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Authors: Vernor Vinge

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The prince struggled to bring his voice back into control. “General, evacuate one of your battlewagons. We’ll annihilate its entire mass right next to the Enemy.” His emphasis capitalized the word; the Mush-faces were merely an enemy.
“Yes, Puissance.”
“Ten minutes.”
Harl nodded, began giving orders on his private comm. In the presence of a member of the Imperial Family he was reduced to the status of messenger boy.
Lal had given his orders, and now had to endure a small eternity as they were executed. Somewhere he knew mountainous computers were ticking away at the calculations involved in even the shortest jump. Somewhere else, ten thousand men were trying to abandon their battlewagon before the deadline he had set. And somewhere, twelve billion kilometers away, was an object that had to be destroyed else the galaxy would die.
A brilliant red star appeared just above the gardens’ pseudo horizon. The dot expanded, becoming fainter as it grew, the mad red eye of a monster. Almost simultaneously, three closely spaced red “stars” shone just two degrees away from the first. Lal recognized the characteristic glow of fusion bombs. The Mush-faces must have discovered that the Dorvik defense patterns were no longer adaptive. Without tactical computers,
the Dorvik were squatting milvaks before the attack. Those bombs couldn’t have been closer than 100,000 kilometers, but the enemy was moving in.
“Enemy rocket bomb at fifty thousand kilometers and closing,” said a disembodied voice.
Lal strained for some glimpse of the enemy. He noticed the silvery crescent of another Dorvik battlewagon some two hundred kilometers away, but that was all.
Both men sat in the flagwagon’s imperial gardens and counted their last seconds.
A white glare lit the gardens. Lal looked up, startled. The battlewagon he had noticed before had fired its rockets and now moved slowly across the sky. The brilliance of its jets brought temporary daylight to the gardens.
“It won’t work,” Harl whispered.
But somehow it did. The feebleminded rocket bomb accepted the other battlewagon as its target of opportunity, and the gardens’ curving crystal walls turned opaque as the wagon’s screens powered up. When the walls cleared, the other wagon was gone: ten thousand men and the gross annual product of an entire continent had been vaporized in less than a millisecond.
General e’Kraft’s fangs clattered together with suppressed emotion. To lose men in war was expected, but to sit defenselessly and let an enemy destroy you with inferior weapons was nightmare. Abruptly he looked up, as if listening to some private voice. “Puissance, the crew of the
Vengeance
have removed to the
Sword of Alkra
.”
Several more red dots appeared near the zenith, but Lal ignored them. The fleet would have to hold together just a little longer … .
The aide reappeared. “Computations complete, Puissance. Just tell us which bat—”
“The
Vengeance
. As soon as the jump is made and you are sure the Enemy is nearby, annihilate the entire mass of the wagon.”
Lal’s urgency was conveyed to the other man, who vanished without even bowing.
Harl said something on his private circuit, and a flat image appeared before them. “That’s from a camera aboard the
Vengeance
. It’s transmitting by gravitic means, so we’ll be able to see everything up to the detonation.”
The picture showed the Maelstrom with the Mush-faces’ planet off to one side. Abruptly the blue planet vanished. Startled, Lal glanced up and saw that the planet was still in his sky. He realized ashamedly that the
Vengeance
had made its jump. Since the wagon’s orientation in space was still the same, the stars had not moved.
Then the camera turned and the constellations slid across the screen. The camera hunted—and found. At the center of the screen Lal saw a tiny white dot that drifted slowly across the field of stars. That was the Enemy. It couldn’t be closer than ten thousand kilometers. The detonation of the
Vengeance
would be quite effective at that range, but the jump should have been more accurate.
Apparently the same thought had occurred to e’Kraft, who said, “Navigation, how far is the
Vengeance
from target?”
“Ten kilometers. The enemy craft is less than nine meters long.”
Less than nine meters long.
The smallest interstellar craft the Dorvik ever made was more than a kilometer wide. The Enemy was superior to anything Lal had imagined. If only there were some way to capture the Enemy craft, to learn its secrets. Possibly even more important, to learn what manner of monster would annihilate a sun.
“Detonate the
Vengeance.”
And the screen turned gray.
E’Kraft spoke. “The entire mass of the wagon has been converted to energy, Puissance.”
