The Peace War

Copyright © 1991 by Vernor Vinge

To my parents,

Clarence L. Vinge and Ada Grace Vinge,

with Love.

Table of Content

Flashback

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Flashforward

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Flashforward

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Flashforward

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

- Flashback -

One hundred kilometers below and nearly two hundred away, the shore of the Beaufort Sea didn't look much like the common image of the arctic: Summer was far advanced in the Northern Hemisphere, and a pale green spread across the land, shading here and there to the darker tones of grass. Life had a tenacious hold, leaving only an occasional peninsula or mountain range gray and bone.

Captain Allison Parker, USAF, shifted as far as the restraint harness would permit, trying to get the best view she could over the pilot's shoulder. During the greater part of a mission, she had a much better view than any of the "truck-drivers," but she never tired of looking out, and when the view was the hardest to obtain, it became the most desirable. Angus Quiller, the pilot, leaned forward, all his attention on the retrofire readout. Angus was a nice guy, but he didn't waste time looking out. Like many pilots — and some mission specialists — he had accepted his environment without much continuing wonder.

But Allison had always been the type to look out windows. When she was very young, her father had taken her flying. She could never decide what would be the most fun: to look out the windows at the ground-or to learn to fly. Until she was old enough to get her own license she had settled for looking at the ground. Later she discovered that without combat aircraft experience she would never pilot the machines that went as high as she wanted to go. So again she had settled for a job that would let her look out the windows. Sometimes she thought the electronics, the geography, the espionage angles of her job were all unimportant compared to the pleasure that came from simply looking down at the world as it really is.

"My compliments to your autopilot, Fred. That burn puts us right down the slot." Angus never gave Fred Torres, the command pilot, any credit. It was always the autopilot or ground control that was responsible for anything good that happened when Fred was in charge. Torres grunted something similarly insulting, then said to Allison, "Hope you're enjoying this. It's not often we fly this thing around the block just for a pretty girl."

Allison grinned but didn't reply. What Fred said was true. Ordinarily a mission was planned several weeks in advance and carried multiple tasks that kept it up for three or four days. But this one had dragged the two-man crew off a weekend leave and stuck them on the end of a flight that was an unscheduled quick look, just fifteen orbits and back to Vandenberg. This was clearly a deep range, global reconnaissance — though Fred and Angus probably knew little more. Except that the newspapers had been pretty grim the last few weeks.

The Beaufort Sea slid out of sight to the north. The sortie craft was in an inverted, nose-down attitude that gave some specialists a sick stomach but that just made Allison feel she was looking at the world pass by overhead. She hoped that when the Air Force got its permanent recon platform, she would be stationed there.

Fred Tomes — or his autopilot, depending on your point of view — slowly pitched the orbiter through 180 degrees to bring it into entry attitude. For an instant the craft was pointing straight down. Glacial scouring could never be an abstraction to someone who had looked down from this height: the land was clearly scraped and grooved like ground before a dozer blade. Tiny puddles had been left behind: hundreds of Canadian lakes, so many that Allison could follow the sun in secular glints that shifted from one to another.

They pitched still further. The southern horizon, blue and misty, fell into and then out of view. The ground wouldn't be visible again until they were much lower, at altitudes some normal aircraft could attain. Allison sat back and pulled the restraint more tightly over her shoulders. She patted the optical disk pack tied down beside her. It contained her reason for being here. There were going to be a lot of relieved generals-and some even more relieved politicians-when she got back. The "detonations" the Livermore crew had detected must have been glitches. The Soviets were as innocent as those bastards ever were. She had scanned them with all her "normal" equipment, as well as with deep penetration gear known only to certain military intelligence agencies, and had detected no new offensive preparations. Only...

...Only the deep probes she had made on her own over Livermore were unsettling. She had been looking forward to her date with Paul Hoehler, if only to enjoy the expression on his face when she told him that the results of her test were secret. He had been so sure his bosses were up to something sinister at Livermore. She now saw that Paul might be right; there was something going on at Livermore. It might have gone undetected without her deep-probe equipment; there had been an obvious effort at concealment. But one thing Allison Parker knew was her high-intensity reactor profiles, and there was a new one down there that didn't show up on the AFIA listings. And she had detected other things — probe-opaque spheres below ground in the vicinity of the reactor.

That was also as Paul Hoehler had predicted.

NMV specialists like Allison Parker had a lot of freedom to make ad lib additions to their snoop schedules; that had saved more than one mission. She would be in no trouble for the unscheduled probe of a US lab, as long as a thorough report was made. But if Paul was right, then this would cause a major scandal. And if Paul was wrong, then he would be in major trouble, perhaps on the road to jail.

Allison felt her body settle gently into the acceleration couch as creaking sounds came through the orbiter's frame. Beyond the forward ports, the black of space was beginning to flicker in pale shades of orange and red. The colors grew stronger and the sensation of weight increased. She knew it was still less than half a gee, though after a day in orbit it felt like more. Quiller said something about transferring to laser comm. Allison tried to imagine the land eighty kilometers below, Taiga forest giving way to farm land and then the Canadian Rockies — but it was not as much fun as actually being able to see it.

Still about four hundred seconds till final pitch-over. Her mind drifted idly, wondering what ultimately would happen between Paul and herself. She had gone out with better-looking men, but no one smarter. In fact, that was probably part of the problem. Hoehler was clearly in love with her, but she wasn't allowed to talk technical with him, and what nonclassified work he did made no sense to her. Furthermore, he was obviously something of a troublemaker on the job — a paradox considering his almost clumsy diffidence. A physical attraction can only last for a limited time, and Allison wondered how long it would take him to tire of her — or vice versa. This latest thing about Livermore wasn't going to help.

The fire colors faded from the sky, which now had a faint tinge of blue in it. Fred — who claimed he intended to retire to the airlines — spoke up, "Welcome, lady and gentleman, to the beautiful skies of California... or maybe it's still Oregon."

The nose pitched down from reentry attitude. The view was much like that from a commercial flyer, if you could ignore the slight curvature of the horizon and the darkness of the sky. California's Great Valley was a green corridor across their path. To the right, faded in the haze, was San Francisco Bay. They would pass about ninety kilometers east of Livermore. The place seemed to be the center of everything on this flight: It had been incorrect reports from their detector array which convinced the military and the politicians that Sov treachery was in the offing. And that detector was part of the same project Hoehler was so suspicious of — for reasons he would not fully reveal.

Allison Parker's world ended with that thought.

ONE

The Old California Shopping Center was the Santa Ynez Police Company's biggest account — and one of Miguel Rosas' most enjoyable beats. On this beautiful Sunday afternoon, the Center had hundreds of customers, people who had traveled many kilometers along Old 101 to be here. This Sunday was especially busy: All during the week, produce and quality reports had shown that the stores would have best buys. And it wouldn't rain till late. Mike wandered up and down the malls, stopping every now and then to talk or go into a shop and have a closer look at the merchandise. Most people knew how effective the shoplift-detection gear was, and so far he hadn't had any business whatsoever.

Which was okay with Mike. Rosas had been officially employed by the Santa Ynez Police Company for three years. And before that, all the way back to when he and his sisters had arrived in California, he had been associated with the company. Sheriff Wentz had more or less adopted him, and so he had grown up with police work, and was doing the job of a paid undersheriff by the time he was thirteen. Wentz had encouraged him to look at technical jobs, but somehow police work was always the most attractive. The SYP Company was a popular outfit that did business with most of the families around Vandenberg. The pay was good, the area was peaceful, and Mike had the feeling that he was really doing something to help people.

Mike left the shopping area and climbed the grassy hill that management kept nicely shorn and cleaned. From the top he could look across the Center to see all the shops and the brilliantly dyed fabrics that shaded the arcades.

He tweaked up his caller in case they wanted him to come down for some traffic control. Horses and wagons were not permitted beyond the outer parking area. Normally this was a convenience, but there were so many customers this afternoon that the owners might want to relax the rules.

Near the top of the hill, basking in the double sunlight, Paul Naismith sat in front of his chessboard. Every few months, Paul came down to the coast, sometimes to Santa Ynez, sometimes to towns further north. Naismith and Bill Morales would come in early enough to get a good parking spot, Paul would set up his chessboard, and Bill would go off to shop for him. Come evening, the Tinkers would trot out their specialties and he might do some trading. For now the old man slouched behind his chessboard and munched his lunch.

Mike approached the other diffidently. Naismith was not personally forbidding. He was easy to talk to, in fact. But Mike knew him better than most — and knew the old man's cordiality was a mask for things as strange and deep as his public reputation implied.

"Game, Mike?" Naismith asked.

"Sorry, Mr. Naismith, I'm on duty. "Besides, I know you never lose except on purpose.

The older man waved impatiently. He glanced over Mike's shoulder at something among the shops, then lurched to his feet. "Ah. I'm not going to snare anyone this afternoon. Might as well go down and window shop."

Mike recognized the idiom, though there were no "windows" in the shopping center, unless you counted the glass covers on the jewelry and electronics displays. Naismith's generation was still a majority, so even the most archaic slang remained in use. Mike picked up some litter but couldn't find the miscreants responsible. He stowed the trash and caught up with Naismith on the way down to the shops.

The food vendors were doing well, as predicted. Their tables were overflowing with bananas and cacao and other local produce, as well as things from farther away, such as apples. On the right, the game area was still the province of the kids. That would change when evening came. The curtains and canopies were bright and billowing in the light breeze, but it wasn't till dark that the internal illumination of the displays would glow and dance their magic. For now, all was muted, many of the games powered down. Even chess and the other symbiotic games were doing a slow business. It was almost a matter of custom to wait till the evening for the buying and selling of such frivolous equipment.

The only crowd, five or six youngsters, stood around Gerry Tellman's Celest game. What was going on here? A little black kid was playing — had been playing for fifteen minutes, Mike realized. Tellman had Celest running at a high level of realism, and he was not a generous man. Hmmm.

Ahead of him, Naismith creaked toward the game. Apparently his curiosity was pricked, too.

Inside the shop it was shady and cool. Tellman perched on a scuffed wood table and glared at his small customer. The boy looked to be ten or eleven and was clearly an outlander: His hair was bushy, his clothes filthy. His arms were so thin that he must be a victim of disease or poor diet. He was chewing on something that Mike suspected was tobacco — definitely not the sort of behavior you'd see in a local boy.

