The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (51 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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“ … Well, her kind must be rare. I haven’t talked to any Tourist who recognized the race.”
Lazy Larry just nodded. Space is deep. The Blab might be from somewhere else in the Slow Zone.
“When she was a pup, lots of people studied her. You saw the articles. She has a brain as big as a chimp’s, but most of it’s tied up in driving her tympana and processing what she hears. One guy said she’s the ultimate in verbal orientation—all mouth and no mind.”
“Ah! A student!”
Hamid ignored the Larryism. “Watch this.” He patted the Blab’s shoulder.
She was slow in responding; that ultrasound equipment must be fascinating. Finally she raised her head. “What’s up?” The intonation was natural, the voice a young woman’s.
“Some people think she’s just a parrot. She can play things back better than a high-fidelity recorder. But she also picks up favorite phrases, and uses them in different voices—and almost appropriately … . Hey, Blab. What’s that?” Hamid pointed at the electric heater that Larry had propped by his feet. The Blab stuck her head around the corner of the desk, saw the cherry glowing coils. This was not the sort of heater Hamid had in his apartment.
“What’s that … that …” The Blab extended her head curiously toward the glow. She was a bit too eager; her nose bumped the heater’s safety grid.
“Hot!”
She jumped back, her nose tucked into her neck fur, a foreleg extended toward the heater. “Hot! Hot!” She rolled onto her haunches, and licked tentatively at her nose. “Jeeze!” She gave Hamid a look that was both calculating and reproachful.
“Honest, Blab, I didn’t think you would touch it … . She’s going to get me for this. Her sense of humor extends only as far as ambushes, but it can be pretty intense.”
“Yeah. I remember the Zoo Society’s documentary on her.” Fujiyama
was grinning broadly. Hamid had always thought that Larry and the Blab had kindred humors. It even seemed that the animal’s cackling became like the old man’s after she attended a couple of his lectures.
Larry pulled the heater back and walked around the desk. He hunched down to the Blab’s eye level. He was all solicitude now, and a good thing: he was looking into a mouth full of sharp teeth, and somebody was playing the “Timebomb Song.” After a moment, the music stopped and she shut her mouth. “I can’t believe there isn’t human equivalence hiding here somewhere. Really. I’ve had freshmen who did worse at the start of the semester. How could you get this much verbalization without intelligence to benefit from it?” He reached out to rub her shoulders. “You got sore shoulders, Baby? Maybe little hands ready to burst out?”
The Blab cocked her head. “I like to soar.”
Hamid had thought long about the Heinlein scenario; the science fiction of Old Earth was a solid part of the ATL curriculum. “If she is still a child, she’ll be dead before she grows up. Her bone calcium and muscle strength have deteriorated about as much as you’d expect for a thirty-year-old human.”
“Hm. Yeah. And we know she’s about your age.” Twenty. “I suppose she could be an ego frag. But most of those are brain-damaged transhumans, or obvious constructs.” He went back behind his desk, began whistling tunelessly. Hamid twisted uneasily in his chair. He had come for advice. What he got was news that they were in totally over their heads. He shouldn’t be surprised; Larry was like that. “What we need is a whole lot more information.”
“Well, I suppose I could flat out demand the slug tell me more. But I don’t know how I can force any of the Tourists to help me.”
Larry waved breezily. “That’s not what I meant. Sure, I’ll ask the Lothlrimarre about it. But basically the Tourists are at the end of a ninelight-year trip to nowhere. Whatever libraries they have are like what you would take on a South Seas vacation—and out of date, to boot … . And of course the federal government of Middle America doesn’t know what’s coming off to begin with. Heh, heh. Why else do they come to me when they’re really desperate? … No, what we need is direct access to library resources Out There.”
He said it casually, as though he were talking about getting an extra telephone, not solving Middle America’s greatest problem. He smiled complacently at Hamid, but the boy refused to be drawn in. Finally, “Haven’t you wondered why the campus—Morale Hall, in particular—is crawling with cops?”
