by Vernor Vinge
From orbit he saw golden morning spread across Northern California. Livermore Valley sparkled with a false dew that was really dozens—hundreds—of bobbles. Unaided humans would need many versions of this picture to understand what Wili saw at once.
There were ground troops a couple of thousand meters east of him. They had fanned out, obviously didn’t know where he was. The tricky course he had given Allison would keep him safe from them for at least five minutes.
Jets had been diverted from the north side of the Valley. He watched them crawl across the landscape at nearly four hundred meters per second. They were the real threat. They could see him before the capacitors were charged. There was no way to divert them or to trick them. The pilots had been instructed to use their own eyes, to find the crawler, and to destroy it. Even if they failed in the last, they would report an accurate position—and the Livermore bobbler would get him.
He burst-transmitted a last message to the Tinker teams in the Valley: Paul’s voice announced the imminent bobbling and assigned new missions. Because of Wili’s deceptions, their casualties had been light; that might change now. He told them what he had learned about Renaissance and redirected them against the missile sites he had detected. He wondered fleetingly how many would feel betrayed to learn of Renaissance, would wish that he—Paul—would stop the assault. But if Paul were really here, if Paul could think as fast as Wili, he’d’ve done the same.
He must end the Peace so quickly that Renaissance died, too.
Wili passed from one satellite to another, till he was looking down on Beijing at midnight. Without Wili’s close supervision, the fighting had been bloodier: There were bobbles scattered through the ruins of the old city, but there were bodies, too, bodies that would not live again. The Chinese Tinkers had to get in very close; they did not have a powerful bobbler or the Wili/Jill processor. Even so, they might win. Wili had guided three teams to less than one thousand meters of the Beijing bobbler. He sent his last advice, showing them a transient gap in the defense.
Messages sent or automatically sending. Now there was only his own mission. The mission all else depended on.
From high above, Wili saw an aircraft sweep south over the alley. (Its boom crashed around the carrier, but Wili’s own senses were locked out and he barely felt it.) The pilot must have seen him. How long till the follow-up bomb run?
The Authority’s great bobbler was four thousand meters north of him. He and Jill had made a deadly minimax decision in deciding on that range. He “looked at” the capacitors. They were still ten seconds from the overcharge he needed. Ten seconds? The charge rate was declining as charge approached the necessary level. Their haywired interface to the crawler’s electrical generator was failing. Extrapolation along the failure curve: thirty seconds to charge.
The other aircraft had been alerted. Wili saw courses change. More extrapolation: It would be very, very close. He could save himself by self-bobbling, the simplest of all generations. He could save himself and lose the war.
Wili watched in an omniscient daze, watched from above as death crept down on the tiny crawler.
Something itched. Something demanded attention. He relaxed his hold, let resources be diverted . . . and Jill’s image floated up.
Wili! Go! You can still go! Jill flooded him with a last burst of data, showing that all processes would proceed automatically to completion. Then she cut him off.
And Wili was alone in the crawler. He looked around, vision blurred, suddenly aware of sweat and diesel fuel and turbine noise. He groped for his harness release, then rolled off onto the floor. He barely felt the scalp connector tear free. He came to his feet and blundered out the rear doors into the sunlight.
He didn’t hear the jets’ approach.
______
Paul moaned. Allison couldn’t tell if he was trying to say something or was simply responding to the rough handling. She got under his weight and stagger-ran across the alley toward a stonewalled patio. The gate was open; there was no lock. Allison kicked aside a child’s tricycle and laid Paul down behind the waist-high wall. Should be safe from shrapnel here, except—she glanced over her shoulder at the glass wall that stretched across the interior side of the patio. Beyond was carpeting, elegant furniture. That glass could come showering down if the building got hit. She started to pull Paul behind the marble table that dominated the patio.
“No! Wili. Did he make it?” He struggled weakly against her hands.
The sky to the north showed patches of smoke, smudged exhaust trails, a vagrant floating bobble where someone had missed a target—but that was all. Wili had not acted; the crawler sat motionless, its engines screaming. Somewhere else she heard treads.
The boom was like a wall of sound smashing over them. Windows on both sides of the street flew inward. Allision had a flickering impression of the aircraft as it swept over the street. Her attention jerked back to the sky, scanned. A dark gnat hung there, surrounded by the dirty aureole of its exhaust. There was no sound from this follow-up craft; it was coming straight in. The length of the street—and the crawler—would be visible to it. She watched it a moment, then dived to the tiled patio deck next to Paul.
Scarcely time to swear, and the ground smashed up into them.
Allision didn’t lose consciousness, but for a long moment she didn’t really know where she was. A girl in a gingham dress leaned over an old man, seeing red spread across a beautiful tile floor.
A million garbage cans dropped and rattled around her.
Allison touched her face, felt dust and untorn skin. The blood wasn’t hers.
How bad was he hurt?
The old man looked up at her. He brushed her hands away with some last manic strength. “Allison. Did we win . . . please? After all these years, to get that bastard Avery.” His speech slurred into mumbling.