The kid clutched a wad of Bank of Santa Ynez gAu notes. From the look on Tellman's face, Rosas could guess where they came from.

"Otra vez," the boy said, returning Tellman's glare. The proprietor hesitated, looked around the circle of faces and noticed the adults.

"Aw right," agreed Tellman, "but this'll have to be the last time... ¿Esta es el final, entiende?" he repeated in pidgin Spanish. "I, uh, I gotta go to lunch." This remark was probably for the benefit of Naismith and Rosas.

The kid shrugged. "Okay."

Tellman initialized the Celest board to level nine, Rosas noticed. The kid studied the setup with a calculating look. Tellman's display was a flat, showing a hypothetical solar system as seen from above the plane of rotation. The three planets were small disks of light moving around the primary. Their size gave a clue to mass, but the precise values appeared near the bottom of the display. Departure and arrival planets moved in visibly eccentric orbits, the departure planet at one rev every five seconds — fast enough so precession was clearly occurring. Between it and the destination planet moved a third world, also in an eccentric orbit. Rosas grimaced. No doubt the only reason Tellman left the problem coplanar was that he didn't have a holo display for his Celest. Mike had never seen anyone without a symbiotic processor play the departure/destination version of Celest at level nine. The timer on the display showed that the player — the kid — had ten seconds to launch his rocket and try to make it to the destination. From the fuel display, Rosas was certain that there was not enough energy available to make the flight in a direct orbit. A cushion shot on top of everything else!

The kid laid all his bank notes on the table and squinted at the screen. Six seconds left. He grasped the control handles and twitched them. The tiny golden spark that represented his spacecraft fell away from the green disk of the departure world, inward toward the yellow sun about which all revolved. He had used more than nine-tenths of his fuel and had boosted in the wrong direction. The children around him murmured their displeasure, and a smirk came over Tellman's face. The smirk froze:

As the spacecraft came near the sun, the kid gave the controls another twitch, a boost which — together with the gravity of the primary-sent the glowing dot far out into the mock solar system. It edged across the two-meter screen, slowing at the greater remove, heading not for the destination planet but for the intermediary. Rosas gave an low, involuntary whistle. He had played Celest, both alone and with a processor. The game was nearly a century old and almost as popular as chess; it made you remember what the human race had almost attained. Yet he had never seen such a two-cushion shot by an unaided player.

Tellman's smile remained but his face was turning a bit gray. The vehicle drew close to the middle planet, catching up to it as it swung slowly about the primary. The kid made barely perceptible adjustments in the trajectory during the closing period. Fuel status on the display showed 0.001 full. The representation of the planet and the spacecraft merged for an instant, but did not record as a collision, for the tiny dot moved quickly away, going for the far reaches of the screen.

Around them, the other children jostled and hooted. They smelled a winner, and old Tellman was going to lose a little of the money he had been winning off them earlier in the day. Rosas and Naismith and Tellman just watched and held their breaths. With virtually no fuel left, it would be a matter of luck whether contact finally occurred.

The reddish disk of the destination planet swam placidly along while the mock spacecraft arced higher and higher, slower and slower, their paths becoming almost tangent. The craft was accelerating now, falling into the gravity well of the destination, giving the tantalizing impression of success that always comes with a close shot. Closer and closer. And the two lights became one on the board.

"Intercept," the display announced, and the stats streamed across the lower part of the screen. Rosas and Naismith looked at each other. The kid had done it.

Tellman was very pale now. He looked at the bills the boy had wagered. "Sorry, kid, but I don't have that much here right now." He started to repeat the excuse in Spanish, but the kid erupted with an unintelligible flood of spañolnegro abuse. Rosas looked meaningfully at Tellman. He was hired to protect customers as well as proprietors. If Tellman didn't pay off, he could kiss his lease good-bye. The Shopping Center already got enough flak from parents whose children had lost money here. And if the kid were clever enough to press charges...

The proprietor finally spoke over youthful screaming. "Okay, so I'll pay. Pago, pago... you little son of a bitch." He pulled a handful of gAu notes out of his cash box and shoved them at the boy. "Now get out."

The black kid was out the door before anyone else. Rosas eyed his departure thoughtfully. Tellman went on, plaintively, talking as much to himself as anyone else. "I don't know. I just don't know. The little bastard has been in here all morning. I swear he had never seen a game board before. But he watched and watched. Diego Martinez had to explain it to him. He started playing. Had barely enough money. And he just got better and better. I never seen anything like it... In fact" — he brightened and looked at Mike — "in fact, I think I been set up. I betcha the kid is carrying a processor and just pretending to be young and dumb. Hey, Rosas, how about that? I should be protected. There's some sorta con here, especially on that last game. He —

" — really did have a snowball's chance, eh, Telly?" Rosas finished where the proprietor had broken off. "Yeah, I know. You had a sure win. The odds should have been a thousand to one-not the even money you gave him. But I know symbiotic processing, and there's no way he could do it without some really expensive equipment." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Naismith nod agreement. "Still" — he rubbed his jaw and looked out into the brightness beyond the entrance — "I'd like to know more about him."

Naismith followed him out of the tent, while behind them Tellman sputtered. Most of the children were still visible, standing in clumps along the Tinkers' mall.

The mysterious winner was nowhere to be seen. And yet he should have been. The game area opened onto the central lawn which gave a clear view down all the malls. Mike spun around a couple times, puzzled. Naismith caught up with him. "I think the boy has been about two jumps ahead of us since we started watching him, Mike. Notice how he didn't argue when Tellman gave him the boot. Your uniform must have spooked him."

"Yeah. Bet he ran like hell the second he got outside."

"I don't know. I think he's more subtle than that." Naismith put a finger to his lips and motioned Rosas to follow him around the banners that lined the side of the game shop.

There was not much need for stealth. The shoppers were noisy, and the loading of furniture onto several carts behind the refurbishers' pavilion was accompanied by shouting and laughter.

The early afternoon breeze off Vandenberg set the colored fabric billowing. Double sunlight left nothing to shadow. Still, they almost tripped over the boy curled up under the edge of a tarp. The boy exploded like a bent spring, directly into Mike's arms: If Rosas had been of the older generation, there would have been no contest: Ingrained respect for children and an unwillingness to damage them would have let the kid slip from his grasp. But the undersheriff was willing to play fairly rough, and for a moment there was a wild mass of swinging arms and legs. Mike saw something gleam in the boy's hand, and then pain ripped through his arm.

Rosas fell to his knees as the boy, still clutching the knife, pulled loose and sprinted away. He was vaguely conscious of red spreading through the tan fabric of his left sleeve. He narrowed his eyes against the pain and drew his service stunner.

"No!" Naismith's shout was a reflex born of having grown up with slug guns and later having lived through the first era in history when life was truly sacred.

The kid went down and lay twitching in the grass. Mike holstered his pistol and struggled to his feet, his right hand clutching at the wound. It looked superficial, but it hurt like hell. "Gall Seymour," Mike grated at the old man. "We're going to have to carry that little bastard to the station."

TWO

The Santa Ynez Police Company was the largest protection service south of San Jose. After all, Santa Ynez was the first town north of Santa Barbara and the Aztlán border. Sheriff Seymour Wentz had three full-time deputies and contracts with eighty percent of the locals. That amounted to almost four thousand customers.

Wentz's office was perched on a good-sized hill overlooking Old 101. From it one could follow the movements of Peace Authority freighters for several kilometers north and south. Right now, no one but Paul Naismith was admiring the view. Miguel Rosas watched gloomily as Seymour spent half an hour on the phone to Santa Barbara, and then even managed to patch through to the ghetto in Pasadena. As Mike expected, no one south of the border could help. The rulers of Aztlán spent their gold trying to prevent "illegal labor emigration" from Los Angeles but never wasted time tracking the people who made it. The sabio in Pasadena seemed initially excited by the description, then froze up and denied any interest in the boy. The only other lead was with a contract labor gang that had passed though Santa Ynez earlier in the week, heading for the cacao farms near Santa Maria. Sy had some success with that. One Larry Faulk, labor contract agent, was persuaded to talk to them. The nattily dressed agent was not happy to see them:

"Certainly, Sheriff, I recognize the runt. Name is Wili Wachendon." He spelled it out. The W's sounded like a hybrid of zu with v and b. Such was the evolution of Spanolnegro. "He missed my crew's departure yesterday, and I can't say that I or anyone else up here is sorry."

"Look, Mr. Faulk. This child has clearly been mistreated by your people." He waved over his shoulder at where the kid — Wili — lay in his cell. Unconscious, he looked even more starved and pathetic than he had in motion.

"Ha!" came Faulk's reply over the fiber. "I notice you have the punk locked up; and I also see your deputy has his arm bandaged." He pointed at Rosas, who stared back almost sullenly. "I'll bet little Wili has been practicing his people-carving hobby. Sheriff, Wili Wachendon may have had a hard time someplace; I think he's on the run from the Ndelante Ali. But I never roughed him up. You know how labor contractors work. Maybe it was different in the good old days, but now we are agents, we get ten percent, and our crews can dump on us any time they please. At the wages they get, they're always shifting around, bidding for new contracts, squeezing for money. I have to be damn popular and effective or they would get someone else.

"This kid has been worthless from the beginning. He's always looked half-starved; I think he's a sicker. How he got from L.A. to the border is... " His next words were drowned out by a freighter whizzing along the highway beneath the station. Mike glanced out the window at the behemoth diesel as it moved off southward carrying liquefied natural gas to the Peace Authority Enclave in Los Angeles. "... took him because he claimed he could run my books. Now, the little bas — the kid may know something about accounting. But he's a lazy thief, too. And I can prove it. If your company hassles me about this when I come back through Santa Ynez, I'll sue you into oblivion."

There were a couple more verbal go-arounds, and then Sheriff Wentz rang off. He turned in his chair. "You know, Mike, I think he's telling the truth. We don't see it so much in the new generation, but children like your Sally and Arta-* "

Mike nodded glumly and hoped Sy wouldn't pursue it. His Sally and Arta, his little sisters. Dead years ago. They had been twins, five years younger than he, born when his parents had lived in Phoenix. They had made it to California with him, but they had always been sick. They both died before they were twenty and never looked to be older than ten. Mike knew who had caused that bit of hell. It was something he never spoke of.

