Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

  “That Gu kid is such a pain,” Rabbit continued. “Sometimes I think she—”

  Alfred waved his hand and the creature disappeared—along with all public network communication. There was now a deep local silence, a hard deadzone.

  But his milnet link was still in place, a fragile chain that led through his mobiles to his stealthed aerobot and thence across the Pacific. Alfred’s analyst pool in Mumbai was estimating sixty seconds till the deadzone got serious attention from the campus police and fire departments.

  Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz: This can’t be sustained, Alfred.

  Vaz --> Braun, Mitsuri: I’ll clear the deadzone in a few seconds. This was why successful missions had a Local Honcho. He probed the mobiles that had made it into the building: the children were about thirty feet away, well inside the deadzone, and still coming. He could hear them, right through the plastic wall. He glanced at the door; it was locked. Maybe he could pretend to be empty air while they pounded on the door. No, they’d just back off and call the police.

  Okay, time for direct action. Alfred set the two nearest mobiles into motion. These were network-superiority bots with essentially no antipersonnel capacity, but they would be a distraction. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the hall, confronting two children and a folded-up bicycle.

  “May I help you?”

  MIRI TRIED TO glare at the old fellow. Self-righteous indignation came hard when you were trespassing and trying to think of a good lie. And her link to the outside world was still fully dead.

  Juan stepped forward and just blathered out the truth. “We’re looking for Miri’s grandfather. We ping him somewhere behind you.”

  The janitor/professor/whatever shrugged. “There’s no one here but myself. As you know, network connections are very unreliable this evening. The building shouldn’t have allowed you down here. I’ll have to ask you to go back to the public area.” There was a sign by the door now, one of the standard biohazard symbols that covered a lot of the classrooms and labs in Pilchner Hall. You might think the public net was coming back up—except that Miri still couldn’t probe beyond her line of sight.

  Juan nodded as if the old man made perfect sense. He walked forward a couple more steps, at the same time relaying what he saw back to Miri. The room beyond was brightly lit. There was some kind of hole in the floor, and she could see the top of a metal ladder.

  “Okay,” said Juan agreeably. He was fiddling with something on his bike. But point-to-point, his words were on fire:

  Juan --> Miri: See the clothes! piled on the floor beside the pit.

  Miri --> Juan: Time to go. Get outside, get where they could call the cops. She shrugged, as casually as she could, and said, “We’ll be on our way then.”

  The stranger sighed. “No, it’s too late for that.” He started toward them. Behind her there was the snick of something hard on the floor and she saw dark things scuttling toward her.

  There was no way back and no way forward.

  And then Juan made a way forward. He bounced his bike toward the stranger. There was a screech of rubber. The wheels spun up with all the power from the regen brakes, and the bike exploded across the room, smashing into the stranger and the equipment behind him. Miri ran forward, toward the pit. “C’mon, Juan!” She knew where Robert must be, and how she could put out the alarm.

  She scrambled over the edge, saw metal rungs. “Juan!”

  Mr. Janitor/Professor was back on his feet and staggering forward. He had something pointy in his hand. Miri was frozen for an instant, watching the pointy thing swing toward her.

  Orozco was such a runt. He couldn’t stop someone like that. But he tried. The bad guy staggered back and the thing in his hand made a bright purple flash. Miri felt a numbing tingle all across her side. She tipped over the edge of the pit, managed to grab a ladder rung with the hand that still had feeling. But her feet swung through emptiness. She pawed with her numb hand, missed, and fell onto very hard concrete.

  All her imagery was gone; maybe her Epiphany was fried. But she could see the circle of light above, and she could hear.

  “Run Miri! Run—” Juan’s shout was cut off by a meaty crunching sound.

  Miri ran.

  23

  IN THE CATHEDRAL

  The UCSD library riot was the news of the evening. No doubt it would be echoing back and forth across the world for the next few weeks, a new twist in the trajectory of public entertainment. It was also a bright spot on Bob Gu’s situation board. Too bright. Bob watched the analysts—even people with specialties as remote as forensic virology—cluster around that single locus in Southern California.

