Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  A month ago he would not have thought of the question. Two weeks ago he couldn’t have answered. In those weeks a theory had been trashed and his new theory born. It was totally untested, but soon, soon that would change. “Uh. My answer’s still guessing, Allison: The Authority technique, the only way I could think of then, is a brute force method. With it, the lifetime is about fifty years. So now I can represent radius or mass as a perturbation series about a fifty-year decay time. The smallest bobbles the Authority made were about ten meters across. They burst first. Your sortie craft was trapped in a thirty-meter bobble; it decayed a little later.” Paul realized he was wandering and tried to force his answer into the mold she must want. He thought a moment. “Vandenberg ought to last fifty-five years.”

  “Five more years. Damn it.” She walked back across the veranda. “I guess you’ll have to win without them. I was wondering why you hadn’t told your friends about me—you haven’t even told them that time stops inside the bobbles. I thought maybe you expected to surprise the Peacers with their long-dead victims suddenly alive.”

  “You’re close. You, me, Wili, and the Morales are the only ones who know. The Authority hasn’t guessed—Wili says they’ve carted your orbiter up to Livermore as if it were full of clues. No doubt the fools think they’ve stumbled on some new conspiracy…But then, I guess it’s not so stupid. I’ll bet you didn’t have any paper records aboard the orbiter.”

  “Right. Even our notepads were display flats. We could trash everything in seconds if we fell among unfriendlies. The fire would leave them with nothing but slagged optical memory. And if they don’t have the old fingerprint archives, they’re not going to identify Fred or Angus.”

  “Anyway, I’ve told the Tinkers to be ready, that I’m going to tell them how to make bobble generators. Even then, I may not say anything about the stasis effect. That’s something that could give us a real edge, but only if we use the knowledge at the right time. I don’t want some leak to blow it.”

  Allison turned as if to pace back to the edge of the veranda, then noticed the display that Paul had been studying. Her hand rested lightly on his shoulder as she leaned over to look at the displays. “Looks like a recon pattern,” she said.

  “Yes. Wili and Jill synthesized it from the satellites we’re tapping. This shows where Authority aircraft have been searching.”

  “For you.”

  “Probably.” He touched the keyboard at the margin of the flat, and the last few days’ activity were displayed.

  “Those bums.” There was no lightness in her voice. “They destroyed our country and then stole our own procedures. Those search patterns look SOP 1997 for medium-level air recon. I bet your damn Peacers never had an original thought in their lives…Hmm. Run that by again.” She knelt to look closely at the daily summaries. “I think today’s sorties were the last for that area, Paul. Don’t be surprised if they move the search several hundred klicks in the next day or two.” In some ways, Allison’s knowledge was fifty years dead and useless—in other ways, it could be just what they needed.

  Paul gave a silent prayer of thanks to Hamilton Avery for having kept the heat on all these years, for having forced Paul Hoehler to disguise his identity and his location through decades when there would have otherwise been no reason to. “If they shift further north, fine. If they come all the way south. Hmm. We’re well hidden, but we wouldn’t last more than a couple days under that sort of scrutiny. Then…” He drew a finger across his throat and made a croaking noise.

  “No way you could put this show on the road, huh?”

  “Eventually we could. Have to start planning for it. I have an enclosed wagon. It may be big enough for the essential equipment. But right now, Allison…Look, we don’t yet have anything but a lot of theories. I’m translating the physics into problems Wili can handle. With Jill, he’s putting them into software as fast as he can.”

  “He seems to spend his time daydreaming, Paul.”

  Naismith shook his head. “Wili’s the best.” The boy had picked up symbiotic programming faster than Paul had ever seen, faster than he’d thought possible. The technique improved almost any programmer, but in Wili’s case, it had turned a first-rank genius into something Naismith could no longer completely understand. Even when he was linked with Wili and Jill, the details of their algorithms were beyond him. It was curious, because off the symbiosis Wili was not that much brighter than the old man. Paul wondered if he could have been that good, too, if he had started young. “I think we’re nearly there, Allison. Based on what we understand now, it ought to be possible to make bobbles with virtually no energy input. The actual hardware should be something Jill can prototype here.”

