The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  “Why, yes, Mary.”

  “And in a few decades, we will be the same as you with all your…perversions and violence and death?”

  “Don’t say it that way, Mary. You’ll have Mikin cultures, with some Terran enclaves. Nothing could have stopped this. But at least you won’t be killed. I’ve saved—”

  For an instant I thought I’d been shot in the face. My mind did three lazy loops, before I realized that Mary had just delivered a roundhouse slap. “You green-faced thing,” she hissed. “You’ve saved us nothing. Look at this street. Look! It’s quiet. No one’s killing anyone. Most people are tolerably happy. This suburb is not old, but its way of life is—almost five hundred years old. We’ve tried very hard in that time to make it better, and we’ve succeeded in many ways. Now, just as we’re on the verge of discovering how all people can live in peace, you monsters breeze in. You’ll rip up our cities. ‘They are too big’ you say. You’ll destroy our police forces. ‘Monopolistic enterprise’ you call them. And in a few years we’ll have a planet-wide Clowntown. We’ll have to treat each other as animals in order to survive on these oh-so-generous terms you offer us!” She paused, out of breath, but not out of anger.

  And for the first time I saw the real fear she had tried to express from the first. She was afraid of dying—of her race dying; everybody had those fears. But what was just as important to her was her home, her family, her friends. The shopping center, the games, the theaters, the whole concept of courtesy. My people weren’t going to kill her body, that was true, but we were destroying all the things that give meaning to life. I hadn’t found a solution—I’d just invented murder without bloodshed. Somehow I had to make it right.

  I tried to reach my arm around her. “I love you, Mary.” The words came out garbled, incomprehensible. “I love you, Mary,” more clearly this time.

  I don’t think she even heard. She pushed away hysterically. “Horlig was the one who was right. Not you. It is better to fight and die than—” She didn’t finish. She hit frantically and inexpertly at my face and chest. She’d never had any training, but those were hard, determined blows and they were doing damage. I knew I couldn’t stop her, short of injuring her. I stood up under that rain of blows and made for the steps. She followed, fighting, crying.

  I stumbled off the steps. She stayed on the porch, crying in a low gurgle. I limped past the street lamp and into the darkness.

  So there you have it: anarchy stabilized by antitrust laws! I certainly wouldn’t suggest that in our real world, where such laws are chiefly used to maintain monopolies of power. With my alien invaders, the “laws” were more a matter of religious custom. Still, I suspect that the scheme’s success must be the most alien thing about these aliens.

  THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME

  As history extends past a Great War, the horror may be gone but there might be a feeling of sadness for the lost “golden age,” for the mistakes that were made. I think that theme is clear in “Apartness” and “Conquest by Default.” These two stories have little editorializing about the cause of the Great War or the nature of the aggressors; such issues are irrelevant to my protagonists. I did write one story, though, where one side won with a nuclear attack.

  Back around 1970, I noticed a comment in Aviation Week that the (then) planned Sprint anti-ballistic missile could go from launch to 60,000 feet in four seconds. Scale that up just a little bit and there is an interesting side effect. The idea went onto a three-by-five card and into the little wooden box where I kept inspirations deferred. Eventually, it became “The Whirligig of Time.” It was published in 1974, long before SDI.

  ____________________

  The defense station high in the Laguna Mountains had been on alert since dawn. The clear fall day had passed without event, and now the dark was closing in over the pine-covered hills. A cool, dry wind blew among the trees, nudged at the deep layers of pine needles and slid around the defense station’s armored cupolas. Overhead, between the dark silhouettes of the pines, the stars were out, brighter and more numerous than they could ever seem in a city’s sky.

  To the west, limning the dark Pacific, a narrow band of greenish yellow was all that was left of day, and the city was a fine dusting of light spread inward from the ocean. From the Laguna Mountains, eighty kilometers inland, the city seemed a surrealistic carpet of tiny glowing gems—the most precious of the treasures this station had been constructed to protect.

  This was the last moment of comfortable tranquility that this land would know for many, many centuries.

