The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (76 page)

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Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
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“Maybe we should have just stayed up top and watched.”
It was a little late for her to be saying that! Juan surveyed the crumb net. There was not even a hazy guesstimate on the lost node. But there were several pictures from the crumb he had tossed beyond all this: every one of them showed an empty path. “Miri! I don’t think the mice ever got to the next viewpoint.”
“Hey, did you hear that, William? The mice have taken off down a hole somewhere.”
“Okay, I’ll look around back here.”
Juan and Miri moved back along the passage, looking for bolt-holes. Of course there were no shadows. The fine sand of the path was almost black, the fallen pine needles scarcely brighter. On either side, the rock walls showed dark and mottled red as the sandstone cooled in the night air. “You’d think their nest would show a glow.”
“So they’re in deep.” Miri held up her probe gun, and slipped the radar attachment back onto the barrel. “USMC to the rescue.”
They traversed the chamber from one narrowness to the other. When they put the GPR snout of the guns right up to the rock, the lavender echograms were
much
more detailed than before. There really were tunnels, mouse-sized and extending back into the rock. They went through three batteries in about five minutes, but—“But we still haven’t found an entrance!”
“Keep looking. We know there is one.”
“Caray
, Miri! It’s just not here.”
“You’re right.” That was William. He had crawled part way in to look at them. “Come back here. The critters jumped off the trail before it got narrow.”
“What? How do you know?”
William backed out, and the kids wriggled out after him. Ol’ William had been busy. He had swept the pine cones and needles away from the edges of the path. His little flashlight lay on the ground.
But they didn’t need a flashlight to see what William had discovered. The edge of the path, which should have been black and cold, was a dim red, a redness that spread across the rock face like weird, upward-dripping blood.
Miri dropped flat and poked around where the heat red was brightest. “Ha. I got my finger into something! Can’t find an end to it.” She pulled back … and a plume of orange followed her hand and then drifted up, its color cooling to red as it swelled and rose above them.
There was the faint smell of burning wood.
For a moment, they just stared at each other, the big black goggle eyes a true reflection of their inner shock.
No more warm air rose from the hole. “We must have found an indraft,” William said.
Both Miri and Juan were on their knees now. They looked carefully, but the goggles didn’t have the resolution to let them see the hole clearly—it was simply a spot that glowed a bit redder than anything else.
“Use the gun, Juan.”
He probed the rock above the hole and on either side. The tiny passage extended two feet down from the entrance, branching several times before it reached the main network of tunnels and chambers.
“So what happened to the dungball they grabbed? It would be nice to get some pictures from in there.”
Juan shrugged, and fed his probe gun still another battery. “They must have it in one of the farther chambers, behind several feet of rock. The crumb doesn’t have the power to get through that.”
Juan and Miri looked at each other, and laughed. “But we have lots more breadcrumbs!” Juan felt around for the entrance hole and rolled a crumb into it. It lit up about six inches down, just past the first tunnel branch.
“Try another.”
Juan studied the tunnel layout for a moment. “If I throw one in just right, I bet I can carom it a couple of feet.” The crumb’s light disappeared for a moment … and then appeared as data forwarded via the first one.
Yes!
“Still no word from the one they stole,” said Miri. There were just the two locator gleams, about six inches and thirty-six inches down their respective tunnels.
Juan touched the gun here and there to the rock face. With the GPR at high power, he could probe through a lot of sandstone. How much
could he figure out from what came back? “I think 1 can refine this even more,” he said. Though that would surely make Miri suspicious. “That third fork in the tunnel. Something … soft … is blocking it.” A brightly reflecting splotch, coming slowly toward them.
“It looks like a mouse.”
“Yeah. And it’s moving between two breadcrumbs,” effectively a two-station wireless tomograph.
Maybe I can combine it all
. For a moment, Juan’s whole universe was the problem of meshing the “breadcrumb tomography” with the GPR backscatter. The image showed more and more detail. He blanked out for a just a second, and for a moment after that forgot to be cautious.
It was a mouse all right. It was facing up the tunnel, toward the entrance the three humans were watching. They could even see its guts, and the harder areas that were skull and ribs and limbs. There was something stuck in its forepaw.
The whole thing looked like some cheap graphics trick. Too bad Miri didn’t take it that way. “Okay! I’ve
had it
with you, Juan! One person could never work that fast. You
doormat
! You let Bertie and his committee—”
“Honest, Miri, I did this myself!” said Juan, defending where he should not defend.
“We’re getting an F on account of you, and Bertie will own all of this!”
William had been watching with the same detachment as during Miri’s earlier accusations. But this time: “I see the picture, Munchkin, but … I don’t think he’s lying. I think he did it himself.”
“But—”
William turned to Juan, “You’re on drugs, aren’t you, kid?” he said mildly.
Once a secret is outed
—
“No!”
Make the accusation look absurd
. But Juan floundered, wordless.
For an instant, Miri stared open-mouthed. And then she did something that Juan thought about a lot in the times that followed. She raised her hands, palms out, trying to silence them both.
William smiled gently. “Miriam, don’t worry. I don’t think Foxwarner is patching us into their summer release. I don’t think anyone but us knows what we’re saying here at the bottom of a canyon in thick fog.”
She slowly lowered her hands. “But … William.” She waved at the warmth that spread up the rock face. “None of this could be natural.”
“But what kind of
un
natural is it, Munchkin? Look at the picture your friend Juan just made. You can see the insides of the mouse. It’s not animatronic.” William ran a twitchy hand through his hair. “I think somebody in the bioscience labs hereabouts really did have an accident.