"The generation before that had it worse. But back then it was just another sort of plague and people didn't notice especially." The diseases, the sterility, had brought a kind of world never dreamed of by the bomb makers of the previous century. "If this Wili is like your sisters, I'd estimate he's about fifteen. No wonder he's brighter than he looks."

"It's more than that, Boss. The kid is really smart. You should have seen what he did to Tellman's Celest."

Wentz shrugged. "Whatever. Now we've got to decide what to do with him. I wonder whether Fred Bartlett would take him in." This was gentle racism; the Bartletts were black.

"Boss, he'd eat 'em alive," Rosas patted his bandaged arm.

"Well, hell, you think of something better, Mike. We've got four thousand customers. There must be someone who can help... A lost child with no one to take care of him — it's unheard of!"

Some child! But Mike couldn't forget Sally and Arta. "Yeah."

Through this conversation, Naismith had been silent, almost ignoring the two peace officers. He seemed more interested in the view of Old 101 than what they were talking about. Now he twisted in the wooden chair to face the sheriff and his deputy. "I'll take the kid on, Sy."

Rosas and Wentz looked at him in stupefied silence. Paul Naismith was considered old in a land where two thirds of the population was past fifty. Wentz licked his lips, apparently unsure how to refuse him. "See here, Paul, you heard what Mike said. The kid practically killed him this afternoon. I know how people your, uh, age feel about children, but-"

The old man shook his head, caught Mike with a quick glance that was neither abstracted nor feeble. "You know they've been after me to take on an apprentice for years, Sy. Well, I've decided. Besides trying to kill Mike, he played Celest like a master. The gravity-well maneuver is one I've never seen discovered unaided."

"Mike told me. It's slick, but I see a lot of players do it. We almost all use it. Is it really that clever?"

"Depending on your background, it's more than clever. Isaac Newton didn't do a lot more when he deduced elliptical orbits from the inverse square law."

"Look, Paul... I'm truly sorry, but even with Bill and Irma, it's just too dangerous."

Mike thought about the pain in his arm. And then about the twin sisters he had once had. "Uh, Boss, could you and I have a little talk?"

Wentz raised an eyebrow. "So...? Okay. 'Scuse us a minute, Paul."

There was a moment of embarrassed silence as the two left the room. Naismith rubbed his cheek with a faintly palsied hand and gazed across Highway 101 at the pale lights just coming on in the Shopping Center. So very much had changed and all the years in between were blurred now. Shopping Center? All of Santa Ynez would have been lost in the crowd at a good high-school basketball game in the 1990s. These days a county with seven thousand people was considered a thriving concern.

It was just past sunset now, and the office was growing steadily darker. The room's displays were vaguely glowing ghosts hovering in the near distance. Cameras from down in the shopping areas drove most of those displays. Paul could see that business was picking up there. The Tinkers and mechanics and 'furbishers had trotted out their wares, and crowds were hanging about the aerial displays. Across the room, other screens showed pale red and green, relaying infrared images from cameras purchased by Wentz's clients.

In the next room the two officers' talk was a faint murmur. Naismith leaned back and pushed up his hearing aid. For a moment the sound of his lung and heart action was overpoweringly loud in his ears. Then the filters recognized the periodic noises and they were diminished, and he could hear Wentz and Rosas more clearly than any unaided human. Not many people could boast such equipment, but Naismith demanded high pay and Tinkers from Norcross to Beijing were more than happy to supply him with better than average prosthetics.

Rosas' voice came clearly: "... think Paul Naismith can take care of himself, Boss. He's lived in the mountains for years. And the Moraleses are tough and not more than fifty-five. In the old days there were some nasty bandits and ex-military up there

"Still are," Wentz put in.

"Nothing like when there were still a lot of weapons floating around. Naismith was old even when they were going strong, and he survived. I've heard about his place. He has gadgets we won't see for years. He isn't called the Tinker wizard for nothing. I

The rest was blotted out by a loud creaking that rose to near painful intensity in Naismith's ear, then faded as the filters damped out the amplification. Naismith looked wildly around, then sheepishly realized it was a microquake. They happened all the time this near Vandenberg. Most were barely noticeable — unless one used special amplification, as Paul was now. The roar had been a slight creaking of wall timbers. It passed... and he could hear the two peace officers once more.

"... at he said about needing an apprentice is true, Boss. It hasn't been just us in Middle California who've been after him. I know people in Medford and Norcross who are scared witless he'll die without leaving a successor. He's hands down the best algorithms man in North America — I'd say in the world except I want to be conservative. You know that comm gear you have back in the control room? I know it's close to your heart, your precious toy and mine. Well, the bandwidth compression that makes possible all those nice color pictures coming over the fiber and the microwave would be plain impossible without the tricks he's sold the Tinkers. And that's not all —"

"All right!" Wentz laughed. "I can tell you took it serious when I told you to specialize on our high tech clients. I know Middle California would be a backwater without him, but-"

"And it will be again, once he's gone, unless he can find an apprentice. They've been trying for years to get him to take on some students or even to teach classes like before the Crash, but he's refused. And I think he's right. Unless you are terribly creative to begin with, there's no way you can make new algorithms. I think he's been waiting — not taking anyone on — and watching. I think today he found his apprentice. The kid's mean... he'd kill. And I don't know what he really wants besides money. But he has one thing that all the good intentions and motivation in world can't get us, and that's brains. You should have seen him on the Celest, Boss..."

The argument — or lecture — went on for several more minutes, but the outcome was predictable. The wizard of the Tinkers had at long last got himself an apprentice.

THREE

Night and triple moonlight. Wili lay in the back of the buckboard, heavily bundled in blankets. The soft springs absorbed most of the bumps and lurches as the wagon passed over the tilting, broken concrete. The only sounds Wili heard were the cool wind through the trees, the steady clapclapclap of the horse's rubberized shoes, its occasional snort in the darkness. They had not yet reached the great black forest that stretched north to south; it seemed like all Middle California was spread out around him. The sea fog which so often made the nights here dark was absent, and the moonlight gave the air an almost luminous blue tone. Directly west- the direction Wili faced — Santa Ynez lay frozen in the still light. Few lights were visible, but the pattern of the greets was clear, and there was of a hint of orange and violet from the open square of the bazaar.

Wili wriggled deeper in the blankets, the tingling paralysis in his limbs mostly gone now; the warmth in his arms and legs, the cold air on his face, and the vision spread below him was as good as any drug high he'd ever stolen in Pasadena. The land was beautiful, but it had not turned out to be the easy pickings he had hoped for when he had defected from the Ndelante and headed north. There were unpeopled ruins, that was true: He could see what must have been the pre-Crash location of Santa Ynez, rectangular tracings all overgrown and no lights at all.

The ruins were bigger than the modern version of the town, but nothing like the promise of the L.A. Basin, where kilometer after kilometer of ruins — much of it unlooted -stretched as far as a man could walk in a week. And if one wanted some more exciting, more profitable way of getting rich, there were the Jonque mansions in the hills above the Basin. From those high vantage points, Los Angeles had its own fairyland aspect: Horizon to horizon had sparkled with little fires that marked towns in the ruins. Here and there glowed the incandescent lights of Jonque outposts. And at the center, a luminous, crystal growth, stood the towers of the Peace Authority Enclave. Wili sighed. That had all been before his world in the Ndelante Ali had fallen apart, before he discovered Old Ebenezer's con... If ever he returned, it would be a contest between the Ndelante and the Jonques over who'd skin him first.

Wili couldn't go back.

But he had seen one thing on this journey north that made it worth being chased here. That one thing made this landscape forever more spectacular than LAs. He looked over Santa Ynez at the object of his wonder:

The silver dome rose out of the sea, into the moonlight. Even at this remove and altitude, it still seemed to tower. People called it many things, and even in Pasadena he had heard of it, though he'd never believed the stories. Larry Faulk called it Mount Vandenberg. The old man Naismith — the one who even now was whistling aimlessly as his servant drove their wagon into the hills — he had called it the Vandenberg Bobble. But whatever they called it, it transcended the name.

In its size and perfection it seemed to transcend nature itself. From Santa Barbara he had seen it. It was a hemisphere at least twenty kilometers across. Where it fell into the Pacific, Wili could see multiple lines of moonlit surf breaking soundlessly against its curving arc. On its inland side, the lake they called Lompoc was still and dark.

Perfect, perfect. The shape was an abstraction beyond reality. Its mirror-perfect surface caught the moon and held it in a second image, just as clear as the first. And so the night had two moons, one very high in the sky, the other shining from the dome. Out in the sea, the more normal reflection was a faint silver bar lying straight to the ocean's horizon. Three moon's worth of light in all! During the day, the vast mirror captured the sun in a similar way. Larry Faulk claimed the farmers planted their lands to take advantage of the double sunlight.

Who had made Vandenberg Dome? The One True God? Some Jonque or Anglo god? And if made by man, how? What could be inside? Wili dozed, imagining the burglary of all burglaries — to get inside and steal what treasures would be hidden by a treasure so great as that Dome...

When he woke, they were in the forest, rolling upward still, the trees deep and dark around them. The taller pines moved and spoke unsettlingly in the wind. This was more of a forest than he had ever seen. The real moon was low now; an occasional splash of silver shouldered past the branches and lay upon further trees, glistening on their needles. Over his head, a band of night, brighter than the trees, was visible. The stars were there.

The Anglo's servant had slowed the horse. The ancient concrete road was gone; the path was scarcely wide enough for the cart. Wili tried to face forward, but the blankets and remaining effects of the cop's stunner prevented this. Now the old man spoke quietly into the darkness. Password! Wili doubled forward to see if the cops had discovered his other knife. No. It was still there, strapped to the inside of his calf. Old men running labor camps were something he knew a lot about from L.A. He was one slave this old man was not going to own.

After a moment, a woman's voice came back, cheerfully telling them to come ahead. The horse took up its former pace. Wili saw no sign of the speaker.

The cart turned through the next switchback, its tires nearly soundless in the carpet of pine needles that layered the road. Another hundred meters, another turn, and —

It was a palace! Trees and vines closed in on all sides of the structure, but it was clearly a palace, though more open than the fortresses of the Jonque jefes in Los Angeles. Those lords usually rebuilt pre-Crash mansions, installed electrified fences and machine gun nests for security. This place was old, too, but in other ways strange. There was no outward sign of defenses — which could only mean that the owner must control the land for kilometers all around. But Wili had seen no guardian forts on their trip up here. These northerners could not be as stupid and defenseless as they seemed.

