The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (41 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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She leaned closer to him, looked down at the screen. “Yes. If you know where to look you can often see them at night.”
“They were put up for your colony’s use, and though you no longer have receiving equipment, they are still in working order.”
“And this thing—”
“ … Is reading from a synchronous satellite some 40,000 kilometers up. This picture shows most of the Fragge.”
Martha’s fatigue was forgotten. “We never dreamed the satellites could still work. I feel like God looking down on things this way. Now we can find that village easily.”
“Yes—” Using the controls at the side of the display he began to follow the Fragge’s coastline at medium resolution.
Martha spoke up again. “I think we’re seeing the north coast now.
At least, the part that isn’t under cloud looks like the last map I saw. The village is to the southeast of us, so you’re not going to find much of anything—”
Chente frowned, looked more closely at the screen, then increased the magnification. It was as if the camera had been dropped straight toward the ground. The tiny bay at the center of the screen swelled to fill the entire display. Now they were looking down through late afternoon haze at a large natural harbor. Chente identified thirty or forty piers and a number of ships. All along the waterfront buildings cast long, incriminating shadows. He pushed a button and five tiny red lights glowed over the image of one of those buildings.
Martha was silent for a long moment. She looked more closely at the picture, and finally she said, “Those ships, they’re Ontarian. They have an entire naval base hidden away there. The scum! I can imagine what they’re planning: to build up a large secret reserve, and then tempt us into a major battle. Why, Chente, this changes our entire naval situation. It—” Suddenly she seemed to realize that she was not sitting in some intelligence briefing, but was instead stranded thousands of kilometers from the people who could use this discovery.
Chente made no comment, but returned the magnification to its previous level. He followed the coastline all the way around to the south and eventually found two other settlements, both small villages.
“Now let’s try to find some food,” he said. “If I’m oriented properly, I’ve got the picture centered on our location.” He stepped up the magnification. On the enlarged scale they could see individual hillocks and identify the small stream they had crossed half a kilometer back. Toward the top of the picture, a collection of spikelike shadows stretched several millimeters. He magnified the image still further.
“Animals,” Chente said. “They look better than two meters long.”
“Then they’re buzzards.”
“Buzzards?”
“Yes, herbivores. The next largest thing we know about on the Fragge is a predator not much more than a meter long.”
Chente grinned at her. “I think I’ve materialized that food for you.”
She looked dubious. “Only if I can acquire a taste for copper salts in my meat.”
“Perhaps we can do something about that.” He looked at the scale key that flickered near the bottom of the picture. “That herd isn’t more than five thousand meters away. I hadn’t expected luck this good. How long till sunset? Two hours?”
Martha glanced at the sun, which hung some thirty degrees off the stony ridges behind them. “More like ninety minutes.”
“We’ll have buzzard soup yet. Come on.”
THE PACE HE SET WAS A SLOW ONE, BUT IN THEIR PRESENT STATE IT WAS about the best they could do. The spidery vegetation caught at their feet and the ground was not nearly as level as it looked. An hour and three quarters passed. Behind them the sun had set, and only the reddish skyglow lighted their way. Chente touched Martha’s elbow, motioned her to bend low. If they spooked the herd now, they would have a hungry night. They crawled over a broad hill crest, then lay down to scan the plain beyond. They had not been too cautious: the herd was some five hundred meters down the slope, near a waterhole. Chente almost laughed; buzzards, indeed! They certainly hadn’t been named by the first-generation colonists. In this light the creatures might almost have been mistaken for tall men stooped over low against the ground. Their thin wings were clasped behind their backs as they walked slowly about.
Chente chose a medium-sized animal that was browsing away from the main group. He silently took his pistol from his coverall and aimed. The beast screamed once, then ran fifteen meters, right into the waterhole, where it collapsed. The others didn’t need two warnings. The herd stampeded off to Chente’s right. The creatures didn’t run or fly—they bounded, in long, wing-assisted leaps. The motion reminded Chente of the impalas he had seen in the San Joaquin valley. In fact, their ecological niche was probably similar.
In which case
, he thought,
we’d better watch out for whatever passes for lions around here.
The humans picked themselves up, and walked slowly down toward the abandoned waterhole. Vicente waded cautiously into the shallow, acrid-smelling water. The top of the buzzard’s head was blown off. It was probably dead, but he didn’t take any chances with it. By the time he got the hundred-kilo carcass out of the pool the short twilight was nearly ended. Martha took over the butchering—though she remarked that buzzards didn’t have much in common with the farm animals she was used to. Apparently she had not spent her whole life administrating. He watched her work in the gathering darkness, glad for her help and gladder for her presence.
When the beast was cut into small enough pieces, Chente took a short cylinder from his coveralls and fed some of the meat into it. There was a soft buzzing sound, and then he pressed a cup into Martha’s hand. “Buzzard soup. Minus the heavy metal salts.”
He could just make out her silhouette as she slowly raised the cup to her lips and drank. She gagged several times but got it all down. When Chente had his first taste he understood her reaction. The sludge didn’t
taste
edible.
“This will keep us alive?” Martha asked hoarsely.
“For a number of weeks, anyway. Over a longer time we’d need dietary
supplements.” He continued feeding the buzzard to the processor, and bagging the resulting slop.
“Why hasn’t Earth given us the secret of this device, Vicente? Only one percent of New Providence has soil free from metallic poisons, and Ontario is only three or four times better off. With your processor we could conquer this planet.”