  Allison didn’t come off her knees. Her face was just centimeters from his. “That Jill program is something. Just the motion holo for the face would have swamped our best array processors…But why make it look like me, Paul? After all those years, did I really mean so much?”

  Naismith tried to think of something flippant and diversionary, but no words came. She looked at him a second longer, and he wondered if she could see the young man trapped within.

  “Oh, Paul.” Then her arms were around him, her cheek next to his.

  She held him as one would hold something very fragile, very old.

  Two days later, Wili was ready.

  They waited till after dark to make the test. In spite of Paul’s claims, Wili wasn’t sure how big the bobble would be, and even if it did not turn out to be a monster, its mirrorlike surface would be visible for hundreds of kilometers to anyone looking in the right direction in the daytime.

  The three of them walked to the pond north of the house. Wili carried the bulky transmitter for his symb link. Near the pond’s edge he set his equipment down and slipped on the scalp connector. Then he lit a candle and placed it on a large tree stump. It was a tiny spot of yellow, bright only because all else was so dark. A gray thread of smoke rose from the glow.

  “We think the bobble, it will be small, but we don’t want to take chances. Jill is going to make its lower edge to snip the top of this candle. Then if we’re wrong, and it is huge—”

  “Then as the night cools, the bobble will rise and be just another floater. By morning it could be many kilometers from here.” Paul nodded. “Clever…”

  He and Allison backed further away, Wili following. From thirty meters, the candle was a flickering yellow star on the stump. Wili motioned them to sit; even if the bobble was super-large, its lower surface would still clear them.

  “You don’t need any power source at all?” said Allison. “The Peace Authority uses fusion generators and you can do it for free?”

  “In principle, it isn’t difficult—once you have the right insight, once you know what really goes on inside the bobbles. And the new process is not quite free. We’re using about a thousand joules here—compared to the gigajoules of the Authority generators. The trade-off is in complexity. If you have a fusion generator backing you up, you can bobble practically anything you can locate. But if you’re like us, with solar cells and small capacitors, then you must finesse it.

  “The projection needs to be supervised, and it’s no ordinary process control problem. This test is about the easiest case: The target is motionless, close by, and we only want a one-meter field. Even so, it will involve—how much crunching do we need, Wili?”

  “She needs thirty seconds initial at about ten billion flops, and then maybe one microsecond for ‘assembly’—at something like a trillion.”

  Paul whistled. A trillion floating-point operations per second! Wili had said he could implement the discovery, but Paul hadn’t realized just how expensive it might be. The gear would not be very portable. And long distance or very large bobbles might not be feasible.

  Wili seemed to sense his disappointment. “We think we can do it with a slower processor. It maybe takes many minutes for the setup, but you could still bobble things that don’t move or are real close.”
/>   “Yeah, we’ll optimize later. Let’s make a bobble, Wili.”

  The boy nodded.

  Seconds passed. Something—an owl—thuttered over the clearing, and the candle went out. Nuts. He had hoped it would stay lit. It would have been a nice demonstration of the stasis effect to have the candle still burning later on when the bobble burst.

  “Well?” Wili said. “What do you think?”

  “You did it!” said Paul. The words were somewhere between a question and an exclamation.

  “Jill did, anyway. I better grab it before it floats away.”

  Wili slipped off the scalp connector and sprinted across the clearing. He was already coming back before Naismith had walked halfway to the tree stump. The boy was holding something in front of him, something light on top and dark underneath. Paul and Allison moved close. It was about the size of a large beach ball, and in its upper hemisphere he could see reflected stars, even the Milky Way, all the way down to the dark of the tree line surrounding the pond. Three silhouettes marked the reflections of their own heads. Naismith extended his hand, felt it slide silkily off the bobble, felt the characteristic bloodwarm heat—the reflection of his hand’s thermal radiation.