The cart drove the length of the mansion. The trail broadened into a clearing before the entrance, and Wili had the best view yet. It was smaller than the palaces of L.A. If the inner court was a reasonable size, then it couldn't house all the servants and family of a great jefe. But the building was massive, the wood and stone expertly joined. What moonlight was left glinted off metal tracery and shone streaming images of the moon's face in the polish of the wood. The roof was darker, barely reflecting. There were gables and a strange turret: dark spheres, in diameters varying from five centimeters to almost two meters, impaled on a glinting needle.

"Wake up. We are here." Hands undid the blankets, and the old man gently shook his shoulder. It took an effort to keep from lashing out. He grunted faintly, pretended he was slowly waking. "Estamos llegado, chico," the servant, Morales, said. Wili let himself be helped from the cart. In truth he was still a little unsteady on his feet, but the less they knew of his capabilities the better. Let them think he was weak, and ignorant of English.

A servant came running out of the main entrance (or could the servants' entrance be so grand?). No one else appeared, but Wili resolved to be docile until he knew more. The woman-like Morales, middle-aged-greeted the two men warmly, then guided Wili across the stone flagging to the entrance. The boy kept his eyes down, pretending to be dopey. Out of the corner of this eye, though, he saw something more — a silver net like some giant spider web stretched between a tree and the side of the mansion.

Past the huge careen doors, a light glowed dimly, and Wili saw that the place was the equal of anything in Pasadena, though there were no obvious art treasures or golden statuary lying about. They led him up (not down! What sort of jefe put his lowest servants on an upper floor?) a wide staircase, and into

a room under the eaves. The only light was the moon's, coming through a window more than large enough to escape by.

"Tienes hambre?" the woman asked him.

Wili shook his head dumbly, surprised at himself. He really wasn't hungry; it must be some residual effect of the stunner. She showed him a toilet in an adjoining room and told him to get some sleep.

And then he was left alone!

Wili lay on the bed and looked out over the forest. He thought he could see a glint from the Vandenberg Dome. His luck was almost past marveling at. He thanked the One God he had not bolted at the entrance to the mansion. Whoever was the master here knew nothing of security and employed fools. A week here and he would know every small thing worth stealing. In a week he would be gone with enough treasure to live for a long, long time!

- Flashforward -

Captain Allison Parker's new world began with the sound of tearing metal.

For several seconds she just perceived and reacted, not trying to explain anything to herself. The hull was breached. Quiller was trying to crawl back toward her. There was blood on his face. Through rents in the hull she could see trees and pale sky. Trees?

Her mind locked out the wonder, and she struggled from her harness. She snapped the disk pack to her side and pulled down the light helmet with its ten-minute air supply. Without thinking, she was following the hull-breach procedures that had been drilled into all of them so many times. If she had thought about it she might have left off the helmet — there were sounds of birds and wind-rustled trees — and she would have died.

Allison pulled Quiller away from the panel and saw why the harness had not protected him: The front of the shuttle was caved in toward the pilot. Another few centimeters and he would have been crushed. A harsh, crackling sound came clearly through the thin shell of her helmet. She slipped Quiller's in place and turned on the oxygen feed. She recognized the smell that still hung in her helmet: The tracer stench that tagged their landing fuel.

Angus Quiller straightened out of her grasp. He looked around dazedly. "Fred?" he shouted.

Outside, the improbable trees were beginning to flare. God only knew how long the forward hull would keep the fire in the nose tanks from breaking into the crew area.

Allison and Quiller pulled themselves forward... and saw what had happened to Fred Torres. The terrible sound that had begun this nightmare had been the left front of the vehicle coming down into the flight deck. The back of Fred's acceleration couch was intact, but Allison could see that the man was beyond help. Quiller had been very lucky.

They looked through the rent that was almost directly over their heads. It was ragged and long, perhaps wide enough to escape through. Allison glanced across the cabin at the main hatch. It was subtly bowed in; they would never get out that way. Even through their pressure suits, they could now feel the heat. The sky beyond the rent was no longer blue. They were looking up a flue of smoke and flame that climbed the nearby pines.

Quiller made a stirrup with his hands and boosted the NMV specialist though the ragged tear in the hull. Allison's head popped through. Under anything less than these circumstances she would have screamed at what she saw sitting in the flames: an immense dark octopus shape, its limbs afire, cracked and swaying. Allison wriggled her shoulders free of the hole and pulled herself up. Then she reached down for the pilot. At the same time, some part of her mind realized that what she had seen was not an octopus but the mass of roots of a rather large tree which somehow had fallen downward on the nose of the sortie craft. This was what had killed Fred Torres.

Quiller leaped up to grab her hand. For a moment his broader form stuck in the opening, but after a single coordinated push and tug he came through — leaving part of his equipment harness on the jagged metal of the broken hull.

They were at the bottom of a long crater, now filled with heat and reddish smoke. Without their oxygen, they would have had no chance. Even so, the fire was intense. The forward area was well involved, sending rivulets of fire toward the rear, where most of the landing fuel was tanked. She looked wildly around, absorbing what she saw without further surprise, simply trying to find a way out.

Quiller pointed at the right wing section. If they could run along it, a short jump would take them to the cascade of brush and small trees that had fallen into the crater. It wasn't till much later that she wondered how all that brush had come to lie above the orbiter when it crashed.

Seconds later they were climbing hand-over-hand up the wall of brush and vines. The fire edged steadily through the soggy mass below them and sent flaming streamers ahead along the pine needles imbedded in the vines. At the top they turned for a moment and looked down. As they watched, the cargo bay broke in half and the sortie craft slumped into the strange emptiness below it. Thus died all Allison's millions of dollars of optical and deep-probe equipment. Her hand tightened on the disk pack that still hung by her side.

The main tank blew, and simultaneously Allison's right leg buckled beneath her. She dropped to the ground, Quiller a second behind her. "Damn stupidity," she heard him say as debris showered down on them, "us standing here gawking at a bomb. Let's move out."

Allison tried to stand, saw the red oozing from the side of her leg. The pilot stooped and carried her through the damp brush, twenty or thirty meters upwind from the crater. He set her down and bent to look at the wound. He pulled a knife from his crash kit and sawed the tough suit fabric from around her wound.

"You're lucky. Whatever it was passed right through the side of your leg. I'd call this a nick, except it goes so deep." He sprayed the area with first-aid glue, and the pain subsided to a throbbing pressure that kept time with her pulse.

The heavy red smoke was drifting steadily away from them. The orbiter itself was hidden by the crater's edge. The explosions were continuing irregularly but without great force. They should be safe here. He helped her out of her pressure suit, then struggled out of his own.

Quiller walked several paces back toward the wreck. He bent and picked up a strange, careen shape. "Looks like it got thrown here by the blast." It was a Christian cross, its base still covered with dirt.

"We crashed in a damn cemetery," Allison tried to laugh, but it made her dizzy. Quiller didn't reply. He studied the cross for some seconds. Finally he set it down and came back to look at Allison's leg. "That stopped the bleeding. I don't see any other punctures. How do you feel?"

Allison glanced down at the red on her gray flight fatigues. Pretty colors, except when it's your own red. "Give me some time to sit here. I bet I'll be able to walk to the rescue choppers when they come."

"Hmm. Okay, I'm going to take a look around... There may be a road nearby." He unclipped the crash kit and set it beside her. "Be back in fifteen minutes."

FOUR

They started on Wili the next morning. It was the woman, Irma, who brought him down, fed him breakfast in the tiny alcove off the main dining room. She was a pleasant woman, but young enough to be strong and she spoke very good Spanish. Wili did not trust her. But no one threatened him, and the food seemed endless; he ate so much that his eternal gnawing hunger was almost satisfied. All this time Irma talked — but without saying a great deal, as though she knew he was concentrating on his enormous breakfast. No other servants were visible. In fact, Wili was beginning to think the mansion was untenanted, that these three must be housekeeping staff holding the mansion for their absent lord. That jefe was very powerful or very stupid, because even in the light of day, Wili could see no evidence of defenses. If he could be gone before the jefe returned...

"— and do you know why you are here, Wili?" Irma said as she collected the plates from the mosaicked surface of the breakfast table.

Wili nodded, pretending shyness. Sure he knew. Everyone needed workers, and the old and middle-aged often needed whole gangs to keep them living in style. But he said, "To help you?"

"Not me, Wili. Paul. You will be his apprentice. He has looked a long time, and he has chosen you."

That figured. The old gardener — or whatever he was — looked to be eighty if he was a day. Right now Wili was being treated royally. But he suspected that was simply because the old man and his two flunkies were making illegitimate use of their master's house. No doubt there would be hell to pay when the jefe returned. "And, and what am I to do for My Lady?" Wili spoke with his best diffidence.

"Whatever Paul asks."

She led him around to the back of the mansion where a large pool, almost a lake, spread away under the pines. The water looked clear, though here and there floated small clots of pine needles. Toward the center, out from under the trees, it reflected the brilliant blue of the sky. Downslope, through an opening in the trees, Wili could see thunderheads gathering about Vandenberg.

"Now off with your clothes and we'll see about giving you a bath." She moved to undo the buttons on his shirt, an adult helping a child.

Wili recoiled. "No!" To be naked here with the woman!

Irma laughed and pinned his arm, continued to unbutton the shirt. For an instant, Wili forgot his pose — that he was a child, and an obedient one. Of course this treatment would be unthinkable within the Ndelante. And even in Jonque territory, the body was respected. No woman forced baths and nakedness on males.

But Irma was strong. As she pulled the shirt over his head, he lunged for the knife strapped to his leg, and brought it up toward her face. Irma screamed. Even as she did, Wili was cursing himself.

"No, no! I am going to tell Paul." She backed away, her hands held between them, as if to protect herself. Wili knew he could run away now (and he couldn't imagine these three catching him) — or he could do what was necessary to stay. For now he wanted to stay.

He dropped the knife and groveled. "Please, Lady, I acted without thought." Which was true. "Please forgive me. I will do anything to make it up." Even, even...

