The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (34 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

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I used my badge to reach the reserved pallets set right before the stage. Yelén Dragnor had already arrived. I squeezed in beside her, slipped my arm across her shoulders.
“Surprise, dear Lenska! Despite immense and perilous difficulties I have delivered your father safe and sound to the Speakers Subcommittee.”
She wiggled delightedly, then remembered that she was the daughter of a researcher and I was a poor freeman. She said, “We are most grateful, sir Leandru.” Her eyes said much more.
I glanced down the row of pallets. The pavilion was brightly lit and the costumes of the various personages in our special section gleamed and glittered in eight colors. At the end of the row sat the three official representatives of the House of Graun. They were dressed in ruffled pants and overcapes checkered bright orange and medium infra—the Graun colors. The one in the middle was Thorc Graun bvo-Graun, reputed to be the master of the House of Graun. At the moment, that individual had the look of a frustrated creditor. His pale eyes swept back and forth across the stage, occasionally rested on me. It was notice I could do without.
The stage was empty except for a small console set to one side. This increased the mystery, since what is science without gadgetry? I didn’t have a chance to wonder on the question further, for just then attention sounded and the speaker walked on the stage.
Beoling Dragnor was an old man. He had lost much of his hair and his splotchily colored skin revealed poor circulation. He reached center stage, turned, and looked down upon us. For a long moment, the loudest sound was the sea three miles away.
“Good tide.” The voice was cracked and squeaking but not weak, not timorous. “My name is now Beoling Dragnor bvo-Science-Fair-Committee. Before this Fair I served the House of Graun in Benobles.” He nodded stiffly to the princes of Graun in the first row below him. “In at least one respect, Benobles is a superior city: the skies are clear there more often than any other city of my acquaintance. On the average, the stars are visible more than one hour in every sixty-four. I have observed and studied them for more than a generation.”
A ripple of disappointment spread through the audience. Except for the discovery of the moon and its connection with the tides, astronomy had always seemed a singularly useless field.
But Dragnor continued his slow discourse. “We know very little about the stars. Many generations ago, Xlomenes Onasiu proposed that they are worlds similar to our own but much hotter—so hot that their surfaces are covered with glowing magma. Even now this is the best theory we have, though modern physics still can’t justify all the details.
“Over the generations, a number of people have studied the stars from Benobles. I have used their observations to arrange the lamps which light this lecture pavilion. If you are sitting near the center of the pavilion, the relative positions and luminosities of these lamps will appear very much as did the sixteen brightest stars in the sky’s fifth octant, sixty-four generations ago.”
Dragnor nodded to a technician who sat by the console at the side of the stage. “The stars are probably the most stable features in our universe. In this case, a simple change of one rheostat will demonstrate how the stars appeared thirty-two generations ago.”
The technician fiddled and one of the lamps shone several times brighter. I squinted over my shoulder at the light. All the other “stars” were ordinary heat lamps, but this variable one was actually an electric arc stopped down to low power.
“And finally the sky as it appears at present.” The same star became yet brighter, till it was the brightest of all the stars in the display. The effect was not lost on the audience. An unhappy murmuring rose behind us.
Old Dragnor seemed unperturbed. After all, he presumably knew what was coming. “You have noticed that one particular star has waxed. In a technical lecture, to be given later, I will offer evidence that this increased brightness is not intrinsic but is due entirely to the motion of the star.” He paused, let the audience guess where the talk was going.
When he spoke again it was with seeming irrelevance. “The city of Benobles is connected to the rest of the world by its steam sledge traffic. When it is not too cold I enjoy going to one of the outer sledge terminals to watch the express approach town. At first, all you can see of the sledge is its tiny headlight glowing in the far away. The light grows brighter and brighter, but it does not move left or right, up or down. At the last moment, when the light is brightest, it slides to one side as the express whips past the siding and goes on into the center of town.
“Until fifteen bornings ago, the Waxing Star represented above had no measurable proper motion. Then, shortly after the last Science Fair, I succeeded in measuring its motion. The drift is small: less than a minute of arc during all the time I have observed it, but more than large enough for me to predict the future position of the Star.”
The murmuring around us was louder, more anxious. Thorc Graun clenched and unclenched his hands, all the while glaring at Dragnor.
The scientist continued, “I’ll reserve the details of my calculations for a technical lecture. At this time, I will content myself with showing you our sky as it will appear only a few generations from now.”
The Science Fair technician must have turned that arc light up to full. I shut my eyes but the glare seemed to go right through the eyelids. Every inch of exposed skin felt as though it were being flayed. Old Dragnor’s calm voice went on. “The Waxing Star’s closest approach to Ge will occur just eight generations from now. At that time, the Star will be many times brighter than the representation hung above us here. For two hundred fifty-six tides it will glow so brightly and then slowly fade, as it passes on by us.”
