The Peace War (11 page)

So what are you going to do?"

"Nothing much. There can't be too many of 'em; they're awful shy. We'd go out after
them if we had more people. As it is, we've got four smart rifles and men who can use
them. And Sheriff Wentz knows about the situation... Union, don't worry." He didn't
notice Wili bristle. The smaller boy hid it well. He was beginning to realize that there
was scarcely a mean bone in Jeremy's body. "I want to show you the stuff we have here."

He turned off the gravel road and walked toward a large, one-storey building. It could
scarcely be a barn; the entire roof was covered with solar batteries. "If it weren't for the
Vandenberg Bobble, I think Middle California would be most famous for Red Arrow
Products — that's our trade name. We're not as sophisticated as the Greens in Norcross, or
as big as the Qens in Beijing, but the things we do are the best."

Wili pretended indifference. "This place is just a big farm, it looks like to me."

"Sure, and Dr. Naismith is just a hermit. It is big and it's terrific farmland. But where
do you think my family got the money to buy it? We've been real lucky: Grandmother
and the Colonel had four children after the War, and each of them had at least two. We're
practically a clan, and we've adopted other folk, people who can figure out things we
can't. The Colonel believes in diversification; between the farm and our software, we're
unsinkable."

Jeremy pounded on the heavy white door. There was no answer, but it swung slowly
inward and the boys entered. Down each side of the long building, windows let in
morning light and enough breeze to make it relatively comfortable. He had an impression
of elegant chaos. Ornamental plants surrounded scattered desks. There was more than
one aquarium. Most of the desks were unoccupied: Some sort of conference was going
on at the far end of the room. The men waved to Jeremy but continued with what
sounded perilously close to being an argument.

"Lots more people here than usual. Most guys like to work from home. Look." He
pointed to one of the few seated workers. The man seemed unaware of them. In the holo
above his desk floated colored shapes, shapes that shifted and turned. The man watched
intently. He nodded to himself, and suddenly the pattern was tripled and sheared.
Somehow he was in control of the display. Wili recognized the composition of linear and
nonlinear transformations: Inside his head, Wili had played with those through most of
the winter.

"What's he doing?"

Jeremy's normal loudness was muted. "Who do you think implements those algorithms
you and Dr. Naismith invent?" He swept his hand across the room. "We've done some of
the most complicated implementations in the world."

Wili just stared at him. "Look, Wili. I know you have all sorts of wonderful machines
up in the mountains. Where do you think they come from?"

Wili pondered. He had never really thought about it! His education had moved very fast
along the paths Naismith laid out. One price for this progress was that in most respects
Wili's opinions about what made things work were a combination of mathematical
abstraction and Ndelante myth. "I guess I thought Paul made most of them."

"Dr. Naismith is an amazing man, but it takes hundreds of people all over the world to
make all the things he needs. Mike Rosas says it's like a pyramid: At the top there are just
a few men — say Naismith in algorithms or Masaryk in surface physics — guys who can
invent really new things. With the Peace Authority Bans on big organizations, these
people got to work alone, and there probably aren't more than five or ten of them in the
whole world. Next down in the pyramid are software houses like ours. We take
algorithms and implement them so that machines can run them.

Wili watched the programmatic phantoms shift and turn above the desk. Those shapes
were at once familiar and alien. It was as if his own ideas had been transformed into
some strange form of Celest. "But these people don't
make
anything. Where do the
machines come from?"

"You're right; without hardware to run our programs, we're just daydreamers. That's the
next level of the pyramid. Standard processors are cheap. Before the plagues, several
families from Sunnyvale settled in Santa Maria. They brought a truckload of gamma-ray
etching gear. It's been improved a lot since. We import purified base materials from
Oregon. And special-purpose stuff comes from even further: For instance, the Greens
make the best synthetic optics."