  There are other things going on tonight, guys. The DEA raid in Kern County had triggered real violence in the Canadian North. That was outside of Bob’s watch area—but it might indicate that something more than simple enhancement drugs was involved. If not for the library riot, he’d be seeing dozens of theories floating up: Maybe the Kern County business was a cover for immigrant bashing. Maybe something more lethal than enhancements was involved. Analysts were great at such wild conjectures, and equally great at feeding on them, reducing them to rubble—or finding solid evidence and drawing in the firepower that Bob Gu commanded.

  But tonight—well, the UCSD riot did have the taint of a classic diversion, covering something big and bad and elsewhere in CONUS Southwest. Alice had doubled the size of the analyst pool. Now there were specialists from the Centers for Disease Control, even folks from other Watches. Normally, she would have groomed her unruly mob of specialists; she had the breadth and the depth and the charisma to bring even academic civilians into line. But tonight, Alice was part of the problem. Every time he redirected the group into a wider view, she drew it back. She was the one who had diverted the virologists. There was a tight little cluster of bioscience types that grew brighter and closer, bandwidths rising. Alice was not studying the riot per se, but its connections to the bioscience labs that surrounded the school. Except for the diversion of their night staff, the labs showed all green. And the harder she pounded on the lab network security, the cleaner it looked.

  It’s the damn JITT. Alice had just completed her Training for the bio lab audit. That had been the most extensive JITT she had ever undertaken. At this moment, he’d guess there wasn’t anyone in the world with more knowledge of lab automation and associated research. I should talk to her direct, no more polite redirections…Hell, if she won’t back off, I should relieve her! And those thoughts were much too like their recent fights at home.

  So it was Bob who drew back. He sat and watched the correlations, the statistical outliers. He moved his group members away from San Diego issues. They would be the tripwires if UCSD was a diversion.

  The bioscience pool just got brighter. Alice had preempted CDC’s genomics division. He would hear about that in the after-action meetings. He had a cold intuition. Tonight could be the night. The thing he personally feared as much as anything in the world, the possibility Alice always denied. Is she slipping away? What would a full-sized JITT collapse be like for someone who had Trained a dozen times more than the worst JITT-head in a VA hospital?

  “DID YOU HEAR something?”

  “Like what, Tommie?”

  “You know, like a distant thump.”

  They stopped and looked back. Winnie made an indignant noise. This was like the old days, when Tommie was always working to increase the suspense of their illicit expeditions.

  Tommie hesitated. He was leading from behind so that the fine fiber he was paying out wouldn’t get trampled by the others. He listened for a moment more, and then turned to catch up. “Maybe it was nothing…but the fiber went dead for moment, too.” He glanced down at his laptop. “It looks okay now.” He waved them up the tunnel, into the dark beyond their little pool of light. “Keep going.”

  The first part of the tunnel had been very familiar, an eerie walk down memory lane. There was a time, now more than fift
y years past, when all of them but Carlos had explored the tunnels. Tommie Parker had been a smartass freshman showing off to a couple of grad students who often wondered how they had been inveigled into such harebrained expeditions.

  As they walked farther on, things became less familiar. Glassy tubes ran along the walls. Robert saw signs printed on the walls, cryptic physical backup for nodes that wouldn’t respond to his computer box. Thunk. Something white and the size of a volleyball whizzed by in one tube. Thunk, thunk. Similar traffic in the opposite direction. Pneumatic tubes had once been a sign of the brave new world. When Robert was a child, he’d seen such things in dying department stores. “Why the pneumo tubes, Tommie?”

  “Well, this is where theory meets reality. Proteomics, genomics, regulomics—you name the ‘omic,’ and it’s here. These labs are huge. The local data traffic is a million times what you have on a public trunk, with the latencies of a home network. But they still need to look at real biologicals. Sometimes they gotta move samples—transport trays for short moves, pneumos for longer ones. GenGen even has its own UP/Express launcher, for shipping parcels to other labs around the world.”