  The life in the forest—the birds asleep in the trees, the squirrels in their holes—heard and felt nothing; but deep within the station men looked out into space with microwave eyes, saw the tiny specks rising beyond the polar horizon, plotted their trajectories and predicted that hell would burn in heaven and on earth this night.

  On the surface, concrete and steel cowlings whirred open to reveal the lasers and ABMs now tracking the enemies falling out of space. The birds fluttered nervously about their trees now, disturbed by the noises below, and a faint red light shone up from the holes in the ground. Yet from the next ridgeline over, the night would still have seemed silent, and the starlit pine forest undisturbed.

  Halfway up in the northern sky, three new stars lit, so bright that a blue-white day shone on the forest, still silent. Their glare faded swiftly through orange to red and guttered out, leaving a play of pale green and gold to spread through the sky. Those pastel colors were the only visible sign of the immense fog of charged particles the explosions had set between ground radars and the missiles that were yet to come. The men in the station held their fire. The explosions had not completely blinded them—they still had a proxy view of part of the battle space from a synchronous satellite—but the distance to their targets was far too great.

  In the skies to the north and east more miniature stars were visible—mostly defensive fires. The unnatural aurora spread from horizon to horizon, yet in the west the lights of the city glowed as placidly, as beautifully, as before the end began.

  Now the defenders’ radars could pick up the enemy warheads falling out of the ionospheric fog that had concealed them. But not one of the incoming missiles was targeted on the city to the west—all were falling in toward the defense station and the ICBM bases in the desert to the east. The defenders noticed this but had no time to puzzle over it. Their own destruction was seconds away unless they acted. The station’s main laser fired, and the pines and the hills flashed red by its reflected light. The ten-centimeter beam was a hundred-kilometer-tall thread of fire, disappearing only at the top of the sensible atmosphere where there was no more air to be ionized. Its sound, the sound of whole tons of air being turned into plasma, was a bone-shattering crack that echoed off the distant hills to sweep back and forth across the land.

  Now there was nothing left asleep in the forest.

  And when the beam itself was gone, there—high in the sky—hung a pale blue thread, with a nob of faintly glowing yellow and gold at one end. The first target, at least, had been destroyed; the beam was so energetic it created its own miniature aurora as it passed through the ionosphere, and the knob at the end of it marked a vaporized target.

  Then the other lasers began firing, and the sky was crisscrossed by strange red lightning. The ABMs streaking from the hillside contributed their own peculiar roar to this local armageddon. The tiny rockets were like flecks of molten metal spewed up on rays of fire and smoke. Their success or failure was determined in the scant five seconds of their powered flight—five seconds in which they climbed more than thirty kilometers into the sky. The spaces above the hills were filled with bright new stars, and the more frequent—yet less impressive—glows that marked successful laser interceptions.

  For seventy-five seconds the battle in the spaces over the defense station continued. During that time the men could do little but sit and watch their machines—the defense demanded microsecond reflexes, and only the machines could prov
ide that. In those seventy-five million microseconds, the station destroyed dozens of enemy missiles. Only ten of the attacking bombs got through; bright blue flashes on the eastern horizon marked the end of the ICBM bases there. Yet even those ten might have been intercepted, if only the station had not held back its reserve, waiting for the attack that must sooner or later come upon the great city to the west.

  Seventy-five seconds—and the city they waited to protect still lay glowing beneath the yellow-green sky.

  And then, from the middle of the gleaming carpet that was the city, one more new star was born. In an astronomical sense, it was a very small star; but to itself and to what lay nearby, it was an expanding, gaseous hell of fission-fusion products, neutrons, and X rays.

  In seconds the city ceased to be, and the defenders in the mountains realized why all the enemy missiles had been targeted on military installations, realized what must be happening to the larger cities all across the land, realized how much easier it had been for the enemy to smuggle his bombs into the nation’s cities than to drop them in along ballistic trajectories.

