The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (58 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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“Stay away!” For an instant the tines’s voice changed, held the same edge as the night before. Hamid stood on the wall next to the doorway and looked down the hall. The Blab was there, sitting on the closed door at the far end. Hamid’s orientation flipped … the hall could just as well be a deep, bright-lit well, with the Blab trapped at the bottom of it.
“Blab?” He said softly, aware of the tines behind him.
She looked up at him. “I can’t play the old games anymore, Hamid,” she said in her softest femvoice. He stared for a moment, uncomprehending. Over the years, the Blab said plenty of things that—by accident or in the listeners’ imagination—might seem humanly intelligent. Here, for the first time, he knew that he was hearing sense … . And he guessed what Ravna meant when she said the Blab was dead.
Hamid backed away from the edge of the pit. He looked at the other tines, remembered that their speech came as easily from one as the other. “You’re like a hive of roaches, aren’t you?”
“A little,” the tenor voice came from somewhere among them.
“But telepathic,” Hamid said.
The one who had been his friend answered, but in the tenor voice: “Yes, between myselves. But it’s no sixth sense. You’ve known about it all your life. I like to talk a lot. Blabber.” The squeaking and the hissing: just the edge of all they were saying to each other across their two-hundred-kilohertz bandwidth. “I’m sorry I flinched. Myselves are still confused. I don’t know quite who I am.”
The Blab pushed off and drifted back into the bridge. She grabbed a piece of ceiling as she came even with Hamid. She extended her head toward him, tentatively, as though he were a stranger.
I feel the same way about you,
thought Hamid. But he reached out to brush her neck with his fingers. She twitched back, glided across the room to nestle among the other tines.
Hamid stared at them staring back. He had a sudden image: a pack of long-necked rats beadily analyzing their prey. “So. Who is the real Mr. Tines? The monster who’d smash a world, or the nice guy I’m hearing now?”
Ravna answered, her voice tired, distant. “The monster tines is gone … or going. Don’t you see? The pack was unbalanced. It was dying.”
“There were five in my pack, Hamid. Not a bad number: some of the brightest packs are that small. But I was down from seven—two of myselves had been killed. The ones remaining were mismatched, and only one of them was female.” Tines paused. “I know humans can go for years without contact with the opposite sex, and suffer only mild discomfort—”
Tell me about it.
“—but tines are very different. If a pack’s sex ratio gets too lopsided, especially if there is a mismatch of skills, then the mind disintegrates … . Things can get very nasty in the process.” Hamid noticed that all the time it talked, the two tines next to the one with the orange scarf had been nibbling at the scarf’s knots. They moved quickly, perfectly coordinated,
untying and retying the knots.
Tines doesn’t need hands.
Or put another way, he already had six. Hamid was seeing the equivalent of a human playing nervously with his tie.
“Ravna lied when she said the Blab is dead. I forgive her: she wants you off our ship, with no more questions, no more hassle. But the Blabber isn’t dead. She was
rescued …
from being an animal the rest of her life. And her rescue saved the pack. I feel so … happy. Better even than when I was seven. I can understand things that have been puzzles for years. Your Blab is far more language-oriented than any of my other selves. I could never talk like this without her.”
Ravna had drifted toward the pack. Now she had her feet planted on the floor beneath them. Her head brushed the shoulder of one, was even with the eyes of another. “Imagine the Blabber as like the verbal hemisphere of a human brain,” she said to Hamid.
“Not quite,” Tines said. “A human hemisphere can almost carry on by itself. The Blab by itself could never be a person.”
Hamid remembered how the Blab’s greatest desire had often seemed just to
be
a real person. And listening to this creature, he heard echoes of the Blab. It would be easy to accept what they were saying … . Yet if you turned the words just a little, you had enslavement and rape—the slug’s theory with frosting.
Hamid turned away from all the eyes and looked across the star clouds.
How much should I believe? How much should I seem to believe?
