Wil found himself grinning stupidly. Glowballs were some- thing new, just a couple of months old... at the time he was shanghaied. It might be old hat to some, but it was a complete novelty to the Peacers and even to the NMs. The ball had the same size and feel as a regulation volleyball-but its surface was brightly aglow. The teams were playing by this light alone, and Wil knew the first few games would be comic relief. If you kept your eye on the ball, then little else was bright enough to see The ball became the center of the universe, a sphere that seemed to swell and shrink while everything else swung around it. After a few moments, you couldn't find your teammates--or even the ground. The NM and Peacer players spent almost as much time on their butts as standing. Laughter swept the far side of the court as three spectators fell down. This ball was better than the others Wil had seen. Whenever it touched out-of-bounds, it chimed and the light changed to yellow. That was as an impressive trick.
Not everyone had problems. No doubt Tun‡ Blumenthal had always played with glowballs. In any case, Wil knew that Tun‡'s biggest problem was playing down to everyone else's level. The high-tech massed as much as Wil, but stood over two meters tall. He had the speed and coordination of a professional. Yet, when he held back and let others dominate the play, he didn't seem condescending. Tun‡ was the only high-tech who really mixed with the lows.
After a time, all players learned the proper strategy: less and less did they watch the ball directly. They watched each other.lost important, they watched the shadows. With the glowball, those shadows were twisting, shifting fingers-showing, where the ball was and where it was going.
The games went quickly, but there was only one ball and many wanted to play. Wil gave up any immediate plans to get on the court. He wandered around the edge of the crowd, watching the shadows flick back and forth, highlighting a face for an instant, then plunging it into darkness. It was fun to sec adults as fascinated as kids.
One face stopped him short: Kim Tioulang stood at the outskirts of the crowd, less than five meters from Brierson. He vas alone. He might be a boss, but apparently he didn't -iced a herd of "aides" like Steve Fraley. The man was short, his face in shadow except when a high shot washed him in a quick down-and-up of light. His concentration was intense, but his expressionless gaze contained no hint of pleasure.
The man was strikingly frail. He was something that did not exist in Wil's time-except by suicidal choice or metabolic accident. Kim Tioulang's body was old; it was in the final stages of the degeneration which, before the mid-twenty-first, had limited life spans to less than a century.
There were so many different ways to think of time now. Kim had lived less than eighty years. He was young by comparison with the "teenagers" from the twenty-second. He had nothing on Yel‚n's three hundred years of realtime experience or the mind-destroying stretch of Della's nine thousand. Yet, in some ways, Tioulang was a more extreme case than either Korolev or Lu.
Brierson had read the GreenInc summary on the man. Kim Tioulang was born in 1967. That was two years before Man began the conquest of space, thirty years before the war and the plagues, at least fifty years before Della Lu was born. In a perverse sense, he was the oldest living human.
Tioulang had been born in Kampuchea, in the middle of one of the regional wars that pocked the late twentieth. Though limited in space and time, some of those wars were as horrible as what followed the 1997 collapse. Tioulang's childhood was drenched in death-and unlike the twenty-first-century plagues, where the murderers were faceless ambiguities, death in Kampuchea came person to person via bullets and backings and deliberate starvation. GreenInc said the rest of Tioulang's family disappeared in the maelstrom... and little Kim ended up in the USA. He was a bright kid; by 1997 he was finishing a doctorate in physics. And working for the organization that overthrew the governments and became the Peace Authority.
From there, GreenInc had little but Peacer news stories and historical inference to document Tioulang's life. No one knew if Tioulang had anything to do with starting the plagues. (For that matter, there was no absolute proof the Peace had started them.) By 2010, the man was Director for Asia. He'd kept his third of the planet in line. He had a better reputation than the other Directors; he was no Christian Gerrault, "Butcher of Eurafrica." Except during the Mongolian insurrection, he managed to avoid large-scale bloodshed. He remained in power right up to the fall of the Peace in 2048-and that fall was for Tioulang less than four months past.
And so, even though Kim Tioulang predated the rest of living humanity by scant decades, his background put him in a class by himself. He was the only one who had grown up in a world where humans routinely killed other humans. He was the only one who had ruled, and killed to stay in power. Next to him, Steve Fraley was a high-school class president.
An arcing shot lifted the glowball above the crowd, putting Tioulang's face back in the light-and Wil saw that the Peacer was staring at him. The other smiled faintly, then stepped back from the crowd to stand beside Brierson. Up close, Wil saw that his face was mottled, pocked. Could old age alone do that?
"You're Brierson, the one who works for Korolev?" His voice was just loud enough to be heard over the laughs and shouting. Light danced back and forth around them.
Wil bridled, then decided he wasn't being accused of betraying the low-techs. "I'm investigating Marta Korolev's murder."
"Hmm." Tioulang folded his arms and looked away from Wil. "I've done some interesting reading the last few weeks, Mr. Brierson." He chuckled. "For me, it's like future history to see where the next hundred and fifty years took the world.... You know, those years turned out as well as ever I could hope. I always thought that without the Peace, humankind would exterminate itself.... And maybe it did eventually, but you went for more than a century without our help. I think the immortality thing must have something to do with it. Does it really work? You look around twenty years old-"
Brierson nodded. "But I'm fifty."
Tioulang scuffed at the lawn with his heel. His voice was almost wistful. "Yes. And apparently I can have it now, too. The long view-I can already see how it softens things, and how that's probably for the best.
"I've also read your histories of the Peace. You people make us out as monsters. The hell of it is, you have some of it right." He looked up at Wil, and his voice sharpened. "I meant what I said this afternoon. The human race is in a bind here; we of the Peace would make the best leaders. But I also meant it when I said we're willing to go with democracy; I see now it could really work.
"You are very important to us, Brierson. We know you have Korolev 's ear-don't interrupt, please! We can talk to her whenever we wish, but we think she respects your opinions. If you believe what I am telling you, there is some chance she may too."
"Okay," said Wil. "But what is the message? You oppose Yel‚n's policies, want to run things under some government system with majority rule. What if your people don't win out? The NMs have a lot more in common with the ungovs and the high-techs than you. If we fall back to a government situation, they are more likely to be the leaders than you. Would you accept that?" Or grab for dower like you did at the end o f the twentieth?
Tioulang looked around, almost as though checking for eavesdroppers. "I expect we'll win, Brierson. The problems we face here are problems the Peace is especially well equipped to handle. Even if we don't win, we'll still be needed. I've talked to Steven Fraley. He may seem rough and tough to you.. , but not to me. He's a little bit of a fool, and likes to boss people around, but left to ourselves, we could get along."