Lal stared stupidly: it was so anticlimactic. They had just created more energy in a second than the average G-class star produces in an hour, yet this explosion was observable only as a blank image screen, or the motion of a tiny hand on the dial of a gravitic surge detector. It would take ten hours for the light from that explosion to reach them. Even then it would set houses afire on the blue planet.
How close it had been … another few seconds and the Enemy might have completed its obscene mission, and so doomed the Dorvik race. For the moment at least, all was saved. He turned to e’Kraft and saw relief mirrored in his eyes.
“General, I—”
He was interrupted by the reappearance of the general’s aide. “Puissance, we detected a grave disturbance after the detonation.”
“After?”
“Yes, Puissance. Somehow the intruder survived the detonation.”
“That’s impossible!” shrieked Lal, even as he accepted the awful truth. Nothing made by men could withstand the vast fireball that the
Vengeance
had become.
What were they fighting?
The game might already be over. Lal’s eyes looked across the imperial gardens, but his mind saw a wave of hell creeping out ever so slowly from an annihilated star. The energy from such a detonation would vaporize planets a hundred parsecs away; and the destruction would creep on, confined to the speed of light but pushing inexorably across the galaxy. His race would know of the explosion, and would retreat before the
swelling sphere of oblivion, but little by little the galaxy would be taken away from them, until every planet was lifeless and his race …
“SEE! THE MAGGOTS HAVE GUESSED WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO. THAT WAS a nasty jolt they just gave us, don’t you think, Gyrd?
“The maggots are trying to avoid the big fry, but they can’t save themselves.” He paused, overcome by anticipations of delight.
“We’ll watch the fire spread from nest to nest—for ten thousand years we’ll watch them burn.”
The other creature agreed enthusiastically, its earlier anger almost forgotten. Neither of them noticed a slight wavering in the air behind them. The distortion was in the far infrared and near microwave. The changing refractive indices moved through the visible, the ultraviolet, the gamma. Still Gyrd and Arn were too engrossed to notice.
“The converter is set to go when we jump, Arn. What’s keeping you?”
“The navigation, of course. This is a galactic jump we’re making. Give me a few more seconds.”
“Idiot.”
The shimmer took form. Gyrd turned from Arn and saw what had materialized behind them.
“Mother!”
But for her physical perfection she looked much like her remote ancestors, who tamed fire in Africa and—scant millennia later—played with fission under a stadium in Chicago. There was fear on her face, the fear of a parent who has discovered anew that untrained children are essentially monsters—and that if those children are godlings, then their evil can be satanic. She stared at her daughter, Gyrd, for a long moment, then said slowly, “Why are you here?”
Arn said, “Because we’re lost?”
The woman shook her head. “I defused the converter, Arn, right where Gyrd dropped it. You can make no successful lie, or excuse, for what you’ve done. A million different races, all with the potential to become what we are, would have been destroyed by what you planned.”
Gyrd pulled nervously at one of her pigtails. “But they’re just festering in their nests. They don’t feel pain the way we can. It would be fun—”
“Fun?” the woman said, and Gyrd screamed.
“Go home now.” She frowned in momentary concentration. “The arithmetic has been done. The machine is ready to jump. I’ll be following right behind you.”
Both Arn and Gyrd were silent now, dazed. Arn made an adjustment
in the controls, and their craft vanished, leaving the woman standing pensively in space.
LAL ONLY CAUGHT THE LAST PART OF THE SENTENCE.
“ … Gone from the galaxy.”
“Damn it! Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” snapped Harl.
“Never mind, General,” said Lal. He turned back to the aide. “Say that again.”
“Puissance, our instruments indicate that the intruder jumped before making any attempt to annihilate the sun.”
The universe regained.
The silence was finally broken by General e’Kraft. “Have we your permission to resume tactical operations, Puissance?”
Lal looked through him and beyond. For a moment he could feel only the beauty of the luscious gardens and the now safe stars.
But it could happen again
. The Enemy could sweep in on any large star in the galaxy and set their bomb. “General, you may retreat, and you may ask the Mush-faces for peace terms.” He gnashed his fangs once as he discarded his race’s dream and accepted a nightmare. “We can spread the news of this day through the galaxy much faster than we can our empire. And we’ll need all the help we can get.” But Lal knew with silent desperation that there would never be enough advanced races to guard all the super stars.
