Wili had learned enough now to see that these were not nearly as simple as making local calls. Communication be-tween 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 real-time 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 some-thing. 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 ap-prentice. 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 build-ing 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 im-agine 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 Jon-ques, 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 storey 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 eventual-ly 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 fron-tiers of Naismith's books! Paul claimed that no previous human had insight on the coding problem that he had at-tacked! 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 Nais-mith 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.