The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (49 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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I turned up the throttle. The engine tried to twist off its moorings and the view to the side became a gray blur.
Three or four minutes passed—or maybe it wasn’t that long. I couldn’t tell. Suddenly Sirbat was screaming, “Left turn … two hundred meters more.” I slammed on the brakes. Thank God they’d taught him English instead of modern Japanese—which doesn’t really have quantitative terms for distance. We probably would have driven right through the intersection before Sirbat would come up with a circumlocution that would tell me how far to go and where to turn. The car skidded wildly across the intersection. Either the street was wet or the Shimans made their brake linings out of old rags. We ended up with our two front wheels over the curb. I backed the car off the sidewalk and made the turn.
NOW THE GOING GOT TOUGH. WE HAD TO TURN EVERY FEW BLOCKS AND there were some kind of traffic signals I couldn’t figure out. That tiny steering wheel was hell to turn. The skin on my hands felt like it was being ripped off. All the time Sirbat was telling me to go faster, faster. I tried. If he died there in the car it would be like getting trapped in a school of piranha.
The fog got thicker, but less uniform. Occasionally we broke into a clear spot where I could see nearly a block. We blasted up a sharply arched bridge, felt a brief moment of near-weightlessness at the top, and then were down on the other side. In the river that was now behind us, a boat whistled.
From the back set, Sirbat’s mumbling became coherent English: “Earthman, do you have knowledge … how lucky you are?”
“What?” I asked. Was he getting delirious?
Ahead of me the road narrowed, got twisty. We were moving up the ridge that separated the city from the ocean. Soon we were above the murk. In the starlight the fog spread across the lands below, a placid cottony sea that drowned everything but the rocky island we were climbing. Earthpol’s gunboat skulked north of us.
Finally Sirbat replied, “Being good is no trouble at all for you. You’re … born that way. We have to work so … hard at it … like Gorst. And in the end … I’m still as bad … as hungry as I ever was. So hungry.” His speech died in a liquid gurgle. I risked a look behind me. The Shiman was chewing feebly at the upholstery.
We were out of the city proper now. Far up, near the crest of the ridge, I could see the multiple fences that bounded the cemetery. Even by starlight I could see that the ground around us was barren, deeply eroded.
I pulled down my veil and turned the throttle to full. We covered the last five hundred meters to the open gates in a single burst of speed. The guards waved us through—after all, their job was to keep things from getting
out
—and I cruised into the parking area. There were lots of people around, but fortunately the street lights were dimmed. I parked at the side of the lot nearest the graveyard. We hustled Sirbat out of the car and onto the pavement. The nearest Shimans were twenty meters from us, but when they saw what we were doing they moved even further away, whispered anxiously to each other. We had a live bomb on our hands, and they wanted no part of it.
Sirbat lay on the pavement and stared into the sky. Every few seconds his face convulsed. He seemed to be whispering to himself. Delirious. Finally he said in English, “Tell him … I forgive him.” The Shiman rolled onto his feet. He paused, quivering, then sprinted off into the
darkness. His footsteps faded, and all we could hear were faint scratching sounds and the conversation of Shimans around us in the parking lot.
For a moment we stood silently in the chill, moist air. Then I whispered to Tsumo, “How long?”
“It’s about two hours before dawn. I am sure Earthpol will penetrate my evasion patterns in less than three hours. If you stay until the swarming, you’ll probably be caught.”
I turned and looked across the rising fog bank. There were thirty billion people on this planet, I had been told. Without the crude form of birth control practiced at thousands of cemeteries like this one, there could be many more. And every one of the creatures was intelligent, murderous. If I finished my analysis, then they’d have practical immortality along with everything else, and we’d be facing them in our own space in a very short time … which was exactly what Samuelson wanted. In fact, it was the price he had demanded of the Shimans—that their civilization expand into space, so mankind would at last have a worthy competitor. And what if the Shiman brain was as far superior as timid souls like Tsumo claimed?
Well then, we will have to do some imitating, some catching up.
I could almost hear Samuelson’s reedy voice speaking the words. Myself, I wasn’t as sure: ever since we were kids back in Chicago, Samuelson had been kinda kinky about street-fighting, and about learning from the toughs he fought—me for instance.
“Give me that,” I said, taking the
‘mam’ri
from Tsumo’s hand, and turning it to make my preliminary scan across the cemetery. Whether Samuelson and I were right or wrong, the next century was going to be damned interesting.