Allison came to her knees and looked over the wall. The street was in ruins, riddled with flying debris. The crawler had been hit, its front end destroyed. Fire spread crackling from what was left of its fuel. Under the treads something else burned green and violent. And the sky to the north . . .
. . . was as empty as before. No bobble stood where she knew the Peace generator was hidden. The battle might yet go on for hours, but Allison knew that they had lost. She looked down at the old man and tried to smile. “It’s there, Paul. You won.”
41
“We got one of them, sir. Ground troops have brought in three survivors. They’re—”
“From the nearer one? Where is that second crawler?” Hamilton Avery leaned over the console, his hands pale against the base of the keyboard.
“We don’t know, sir. We have three thousand men on foot in that area. We’ll have it in a matter of minutes, even if tac air doesn’t get it first. About the three we picked—”
Avery angrily cut the connection. He sat down abruptly, chewed at his lip. “He’s getting closer, I know it. Everything we do seems a victory, but is really a defeat.” He clenched his fists, and Delia could imagine him screaming to himself: What can we do? She had seen administrators go over the edge in Mongolia, frozen into inaction or suicidal overreaction. The difference was that she had been the boss in Mongolia. Here . . .
Avery opened his fists with visible effort. “Very well. What is the status of Beijing? Is the enemy any closer than before?”
General Maitland spoke to his terminal. He looked at the response in silence. Then, “Director, we have lost comm with them. The recon birds show the Beijing generator has been bobbled. . . .” He paused as though waiting for some explosion from his boss. But Avery was composed again. Only the faint glassiness of his stare admitted his terror.
“—and of course that could be faked, too,” Avery said quietly. “Try for direct radio confirmation . . . from someone known to us.” Maitland nodded, started to turn away. “And, General. Begin the computations to bobble us up.” He absently caressed the Renaissance trigger that sat on the table before him. “I can tell you the c
oordinates.”
Maitland relayed the order to try for shortwave communication with Beijing. But he personally entered the coordinates as Avery spoke them. As Maitland set up the rest of the program, Delia eased into a chair behind the Director. “Sir, there is no need for this.”
Hamilton Avery smiled his old, genteel smile, but he wasn’t listening to her. “Perhaps not, my dear. That is why we are checking for confirmation from Beijing.” He flipped open the Renaissance box, revealing a key pad. A red light began blinking on the top. Avery fiddled with a second cover, which protected some kind of button. “Strange. When I was a child, people talked about ‘pushing the button’ as though there was a magic red button that could bring nuclear war. I doubt if ever power was just so concentrated . . . But here I have almost exactly that, Delia. One big red button. We’ve worked hard these last few months to make it effective. You know, we really didn’t have that many nukes before. We never saw how they might be necessary to preserve the Peace. But if Beijing is really gone, this will be the only way.”
He looked into Delia’s eyes. “It won’t be so bad, my dear. We’ve been very selective. We know the areas where our enemy is concentrated; making them uninhabitable won’t have any lasting effect on the race.”
To her left, Maitland had completed his preparations. The display showed the standard menu she had seen in his earlier operations. Even by Authority standards, it looked old-fashioned. Quite likely the control software was unchanged from the first years of the Authority.
Maitland had overridden all the fail-safes. At the bottom of the display, outsized capitals blinked:
WARNING! THE ABOVE TARGETS
ARE FRIENDLY. CONTINUE?
A simple “yes
“We have shortwave communication with Peace forces at Beijing, Director.” The voice came unseen, but it was recognizably Maitland’s chief aide. “These are troops originally from the Vancouver franchise. Several of them are known to people here. At least we can verify these are really our men.”
“And?” Avery asked quietly.
“The center of the Beijing Enclave is bobbled, sir. They can see it from where their positions. The fighting has pretty much ended. Apparently the enemy is lying low, waiting for our reaction. Your instructions are requested.”
“In a minute,” Avery smiled. “General, you may proceed as planned.” That minute would be more than fifty years in the future.
“yes
Maitland set up the last target, and the console showed:
FINAL WARNING! PROJECTION
WILL SELF-ENCLOSE. CONTINUE?
Now Hamilton Avery was punching an elaborate pass-code into his red trigger box. In seconds, he would issue the command that would poison sections of continents. Then Maitland could bobble them into a future made safe for the “Peace.”
The shock in Delia’s face must finally have registered on him. “I am not a monster, Miss Lu. I have never used more than the absolute minimum force necessary to preserve the Peace. After I launch Renaissance, we will bobble up, and then we will be in a future where the Peace can be reestablished. And though it will be an instant to us, I assure you I will always feel the guilt for the price that had to be paid.” He gestured at his trigger box. “It is a responsibility I take solely upon myself.”
That’s damned magnanimous of you. She wondered fleetingly if hard-boiled types like Delia Lu and Hamilton Avery always ended up like this—rationalizing the destruction of all they claimed to protect.
Maybe not. Her decision had been building for weeks, ever since she had learned of Renaissance. It had dominated everything after her talk with Mike. Delia glanced around the room, wished she had her sidearm: She would need it during the next few minutes. She touched her throat and said clearly, “See you later, Mike.”
