The Peace War (21 page)

Wili got to his feet and walked back along Elmir, looking carefully for unwanted
baggage. He ran his hand along the underside of her belly, and on the cinch found what
he was looking for: The transmitter was large, almost two centimeters across. No doubt it
had some sort of timer so it hadn't begun radiating back where the Kaladzes would have
been sure to notice. He weighed the device with his hand. It was awfully big, probably an
Authority bug.
But Rosas could have supplied something more subtle.
He went back to
the horse and inspected her and her gear again, much more carefully. Then he took off his
own clothes and did the same for them. The early morning air was chill, and muck oozed
up between his toes. It felt great.

He looked very carefully, but found nothing more, which left him with nagging doubts.
If it had just been Lu, he could understand...

And there was still the question of what to do with the bug he had found. He got
dressed and started to lead Elmir out from under the roadway. In the distance a rumbling
grew louder and louder. The timbers began shaking, showering them with little globs of
mud. Finally the land freighter passed directly overhead, and Wili wondered how the
wooden trestle structure could take it.

It gave him an idea, though. There was that truckers' camp to the south, maybe just a
couple of kilometers away. If he tied Elmir up here, he could probably make it in less
than an hour. Not just Authority freighters used the stop. Ordinary truckers, with their big
wagons and horse teams, would be there, too. It should be easy to sneak up early in the
twilight and give one of those wagons a fifty gram hitchhiker.

Wili chuckled out loud. So much for Missy Lu and Rosas. With a little luck, he'd have
the Authority thinking Naismith was hiding in Seattle!

She was trapped in some sort of gothic novel. And that was the least of her problems.

Allison Parker sat on an outcropping and looked off to the north. This far from the
Dome the weather was as before, with maybe a bit more rain. If she looked neither right
nor left, she could imagine that she was simply on a camping trip, taking her ease in the
late morning coolness. Here she could imagine that Angus Quiller and Fred Torres were
still alive, and that when she got back to Vandenberg, Paul Hoehler might be down from
Livermore
for a date.

But a glance to the left and she would see her rescuer's mansion, buried dark and deep
in the trees. Even by day, there seemed something gloomy and alien about the building.
Perhaps it was the owner. The old man, Naismith, seemed so furtive, so apparently
gentle, yet still hiding some terrible secret or desire. And as in any gothic, his servants — themselves in their fifties — were equally furtive and closemouthed.

Of course, a lot of mysteries had been solved these last days, the greatest the first night.
When she had brought the old man in, the servants had been very surprised. All they
would say was that the "master will explain all that needs explaining." "The master" was
nearly unconscious at the time, so that was little help. Otherwise they had treated her
well, feeding her and giving her clean, though ill-fitting clothes. Her bedroom was almost
a dormer, its windows half in and half out of the roof. The furniture was simple but
elegant; the oiled burl dresser alone would have been worth thousands back... where she
came from. She had sat on the
bright patchwork quilt and thought darkly that there better
be some explanations coming in the morning, or she was going to leg it back to the coast,
unfriendly armies or no.

The huge house had been still and dead as the twilight deepened. Faint but clear against
the silence, Allison could hear the sounds of applause and an audience laughing. It took
her a second to realize that someone had turned on a television — though she hadn't seen a
set during the day. Ha! Fifteen minutes of programming would probably tell her as much
about this new universe as a month of talking to "Bill" and "Irma." She slid open her
bedroom door and listened to the tiny, bright sounds:

The program was weirdly familiar, conjuring up memories of a time when she was
barely tall enough to reach the "on" switch of her mother's TV "Saturday Night?" It was
either that or something very similar. She listened a few moments more, heard references
to actors, politicians who had died before she ever entered college. She walked down the
stairs, and sat with the Moraleses through an evening of old TV shows.

They hadn't objected, and as the days passed they'd opened up about some things. This
was the future, about a half-century forward of her present. They told her of the war and
the plagues that ended her world, and the force fields, the "bobbles," that birthed the new
one.

