The Peace War (7 page)

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.

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...

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.