Across Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  Their quixotic conspiracy wasn't winning, but, by God, the enemy knew it was in a fight. Take the TV: The first couple of weeks it seemed that there were hardly any stations, and those were mostly run by families. The Moraleses spent most of their viewing time with old recordings. Then, after the L.A. rescue, the Authority had begun around-the-clock saturation broadcasting similar to twentieth century Soviet feeds, and as little watched: It was all news, all stories about the heinous Tinkers and the courageous measures being taken by "your Peace Authority" to make the world safe from the Tinker threat.

  Paul called those "measures" the Silvery Pogrom. Every day there were more pictures of convicted Tinkers and fellow-travelers disappearing into the bobble farm the Authority had established at Chico. Ten years, the announcers said; and those bobbles would burst and the felons would have their cases reviewed. Meantime, their property would also be held in stasis. Never in history, the audience was assured, had criminals and monsters been treated with more firmness or more fairness. Allison knew bullshit when she heard it; if she hadn't been bobbled herself, she would have assumed that it was a cover for extermination.

  It was a strange feeling to have been present at the founding of the present order, and to be alive now, fifty years later. This great Authority, ruling the entire world - except now Europe and Africa -had grown from nothing more than that third-rate company Paul worked for in Livermore. What would have happened if she and Angus and Fred had made their flight a couple of days earlier, in time to return safely with the evidence?

  Allison looked out the mansion's wide windows, into the twilight. Tears didn't come to her eyes anymore when she thought about it, but the pain was still there. If they had gotten back in time, her CO might have listened to Hoehler. They just might have been able to raid the Livermore labs before the brazen takeover that was called the "War" nowadays. And apparently the "War" had been just the beginning of decades of war and plague, now blamed on the losers. Just a couple of days' difference, and the world would not be a near-lifeless tomb, the United States a fading memory. To think that some lousy contractors could have brought down the greatest nation in history!

  She turned back into the room, trying to see the three other conspirators in the dimness. An old man, a skinny kid, and Miguel Rosas. This was the heart of the conspiracy? Tonight, at least, Rosas sounded as pessimistic as she felt.

  "Sure, Paul, your invention will bring them down eventually, but I'm telling you the Tinkers are all going to be dead or bobbled before that happens. The Peacers are moving fast."

  The old man shrugged. "Mike, I think you just need something to panic over. A few weeks back it was the Peacers' recon operation. Wili fixed that - more than fixed it - so now you have to worry about something else." Allison agreed with Mike, but there was truth in Paul's complaint. Mike seemed both haunted and trapped: haunted by what he had done in the past, trapped by his inability to do something to make up for that past. "The Tinkers have simply got to hide out long enough to make more bobblers and im- prove on 'em. Then we can fight back." Paul voice was almost petulant, as though he thought that he had done all the hard work and now the Tinkers were incompetent to carry through with what remained. Sometimes Paul seemed exactly as she remembered him. But other times - like tonight he just seemed old, and faintly befuddled.

  "I'm sorry, Paul, but I think that Mike he is right." The black kid spoke up, his Spanish accent incongruous yet pleasant. The boy had a sharp tongue and a temper to go with it, but when he spoke to Paul-even in contradiction he sounded respectful and diffident. "The Authority will not give us the time to succeed. They have bobbled the Alcalde del Norte himself. Red Arrow Farm is gone; if Colonel Kaladze was hiding there, then he is gone, too." On a clear day, dozens of tiny bobbles could be seen about the skirts of the Vandenberg Dome.

  "But our control of Peacer recon. We should be able to protect large numbers of-" he noticed Wili shaking his head. "What? You don't have the processing power? I thought you -"

  "That's not the big problem, Paul. Jill and I have tried to cover for many of the Tinkers that survived the first bobblings. But see: The first time the Peacers fall on to one of these groups, they will have a contradiction. They will see the satellites telling them something different than what is on the ground. Then our trick is worthless. Already we must remove protection from a couple of the groups we agreed on - they were going to be captured very soon no matter what, Paul," he spoke the last words quickly as he saw the old man straighten in his chair.