Jeremy started for the door. "I'd show you more here except they seem awfully busy
today. That's probably your fault. The Colonel seems real excited about whatever you
and Dr. Naismith invented this winter." He stopped and looked at Wili, as though hoping
for some inside information. And Wili wondered to himself,
How
can I explain?
He
could hardly describe
the algorithm in a few words. It was a delicate matter of coding
schemes, of packing and unpacking certain objects very cleverly and very quickly. Then
he realized that the other was interested in its
effects,
in the ability it could give the
Tinkers to listen to the Authority satellites.

His uncertainty was misinterpreted, for the taller boy laughed. "Never mind, I won't push
you. Fact is, I probably shouldn't know. C'mon, there's one thing more I want to show
you — though maybe it should be a secret, too. The Colonel thinks the Peace Authority
might issue a Ban if they knew about it."

They continued down the farm's main road, which ran directly into the side of the
Vandenberg Dome some thousand meters further on. It made Wili dizzy just to look in
that direction. This close, there was no feeling of the overall shape of the Dome. In a
sense, it was invisible, a vast vertical mirror. In it he saw the rolling hills of the farm, the
landscape that spread away behind them: There were a couple of small sailboats making
for the north shore of Lake Lompoc, and he could see the ferry docked on the near side of
the Salsipuedes fiord.

As they walked closer to the bobble, he saw that the ground right at the edge was torn,
twisted. Rain off the Dome had gouged a deep river around the base, runoff to Lake
Lompoc. The ground shook faintly but constantly with tiny earthquakes. Wili tried to
imagine the other half of the bobble, extending kilometers into the earth. No wonder the
world trembled around this obstruction. He looked up and swayed.

"Gets you, doesn't it?" Jeremy grabbed his arm and steadied him. "I grew up close to it,
and I still fall flat on my behind when I stand here and imagine trying to climb the thing."
They scrambled up the embanked mud and looked down at the river. Even though it
hadn't rained for hours, the waters moved fast and muddy, gouging at the land. Across
the river, a phantom Jeremy and Wili stared back. "It's dangerous to get much closer. The
water channel extends a ways underground. We've had some pretty big landslides.

"That's not why I brought you here, anyway." He led Wili down the embankment
toward a small building. "There's another level in Mike's pyramid: the folks who make
things like carts and houses and plows. The refurbishers still do a lot of that, but they're
running out of ruins, at least around here. The new stuff is made just like it was hundreds
of years ago. It's expensive and takes a lot of work-the type of thing the Republic of New
Mexico or Aztlán is good at. Well, we can program processors to control moving-parts
machines. I don't see why we can't make a moving-parts machine to
make
all those other
things. That's my own special project."

"Yes, but that's Banned. Are you telling me — '

"Moving-parts machines aren't Banned.
Not directly. It's high-energy, high-speed stuff
the Authority is death on. They don't want anyone making bombs or bobbles and starting
another War." The building looked like the one they had left up the road, but with fewer
windows.

An ancient metal pylon stuck out of the ground near the entrance. Wili looked at it
curiously, and Jeremy said, "It doesn't have anything to do with my project. When I was
little, you could still see numbers painted on it. It's off the wing of a pre-Authority
airplane. The Colonel thinks it must have been taking off from Vandenberg Air Force
Base at the instant they were bobbled: Half of it fell out here, and the rest crashed inside
the Dome."

He followed Jeremy into the building. It was much dimmer than inside the software
house. Something moved; something made high-pitched humming noises. It took Wili a
second to realize that he and Jeremy were the only living things present. Jeremy led him
down an aisle toward the sounds. A small conveyer belt stretched into the darkness. Five
tiny arms that ended in mechanical hands were making a... what? It was barely two
meters long and one high. It had wheels, though smaller than those on a cart. There was
no room for passengers or cargo. Beyond this machine aborning, Wili saw at least four
completed copies.

"This is my fabricator." Jeremy touched one of the mechanical arms. The machine
immediately stopped its precise movements, as though in respect to a master. "It can't do
the whole job, only the motor windings and the wiring. But I'm going to improve it."

Wili was more interested in what was being fabricated. "What... are they?" He pointed
to the vehicles.

