The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (44 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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THE LAUNCH KNIFED INTO THE WATER AND FOR A MOMENT SUBMERGED COMPLETELY, but somehow Chente managed to keep from being washed away. The boat bobbed back to the surface, and he scrambled into the cockpit.
From his talks with Balquirth, Quintero knew the boat had a steam-electric power plant—it was ordinarily used for espionage work. Looking over the control panel, Chente decided that this was the most advanced Ontarian mechanism he had encountered—just the kind of luck they needed. He depressed the largest switch on the board and felt a faint humming beneath his feet. He eased the throttle forward. As the launch pulled slowly away from the foundering
Fearsome
, he thought he heard the whine and snick of small arms fire caroming off the boat’s hull; apparently Balquirth was not easily put out of action. But now it was too late to stop their escape. The
Fearsome
was soon lost to sight amid the deep swells and pounding rain. The last Chente saw and heard of the Ontarian fleet was a pale orange glow through the storm, followed by a sound that might have been thunder. Then they were alone with the storm.
The storm was bad enough in itself. The tiny cabin spun like a compass needle, and several times Chente was afraid the boat would capsize. Somehow Martha managed to tie down the equipment and dig a couple of life jackets out of a storage cubby.
Chente fastened the recon screen to the control board, and inspected the radar display. On high resolution he could distinguish every vessel in the area. Even his motor launch showed—or at least the transponder on his communications bomb did. They would have no trouble navigating through this storm, if they didn’t sink. He briefly thanked heaven that the comm bombs were about as clean as anything that energetic can be: nearly all the destruction was radiated as soft X rays. At least
they didn’t have to worry that the rain was drenching them in radioactive poisons.
“Now what?” Martha shouted finally. She had wedged herself in the corner, trying to keep her balance.
Chente hesitated. He had three choices. He could flee the scene immediately; he could use his bomb to destroy the Providencians and their remaining bomb—just as he and Balquirth had planned; or he could indulge in more treachery. The first option would leave the Providencians with a bomb, and an enormous advantage in the world. The second option would be difficult to execute; at this point Martha might be stronger than he was. He might have to kill her. Besides, if he exploded his bomb, he would have no way to make his report to Earth.
That left treachery. “We’re going to try to get picked up by one of the ships in the Providencian fleet.”
TWENTY MINUTES PASSED. AT THE TOP OF THE SCREEN THE LAUNCH’S BLIP moved closer and closer to the red dot that represented the last Providencian bomb. He kept the screen angled so that Martha didn’t have a clear view of it.
They should be able to see the ship before much longer. He leaned his head close to Martha and said, “Do you know any signals that would keep them from shooting us out of hand?” He pointed at the electric arc lamp mounted in the windscreen.
Her voice came back faintly over the wind. “I know some diplomatic codes. We update them every fifteen days—they just might respect them.”
“We’ll have to chance it.” Chente helped her light the arc lamp. But there was nothing to see except storm. Chente guided the launch so that its image on the screen approached the other. As they swung over the top of a swell, they saw a long gray shadow not more than two hundred meters ahead. It appeared to be an auxiliary craft, probably a converted cargo ship.
Chente reached across the panel and tapped new instructions into the display. Now the machine was reading the transponder’s position from its internal direction finders. Beside him at the control panel, Martha awkwardly closed and opened the signaler’s shutter. For nearly thirty seconds there was no reply. Chente held his breath. He expected that this particular ship would be manned by Special Weapons people, who might well be trigger-happy and extremely suspicious. On the other hand, depending on what they expected of the Ontarians, the weapons people might be cocksure and careless.
Finally a light high on one of the ship’s masts blinked irregularly. “They acknowledge. They want us to move in closer.”
Chente worked the electric boat closer and closer to the ship. Martha continued sending. They were about fifty meters out now, and they could make out the details of the other vessel. Quintero looked closely at his display, then scanned the ship’s foredeck. He noticed a shrouded boat lashed down near the bow. Its position agreed with the location of the blip on his display. This was better than he had hoped. That was the twin of the robot boat that had nearly destroyed the Ontarian fleet.