  Allison put in, "I agree with Wili. We three may be able to hold out forever, but the Tinkers in California will be all gone in another couple of weeks. Controlling the enemy's comm and recon is an enormous advantage, but it's something they will learn about sooner or later. It's worthless except for short-term goals."

  Paul was silent for along moment. When he spoke again, it sounded like the Paul she had known so long ago, the fellow who never let a problem defeat him. "Okay. Then victory must be our short-term goal.... We'll attack Livermore, and bobble their generator."

  "Paul, you can do that? You can cast a bobble hundreds of kilometers away, just like the Peacers?" From the corner of her eye, Allison saw Wili shake his head.

  "No, but I can do better than in L.A. If we could get Wili and enough equipment to within four thousand meters of the target, he could bobble it."

  "Four thousand meters?" Rosas walked to the open windows. He looked out over the forest, seeming to enjoy the cool air that was beginning to sweep into the room. "Paul, Paul. I know you specialize in the impossible, but... In Los Angeles we needed a gang of porters just to carry the storage cells. A few weeks ago you wouldn't hear of taking a wagon off into the eastern wilderness. Now you want to haul a wagonful of equipment through some of the most open and well-populated country on Earth.

  "And then, if you do get there, all you have to do is get those several tonnes of equipment within four thousand meters of the Peacer generator. Paul, I've been up to the Livermore Enclave. Three years ago. It was police service liaison with the Peacers. They've got enough firepower there to defeat an old-time army, enough aircraft that they don't need satellite pickups. You couldn't get within forty kilometers without an engraved invitation. Four thousand meters range is probably right inside their central compound."

  "There is another problem, Paul," Wili spoke shyly. "I had thought about their generator, too. Someday, I know we must destroy it - and the one in Beijing. But Paul, I can't find it. I mean, the Authority publicity, it gives nice pictures of the generator building at Livermore, but they are fake. I know. Since I took over their communication system, I know everything they say to each other over the satellites. The generator in Beijing is very close to its official place, but the Livermore one is hidden. They never say its place, even in the most secret transmissions."

  Paul slumped in his chair, defeat very obvious. "You're right, of course. The bastards built it in secret. They certainly kept the location secret while the governments were still powerful."

  Allison stared from one to the other and felt crazy laughter creeping up her throat. They really didn't know. After all these years they didn't know. And just minutes before, she had been hurting herself with might-have-beens. The laughter burbled out, and she didn't try to stop it. The others looked at her with growing surprise. Her last mission, perhaps the last recon sortie the USAF ever flew, might yet serve its purpose.

  Finally, she choked down the laughter and told them the cause for joy. "...so if you have a reader, I think we can find it."

  There followed frantic calls for Irma, then even more frantic searches through attic storage for the old disk reader. An hour later, the reader sat on the living room table. It was bulky, gray, the Motorola insignia almost scratched away. Irma plugged it in and coaxed it to life. "It worked fine years ago. We used it to copy all our old disks onto solid storage. It uses a lot of power though; that's one reason we gave it up."

  The reader's screen came to life, a brillian
t glow that lit the whole room. This was the honest light Allison remembered. She had brought her disk pack down, and undone the combination lock. The disk was milspec, but it was commercial format; it should run on the Motorola. She slipped it into the reader. Her fingers danced across the keyboard, customizing off routines on the disk. Everything was so familiar; it was like suddenly being transported back to the before.

  The screen turned white. Three mottled gray disks sat near the middle of the field. She pressed a key and the picture was overlaid with grids and legends.

  Allison looked at the picture and almost started laughing again. She was about to reveal what was probably the most highly classified surveillance technique in the American arsenal. Twelve weeks "before," such an act would have been unthinkable. Now, it was a wonderful opportunity, an opportunity for the murdered past to win some small revenge. "Doesn't look like much, does it?" she said into the silence. "We're looking down at - I should say 'through' -Livermore." The date on the legend was 01JUL97.

  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 aping 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.

  THIRTY-THREE

  "Eat Vandenberg Bananas. They Can't Be Beat." The ban-- ner 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 oc-- casional. 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 to 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 so
me 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.

  Some 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.