The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (62 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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Yet Interior fantasies were still written. Guille saw hundreds of them a year—and worse, had to buy dozens. Ah well. It was a living, and it gave him a chance to show people more important things. Rey stepped back from the telescope, and turned its tube almost straight up. It was Seraph he really wanted to look at.
“Hel-lo?”
Rey looked up, startled. He had an audience. It was the Fair Haven waif. She stood almost behind him and about ten feet away. He had the feeling she’d been watching for several minutes. “Hello indeed. And how are you today, Mistress Grimm?”
“Well.” She smiled shyly and took a step forward. She certainly looked better than when he first saw her. Her face was scrubbed clean. In place of rancid leather, she wore tripulation fatigues. If she had been five feet tall instead of six, she would have seemed a pretty pre-teener.
“Shouldn’t you be rehearsing with Cor?”
“I, uh, that is la-ter.”
“I see. You’re off duty.”
She bobbed her head, seeming to understand the term. Somehow, Rey had imagined that Cor or the publicity people would be looking after Tatja all the time. In fact, no matter how incompetent she was,
there simply were not enough people to baby-sit her. The girl must have many hours to herself; no doubt she wandered all over the Barge. By the Light, the trouble she could get into!
They stared at each other for a moment. The girl seemed so attentive, almost in awe of him. He realized she wouldn’t leave unless he explicitly told her to get lost. He tried to think of an appropriate dismissal, but nothing came. Damn. Finally he said, “Well, how do you like my new telescope?”
“Good. Good.” The girl stepped almost close enough to touch the scope, and Rey went through the usual explanations: He showed her how the wheels could be fastened to the deck. The oil bath in the cart’s base damped the sea motion and kept the optics steady. The cart itself was an old drafting rig from the art deck. Rey had removed the drawing table and substituted clamps that attached to the base of his twelve-inch scope.
Tatja Grimm didn’t say much, but her enthusiasm was obvious. She leaned close to the equipment to see the details Rey pointed out. When he explained something, she would pause for an instant and then bob her head and say, “Yes. So nice.”
Guille wondered if he could have been wrong about her. In some ways, she seemed a more thoughtful and enthusiastic audience than crew people he had shown the gear to. But then he noticed the uniformity of her responses. Everything seemed to impress her equally. Every explanation took the same brief moment for her to absorb. Guille had a retarded cousin, mental age around five years, physical age thirty after so much living, a retarded person learns to mimic the head movements and nonsense sounds that normal people make in conversation. Rey could imagine the blank look he would get if he asked Tatja something related to his explanations.
He didn’t try such an experiment. What point was there in hurting the girl’s feelings? Besides, she seemed to enjoy the conversation as much as a normal person. He aimed the scope at Seraph as he continued his spiel. The planet was in quarter phase, and the mountains of its southern continent stood in stark relief near the terminator. Wind and ship vibration jostled the image a bit. On the other hand, the line of sight was straight up, without lots of dirty air to smudge things. This was the clearest day-view he’d ever had. “ … so my telescope makes objects seem much closer. Would you like to look?” Even a retard should be thrilled by the sight.
“Yes.” She stepped forward, and he showed her how to use the eyepiece. She bent to it … and gave a squeal, a wonderful mixture of pleasure and surprise. Her head jerked back from the eyepiece. She stared upwards at the twin planet, as if to assure herself that it hadn’t moved.
Just as quickly she took another look through the lense, and then backed off again. “So big. So
big
!” Her smile all but split her face. “How can te-le-scope—” she reached up, as if to jerk the tube’s end down to eye level.
Guille caught her hands. “Oops. Be gentle. Turn it around this pivot.” She wasn’t listening, but she let him rotate the tube so she could look in. Her eyes went wide as she saw the expanded image of her face in the main mirror. Rey found himself explaining about “curved mirrors” and how the diagonal directed the image from the twelve-inch through the eyepiece. The girl hesitated the same fraction of a second she had after his other explanations. Then, just as before, her head bobbed with an enthusiastic imitation of total understanding. “Yes. Yes. So nice.”