But while some things were explained, others became mysteries in themselves. The old
man didn't socialize, though the Moraleses said that he was recovered. The house was big
and there were many rooms whose doors stayed closed. He — and whoever else was in the
house besides the servants — was avoiding her. Eerie. She wasn't welcome here. The
Moraleses were not unfriendly and had let her take a good share of the chores, but behind
them she sensed the old man wishing she would go away. At the same time, they couldn't
afford to have her go. They feared the occupying armies, the "Peace Authority," as much
as she did; if she were captured, their hiding place would be found. So they continued to
be her uneasy hosts.

She had seen the old man scarcely a handful of times since the first afternoon, and
never to talk to. He was in the mansion though. She heard his voice behind closed doors,
sometimes talking with a woman — not Irma Morales
.
That female voice was strangely
familiar.

God, what I wouldn't give for a friendly face right now. Someone to talk to. Angus,
Fred, Paul Hoehler

Allison slid down from her rocky vantage point and paced angrily into the sunlight. On
the coast, morning clouds still hung over the lowlands. The silver arch of the force field
that enclosed Vandenberg and Lompoc seemed to float halfway up the sky. No structure
could possibly be so big. Even mountains had the decency to introduce themselves with
foothills and highlands. The Vandenberg Bobble simply rose, sheer and insubstantial as a
dream. So that glistening hemisphere contained much of her old world, her old friends.
They were trapped in timelessness in there, just as she and Angus and Fred had been
trapped in the bobble around the sortie craft. And one day the Vandenberg bobble would
burst...

Somewhere in the trees beyond her vision there was a cawing; a crow ascended above
the pines, circled down at another point. Over the whine of insects, Allison heard padded
clopping. A horse was coming up the narrow trail that went past her rock pile. Allison
moved back into the shadows and watched.

Three minutes passed and a lone horseman came into view: It was a black male, so
spindly it was hard to guess his age, except to say that he was young. He was dressed in
dark greens, almost a camouflage outfit and his hair was short and unbraided. He looked
tired, but his eyes swept attentively back and forth across the trail ahead of him. The
brown eyes flickered across her.

"Jill! How did you get so far from the veranda?" The words were spoken with a heavy
Spanish accent; at this point it was an incongruity beneath Allison's notice. A broad grin
split the boy's face as he slid off the horse and scrambled across the rocks toward her.
"Naismith says that-" the words came to an abrupt halt along with the boy himself. He
stood an arm's-length away, his jaw sagging in disbelief. `Jill? Is that really you?" He
swung his hand in a flat arc toward Allison's midsection. The gesture was too slow to be
a blow, but she wasn't taking any chances. She grabbed his wrist.

The boy actually squeaked — but with surprise, not pain. It was as if he could not
believe she had actually touched him.

She marched him back to the
trail, and they started toward the house. She had his arm
behind his back now. The boy did not struggle, though he didn't seem intimidated either.
There was more shock and surprise in his eyes than fear.

Now that it was the other guy who was at a disadvantage, maybe she could get some
answers. "'you, Naismith, none of you have ever seen me before, yet you all seem to
know me. I want to know why." She bent his arm a bit more, though not enough to hurt.
The violence was in her voice.

"But, but I
have
seen you." He paused an instant, then rushed on. "In pictures, I mean."

It might not be the whole truth, but... Perhaps it was like those fantasies Angus used to
read. Perhaps she was somehow important, and the world had been waiting for them to
come out of stasis. In that case their pictures might be widely distributed.

They walked a dozen steps along the soft, needle-covered path. No, there was
something more. These people acted as if they had known her as a person. Was that
possible? Not for the boy, but Bill and Irma and certainly Naismith were old enough that
she might have known them ...before. She tried to imagine those faces fifty years
younger. The servants couldn't have been more than children. The old man, he would
have been around her own age.