The woman stopped, came back, and picked up the knife. She obviously had no experience as a foreman, to trust anything he said. The whole situation was alien and unpredictable. Wili would almost have preferred the lash, the predictability. Irma shook her head, and when she spoke there was still a little fear in her voice. Wili was sure she now knew that he was a good deal older than he looked; she made no move to touch him. "Very well. This is between us, Wili. I will not tell Paul." She smiled, and Wili had the feeling there was something she was not telling him. She reached her arm out full length and handed him the brush and soap. Wili stripped, waded into the chill water, and scrubbed.

"Dress in these," she said after he was out and had dried himself. The new clothes were soft and clean, a minor piece of loot all by themselves. Irma was almost her old self as they walked back to the mansion, and Wili felt safe in asking the question that had been on his mind all that morning: "My Lady, I notice we are all alone here, the four of us — or at least so it appears. When will the protection of the manor lord be returned to us?"

Irma stopped and after a second, laughed. "What manor lord? Your Spanish is so strange. You seem to think this is a castle that should have serfs and troops all round." She continued, almost to herself, "Though perhaps that is your reality. I have never lived in the South.

"You have already met the lord of the manor, Wili." She saw his uncomprehending stare. "It's Paul Naismith, the man who brought you here from Santa Ynez."

"And... " Wili could scarcely trust himself to ask the question,"... you all, the three of you, are alone here?"

"certainly. But don't worry. You are much safer here than you ever were in the South, I am sure."

I am sure, too, My Lady. Safe as a coyote among chickens. If ever he'd made a right decision, it had been his escape to Middle California. To think that Paul Naismith and the others had the manor to themselves — it was a wonder the Jonques had not overrun this land long ago. The thought almost kindled his suspicions. But then the prospect of what he could do here overwhelmed all. There was no reason he should have to leave with his loot. Wili Wachendon, weak as he was, could probably be ruler here — if he was clever enough during the next few weeks. At the very least he would be rich forever. If Naismith were the jefe, and if Wili were to be his apprentice, then in essence he was being adopted by the manor lord. That happened occasionally in Los Angeles. Even the richest families were cursed with sterility. Such families often sought an appropriate heir. The adopted one was usually high-born, an orphan of another family, perhaps the survivor of a vendetta. But there were not many children to go around, especially in the old days. Wili knew of at least one case where the oldsters adopted from the Basin — not a black child, of course, but still a boy from a peasant family. Such was the stuff of dreams; Wili could scarcely believe that it was being offered to him. If he played his cards right, he would eventually own all of this-and without having to steal a single thing, or risk torture and execution! It was... unnatural. But if these people were crazy, he would certainly do what he could to profit by it.

Wili hurried after Irma as she returned to the house.

A week passed, then two. Naismith was nowhere to be seen, and Bill and Irma Morales would only say that he was traveling on "business." Wili began to wonder if "apprenticeship" really meant what he had thought. He was treated well, but not with the fawning courtesy that should be shown the heir-apparent of a manor. Perhaps he was on some sort of probation: Irma woke him at dawn, and after breakfast he spent most of the day — assuming it wasn't raining — in the manor's small fields, weeding, planting, hoeing. It wasn't hard work — in fact, it reminded him of what Larry Faulk's labor company did — but it was deadly boring.

On rainy days, when the weather around Vandenberg blew inland, he stayed indoors and helped Irma with cleaning. He had scarcely more enthusiasm for this, but it did give him a chance to snoop: The mansion had no interior court, but in some ways it was more elaborate than he had first imagined. He and Irma cleaned some large rooms hidden below ground level. Irma would say nothing about them, though they appeared to be for meetings or banquets. The building's floor space, if not the available food supply, implied a large household. Perhaps that was how these innocents protected themselves: They simply hid until their enemies got tired of searching for them. But it didn't really make sense. If he were a bandit, he'd burn the place down or else occupy it He wouldn't simply go away because he could find no one to kill. And yet there was no evidence of past violence in the polished hardwood walls or the deep, soft carpeting.

In the evenings, the two treated him more as they should the adopted son of a lord. He was allowed to sit in the main living room and play Celest or chess. The Celest was every bit as fascinating as the one in Santa Ynez. But he never could attain quite the accuracy he'd had that first time. He began to suspect that part of his win had been luck. It was the precision of his eye and hand that betrayed him, not his physical intuition. Delays of a thousandth of a second in a cushion shot could cause a miss at the destination. Bill said there were mechanical aids to overcome this difficulty, but Wili had little trust for such. He spent many hours hunched before the glowing volume of the Celest, while on the other side of the room Bill and Irma watched the holo. (After the first couple of days, the shows seemed uniformly dull — either local gossip, or flat television game shows from the last century.)

Playing chess with Bill was almost as boring as the holo. After a few games, he could easily beat the caretaker. The programmed version was much more fun than playing Bill.

As the days passed, and Naismith did not return, Wili's boredom intensified. He reconsidered his options. After all this time, no one had offered him the master's rooms, no one had shown him the appropriate deference. (And no tobacco was available, though that by itself was something he could live with.) Perhaps it was all some benign labor contract operation, like Larry Faulk's. If this were the Anglo idea of adoption, he wanted none of it, and his situation became simply a grand opportunity for burglary.

Wili began with small things: jeweled ashtrays from the subterranean rooms, a pocket Celest he found in an empty bedroom. He picked a tree out of sight behind the pond and hid his loot in a waterproof bag there. The burglaries, small as they were, gave him a sense of worth and made life a lot less boring. Even the pain in his gut lessened and the food seemed to taste better.

Wili might have been content to balance indefinitely between the prospect of inheriting the estate and stealing it, but for one thing: The mansion was haunted. It was not the air of mystery or the hidden rooms. There was something alive in the house. Sometimes he heard a woman's voice — not Irma's, but the one he had heard talk to Naismith on the trail. Wili saw the creature once. It was well past midnight. He was sneaking back to the mansion after stashing his latest acquisitions. Wili oozed along the edge of the veranda, moving silently from shadow to shadow. And suddenly there was someone behind him, standing full in the moonlight. It was a woman, tall and Anglo. Her hair, silver in the light, was cut in an alien style. The clothes were like something out of the Moraleses old-time television. She turned to look straight at him. There was a faint smile on her face. He bolted — and the creature twisted, vanished.

Wili was a fast shadow through the veranda doors, up the stairs, and into his room. He jammed a chair under the doorknob and lay for many minutes, heart pounding. What had he seen? How he would like to believe it was a trick of the moonlight: The creature had vanished as if by the flick of a mirror, and large parts of the walls surrounding the veranda were of slick black glass. But tricks of the eye do not have such detail, do not smile faint smiles. What then? Television? Wili had seen plenty of flat video, and since coming to Middle California had used holo tanks. Tonight went beyond all that. Besides, the vision had turned to look right at him.

So that left... a haunting. It made sense. No one — certainly no woman — had dressed like that since before the plagues. Old Naismith would have been young then. Could this be the ghost of a dead love? Such tales were common in the ruins of L.A., but until now Wili had been skeptical.

Any thought of inheriting the estate was gone. The question was, could he get out of this alive? — and with how much loot? Wili watched the doorknob with horrified fascination. If he lived through this night, then it was probably safe to stay a few more days. The vision might be just the warning of a jealous spirit. Such a ghost would not begrudge him a few more trinkets, as long as he departed when Naismith returned.

Wili got very little sleep that night.

FIVE

The horsemen — four of them, with a row of five pack mules — arrived the afternoon of a slow, rainy day. It had been thundering and windy earlier, but now the rains off Vandenberg came down in a steady drizzle from a sky so overcast that it already seemed evening.

When Wili saw the four, and saw that none of them was Naismith, he faded around the mansion, toward the pond and his cache. Then he stopped for a foolish moment, wondering if he should run back and warn Irma and Bill.

But the two stupid caretakers were already running down the front steps to greet the intruders: an enormous fat fellow and three rifle-carrying men-at-arms. As he skulked in the bushes, Bill turned and seemed to look directly at his hiding place. "Wili, come help our guests."

Mustering what dignity he could, the boy emerged and walked toward the group. The old, fat one dismounted. He looked like a Jonque, but his English was strangely accented. "Ah, so this is his apprentice, hein? I have wondered if the master would ever find a successor and what sort of person he might be." He patted the bristling Wili on the head, making the usual error about the boy's age.

The gesture was patronizing, but Wili thought there was a hint of respect, almost awe, in his voice. Perhaps this slob was not a Jonque and had never seen a black before. The fellow stared silently at Wili for a moment and then seemed to notice the rain. He gave an exaggerated shiver and most of the group moved up the steps. Bill and Wili were left to take the animals around to the outbuilding.

Four guests. That was not the end. By twos and threes and fours, all through the afternoon and evening, others drifted in. The horses and mules quickly overflowed the small outbuilding, and Bill showed Wili hidden stables. There were no servants. The guests themselves, or at least the more junior of them, carried the baggage indoors and helped with the animals. Much of the luggage was not taken to their rooms, but disappeared into the halls below ground. The rest turned out to be food and drink — which made sense, since the manor produced only enough to feed three or four people.

Night and, more rain. The last of the visitors arrived — and one of these was Naismith. The old man took his apprentice aside. "Ah, Wili, you have remained." His Spanish was as stilted as ever, and he paused frequently as if waiting for some unseen speaker to supply him with a missing word. "After the meetings, when our guests have gone, you and I must talk on your course of study. You are too old to delay. For now, though, help Irma and Bill and do not... bother... our guests." He looked at Wili as though suspecting the boy might do what Wili had indeed been considering. There was many a fat purse to be seen among these naive travelers.

"A new apprentice has nothing to tell his elders, and there is little he can learn from them in this short time." With that the old man departed for the halls beneath his small castle, and Wili was left to work with Irma and two of the visitors in the dimly lit kitchen.

Their mysterious guests stayed all that night and through the next day. Most kept to their rooms and the meeting halls. Several helped Bill with repairs on the outbuilding. Even here they behaved strangely: For instance, the roof of the stable badly needed work. But when the sun came out, the men wouldn't touch it. They seemed only willing to work on things where there was shade. And they never worked outside in groups of more than two or three. Bill claimed this was all Naismith's wish.

The next evening, there was a banquet in one of the halls. Wili, Bill, and Irma brought the food in, but that was all they got to see. The heavy doors were locked and the three of them went back up to the living room. After the Moraleses had settled down with the holo, Wili drifted away as if to go to his room.