Abruptly, she grabbed Rey’s hand. “And you think this thing? You make it?”
Tatja’s grip was almost painful; her hands were slender but as outsized as the rest of her. “You mean, did I invent the telescope?” He chuckled. “No, Miss Grimm. The basic idea is two hundred years old. People don’t invent telescopes just to pass the time on a dull morning. Things like this are the work of scattered geniuses. Part of an invention may exist for decades, useless, before another genius makes the idea successful.”
The girl’s expression collapsed. It might have been laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. She had no concept of what was difficult and what was trivial, and so her attempt at bright conversation had foundered. Rey turned her gently back to the telescope and showed her how to adjust the focus. Her former enthusiasm did not completely return, but she seemed sincerely taken by the close-up view of Seraph. Rey gave her his usual spiel, pointing out the brown smudges across part of the southern continent. “Brush fires, we think. That land must be a lot like the grassy plains north of Bayfast. The religions have all sorts of visions of Seraph, but we now know it’s a world much like ours.” And the stories of hidden civilizations
there
might still be true. Rey had written more than one editorial about plans for detecting and communicating with Seraph’s hypothetical inhabitants. One of the first steps would be to build an observatory in this part of the world, where Seraph could be observed with a minimum of atmospheric distortion.
A couple of people from Printing had stopped nearby, were watching intently. They were not the sort Rey would think attracted by skygazing; one was Brailly Tounse’s bombwright. Rey glanced at her questioningly.
“Sir, we’ve got a line of sight into the harbor now,” the bombwright waved to the north. “We were wondering if you’d take a quick look at Termite Town through your scope.”
Rey hid a sigh, and gave up any hope of having the device to himself this morning. The bombwright must have noticed his irritation. She
hurried on to say, “Something strange is happening with the Termite People, sir. So far the officer types ain’t talking, but—take a look, will you?”
Guille eased Tatja Grimm away from the scope and tilted it toward the horizon. He made a quick adjustment with the spotter scope and then looked through the main eyepiece. “Looks about like I remember it.” There were dozens of towers, from water’s edge back up the hills around the harbor. The smallest ones were bigger than a house. The largest were over a hundred feet tall. The spaces between were like streets at the bottom of shadowed canyons. Even knowing the truth, one’s first reaction was awe: this must be a city, the greatest one in the world. Krirsarque and Bayfast were insignificant, low-storey affairs compared to this. In fact, there were only a few thousand humans in this whole “city.” They dug their burrows and staircases through the termite mounds; they poked air holes through the walls, holes that also served as windows. “Hmm. There’s something different. One of the towers by the moorage … it looks like it was burned, or stained with soot. The dark goes as high as the windows overhanging the water.”
“Yes, sir. That’s what got our attention, but we couldn’t see what made the stain. And there’s something strange in the water, too.”
Rey tilted the scope a fraction. A twisted pile of spikes and filaments stuck through the water, directly in front of the scorch-marked tower. Rey sucked in a breath. “It looks like ship’s rigging, the fiberglass part.”
The bombwright stepped close, and he let her take a look. She was silent for a moment, then, “Unh huh. That’s where they like visitors to dock. Looks like the gooks dumped pet’ bombs out those windows, right onto the moorage. The guys they ambushed didn’t have a chance.”
A minute before, Rey had been feeling sorry for one retarded girl. Now … He looked across the water. Without a telescope, the Village was a barely distinguishable skyline, the scorch unnoticeable.
The guys they ambushed …
According to the advance reports, there had been exactly one ship tied up at the Village: the
Science
.
CREW AND PUBLISHING FOLK SPENT THE NEXT FEW HOURS SPECULATING: WHY was the
Science
ambushed? What would Tarulle do about it? The Barge stayed several miles offshore, but rumor held that fastboats were doing close recon under cover of the midday eclipse. The only word from the executive deck was that there would be no immediate landing.
Top management was not asleep—just terribly indecisive. Rey Guille bluffed his way onto the bridge shortly before eclipsend. All the Biggies were there, both from Ownership and Operations. The atmosphere was that of an incipient brawl: consensus time had not arrived.
