The Peace War (23 page)

Except for Europe, the Authority was taking little direct action. They seemed to realize
their enemy was too numerous to root out with a frontal assault. Instead the Peacers were
engaged in an all-out search to find one Paul Naismith before Paul Naismith could make
good on his promises to the rest of the world.

Yes, Wili?
Nothing was spoken aloud and no keys were tapped. Input/output was like
imagination itself. And when Jill responded, he had a fleeting impression of the face and
the smile that he would have seen in the holo if he'd been talking to her the old way. Wili
could have bypassed Jill; most symbiotic programs didn't have an intermediate surrogate.
But Jill was a friend. And though she occupied lots of program space, she reduced the
confusion Wili still felt in dealing with the flood of input. So Wili frequently had Jill
work in parallel with him, and called her when he wanted updates on the processes she
supervised.

Show me the status of the search for Paul.

Wili's viewpoint was suddenly suspended over California. Silvery traces marked the
flight paths of hundreds of aircraft. He sensed the altitude and speed of every craft. The
picture was a summary of all Jill had learned monitoring the Authority's recon satellites
and Tinker reports over the last twenty-four hours. The rectangular crisscross pattern was
still centered over Northern California, though it was more diffuse and indecisive than on
earlier days.

Wili smiled. Sending Della Lu's bug north had worked better than he'd hoped. The
Peacers had been chasing their tails up there for more than a week. The satellites weren't
doing them any good. One of the first fruits of Wili's new power was discovering how to
disable the comm and recon satellites. At least, they appeared disabled to the Authority.
Actually, the recon satellites were still broadcasting but according to an encryption
scheme that must seem pure noise to the enemy. It had seemed an easy trick to Wili; once
he conceived the possibility, he and Jill had implemented it in less than a day. But
looking back — after having disconnected — Wili realized that it was deeper and trickier
than his original method of tapping the satellites. What had taken him a winter of mind-busting effort was an afternoon's triviality now.

Of course, none of these tricks would have helped if Paul had not been very cautious all
these years; he and Bill Morales had traveled great distances to shop at towns farther up
the coast. Many Tinkers thought his hideout was in Northern California or even Oregon.
As long as the Peacers didn't pick up any of the few people who had actually visited here-say at the NCC meeting-they might be safe.

Wili frowned. There was still the greatest threat. Miguel Rosas probably did not know
the location, though he must suspect it was in Middle California. But Wili was sure
Colonel Kaladze knew. It could only be a matter of time before Mike and the Lu woman
ferreted out the secret. If subtlety were unsuccessful, then Lu would no doubt call in the
Peace goons and try to beat it out of him.
Are they still on the farm?

Yes. And there have been no outgoing calls from them. However, the Colonel's ten-day
promise lapses tomorrow.
Then Kaladze would no doubt let Lu call her "family" in San
Francisco. But if she hadn't called in the army already, she must not have anything
critical to report to her bosses.

Wili had not told Paul what he knew of Mike and Lu. Perhaps he should. But after
trying to tell Kaladze... Instead he'd been trying to identify Della Lu with independent
evidence. More than ten percent of Jill's time was spent in the effort. So far she had
nothing definite. The story about relatives in the Bay Area appeared to be true. If he had
some way of tapping Peacer communication or records, things would be different. He
saw now he should have disabled their recon satellites alone. If their comsats were
usable, it would give them some advantage — but perhaps he could eventually break into
their high crypto channels. As it was, he knew very little about what went on inside the
Authority .

...and sometimes, he really wondered if Colonel Kaladze might be right. Wili had been
half-delirious that morning on the boat; Mike and Della had been several meters away.
Was it possible he'd misinterpreted what he heard? Was it possible they were innocent
after all? No! By the One True God, he had heard what he had heard. Kaladze hadn't
been there.

Sunlight still lay on the hills, but the lowlands and Lake Lompoc were shrouded in blue
shadows. Paul sat on his veranda and listened to the news that Wili's electronic spies
brought in from all over the world.

There was a small cough and Naismith looked up. For an instant he thought it was
Allison standing there. Then he noticed how carefully she stood between him and the
holo surface built into the wall. If he moved more than a few centimeters, parts of the
image would be cut off: This was only Jill.

"Hi." He motioned for her to come and sit. She stepped forward, careful to generate
those little moving sounds that made her projection seem more real, and sat in the image
of a chair. Paul watched her face as she approached. There really were differences, he
realized. Allison was very pretty, but he had made Jill's face beautiful. And of course the
personalities were subtly different, too. It could not have been otherwise considering that
he had done his design from memories forty-five years stale (or embellished), and
considering that the design had grown by itself in response to his reactions. The real
Allison was more outgoing, more impatient. And Allison's mere presence seemed to be
changing Jill. The interface program had been much quieter these last days.

He smiled at her, "You've got the new bobble theory all worked out?"

She grinned back and was more like Allison than ever. "Your theory. I do nothing but
crunch away-"

"I set up the theory. It would take a hundred lifetimes for me to do the symbolic math and
see the theory's significance." It was a game they — he — had played many times before.
The back and forth had always made Jill seem so real. "What have you got?"

"Everything seems consistent. There are a lot of things that were barred under your old
theory, that are still impossible: It's still impossible to burst a bobble before its time. It's
impossible to generate a bobble around an existing one. On the other hand — in theory at
least — it should be possible to balk an enemy bobbler."

"Hmm... " Simply carrying a small bobble was a kind of defense against bobble attack —
a very risky defense, once noticed: It would force the attacker to project smaller bobbles,
or off-center ones, trying to find a volume that wasn't 'banned.' A device that could
prevent bobbles from being formed nearby would be a tremendous improvement, and
Naismith had guessed the new theory might allow such, but...

"Betcha that last will be an
engineering
impossibility for a long time. We should
concentrate on making a low-power bobbler. That looks hard enough."

"Yes. Wili's right on schedule with that."

Jill's image suddenly froze, then flicked out of existence. Naismith heard the veranda
door slide open. "Hi, Paul," came Allison's voice. She walked up the steps. "You out here
by yourself?"

"...Yes. Just thinking."

She walked to the edge of the veranda and looked westward. These last weeks, every
day had brought more change in Paul's life and in the world beyond the mountains than a
normal year. Yet for Allison, it was different. Her world had turned inside out in the
space of an hour. He knew the present rate of change was agonizingly slow for her. She
paced the stone flags, stopping occasionally to glare off into the sunset at the Vandenberg
Bobble.

Allison. Allison.
Few old men had dreams come quite so stunningly true. She was so
young; her energy seemed to flash about her in every stride, in every quick movement of
her arms. In some ways the memories of Allison lost were less hurtful than the present
reality. Still, he was glad he had not succeeded in disguising what became of Paul
Hoehler.

Allison suddenly looked back at him, and smiled. "Sorry about the pacing."

"No problem. I..."

She waved toward the west. The air was so clear that-except for the lake and the
coastline reflected in its base — the Dome was almost invisible. "When will it burst, Paul?
There were three thousand of us there the day I left. They had guns, aircraft. When will
they come out?"

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
to
tally 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 Moraleses 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.