He cut through the kitchen to the side stairs. The thick carpet made speedy, soundless progress possible, and a moment later he was peeking round at the entrance to the meeting hall. There were no guards, but the oak doors remained closed. A wood tripod carried a sign of gold on black. Wili silently crossed the hall and touched the sign. The velvet was deep but the gold was just painted on. It was cracked here and there and seemed very old. The letters said:

NCC

and below this, hand-lettered on vellum, was:

2047

Wili stepped back, more puzzled than ever. Why? Who was there to read the sign, when the doors were shut and locked? Did these people believe in spirit spells? Wili crept to the door and set his ear against the dark wood. He heard...

Nothing. Nothing but the rush of blood in his ear. These doors were thick, but he should at least hear the murmur of voices. He could hear the sound of a century-old game show from all the way up in the living room, but the other side of this door might as well be the inside of a mountain.

Wili fled upstairs, and was a model of propriety until their guests departed the next day.

There was no single leave-taking; they left as they had come. Strange customs indeed, the Anglos had.

But one thing was as in the South. They left gifts. And the gifts were conveniently piled on the wide table in the mansion's entrance way. Wili tried to pretend disinterest, but he felt his eyes must be visibly bugging out of his head whenever he walked by. Till now he had not seen much that was like the portable wealth of Los Angeles, but here were rubies, emeralds, diamonds, gold. There were gadgets, too, in artfully carved boxes of wood and silver. He couldn't tell if they were games or holos or what. There was so much here that a fortune could be taken and not be missed.

The last were gone by midnight. Wili crouched at the window of his attic room and watched them depart. They quickly disappeared down the trail, and the beat of hooves ceased soon after that. Wili suspected that, like the others, these three had left the main trail and were departing along some special path of their own.

Wili did not go back to his bed. The moon's waning crescent slowly rose and the hours passed. Wili tried to see familiar spots along the coast, but the fog had rolled in, and only the Vandenberg Dome rose into sight. He waited till just before morning twilight. There were no sounds from below. Even the horses were quiet. Only the faint buzzing of insects edged the silence. If he was going to have part of that treasure, he would have to act now, moonlight or not.

Wili slipped down the stairs, his hand lightly touching the haft of his knife. (It was not the same one he had flashed at Irma. That he had made a great show of giving up. This was a short carving knife from the kitchen set.) There had been no more ghostly apparitions since that night on the veranda. Wili had almost convinced himself that it had been an illusion, or some holographic scare show. Nevertheless, he had no desire to stay.

There, glinting in the moonlight, was his treasure. It looked even more beautiful than by lamplight. Far away, he heard Bill turn over, begin to snore. Wili silently filled his sack with the smallest, most clearly valuable items on the table. It was hard not to be greedy, but he stopped when the bag was only half full. Five kilos would have to do! More wealth than Old Ebenezer passed to the lower Ndelante in a year! And now out the back, around the pond, and to his cache.

Wili crept out onto the veranda, his heart suddenly pounding. This would be the spirit's last chance to get him. iDio! There was someone out there. Wili stood absolutely still, not breathing. It was Naismith. The old man sat on a lounge chair, his body bundled against the chill. He seemed to be gazing into the sky-but not at the moon, since he was in the shadows. Naismith was looking away from Wili; this could not be an ambush. Nevertheless, the boy's hand tightened on his knife. After a moment, he moved again, away from the old man and toward the pond.

"Come here to sit," said Naismith, without turning his head. Wili almost bolted, then realized that if the old man could be out here stargazing, there was no reason why the excuse should not also serve him. He set his sack of treasure down in the shadows and moved closer to Naismith.

"That's close enough. Sit. Why are you here so late, young one?"

"The same as you, I think, My Lord... To view the sky." What else could the old man be out here for?

"That's a good reason." The tone was neutral, and Wili could not tell if there was a smile or a scowl on his face; he could barely make out the other's profile. Wili's hand tightened nervously on the haft of his knife. He had never actually killed anyone before, but he knew the penalties for burglary.

"But I don't admire the sky as a whole," Naismith continued, "though it is beautiful. I like the morning and the late evening especially, because then it is possible to see the —" there was one of his characteristic pauses as he seemed to listen for the right word " satellites. See? There are two visible right now." He pointed first near the zenith and then waved at something close to the horizon. Wili followed his first gesture, and saw a tiny point of light moving slowly, effortlessly across the sky. Too slow to be an aircraft, much too slow to be a meteor: It was a moving star, of course. For a moment, he had thought the old man was going to show him something really magical. Wili shrugged and somehow Naismith seemed to catch the gesture.

"Not impressed, eh? There were men there once, Wili. But no more."

It was hard for Wili to conceal his scorn. How could that be? With aircraft you could see the vehicle. These little lights were like the stars and as meaningless. But he said nothing and a long silence overcame them. "You don't believe me, do you, Wili? But it is true. There were men and women there, so high up you can't see the form of their craft."

Wili relaxed, squatted before the other's chair. He tried to sound humble, "But then, Lord, what keeps them up? Even aircraft must come down for fuel."

Naismith chuckled. "That from the expert Celest player! Think, Wili. The universe is a great game of Celest. Those moving lights are swinging about the Earth, just like planets on a game display.

Del Nico Dio! Wili sat on the flags with an audible thump. A wave of dizziness passed over him. The sky would never be the same. Wili's cosmology had-until that moment-been an unexamined flatland image. Now, suddenly, he found the interior cosmos of Celest surrounding him forever and ever, with no up or down, but only the vast central force field that was the Earth, with the moon and all those moving stars circling about. And he couldn't disguise from himself the distances involved; he was far too familiar with Celest to do that. He felt like an infinitesimal shrinking toward some unknowable zero.

His mind tumbled over and over in the dark, caught between the relationships flashing through his mind and the night sky that swung overhead. So all those objects had their own gravity, and all moved-at least in some small way-at the behest of all the others. An image of the solar system not too different from the reality slowly formed in his mind. When at last he spoke, his voice was very small, and his humility was not pretended, "But then the game, it represents trips that men have actually made? To the moon, to the stars that move? You... we... can do that?"

"We could do that, Wili. We could do that and more. But no longer."

"But why not?" It was as though the universe had suddenly been taken back from his grasp. His voice was almost a wail.

"In the beginning, it was the War. Fifty years ago there were men alive up there. They starved or they came back to Earth. After the War there were the plagues. Now... now we could do it again. It would be different from before, but we could do it... if it weren't for the Peace Authority." The last two words were in English. He paused and then said, "Mundopaz."

Wili looked into the sky. The Peace Authority. They had always seemed a part of the universe as far away and indifferent as the stars themselves. He saw their jets and occasionally their helicopters. The major highways passed two or three of their freighters every hour. They had their enclave in Los Angeles. The Ndelante Ali had never considered hitting it; better to burgle the feudal manors of Aztlán. And Wili remembered that even the lords of Aztlán, for all their arrogance, never spoke of the Peace Authority except in neutral tones. It was fitting in a way that something so nearly supernatural should have stolen the stars from mankind. Fitting, yet now he knew, intolerable.

"They brought us peace, Wili, but the price was very high." A meteor flashed across the sky, and Wili wondered if that had been a piece of man's work, too. Naismith's voice suddenly became businesslike, "I said we must talk, and this is the perfect time for it. I want you for my apprentice. But this is no good unless you want it also. Somehow, I don't think our goals are the same. I think you want wealth: I know what's in the bag yonder. I know what's in the tree behind the pond."

Naismith's voice was dry, cool. Wili's eyes hung on the point where the meteor had swept to nothingness. This was like a dream. In Los Angeles, he would be on his way to the headsman now, an adopted son caught in treachery. "But what will wealth get you, Wili? Minimal security, until someone takes it from you. Even if you could rule here, you would still be nothing more than a petty lord, insecure.

"Beyond wealth, Wili, there is power, and I think you have seen enough so that you can appreciate it, even if you never thought to have any"

Power. Yes. To control others the way he had been controlled. To make others fear as he had feared. Now he saw the power in Naismith. What else could really explain this man's castle? And Wili had thought the spirit a jealous lover. Hah! Spirit or projection, it was this man's servant. An hour ago, this insight alone would have made him stay and return all he had stolen. Somehow, he still couldn't take his eyes off the sky.

"And beyond power, Wili, there is knowledge — which some say is power." He had slipped into his native English, and Wili didn't bother to pretend ignorance. "Whether it is power or not depends on the will and the wisdom of its user. As my apprentice, Wili, I can offer you knowledge, for a surety; power, perhaps; wealth, only what you have already seen."

The crescent moon had cleared the pines now. It was one more thing that would never be the same for Wili.

Naismith looked at the boy and held out his hand. Wili offered his knife hilt first. The other accepted it with no show of surprise. They stood and walked back to the house.

SIX

Many things were the same after that night. They were the outward things: Wili worked in the gardens almost as much as before. Even with the gifts of food the visitors had brought, they still needed to work to feed themselves. (Wili's appetite was greater than the others'. It didn't seem to help; he remained as undernourished and stunted as ever.) But in the afternoons and evenings he worked with Naismith's machines.

It turned out the ghost was one of those machines. Jill, the old man called her, was actually an interface program run on a special processor system. She was good, almost like a person. With the projection equipment Naismith had built into the walls of the veranda, she could even appear in open space. Jill was the perfect tutor, infinitely patient but with enough "humanity" to make Wili want to please her. Hour after hour, she flashed language questions at him. It was like some verbal Celest. In a matter of weeks, Wili progressed from being barely literate to having a fair command of technical written English.

At the same time, Naismith began teaching him math. At first Wili was contemptuous of these problems. He could do arithmetic as fast as Naismith. But he discovered that there was more to math than the four basic arithmetic operations. There were roots and transcendental functions; there were the relationships that drove both Celest and the planets.

Naismith's machines showed him functions as graphs and related function operations to those pictures. As the days passed, the functions became very specialized and interesting. One night, Naismith sat at the controls and caused a string of rectangles of varying width to appear on the screen. They looked like irregular crenellations on some battlement. Below the first plot, the old man produced a second and then a third, each somewhat like the first but with more and narrower rectangles. The heights bounced back and forth between 1 and -1.