The arc lamp was turned down, till it was merely a very bright light. I opened my eyes and looked around. Lenska Dragnor sagged against my side, her face hidden behind her hands. The audience seemed wilted, almost hypnotized. At the far end of our row, Thorc Graun looked as though he were gathering himself up to pounce onto the stage.
“My lords, do you know what this close passage will do to our world? I do not. Our ignorance is immense. Our instruments are crude. Within the range of error of my estimates, the Waxing Star might burn away our oceans. Failing that, it could easily melt the glaciers and drown us all.
“Our only hope for certain survival is the development of a science and a technology to meet the challenge. To achieve this, we must abolish all proprietary rights to inventions and discoveries. This Science Fair must be declared permanent!”
The crowd’s dazed silence lasted only a moment. Then there was pandemonium. Half the noblemen and corporate chairmen in the pavilion were on their hooves, shouting. It was hard to blame them. They
sank much of their resources into research, and now someone was suggesting that they give away the fruits of those endeavors. For that matter, where did Dragnor’s suggestion put
me?
If all research were public knowledge, what use would there be for an industrial spy?
I had to pull Lenska back down onto her pallet as Thorc Graun bvo-Graun scrambled onstage and pushed Dragnor to one side. If the old man were not safe with his secret told, he would never be. The prince of Graun raced back and forth along the edge of the platform, shouting at the top of his lungs. I couldn’t hear a word.
Behind us the city folk and the scientists pushed and jostled one another as various factions tried to approach the stage. For them, Dragnor’s revelation far outshone the question of extending the Fair, and their shouted questions and speculations drowned out everything else.
Still, I doubt if a single one of them guessed that the Waxing Star was not nearly so important as what was
near
it.
The inspiration for “The Science Fair” came from wondering what the tail of the mass/frequency distribution would look like in the galaxy: smaller objects seem to be more common. But when objects get too small we often can’t detect them anymore. Could there be gas giant planets wandering the galaxy? How about rocky, earth-sized planets? How about “globular clusters” of asteroids? Nowadays (2001), we know that there
are
things like wandering gas giants, though there are different theories about their formation. As far as I know, present theory does not foresee small, “rocky” objects wandering free—except as may be ejected from solar systems. Still, the idea of a sunless solar system, or a solar system centered on a brown dwarf, is intriguing.
Thanks, Damon, for making “The Science Fair” good enough to see the light of day!
It is a cliché that writers put their own experiences into their stories (a cliché that is not always true, fortunately). Personal unhappiness can have a writerly payoff. (This notion was beautifully treated in George R. R. Martin’s “Portraits of His Children.” I am convinced that story won a Nebula but not a Hugo because the authors—who are the Nebula voters—felt special kinship with the protagonist of the story.) In my case, an unhappy vacation as a child—and a happy vacation many years later in New Zealand—came together with a random idea from the ol’ idea box. The result is a story that turns and turns, surely the most unbalanced thing I have ever written. Stan Schmidt initially rejected it, then wrote me three months later, asking to see it again. I’m very grateful that he bought it. Even if “Gemstone” never quite decides what it wants to be, it means something to me.
T
he summer of 1957 should have been Sanda’s most wonderful vacation. She had known about her parents’ plans since March, and all through the La Jolla springtime, all through the tedious spring semester of her seventh grade, she had that summer to dream about.
Nothing ever seemed so fair at first, and turned out so vile:
Sanda sat on the bedroom balcony of her grandmother’s house and looked out into the gloom and the rain. The pine trees along the street were great dark shadows, swaying and talking in the dusk. A hundred yards away, toward downtown Eureka, the light of a single streetlamp found its way through pines to make tiny glittering reflections off the slick street. As every night these last four weeks, the wind seemed stronger when the daylight departed. She hunched down in her oversized jacket and let the driven mist wash at the tears that trickled down her face. Tonight had been the end, just the end. Daddy and Mom would be here in six days, and two or three days after that the three of them would drive back home. Six days. Sanda unclenched her jaws and tried to relax her face. How could she last? She would have to see Grandma at least for meals, at least to help around the house. And every time she saw Grandma she would feel the shame and know that she had ruined things.
And it isn’t all my fault!
Grandmother had her secrets, her smugness, her ignorance—flaws Sanda had never imagined during those short visits of years passed.
In the hallway beyond the bedroom, the Gemstone was at it again.
Sanda felt a wave of cold wash over her. For a moment the dark around her and the balcony beneath her knees were not merely chill and wet, but glacially frozen, the center of a lifeless and friendless waste. It was funny that now that she
knew
the house was haunted and
knew
precisely the thing that caused these moods, it was not nearly as frightening as before. In fact, it was scarcely more than an inconvenience compared to the
people
problems she had.
