The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  His hands reached again for the metal band, twitching with indecision; jerked back as Jagit suddenly smiled at him. The dark eyes opened and the peddler sat forward, taking the metal band gently from his own head with a sigh. “I’m glad you waited. You’ll probably never know how glad.” Wim’s grin became real, and relieved.

  Jagit got unsteadily to his feet, glanced at Aydricks’s body and shook his head; his face was haggard. “Said you might be a help, didn’t I?” Wim stood phlegmatically while the peddler who was as old as Sharn itself unfastened the cords on his raw wrists. “I’d say our business is finished. You ready to get out of here? We don’t have much time.”

  Wim started for the door in response, opened it, and came face-to-face with the unsummoned guard standing in the hall. His fist connected with the gaping jaw; the guard’s knees buckled and he dropped to the floor, unconscious. Wim picked up the guard’s rifle as Jagit appeared beside him, motioning him down the dim hallway.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Let’s hope they’re home in bed; it’s four-thirty in the morning. There shouldn’t be any alarms.”

  Wim laughed giddily. “This’s a sight easier than getting away from the Borks!”

  “We’re not away yet; we may be too late already. Those faces on the wall were trying to drop a—piece of sun on Fyffe. I think I stopped them, but I don’t know for sure. If it wasn’t a total success, I don’t want to find out the hard way.” He led Wim back down the wide stairway, into the empty hall where petitioners had gathered during the day. Wim started across the echoing floor but Jagit called him back, peering at something on the wall; they went down another flight into a well of darkness, guided by the peddler’s magic light. At the foot of the stairs the way was blocked by a door, solidly shut. Jagit looked chagrined, then suddenly the beam of his light shone blue; he flashed it against a metal plate set in the door. The door slid back and he went through it.

  Wim followed him, into a cramped, softly glowing cubicle nearly filled by three heavily padded seats around a peculiar table. Wim noticed they seemed to be bolted to the floor, and suddenly felt claustrophobic.

  “Get into a seat, Wim. Thank God I was right about this tower being a ballistic exit. Strap in, because we’re about to use it.” He began to push lighted buttons on the table before him.

  Wim fumbled with the restraining straps, afraid to wonder what the peddler thought they were doing, as a heavy inner door shut the room off from the outside. Why weren’t they out of the building, running? How could this—Something pressed him down into the seat cushions like a gentle, insistent hand. His first thought was of another trap; but as the pressure continued, he realized this was something new. And then, glancing up past Jagit’s intent face, he saw that instead of blank walls, they were now surrounded by the starry sky of night. He leaned forward—and below his feet was the town of Fyffe, shrinking away with every heartbeat, disappearing into the greater darkness. He saw what the eagle saw…he was flying. He sat back again, feeling for the reassuring hardness of the invisible floor, only to discover suddenly that his feet no longer touched it. There was no pressure bearing him down now, there was nothing at all. His body drifted against the restraining straps, lighter than a bird. A small sound of incredulous wonder escaped him as he stared out at the unexpected stars.

  And saw a brightness begin to grow at the opaque line of the horizon, spreading and creeping upward second by second, blotting out the stars with the fragile hues of dawn. The sun’s flaming face thrust itself up past the edge of the world, making him squint, rising with arcane speed and uncanny brilliance into a sky that remained stubbornly black with night. At last the whole sphere of the sun was revealed, and continued to climb in the midnight sky while now Wim could see a thin streak of sky-blue stretched along the horizon, left behind with the citron glow of dawn still lighting its center. Above the line in darkness the sun wore the pointed crown of a star that dimmed all others, and below it he could see the world at the horizon’s edge moving into day. And the horizon did not lie absolutely flat, but was bowing gently downward now at the sides…Below his feet was still the utter darkness that had swallowed Fyffe. He sighed.

  “Quite a view.” Jagit sat back from the glowing table, drifting slightly above his seat, a tired smile on his face.

  “You see it too?” Wim said hoarsely.

  The peddler nodded. “I felt the same way, the first time. I guess everyone always has. Every time civilization has gained space flight, it’s been rewarded again by that sight.”

  Wim said nothing, unable to find the words. His view of the bowed horizon had changed subtly, and now as he watched there came a further change—the sun began, slowly but perceptibly, to move backward down its track, sinking once more toward the point of dawn that had given it birth. Or, he suddenly saw, it was they who were slipping, back down from the heights of glory into his world’s darkness once more. Wim waited while the sun sank from the black and alien sky, setting where it had risen, its afterglow reabsorbed into night as the edge of the world blocked his vision again. He dropped to the seat of his chair, as though the world had reclaimed him, and the stars reappeared. A heavy lurch, like a blow, shook the cubicle, and then all motion stopped.

  He sat still, not understanding, as the door slid back in darkness and a breath of cold, sharp air filled the tiny room. Beyond the doorway was darkness again, but he knew it was not the night of a building hallway.