"Well," he said, turning from the display, "what is the pattern? Can you show me the next three plots in this series?" It was a game they had been playing for several days now. Of course, it was all a matter of opinion what really constituted a pattern, and sometimes there was more than one answer that would satisfy a person's taste, but it was amazing how often Wili felt a certain rightness in some answers and an unaesthetic blankness in others. He looked at the screen for several seconds. This was harder than Celest, where he merely cranked on deterministic relationships. Hmmm. The squares got smaller, the heights stayed the same, the minimum rectangle width decreased by a factor of two on every new line. He reached out and slid his finger across the screen, sketching the three graphs of his answer.

"Good," said Naismith. "And I think you see how you could make more plots, until the rectangles became so narrow that you couldn't finger-sketch or even display them properly.

"Now look at this." He drew another row of crenellations, one clearly not in the sequence: The heights were not restricted to 1 and -1 . "Write me that as the sum and differences of the functions we've already plotted. Decompose it into the other functions." Wili scowled at the display; worse than "guess the pattern," this was. Then he saw it: three of the first graph minus four copies of the third graph plus...

His answer was right, but Wili's pride was short-lived, since the old man followed this problem with similar decomposition questions that took Wili many minutes to solve... until Naismith showed him a little trick — something called orthogonal decomposition — that used a peculiar and wonderful property of these graphs, these "walsh waves" he called them. The insight brought a feeling of awe just a little like learning about the moving stars, to know that hidden away in the patterns were realities that might take him days to discover by himself.

Wili spent a week dreaming up other orthogonal families and was disappointed to discover that most of them were already famous — haar waves, trig waves — and that others were special cases of general families known for more than two hundred years. He was ready for Naismith's books now. He dived into them, rushed past the preliminary chapters, pushed himself toward the frontier where any new insights would be beyond the farthest reach of previous explorers.

In the outside world, in the fields and the forest that now were such a small part of his consciousness, summer moved into fall. They worked longer hours, to get what crops remained into storage before the frosts. Even Naismith did his best to help, though the others tried to prevent this. The old man was not weak, but there was an air of physical fragility about him.

From the high end of the bean patch, Wili could see over the pines. The leafy forests had changed color and were a band of orange-red beyond the evergreen. The land along the coast was clouded over, but Wili suspected that the jungle there was still wet and green. Vandenberg Dome seemed to hang in the clouds, as awesome as ever. Wili knew more about it now, and someday he would discover all its secrets. It was simply a matter of asking the right questions — of himself and of Paul Naismith.

Indoors, in his greater universe, Wili had completed his first pass through functional analysis and now undertook a three-pronged expedition that Naismith had set for him: into finite galois theory, stochastics, and electromagnetics. There was a goal in sight, though (Wili was pleased to see) there was no ultimate end to what could be learned. Naismith had a project, and it would be Wili's if he was clever enough.

Wili saw why Naismith was valued and saw the peculiar service he provided to people all over the continent. Naismith solved problems. Almost every day the old man was on the phone, sometimes talking to people locally — like Miguel Rosas down in Santa Ynez — but just as often to people in Fremont, or in places so far away that it was night on the screen while still day here in Middle California. He talked to people in English and in Spanish, and in languages that Wili had never heard. He talked to people who were neither Jonques nor Anglos nor blacks.

Wili had learned enough now to see that these were not nearly as simple as making local calls. Communication between towns along the coast was trivial over the fiber, where almost any bandwidth could be accommodated. For longer distances, such as from Naismith's palace to the coast, it was still relatively easy to have video communication: The coherent radiators on the roof could put out microwave and infrared beams in any direction. On a clear day, when the IR radiator could be used, it was almost as good as a fiber (even with all the tricks Naismith used to disguise their location). But for talking around the curve of the Earth, across forests and rivers where no fiber had been strung and no line of sight existed, it was a different story: Naismith used what he called "short-waves" (which were really in the one to ten meter range). These were quite unsuitable for high-fidelity communication. To transmit video-even the wavery black-and-white flat pictures Naismith used in his transcontinental calls — took incredibly clever coding schemes and some realtime adaptation to changing conditions in the upper atmosphere.

The people at the other end brought Naismith problems, and he came back with answers. Not immediately, of course; it often took him weeks, but he eventually thought of something. At least the people at the other end seemed happy. Though it was still unclear to Wili how gratitude on the other side of the continent could help Naismith, he was beginning to understand what had paid for the palace and how Naismith could afford full-scale holo projectors. It was one of these problems that Naismith turned over to his apprentice. If he succeeded, they might actually be able to steal pictures off the Authority's snooper satellites.

It wasn't only people that appeared on the screens.

One evening shortly after the first snowfall of the season, Wili came in from the stable to find Naismith watching what appeared to be an empty patch of snow-covered ground. The picture jerked every few seconds, as if the camera were held by a drunkard. Wili sat down beside the old man. His stomach was more upset than usual and the swinging of the picture did nothing to help the situation — but his curiosity gave him no rest. The camera suddenly swung up to eye level and looked through the pine trees at a house, barely visible in the evening gloom. Wili gasped — it was the building they were sitting in.

Naismith turned from the screen and smiled. "It's a deer, I think. South of the house. I've been following her for the last couple of nights." It took Wili a second to realize he was referring to what was holding the camera. Wili tried to imagine how anyone could catch a deer and strap a camera on it. Naismith must have noticed his puzzlement. "Just a second." He rummaged through a nearby drawer and handed Wili a tiny brown ball. "That's a camera like the one on the critter. It's wide enough so I have resolution about as good as the human eye. And I can shift the decoding parameters so it will 'look' in different directions without the deer's having to move.

`Jill, move the look axis, will you?"

"Right, Paul." The view slid upward till they were looking into overhanging branches and then down the other side. Wili and Naismith saw a scrawny back and part of a furry ear.

Wili looked at the object Paul had placed in his hand. The "camera" was only three or four millimeters across. It felt warm and almost sticky in Wili's hand. It was a far cry from the lensed contraptions he had seen in Jonque villas. So you just stick them to the fur, true?" said Wili.

Naismith shook his head. "Even easier than that. I can get these in hundred lots from the Greens in Norcross. I scatter them through the forest, on branches and such. All sorts of animals pick them up. It provides just a little extra security. The hills are safer than they were years ago, but there are still a few bandits."

"Um." If Naismith had weapons to match his senses, the manor was better protected than any castle in Los Angeles. "This would be greater protection if you could have people watching all the views all the time."

Naismith smiled, and Wili thought of Jill. He knew enough now to see that the program could be made to do just that.

Wili watched for more than an hour as Naismith showed him scenes from a number of cameras, including one from a bird. That gave the same sweeping view he imagined could be seen from Peace Authority aircraft.

When at last he went to his room, Wili sat for a long while looking out the garret window at the snow-covered trees, looking at what he had just seen with godlike clarity from dozens of other eyes. Finally he stood up, trying to ignore the cramp in his gut that had become so persistent these last few weeks. He removed his clothes from the closet and lay them on the bed, then inspected every square centimeter with his eyes and fingers. His favorite jacket and his usual work pant both had tiny brown balls stuck to cuffs or seams. Wili removed them; they looked so innocuous in the room's pale lamplight.

He put them in a dresser drawer and returned his clothes to the closet.

He lay awake for many minutes, thinking about a place and time he had resolved never to dwell on again. What could a hovel in Glendora have in common with a palace in the mountains? Nothing. Everything. There had been safety there. There had been Uncle Sylvester. He had learned there, too — arithmetic and a little reading. Before the Jonques, before the Ndelante — it had been a child's paradise, a time lost forever.

Wili quietly got up and slipped the cameras back into his clothing. Maybe not lost forever.

SEVEN

January passed, an almost uninterrupted snowstorm. The winds coming off Vandenberg brought ever-higher drifts that eventually reached the mansion's second story and would have totally blocked the entrances if not for the heroic efforts of Bill and Irma. The pain in Wili's middle became constant, intense. Winters had always been bad for him, but this one was worse than ever before, and the others eventually became aware of it. He could not suppress the occasional grimace, the faint groan. He was always hungry, always eating-and yet losing weight.

But there was great good, too. He was beyond the frontiers of Naismith's books! Paul claimed that no previous human had insight on the coding problem that he had attacked! Wili didn't need Naismith's machines now; the images in his mind were so much more complete. He sat in the living room for hours-through most of his waking time — almost unaware of the outside world, almost unaware of his pain, dreaming of the problem and his schemes for its defeat. All existence was groups and graphs and endless combinatorical refinements on the decryption scheme he hoped would break the problem.

But when he ate and even when he slept, the pain levered itself back into his soul.

It was Irma, not Wili, who noticed that the paler skin on his palms had a yellow cast beneath the brown. She sat beside him at the dining table, holding his small hands in her large, calloused ones. Wili bristled at her touch. He was here to eat, not to be inspected. But Paul stood behind her.

"And the nails look discolored, too." She reached across to one of Wili's yellowed fingernails and gave it a gentle tug. Without sound or pain, the nail came away at its root. Wili stared stupidly for a second, then jerked his hand back with a shriek. Pain was one thing; this was the nightmare of a body slowly dismembering itself. For an instant terror blotted out his gutpain the way mathematics had done before.

They moved him to a basement room, where he could be warm all the time. Wili found himself in bed most of each day. His only view of the outside, of the cloudswept purity of Vandenberg, was via the holo. The mountain snows were too deep to pass travelers; there would be no doctors. But Naismith moved cameras and high-bandwidth equipment into the room, and once when Wili was not lost in dreaming, he saw that someone from far away was looking on, was being interrogated by Naismith. The old man seemed very angry.

Wili reached out to touch his sleeve. "It will be all right, Uncle Syl — Paul. This problem I have always had and worst in the winters. I will be okay in the spring."

Naismith smiled and nodded, then turned away.

But Wili was not delirious in any normal sense. During the long hours an average patient would have lain staring at the ceiling or watching the holo and trying to ignore his pain, Wili dreamed on and on about the communications problem that had resisted his manifold efforts all these weeks. When the others were absent, there was still Jill, taking notes, ready to call for help; she was more real than any of them. It was hard to imagine that her voice and pretty face had ever seemed threatening.

In a sense, he had already solved the problem, but his scheme was too slow; he needed n*log(n) time for this application. He was far beyond the tools provided by his brief, intense education. Something new, something clever was needed, and by the One True God he would find it!