  FROM WHERE THE YACHT floated, a million kilometers above the ecliptic and six million behind the Earth in its orbit, the home planet was a marbled bluish ball, nearly as bright as a full moon yet only a quarter the size. The moon itself, a couple of degrees farther out from the sun, shone twice as bright as Venus. The rest of heaven seemed infinitely far away, misty sweeps of stars at the bottom of an endless well.

  By the blue-white sunlight, the yacht was a three-hundred-meter silver crescent, devoid of fins and aerials and ports. In fact, the only visible marking was the Imperial escutcheon—a scarlet wreath and a five-pointed star—just short of the nose.

  But from within, a large part of that hull was not opaque. Arching over the main deck it was as clear, as transparent, as the air of a desert night; and the lords and ladies attending the Prince’s birthday party could see the Earth-Moon system hanging just above the artificial horizon created by the intersection of deck and hull. The scene was lost on most of them. Only a few ever bothered to look up into the strange sky. They were the fifteenth generation of an aristocracy that regarded the entire universe as its just due. They would have been just as bored—or just as amused—at Luna or back on the Avstralijan Riviera on Earth.

  In all the two-million-ton bulk of the yacht, perhaps only four or five people were really aware of the surrounding emptiness:

  Vanja Biladze floated near the center of the yacht’s tiny control cabin—he liked to keep it at zero gee—steadying himself with one hand draped negligently around a wall strap. His three-man crew sat belted down to control saddles before the computer inputs and the holo-screens. Biladze gestured at the gray-white cone that tumbled slowly across the central screen. “Do you have any idea what it is, Boblanson?” he asked the fifth man in the control cabin.

  The little man called Boblanson had just entered the cabin from the kennels belowdecks, and he still looked a bit green about the gills. His rickets-bent hands held tightly to the wall straps as his balding head bobbed about in an attempt to focus on the screen. The three crewmen seemed as intrigued by this twisted dwarf as by what the long-range scope was throwing on their screen. The men were new to the Imperial yacht, and Biladze guessed they had never before seen a non-Citizen in person. Outside of the Preserves, about the only place one could be found was in the Emperor’s menageries.

  Boblanson’s nearsighted eyes squinted for a long moment at the screen. The ship’s computer had superimposed a reticle on the image, indicating the cone was about a meter wide and perhaps three meters long. Ranging figures printed below the reticle showed the object was more than two hundred kilometers away. Even at that range the synthetic aperture scope resolved a lot of detail. The cone was not a smooth, uniform gray but was scored with hundreds of fine lines drawn parallel to its axis. There were no aerials or solar panels protruding from the cone. Every fifteen seconds the base of the object rotated into view, a dark uninformative hole.

  The little man licked his lips nervously. If it had been possible to grovel in zero gee, Biladze was sure that Boblanson would have done so. “It is marvelous, Your Eminence. An artifact, to be sure.”

  One of the crewmen rolled his eyes. “We know that, you idiot. The question is, would the Prince be interested in it? We were told you are his expert on pre-Imperial spacecraft.”

  Boblanson bobbed his head emphatically, and the rest of his body bobbed in sympathy. “Yes, Eminence. I was born in the Prince’s Kalifornija Preserve. For all these centuries, my tribes have passed from father to son the lore of the Great Enemy. Many times the Prince has sent me to explore the glowing ruins within the Preserves. I have learned all I can of the past.”

  The crewman opened his mouth—no doubt to give his acid opinion of illiterate savages who pose as archeologists—but Biladze broke in before the other could speak. The crewman was new to the Court, but not so new that he could get away with insulting the Prince’s judgment. Biladze knew that every word spoken in the control cabin was monitored by Safety Committee agents hidden elsewhere in the ship, and every maneuver the crew undertook was analyzed by the Safety Committee’s computers. Citizens of the Empire were used to surveillance, but few realized just how pervasive any eavesdropping could be until they entered the Imperial Service. “Let me rephrase Kolja’s question,” said Biladze. “As you know, we’re tracking back along Earth’s orbit. Eventually—in another fifteen hours, if we hadn’t stopped for this thing—we will be far enough back to encounter objects in trojan orbits. Now there is some reason to believe that at least a few of the probes launched into Earthlike orbits eventually wound up near Earth’s trojan points—”

  “Yes, Eminence, I suggested the idea,” said Boblanson. So there is spirit in you after all, thought Biladze with surprise; perhaps the little man knew that the Prince’s pets sometimes counted for more than an Imperial Citizen. And the fellow’s education obviously went beyond the folktales his tribe passed from generation to generation. The idea of looking for artifacts near the trojan points was clever, though Biladze guessed that careful analysis would show it to be impractical for at least two different reasons. But the Prince rarely bothered with careful analysis.

