by Vernor Vinge
Paul protested. “It’s no ordinary camouflage, it—”
“I know it was a lot of work. You’ve told me Allison and the Moraleses spent two weeks putting it together. I know she and Wili added a few electronic twists that make it even better than it looks. But, Paul”—he sat down and glared at Paul, as if to persuade by the force of his own conviction—“they have other ways. They can interrogate del Norte—or at least his subordinates. That will get them to Ojai. They’ve raided Red Arrow and Santa Ynez and the market towns further north. Apparently the few people—like Kaladze—who really know your location have escaped. But no matter how many red herrings you’ve dropped over the years, they’re eventually going to narrow things down to this part of the country.”
“And there’s Delia Lu,” said Allison.
Mike’s eyes widened, and Wili could see that the comment had almost unhorsed him. Then he seemed to realize that it was not a jibe. “Yes, there’s Lu. I’ve always thought this place must be closer to Santa Ynez than the other trading towns: I laid my share of red herrings on Delia. But she’s very clever. She may figure it out. The point is this: In the near future, they’ll put the whole hunt on this part of California. It won’t be just a plane every other day. If they can spare the people, they might actually do ground sweeps.”
“What are you suggesting, Mike?” Allison again.
“That we move. Take the big wagon, stuff it with all the equipment we need, and move. If we study the search patterns and time it right, I think we could get out of Middle California, maybe to someplace in Nevada. We have to pick a place we can reach without running into people on the way, and it has to be some ways from here; once they find the mansion, they’ll try to trace us. . . . I know, it’ll be risky, but it’s our only chance if we want to last more than another month.”
Now it was Paul’s turn to be upset. “Damn it, we can’t move. Not now. Even if we could bring all the important equipment—which we can’t—it would still be impossible. I can’t afford the time, Mike. The Tinkers need the improvements I’m sending out; they need those bobble generators if they’re going to fight back. If we take a month’s vacation now, the revolution will be lost. We’ll be safe in some hole in Nevada—safe to watch everything we’ve worked for go down the tubes.” He thought a moment and came up with another objection. “Hell, I bet we couldn’t even keep in touch with the Tinkers afterwards. I’ve spent years putting together untraceable communication links from here. A lot of it depends on precise knowledge of local terrain and climate. Our comm would make us sitting ducks if we moved.”
Throughout the discussion, Wili sat quietly at the edge of the veranda, where the sunlight came through the camouflage mesh most strongly. In the back of his mind, Jill was providing constant updates on the Authority broadcasts she monitored. From the recon satellites, he knew the location of all aircraft within a thousand kilometers. They might be captured, but they could never be surprised.
This omniscience was little use in the present debate. At one extreme, he “knew” millions of little facts that together formed their situation; at the other, he knew mathematical theories that governed those facts. In between, in matters of judgment, he sensed his incompetence. He looked at Allison. “What do you think? Who is right?”
She hesitated just a moment. “It’s the reconnaissance angle I know.” It was eerie watching Allison. She was Jill granted real-world existence. “If the Peacers are competent, then I don’t see how Mike could be wrong.” She looked at Naismith. “Paul, you say the Tinkers’ revolt will be completely suppressed if we take time out to move. I don’t know; that seems a much iffier contention. Of course, if you’re both right, then we’ve had the course. . . .” She gazed up at the dappled sunlight coming through the green-brown mesh. “You know, Paul, I almost wish you and Wili hadn’t trashed the Authority’s satellite system.”
“What?” Wili said abruptly. That sabotage was his big contribution. Besides, he hadn’t “trashed” the system, only made it inaccessible to the Authority. “They would have found us long ago with their satellites, if I had not done that.”
Allison held up her hand. “I believe it. From what I’ve seen, they don’t have the resources or the admin structure for wide-air recon. I just meant that given time we could have sabotaged their old comm and recon system—in such a way that the Peacers would think it was still working.” She smiled at the astonishment on their faces. “These last weeks, I’ve been studying what you know about their old system. It’s really the automated USAF comm and recon scheme. We had it fully in place right before . . . everything blew up. In theory it could handle all our command and control functions. All you needed was the satellite system, the ground receivers and computers, and maybe a hundred specialists. In theory, it meant we didn’t need air recon or land lines. In theory. OMBP was always twisting our arm to junk our other systems and rely on the automated one instead. They could cut our budget in half that way.”
She grinned. “Of course we never went along. We needed the other systems. Besides, we knew how fragile the automated system was. It was slick, it was thorough, but one or two rotten apples on the maintenance staff could pervert it, generate false interpretations, fake communications. We demanded the budget for the other systems that would keep it honest.
“Now it’s obvious that the Peacers just took it over. They either didn’t know or didn’t care about the dangers; in any case, I bet they didn’t have the resources to run the other systems the Air Force could. If we could have infiltrated a couple people into their technical staff, we could be making them see whatever we wanted. They’d never find us out here.” She shrugged. “But you’re right; at this point it’s just wishful thinking. It might have taken months or years to do something like that. You had to get results right away.”
“Damn,” said Paul. “All those years of clever planning, and I never . . .”