  Jagit fumbled wearily with the restraining straps on his seat. “Home the same day…”

  Wim didn’t wait, but driven by instinct freed himself and went to the doorway. And jerked to a stop as he discovered they were no longer at ground level. His feet found the ladder, and as he stepped down from its bottom rung he heard and felt the gritty shifting of gravel. The only other sounds were the sigh of the icy wind, and water lapping. As his eyes adjusted they told him what his other senses already knew—that he was home. Not Darkwood Corners, but somewhere in his own cruelly beautiful Highlands. Fanged shadow peaks rose up on either hand, blotting out the stars, but more stars shone in the smooth waters of the lake; they shivered slightly, as he shivered in the cold breeze, clammy with sweat under his thin shirt. He stood on the rubble of a mountain pass somewhere above the treeline, and in the east the gash between the peaks showed pinkish-gray with returning day.

  Behind him he heard Jagit, and turned to see the peddler climbing slowly down the few steps to the ground. From outside, the magician’s chamber was the shape of a truncated rifle bullet. Jagit carried the guard’s stolen rifle, leaning on it now like a walking stick. “Well, my navigation hasn’t failed me yet.” He rubbed his eyes, stretched.

  Wim recalled making a certain comment about flying over the moon on a broomstick, too long ago, and looked again at the dawn, this time progressing formally and peacefully up a lightening sky. “We flew here. Didn’t we, Mr. Jagged?” His teeth chattered. “Like a bird. Only…we f-flew right off the world.” He stopped, awed by his own revelation. For a moment a lifetime of superstitious dread cried that he had no right to know of the things he had seen, or to believe—The words burst out in a defiant rush. “That’s it. Right off the world. And…and it’s all true: I heard how the world’s round like a stone. It must be true, how there’s other worlds, that’s what you said back there, with people just like here; I seen it, the sun’s like all them other stars, only it’s bigger…” He frowned. “It’s—closer? I—”

  Jagit was grinning, his teeth showed white in his beard. “Magician, first-class.”

  Wim looked back up into the sky. “If that don’t beat all—” he said softly. Then, struck by more practical matters, he said. “What about them ghosts? Are they going to come after us?”

  Jagit shook his head. “No. I think I laid those ghosts to rest pretty permanently. I changed the code words in their communications system. A good part of it is totally unusable now. Their computer net is broken up, and their space defense system must be out for good, because
they didn’t destroy Fyffe. I’d say the World Government is finished; they don’t know it yet, and they may not go for a few hundred years, but they’ll go in the end. Their grand ‘stability’ machine has a monkey wrench in its works at last…They won’t be around to use their magic in these parts anymore, I expect.”

  Wim considered, and then looked hopeful. “You going to take over back there, Mr. Jagged? Use your magic on them Flatlanders? We could—”

  But the peddler shook his head. “No, I’m afraid that just doesn’t interest me, Wim. All I really wanted was to break the hold those other magician sorts had on this world; and I’ve done that already.”

  “Then…you mean you really did all that, you risked our necks, for nothing? Like you said, because it just wasn’t right, for them to use their magic on folks who couldn’t stop them? You did it for us—and you didn’t want anything? You must be crazy.”

  Jagit laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t say that. I told you before; All I want is to be able to see new sights, and sell my wares. And the World Government was bad for my business.”

  Wim met the peddler’s gaze, glanced away undecided. “Where you going to go now?” He half expected the answer to be, Back beyond the sky.

  “Back to bed.” Jagit left the ballistic vehicle, and began to climb the rubbly slope up from the lake; he gestured for Wim to follow.

  Wim followed, breathing hard in the thin air, until they reached a large fall of boulders before a sheer granite wall. Only when he was directly before it did he realize they had come on the entrance to a cave hidden by the rocks. He noticed that the opening was oddly symmetrical; and there seemed to be a rainbow shimmering across the darkness like mist. He stared at it uncomprehendingly, rubbing his chilled hands.

  “This is where I came from, Wim. Not from the East, as you figured, or from space as the governor thought.” The peddler nodded toward the dark entrance. “You see, the World Government had me entirely misplaced—they assumed I could only have come from somewhere outside their control. But actually I’ve been here on earth all the time; this cave has been my home for fifty-seven thousand years. There’s a kind of magic in there that puts me into an ‘enchanted’ sleep for five or ten thousand years at a time here. And meanwhile the world changes. When it’s changed enough, I wake up again and go out to see it. That’s what I was doing in Sharn, ten thousand years ago: I brought artworks from an earlier, primitive era; they were popular, and I got to be something of a celebrity. That way I got access to my new items of trade—my Sharnish magics—to take somewhere else, when things changed again.

  “That was the problem with the World Government—they interrupted the natural cycles of history that I depend on, and it threw me out of synch. They’d made stability such a science they might have kept things static for fifty or a hundred thousand years. Ten or fifteen thousand, and I could have come back here and outwaited them, but fifty thousand was just too long. I had to get things moving again, or I’d have been out of business.”

  Wim’s imagination faltered at the prospect of the centuries that separated him from the peddler, that separated the peddler from everything that had ever been a part of the man, or ever could be. What kind of belief did it take, what sort of a man, to face that alone? And what losses or rewards to drive him to it? There must be something, that made it all worthwhile—

  “There have been more things done, Wim, than the descendants of Sharn have dreamed. I am surprised at each new peak I attend…I’ll be leaving you now. You were a better guide than I expected; I thank you for it. I’d say Darkwood Corners is two or three days journey northwest from here.”