  “In any case,” continued Vanja Biladze, “we’ve found something, but it’s nowhere near our destination. Perhaps the Prince will not be interested. After all, the chief reason for this excursion is to celebrate his birthday. We are not sure if the Emperor and the Prince and all the gentle people attending will really be too happy if we interrupt them with this matter. But we know that you have the special confidence of the Prince when it comes to his collection of pre-Imperial space probes. We hoped—”

  We hoped you’d take us off the hook, fellow, thought Biladze. His predecessor at this job had been executed by the teen-age prince. His crime: interrupting the boy at dinner. For the thousandth time, Biladze wished he were back in the old-time Navy—where research had been disguised as maneuvers—or even back on Earth in some Gruzijan lab. The closer a Citizen came to the centers of power, the more of a madhouse the universe became.

  “I understand, Eminence,” said Boblanson, sounding as if he really did. He glanced once more at the screen, then back at Biladze. “And I assure you that the Prince would hate to pass this up. His collection is immense, you know. Of course it contains all the moon landers ever launched. They are rather easy to find, given your Navy’s maps. He even has a couple of Martian probes—one Republican and one launched by the Great Enemy. And the surviving near-Earth satellites are generally quite easy to find, too. But the solar and outer planet probes—those are extremely difficult to recover, since they are no longer associated with any celestial body but roam through an immense volume of space. He has only two solar probes in his entire collection, and both were launched by the Republic. I’ve never seen anything like this,” he motioned jerkily at the tumbling white cone on the screen. “Even if it were launched by your ancestors in the days
of the Republic, it would still be a find. But if it belonged to the Great Enemy, it would be one of the Prince’s favorite acquisitions, without doubt,” Boblanson lowered his voice, “And frankly, I think it’s conceivable that this spacecraft was not launched by either the Republic or the Great Enemy.”

  “What!” The exclamation came simultaneously from four throats.

  The little man still seemed nervous and half-nauseated, but for the first time Biladze saw an almost hypnotic quality about him. The fellow was diseased, half-crippled. After all, he had been raised in a poisoned and desolate land, and since coming to the Imperial Service he had apparently been used to explore the radioactive ruins of the Great Enemy’s cities. Yet with all that physical abuse, the mind within was still powerful, persuasive. Biladze wondered whether the Emperor realized that his son’s pet was five times the man the Prince was.

  “Yes, it would be fantastic,” said Boblanson. “Mankind has found no evidence of life—much less intelligent life—anywhere else in the universe. But I know…I know the Navy once listened for signals from interstellar space. The possibility is still alive. And this object is so strange. For example, there is no communication equipment sticking through its hull. I know that you of the Empire don’t use exterior aerials—but in the time of the Republic, all spacecraft did. And, too, there are no solar panels, though perhaps the craft had an isotopic power source. But the pattern of rays along its hull is the strangest thing of all. Those grooves are what you might expect on a meteorite or space probe—after it had come down through a planetary atmosphere. But there is simply no explanation for finding such an ablated hull out in interplanetary space.”

  That certainly decides the question, thought Biladze. Everything the non-citizen had said was on tape somewhere, and if it ever came out that Vanja Biladze had passed up an opportunity to obtain an extraterrestrial artifact for the Prince’s collection, there would be need for a new pilot on the Imperial yacht. “Kolja, get on the printer, and tell the Lord Chamberlain what Boblanson has discovered here.” Perhaps that phrasing would protect him and the crew if the whirling gray cone did not interest the Prince.