It had not always been this way. Sanda thought back to the beginning of the summer, trying to imagine blue skies and warm sun. Those first few days had been like the other times she remembered in Eureka. Grandmother’s house sat near the end of its street, surrounded by pines. The only other trees were a pair of small palms right before the front steps. (These needed constant attention. Grandma liked to say that she kept them here just so her visitors from San Diego would never feel homesick.) The house had two storeys, with turrets and dormers coming out of the attic. Against the blue, cloudless sky it looked like a fairy-tale castle. The Victorian gingerbread had been carefully maintained through the years, and in its present incarnation gleamed green and gold.
Her parents had left for San Francisco after a one-day stay. The summer conference at USF was starting that week, and they weren’t yet sure they had an apartment. Sanda’s first night alone with Grandma had been everything she imagined. Even though the evening beyond the porch was turning chill, the living room still held its warmth. Grandma set her old electric heater in the middle of the carpeted floor so that it shone on the sofa side of the room. Then she walked around the book-lined walls pretending to search for the thing she so liked to show her grandchild.
“Not here, not here. Oh my, I hardly ever look at it nowadays. I forget where …” Sanda tagged along, noticing titles where her earlier, younger self had been impressed only by color and size. Grandma had a complete collection of
National Geographics.
Where most families put such magazines in boxes and forget them, Grandmother had every issue there, as though they were some grand encyclopedia. And for Sanda, they were. On her last visit she had spent many an afternoon looking through the pictures. It was the only item she remembered for sure from this library. Now she saw dozens of books on polar exploration, meteorology, biology. Grandfather Beauchamp had been a great man, and Grandmother kept the library and its books, plaques, and certificates in honor of his memory.
“Ah, here it is!” She pulled the huge notebook down from its central position. She led Sanda back to the sofa. “Too big to sit in my lap, now, aren’t you?” They grinned at each other and she opened the book across their laps, then put her arm across Sanda’s shoulders.
The book was precisely organized. Every newspaper clipping, photo, article, was framed and had a short legend. Some of the pictures existed nowhere else in the world. Others could be found in articles in magazines like the
National Geographic
from the ’20s and ’30s. Rex Beauchamp had been on the “Terra Nova” expedition in 1910. If it hadn’t been for a knee injury he would actually have been on Scott’s tragic journey to the South Pole. Sanda sucked in her breath and asked the same question she had asked once before, “And so if his knee had been okay, why, he would have died with the others—and would never have met you, and you would never have had Dad, and—”
GRANDMA SLAPPED THE NOTEBOOK. “No. I KNOW REX. HE WOULD HAVE made the difference. If they had just waited for him to get well, they could have made it back to the coast.”
IT WAS AN ANSWER SHE HAD HEARD BEFORE, BUT ONE SHE WANTED TO HEAR again. Sanda sat back and waited for the rest of the story. After World War I, the Beauchamps had emigrated from Great Britain, and Grandfather participated in several American expeditions. There were dozens of pictures of him on shipboard and in the brave little camps the explorers had established along the Antarctic coast. Rex Beauchamp had been very handsome and boyish even in middle age, and it made Sanda proud to see him in those pictures—though he was rarely the center of attention. He always seemed to be in the background, or in the third row of the group portraits. Grandma said he was a doer and not a talker. He never had a college degree and so had to serve in technician and support jobs. But they depended on him nevertheless.
NOT ALL THE PICTURES WERE OF ICE AND SNOW. MANY OF THE EXPEDITIONS had worked out of Christchurch, New Zealand. On one occasion, Grandmother had gone along that far. It had been a wonderful vacation for her. She had pictures of the city and its wide, circular harbor, and others of her visiting the North Island and Maori country with Grandfather.
Sanda raised her eyes from the picture collection as her grandmother spoke. There were things in this room that illustrated her story more spectacularly than any photographs. The area around the sofa was brightly lit by one of the beautiful stained-glass lamps that Grandma had in every room. But at the limits of its light, the room glowed in mysterious blue and red and yellow from the higher panes in the glass. Dark polished wood edged the carpet and the moldings of every doorway. Beyond the electric heater she could see the Maori statues the Beauchamps had brought back from their stay at Rotorua. In normal light those figures carved in wooden relief seemed faintly comical, their
pointed tongues stuck out like weapons, their hands held claw-like. But in the colored dimness the mother-of-pearl in their eyes shone almost knowingly, and the extended tongues were no childish aggression. Sanda wriggled with a moment of delicious fright. The Maori were all civilized now, Grandmother said, but they had been more hideously ferocious than any savages on Earth.
“Do you still have the
meri
, Grandma?”