  Now Robert heard sounds from the darkness ahead of them, voices that never quite made recognizable words, clicking that might have been old-time typewriters. This is science?

  Carlos said, “When I try to probe the local net, all I see are the bare walls.”

  “I told you. Talking to the labnet would make this scam way too complicated.”

  “The tunnel must know we’re here.” They walked in a small pool of light. Behind and ahead of them, the tunnel was dark.

  “Yup. It knows we’re here. But you might say that’s only at a subconscious level.”

  Robert was in the lead. He pointed at the wall just at the front edge of the light. “What about these signs?” The letters were physically painted on the wall:

  5PBps:Prot<->Geno. 10PBps:Multi

  That brought Tommie forward. “Maybe it’s the General Genomics crossbar!” He held his prayer wheel high, waving the fiber out and away from the others. The Stranger was visible beside Tommie, but down here the monster couldn’t quite locate itself. Its feet floated above the floor, and its gaze was wrong by ninety degrees.

  Tommie pointed his laptop so its camera could see the lettering. “I have to admit, this fiber link is handy. I can send video out to my consultancy.” Invisible to Tommie, the Mysterious Stranger jerked a thumb at itself and grinned. Tommie studied his laptop’s display for a moment. “Yes! We have reached the GenGen optical crossbar.” He pointed down the side tunnel. “This is where things get tricky.”

  Within fifty feet, the side tunnel had opened into something wider…something cavernous. In the shadows, something slanted into the heights. “See that tower?” said Tommie. “That’s GenGen’s private launcher. These guys don’t bother with the launchers in East County.”

  The clickety sound was all around them now. It came from the tops of equipment cabinets; it had a pattern, like poetry scanned purely for stress. At the end of a stanza, things actually moved. Light glittered from deep within matted crystals. Some of the cabinets had a physical label:

  Mus MCog.

  The Stranger danced among them, a fantasy from Tommie’s laptop and the fiber behind them. But the fantasy was watching through the laptop’s camera, and talking—at least to Robert. The Stranger pointed in the general direction of the crystals. “The wonders of nano-fluidics. A decade of old-time bioscience done in every shifting of the lights. How do you represent a trillion samples, and a billion trillion analyses? How can art deal with that?” It hesitated as if truly anxious for an answer, and then it was gone again. But it left behind its own labels and explanations.

  Robert looked at the ranks of machines, the tower almost lost in the distant dark. The place was a machine cathedral. But how to represent it, when it would take him years to have even shallow understanding? The massed crystal was not spectacularly colored; most of the fluid paths were microscopic and hidden within appliances that might have been oversized refrigerators. The Stranger’s labels floated randomly about, ghostly subtitles to some transcendent process. And yet, it almost made him remember what he had lost; words burbled up within his imagination, words striving to capture the awe he felt.

  They walked down the narrow aisles, turning only when Tommie told them to turn. Every minute or so, he would stop their progress and grab a few more gadgets from the backpacks.

  “We gotta install these just right, guys. Staying invisible here is a lot harder than in the tunnel.” Tommie wanted the gadgets set near comm nodes, which turned out to be way back within the fluidics crystals. Robert did most of the “installing.” Carlos would boost him up over the top of the cabinet. Robert would wiggle back, so near the glassworks that he could hear tiny, tiny clicks and the fluid hissing so faintly it might have been seepage. In their millions, those sounds added up to the larger atmosphere of the room.

  In one case, Robert lingered, and noticed that the gadget itself took care of final installation, sliding away from him, deeper into the glassworks—as if its underside were a miniature transport tray.

  “What are you laughing at, Gu?” Blount’s voice came from below.

  “Nothing!” Robert crawled off the cabinet and dropped to the floor. “I just figured out a little mystery.”

  They continued on. Most of the cabinets were labeled Dros MCog now. They were making faster progress, mainly because Carlos and Robert had figured out the gymnastics of the operation.

