The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (50 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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The police officer stood aside as they reached the door; Hamid was going to have to get in under his own power. Ham gave the door a couple of quick knocks. There was the sound of footsteps, and the door opened a crack. “What’s the secret password?” came Larry’s voice.
“Professor Fujiyama, I need to talk to—”
“That’s not it!” The door was slammed loudly in Hamid’s face.
The senior cop put her hand on Hamid’s shoulder. “Sorry, son. He’s done that to bigger guns than you.”
He shrugged off her hand. Sirens sounded from the black and white creature at his feet. Ham shouted over the racket, “Wait! It’s me, Hamid Thompson! From your Transhume 201.”
The door came open again. Larry stepped out, glanced at the cops, then looked at the Blabber. “Well, why didn’t you say so? Come on in.” As Hamid and the Blab scuttled past him, Larry smiled innocently at the Federal officer. “Don’t worry, Susie, this is official business.”
Fujiyama’s office was long and narrow, scarcely an aisle between deep equipment racks. Larry’s students (those who dared these depths) doubted the man could have survived on Old Earth before electronic datastorage. There must be tonnes of junk squirreled away on those shelves. The gadgets stuck out this way and that into the aisle. The place was a museum—perhaps literally; one of Larry’s specialties was archeology. Most of the machines were dead, but here and there something clicked, something glowed. Some of the gadgets were Rube Goldberg jokes, some were early colonial prototypes … and a few were from Out There. Steam and water pipes covered much of the ceiling. The place reminded Hamid of the inside of a submarine.
At the back was Larry’s desk. The junk on the table was balanced precariously high: a display flat, a beautiful piece of night-black statuary. In Transhume 201, Larry had described his theory of artifact management: Last-In-First-Out, and every year buy a clean bed sheet, date it, and lay it over the previous layer of junk on your desk. Another of Lazy Larry’s jokes, most had thought. But there really
was
a bed sheet peeking out from under the mess.
Shadows climbed sharp and deep from the lamp on Larry’s desk. The
cabinets around him seemed to lean inwards. The open space between them was covered with posters. Those posters were one small reason Larry was down here: ideas to offend every sensible faction of society. A pile of … something … lay on the visitor’s chair. Larry slopped it onto the floor and motioned Hamid to sit.
“Sure, I remember you from Transhume. But why mention that? You own the Blabber. You’re Huss Thompson’s kid.” He settled back in his chair.
I’m not Huss Thompson’s kid!
Aloud, “Sorry, that was all I could think to say. This is about my Blabber, though. I need some advice.”
“Ah!” Fujiyama gave his famous polliwog smile, somehow innocent and predatory at the same time. “You came to the right place. I’m full of it. But I heard you had quit school, gone to work at the Tourist Bureau.”
Hamid shrugged, tried not to seem defensive. “Yeah. But I was already a senior, and I know more American Thought and Lit than most graduates … and the Tourist caravan will only be here another half year. After that, how long till the next? We’re showing them everything I could imagine they’d want to see. In fact, we’re showing them more than there really is to see. It could be a hundred years before anyone comes down here again.”
“Possibly, possibly.”
“Anyway, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve met almost half the Tourists. But …” There were ten million people living on Middle America. At least a million had a romantic yearning to get Out There. At least ten thousand would give everything they owned to leave the Slow Zone, to live in a civilization that spanned thousands of worlds. For the last ten years, Middle America had known of the Caravan’s coming. Hamid had spent most of those years—half his life, all the time since he got out of math—preparing himself with the skills that could buy him a ticket Out.
