The Peace War by Vernor Vinge Page A

get what crops
remained into storage before the frosts. Even Naismith did his best to help, though the
others tried to prevent this. The old man was not weak, but there was an air of physical
fragility about him.
    From the high end of the bean patch, Wili could see over the pines. The leafy forests
had changed color and were a band of orange-red beyond the evergreen. The land along
the coast was clouded over, but Wili suspected that the jungle there was still wet and
green. Vandenberg Dome seemed to hang in the clouds, as awesome as ever. Wili knew
more about it now, and someday he would discover all its secrets. It was simply a matter
of asking the right questions — of himself and of Paul Naismith.
    Indoors, in his greater universe, Wili had completed his first pass through functional
analysis and now undertook a three-pronged expedition that Naismith had set for him:
into finite galois theory, stochastics, and electromagnetics. There was a goal in sight,
though (Wili was pleased to see) there was no ultimate end to what could be learned.
Naismith had a project, and it would be Wili's if he was clever enough.
    Wili saw why Naismith was valued and saw the peculiar service he provided to people
all over the continent. Naismith solved problems. Almost every day the old man was on
the phone, sometimes talking to people locally — like Miguel Rosas down in Santa Ynez —
but just as often to people in Fremont, or in places so far away that it was night on the
screen while still day here in Middle California. He talked to people in English and in
Spanish, and in languages that Wili had never heard. He talked to people who were
neither Jonques nor Anglos nor blacks.
    Wili had learned enough now to see that these were not nearly as simple as making local
calls. Communication between 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 realtime 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 something. 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
apprentice. 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