The Peace War (2 page)

The only crowd, five or six youngsters, stood around Gerry Tellman's Celest game.
What was going on here? A little black kid was playing — had been playing for fifteen
minutes, Mike realized. Tellman had Celest running at a high level of realism, and he
was not a generous man. Hmmm.

Ahead of him, Naismith creaked toward the game. Apparently his curiosity was
pricked, too.

Inside the shop it was shady and cool. Tellman perched on a scuffed wood table and
glared at his small customer. The boy looked to be ten or eleven and was clearly an
outlander: His hair was bushy, his clothes filthy. His arms were so thin that he must be a
victim of disease or poor diet. He was chewing on something that Mike suspected was
tobacco — definitely not the sort of behavior you'd see in a local boy.

The kid clutched a wad of Bank of Santa Ynez gAu notes. From the look on Tellman's
face, Rosas could guess where they came from.

"
Otra vez,
" the boy said, returning Tellman's glare. The proprietor hesitated, looked
around the circle of faces and noticed the adults.

"Aw right," agreed Tellman, "but this'll have to be the last time...
¿Esta es el final,
entiende?
" he repeated in pidgin Spanish. "I, uh, I gotta go to lunch." This remark was
probably for the benefit of Naismith and Rosas.

The kid shrugged. "Okay."

Tellman initialized the Celest board to level nine, Rosas noticed. The kid studied the
setup with a calculating look. Tellman's display was a flat, showing a hypothetical solar
system as seen from above the plane of rotation. The three planets were small disks of
light moving around the primary. Their size gave a clue to mass, but the precise values
appeared near the bottom of the display. Departure and arrival planets moved in visibly
eccentric orbits, the departure planet at one rev every five seconds — fast enough so
precession was clearly occurring. Between it and the destination planet moved a third
world, also in an eccentric orbit. Rosas grimaced. No doubt the only reason Tellman left
the problem coplanar was that he didn't have a holo display for his Celest. Mike had
never seen anyone without a symbiotic processor play the departure/destination version
of Celest at level nine. The timer on the display showed that the player — the kid — had ten
seconds to launch his rocket and try to make it to the destination. From the fuel display,
Rosas was certain that there was not enough energy available to make the flight in a
direct orbit. A cushion shot on top of everything else!

The kid laid all his bank notes on the table and squinted at the screen. Six seconds left.
He grasped the control handles and twitched them. The tiny golden spark that represented
his spacecraft fell away from the green disk of the departure world,
inward
toward the
yellow sun about which all revolved. He had used more than nine-tenths of his fuel and
had boosted in the wrong direction. The children around him murmured their displeasure,
and a smirk came over Tellman's face. The smirk froze:

As the spacecraft came near the sun, the kid gave the controls another twitch, a boost
which — together with the gravity of the primary-sent the glowing dot far out into the
mock solar system. It edged across the two-meter screen, slowing at the greater remove,
heading not for the destination planet but for the intermediary. Rosas gave an low,
involuntary whistle. He had played Celest, both alone and with a processor. The game
was nearly a century old and almost as popular as chess; it made you remember what the
human race had almost attained. Yet he had never seen such a two-cushion shot by an
unaided player.

Tellman's smile remained but his face was turning a bit gray. The vehicle drew close to
the middle planet, catching up to it as it swung slowly about the primary. The kid made
barely perceptible adjustments in the trajectory during the closing period. Fuel status on
the display showed 0.001 full. The representation of the planet and the spacecraft merged
for an instant, but did not record as a collision, for the tiny dot moved quickly away,
going for the far reaches of the screen.

Around them, the other children jostled and hooted. They smelled a winner, and old
Tellman was going to lose a little of the money he had been winning off them earlier in
the day. Rosas and Naismith and Tellman just watched and held their breaths. With
virtually no fuel left, it would be a matter of luck whether contact finally occurred.

The reddish disk of the destination planet swam placidly along while the mock
spacecraft arced higher and higher, slower and slower, their paths becoming almost
tangent. The craft was accelerating now, falling into the gravity well of the destination,
giving the tantalizing impression of success that always comes with a close shot. Closer
and closer. And the two lights became one on the board.