Thousands of others had worked just as hard. During the last decade, every department of American Thought and Literature on the planet had been jammed to the bursting point. And more had been going on behind the scenes. The government and some large corporations had had secret programs that weren’t revealed till just before the Caravan arrived. Dozens of people had bet on the long shots, things that no one else thought the Outsiders might want. Some of those were fools: the world-class athletes, the chess masters. They could never be more than eighth rate in the vast populations of the Beyond. No, to get a ride you needed something that was odd … Out There. Besides the Old Earth angle, there weren’t many possibilities—though that could be approached in surprising ways: there was Gilli Weinberg, a bright but not brilliant ATL student. When the Caravan reached orbit, she bypassed
the Bureau, announced herself to the Tourists as a genuine American cheerleader and premier courtesan. It was a ploy pursued less frankly and less successfully by others of both sexes. In Gilli’s case, it had won her a ticket Out. The big laugh was that her sponsor was one of the few non-humans in the Caravan, a Lothlrimarre slug who couldn’t survive a second in an oxygen atmosphere.
“I’d say I’m on good terms with three of the Outsiders. But there are least five Tour Guides that can put on a better show. And you know the Tourists managed to revive four more corpsicles from the original Middle America crew. Those guys are sure to get tickets Out, if they want ’em.” Men and women who had been adults on Old Earth, two thousand light years away and twenty thousand years ago. It was likely that Middle America had no more valuable export this time around. “If they’d just come a few years later, after I graduated … maybe made a name for myself.”
Larry broke into the self-pitying silence. “You never thought of using the Blabber as your ticket Out?”
“Off and on.” Hamid glanced down at the dark bulk that curled around his feet. The Blab was
awfully
quiet.
Larry noticed the look. “Don’t worry. She’s fooling with some ultrasound imagers I have back there.” He gestured at the racks behind Hamid, where a violet glow played hopscotch between unseen gadgets.
The boy smiled. “We may have trouble getting her out of here.” He had several ultrasonic squawkers around the apartment, but the Blab rarely got to play with high-resolution equipment. “Yeah, right at the beginning, I tried to interest them in the Blab. Said I was her trainer. They lost interest as soon as they saw she couldn’t be native to Old Earth … . These guys are
freaks,
Professor! You could rain transhuman treasure on ‘em, and they’d call it spit! But give ’em Elvis Presley singing Bruce Springsteen and they build you a spaceport on Selene!”
Larry just smiled, the way he did when some student was heading for academic catastrophe. Hamid quieted. “Yeah, I know. There are good reasons for some of the strangeness.” Middle America had nothing that would interest anybody rational from Out There. They were stuck nine light years inside the Slow Zone: commerce was hideously slow and expensive. Middle American technology was obsolete and—considering their location—it could never amount to anything competitive. Hamid’s unlucky world had only one thing going for it. It was a direct colony of Old Earth, and one of the first. Their greatship’s tragic flight had lasted twenty thousand years, long enough for the Earth to become a legend for much of humankind.
In the Beyond, there were millions of solar systems known to bear human-equivalent intelligences. Most of these could be in more or less
instantaneous communication with one another. In that vastness humanity was a speck—perhaps four thousand worlds. Even on those, interest in a first-generation colony within the Slow Zone was near zero. But with four thousand worlds, that was enough: here and there was a rich eccentric, an historical foundation, a religious movement—all strange enough to undertake a twenty-year mission into the Slowness. So Middle America should be glad for these rare mixed nuts. Over the last hundred years there had been occasional traders and a couple of tourist caravans. That commerce had raised the Middle American standard of living substantially. More important to many—including Hamid—it was almost their only peephole on the universe beyond the Zone. In the last century, two hundred Middle Americans had escaped to the Beyond. The early ones had been government workers, commissioned scientists. The Feds’ investment had not paid off: of all those who left, only five had returned. Larry Fujiyama and Hussein Thompson were two of those five.
“Yeah, I guess I knew they’d be fanatics. But most of them aren’t even much interested in accuracy. We make a big thing of representing twenty-first-century America. But we both know what that was like: heavy industry moving up to Earth orbit, five hundred million people still crammed into North America. At best, what we have here is like mid-twentieth-century America—or even earlier. I’ve worked very hard to get our past straight. But except for a few guys I really respect, anachronism doesn’t seem to bother them. It’s like just being here with us is the big thing.”
Larry opened his mouth, seemed on the verge of providing some insight. Instead he smiled, shrugged. (One of his many mottos was, “If you didn’t figure it out yourself, you don’t understand it.”)