He took one hand from the wheel, drew his pistol and fired a single low-power bolt. The thick windscreen shattered, throwing slivers of glass all around. He stepped the pistol’s power to full and aimed at the other vessel’s bow.
“No!” Martha screamed as she rammed him against the bulkhead. She was tall and strong and she fought desperately. They careened wildly about the cabin for several seconds before Chente got a solid, close-fisted blow to her solar plexus. She collapsed without a sound, and the Earthman whirled back to face the deadlier enemy.
The ship’s main guns were turned toward him, but he was below them now. He sprayed fire all along the vessel, concentrating on the smaller deck guns and the shrouded boat. Clouds of steam quickly obscured the glowing craters his pistol gouged in the ship’s hull, and then the fuel supply aboard the robot boat exploded in a ball of orange-red flame hot enough to melt the controls of the bomb within.
There was the sparkle of automatic fire from up in the ship’s masts, and the cockpit seemed to shred around him. He fired upward blindly.
Chente grabbed the wheel and turned about. The seconds passed but there was no more Providencian gunfire. The sounds of the burning ship quickly faded behind them and they were alone.
THEY DROVE STEADILY WEST FOR THREE HOURS. THE SEAS FELL. JUST AS THE sun set, the cloud cover in the far west moved aside so that the sun shone red and gold through the narrow band between horizon and cloud.
His reconnaissance screen showed no sign of pursuit. More importantly, there was only one transponder blip glowing on Chente’s display—his own.
The tiny launch was slowing, and finally Chente decided to try to fire its boiler. He eased the throttle back to null, and the boat sat bobbing almost gently in the sea the sun turned gold.
“Martha?” No response. “I had to do it.”
“Had to?” Her tone showed despair and unbelieving indignation. She looked briefly up at him through her rain-plastered hair. “How many Providencians did you kill today?”
Chente didn’t answer. The rationalizations that men use for killing
other men stuck in his throat, at least for the moment. Finally he said, “I told you, I told the Ontarians: Unless you work together you will all be wiped out. But it didn’t do any good just to say it. Now, Ontario and New Providence have a mutual enemy: me. I have the only nuclear weapon left, and I have means to deliver it. Soon I will control territory, too. Your nations will spend their energies to develop the technology to defeat me, and in the end you may be good enough to meet your real peril.”
But Martha had resumed her study of the deck, and made no reply.
Chente sighed, and began to pull back the deck plates that should cover the boiler.
The sun set and the first stars of twilight shone through the gap between the clouds and the horizon. Nineteen light-years away, his likeness must still be awaiting his report. In a few weeks, Chente would make that report, using the Ontarian communications bomb. But the people of the New Canada would never know it, for that bomb was the lever he would use to take over some small Ontarian fiefdom. Already he must begin casting the net of schemes and the machinations that would stretch one hundred years into this miserable planet’s future. It was small consolation to hope that his likeness would live to see other worlds.
There are a lot of things I like about “Just Peace.” As a collaboration it went very smoothly. Bill and I had many small things in our idea boxes that found a nice home here: the Canadian background, the danger of colonizing a planet whose core was about to undergo a phase change.
We were vague about Chente’s background on Earth. This was deliberate. I assumed Earth had already gone through the Technological Singularity. We see about as much of Earth as we could understand. One major aspect of Earth’s technology leaks into this story: the duplicative transport used to bring Chente to New Canada. Not much is made of it here, but I find the idea immensely intriguing. If we could make exact copies of someone (not just clones, but exact down to quantum limits) what would this do to our concept of ego? The idea has been in SF for many years (at least back to Algis Budrys’s
Rogue Moon
and Poul Anderson’s
We Have Fed Our Sea
). There is plenty of mileage left in the gimmick. It is just one of the issues that I see looming in our future. Our most basic beliefs—including the concept of self itself—are in for rough times.