There was quick understanding on Avery’s face, but he didn’t have a chance. With her right hand she flicked the red box down the table, out of Avery’s reach. Almost simultaneously, she smashed Maitland’s throat with the edge of her left. Turning, she leaned over the general’s collapsing form—and typed:
“yes
42
Wili moped across the lawn, his hands stuck deep in his pockets, his face turned downward. He kicked up little puffs of dust where the grass was brownest. The new tenants were lazy about watering, or else maybe the irrigation pipes were busted.
This part of Livermore had been untouched by the fighting; the losers had departed peaceably enough, once they saw bobbles sprout over their most important resources. Except for the dying grass, it was beautiful here, the buildings as luxurious as Wili could imagine. When they turned on full electric power, it made the Jonque palaces in LA look like hovels. And most anything here—the aircraft, the automobiles, the mansions—could be his.
Just my luck. I get everything I ever wanted, and then I lose the people that are more important. Paul had decided to drop out. It made sense and Wili was not angry about it, but it hurt anyway. Wili thought back to their meeting, just half an hour before. He had guessed the moment he’d seen Paul’s face. Wili had tried to ignore it, had rushed into the subject he’d thought they were to talk about. “I just talked to those doctors we flew in from France, Paul. They say my insides are as normal as anything. They measured me every way”—he had undergone dozens of painful tests, massive indignities compared to what had been done to him at Scripps, and yet much less powerful. The French doctors were not bioscientists, but simply the best medical staff the European director would tolerate—“and they say I’m using my food, that I’m growing fast.” He grinned. “Bet I will be more than one meter seventy.”
Paul leaned back in his chair and returned the smile. The old man was looking good himself. He’d had a bad concussion during the battle, and for a while the doctors weren’t sure he would survive. “I’ll bet too. It’s exactly what I’d been hoping. You’re going to be around for a long time, and the world’s going to be a better place for it. And . . .” His voice trailed off, and he didn’t meet the boy’s look. Wili held his breath, praying Dio his guess wouldn’t be correct. They sat in silence for an awkward moment. Wili looked around, trying to pretend that nothing of import was to be said. Naismith had appropriated the office of some Peacer bigwig. It had a beautiful view of the hills to the south, yet it was plainer than most, almost as if it had been designed for the old man all along. The walls were unadorned, though there was a darker rectangle of paint on the wall facing Paul’s desk. A picture had hung there once. Wili wondered about that.
Finally Naismith spoke. “Strange. I think I’ve done penance for blindly giving them the bobble in the first place. I have accomplished everything I dreamed of all these years since the Authority destroyed the world. . . . And yet—Wili, I’m going to drop out, fifty years at least.”
“Paul! Why?” It was said now, and Wili couldn’t keep the pain from his voice.
“Many reasons. Many good reasons.” Naismith leaned forward intently. “I’m very old, Wili. I think you’ll see many from my generation go. We know the bioscience people in stasis at Scripps have ways of helping us.”
“But there are others. They can’t be the only ones with the secret.”
“Maybe. The bioscience types are surfacing very slowly. They can’t be sure if humanity will accept them, even though the plagues are decades passed.”
“Well, stay. Wait and see.” Wili cast wildly about, came up with
a reason that might be strong enough. “Paul, if you go, you may never see Allison again. I thought—”
“You thought I loved Allison, that I hated the Authority on her account as much as any.” His voice went low. “You are right, Wili, and don’t you ever tell her that! The fact that she lives, that she is just as I always remembered her, is a miracle that goes beyond all my dreams. But she is another reason I must leave, and soon. It hurts every day to see her; she likes me, but almost as a stranger. The man she knew has died, and I see pity in her more than anything else. I must escape from that.”
He stopped. “There’s something else too. . . . Wili, I wonder about Jill. Did I lose the only one I ever really had? I have the craziest dreams from when I was knocked out. She was trying like hell to bring me back. She seemed as real as anyone . . . and more caring. But there’s no way that program could have been sentient; we’re nowhere near systems that powerful. No person sacrificed her life for us.” The look in his eyes made the sentence a question.
It was a question that had hovered in Wili’s mind ever since Jill had driven him out of the crawler. He thought back. He had known Jill . . . used the Jill program . . . for almost nine months. Her projection had been there when he was sick; she had helped him learn symbiotic programming. Something inside him had always thought her one of his best friends. He tried not to guess how much stronger Paul’s feelings must be. Wili remembered Jill’s hysterical reaction when Paul had been hurt; she had disappeared from the net for minutes, only coming back at the last second to try to save Wili. And Jill was complex, complex enough that any attempt at duplication would fail; part of her “identity” came from the exact pattern of processor interconnection that had developed during her first years with Paul.
Yet Wili had been inside the program; he had seen the limitations, the inflexibilities. He shook his head. “Yes, Paul. The Jill program was not a person. Maybe someday we’ll have systems big enough, but . . . Jill was j-just a s-simulation.” And Wili believed what he was saying. So why were they sitting here with tears on their eyes?
