Marooned in Realtime

by Vernor Vinge

  “We have a good chance.” Wili’s voice came suddenly in her earphone. “We won’t make our run until the patrol planes are in good position. We should be in their blind spot for almost five minutes.”

  “And they’ll have other things to worry about,” said Paul. “I’ve been talking to the Tinkers coming in on foot. They all know the site of the Peacer generator now. Some of them have gotten pretty close, closer than we. They don’t have our equipment—but the Authority can’t know that for sure. When Wili gives the signal, they’ll come out of hiding and make their own dash inwards.”

  The war went far beyond their crawlers, beyond even the Livermore Valley. Paul said a similar battle was being played out in China.

  Even so, victory or defeat seemed to depend on what happened to this one crawler in the next few minutes.

  38

  Della slipped on the earpiece and adjusted the microphone to her throat. She had the undivided attention of Avery, Maitland, and everyone else in earshot. None of them except Hamilton Avery had heard of one Miguel Rosas, but they all knew he had no business on a maximum security channel. “Mike?”

  A familiar voice came from the earpiece and the speaker on the terminal. “Hello, Della. I’ve got some news for you.”

  “Just calling on this line is news enough. So your people have cracked our comm and recon system.”

  “Right the first time.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “The ridgeline southwest of you. I don’t want to say more—I still don’t trust your friends…It’s just that I trust mine even less.” This last was spoken low, almost muttered. “Look. There are other things you don’t know. The Tinkers know exactly where your bobbler is hidden.”

  “What?” Avery turned abruptly to the situation board and motioned for Maitland to check it out.

  “How can they know? You have spies? Carry-in bugs?”

  Mike’s forced chuckle echoed from the speaker. “It’s a long story, Della. You would be amused. The old US Air Force had it spotted—just too late to save the world from you. The Tinkers stumbled on the secret only a few weeks ago.”

  Della glanced questioningly at the Director, but Avery was looking over Maitland’s shoulder, at the terminal. The general’s people were frantically typing queries, posting results. The general looked up at the Director. “It’s possible, sir. Most of the infiltrators are north and west of the Enclave. But the ones closest to the inner zone boundary are also the closest to the generator; they seem to have a preference for that sector.”

  “It could be an artifact of our increased surveillance in that area.”

  “Yes, sir.” But now Maitland did not sound complacent. Avery nodded to himself. He hadn’t believed his own explanation. “Very well. Concentrate tactical air there. I see you have two armored vehicles already tracking along the boundary. Keep them there. Bring in more. I want what infantry we have moved there, too.”

  “Right. Once we locate them, they’re no threat. We have all the firepower.”

  Della spoke again to Mike. “Where is Paul Hoehler—the man you call Naismith?” Avery stiffened at the question, and his attention returned to her, an almost physical force.

  “Look, I really don’t know. They have me working a pointer relay; some of our people don’t have their own satellite receivers.”

  Della cut the connection and said to Avery, “I think he’s lying, Director. Our only lever on Mike Rosas is his hatred for certain Tinker potentials, in particular bioscience. He’ll resist hurting his personal friends.”

  “He knows Hoehler?” Avery seemed astounded to find someone so close to the ultimate antagonist. “If he knows where Hoehler is…” The Director’s eyes unfocused. “You’ve got to squeeze that out of him, Della. Take this conversation off the speaker and talk to him. Promise him anything, tell him anything, but find Hoehler.” With a visible effort he turned back to Maitland. “Get me Tioulang in Beijing. I know, I know. Nothing is secure.” He smiled, an almost skeletal grimace. “But I don’t care if they know what I tell him.”

  Della resumed the link with Mike. Now that the speaker was off, his voice would sound in her ear only. And with the throat mike, her side of the conversation would be inaudible to those around her. “This is just you and me now, Mike. The brass thinks they got everything they can out of you.”

  “Oh yeah? And what do you think?”

  “I think some large but unknown percentage of what you are telling me is bullshit.”

  “I guessed that. But you’re still talking.”

  “I think we’re both betting we can learn more than the other from talking. Besides—” Her eyes fixed on the Renaissance trigger box sitting on the table before Hamilton Avery. With a small part of her attention she followed what Avery was saying to his counterpart in Beijing. “Besides, I don’t think you know what you’re up against.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “The Tinker goal is to bobble the Livermore generator. Similarly for the attack on Beijing. You don’t realize that if we consider the Peace truly endangered, we will embobble ourselves, and continue the struggle decades in the future.”

  “Hmm. Like the trick we played on you at Mission Pass.”

  “But on a much larger scale.”

  “Well, it won’t help you. Some of us will wait—and we’ll know where to wait. Besides, the Authority’s power isn’t just in Livermore and Beijing. You need your heavy industry, too.”