Alien contact stories have always been a favorite of mine. I grew up with John Campbell’s notion that the humans were short-lived, bright, and terribly aggressive compared to the wiser intellects of galactic civilization.
Why not turn that around?
Why not have a race even
more
short-lived, intelligent, and aggressive than humans? John’s older/wiser races often tried to keep the human “superrace” confined to Earth. What would we do if confronted by aggressive primitives with the potential to run circles around us?
I hadn’t seen any stories with this theme, but knowing science fiction I guessed that such had already been written. I needed something more. Many human personalities are piled deep with interacting layers of shame and loneliness and hatred. My fictional race would have even more inner turmoil. How to do it? A short lifespan would certainly intensify such problems, but I wanted something that would give individuals
real
reason to feel guilt. I remembered the extraordinary life cycle of the
hugl
(a nonsentient pest) in Silverberg and Garrett’s
Shrouded Planet.
Maybe I could jazz that up, and apply it to an intelligent race. Thus was born …
ORIGINAL SIN
F
irst twilight glowed diffusely from the fog. On the landscaped terraces that fell away from the hilltop, long rows of tiny crosses slowly materialized. Low trees dripped almost silently upon the sodden grass.
The officer in charge was young. This was his first assignment. And it was an assignment more important than most. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. There must be something to do with his time—something to check, something to worry over; the machine guns. Yes. He could check those again. He moved rapidly up the narrow, concrete walk to where his gun crews manned their weapons. But the magazine feeds were all set, the muzzle chokes screwed down. Everything was just as proper as the last time he had checked, ten minutes earlier. The crews watched him silently, but resumed their whispered conversations as he walked away.
Nothing to do. Nothing to do. The officer stopped for a moment and stood trembling in the cool dampness. Christ, he was hungry.
Behind the troops, and even farther from the field of crosses, the morning twilight defined the silhouettes of the doctors and priests attendant. Their voices couldn’t carry through the soggy air, but he could see their movements were
jerky, aimless. They had time on their hands, and that is always the greatest burden.
The officer tapped his heavy boot on the concrete walk in a rapid tattoo of frustration. It was so quiet here.
The mists hid the city that spread across the lowlands. If he listened carefully he could hear auto traffic below. Occasionally, a ship in the river would sound its whistle, or a string of railway freight cars would faintly crash and rattle as it moved along the wharves. Except for these links with the everyday world, he might as well be at the end of time here on the hilltop with its grasses, its trees. Even the air seemed different here—it didn’t burn into his eyes, and there was only a hint of creosote and kerosene in its smell.
It was brighter now. The ground became green, the fog a cherry brown. With a sigh of anguished relief, the officer glanced at his watch. It was time to inspect the cross-covered hillside. He nearly ran out onto the grass.
Low hedges curved back and forth between the white crosses to form an intricate topiary maze. He must check that pattern one last time. It was a dangerous job, but hardly a difficult one. There were less than a thousand critical points and he had memorized the scheme the evening before. Every so often he broke stride to cock a deadfall, or arm a claymore mine. Many of the crosses rose from freshly turned earth, and he gave these an especially wide berth. The air was even cleaner here above the grass than it had been back by the machineguns, and the deep wet sod sucked at his feet. He gulped back saliva and tried to concentrate on his job. So hungry. Why must he be tempted so?
Time seemed to move faster, and the ground brightened steadily beneath his running feet. Twenty minutes passed. He was almost done. The ground was visible for nearly fifty meters through the brownish mists. The city sounds were louder, more numerous. He must hurry. The officer ran along the last row of crosses, back toward friendly lines—the cool sooty concrete, the machine-guns, the trappings of civilization. Then his boots were clicking on the walkway, and he paused for three seconds to catch his breath.
He looked at the cemetery. All was still peaceful. The preliminaries were completed. He turned to run to his gun crews.
