The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (27 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

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“In the last three years we’ve managed to interview more than fifteen of you Mikins. It’s crazy. You’re all so different from one another. You claim you are all from the same continent, and yet each individual appears to have an entirely different cultural background. Some of you don’t wear clothes at all, while others go around with every inch of their skin covered. Some, like Horlig, make a fetish of primitiveness. But we had one fellow here who had so many gadgets with him that he had to wear powered body armor. He was so heavy, he busted my father’s favorite chair. We can’t find any common denominator. Mikins believe in one god, or in many, or in none. At the same time, many of you are dreadfully superstitious. We’ve always wondered what aliens might be like, but we never guessed that—What’s the matter?”
I pointed shakily at the creature in the street. She placed a reassuring hand on my arm. “Why, that’s just a cat. Don’t you have catlike creatures on Miki?”
“Certainly.”
“Why the shock then? Are your cats poisonous or something?”
“Of course not. Many people keep them as pets. It’s just that it’s a bad sign to see one at night—an especially bad sign if it looks at you and its eyes glow.” I was sorry when she withdrew her hand.
She looked at me closely. “I hope you won’t be angry, Mr. Melmwn, but this is exactly what I mean. How can a race that travels between the stars believe in ill or good omens? Or have you developed magic as a science?”
“No, that’s not it. Many Mikins don’t believe in signs at all, and depending on whether you are a demon-monger or a witch-fearer, you recognize different signs. As for how I personally can believe in nonempirical, nonscientific signs—that’s easy. There are many more causal relations in this universe than Mikin science will ever discover. I believe that witch-fearers have divined a few of these. And though I am quite a mild witch-fearer, I don’t take any chances.”
“But you are an anthropologist. I should think in your studies you would see so many different attitudes and superstitions that you would disregard your own.”
I watched carefully as the cat went round the corner of the house.
Then I turned to look at Mary Dahlmann. “Is that how it is with Terran anthropologists? Perhaps then I should not translate my occupation as ‘anthropology.’ Before %wrlyg, I was employed by the Ana#og Pacific Enclave & Motor Corporation. A fine group. As anthropologist, my job was to screen the background attitudes of perspective employees. For instance, it just wouldn’t do to have a Cannibal and a Militant Vegetarian work next to each other on the production line—they’d kill each other inside of three hours, and the corporation would lose money.”
She pushed the swing back with an agitated kick. “But now we’re back where we started. How can a single culture produce both cannibals and ‘militant’ vegetarians?”
I thought about it. Her question really seemed to go beyond cultures entirely—right to the core of reality. I had practiced my specialty within the Mikin framework—where such questions never came up. Maybe I should start with something basic.
“OUR SYSTEM IS FOUNDED ON THE CONCEPT OF CHAOS. THE UNIVERSE IS basically a dark and unhappy place—a place where evil and injustice and randomness rule. The ironic thing is that the very act of organization creates the potential for even greater ruin. Social organizations have a natural tendency to become monopolistic and inflexible. When they finally break down, it is a catastrophic debacle. So, we must accept a great deal of disorder and violence in our lives if we are to avoid a complete blowup later.
“Every Mikin is free to
try
anything. Naturally, in order to survive, groups of people cooperate—and from this you get the tens of thousands of organizations, corporations, and convents that make our civilization. But no group may become monopolistic. This is why we have Umpires. I don’t think you have anything comparable. Umpires see that excessively large organizations are never formed. They keep our society from becoming rigid and unresponsive to the natural world. Our system has lasted a very long time.”
Much longer than yours
, I added to myself.
She frowned. “I don’t understand. Umpires? Is this some sort of police force? How do they keep governments from forming? What’s to keep the Umpires from becoming a government themselves?”
If I didn’t watch out, I was going to learn more about Miki than I did about Earth. Mary’s questions opened doors I never knew existed. My answer was almost as novel to me as it was to her. “I suppose it’s because the Umpire tradition is very old with us. With one minor exception, all Mikins have had this tradition for almost four thousand years. The Umpires probably originated as a priest class serving a number of different nomad tribes. There never were many Umps. They go unarmed. They have bred for intelligence and flexibility. There’s quite a bit of, uh, mystery—which
we take for granted—surrounding them. I believe that they live under the influence of some rather strange drugs. You might say that they are brainwashed. In all history, there is no period in which they have sought power. Though they spend most of their lives in the abstract study of behavior science, their real task is to watch society for signs of bigness.
