The Peace War (6 page)

"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.

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.