Five more minutes. Five more minutes, and the sun would rise behind the fog bank to the east. Its light would seep down through the mists, and warm the grass on the hillside. Five more minutes and children would be born.
WHAT A GLORIOUS DUMP! THEY HAD ME HIDDEN IN ONE OF THE BETTER PARTS of town, on a slight rise about three kilometers east of the brackish river that split the downtown area in two. I stood at the tiny window of my “lab” and looked out across the city. The westering sun was a smudged reddish disk shining through the multiple layers of crap that city traffic pumped into the air. I could actually see bits of ash sift down from the high spaces above.
It was the rush hour. The seven-lane freeways that netted the city were a study in still life, with idling cars backed up thousands of meters at the interchanges. I could imagine the shark-faced drivers shaking their clawed fists at each other, frothing murderous threats. Even here on the rise, it was so hot and humid that the soot stuck to my sweating skin. Down in the city basin it must have been infernal.
Further across town was a cluster of skyscrapers, seventy and eighty stories high. Every fifteen seconds a five-prop airplane would cruise in from the east, make a one-eighty just above the rooftops, and attempt a landing at the airport between the skyscrapers and the river.
And beyond the river, misty in the depths of the smog, was the high ridgeline that blocked the ocean from view. The grayish-green expanse of the metropolitan cemetery ran across the whole northern end of the ridge.
Sounds like something out of a historical novel, doesn’t it? I mean, I hadn’t seen an aircraft in nearly seventy years. And as for cemeteries … This side of the millennium, such things just didn’t exist—or so I had thought. But it was all here on Shima, and less than ten parsecs from mother Earth. It’s not surprising if you don’t recognize the name. Earthgov lists the planet’s star + 56°2966. You can tell the Empire is trying to hide something when the only designation they have for a nearby K-star is a centuries-old catalog number. If you’re old enough, though, you remember the name. Two centuries back, “Shima” was a household word. Not counting Earth, Shima was the second planet where man discovered intelligent life.
A lot has happened in two hundred years: the Not-Wars, the secession of the Free Human Worlds from Earthgov. Somewhere along the line, Earth casually rammed Shima under the rug. Why? Well, if nothing else, Earthgov is cautious (read: chicken). When humans first landed (remember spaceships?) on Shima, the native culture was paleolithic. Two centuries later, their technology resembled Earth’s in the late Twentieth Century. Of course, that was no great shakes, but remember it took us thousands of years to get from stone ax to steam engine. It’s really hard to imagine how the Shimans did it.
You can bet Earthgov didn’t give ’em any help. Earth has always been scared witless by competition, while at the same time they don’t have the stomach for genocide. So they pretend competition doesn’t exist. The Free Worlds aren’t like that. Over the last one hundred and fifty years, dozens of companies have tried to land entrepreneurs on the planet. The Earth Police managed to rub out every one of them.
Except for me (so far). But then, the people who hired me had had a lucky break. Earthgov occasionally imports Shimans to work as troubleshooters. (The Empire would import a lot more—Shimans are incredibly
quick at solving problems that don’t require background work—except that Earthpol can’t risk letting the aliens return with what they learn.) Somehow one such contacted the spy system that Samuelson Enterprises maintains throughout the Empire. Samuelson got in touch with me.
Together, S.E. and the Shimans bribed an Earthman to look the other way when I made my appearance on Shima. Yes, some Earthcops do have a price—in this case it was the annual gross product of an entire continent. But the bribe was worth it. I stood to gain one hundred times as much, and Samuelson Enterprises had—in a sense—been offered one of the biggest prizes of all time by the Shimans. But that, as they say, is another story. Right now I had to come across with what the Shimans wanted, or we’d all have empty pockets—or worse.
You see, the Shimans wanted immortality. S.E. had impaled many a hick world on that particular gaff, but never like this. The creatures were really desperate: no Shiman had ever lived longer than twenty-five Earth months.