“Oh, Paul,” she said softly. “You are a genius. But you couldn’t know everything about everything. You couldn’t be a one-man revolution.”
“Yeah,” said Mike. “And he couldn’t convince the rest of us that there was anything worth revolting against.”
Wili just stared, his eyes wide, his jaw slack. It would be harder than anything he had done before but . . . “Maybe you do not need spies, Allison. Maybe we can. . . . I’ve got to think about this. We’ve still got days. True, Mike?”
“Unless we have real bad luck. With good luck we might have weeks.”
“Good. Let me think. I must think. . . .” He stood up and walked slowly indoors. Already the veranda, the sunlight, the others were forgotten.
It was not easy. In the months before he learned to use the mind connect, it would have been impossible; even a lifetime of effort would not have brought the necessary insights. Now creativity was in harness with his processors. He knew what he wanted to do. In a matter of hours he could test his ideas, separate false starts from true.
The recon problem was the most important—and probably the easiest. Now he didn’t want to block Peacer reception. He wanted them to receive . . . lies. A lot of preprocessing was done aboard the satellites; just a few bytes altered here and there might be enough to create false perceptions on the ground. Somehow he had to break into those programs, but not in the heavy-handed way he had before. Afterward, the truth would be received by them alone. The enemy would see what Paul wanted them to see. Why, they could protect not just themselves, but many of the Tinkers as well!
Days passed. The answers came miraculously fast, and perilously slow. At the edge of his consciousness, Wili knew Paul was helping with the physics, and Allison was entering what she knew about the old USAF comm/recon system. It all helped, but the hard inner problem—how to subvert a system without seeming to and without any physical contact—remained his alone.
They finally tested it. Wili took his normal video off a satellite over Middle California, analyzed it quickly, and sent back subtle sabotage. On the next orbit, he simulate
d Peacer reception: A small puff of synthetic cloud appeared in the picture, just where he had asked. The satellite processors could keep up the illusion until they received coded instructions to do otherwise. It was a simple change. Once operational, they could make more complicated alterations: Certain vehicles might not be reported on the roads, certain houses might become invisible.
But the hard part had been done.
“Now all we have to do is let the Peacers know their recon birds are ‘working’ again,” said Allison when he showed them his tests. She was grinning from ear to ear. At first Wili had wondered why she was so committed to the Tinker cause; everything she was loyal to had been dead fifty years. The Tinkers didn’t even exist when her orbiter was bobbled. But it hadn’t taken him long to understand: She was like Paul. She blamed the Peacers for taking away the old world. And in her case, that was a world fresh in memory. She might not know anything about the Tinkers, but her hate for the Authority was as deep as Paul’s.
“Yeah,” said Paul. “Wili could just return the comm protocols to their original state. All of a sudden the Peacers would have a live system again. But even as stupid as they are, they’d suspect something. We have to do this so they think that somehow they have solved the problem. Hmm. I’ll bet Avery still has people working on this even now.”
“Okay,” said Wili. “I fix things so the satellites will not start sending to them until they do a complete recompile of their ground programs.”
Paul nodded. “That sounds perfect. We might have to wait a few more days, but—”
Allison laughed. “—But I know programmers. They’ll be happy to believe their latest changes have fixed the problem.”
Wili smiled back. He was already imagining how similar things could be done to the Peacer communication system.
31
War had returned to the planet. Hamilton Avery read the Peace Authority News Service article and nodded to himself. The headline and the following story hit just the right note: For decades, the world had been at peace, thanks to the Authority and the cooperation of peace-loving individuals around the world. But now—as in the early days, when the bioscience clique had attempted its takeover—the power lust of an evil minority had thrown the lives of humankind into jeopardy. One could only pray that the ultimate losses would not be as great as those of the War and the plagues.
The news service story didn’t say all this explicitly. It was targeted for high tech regions in the Americas and China and concentrated on “objective” reporting of Tinker atrocities and the evidence that the Tinkers were building energy weapons—and bobble generators. The Peace hadn’t tried to cover up that last development: A four-hundred-meter bobble floating through the skies of LA is a bit difficult to explain, much less cover up.
Of course, these stories wouldn’t convince the Tinkers themselves, but they were a minority in the population. The important thing was to keep other citizens—and the national militias—from joining the enemy.
The comm chimed softly. “Yes?”
“Sir, Director Gerrault is on the line again. He sounds very . . . upset.”
Avery stifled a smile. The comm was voice-only, but even when alone, Avery tried to disguise his true feelings. “Director” Gerrault indeed! There might still be a place for that pupal Bonaparte in the organization, but hardly as a Director. Best to let him hang a few hours more. “Please report to Monsieur Gerrault—again—that the emergency situation here prevents my immediate response. I’ll get to him as soon as humanly possible.”
“Uh, yes sir. . . . Agent Lu is down here. She also wishes to see you.”
“That’s different. Send her right up.”
Avery leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. Beyond the clear glass of the window wall, the lands around Livermore spread away in peace and silence. In the near distance—yet a hundred meters beneath his tower—were the black-and-ivory buildings of the modern centrum, each one separated from the others by green parkland. Farther away, near the horizon, the golden grasses of summer were broken here and there by clusters of oaks. It was hard to imagine such peace disrupted by the pitiful guerrilla efforts of the world’s Tinkers.