"Farm tractors, of course! They're not big. They can't carry passengers; you have to
walk behind them. But they can draw a plow, and do planting. They can be charged off
the roof batteries. It's a dangerous first project, I know. But I wanted to make something
nice. The tractors aren't really vehicles; I don't think the Authority will even notice. If
they do, we'll just make something else. My fabricators are flexible."

They'll Ban your fabricators, too.
Not surprisingly, Wili had absorbed Paul's opinion of
the Peace Authority. They had Banned the research that could cure his own problems.
They were like all the other tyrannies, only more powerful.

But Wili said none of this aloud. He walked to the nearest completed "tractor" and put
his hand on the motor shell, half expecting to feel some electric power. This was, after
all, a machine that could move under its own power. How many times he had dreamed of
driving an automobile. He knew it was the fondest wish of some minor Jonque aristocrats
that one of their sons might be accepted as an Authority truck driver.

"You know, Jeremy, this thing
can
carry a passenger. I bet I could sit here on its back
and still reach the controls."

A grin slowly spread across Jeremy's face. "By golly, I see what you mean. If only I
weren't so big, I could, too. Why, you could be an automobilist! C'mon, let's move this
one outside. There's smooth ground behind the building where we can —

A faint
beep
came from the phone at Jeremy's waist. He frowned and raised the device
to his ear. "Okay. Sorry."

"Wili, the Colonel and Dr. Naismith want to see us — and they mean right now. I guess
we were expected to hang around the main house and wait on their pleasure." It was
closest Wili ever heard Jeremy come to disrespect for his elders. They started toward the
door. "We'll come back before the afternoon rain and try to ride."

But there was sadness in his voice, and Wili looked back into the shadowed room.
Somehow he doubted he would return any time soon.

It might have been a council of war. Colonel Kaladze certainly looked the part. In some
ways Kaladze reminded Wili of the bosses in the Ndelante Ali: He was almost eighty, yet
ramrod straight. His hair was cut as theirs, about five millimeters long everywhere, even
on the face. The silvery stubble was stark against his tan. His gray-green work clothes
were unremarkable except for their starched and shiny neatness. His blue eyes were
capable of great good humor — Wili remembered from the welcoming dinner but this
morning they were set and hard. Next to him Miguel Rosas — even armed and wearing his
sheriff's brassard looked like a loose civilian.

Paul looked the same as always, but he avoided Wili's eyes. And that was the most
ominous sign of all.

"Be seated, gentlemen," the old Russian spoke to the boys. All his sons — except
Jeremy's father, who was on a sales expedition to Corvallis — were present. "Wili, Jeremy,
you'll be leaving for San Diego earlier than we had planned. The Authority desires to
sponsor the North American Chess Tourney, much as they've sponsored the Olympics
these last few years: they are providing special transportation, and have moved up the
semifinals correspondingly."

This was like a burglar who finds his victim passing out engraved invitations, thought
Wili.

Even Jeremy seemed a little worried by it: "What will this do to Wili's plan to, uh, get
some help down there? Can he do this right under their noses?"

"I think so. Mike thinks so." He glanced at Miguel Rosas, who gave a brief nod. "At
worst, the Authority is suspicious of us Tinkers as a group. They don't have any special
reason to be watching Wili. In any case, if we are to participate, our group must be ready
for their truck convoy. It will pass the farm in less than fifteen hours."

Truck convoy.
The boys stared at each other. For an instant, any danger seemed small.
The Authority was going to let them ride like kings down the coast of California all the
way to La Jolla! "All who go must leave the farm in two or three hours to reach Highway
101 before the convoy passes through." He grinned at Ivan, his eldest son. "Even if the
Authority is watching, even if Wili didn't need help, Kaladzes would still be going. You
boys can't fool me. I know you've been looking forward to this for a long time. I know all
the time you've wasted on programs you think are unbeatable."

Ivan Nikolayevich seemed startled, then smiled back. "Besides, there are people there
we've known for years and never met in person. It would be even more suspicious if we
pulled out now."