I leaned out to look at the patterns of soot on the window sill, trying at the same time to ignore the laboratory behind me. It was filled with equipment the Shimans thought I might need: microtomes, ultracentrifuges, electron microscopes—a real antique shop. The screwy thing was that I did need some of those gadgets. For instance, if I had used my ‘
mam
’
ri
at the prime integers, Earthpol would be there before I could count to three. I’d been on Shima four weeks, and considering the working conditions, I thought progress had been pretty good. But the Shimans were getting suspicious and very, very impatient. Samuelson had negotiated with them through third parties on Earth, and so hadn’t been able to teach me the Shiman language. Sometime
you
try explaining biological chemistry with sign language and grunts. And these damn fidget brains seemed to think that a project was overdue if it hadn’t been finished last week. I mean, the ol’ Protestant Ethic stood like a naked invitation to hedonism next to what these underweight kangaroos practiced.
THREE DAYS EARLIER, THEY HAD POSTED ARMED GUARDS INSIDE MY LAB. AS I stood glooming at the windowsill I could hear my three pals shuffling endlessly about the room, stopping every so often to poke into the equipment. Nothing short of physical violence could make them stay in one spot.
Sometimes I would look up from my bench to see one of them staring back at me. His gaze was not unfriendly—I’ve often looked at a steak just that way. When he saw me looking back, the Shiman would abruptly turn away, unsuccessfully trying to swallow slaver back from the multiple rows of inward curving teeth that covered his mouth. (Actually the creatures were omnivorous. In fact, they’d killed off virtually
all animal life on the planet, and most of their vast population subsisted on cereal crops grown—in insufficient quantities—on well-defended collective farms.)
I could feel them staring at me right now. I had half a mind to turn around and show them a thing or three—Earthpol and its detection devices be damned.
This line of thought was interrupted as a sports car breezed up from the sentry gate three hundred meters away. I was housed in some sort of biological science complex. The place looked like a run-down Carnegie Library (if you remember what a library is), and was surrounded by hectares of blackened concrete. Beyond this were tank traps and a three-meter high barricade. Till now the only vehicles I had seen inside the compound were tracked military jobs.
The blue and orange sports car burned rubber as the driver skidded to a stop against the curb beneath my window. The driver bounded out of his seat, and double-timed up the walk. Typical. Shimans never slow down.
The passenger door opened, and a second figure appeared. Normal Shiman dress consists of a heavy jacket and a kilt which conceals their broad haunches and part of their huge feet. But this second fellow was wrapped from head to foot in black, a costume I had seen only once or twice before—some kind of penance outfit. And when he moved it wasn’t with short rapid hops, but with longer slower strides, almost as if …
I turned back to my equipment. At most I had only seconds, not really enough time to set the devious traps I had prepared. The two were inside the building now. I could hear the rapid
thumpthumpthump
as the driver bounced up the stairs, and the softer sound of someone moving unseemly slow. But not slow enough. Through the door came the whistly buzz of Shiman talk. Perhaps those guards would do their job, and I would have a few extra seconds. No luck. The door opened. Driver and passenger stepped into my lab. With nearly Shiman haste, the veiled passenger whipped off the headpiece and dropped it to the floor. As expected, the face behind the veil was human. It was also female. The girl looked about the room expressionlessly. A sheen of sweat glistened on her skin. She brushed straight blond hair out of her face and turned to me.
“I wish to speak to Professor Doctor Hjalmar Kekkonen,” she said. It was hard to believe that such a flat delivery could come from that sensuous mouth.
“That’s one I’ll grant,” I said, wondering if she was going to read me my rights.
She didn’t answer at once, and I could see the throb at her temple as she clenched her jaws. Her eyes, I noticed, were like her voice: pretty,
but somehow dead and implacable. She pulled open her heavy black gown. Underneath she wore a frilly thing which wouldn’t have been out of place in Tokyo—or with the Earth Police.

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