And when the solution did come it was like a sun rising on a clear morning, which was appropriate since this was the first clear day in almost a month. Bill brought him up to ground level to sit in the sunlight before the newly cleared windows. The sky was not just clear, but an intense blue. The snow was piled deep, a blinding white. Icicles grew down from every edge and corner, dripping tiny diamonds in the warm light.

Wili had been dictating to Jill for nearly an hour when the old man came down for breakfast. He took one look over Wili's shoulder and then grabbed his reader, saying not a word to Wili or anyone else. Naismith paused many times, his eyes half closed in concentration. He was about a third of the way through when Wili finished. He looked up when Wili stopped talking, "You got it?"

Wili nodded, grinning. "Sure, and in n*log(n) time, too." He glanced at Naismith's reader. "You're still looking at the filter setting up. The real trick isn't for a hundred more lines." He scanned forward. Naismith looked at it for a long time, finally nodded. "I, I think I see. I'll have to study it, but I think... My little Ramanujan. How do you feel?"

"Great," filled with elation, "but tired. The pain has been less these last days, I think. Who is Ramanujan?"

"Twentieth-century mathematician. An Indian. There are a lot of similarities: You both started out without much formal education. You are both very, very good."

Wili smiled, the warmth of the sun barely matching what he felt. These were the first words of real praise he had heard from Naismith. He resolved to look up everything on file about this Ramanujan... His mind drifted, freed from the fixation of the last weeks. Through the pines, he could see the sun on Vandenberg. There were so many mysteries left to master...

EIGHT

Naismith made some phone calls the next day. The first was to Miguel Rosas at the SYP Company. Rosas was undersheriff to Sy Wentz, but the Tinkers around Vandenberg hired him for almost all their police operations.

The cop's dark face seemed a touch pale after he watched Naismith's video replay. "Okay," he finally said, "who was Ramanujan?"

Naismith felt the tears coming back to his eyes. "That was a bad slip; now the boy is sure to look him up. Ramanujan was everything I told Wili: a really brilliant fellow, without much college education." This wouldn't impress Mike, Naismith knew. There were no colleges now, just apprenticeships. "He was invited to England to work with some of the best number theorists of the time. He got TB, died young."

...Oh. I get the connection, Paul. But I hope you don't think that bringing Wili into the mountains did anything to hurt him."

"His problem is worse during winters, and our winters are fierce compared to L.A.'s. This has pushed him over the edge."

"Bull! It may have aggravated his problem, but he got better food here and more of it. Face it, Paul. This sort of wasting just gets worse and worse. You've seen it before."

"More than you!" That and the more acute diseases of the plague years had come close to destroying mankind. Then Naismith brought himself up short, remembering Miguel's two little sisters. Three orphans from Arizona they had been, but only one survived. Every winter, the girls had sickened again. When they died, their bodies were near-skeletons. The young cop had seen more of it than most in his generation.

"Listen, Mike, we've got to do something. Two or three years is the most he has. But hell, even before the War a good pharmaceutical lab could have cured this sort of thing. We were on the verge of cracking DNA coding and —

"Even then, Paul? Where do you think the plagues came from? That's not just Peace Authority jive. We know the Peace is almost as scared of bioresearch as they are that someone might find the secret of their bobbles. They bobbled Yakima a few years ago just because one of the their agents found a recombination analyzer in the city hospital. That's ten thousand people asphyxiated because of a silly antique. Face it: The bastards who started the plagues are forty years dead-and good riddance."

Naismith sighed. His conscience was going to hurt him on this — a little matter of protecting your customers. "You're wrong, Mike. I have business with lots of people. I have a good idea what most of them do."

Rosas' head snapped up. "Bioscience labs, even in our time?"

"Yes. At least three, perhaps ten. I can't be sure, since of course they don't admit to it. And there's only one whose location is certain."

'Jesus, Paul, how can you deal with such vermin?"

Naismith shrugged. "The Peace Authority is the real enemy. In spite of what you say, it's only their word that the bioscience people caused the plagues, trying to win back for their governments what all the armies could not. I know the Peace," he stopped for a moment, remembering treachery that had been a personal, secret thing for fifty years.

"I've tried to convince you tech people: The Authority can't tolerate you. You follow their laws: You don't make high-density power sources, don't make vehicles or experiment with nucleonics or biology. But if the Authority knew what was going on within the rules... You must have heard about the NCC: I showed conclusively that the Peace is beginning to catch on to us. They are beginning to understand how far we have gone without big power sources and universities and old-style capital industry. They are beginning to realize how far our electronics is ahead of their best. When they see us clearly, they'll step on us the way they have on all opposition, and we're going to have to fight."

"You've been saying that for as long as I can remember, Paul, but-"

"But secretly you Tinkers aren't that unhappy with the status quo. You've read about the wars before the War, and you're afraid of what could happen if suddenly the Authority lost power. Even though you deceive the Peace, you're secretly glad they're there. Well, let me tell you something, Mike." The words came in an uncontrollable rush. "I knew the mob you call the Peace Authority when they were just a bunch of R and D administrators and petty crooks. They were at the right place and the right time to pull the biggest con and rip-off of all history. They have zero interest in humanity or progress. That's the reason they've never invented anything of their own."

He stopped, shocked by his outburst. But he saw from Rosas' face that his revelation had not been understood. The old man sat back, tried to relax. "Sorry, I wandered off. What's important right now is this: A lot of people — from Beijing to Norcross — owe me. If we had a patent system and royalties it would be a lot more gAu than has ever trickled in. I want to call those IOUs due. I want my friends to get Wili to the bioscience underground.

"And if the past isn't enough, think about this: I'm seventy-eight. If it's not Wili, it's no one. I've never been modest: I know I'm the best mathman the Tinkers have. Wili's not merely a replacement for me. He is actually better, or will be with a few years' experience. You know the problem he just cracked? It's the thing the Middle California Tinkers have been bugging me about for three years: eavesdropping on the Authority's recon satellites."

Rosas' eyes widened slightly.

"Yes. That problem. You know what's involved. Wili's come up with a scheme I think will satisfy your friends, one that runs a very small chance of detection. Wili did it in six weeks, with just the technical background he picked up from me last fall. His technique is radical, and I think it will provide leverage on several other problems. You're going to need someone like him over the next ten years."

"Um." Rosas fiddled with his gold and blue sheriff's brassard. "Where is this lab?"

`Just north of San Diego."

"That close? Wow." He looked away. "So the problem is getting him down there. The Aztlán nobility is damned unpleasant about blacks coming in from the north, at least under normal circumstances."

" `Normal circumstances'?"

"Yes. The North American Chess Federation championships are in La Jolla this April. That means that some of the best high tech people around are going to be down there legitimately. The Authority has even offered transportation to entrants from the East Coast, and they hardly ever sully their aircraft with us ordinary humans. If I were as paranoid as you, I would be suspicious. But the Peace seems to be playing it just for the propaganda value. Chess is even more popular in Europe than here; I think the Authority is building up to sponsorship of the world championships in Berne next year.

"In any case, it provides a cover and perfect protection from the Aztlán black or Anglo, they've never touched anyone under Peace Authority protection."

Naismith found himself grinning. Some good luck after all the bad. There were tears in his eyes once more, but now for a different reason. "Thanks, Mike. I needed this more than anything I've ever asked for."

Rosas smiled briefly in return.

- Flashforward -

Allison didn't know much about plant identification (from less than one hundred kilometers anyway), but there was something very odd about this forest. In places it was overgrown right down to the ground; in other places, it was nearly clear. Everywhere a dense canopy of leaves and vines prevented anything more than fragmented views of the sky. It reminded her of the scraggly second growth forests of Northern California, except there was such a jumble of types: conifers, eucalyptus, even something that looked like sickly manzanita. The air was very warm, and muggy. She rolled back the sleeves of her flight fatigues.

The fire was barely audible now. This forest was so wet that it could not spread. Except for the pain in her leg, Allison could almost believe she were in a park on some picnic. In fact, they might be rescued by real picnickers before the Air Force arrived.

She heard Quiller's progress back toward her long before she could see him. When he finally came into view, the pilot's expression was glum. He asked again about her injury.

"I — I think I'm fine. I pinched it shut and resprayed." She paused and returned his somber look. "Only..."

"Only what?"

"Only... to be honest, Angus, the crash did something to my memory. I don't remember a thing from right after entry till we were on the ground. What went wrong anyway? Where did we end up?"

Angus Quiller's face seemed frozen. Finally he said, "Allison, I think your memory is fine — as good as mine, anyway. You see, I don't have any memory from someplace over Northern California till the hull started busting up on the ground. In fact, I don't think there was anything to remember."

"What?"

"I think we were something like forty klicks up and then we were down on a planetary surface — just like that." He snapped his fingers. "I think we've fallen into some damn fantasy." Allison just stared at him, realizing that he was probably the more distressed of the two of them. Quiller must have interpreted the look correctly. "Really, Allison, unless you believe that we could have exactly the same amount of amnesia, then the only explanation is... I mean one minute we're on a perfectly ordinary reconnaissance operation, and the next we're... we're here, just like in a lot of movies I saw when I was a kid."

"Parallel amnesia is still more believable than that, Angus." If only I could figure out where we are.

The pilot nodded. "Yes, but you didn't climb a tree and take a look around, Allison. Plant life aside, this area looks vaguely like the California coast. We're boxed in by hills, but in one direction I could see that the forests go down almost to the sea. And..."

"And?"

"There's something out there on the coast, Allison. It's a mountain, a silver mountain sticking kilometers into the sky. There's never been anything on Earth like that."

Now Allison began to feel the bedrock fear that was gnawing at Angus Quiller. For many people, the completely inexplicable is worse than death. Allison was such a person. The crash — even Fred's death — she could cope with. The amnesia explanation had been so convenient. But now, almost half an hour had passed. There was no sign of aircraft, much less of rescue. Allison found herself whispering, reciting all the crazy alternatives, "You think we're in some kind of parallel world, or on the planet of another star-or in the future?" A future where alien invaders set their silvery castle-mountains down on the California shore?

Quiller shrugged, started to speak, seemed to think better of it — then finally burst out with, "Allison, you know that... cross near the edge of the crater?"

She nodded.

"It was old, the stuff carved on it was badly weathered, but I could see... It had your name on it and... and today's date."

Just the one cross, and just the one name. For a long while they were both silent.