“—and I say, sail into catapult range and burn their filthy village to
the ground! Barbarians must learn that ambushing merchants is a dangerous sport.” The speaker was one of Tarulle’s nephews, an arrogant pip-squeak who’d be scrubbing decks if it weren’t for his relatives. The little man looked angrily around the room, daring anyone to disagree. Fortunately for the Company, there were some strong personalities present:
Barge Captain Maccioso stood near the helm, facing the rest. His form was a vague, intimidating shadow in the eclipse light. Maccioso was a huge man; the bridge itself had been rebuilt to accommodate his six feet eight inch height. He was in his early fifties and only just beginning to go to fat. The first twenty years of his career had been spent in the Chainpearls Navy. The man had retired an admiral, and the greatest hero of the Loretto Bight affair. Now he crossed his ham-like arms and seemed to lean toward Tarulle’s nephew. “War-like talk coming from …”
a wee wimp who couldn’t cock a bow
, the pause seemed to say, “from those who need customers to live. It’s true, I could torch the Village. It would be expensive; we wouldn’t be left with much reserve. And what would we get for it? The Termite Folk are isolated, Master Craeto. There would be few to learn from the lesson. The Tarulle Company would lose one—admittedly minor—customer. The Barge has visited here four times since I’ve been captain. We’ve had less trouble than in some civilized ports. These people are not pirates. The
Science
crew did something, broke some taboo … .”
Maccioso turned to looked into the harbor; sunbreak was almost upon them. The land was bright with washed-out pastels. When he continued, his voice held more frustration than certainty. “Sure. We have the power to raze the place. But we could never bring off an assault landing. There’s no way we can rescue the survivors and find out how to avoid such a debacle in the future.”
Survivors?
Someone had lived through the pet’ bombing. Rey felt a surge of joy. No one else seemed moved by the news; they already knew. This must be a major point of the debate. “We can’t just leave them there!” The words popped out of Guille’s mouth without conscious thought.
Dead silence greeted his words. The people closest to him moved slightly away, but didn’t look at him; it was as though he had made a bad smell. Maccioso turned and his gaze swept the bridge. “Master Tounse!”
“Sir!”
The Barge Captain pointed at Rey Guille. “Take this man out and …” Rey’s guts went cold; there were stories about Ked Maccioso’s command of the Chainpearl Armada.
“ … brief
him.”
“Yessir!”
Brailly Tounse emerged from the crowd and hustled Rey onto the open walkway beyond the bridge. The Printmaster shut the hatch and turned to face him. “‘Brief you’? The commercial life is turning Ked soft.” It took a moment for Rey to realize that the other man was suppressing laughter. “Don’t you understand that a rescue is what Ked is dying to do? For almost an hour, he’s been trying to trick these flightless bats into backing one.”
“Oh.” Rey was both embarrassed and encouraged. “Maybe my, uh, little outburst will start something.”
“I hope so.” Brailly stopped smiling. “But even by Ked’s standards, it would be risky operation pulling those
Science
people out.”
He led Rey to the forward end of the walkway. All around them, twilight brightened suddenly into day as the sun came past the edge of Seraph. Swarms of daybats rose from the harbor. They swept around the towers, their cries coming clear and reedy across the water.
Brailly gestured at the bridge binoculars. “Take a look to the left of the harbor towers. That’s where they’re holding the survivors.” It was some kind of pit, probably the root of a fallen tower. Rey saw Termite Folk camped around the edge. Tounse continued, “They’re in that hole, out of sight from this angle. See how the locals have set petroleum vats along the edge? They could light and dump those in a matter of minutes …”
… incinerating the prisoners. The Tarulle people would have to sneak in a large party and overpower the guards at those vats all at once. One slip and a lot of Company people would share the fate of those in the pit. “We could offer a ransom, Brailly. It might be expensive, but the
Science
home universities would probably pay us back … . And there’d be lots of good publicity.” The spinoffs from such an adventure could fill several issues of the Tarulle magazines.

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