She let the boy lead the way. She was more holding his hand than twisting his arm
now; her mind was far away, thinking of the single tombstone with her name, thinking
how much someone must have cared. They walked past the front of the house, descended
the grade that led to a belowground-level entrance. The door there was open, perhaps to
let in the cool smells of morning. Naismith sat with his back to them, his attention all
focused on the equipment he was playing with. Still holding his horse's reins, the boy
leaned past the doorway and said, "Paul?"

Allison looked past the old man's shoulder at the screen he was watching: a horse and a
boy and a woman stood looking through a doorway at an old man watching a screen that...
Allison echoed the boy, but in a tone softer, sadder, more questioning. "Paul?"

The old man, who just last month had been young, turned at last to meet her.

There were few places on Earth that were busier or more populous than they had been
before the War. Livermore was such a place. At its pre-War zenith, there had been the
city and the clusters of commercial and federal labs scattered through the rolling hills.
Those had been boom times, with the old Livermore Energy Laboratories managing
dozens of major enterprises and a dozen-dozen contract operations from their square-mile
reservation just outside of town. And one of those operations, unknown to the rest, had
been the key to the future. Its manager, Hamilton Avery's father, had been clever enough
to see what could be done with a certain staff scientist's invention, and had changed the
course of history.

And so when the old world had disappeared behind silver bobbles, and burned beneath
nuclear fireballs, and later withered in the war plagues — Livermore had grown. First from
all over the continent and then from all over the planet, the new rulers had brought their
best and brightest here. Except for a brief lapse during the worst of the plague years, that
growth had been near-exponential. And Peace had ruled the new world.

The heart of Authority power covered a thousand square kilometers, along a band that
stretched westward toward the tiny bay towns of Berkeley and Oakland. Even the Beijing
and the Paris Enclaves had nothing to compare with Livermore. Hamilton Avery had
wanted an Eden here. He had had forty years and the wealth and genius of the planet to
make one.

But still at the heart of the heart there was the Square Mile, the original federal labs,
their century-old University of California architecture preserved amidst the sweep of one-thousand meter bobbles, obsidian towers, and forested parks.

If the three of us are to meet,
thought Avery,
what more appropriate place than here?
He had left his usual retinue on the greensward which edged the Square Mile. He and a
single aide walked down the aged concrete sidewalk toward the gray building with the
high narrow windows that had once held central offices.

Away from the carefully irrigated lawns and ornamental forests, the air was hot, more
like the natural summer weather of the Livermore Valley. Already Avery's plain white
shirt was sticking to his back.

Inside, the air-conditioning was loud and old-fashioned, but effective enough. He
walked down ancient linoleum flooring his footsteps echoing in the past. His aide opened
the conference room's doors before him and Hamilton Avery stepped forward to meet-or
confront-his peers.

"Gentlemen." He reached across the conference table to shake first Kim Tioulang's
hand, then Christian Gerrault's. The two were not happy; Avery had kept them waiting.
And the hell of it is, I didn't mean to.
Crisis had piled on top of crisis these last few hours,
to the point that even a lifetime of political and diplomatic savvy was doing him no good.

Christian Gerrault, on the other hand, never had had much time for diplomacy. His
piggish eyes were even more recessed in his fat face than they seemed on the video. Or
perhaps it was simply that he was angry: "You have a very great deal of explaining to do,
monsieur. We are not your servants, to be summoned from halfway around the world."

Then why are you here, you fat fool?
But out loud he said, "Christian — Monsieur le
Directeur — it is precisely because we are the men who count that we must meet here
today."

Gerrault threw up a meaty arm. "Pah! The television was always good enough before."

"The `television,' monsieur, no longer works." The Central African looked
disbelieving, but Avery knew Gerrault's people in Paris were clever enough to verify that
the Atlantic comsat had been out of action for more than twenty-four hours. It had not
been a gradual or partial failure, but an abrupt, total cessation of relayed communication.