  Della smiled to herself. Mike’s phrasing was tacit admission he was still a Tinker. There were deceptions here—deceptions she could penetrate given a little time—but neither of them was pretending loyalties they did not have. Time to give away a little information, information that would do them no good now: “There are a few things you don’t know. The Peace has more than two bobble generators.”

  There was a moment of silence in her ear. “I don’t believe you—How many?”

  Della laughed quietly. Maitland glanced up at her, then turned back to his terminal. “That is a secret. We’ve been working on them ever since we suspected Tinker infiltration—spies, we thought. Only a few people know, and we never spoke of it on our comm net. More important than the number is the location; you won’t know about them till they come out at you.”

  There was a longer silence. She had made a point.

  “And what other things make ‘Peace’ unbeatable?” There was sarcasm and something else in his words. In the middle of the sentence, his voice seem to catch—as if he had just lifted something. As was usual with a high-crypto channel, there were no background sounds. But the data massaging left enough in the voice to recognize tones and sublinguistical things like this sudden exhalation. The sound, almost a grunt, had not been repeated. If she could just get him to talk a little more.

  There was a secret that might do it. Renaissance. Besides, it was something she owed him, perhaps owed all the enemy. “You should know that if you force this on us, we’ll not let you grow strong during our absence. The Authority”—for once calling it “the Peace” stuck in her throat—“has planted nukes in the Valley. And we have such bombs on rockets. If we bobble up…if we bobble up, your pretty Tinker culture gets bombed back to the Stone Age, and we’ll build anew when we come out.”

  Still a longer silence. Is he talking to someone else? Has he broken the connection? “Mike?”

  “Della, why are you on their side?”

  He’d asked her that once before. She bit her lip. “I—I didn’t dream up Renaissance, Mike. I think we can win without it. The world has had decades now more peaceful than any in human history. When we took over, the race was at the edge of the precipice. You know that. The nation states were bad enough; they would have destroyed civilization if left to themselves. But even worse, their weapons had become so cheap that small groups—some reasonable, some monstrous—would have had them. If the world could barely tolerate a dozen killer nations, how could it survive thousands of psychotics with rad bombs and war plague
s?

  “I know you understand what I’m saying. You felt that way about bioscience. There are other things as bad, Mike.” She stopped abruptly, wondering who was manipulating whom. And suddenly she realized that Mike, the enemy, was one of the few people she could ever talk to, one of the few people who could understand the…things…she had done. And perhaps he was the only person—outside of herself—whose disapproval could move her.

  “I understand,” came Mike’s voice. “Maybe history will say the Authority gave the human race time to save itself, to come up with new institutions. You’ve had fifty years; it hasn’t been all bad…But no matter what either of us wants, it’s ending now. And this ‘Renaissance’ will destroy whatever good you’ve done.” His voice caught again.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll win fair and square and there’ll be no Renaissance.” She was watching the main display. One of the crawlers had turned almost directly inward, toward the heart of the Enclave. Della cut audio and got the attention of Maitland’s aide. She nodded questioningly at the crawler symbol on the display.

  The colonel leaned across from his chair and said quietly, “They saw Tinkers within the perimeter. They’re chasing.”

  The symbol moved in little jerks, updated by the nearly manual control they had been reduced to. Suddenly the crawler symbol disappeared from the board. Avery sucked in his breath. An analyst looked at his displays and said almost immediately, “We lost laser comm. They may have been bobbled…or may be out of sight.”

  Possible. The ground was rough, even inside the Enclave boundary. Riding a crawler over that would be an exciting thing…And then Della understood the mystery in Mike’s speech. “Mr. Director.” Her shout cut across all other voices. “That crawler isn’t looking for the enemy. It is the enemy!”

  39

  While they drove parallel to the perimeter fence, the ground was not too rough. When they turned inward, it would be a different story. There was a system of ditches running along the fence.

  Beyond that was the interior of the Enclave. Allison risked a glance every now and then. It was like the future she had always imagined: spires, tall buildings, wide swaths of green. Paul said Authority ground troops were moving into the area, but right now all was peaceful, abandoned.

  Wait. Three men came running out of the ditches. They paused at the fence and then were somehow through. Two of them carried heavy backpacks. So these were their Tinker allies. One waved to their crawler, and then they disappeared among the buildings.

  “Turn here. Follow them inward,” said Paul. “Wili’s told the Peacer command we’re in hot pursuit.”

  Allison pushed/pulled on the control sticks. The armored vehicle spun on its treads, one reversed, the other still pulling forward. Through the side periscope she saw Mike’s crawler, moving off to the north. No doubt Wili had told him not to turn.

