the coast, morning clouds still hung over the lowlands. The silver arch of the force field that enclosed Vandenberg and Lompoc seemed to float halfway up the sky. No structure could possibly be so big. Even mountains had the decency to introduce themselves with foothills and highlands. The Vandenberg Bobble simply rose, sheer and insubstantial as a dream. So that glistening hemisphere contained much of her old world, her old friends. They were trapped in timelessness in there, just as she and Angus and Fred had been trapped in the bobble around the sortie craft. And one day the Vandenberg bobble would burst...
Somewhere in the trees beyond her vision there was a cawing; a crow ascended above the pines, circled down at another point. Over the whine of insects, Allison heard padded clopping. A horse was coming up the narrow trail that went past her rock pile. Allison moved back into the shadows and watched.
Three minutes passed and a lone horseman came into view: It was a black male, so spindly it was hard to guess his age, except to say that he was young. He was dressed in dark greens, almost a camouflage outfit and his hair was short and unbraided. He looked tired, but his eyes swept attentively back and forth across the trail ahead of him. The brown eyes flickered across her.
'Jill! How did you get so far from the veranda?' The words were spoken with a heavy Spanish accent; at this point it was an incongruity beneath Allison's notice. A broad grin split the boy's face as he slid off the horse and scrambled across the rocks toward her. 'Naismith says that-' the words came to an abrupt halt along with the boy himself. He stood an arm's-length away, his jaw sagging in disbelief. `Jill? Is that really you?' He swung his hand in a flat arc toward Allison's midsection. The gesture was too slow to be a blow, but she wasn't taking any chances. She grabbed his wrist.
The boy actually squeaked — but with surprise, not pain. It was as if he could not believe she had actually touched him.
She marched him back to the trail, and they started toward the house. She had his arm behind his back now. The boy did not struggle, though he didn't seem intimidated either. There was more shock and surprise in his eyes than fear.
Now that it was the other guy who was at a disadvantage, maybe she could get some answers. ''you, Naismith, none of you have ever seen me before, yet you all seem to know me. I want to know why.' She bent his arm a bit more, though not enough to hurt. The violence was in her voice.
'But, but I
It might not be the whole truth, but... Perhaps it was like those fantasies Angus used to read. Perhaps she was somehow important, and the world had been waiting for them to come out of stasis. In that case their pictures might be widely distributed.
They walked a dozen steps along the soft, needle-covered path. No, there was something more. These people acted as if they had known her as a person. Was that possible? Not for the boy, but Bill and Irma and certainly Naismith were old enough that she might have known them ...before. She tried to imagine those faces fifty years younger. The servants couldn't have been more than children. The old man, he would have been around her own age.
She let the boy lead the way. She was more holding his hand than twisting his arm now; her mind was far away, thinking of the single tombstone with her name, thinking how much someone must have cared. They walked past the front of the house, descended the grade that led to a belowground-level entrance. The door there was open, perhaps to let in the cool smells of morning. Naismith sat with his back to them, his attention all focused on the equipment he was playing with. Still holding his horse's reins, the boy leaned past the doorway and said, 'Paul?'
Allison looked past the old man's shoulder at the screen he was watching: a horse and a boy and a woman stood looking through a doorway at an old man watching a screen that... Allison echoed the boy, but in a tone softer, sadder, more questioning. 'Paul?'
The old man, who just last month had been young, turned at last to meet her.
TWENTY-THREE
There were few places on Earth that were busier or more populous than they had been before the War. Livermore was such a place. At its pre-War zenith, there had been the city and the clusters of commercial and federal labs scattered through the rolling hills. Those had been boom times, with the old Livermore Energy Laboratories managing dozens of major enterprises and a dozen-dozen contract operations from their square-mile reservation just outside of town. And one of those operations, unknown to the rest, had been the key to the future. Its manager, Hamilton Avery's father, had been clever enough to see what could be done with a certain staff scientist's invention, and had changed the course of history.
And so when the old world had disappeared behind silver bobbles, and burned beneath nuclear fireballs, and later withered in the war plagues — Livermore had grown. First from all over the continent and then from all over the planet, the new rulers had brought their best and brightest here. Except for a brief lapse during the worst of the plague years, that growth had been near-exponential. And Peace had ruled the new world.
The heart of Authority power covered a thousand square kilometers, along a band that stretched westward toward the tiny bay towns of Berkeley and Oakland. Even the Beijing and the Paris Enclaves had nothing to compare with Livermore. Hamilton Avery had wanted an Eden here. He had had forty years and the wealth and genius of the planet to make one.
But still at the heart of the heart there was the Square Mile, the original federal labs, their century-old University of California architecture preserved amidst the sweep of one-thousand meter bobbles, obsidian towers, and forested parks.