“One of the Tourists wanted to sell us a gadget, an ‘ftl radio.’ Did you know that we used it to ask about the tines? Do you know what we found?” He told them about the horrors Larry had found around the galactic rim.
Ravna exchanged a glance with the tines by her head. For a moment the only sound was the twittering and hissing. Then Tines spoke. “Imagine the most ghastly villains of Earth’s history. Whatever they are, whatever holocausts they set, I assure you much worse has happened elsewhere … . Now imagine that this regime was so vast, so effectively
evil
that no honest historians survived. What stories do you suppose would be spread about the races they exterminated?”
“Okay. So—”
“Tines are not monsters. On average, we are no more bloodthirsty than you humans. But we are descended from packs of wolf-like creatures. We are deadly warriors. Given reasonable equipment and numbers, we can outfight most anything in the Slow Zone.” Hamid remembered the shark pack of attack boats. With one animal in each, and radio communication … no team of human pilots could match their coordination. “We once were a great power in our part of the Slow Zone. We had enemies, even when there was no war. Would you trust creatures who live indefinitely, but whose personalities may drift from
friendly to indifferent—even to inimical—as their components die and are replaced?”
“And you’re such a peach of a guy because you’ve got the Blab?”
“Yes!
Though you liked … I know you would have liked me when I was seven. But the Blab has a lovely outlook; she makes it fun to be alive.”
Hamid looked at Ravna and the pack who surrounded her. So the tines had been great fighters. That he believed. So they were now virtually extinct, having run into something even deadlier. That he could believe, too. Beyond that … he’d be a fool to believe anything. He could imagine Tines as a friend, he wanted Ravna as one. But all the talk, all the seeming argument—it could just as well be manipulation. One thing was sure: if he returned to Middle America, he would never know the truth. He might live the rest of his life safe and cozy, but he wouldn’t have the Blab, and he would never know what had really happened to her.
He gave Ravna a lopsided smile. “Back to square one then. I want passage to the Beyond with you.”
“Out of the question. I—I made that clear from the beginning.” Hamid pushed nearer, stopped a meter in front of her. “Why won’t you look at me?” he said softly. “Why do you hate me so much?”
For a full second, her eyes looked straight into his. “I
don’t
hate you!” Her face clouded, as if she were about to weep. “It’s just that you’re such a God
-damned
disappointment!” She pushed back abruptly, knocking the tines out of her way.
He followed her slowly back to the conference table. She “stood” there, talking to herself in some unknown language. “She’s swearing to her ancestors,” murmured a tines that drifted close by Hamid’s head. “Her kind is big on that sort of thing.”
Hamid anchored himself across from her. He looked at her face. Young, no older than twenty it looked. But Outsiders had some control over aging. Besides, Ravna had spent at least the last ten years in relativistic flight. “You hired my—you hired Hussein Thompson to adopt me, didn’t you?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
She looked back at him for a moment, this time not flinching away. Finally she sighed. “Okay, I will try but … there are many things you from the Slow Zone do not understand. Middle America is close to the Beyond, but you see out through a tiny hole. You can have even less concept of what lies beyond the Beyond, in the Transhuman reaches.” She was beginning to sound like Lazy Larry.
“I’m willing to start with the version for five-year-olds.”
“Okay.” The faintest of smiles crossed her face. It was everything he’d guessed it would be. He wondered how he could make her do it again. “‘Once upon a time,’” the smile again, a little wider! “there was a very wise and good man, as wise and good as any mere human or human equivalent can ever be: a mathematical genius, a great general, an even greater peacemaker. He lived five hundred years’ subjective, and half that time he was fighting a very great evil.”
The Tines put in, “Just a part of that evil chewed up my race for breakfast.”
Ravna nodded. “Eventually it chewed up our hero, too. He’s been dead almost a century objective. The enemy has been very alert to keep him dead. Tines and I may be the last people trying to bring him back … . How much do you know about cloning, Mr. Thompson?”