  They shot forward at top speed, the engines an eerie screaming all around them. Beside Allison, Paul was gasping. Thirty kph across open terrain was rough as any air maneuver. Then they were falling, and the view ahead was filled with concrete. They flew over the edge of the ditch and crashed downward onto the floor. The restraint webbing couldn’t entirely absorb the shock. For a moment Allison was in a daze, her hands freezing the controls into fast forward. The crawler ran up the steep far wall and teetered there an instant, as if unsure whether to proceed upward or fall on its back.

  Then they slammed down on the other side, collapsing the fence. Whatever automatic defenses lived here must be temporarily disabled.

  She ground clear of the concrete-and-steel rubble, then risked a glance at Paul. “Oh, my God.” He was slumped forward, a wash of red spread down his face. Red was smeared on the wall in front of him. Somehow he had not tied down properly.

  Allison slowed the crawler. She twisted in her seat, saw that the boy remained comatose. “Wili! Paul’s hurt!”

  A woman’s voice shrieked in her ear, “You dumb bitch!”

  Wili twisted, his face agonized, like someone trying to waken from a dream.

  But if he woke, if his dream died, then all their dreams would die. “Drive, Allison. Please drive.” Wili’s synthetic voice came cool from her earpiece. “Paul…Paul wants this more than anything.” Behind her, the boy’s real voice was softly moaning. And Paul moved not at all.

  Allison closed out everything but her job: They were on a surfaced street. She rammed the throttle forward, took the crawler up to seventy kph. She had only vague impressions of the buildings on either side of them. It looked like residential housing, though more opulent than in her time. All was deserted. Coming up on a T-intersection. Over the roofs of the multistory residences, the towers at the center of the Enclave seemed no nearer.

  Wili’s voice continued. “Right at the intersection. Then left and left. Foot soldiers are coming from east. So far they think we’re one of them, but I’m breaking laser contact…now”—Allison whipped into the turn—“and they should guess what we are very soon.”

  They continued so for several minutes. It was like dealing with an ordinary voice program: Turn right. Turn left. Slow down. Keep to the edge of the street.

  “Five hundred meters. Take the service alley here. They’re onto us. Gunships coming. They can’t locate us precisely enough to bobble. Whoever sees us is to shoot.” He was silent again as Allison negotiated the alley. Still no sign of life from Paul.

  “He still lives, Allison. I can still…hear…him a little.”

  Through the front periscope she had a glimpse of something dark and fast cross the narrow band of sky between the houses.

  “Pull under that overhang. Stop. Throttle up to charge the cells. Thirty seconds for local conditions and I’ll be ready to fire.”

  The moment they were stopped, Allison was out of her harness and bending over Paul. “Now leave me. I need to think. Take Paul. Save Paul.”

  She looked at the boy. He still hadn’t opened his eyes. He was further off than she had ever seen him.

  “But, Wili—”

  His body twitched, and the synthetic voice was suddenly angry in her ear. “I need time to think, and I don’t have it. Their planes are on the way. Get out. Get out!”

  Allison unbuckled Paul and removed the scalp connector. He was breathing, but his face remained slack. She cranked at the rear doors, praying that nothing had been warped by their fall into the ditch. The doors popped open and cool morning air drifted in, along with the increased keening of the engines.

  She ripped off her headset and struggled to get the old man’s body over her shoulder. As she staggered past Wili, she noticed his lips were moving. She bent down awkwardly to listen. The boy was mumbling, “Run, run, run, run…”

  Allison did her best.

  40

  No one understood the conflict as Wili did. Even when he was linked with Jill, Paul had only a secondhand view. And after Paul, there was no one who saw more than fragments of the picture. It was Wili who ran the Tinker side of the show—and to some extent the Peacer side, too. Without his directions in Paul’s voice, the thousands of separate operations going on all over the Earth would be so scattered in time and effect that the Authority would have little trouble keeping its own control system going.

  But Wili knew his time would end very, very soon.

  From the crawler’s recon camera, he watched Paul and Allison moving away into the managerial residences. Their footsteps came fainter in his exterior microphones. Would he ever know if Paul survived?

  Through the narrow gap between the sides of the alley a Peacer satellite floated beyond the blue sky. One reason he had chosen this parking spot was to have that line of sight. In ninety seconds, the radio star would slide behind carven wooden eaves. He would lose it, and thus its relay to synchronous altitude, and thus his control of things worldwide. He would be deaf, dumb, and blind. But ninety seconds from now, it wouldn’t matter; he and all the other Tinkers would win or lose in sixty.

  The whole system had spasmed when Paul w
as knocked out. Jill had stopped responding. For several minutes, Wili had struggled with all the high-level computations. Now Jill was coming back on line; she was almost finished with the local state computations. The capacitors would be fully charged seconds after that. Wili surveyed the world one last time.

  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.