“There’s one watching %wrlyg right now. If he decides that %wrlyg is too big—and that’s a distinct possibility, since there are almost twelve thousand %wrlyg employees altogether—the Ump will issue an, uh, antitrust ruling, describing the situation and ordering certain changes. There is no appeal. Defiance of an antitrust ruling is the only deed that is recognized by all Mikins as a sin. When there is such defiance, all Mikins are bound to take antitrust action—that is, to destroy the criminal. Some antitrust actions have involved fusion bombs and armies—they’re the closest thing we have to wars.”
She didn’t look convinced. “Frankly, I can’t imagine how such a system could avoid becoming a dictatorship of ‘Umpires.’”
“I feel the same incredulity about your civilization.”
“How big are your ‘organizations’?”
“It might be a single person. More than half the groups on Miki are just families or family groups. Anything goes unless it threatens stability—or becomes too large. The largest groups allowed are some of the innocuous religious types—the Little Brother Association, for instance. They preach approximately the principles I read of in your Christianity. But they don’t proselytize, and so manage to avoid antitrust rulings. The largest ‘hardware’ organizations have about fifteen thousand employees.”
“And how can a company support interstellar operations?”
“Yes, that’s a very tricky point. %wrlyg had to cooperate with several hundred industrial groups to do it. They came mighty close to antitrust.”
She sat silently, thinking all this over. Then she asked, “When can we expect an antitrust ruling against the Australian government?”
I laughed. “You don’t have to worry about that. No offense, but antitrust can only apply to human groupings.”
She didn’t like that at all, but she didn’t argue it either. Instead she came back with, “Then that means we also don’t have Umpire protection if %wrlyg commits genocide upon us.”
That was a nasty conclusion but it fitted the letter of custom. Killing millions of humans would warrant antitrust, but Terrans weren’t human.
For an instant I thought she was laughing, low and bitter. Then her face seemed to collapse and I knew she was crying. This was an unpleasant turn of events. Awkwardly, I put my arm around her shoulders and tried to comfort her. She no longer seemed to me an abo, but simply a person in pain. “Please, Mary Dahlmann. My people aren’t monsters.
We only want to use places on your planet that are uninhabited, that are too dangerous for you. Our presence will actually make Earth safer. When we colonize the North World, we’ll null the radiation poisons and kill the war viruses.”
That didn’t stop the tears, but she did move closer into my arms. Several seconds passed and she mumbled something like, “History repeats.” We sat like that for almost half an hour.
It wasn’t until I got back to Base that I remembered that I had been out between Demonsloose and Dawn without so much as a Hexagram.
I GOT MY EQUIPMENT INSTALLED THE NEXT DAY. I WAS ASSIGNED AN OFFICE only fifty-four hundred meters from the central supply area. This was all right with me since the site was also quite near the outskirts of Adelaide-west. Though the office was made entirely of local materials, the style was old
#imw#.
The basement contained my sleeping and security quarters, and the first floor was my office and business machines. The surface construction was all hand-polished hardwood. The roof was tiled with rose marble and furnished with night chairs and a drink mixer. At the center of the roof was a recoilless rifle and a live map of the minefield around the building. It was all just like home—which is what I had specified when I had signed the contract back on Miki. I had expected some chiseling on the specifications once we got out in the boondocks, but %wrlyg’s integrity was a pleasant surprise.
After I checked out the equipment, I called Horlig and got a copy of his mission log. I wanted to check on Dahlmann’s charges. Horlig was suspiciously unhappy about parting with the information, but when I pointed out that I was without a job until I got background info, he agreed to squirt me a copy. The incidents were more or less as Dahlmann had described them. At Pret, though, the Zulunders attacked the air tanks with some jury-rigged anti-aircraft weapon—so the retaliation seemed justified. There was also one incident that Dahlmann hadn’t mentioned. Just five days before, Che#—on Horlig’s orders—burned the food supplies of the Sudamérican colony at Panamá, thus forcing the Terran explorers to return to the inhabited portions of their continent. I decided to keep a close watch on these developments. There could be something here quite as sinister as Dahlmann claimed.