"Intercept," the display announced, and the stats streamed across the lower part of the
screen. Rosas and Naismith looked at each other. The kid had done it.

Tellman was very pale now. He looked at the bills the boy had wagered. "Sorry, kid,
but I don't have that much here right now." He started to repeat the excuse in Spanish, but
the kid erupted with an unintelligible flood of spañolnegro abuse. Rosas looked
meaningfully at Tellman. He was hired to protect customers as well as proprietors. If
Tellman didn't pay off, he could kiss his lease good-bye. The Shopping Center already
got enough flak from parents whose children had lost money here. And if the kid were
clever enough to press charges...

The proprietor finally spoke over youthful screaming. "Okay, so I'll pay. Pago, pago...
you little son of a bitch." He pulled a handful of gAu notes out of his cash box and
shoved them at the boy. "Now get out."

The black kid was out the door before anyone else. Rosas eyed his departure
thoughtfully. Tellman went on, plaintively, talking as much to himself as anyone else. "I
don't know. I just don't know. The little bastard has been in here all morning. I swear he
had never seen a game board before. But he watched and watched. Diego Martinez had to
explain it to him. He started playing. Had barely enough money. And he just got better
and better. I never seen anything like it... In fact" — he brightened and looked at Mike —
"in fact, I think I been set up. I betcha the kid is carrying a processor and just pretending
to be young and dumb. Hey, Rosas, how about that? I should be protected. There's some
sorta con here, especially on that last game. He —

" — really did have a snowball's chance, eh, Telly?" Rosas finished where the proprietor
had broken off. "Yeah, I know. You had a sure win. The odds should have been a
thousand to one-not the even money you gave him. But I know symbiotic processing, and
there's no way he could do it without some really expensive equipment." Out of the
corner of his eye, he saw Naismith nod agreement. "Still" — he rubbed his jaw and looked
out into the brightness beyond the entrance — "I'd like to know more about him."

Naismith followed him out of the tent, while behind them Tellman sputtered. Most of
the children were still visible, standing in clumps along the Tinkers' mall.

The mysterious winner was nowhere to be seen. And yet he should have been. The
game area opened onto the central lawn which gave a clear view down all the malls.
Mike spun around a couple times, puzzled. Naismith caught up with him. "I think the boy
has been about two jumps ahead of us since we started watching him, Mike. Notice how
he didn't argue when Tellman gave him the boot. Your uniform must have spooked him."

"Yeah. Bet he ran like hell the second he got outside."

"I don't know. I think he's more subtle than that." Naismith put a finger to his lips and
motioned Rosas to follow him around the banners that lined the side of the game shop.

There was not much need for stealth. The shoppers were noisy, and the loading of
furniture onto several carts behind the refurbishers' pavilion was accompanied by
shouting and laughter.

The early afternoon breeze off Vandenberg set the colored fabric billowing. Double
sunlight left nothing to shadow. Still, they almost tripped over the boy curled up under
the edge of a tarp. The boy exploded like a bent spring, directly into Mike's arms: If
Rosas had been of the older generation, there would have been no contest: Ingrained
respect for children and an unwillingness to damage them would have let the kid slip
from his grasp. But the undersheriff was willing to play fairly rough, and for a moment
there was a wild mass of swinging arms and legs. Mike saw something gleam in the boy's
hand, and then pain ripped through his arm.

Rosas fell to his knees as the boy, still clutching the knife, pulled loose and sprinted
away. He was vaguely conscious of red spreading through the tan fabric of his left sleeve.
He narrowed his eyes against the pain and drew his service stunner.

"No!" Naismith's shout was a reflex born of having grown up with slug guns and later
having lived through the first era in history when life was truly sacred.

The kid went down and lay twitching in the grass. Mike holstered his pistol and
struggled to his feet, his right hand clutching at the wound. It looked superficial, but it
hurt like hell. "Gall Seymour," Mike grated at the old man. "We're going to have to carry
that little bastard to the station."