Hamid couldn’t answer for a moment; it was too clear where all this was going. “The Tourists claim they can build a viable zygote from almost any body cell. They say it’s easy, but that what you get is no more than an identical twin of the original.”
“That is about right. In fact, the clone is often
much
less than an identical twin. The uterine environment determines much of an individual’s adult characteristics. Consider mathematical ability. There is a genetic component—but part of mathematical genius comes from the fetus getting just the right testosterone overdose. A little too much and you have a
dummy.
“Tines and I have been running for a long time. Fifty years ago we reached Lothlrimarre—the back end of nowhere if there ever was one. We had a clonable cell from the great man. We did our best with the humaniform medical equipment that was available. The newborn
looked
healthy enough … .”
Rustle, hiss.
“But why not just raise the—child—yourself?” Hamid said. “Why hire someone to take him into the Slow Zone?”
Ravna bit her lip and looked away. It was Tines who replied: “Two reasons. The enemy wants you permanently dead. Raising you in the Slow Zone was the best way to keep you out of sight. The other reason is more subtle. We don’t have records of your original memories; we can’t make a perfect copy. But if we could give you an upbringing that mimicked the original’s … then we’d have someone with the same outlook.”
“Like having the original back, with a bad case of amnesia.”
Tines chuckled. “Right. And things went very well at first. It was great good luck to run into Hussein Thompson at Lothlrimarre. He seemed a bright fellow, willing to work for his money. He brought the newborn
in suspended animation back to Middle America, and married a woman equally bright, to be your mother.
“We had everything figured, the original’s background imitated better than we had ever hoped. I even gave up one of my selves, a newborn, to be with you.”
“I guess I know most of the rest,” said Hamid. “Everything went fine for the first eight years—” the happy years of loving family—“till it became clear that I wasn’t a math genius. Then your hired hand didn’t know what to do, and your plan fell apart.”
“It didn’t have to!” Ravna slapped the table. The motion pulled her body up, almost free of the foot anchors. “The math ability was a big part, but there was still a chance—if Thompson hadn’t welshed on us.” She glared at Hamid, and then at the pack. “The original’s parents died when he was ten years old. Hussein and his woman were supposed to disappear when the clone was ten, in a faked air crash.
That was the agreement!
Instead—” she swallowed. “We talked to him. He wouldn’t meet in person. He was full of excuses, the clever bastard. ‘I didn’t see what good it would do to hurt the boy any more,’ he said. ‘He’s no superman, just a good kid. I wanted him to be happy!’” She choked on her own indignation. “
Happy!
If he knew what we have been through, what the stakes are—”
Hamid’s face felt numb, frozen. He wondered what it would be like to throw up in zero gee. “What—what about my mother?” he said in a very small voice.
Ravna gave her head a quick shake. “She tried to persuade Thompson. When that didn’t work, she left you. By then it was too late; besides, that sort of abandonment is not the trauma the original experienced. But she did her part of the bargain; we paid her most of what we promised … . We came to Middle America expecting to find someone very wonderful, living again. Instead, we found—”
“—a piece of trash?” He couldn’t get any anger into the question. She gave a shaky sigh. “ … no, I don’t really think that. Hussein Thompson probably did raise a good person, and that’s more than most can claim. But if you were the one we had hoped, you would be known all over Middle America by now, the greatest inventor, the greatest mover since the colony began. And that would be just the beginning.” She seemed to be looking through him … remembering?
Tines made a diffident throat-clearing sound. “Not a piece of trash at all. And not just a ‘good kid,’ either. A part of me lived with Hamid for twenty years; the Blabber’s memories are about as clear as a tines fragment’s can be. Hamid is not just a failed dream to me, Rav. He’s different, but I like to be around him almost as much as … the other one.
And when the crunch came—well, I saw him fight back. Given his background, even the original couldn’t have done better. Hitching a ride on a raw agrav was the sort of daring that—”

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