Poor Gerrault. Avery remembered his boast of being the industrious ant who built armies and secret police while the American and Chinese Directors depended on the people’s good will and trust. Gerrault had spread garrisons from Oslo to Capetown, from Dublin to Szczecin. He had enough troopers to convince the common folk that he was just another tyrant. When the Tinkers finally got Paul Hoehler’s toy working, the people and the governments had not hesitated to throw in with them. And then . . . and then Gerrault had discovered that his garrisons were not nearly enough. Most were now overrun, not so much by the enemy’s puny bobble generators, as by all the ordinary people who no longer believed in the Authority. At the same time, the Tinkers had moved against the heart of Gerrault’s operation in Paris. Where the European Director’s headquarters once stood, there was now a simple monument: a three-hundred-meter silver sphere. Gerrault had gotten out just before the debacle, and was now skulking about in the East European deserts, trying to avoid the Teuton militia, trying to arrange transportation to California or China. It was a fitting end to his tyranny, but it was going to be one hell of a problem retaking Europe after the rest of the Tinkers were put down.
There was a muted knock at the door, and Avery pressed “open,” then stood with studied courtesy as Delia Lu stepped into the room. He gestured to a comfortable chair near the end of his desk, and they both sat.
Week by week his show of courtesy toward this woman was less an act. He had come to realize that there was no one he trusted more than her. She was as competent as any man in his top departments, and there was a loyalty about her—not a loyalty to Avery personally, he realized, but to the whole concept of the Peace. Outside of the old-time Directors, he had never seen this sort of dedication. Nowadays, Authority middle-management was cynical, seemed to think that idealism was the affliction of fools and low-level flunkies. And if Delia Lu was faking her dedication, even in that she was a world champion; Avery had forty years of demonstrated success in estimating others’ characters.
“How is your arm?”
Lu clicked the light plastic cast with a fingernail. “Getting well slowly. But I can’t complain. It was a compound fracture. I was lucky I didn’t bleed to death. . . . You wanted my estimate of enemy potential in the Americas?”
Always business. “Yes. What can we expect?”
“I don’t know this area the way I did Mongolia, but I’ve talked with your section chiefs and the franchise owners.”
Avery grinned to himself. Between staff optimism and franchise-owner gloom she thought to find the truth. Clever.
“The Authority has plenty of good will in Old Mexico and America-central. Those people never had it so good, they don’t trust what’s left of their governments, and they have no large Tinker communities. Chile and Argentina we are probably going to lose: They have plenty of people capable of building generators from the plans that Hoehler broadcast. Without our satellite net we can’t give our people down there the comm and recon support they need to win. If the locals want to kick us out badly enough, they’ll be able—”
Avery held up a hand. “Our satellite problems have been cleared up.”
“What? Since when?”
“Three days. I’ve kept it a secret within our technical branch, until we were sure it was not just a temporary fix.”
“Hmm. I don’t trust machines that choose their own time and place to work.”
“Yes. We know now the Tinkers must have infiltrated some of our software departments and slipped tailor-made bugs into our controller codes. Over the last few weeks, the techs ran a bunch of tests, and they’ve finally spotted the changes. We’ve also increased physical security in the programming areas; it was criminally lax before. I don’t think we’ll lose satellite communications again.”
She nodded. “This should make
our counter-work a lot easier. I don’t know whether it will be enough to prevent the temporary loss of the Far South, but it should be a big help in North America.”
She leaned forward. “Sir, I have several recommendations about our local operations. First, I think we should stop wasting our time hunting for Hoehler. If we pick him up along with the other ringleaders, fine. But he’s done about all the harm he—”
“No!” The word broke sharply from his lips. Avery looked over Lu’s head at the portrait of Jackson Avery on the wall. The painting had been done from photos, several years after his father’s death. The man’s dress and haircut were archaic and severe. The gaze from those eyes was the uncompromising, unforgiving one he had seen so many times. Hamilton Avery had forbidden the cult of personality, and nowhere else in Livermore were there portraits of leaders. Yet he, a leader, was the follower of such a cult. For three decades he had lived beneath that picture. And every time he looked at it, he remembered his failure—so many years ago. “No,” he said again, this time in a softer voice. “Second only to protecting Livermore itself, destroying Paul Hoehler must remain your highest priority.
“Don’t you see, Miss Lu? People have said before, ‘That Paul Hoehler, he has caused us a lot of harm, but there is nothing more he can do.’ And yet Hoehler has always done more harm. He is a genius, Miss Lu, a mad genius who has hated us for fifty years. Personally, I think he’s always known that bobbles don’t last forever, and that time stops inside. I think he has chosen now to cause the Tinker revolt because he knew when the old bobbles would burst. Even if we are quick to rebobble the big places like Vandenberg and Langley, there are still thousands of smaller installations that will fall back into normal time during the next few years. Somehow he intends to use the old armies against us.” Avery guessed that Lu’s blank expression was hiding skepticism. Like the other Directors, she just could not believe in Paul Hoehler. He tried a different tack.