“Everything that lives must be banded against them.” He shook a talon at the sky.
THE WOMAN REMAINED A MOMENT, ALONE. HER FEET SEEMED PLANTED IN the wispy Maelstrom—called the Milky Way by some—and faint air vapors encircled her. She gazed out from the sun and “saw” the Dorvik battlewagons twelve-billion kilometers away. Perhaps some good could come of this yet. She hoped so. She wanted very much to believe that they were really good children …
all
of them.
My old friend Ken Winters suggested the gimmick in the preceding story. Nowadays (2001), the possibility of natural disasters so vast that they could cause damage thousands of light-years away is fairly well accepted. Ken’s suggestion came from around 1960—maybe even earlier, when we were in elementary school.
“The Science Fair” is one of the shortest stories I have ever written: a little one-idea story, that has some nice color. The original version that I submitted to Damon Knight (for his
Orbit
series) is almost what you see here. Damon rejected that with the comment that I had built up an ingenious background and then brought it down to the banal with the last few lines—and was there anything I could do to fix it?
That was a challenge. The solution was to break viewpoint discipline a little and look ahead at consequences. (I think this is entirely in the final two lines of the story.) Damon bought the revision, which you see here:
M
y offices are under the tidal-wave breaker wall. I know, that’s an unsavory and unsafe part of Newton. I was trapped there once for three tides after a really large earthquake smashed the wall and laid several tons of rubble over the walkdown to my rooms. On the other hand, having my offices there gives prospective clients the deliciously naughty feeling that they are dealing with the underworld. Then, when they see how solidly luxurious my offices are, they think that besides being a sinister figure, I am also a successful one.
When the girl knocked on my door, I was deep asleep on the pallet behind my desk—considering how much money I spend on those rooms, I can’t afford to sleep anywhere else. I staggered up and walked to the door, swearing at myself for having let my receptionist go three tides earlier: for obvious reasons, there isn’t much market for industrial spies during the Science Fair.
Even the city police corporation relaxes during the Fair, so I couldn’t guess who my visitor might be. I opened the door.
Vision of visions! Large, soft eyes looked at me over a pertly turned nose and full moist lips. Her satiny skin glowed a deep, even infra, marking out firm, ripe curves. There was a lot to see, since her only clothing was a brief pair of rear leggings.
She was young and nervous. “You are Leandru Ngiarxis bvo-Ngiarxis?”
I smiled. “To the wide world, yes—but you may call me Ndruska.”
She stepped inside. “Why do you keep it so dark in here?”
I wasn’t about to tell her that she’d caught the master industrial spy
asleep. So I lowered my head and ogled up at her. “The maiden glow of your skin is more than sufficient light for me.”
She blushed bright infra from her shoulders up and tried to sound tough when she said, “See here, Ngiarxis, it’s unpleasant enough to do business with someone of your sort. Please don’t make it any worse by, by starting immoral advances.”
“Just as you say, milady.” I turned on the lights and crossed to the other side of the desk.
“Now, how may I … serve you?”
She lowered herself delicately onto a visitor’s pallet. “My name is Yelén Dragnor bvo-Science-Fair-Committee.” She produced the appropriate identification badge.
“Hmm. Are you any relation to the chief scientist of the House of Graun?”
She nodded. “Beoling Dragnor bvo-Graun is my father.”
“Indeed, I am honored. I understand he is to give the popular lecture at the Fair, next-tide. You must be very proud.”
She came to her knees, her brittle mask of sophistication cracking. “I am proud—very. But s-scared, too. We—the Science Fair Committee, that is—know the princes of Graun will m-murder Father rather than let him speak at the Fair.”
I tried not to seem incredulous. I have never heard of any polity willing to risk its own dissolution merely to eliminate one scientist. “What does your father know that could be so distressing to the House of Graun?”
“I don’t know. I-I don’t know. Father won’t tell the Committee. Of course, that’s only proper, since his research is Graun property until the Fair actually begins. But he won’t give us even a
hint
. The princes have tried to kill him once already, and we just have to find
someone
to protect him.”
“And so you came to me.”