  Wim hesitated, half afraid, half longing. “Let me go with you—?”

  Jagit shook his head. “There’s only room for one, from here on. But you’ve seen a few more wonders than most people already; and I think you’ve learned a few things, too. There are going to be a lot of opportunities for putting it all to use right here, I’d say. You helped change your world, Wim—what are you going to do for an encore?”

  Wim stood silent with indecision; Jagit lifted the rifle, tossed it to him.

  Wim caught the gun, and a slow smile, filled with possibilities, grew on his face.

  “Good-bye, Wim.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Jagged.” Wim watched the peddler move away toward his cave.

  As he reached the entrance, Jagit hesitated, looking back. “And Wim—there are more wonders in this cave than you’ve ever dreamed of. I haven’t been around this long because I’m an easy mark. Don’t be tempted to grave-rob.” He was outlined momentarily by rainbow as he passed into the darkness.

  Wim lingered at the entrance, until at last the cold forced him to move and he picked his way back down the sterile gray detritus of the slope. He stopped again by the mirror lake, peering back past the magician’s bullet-shaped vehicle at the cliff face. The rising sun washed it in golden light, but now somehow he really wasn’t even sure where the cave had been.

  He sighed, slinging his rifle over his shoulder, and began the long walk home.

  LORD BUCKRY SIGHED as memories receded, and with them the gnawing desire to seek out the peddler’s cave again; the desire that had been with him for thirty years. There lay the solutions to every problem he had ever faced, but he had never tested Jagged’s warning. It wasn’t simply the risk, though the risk was both deadly and sufficient—it was the knowledge that however much he gained in this life, it was ephemeral, less than nothing, held up to a man whose life spanned half that of humanity itself. Within the peddler’s cave lay the impossible, and that was why he would never try to take it for his own.

  Instead he had turned to the possible and made it fact, depending on himself, and on the strangely clear view of things the peddler had left him. He had solved every problem alone, because he had had to, and now he would just have to solve this one alone too.

  He stared down with sudden possessive pride over the townsfolk in the square, his city of Fyffe now ringed by a sturdy wall…So the West and the South were together, for one reason, and one alone. It balanced the scales precariously against plenty of old hatreds, and if something were to tip them back again—A few rumors, well-placed, and they’d be at each other’s throats. Perhaps he wouldn’t even need to raise an army. They’d solve that problem for him. And afterward—

  Lord Buckry began to smile. He’d always had a hankering to visit the sea.

  I confess I don’t know Jagit’s real motives. I can imagine the character, what he said and did, but as for motive…Jagit’s explanation for destroying the current civilization is certainly reasonable: the World Government was frustrating whatever reason Jagit had for traveling down time. Maybe he was just a merchant with a desire to see new things, but I think he had an additional agenda: Perhaps he wondered why the Singularity never occurred, and was searching for a civilization that would finally break free from the wheel of fate. Perhaps all the previous civilizations had ended in Singularities, leaving Jagit to make sure that it could happen again. Rereading the story, I feel very much like Wim at the end, awed…and a little afraid to learn the truth.

  Did you guess where I stopped writing and Joan began? The last thing I did was the rescue from Axl Bork’s gang. I wrote my part of the story over a summer, one page per day (for me, a strange way to write—but fun). Beyond the rescue scene I had only general ideas, and things stagnated; finishing the story was a fortunate and interesting collaboration.

  THE UNGOVERNED

  At least four of the stories in this collection take place in the aftermath of a catastrophic war. A couple of them use the setting as a stage for admonishment. But there is another reason for some post-catastrophe stories: such a war could postpone the Technological Singularity and leave the world intelligible to us mere humans. Lots of writers have earned their fortunes “in the aftermath” when high tech and medievalism can be jumbled in many different ways.

  It’s hard to know the long-range consequences of a general war. Conceivably it cou
ld mean the end of the human race. The war and the years immediately after would be as terrible as advertised. But the race would probably survive. Such a war would be a great detour into darkness, but as the years passed and the survivors grew old, and their children’s children became adults…the bad times would be remembered as a distant misfortune. There could be happiness and bright times for those descendants; the war might be the end of our world, but not of theirs. Most of our informational heritage exists in a million libraries, even more robust than humanity. And I don’t buy the arguments that technology couldn’t restart because our civilization has consumed all the easily accessible resources. With the exception of petroleum, post-debacle civilizations might well find Earth’s resources more accessible than before. (Non-poisoned urban ruins make great open pit mines.)

  In some scenarios, the post-war civilization might have high levels of education and a clear vision of the past. This is the sort of background I have in the next story: I suppose that luck finally runs out for our current civilization, that we have a general war and worse times than I can describe (or want to imagine). Yet at the far end of it all there is another opportunity for prosperity and progress. I especially wanted to investigate two questions in this story: What sort of government might exist in such an era? How would the new civilization deal with nuclear weapons, and the possibility that everything gained could be lost again? The story’s title reveals my answer to the first question. My answer to the second is equally radical.