“Yeah.”
Or I would have, if there weren’t lots else on my mind.
“One of the more serious Tourists—Skandr Vrinimisrinithan—
brought along a genuine transhuman artifact. He’s been holding back on it for months, hoping he could get what he wants other ways. The Feds—I’ll give ’em this—didn’t budge. Finally he brought out his secret weapon. It’s in this room right now.”
Ham’s eyes were drawn to the stone carving (now bluish green) that sat on Larry’s desk. The old man nodded. “It’s an ansible.”
“Surely they don’t call it that!”
“No. But that’s what it is.”
“You mean, all these years, it’s been a lie that ftl won’t work in the Zone?”
You mean I’ve wasted my life trying to suck up to these Tourists?
“Not really. Take a look at this thing. See the colors change. I swear its size and mass do, too. This is a real transhuman artifact: not an intellect, of course, but not some human design manufactured in Transhuman space. Skandr claims—and I believe him—that no other Tourist has one.”
A transhuman artifact. Hamid’s fascination was tinged with fear. This was something one heard of in the theoretical abstract, in classes run by crackpots.
“Skandr claims this gadget is ‘aligned’ on the Lothlrimarre commercial outlet. From there we can talk to any registered address in the Beyond.”
“Instantaneously.” Hamid’s voice was very small.
“Near enough. It would take a while to reach the universal event horizon; there are some subtle limitations if you’re moving at relativistic speeds.”
“And the Catch?”
Larry laughed. “Good man. Skandr admits to a few. This thing won’t work more than ten light years into the Zone. I’ll bet there aren’t twenty worlds in the Galaxy that could benefit from it—but we are
definitely
on one. The trick sucks enormous energy. Skandr says that running this baby will dim our sun by half a percent. Not noticeable to the guy in the street, but it could have long-term bad effects.” There was a short silence; Larry often did that after a cosmic understatement. “And from your standpoint, Hamid, there’s one big drawback. The mean bandwidth of this thing is just under six bits per minute.”
“Huh? Ten seconds to send a single bit?”
“Yup. Skandr left three protocols at the Lothlrimarre end: ASCII, a Hamming map to a subset of English, and an AI scheme that guesses what you’d say if you used more bits. The first is Skandr’s idea of a joke, and I wouldn’t trust the third more than wishful thinking. But with the Hamming map, you could send a short letter—say five hundred English words—in a day. It’s full-duplex, so you might get a good part of your answer in that time. Neat, huh? Anyway, it beats waiting twenty years.”
Hamid guessed it would be the biggest news since first contact, one hundred years ago. “So … uh, why did they bring it to you, Professor?”
Larry looked around his hole of an office, smiling wider and wider. “Heh, heh. It’s true, our illustrious planetary president is one of the five; he’s been Out There. But I’m the only one with real friends in the Beyond. You see, the Feds are very leery of this deal. What Skandr wants in return is most of our zygote bank. The Feds banned any private sale of human zygotes. It was a big moral thing: ‘No unborn child sold into slavery or worse.’ Now they’re thinking of doing it themselves. They really
want
this ansible. But what if it’s a fake, just linked up to some fancy database on Skandr’s ship? Then they’ve lost some genetic flexibility, and maybe they’ve sold some kids into hell—and got nothing but a colorful trinket for their grief.
“So. Skandr’s loaned them the thing for a week, and the Feds loaned it to me—with close to
carte blanche.
I can call up old friends, exchange filthy jokes, let the sun go dim doing it. After a week, I report on whether the gadget is really talking to the Outside.”
Knowing you,
“I bet you have your own agenda.”
“Sure. Till you showed up the main item was to check out the foundation that sponsors Skandr, see if they’re as clean as he says. Now … well, your case isn’t as important morally, but it’s very interesting. There should be time for both. I’ll use Skandr’s credit to do some netstalking, see if I can find
anyone
who’s heard of blabbers, or this Ravna&Tines.”