“Y-yes. The Fair Committee knows your reputation. They’re willing to pay you well—up to two hundred fifty-six acres of prime farmland. All, all you have to do is guard Father till next-tide. The Committee can protect him after that, when he gives his talk … . Will you do that?”
The Fair Committee must have known a lot about my reputation, considering the nubile creature they had sent with their proposition. I reached across the table and gently brushed the tears from her neck. “Don’t worry, Lenska, I’ll do what I can. It’s really not terribly difficult to outsmart the princes of Graun.” Besides, I still didn’t believe they’d try something so stupid as assassinating a scientist on the eve of the Science Fair.
She perked up considerably at this and provided me with the particular
information I would need to do the job. By the time she left she was almost cheerful. She had met the big, bad spy and found that while he was big, he wasn’t so awfully bad.
At the top of the ramp she turned and looked down at me, her face a pale infra smudge against the sky. I promised to be at her father’s apartment in less than half an hour.
She wagged her rear and was gone.
I’VE LIVED IN MORE THAN A FEW CITIES, BUT NEWTON-BY-THE-SEA WILL ALWAYS be my favorite. I know, Benobles and Is-Hafn have their points: they’re old, they’re rich, and the ground underlying them is so stable that their buildings rise six, seven, even eight stories. But the snow in Benobles is more than three stories deep. It’s so cold there that the city would be pitch-dark without its streetlamps. And Is-Hafn may have some great gamboling houses, but it’s a two-hour steam sledge ride from the present ice harbor to the old city. Personally I’d rather live where I can keep my hooves warm.
That’s easy to do in Newton. Just north of the city, Mt. Hefty pours a sixty-four-foot wide stream of incandescent red lava into the sea. At high tide, the water meets the molten rock just beyond the north sea wall, and a veil of steam rises far up over the city, casting an infra glow down upon it. Along the coast, south of the lava flow, the water is delightfully warm, and the beaches are smooth and sandy.
At the moment I couldn’t see any of this. It was low tide and the lava met the sea several miles out. The steam generated was a faint gleam over my left shoulder, too far away to light my surroundings. If it hadn’t been for the streetlamps, the only light would have been the bright splinters of red from half-shuttered windows, and the deep infra glow of occasional passersby. From my hiding place behind an ornamental deeproot tree, I inspected my surroundings. This was a luxurious section of town, not far from the Fairgrounds. The electric streetlamps cast long shadows up the sides of the apartment buildings that faced both sides of the street. Some of those buildings were three and even four stories tall, constructed pyramid fashion so that the top floor had only a quarter the area of the first. Silk-petal vines gleamed dark and glossy against their carven walls, the pollen making the air heavy and sweet.
Except for the faraway hiss of lava changing water into steam, all was quiet. The party in the building across the street had ended more than an hour ago, and by now the revelers were departed. No one had come down the street past my hiding place for nearly eight minutes. That’s another nice thing about Newton: its citizens are generally asleep during the low tides, when things are darkest out. That makes things a lot easier for people like me.
I rose up off my rear and tried to get the cramps out of my legs. Even here in Newton, stakeouts are an uncomfortable bore. After about four hours on a job like this, even my hand torch and automatic pistol begin to feel awfully heavy. As usual I was wearing a body mask that covered everything but my eyes and nose. The mask is heavy and hot, but my skin glow is virtually invisible when I have it on.
For the umpteenth time I scanned up and down the street: no activity. And that fourth-floor window, the window to Beoling Dragnor’s apartment, was still dark. This whole job was just a false alarm, I complained to myself. The Science Fair Committee had let itself be taken in by the paranoid ravings of a senile scientist. I had been employed against the princes of Graun before, and I knew they were brutal, but their brutality was not irrational or self-destructive. There was only one Science Fair in each generation. In the time between Fairs, a Graun researcher was practically Graun property, and his research results were as secret as Graun counterespionage could keep them. What prince would risk such a cozy situation just to prevent one scientist from talking at the Fair?
Just then the streetlamps went dim, slowly cooled to the point of invisibility.
So much for my theories.
Even the few lights left in the apartments went out. The bvo-Graun must have struck a power substation at least.
We have a simile in Newton: “Dark as the sky at low tide.” Believe me, there are few things darker. And now, without streetlamps, the sky’s darkness was everywhere. I couldn’t see the pistol I held in my hand.