He shook his head. “I doubt it. The machine is a good deal more complicated than it looks. On Earth, the technology to build one has existed for less than thirty years. It’s not enough to remove the heavy metals from the meat. The result would still be poisonous—or at least nonnutritious. This thing actually reassembles the protein molecules it rips apart. For the technique to be of any use to you, we’d have to ship a factory whole. You just—”
Chente heard a faint hiss above and behind him. Martha screamed. As he whirled and drew his pistol he was bowled over by something that had glided in on them in virtual silence. Chente and the birdlike carnivore spun over in the spider-weed, the thing’s beak searching for his face and throat but finding Chente’s upthrust forearm instead. The claws and beak were like knives thrust into his chest and arm. He fired his pistol and the explosion sent the attacker into pieces all over him.
Chente rolled to a sitting position and played fire around the unseen landscape in case there were others waiting. But all he heard was vegetation and earth exploding as the water within them was brought violently to a boil.
The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than ten seconds. Now the night was silent again. Chente had the impression that his attacker had been built more like a leopard than a bird. New Canada’s dense atmosphere and low gravity made some peculiar things possible.
“Are you all right, Chente?”
The question made him aware of the slick flow of blood down his forearm, of the gashes across his ribs. He swore softly. “No bones broken, but I got slashed up. Are these creatures venomous?”
“No.” He heard her move close.
“Good. The first-aid equipment I’ve got should be enough to keep me going, then. Let’s get our stuff away from this waterhole or we’ll be entertaining visitors all night long.” He got stiffly to his feet.
They collected the bags of processed meat and then walked three hundred meters or so from the waterhole, where they settled down in the soft spider-weed. Chente took a pain killer, and for a while everything seemed hazy and pleasant. The night was mild, even warm. The humidity had dropped steadily during the afternoon, so that the ground felt dry. A heavy breeze pushed around them, but there were no identifiable animal sounds: New Canada had yet to invent insects, or their
equivalent. The sky seemed clear, but the stars were not so numerous as in an earthly sky. Chente guessed that the upper-atmosphere haze cut out everything dimmer than magnitude three or four. He looked for Sol near the head of the Great Bear but he wasn’t even sure he had spotted that constellation. More than anything else, this sky made him feel far from home.
He lay back, going over in his mind what he had discovered since his arrival. When his predecessor had failed to report, they had tried to prepare him more thoroughly for his return to New Canada. But none of the historians, none of the psychologists had guessed what an extreme social system had developed here. It must have begun as an attempt by the shattered colony to reform society after the Cataclysm, forging a fragile unity from zealous allegiance. But now it bled the warring nations dry, while blinding the people to the possibility of peace, and what was worse, to the absolute necessity of working together. By rights he should now be a hero among the New Canadians. By rights they should be taking the technical advice he could give to increase what small chances there might be to survive the next core tremor. Instead, he was marooned on this forlorn continent, and the only person who had any real desire to help him was just as much an hysterical nationalist as everyone else.
But his mission still remained, even if he couldn’t get the locals to cooperate in saving themselves. In spite of its terrible problems, New Canada was a more viable colony than most. After four centuries of space flight, Earth knew how rare are habitable planets. Man’s colonies were few. If those failed, there would be no hope for mankind ever to expand itself beyond the Solar System, and eventually the entire race would die of its own stagnation.
Somehow, he had to end this internecine fighting, or at least eliminate the possibility of nuclear war. Somehow he had to force the colonists to fight for survival. At the moment he could see only one possibility. It was a long shot and deception was its essence. How much deception, and of whom, he tried not to consider.
“Martha?”
“Yes?” She huddled tentatively against him, all reserve finally gone.
“We’re going to make for that Ontarian base rather than the village south of here.”
She stiffened. “What? No! In spite of what some of my people tried to do to you, the Ontarians are still worse. Why—”
“Two reasons. First, that naval base is only two hundred fifty kilometers away, not five hundred. Second, I mean to stop this warfare between your two states. There must be peace.”
“A just peace? One where we won’t have our mines expropriated by the Ontarians? One where we get our fair share of the farmland? One where feudalism is outlawed?”
Chente sighed. “Yes.”
Something like that
.
“Then I’ll do anything to help you. But how can going to the Ontarians bring peace?”
“You remember those red blips on my display? Those were signals from the transponders that are on each of the communications bombs. If I’ve been keeping count properly, this means that the Ontarians have all their nuclear weapons stored at this base. If I tell them of New Providence’s treachery, and offer my services, I may eventually get a crack at those bombs.”
“It might work. Certainly, the world isn’t safe as long as those fanatics have the bomb, so perhaps it’s worth the risk.”
Quintero didn’t answer. He gave one quick glance around, saw no “leopards” in the pale starlight. Then he drew Martha into his arms and kissed her, and wondered how many times he had kissed her before.
TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY KILOMETERS IN FIVE DAYS WOULD HAVE BEEN NO burden for Chente if he had started fresh and uninjured. As it was, however, his dizziness and wounds slowed him down to the point where Martha could move as fast as he. Fortunately it didn’t rain again and the nights remained warm. Waterholes were easily detected from orbit, and when they ran out of food after three days they had no trouble getting more meat—this time without having to fight for it.
But by the morning of the fifth day, they were both near the limit of their resources. Through the haze of pain-killer drugs and motion-sickness pills, the landscape gradually became unreal to Chente. He knew that soon he would stop walking, and no effort of will would get him moving again.
Beside him, Martha occasionally staggered. She walked flat-footedly now, no longer trying to favor her blisters. He could imagine the state of her feet after five days of steady walking.
Ahead stretched a long hill, its crest some five thousand meters away. Chente stopped and studied his display. “Just over that hill and we’re home—”

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