“Yes indeed.” She reached into the embroidered sewing stand that sat next to her end of the sofa and withdrew a graceful, eight-inch piece of stone. One end fit the hand, while the other spread out in a smooth, blunt-edged oval. It was beautiful, and no one but someone like Grandma—or a Maori—could know its true purpose. “This is what they fought with, not like American Indians with spears and arrows.” She handed it to Sanda, who ran her fingers over the smoothness. “It’s so short you have to come right up to your enemy and
whack
! right across the forehead.” Sanda tried to imagine but couldn’t. Grandma had so many beautiful things. Sanda had once overheard her mother complain to Daddy that these were thefts from an ancient heritage. Sanda couldn’t see why; she was sure that Grandpa had paid for these things. And if he hadn’t brought them back to Eureka, so many fewer people could have admired them.
Grandma talked on, well past Sanda’s La Jolla bedtime. The girl found herself half hypnotized by the multicolored shadows of the lamp and the pale red from the heater. That heater sat on newspapers.
Sanda felt herself come wide awake. “That heater, Grandma. Isn’t it dangerous?”
The woman stopped in mid-reminiscence. “What? No, I’ve had it for years. And I’m careful not to set it on the carpet where it might stain.”
“But those newspapers. They’re brown, almost burned.”
Grandma looked at the heater. “My, you’re a big girl now, to worry about such things. I don’t know … Anyway, we can turn it off now. You should be going to bed, don’t you think?”
Sanda was to sleep in the same room her father had used when he was little. It was on the second floor. As they walked down the hall to the bedroom, Grandma stopped by the heavy terrarium she kept there. Dad and Mother hadn’t known quite what to make of it: the glass box was something new. Grandma had placed it so the wide skylight gave it sun through most of the day. Now moonlight washed over the glass and the stones. Pale reflections came off some of the smaller rocks. Grandma switched on the hall light and turned everything mundane. The terrarium was empty of life. There was nothing there but rocks of odd sizes mixed with river-washed gravel. It was like the box Sanda kept her pet lizards in. But there were not even lizards in this one. The
only concessions to life were little plastic flowers, “planted” here and there in the landscape.
Grandma smiled wanly. “I think your Dad believes I’m crazy to put something like this here.”
Sanda looked at the strange display for a moment and then suggested, “Maybe if you used real flowers?”
The old woman shook her head. “I like artificial ones. You don’t have to water them. They never fade or die. They are always beautiful.” She paused and Sanda remained diplomatically silent. “Anyway, it’s the rocks that are the important thing here. I showed you pictures of those valleys your grandfather helped discover: the ones that don’t have any snow in them, even though they’re hundreds of miles inside Antarctica. These rocks are from one of those valleys. They must have been sitting there for thousands of years with nothing but the wind to upset them. Rex kept his collection in boxes down in the basement, but I think they are so much nicer up here. This is a little like what they had before.”
Sanda looked into the cabinet with new interest. Some of the stones were strange. A couple looked like the meteorites she had seen in the Natural History Museum back home. And there was another, about the size of her head, that had a vaguely regular pattern in the gray and black minerals that were its substance.
Minutes later, Sanda was tucked into her father’s old bed, the lights were out, and Grandmother was descending the stairs. Moonlight spread silver on the window sills, and the pines beyond were soft, pale, bright. Sanda sighed and smiled. So far, things were just as she dreamed and just as she remembered.
The last she wondered as she drifted off to sleep was why Grandmother put flowers in the terrarium if she really wanted to imitate the bleak antarctic valleys.
THAT FIRST DAY WAS REALLY THE LAST WHEN EVERYTHING WENT TOTALLY well. And looking back on it, Sanda could see symptoms of many of the things that were later to make the summer so unpleasant.
Physically everything was just as she remembered. The stair railings were a rich, deeply polished wood that she hardly ever saw in La Jolla. Everywhere was carpeting, even on the stairs. The basement was cool and damp and filled with all the mysterious things that Grandfather had worked with. But there were so many things that Grandma did and believed that were
wrong.
Some—like the flowers—were differences of opinion that Sanda could keep her mouth shut about. Others—like Grandma’s use of the old electric heater—were really dangerous. When she spoke about those, Grandmother didn’t seem to believe or understand her. The older woman would smile and tell her what a big girl
she was getting to be, but it was clear she was a little hurt by the suggestions, no matter how diplomatically put. Finally Sanda had taken a plastic mat off the back porch and slipped it under the heater in place of the newspapers. But Grandma noticed, and furthermore pointed out that the dirty mat had stained the beautiful carpet—just the thing the nice clean newspapers had been there to prevent. Sanda had been crushed: she’d been harmful when she wanted to be helpful. Grandmother was very good about it; in the end—after she cleaned the carpet—she suggested putting the mat between the newspapers and the heater. So the incident ended happily, after all.

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