They lay for a long time in the ringing silence, till at last the animal sounds resumed and the starlight seemed bright. There was no sign of humans inside of five hundred meters.
Projections? Jeremy wondered aloud. Zombies? Wili thought silently to himself. But they could be neither. They had been hit; they had gone down. Then they had gotten up and run in a panic -and that was unlike the zombies of Ndelante legend. Naismith had no speculations he was willing to share.
It was raining again by the time their rescuers arrived.
Only 9 o'clock on an April morning and already the air was a hot, humid 30 degrees. Thunderheads hung high on the arch of the Dome. It would rain in the afternoon. Wili Wachendon and Jeremy Sergeivich Kaladze walked down the wide, graveled road that led from the main farmhouse toward outbuildings by the Dome. They made a strange sight: One boy near two meters tall, white and lanky; the other short, thin, and black, apparently subadolescent. But Wili was beginning to realize that there were similarities, too. It turned out they were the same age - fifteen. And the other boy was sharp, though not in the same class as Wili. He had never tried to intimidate with his size. If anything, he seemed slightly in awe of Wili (if that were possible in one as rambunctious and outspoken as Jeremy Sergeivich).
"The Colonel says," Jeremy and the others never called Old Kaladze "grandfather," though there seemed to be no fear in their attitude, and a lot of affection, "the Colonel says the farm is being watched, has been since the three of us got here."
"Oh? The bandits?"
"Don't know. We can't afford the equipment Dr. Naismith can buy - those micro-cameras and such. But we have a telescope and twenty-four-hour camera on top of the barn. The processor attached to it detected several flashes from the trees," he swept his hand toward the ridgeline where the rain forest came down almost to the farm's banana plants, "that are probably reflections from old-style optics."
Wili shivered in the warm sunlight. There were lots of people here compared to Naismith's mansion in the wilderness, but it was not a properly fortified site: There were no walls, watchtowers, observation balloons. There were many very young children, and most of the adults were over fifty. That was a typical age distribution, but one unsuitable for defense. Wili wondered what secret resources the Kaladzes might have.
So what are you going to do?"
"Nothing much. There can't be too many of 'em; they're awful shy. We'd go out after them if we had more people. As it is, we've got four smart rifles and men who can use them. And Sheriff Wentz knows about the situation.... Union, don't worry." He didn't notice Wili bristle. The smaller boy hid it well. He was beginning to realize that there was scarcely a mean bone in Jeremy's body. "I want to show you the stuff we have here."
He turned off the gravel road and walked toward a large, one-storey building. It could scarcely be a barn; the entire roof was covered with solar batteries. "If it weren't for the Vandenberg Bobble, I think Middle California would be most famous for Red Arrow Products - that's our trade name. We're not as sophisticated as the Greens in Norcross, or as big as the Qens in Beijing, but the things we do are the best."
Wili pretended indifference. "This place is just a big farm, it looks like to me."
"Sure, and Dr. Naismith is just a hermit. It is big and it's terrific farmland. But where do you think my family got the money to buy it? We've been real lucky: Grandmother and the Colonel had four children after the War, and each of them had at least two. We're practically a clan, and we've adopted other folk, people who can figure out things we can't. The Colonel believes in diversification; between the farm and our software, we're unsinkable."
Jeremy pounded on the heavy white door. There was no answer, but it swung slowly inward and the boys entered. Down each side of the long building, windows let in morning light and enough breeze to make it relatively comfortable. He had an impression of elegant chaos. Ornamental plants surrounded scattered desks. There was more than one aquarium. Most of the desks were unoccupied: Some sort of conference was going on at the far end of the room. The men waved to Jeremy but continued with what sounded perilously close to being an argument.
"Lots more people here than usual. Most guys like to work from home. Look." He pointed to one of the few seated workers. The man seemed unaware of them. In the holo above his desk floated colored shapes, shapes that shifted and turned. The man watched intently. He nodded to himself, and suddenly the pattern was tripled and sheared. Somehow he was in control of the display. Wili recognized the composition of linear and nonlinear transformations: Inside his head, Wili had played with those through most of the winter.
"What's he doing?"
Jeremy's normal loudness was muted. "Who do you think implements those algorithms you and Dr. Naismith invent?" He swept his hand across the room. "We've done some of the most complicated implementations in the world."
Wili just stared at him. "Look, Wili. I know you have all sorts of wonderful machines up in the mountains. Where do you think they come from?"
Wili pondered. He had never really thought about it! His education had moved very fast along the paths Naismith laid out. One price for this progress was that in most respects Wili's opinions about what made things work were a com- bination of mathematical abstraction and Ndelante myth. "I guess I thought Paul made most of them."
"Dr. Naismith is an amazing man, but it takes hundreds of people all over the world to make all the things he needs. Mike Rosas says it's like a pyramid: At the top there are just a few men - say Naismith in algorithms or Masaryk in surface physics - guys who can invent really new things. With the Peace Authority Bans on big organizations, these people got to work alone, and there probably aren't more than five or ten of them in the whole world. Next down in the pyramid are software houses like ours. We take algorithms and implement them so that machines can run them.
Wili watched the programmatic phantoms shift and turn above the desk. Those shapes were at once familiar and alien. It was as if his own ideas had been transformed into some strange form of Celest. "But these people don't make anything. Where do the machines come from?"
"You're right; without hardware to run our programs, we're just daydreamers. That's the next level of the pyramid. Standard processors are cheap. Before the plagues, several families from Sunnyvale settled in Santa Maria. They brought a truckload of gamma-ray etching gear. It's been improved a lot since. We import purified base materials from Oregon. And special-purpose stuff comes from even further: For instance, the Greens make the best synthetic optics."
Jeremy started for the door. "I'd show you more here except they seem awfully busy today. That's probably your fault. The Colonel seems real excited about whatever you and Dr. Naismith invented this winter." He stopped and looked at Wili, as though hoping for some inside information. And Wili wondered to himself, How can I explain? He could hardly describe the algorithm in a few words. It was a delicate matter of coding schemes, of packing and unpacking certain objects very cleverly and very quickly. Then he realized that the other was interested in its effects, in the ability it could give the Tinkers to listen to the Authority satellites.
His uncertainty was misinterpreted, for the taller boy laughed. "Never mind, I won't push you. Fact is, I probably shouldn't know. C'mon, there's one thing more I want to show you - though maybe it should be a secret, too. The
Colonel thinks the Peace Authority might issue a Ban if they knew about it."
They continued down the farm's main road, which ran directly into the side of the Vandenberg Dome some thousand meters further on. It made Wili dizzy just to look in that direction. This close, there was no feeling of the overall shape of the Dome. In a sense, it was invisible, a vast vertical mirror. In it he saw the rolling hills of the farm, the landscape that spread away behind them: There were a couple of small sailboats making for the north shore of Lake Lompoc, and he could see the ferry docked on the near side of the Salsipuedes fiord.