  “That’s the last of them, guys!” Tommie’s gaze shifted from his laptop to the fluidics crystals. “You know, it’s really weird that all the node locations were so deep in the lab equipment,” he said.

  The Mysterious Stranger slipped in front of Tommie and waggled greenish fingers at Robert and Carlos and Winnie Blount. “That’s not a mystery to follow up on. Why doesn’t someone suggest that we get on with Tommie’s great plan, eh?”

  No one said anything for a moment, but Robert guessed two things about what they had just done: It was what they had really come here for. It was how the Stranger might make good on his promises. Maybe Carlos and Winnie realized something similar, because suddenly all of them were talking. Blount waved the others silent and turned to Parker. “Who knows, Tommie? You said this was subtle. It might take weeks to figure out just how everything fits together.”

  “Yup, yup,” Tommie nodded, oblivious of the Stranger’s satisfied look. “Time for analysis later!” He glanced down at his laptop. “In any case this was the hard part. Now we have a clear run to where Huertas stores the shredda.”

  THEY DIDN’T SET down any more gadgets. Tommie’s laptop advised speed, and therefore so did Tommie. Whatever the Mysterious Stranger planned for GenGen no longer needed them. Robert glanced back. Winnie was out of breath, almost trotting. The Stranger must have given him some special encouragement. And behind Carlos, Tommie spun his prayer wheel, drifting the spider thread out behind them.

  Suddenly the concrete floor gave way to something that bounced back against their feet. And the sound of their steps was like tapping on a vast and tightly fitted drum.

  “When does a tunnel fly?” said Tommie. “When it’s really a tunnel in the sky!” And suddenly, Robert realized where they were. This was one of the enclosed walkways that came off the side of Rose Canyon, just north of campus. Right now they were standing in a tube seventy feet above the brush- and manzanita-covered hillside.

  Then they were back on concrete. Ahead was another cavern, and this one was almost empty. Huertas country.

  MIRI RAN, BUT a spotlight followed. No, that was just normal tunnel lighting. She slowed, stopped, slid up against the wall…and looked back. No human followed. The entrance hole was the only other light, and now it was some distance behind her. Juan!

  She watched it and listened. If no one was coming after her, that might mean that UCSD security was still working down here.

  She tried to prob
e the walls. She called 911. Again. Nothing. Maybe the Badguy had permanently zapped her Epiphany. She shrugged up some test routines. No, it wasn’t dead. She could see her files, but every local node was ignoring her. Then she noticed the pink flicker at the edge of the diagnostic, a wireless response that her Epiphany would normally have discarded as too distant, too erratic. A second passed, heaven knew how many retries, and she got an ID. It was Juan, his wearable.

  Miri --> Juan: Please answer!

  No reply came back, and she couldn’t check his medicals without more access rights.

  Abruptly Juan’s light flared, died. Miri sucked in a breath. Mr. Janitor/Professor was still up there. He had whacked poor Juan again. No, be precise: he had whacked Juan’s gear again, maybe just to prevent Miri from forwarding out through it. For a moment, Miri drew in on herself. It was not a good thing that all her planning and leadership could come to this. Alice never seemed to have these problems. She always knew what to do next. Bob…sometimes Bob made mistakes. He was the one who always seemed uneasy about certainty. I wonder what Bob would think of all this?…I wonder what Juan would do?

  Miri looked down the tunnel, away from the entrance. It was dark, but it wasn’t perfectly quiet. There might be voices, chatting conversationally, never quite making words. Robert and his library friends were down here, surely being run as cat’s-paws by Mr. Janitor/Professor. How can I wreck his plan? Miri got to her feet and ran quietly up the tunnel, still trapped in her own private pool of light. No sign of Robert, and none of the mumbled voices sounded quite right. She passed occasional cross tunnels. Small things whizzed down transparent tubes.

  SOME MINUTES LATER, and still no sign of Robert.

  Miri read as she ran along; she had cached plenty about UCSD and the biotechs. There was proprietary and security stuff she couldn’t know, but…the cross tunnels led off to particular labs. Three hundred acres in seventeen separate chambers!