Maybe these creatures aren’t as smart as humans … but they were smart enough to escape, and fool—who was it that was poking around here in January?”
“Feretti and Voss,” Miri said in a small voice.
“Yes. Maybe just hiding down here when the bottom was under water was enough to fool them. I’ll bet these creatures have just a little edge over ordinary lab mice. But a little edge can be enough to change the world.”
And Juan realized William wasn’t talking about just the mice. “I don’t want to change the world,” he said in a choked voice. “I just want to have my chance in it.”
William nodded. “Fair enough.”
Miri looked back and forth at them. What Juan could see of her expression was very solemn.
Juan shrugged. “It’s okay, Miri. I think William is right. We’re all alone here.”
She leaned a little toward him. “Was it Bertie who got you into this?”
“Some. My mother has our family in one of the distributed framing-hams. I showed my part of it to Bertie last spring, after I flunked Adaptability. Bertie shopped it around as an anonymous challenge. He came back with a custom drug. What it does—” Juan tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a rattle. “—most people would think that what it does is a joke. See,” he tapped the side of his head, “it makes my memory very very good. Everyone thinks human memory doesn’t count for much anymore. People say, ‘No need for eidetic memory when your clothes’ data storage is a billion times bigger.’ But that’s not the point. Now I can remember big data blocks perfectly, and I have my wearable put hierarchial tags on all the stuff I see. So I can communicate patterns
back
to my wearable just by citing a few numbers. It gives me this incredible advantage in setting up problems.”
“So Bertie is your great friend because you are his super tool?” Her voice was quiet and outraged, but the anger was no longer directed at Juan.
“No!
I’ve studied the memory effect. The idea itself came from analysis of my own medical data. Even now that we have the gimmick, only one person in a thousand could be affected by it at all. There’s
no way
Bertie could have known beforehand that I was special.”
“Ah. Of course,” she said, and was silent. Juan hated it when people did that, agreed with what you said and then waited for you to figure out why you had just made a fool of yourself … .
Bertie is just very good with connections
. He had connections everywhere, to research groups, idea markets, challenge boards. But maybe Bertie had figured out how to do
even better: How many casual friends did Bertie have? How many did he offer to help with custom drug improvements? Most of that would turn out to be minor stuff, and maybe those friendships would remain casual. But sometimes, Bertie would hit the jackpot.
Like with me.
“But Bertie is my best friend!”
I will not blubber.
“You could find other friends, son,” said William. He shrugged. “Back before I lost my marbles, I had a gift. I could make words sing. I would give almost anything to get that back. And you? Well, however you came by it, the talent you have now is a marvelous gift. You are beholden to no one other than yourself for it.”
Miri said softly. “I—I don’t know, Juan. Custom meds aren’t illegal like twentieth century drugs—but they are off-limits for a reason. There’s no way to do full testing on them. This stuff you’re taking could—”
“I know. It could fry my mind.” Juan put his hands to his face, and ran into the cold plastic of his goggles. For a moment, Juan’s mind turned inward. All the old fear and shame rose up … and balanced against the strange surprise that out of the whole world, this old man could understand him.
But even here, even with his eyes closed, his contacts were still on, and Juan saw the virtual gleam of the breadcrumbs. He stared passively for several seconds, and then surprise began to eat through his funk. “Miri … they’re
moving
.”
“Huh?” She had been paying even less attention than he had. “Yes! Down the tunnels, away from us.”
William moved close to the mouse hole, and pressed his ear against the stone wall. “I’ll bet our little friends are taking your dungballs to wherever the first one went.”
“Can you get some pictures from them, Juan?”
“ … Yes. Here’s one.” A thermal glimpse of a glowing tunnel floor. Frothy piles of something that looked like finely shredded paper. Seconds passed, and a virtual gleam showed dimly through the rock. “There’s the locator beacon of the first crumb.” It was five feet deeper in the rock. “Now it has a node to forward through.”
“We could lose them, too.”
Juan pushed past William, and tossed two more breadcrumbs down the hole. One rolled a good three feet. The other stopped after six inches—and then began moving “on its own.”
“The mice are stringing nodes
for
us!” All but the farthest locator beacon were glowing high-rate bright. Now there were lots of pictures, but the quality was poor. As the crumbs warmed in the hot air of the tunnels the images showed very little detail except for the mice themselves:
paws and snouts and glowing eyes. “Hey, did you see the splinter sticking out of that poor thing’s paw?”
“Yes, I think that’s the one I saw before. Wait, we’re getting a picture from the crumb they stole to begin with.” At first, the data was a jumble.
Still another picture format?
Not exactly. “This picture is normal vision, Miri!” He finished the transformation.
“How—?” Then she gave a sharp little gasp.
There was no scale marker, but the chamber couldn’t have been more than a couple of feet across. To the eye of the breadcrumb it was a wide, high-ceilinged meeting room, crowded with dozens of white-furred mice, their dark eyes glittering by the light of a … fire … in the middle of the hall.
“I think you have your ‘A,’ Miriam,” William said softly.
Miri didn’t answer.
Rank upon rank of mice, crouched around the fire. Three mice stood at the center, higher up—tending the flame? It wobbled and glowed, more like a candle than a bonfire. But the mice didn’t seem to be watching the fire as much as they were the breadcrumb. Bertie’s little breadcrumb was the magical arrival at their meeting.
“See!” Miri hunched forward, her elbows on her knees. “Foxwarner strikes again. A slow flame in a space like that … those ‘mice’ should all be dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

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