The Santa Ynez Police Company was the largest protection service south of San Jose.
After all, Santa Ynez was the first town north of Santa Barbara and the Aztlán border.
Sheriff Seymour Wentz had three full-time deputies and contracts with eighty percent of
the locals. That amounted to almost four thousand customers.

Wentz's office was perched on a good-sized hill overlooking Old 101. From it one
could follow the movements of Peace Authority freighters for several kilometers north
and south. Right now, no one but Paul Naismith was admiring the view. Miguel Rosas
watched gloomily as Seymour spent half an hour on the phone to Santa Barbara, and then
even managed to patch through to the ghetto in Pasadena. As Mike expected, no one
south of the border could help. The rulers of Aztlán spent their gold trying to prevent
"illegal labor emigration" from Los Angeles but never wasted time tracking the people
who made it. The
sabio
in Pasadena seemed initially excited by the description, then
froze up and denied any interest in the boy. The only other lead was with a contract labor
gang that had passed though Santa Ynez earlier in the week, heading for the cacao farms
near Santa Maria. Sy had some success with that. One Larry Faulk, labor contract agent,
was persuaded to talk to them. The nattily dressed agent was not happy to see them:

"Certainly, Sheriff, I recognize the runt. Name is Wili Wachendon." He spelled it out.
The W's sounded like a hybrid of zu with v and
b.
Such was the evolution of
Spanolnegro. "He missed my crew's departure yesterday, and I can't say that I or anyone
else up here is sorry."

"Look, Mr. Faulk. This child has clearly been mistreated by your people." He waved
over his shoulder at where the kid — Wili — lay in his cell. Unconscious, he looked even
more starved and pathetic than he had in motion.

"Ha!" came Faulk's reply over the fiber. "I notice you have the punk locked up; and I
also see your deputy has his arm bandaged." He pointed at Rosas, who stared back almost
sullenly. "I'll bet little Wili has been practicing his people-carving hobby. Sheriff, Wili
Wachendon may have had a hard time someplace; I think he's on the run from the
Ndelante Ali. But I never roughed him up. You know how labor contractors work. Maybe
it was different in the good old days, but now we are agents, we get ten percent, and our
crews can dump on us any time they please. At the wages they get, they're always
shifting around, bidding for new contracts, squeezing for money. I have to be damn
popular and effective or they would get someone else.

"This kid has been worthless from the beginning. He's always looked half-starved; I
think he's a sicker. How he got from L.A. to the border is... " His next words were
drowned out by a freighter whizzing along the highway beneath the station. Mike glanced
out the window at the behemoth diesel as it moved off southward carrying liquefied
natural gas to the Peace Authority Enclave in Los Angeles. "... took him because he
claimed he could run my books. Now, the little bas — the kid may know something about
accounting. But he's a lazy thief, too. And I can prove it. If your company hassles me
about this when I come back through Santa Ynez, I'll sue you into oblivion."

There were a couple more verbal go-arounds, and then Sheriff Wentz rang off. He
turned in his chair. "You know, Mike, I think he's telling the truth. We don't see it so
much in the new generation, but children like your Sally and Arta-* "

Mike nodded glumly and hoped Sy wouldn't pursue it. His Sally and Arta, his little
sisters. Dead years ago. They had been twins, five years younger than he, born when his
parents had lived in Phoenix. They had made it to California with him, but they had
always been sick. They both died before they were twenty and never looked to be older
than ten. Mike knew who had caused that bit of hell. It was something he never spoke of.

"The generation before that had it worse. But back then it was just another sort of
plague and people didn't notice especially." The diseases, the sterility, had brought a kind
of world never dreamed of by the bomb makers of the previous century. "If this Wili is
like your sisters, I'd estimate he's about fifteen. No wonder he's brighter than he looks."

"It's more than that, Boss. The kid is really smart. You should have seen what he did to
Tellman's Celest."

Wentz shrugged. "Whatever. Now we've got to decide what to do with him. I wonder
whether Fred Bartlett would take him in." This was gentle racism; the Bartletts were
black.