“So after all these months, where did you dig up the interest in the Blabber?”
“It was the slug, the guy running the Tour. He just mailed me that he had a party who wanted to buy. Normally, this guy haggles. He—wait, you know him pretty well, don’t you? Well, he just made a flat offer. A payoff to the Feds, transport for me to Lothlrimarre,” that was the nearest civilized system in the Beyond, “and some ftl privileges beyond that.”
“And you kiss your pet goodbye?”
“Yeah. I made a case for them needing a handler: me. That’s not just bluff, by the way. We’ve grown up together. I can’t imagine the Blab accepting anyone without lots of help from me. But they’re not interested. Now, the slug claims no harm is intended her, but … do you believe him?”
“Ah, the slug’s slime is generally clean. I’m sure he doesn’t know of
any harm planned … and he’s straight enough to do at least a little checking. Did he say who wanted to buy?”
“Somebody—something named Ravna&Tines.” He passed Larry a flimsy showing the offer. Ravna&Tines had a logo: it looked like a stylized claw. “There’s no Tourist registered with that name.”
Larry nodded, copied the flimsy to his display flat. “I know. Well, let’s see … .” He puttered around for a moment. The display was a lecture model, with imaging on both sides. Hamid could see the other was searching internal Federal databases. Larry’s eyebrows rose. “Hm
hm!
Ravna&Tines arrived just last week. It’s not part of the Caravan at all.”
“A solitary trader …”
“Not only that. It’s been hanging out past the Jovians—at the slug’s request. The Federal space net got some pictures.” There was a fuzzy image of something long and wasp-waisted, typical of the Outsiders’ ramscoop technology. But there were strange fins—almost like the wings on a sailplane. Larry played some algorithmic game with the display and the image sharpened. “Yeah. Look at the aspect ratio on those fins. This guy is carrying high-performance ftl gear. No good down here of course, but hot stuff across an enormous range of environment …” He whistled a few bars of “Nightmare Waltz.” “I think we’re looking at a High Trader.”
Someone from the Transhuman Spaces.
Almost every university on Middle America had a Department of Transhuman Studies. Since the return of the five, it had been a popular thing to do. Yet most people considered it a joke. Transhume was generally the bastard child of Religious Studies and an Astro or Computer Science department, the dumping ground for quacks and incompetents. Lazy Larry had founded the department at Ann Arbor—and spent much class time eloquently proclaiming its fraudulence. Imagine, trying to study what lay
beyond
the Beyond! Even the Tourists avoided the topic. Transhuman Space existed—perhaps it included most of the universe—but it was a tricky, risky, ambiguous thing. Larry said that its reality drove most of the economics of the Beyond … but that all the theories about it were rumors at tenuous secondhand. One of his proudest claims was that he raised Transhuman Studies to the level of palm reading.
Yet now … apparently a trader had arrived that regularly penetrated the Transhuman Reaches. If the government hadn’t sat on the news, it would have eclipsed the Caravan itself. And
this
was what wanted the Blab. Almost involuntarily, Hamid reached down to pet the creature. “Y-you don’t think there could really be anybody transhuman on that ship?” An hour ago he had been agonizing about parting with the Blab; that might be nothing compared to what they really faced.
For a moment he thought Larry was going to shrug the question off. But the older man sighed. “If there’s anything we’ve got right, it’s that no transhuman can think at these depths. Even in the Beyond, they’d die or fragment or maybe cyst. I think this Ravna&Tines must be a human-equivalent intellect, but it could be a lot more dangerous than the average Outsider … the tricks it would know, the gadgets it would have.” His voice drifted off; he stared at the forty-centimeter statue perched on his desk. It was lustrous green, apparently cut from a flawless block of jade.
Green? Wasn’t it black a minute ago?
Larry’s gaze snapped up to Hamid. “Congratulations. Your problem is a lot more interesting than you thought. Why would any Outsider want the Blab, much less a High Trader?”

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