Hamid didn’t have any really close friends. Sometimes he wondered if that was another penalty of his strange upbringing, or whether he was just naturally unlikable. He had come to Fujiyama for help all right, but all he’d been expecting was a round of prickly questions that eventually brought
him
to some insight. Now he seemed to be on the receiving end of a favor of world-shaking proportions. It made him suspicious and very grateful all at once. He gabbled some words of abject gratitude.
Larry shrugged. “It’s no special problem for me. I’m curious, and this week I’ve got the
means
to satisfy my curiosity.” He patted the ansible. “There’s a real favor I can do, though: so far, Middle America has been cheated occasionally, but no Outsider has used force against us. That’s one good thing about the Caravan system: it’s to the Tourists’ advantage to keep each other straight. Ravna&Tines may be different. If this is really a High Trader, it might just make a grab for what it wants. If I were you, I’d keep close to the Blabber … . And I’ll see if the slug will move one of the Tourist barges over the campus. If you stay in this area, not much can happen without them knowing.
“Hey, see what a help I am? I did nothing for your original question, and now you have a whole, ah, shipload of new things to worry about … .”
He leaned back, and his voice turned serious. “But I don’t have much to say about your original question, Hamid. If Ravna&Tines turn out to be decent, you’ll still have to decide for yourself about giving up the Blab. I bet every critter that thinks it thinks—even the transhumans—worry about how to do right for themselves and the ones they love. I—uh, oh damn! Why don’t you ask your pop, why don’t you ask Hussein about these things? The guy has been heartbroken since you left.”
Ham felt his face go red. Pop had never had much good to say about Fujiyama. Who’d have guessed the two would talk about him? If Hamid had known, he’d never have come here today. He felt like standing up, screaming at this old man to mind his own business. Instead, he shook his head and said softly, “It’s kind of personal.”
Larry looked at him, as if wondering whether to push the matter. One word, and Ham knew that all the pain would come pouring out. But after a moment, the old man sighed. He looked around the desk to where the Blab lay, eyeing the heater. “Hey, Blabber. You take good care of this kid.”
The Blab returned his gaze. “Sure, sure,” she said.
HAMID’S APARTMENT WAS ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF CAMPUS. IT WAS LARGE and cheap, which might seem surprising so near the oldest university around, and just a few kilometers south of the planetary capital. The back door opened on kilometers of forested wilderness. It would be a long time before there was any land development immediately south of here. The original landing zones were just twenty klicks away. In a bad storm there might be a little hot stuff blown north. It might be only fifty percent of natural background radiation, but with a whole world to colonize, why spread towns toward the first landings?
Hamid parked the commons bicycle in the rack out front, and walked quietly around the building. Lights were on upstairs. There were the usual motorbikes of other tenants.
Something
was standing in back, at the far end of the building. Ah. A Hallowe’en scarecrow.
He and the Blab walked back to his end. It was past twilight and neither moon was in the sky. The tips of his fingers were chilled to numbness. He stuck his hands in his pockets, and paused to look up. The starships of the Caravan were in synch orbit at this longitude. They formed a row of bright dots in the southern sky. Something dark, too regular to be a cloud, hung almost straight overhead. That must be the protection Larry had promised.
“I’m hungry.”
“Just a minute and we’ll go in.”
“Okay.” The Blab leaned companionably against his leg, began humming. She looked fat now, but it was just her fur, all puffed out. These
temperatures were probably the most comfortable for her. He stared across the star fields.
God, how many hours have I stood like this, wondering what all those stars mean?
The Big Square was about an hour from setting. The fifth brightest star in that constellation was Lothlrimarre’s sun. At Lothlrimarre and beyond, faster than light travel was possible—even for twenty-first century Old Earth types. If Middle America were just ten more light years farther out from the galactic center, Hamid would have had all the Beyond as his world.
His gaze swept back across the sky. Most everything he could see there would be in the Slow Zone. It extended four thousand light years inward from here, if the Outsiders were to be believed. Billions of star systems, millions of civilizations—trapped. Most would never know about the outside.

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