. Look. I’ve got to talk to Jill about this. I’ll think things out. I promise. But let’s continue in the morning. Okay?”

  Allison reached across as though to touch his shoulder, but Paul was already coming to his feet. He walked slowly away from the campfire. Allison started to get up, then sat down and looked at the other two. “There’s something wrong…There’s something so wrong about Paul making a person out of a thing,” she said softly. Wili didn’t know what to say, and after a moment the three of them spread out their sleeping bags and crawled in.

  Wili’s lay between the cache of storage cells and the wagon with the processors. There should be enough juice for several hours’ operation. He adjusted the scalp connect and wriggled into a comfortable position. He stared up at the half-sinister arches of the oaks and let his mind mesh with the system. He was going into deep connect now, something he avoided when he was with the others. It made his physical self dopey and uncoordinated.

  Wili sensed Paul talking to Jill but did not try to participate.

  His attention drifted to the tiny cameras they had scattered beyond the edges of the camp, then snapped onto a high-resolution picture from above. From there, their oaks were just one of many tiny clumps of darkness on a rolling map of paler grassland. The only light for kilometers around came from the embers that still glowed at the center of their camp. Wili smiled in his mind; that was the true view. The tiny light flicked out, and he looked down on the scene that was being reported to the Peace Authority. Nobody here but us coyotes.

  This was the easiest part of the “high watch.” He did it only for amusement; it was the sort of thing Jill and the satellite processors could manage without his conscious attention.

  Wili drifted out from the individual viewpoints, his atte
ntion expanding to the whole West Coast and beyond, to the Tinkers near Beijing. There was much to do; a good deal more than Mike or Allison—or even Paul—might suspect. He talked to dozens of conspirators. These men had come to expect Paul’s voice coming off Peacer satellites in the middle of the West Coast night. Wili must protect them as he did the banana wagons. They were a weak link. If any of them were captured, or turned traitor, the enemy would immediately know of Wili’s electronic fraud. From them, “Paul’s” instructions and recommendations were spread to hundreds.

  In this state, Wili found it hard to imagine failure. All the details were there before him. As long as he was on hand to watch and supervise, there was nothing that could take him by surprise. It was a false optimism perhaps. He knew that Paul didn’t feel it when he was linked up and helping. But Wili had gradually realized that Paul used the system without becoming part of it. To Paul it was like another programming tool, not like a part of his own mind. It was sad that someone so smart should miss this.

  This real dream of power continued for several hours. As the cells slowly drained, operations were necessarily curtailed. The slow retreat from omniscience matched his own increasing drowsiness. Last thing before losing consciousness and power, he ferreted through Peacer archives and discovered the secret of Della Lu’s family. Now that their cover was blown, they had moved to the Livermore Enclave, but Wili found two other spy families among the ’furbishers and warned the conspirators to avoid them.

  Heat, sweat, dust on his face. Something was clanking and screaming in the distance. Wili lurched out of his daydreaming recollection of the previous evening. Beside him Rosas leaned close to the peephole. A splotch of light danced across his face as he tried to follow what was outside in spite of the swaying progress of the banana wagon.