THE SUN’S DISK STOOD WELL CLEAR OF THE HORIZON. THE MAZES AND DEAD falls and machine guns had taken their toll. Of the original million infants, less than a thousand had survived. They would be weeded no further.
Near the front of the pack, one of the smartest and strongest ran joyfully toward the scent of food ahead
—
where the first schoolmasters had set their cages. The child lashed happily at those around it, but they were wise and kept their distance. For the moment its hunger was not completely devastating and the sunlight warmed its back. It was wonderful to be alive and free and … innocent.
I wrote “Original Sin” around 1970. For many years, it was my favorite of all my stories. I thought I had said something about basic “human” issues. I liked the
tantalizing glimpses of our future civilization (“remember spaceships?”). I deliberately wrote it without reference to any real technologies beyond 1940—the idea being that 1940 jargon should probably be as accurate as 1970 jargon in explaining the far future. The word-hacker in me was also intrigued by the Basic English vocabulary the aliens used. (It turned out to be surprisingly difficult to write in that vocabulary. Once I saw the Gettysburg address re-done in Basic English; it seemed about as eloquent as the original. I didn’t realize until I was writing this story what a feat that was.)
Nevertheless, I had more trouble selling “Original Sin” than almost anything I’ve written. The early versions were just too cryptic. It bounced and bounced and bounced. But usually the editors liked parts of it, and often they told me what they didn’t like. Between the kind advice of Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova, I eventually wrote something that could sell.
In my novel
Marooned in Realtime,
I had a brush with the Singularity. After I finished that book, I felt a bit marooned myself. The closer my stories came to the Singularity, the shorter the timescales and the less opportunity for the kind of adventure stories that I grew up with. Any future history following these events would be a short run over a cliff, into the abyss … with no human equivalent aliens, no intelligible interstellar civilizations.
If I wanted to build a future-history series, it seemed that I was stuck with honest extrapolation and a very quick end to human history—or a series that was overtly science-fictional, but secretly a fantasy since it would be based on the
absence
of the scientific progress that I see coming. I was stuck; the dilemma lasted about two years.
Eventually I found a solution, one that was faithful to my ideas about progress but which still allowed me to write fiction with human-sized characters and interstellar adventure. The solution? Basically I turned my extrapolations sideways, as you will see in this next story. “The Blabber” was a test flight into the universe of my Zones of Thought novels.
S
ome dreams take a long time in dying. Some get a last-minute reprieve … and that can be even worse.
It was just over two klicks from the Elvis revival to the center of campus. Hamid Thompson took the long way, across the Barkers’ stubbly fields and through the Old Subdivision. Certainly the Blabber preferred that route. She raced this way and that across Ham’s path, rooting at roach holes and covertly watching the birds that swooped close on her seductive calls. As usual, her stalking was more for fun than food. When a bird came within striking distance, the Blab’s head would flick up, touching the bird with her nose, blasting it with a peal of human laughter. The Blab hadn’t taken this way in some time; all the birds in her regular haunts had wised up, and were no fun anymore.
When they reached the rock bluffs behind the subdivision, there weren’t any more roach holes, and the birds had become cautious. Now the Blab walked companionably beside him, humming in her own way: scraps of Elvis overlaid with months-old news commentary. She went a minute or two in silence … listening? Contrary to what her detractors might say, she could be both awake and silent for hours at a time—but even then Hamid felt an occasional buzzing in his head, or a flash of
pain. The Blab’s tympana could emit across a two-hundred-kilohertz band, which meant that most of her mimicry was lost on human ears.
They were at the crest of the bluff. “Sit down, Blab. I want to catch my breath.”
And look at the view … . And decide what in heaven’s name I should do with you and with me.
The bluffs were the highest natural viewpoints in New Michigan province. The flatlands that spread around them were pocked with ponds, laced with creeks and rivers, the best farmland on the continent. From orbit, the original colonists could find no better. Water landings would have been easier, but they wanted the best odds on long-term survival. Thirty klicks away, half hidden by gray mist, Hamid could see the glassy streaks that marked the landing zone. The history books said it took three years to bring down the people and all the salvage from the greatship. Even now the glass was faintly radioactive, one cause for the migration across the isthmus to Westland.