Later that day, Horlig briefed me on my first assignment. He wanted me to record and index the Canberra Central Library. The job didn’t appeal at all. It was designed to keep me out of his hair. I spent the next couple weeks getting equipment together. I found Robert Dahlmann especially helpful. He telegraphed his superiors in Canberra and they agreed to let us use Terran clerical help in the recording operation. (I imagine part of the reason was that they were eager to study our equipment.)
I never actually flew to Canberra. Horlig had some deputy take the gear out and instruct the natives on how to use it. It turned out Canberra library was huge—almost as big as the Information Services library at home. Just supervising the indexing computers was a full-time job. It was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. When the job was done I would have many times the source material I could have collected personally.
A strange thing: As the weeks went by, I saw more and more of Mary Dahlmann. Even at this point I was still telling myself that it was all field work for my study of Terran customs. One day we had a picnic in the badlands north of Adelaide. The next she took me on a tour of the business district of the city—it was amazing how so many people could live so close together day after day. Once we even went on a train ride all the way to Murray Bridge. Railroads are stinking, noisy, and dirty, but they’re fun—and they transport freight almost as cheaply as a floater does. Mary had that spark of intelligence and good humor that made it all the more interesting. Still I claimed it was all in the cause of objective research.
About six weeks after my landing I invited her to visit the %wrlyg Base. Though Central Supply is only four or five kilometers from Adelaide-west, I took her in by air, so she could see the whole Base at once. I think it was the first time she had ever flown.
THE %WRLYG PRIMARY TERRITORY IS A RECTANGULAR AREA FIFTEEN BY THIRTY kilometers. It was ceded by the Australian government to the Company in gratitude for our intercession in the Battle of Hawaii, seventeen years before. You might wonder why we didn’t just put all our bases in the Northern Hemisphere, and ignore the Terrans entirely. The most important reason was that the First and Second Fleets hadn’t had the equipment for a large-scale decontamination job. Also, every kilogram of cargo from Miki requires nearly 100,000 megatons of energy for the voyage to Earth: this is expensive by any reckoning. We needed all the labor and materials the locals could provide. Since the Terrans inhabited the Southern Hemisphere only, that’s where our first base had to be.
By native standards %wrlyg paid extremely good wages. So good that almost thirty thousand Terrans were employed at the Ground Base. Many of these individuals lived in an area just off the Base, which Mary referred to as Clowntown. Its inhabitants were understandably enamored with the advantages of Mikin technology. Though their admiration was commendable, the results were a little ludicrous. Clowntowners tried to imitate the various aspects of Mikin life. They dressed eccentrically—by Terran standards—and adopted a variety of social behaviors. But their city was just as crowded as regular Australian urban areas.
And though they had more scraps of our technology than many places in Australia, their city was filthy. Anarchy just isn’t practical in such close quarters. They had absorbed the superficial aspects of our society without ever getting down to the critical matters of Umpires and antitrust. Mary had refused to go with me into Clowntown. Her reason was that police protection ceased to exist in that area. I don’t think that was her real reason.
Below us, the blue sea and white breakers met the orange and gray-green bluffs of the shore. The great Central Desert extended right up to the ocean. It was difficult to believe that this land had once supported grass and trees. Scattered randomly across the sand and sage were the individual office and workshops of Company employees. Each of these had its own unique appearance. Some were oases set in the desert. Others were squat gray forts. Some even looked like Terran houses. And, of course, a good number were entirely hidden from sight, the property of Obscurantist employees who kept their location secret even from %wrlyg. Taken as a whole, the Base looked like a comfortable Metropolitan area on the A1 W1 peninsula. But, if the Company had originally based in the Northern Hemisphere, none of the amenities would have been possible. We would have had to live in prefab domes.

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