I stood very still and strained my ears. If this job were properly orchestrated, the bvo-Graun should be moving in now. I did hear something, a faint creaking. It seemed to come from the direction of Dragnor’s apartment. I couldn’t be sure, though. Even at low tide, the hiss of boiling seawater is loud enough to blur sharp hearing.
I looked into the sky. Nothing. What in Ge’s name was going on? The only thing that could hover in the air so quietly was a balloon. But a balloon’s air heater would have been too bright to look at. Even if they managed to shield the heater, there’s no way they could stop the gas bag from glowing without making the whole contraption too heavy to fly. And I couldn’t see even a shimmer.
I reached over my back and slid my hand torch out of its pocket. Using it would be a last resort, since it would make me a much better target than anyone else.
Several minutes passed. The creaking was unmistakable now, and I could hear body movements too. If the bvo-Graun were trying to involve Dragnor in a simulated accident, they would have to act fast, and
I’d have to be faster to stop them. Ge, I was going to have to use my torch after all.
Then, as it has so often in the past, the Ngiarxis family luck came through for me. The skies parted momentarily and the
stars
shone down on Newton! If you’re from Benobles, maybe this doesn’t seem so unusual. But here on the coast we’re lucky if the sky clears once in a borning.
There must have been sixty-fours of stars: harsh, uncompromising points of light that burned in infra, red, and orange. Even at high tide, the sky above Newton is rarely so bright as it was during those few seconds.
The assassins
were
using a balloon. Its starlit hulk floated two hundred fifty-six feet above the street. Three men hung on slings beneath it. They were less than sixty-four feet up now and were closing in on Dragnor’s window. They must have had guts to try something like that.
Aiming through a clear spot in the branches above me, I fired at the balloon. But I fired wide. I guess I’m just naturally big-hearted. Sixty-four feet is a long way to fall.
I shouldn’t have bothered. The bvo-Graun recovered from their starstruck surprise and rained fire down on me and my little tree. Splinters of wood flew in all directions as their rockets exploded. They had the high ground with a vengeance.
So much for charity. My second shot was aimed for the balloon. The target was just too high up, though. My rocket missed it by at least eight feet. But he who flies hydrogen-filled balloons must be prepared to pay the price: the bottom of the gas bag exploded as my rocket passed under it, and in seconds the entire aircraft was engulfed by fire and thunder.
The ropes to two of the assassins were severed instantly and they fell to the street. Splash. The third fellow rappelled madly downward. He almost made it, being only sixteen feet above the street when his ropes burned through.
As I ran out from what was left of my concealment, flaming debris was still falling out of the sky. I stopped briefly by the corpse of the one who had fallen from sixteen feet. The man was a bvo-Graun all right. His body mask had all insignia removed, but the cut of the cloth was familiar.
What did this Dragnor have on the House of Graun, anyway?
THE FAIRGROUNDS ARE NEAR THE WESTERN EDGE OF NEWTON, ON A GENTLY sloping terrace facing the sea. For fifteen out of sixteen bornings, the grounds are unused except for occasional commercial shows or wandering amusement theaters that contract with the city for the use of
the land. But once in every generation, tents cover the grounds and even sprawl into adjacent properties. A bonfire is set on the crestline west of the grounds, and by its glow the tents reflect every color you can imagine, no matter what the time of tide. And so the Science Fair is begun. In one tent you can see the most recent improvements in steam turbines, while in the next the latest techniques in podiatry are demonstrated, or a lecture in antibody reactions is in progress. The variety is nigh endless.
The crowd trying to squeeze into the main lecture tent was unbelievably large, and it took all my powers of infiltration to get to the tent’s entrance. There the Fair Official badge I had been given was put to good use. I was searched and then admitted.
They were virtually sitting on each others’ backs inside. I knew the Fair’s popular lecture usually lives up to its name, but this was incredible. Even the name Beoling Dragnor wouldn’t ordinarily draw like this. Apparently the people of Newton knew the scientist would report on something spectacular. What could it be? Telegraphy without wires? Perhaps a method of predicting earthquakes? Dragnor had never been pinned down to a single field so it was hard to guess. Doubly so for those who knew that Graun had tried to silence him.

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