Except for the forest around those landing strips, and the old university town just below the bluff, most everything in this direction was farmland, unending squares of brown and black and gray. The year was well into autumn and the last of the Earth trees had given up their colored leaves. The wind blowing across the plains was chill, leaving a crispness in his nose that promised snow someday soon. Hallowe‘en was next week. Hallowe’en indeed.
I wonder if in Man’s thirty thousand years, there has ever been a celebration of that holiday like we’ll be seeing next week.
Hamid resisted the impulse to look back at Marquette. Ordinarily it was one of his favorite places: the planetary capital, population four hundred thousand, a real city. As a child, visiting Marquette had been like a trip to some far star system. But now reality had come, and the stars were so
close
… . Without turning, he knew the position of every one of the Tourist barges. They floated like colored balloons above the city, yet none massed less than a thousand tonnes. And those were their
shuttles.
After the Elvis revival, Hallowe’en was the last big event on the Marquette leg of the Tour. Then they would be off to Westland, for more semi-fraudulent peeks at Americana.
Hamid crunched back in the dry moss that cushioned the rock. “Well, Blabber, what should I do? Should I sell you? We could both make it Out There if I did.”
The Blabber’s ears perked up. “Talk? Converse? Disgust?” She settled her forty-kilo bulk next to him, and nuzzled her head against his chest. The purring from her foretympanum sounded like some transcendental cat. The sound was pink noise, buzzing through his chest and shaking the rock they sat on. There were few things she enjoyed more than a good talk with a peer. Hamid stroked her black and white pelt. “I said, should I sell you?”
The purring stopped, and for a moment the Blab seemed to give the matter thoughtful consideration. Her head turned this way and that, bobbing—a good imitation of a certain prof at the University. She rolled her big dark eyes at him, “Don’t rush me! I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” She licked daintily at the sleek fur at the base of her throat. And for all Hamid knew, she really was thinking about what to say. Sometimes she really seemed to try to understand … and sometimes she almost made sense. Finally she shut her mouth and began talking.
“Should I sell you? Should I sell you?” The intonation was still Hamid’s but she wasn’t imitating his voice. When they talked like this, she typically sounded like an adult human female (and a very attractive one, Hamid thought). It hadn’t always been that way. When she had been a pup and he a little boy, she’d sounded to him like another little boy. The strategy was clear: she understood the type of voice he most likely wanted to hear. Animal cunning? “Well,” she continued,
“I
know what I think. Buy, don’t sell. And always get the best price you can.”
She often came across like that: oracular. But he had known the Blab all his life. The longer her comment, the less she understood it. In this case … Ham remembered his finance class. That was before he got his present apartment, and the Blab had hidden under his desk part of the semester. (It had been an exciting semester for all concerned.) “Buy, don’t sell.” That was a quote, wasn’t it, from some nineteenth-century tycoon?
She blabbered on, each sentence having less correlation with the question. After a moment, Hamid grabbed the beast around the neck, laughing and crying at the same time. They wrestled briefly across the rocky slope, Hamid fighting at less than full strength, and the Blab carefully keeping her talons retracted. Abruptly he was on his back and the Blab was standing on his chest. She held his nose between the tips of her long jaws. “Say Uncle! Say Uncle!” she shouted.
The Blabber’s teeth stopped a couple of centimeters short of the end of her snout, but the grip was powerful; Hamid surrendered immediately. The Blab jumped off him, chuckling triumph, then grabbed his sleeve to help him up. He stood up, rubbing his nose gingerly. “Okay, monster, let’s get going.” He waved downhill, toward Ann Arbor Town.
“Ha, ha! For sure. Let’s get going!” The Blab danced down the rocks faster than he could hope to go. Yet every few seconds the creature paused an instant, checking that he was still following. Hamid shook his head, and started down. Damned if he was going to break a leg just to keep up with her. Whatever her homeworld, he guessed that winter around Marquette was the time of year most homelike for the Blab. Take her coloring: stark black and white, mixed in wide curves and swirls. He’d seen that pattern in pictures of ice-pack seals. When there was snow on the ground, she was practically invisible.
She was fifty meters ahead of him now. From this distance, the Blab could almost pass for a dog, some kind of greyhound maybe. But the paws were too large, and the neck too long. The head looked more like a seal’s than a dog’s. Of course, she could bark like a dog. But then, she could also sound like a thunderstorm, and make something like human conversation—all at the same time. There was only one of her kind in all Middle America. This last week, he’d come to learn that her kind were almost as rare Out There. A Tourist wanted to buy her … and Tourists could pay with coin what Hamid Thompson had sought for more than half his twenty years.