  Wili had his arms extended around its girth and his chin pushed down on the top. He looked like a comedian doing a mock weight lift. “It feels like it will shoot from my hands if I don’t hold it every way.”

  “Probably could. There’s no friction.”

  Allison slipped her hand across the surface. “So that’s a bobble. Will this one last fifty years, like the one…Angus and I were in?”

  Paul shook his head. “No. That’s for big ones done the old way. Eventually, I expect to have very flexible control, with duration only loosely related to size. How long does Jill estimate this one will last, Wili?”

  Before the boy could reply, Jill’s voice interrupted from the interface box. “There’s a PANS bulletin coming over the high-speed channels. It puffs out to a thirty-minute program. I’m summarizing:

  “Big story about threat to the Peace. Biggest since Huachuca plaguetime. Says the Tinkers are the villains. Their leaders were captured in La Jolla raids last month…The broadcast has video of Tinker ‘weapons labs,’ pictures of sinister-looking prisoners…

  “Prisoners to be tried for Treason against the Peace, starting immediately, in Los Angeles.

  “…all government and corporate stations must rebroadcast this at normal speed every six hours for the next two days.”

  There was a long silence after she finished. Wili held up the bobble. “They picked the wrong time to put the squeeze on us!”

  Naismith shook his head. “It’s the worst possible time for us. We’re being forced to use this”—he patted the bobble—“when we’ve barely got a proof of principle. It puts us right where that punk Avery wants us.”

  26

  The rain was heavy and very, very warm. High in the clouds, lightning chased itself around and around the Vandenberg Dome, never coming to earth. Thunder followed the arching, cloud-smeared glows.

  Della Lu had seen more rain the last two weeks than would fall in a normal year in Beijing. It was a fitting backdrop for the dull routine of life here. If Avery hadn’t finally gone for the spy trials, she would be seriously planning to escape Red Arrow hospitality—blown cover or not.

  “Hey, you tired already? Or just daydreaming?” Mike had stopped and was looking back at her. He stood, arms akimbo, apparently disgusted. The transparent rain jacket made his tan shirt and pants glint metallic even in the gray light.

  Della walked a little faster to catch up. They continued in silence for a hundred meters. No doubt they made an amusing pair: Two figures shrouded in rain gear, one tall, one so short. Since Wili’s ten-day “probation period” had lapsed, the two of them had taken a walk every day. It was something she had insisted on, and—for a change—Rosas hadn’t resisted. So far she had snooped as far north as Lake Lompoc and east to the ferry crossing.

  Without Mike, her walks would’ve had to have been with the womenfolk. That would have been tricky. The women were protected, and had little freedom or responsibility. She spent most of every day with them, doing the light manual labor that was considered appropriate to her sex. She had been careful to be popular, and she had learned a lot, but all local intelligence. Just as with families in San Francisco, the women were not privy to what went on in the wider world. They were valued, but second-class, citizens. Even so, they were clever; it would be difficult to look in the places that really interested her without raising their suspicions.

  Today was her longest walk, up to the highlands that overlooked Red Arrow’s tiny sea landing. Despite Mike’s passive deceptions, she had put together a pretty good picture of Old Kaladze’s escape system. At least she knew its magnitude and technique. It was a small payoff for the boredom and the feeling that she was being held offstage from events she should be directing.

  All that could change with the spy trials. If she could just light a fire under the right people…

  The timbered path went back and forth across the hill they climbed. There were many repairs, and several looked quite recent, yet there were also washouts. It was like most things among the Tinkers. Their electronic gadgets were superlative (though it was clear now that the surveillance devices Avery had discovered were rare and expensive items amongst the Tinkers; they didn’t normally spy on each other). But they were labor poor, and without power equipment, things like road maintenance and laundry were distinctly nineteenth century. And Della had the calluses to prove it.

  Finally they reached the overlook point. A steady breeze swept across the hill, blowing the rain into their faces. There was only one tree at the top, though it was a fine, large conifer growing from the highest point. There was some kind of platform about halfway up.

  Rosas put his arm across her shoulder, urging her toward the tree. “They had a tree house up here when I was a kid. There ought to be a good view.”