Hamid desperately needed some good advice. It had been five years since he’d asked his father for help; he’d be damned if he did so now. That left the University, and Lazy Larry … .
BY MIDDLE-AMERICAN STANDARDS, ANN ARBOR TOWN WAS
ANCIENT.
THERE were older places: out by the landing zone, parts of Old Marquette still stood. School field trips to those ruins were brief—the pre-fab quonsets were mildly radioactive. And of course there were individual buildings in the present-day capital that went back almost to the beginning. But much of the University in Ann Arbor dated from just after those first permanent structures: the University had been a going concern for 190 years.
Something was up today, and it had nothing to do with Hamid’s problems. As they walked into town, a couple of police helicopters swept in from Marquette, began circling the school. On the ground, some of Ham’s favorite back ways were blocked off by University safety patrols. No doubt it was Tourist business. He might have to come in through the Main Gate, past the Math Building.
Yuck.
Even after ten years he loathed that place: his years as a supposed prodigy; his parents forcing him into math classes he just wasn’t bright enough to handle; the tears and anger at home, till he finally convinced them that he was not the boy they thought.
They walked around the Quad, Hamid oblivious to the graceful buttresses, the ivy that meshed stone walls into the flute trees along the street. That was all familiar … what was new was all the Federal cop cars. Clusters of students stood watching the cops, but there was no riot in the air. They just seemed curious. Besides, the Feds had never interfered on campus before.
“Keep quiet, okay?” Hamid muttered.
“Sure, sure.” The Blab scrunched her neck back, went into her doggie act. At one time they had been notorious on campus, but he had dropped out that summer, and people had other things on their minds
today. They walked through the main gate without comment from students or cops.
The biggest surprise came when they reached Larry’s slummy digs at Morale Hall. Morale wasn’t old enough to be historic; it was old enough to be in decay. It had been an abortive experiment in brick construction. The clay had cracked and rotted, leaving gaps for vines and pests. By now it was more a reddish mound of rubble than a habitable structure. This was where the University Administration stuck tenured faculty in greatest disfavor: the Quad’s Forgotten Quarter … but not today. Today the cop cars were piled two deep in the parking areas, and there were shotgun-toting guards at the entrance!
Hamid walked up the steps. He had a sick feeling that Lazy Larry might be the hardest prof in the world to see today. On the other hand, working with the Tourists meant Hamid saw some of these security people every day.
“Your business, sir?” Unfortunately, the guard was no one he recognized.
“I need to see my advisor … Professor Fujiyama.” Larry had never been his advisor, but Hamid was looking for advice.
“Um.” The cop flicked on his throat mike. Hamid couldn’t hear much, but there was something about “that black and white off-planet creature.” Over the last twenty-years, you’d have to have been living in a cave never to see anything about the Blabber.
A minute passed, and an older officer stepped through the doorway. “Sorry, son, Mr. Fujiyama isn’t seeing any students this week. Federal business.”
Somewhere a funeral dirge began playing. Hamid tapped the Blab’s forepaw with his foot; the music stopped abruptly. “Ma’am, it’s not school business.” Inspiration struck: why not tell something like the truth? “It’s about the Tourists and my Blabber.”
The senior cop sighed. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say. Okay, come along.” As they entered the dark hallway, the Blabber was chuckling triumph. Someday the Blab would play her games with the wrong people and get the crap beat out of her, but apparently today was not that day.
They walked down two flights of stairs. The lighting got even worse, half-dead fluorescents built into the acoustic tiling. In places the wooden stairs sagged elastically under their feet. There were no queues of students squatting before any of the doors, but the cops hadn’t cleared out the faculty: Hamid heard loud snoring from one of the offices. The Forgotten Quarter—Morale Hall in particular—was a strange place. The one thing the faculty here had in common was that each had been an unbearable
pain in the neck to someone. That meant that both the most incompetent and the most brilliant were jammed into these tiny offices.
Larry’s office was in the sub-basement, at the end of a long hall. Two more cops flanked the doorway, but otherwise it was as Hamid remembered it. There was a brass nameplate: PROFESSOR L. LAWRENCE FUJIYAMA, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSHUMAN STUDIES. Next to the nameplate, a sign boasted implausible office hours. In the center of the door was the picture of a piglet and the legend: “If a student appears to need help, then appear to give him some.”

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