  Wood steps were built into the tree trunk. She noticed a heavy metallic cable that followed the steps upward. Electronics even here? Then she realized that it was a lightning guide. The Tinkers were very careful with their children.

  Seconds later they were on the platform. The cabin was clean and dry with soft padding on the floor. There was a view south and west, somehow contrived to keep out the wind and rain. They shrugged out of their rain jackets and sat for a moment enjoying the sound of wet that surrounded this pocket of dry comfort. Mike crawled to the south-facing window. “A lot of good it will do you, but there it is.”

  The forested hills dropped away from the overlook. The coast was about four kilometers away, but the rain was so heavy that she had only a vague impression of sand dunes and marching surf. It looked like there was a small breakwater, but no boats at anchor. The landing was not actually on Red Arrow property, but they used it more than anyone else. Mike claimed that more people came to the farm from the ocean than overland. Della doubted that. It sounded like another little deception.

  The undersheriff backed away from the opening and leaned against the wall beside her. “Has it really been worth it, Della?” There was a faint edge in his voice. It was clear by now that he had no intention of denouncing her—and implicating himself at the same time. But he was not hers. She had dealt with traitors before, men whose self-interest made them simple, reliable tools. Rosas was not such. He was waiting for the moment when the damage he could do her would be greatest. Till then he played the role of reluctant ally.

  Indeed, had it been worth the trouble? He smiled, almost triumphantly. “You’ve been stuck here for more than two weeks. You’ve learned a little bit about one small corner of the ungoverned lands, and one group of Tinkers. I think you’re more important to the Peacers than that. You’re like a high-value piece voluntarily taken out of the game.”

  Della smiled back. He was saying aloud her own angry thoughts. The only thing that had kept her going was the thought that just a li
ttle more snooping might ferret out the location of Paul Hoehler/Naismith. It had seemed such an easy thing. But she gradually realized that Mike—and almost everyone else—didn’t know where the old man lived. Maybe Kaladze did, but she’d need an interrogation lab to pry it out of him. Her only progress along that line had been right at the beginning, when she tagged the black boy’s horse with a tracer.

  Hallelujah, all that had changed. There was a chance now that she was in the best of strategic positions.

  Mike’s eyes narrowed, and Della realized he sensed some of her triumph. Damn. They had spent too much time together, had too many conversations that were not superficial. His hand closed on her upper arm and she was pulled close to his face. “Okay. What is it? What are you going to spring on us?” Her arm suddenly felt as though trapped in a vice.

  Della suppressed reflexes that would have left him gargling on a crushed windpipe. Best that he think he had the age-old macho edge. She pretended shocked speechlessness. How much to say? When they were alone, Mike often spoke of her real purpose at Red Arrow. She knew he wasn’t trying to compromise her to hidden listeners—he could do that directly whenever he chose. And he knew Red Arrow so well, it was unlikely they would be bugged without his knowledge. So the only danger was in telling him too much, in giving him the motive to blow the whole game. But maybe she should tell him a little; if it all came as a surprise, he might be harder to control. She tried to shrug. “I’ve got a couple maybes going for me. Your friend Hoehler—Naismith—says he has a prototype bobble generator. Maybe he does. In any case, it will be a while before the rest of you can build such. In the meantime, if the Peace can throw you off balance, can get you and Naismith to overextend yourselves…”

  “The trials.”

  “Right.” She wondered what Mike’s reaction would be if he knew that she had recommended immediate treason trials for the La Jolla hostages. He’d made sure there were Kaladzes in earshot when she was allowed to call her family in San Francisco. She had sounded completely innocent, just telling her parents that she was safe among the Middle California Tinkers, though she mustn’t say just where. No doubt Rosas guessed that some sort of prearranged signal scheme was being used, but he could never have known how elaborate it was. Tone codes were something that went right by native speakers of English. “The trials. If they could be used to panic Kaladze and his friends, we might get a look at Naismith’s best stuff before it can do the Peace any real harm.”