The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  Tsumo unobtrusively turned off the car radio, as a guard came over and snatched the clearance papers from Sirbat. The two natives began arguing over the authorization. From the tank, I could hear another radio. It wasn’t the voice from the flagship. This sounded agitated and entirely Shiman. Apparently Earthpol was broadcasting on selected civilian frequencies. Score one against their side. If we could just get past this checkpoint before Earthpol made its ultimatum.

  The guard waved to the tank pilot, who disappeared inside his vehicle. Ahead of us electric motors whined and the massive steel door swung back. Our sports car was already blasting forward as Sirbat reached out of the window and plucked his authorization from the guard’s claws.

  THE CITY’S STREETS were narrow, crowded, but Sirbat zipped our car from lane to lane like we were the only car around. Worst of all, Sirbat was the most conservative driver in that madhouse. I haven’t moved so fast since the last time I was on skis. The buildings to right and left were a dirty gray blur. Ahead of us, though, things stood still long enough to get some sort of perspective. We were heading downtown—toward the river. Over the roofs of the tenements, and through a maze of wires and antennas, I could still see the bulk of the Earthpol flagship.

  I grabbed wildly for support as the car screeched diagonally through an intersection. Seconds later we crashed around another corner and I could see all the way to the edge of the estuary.

  Sirbat summarized the Earthpol announcement coming from the car radio. “He says he’s Admiral Ohara—”

  “—that would be Sergeant Oharasan,” said Tsumo.

  “—and he orders Berelesk to turn over the person-eater and doer of crimes, Hjalmar Kekkonen. If not, destruction will come from the sky.”

  Several seconds passed. Then the entire sky flashed red. Straight ahead that color was eye-searingly bright as a threadlike ray of red-whiteness flickered from flagship to bay. A shockwave-driven cloud of steam exploded where the beam touched water. Sirbat applied the brakes and we ran up over the curb, finally came to a stop against a utility pole. The shock wave was visible as it whipped up the canyon of the street. It smashed over our car, shattering the front windshield.

  Even before the car shuddered to a stop, Sirbat was out. And Tsumo wasn’t far behind. The Shiman quickly ripped the identification tags from the rear windshield and replaced them with—counterfeits?

  In those seconds the city was quiet, Earthpol’s gentle persuasion still echoing through the minds of its inhabitants. Tsumo looked up and down the street. “I hope you see now why we had to run. By now the city and national armies are probably on the hunt for us. Once cowed, the Shimans are dedicated in their servility.”

  I pulled the black veil of my robe more tightly down over my head and swore. “So? What now? This place can’t be more than four kilometers from the lab. We’re still dead ducks.”

  Tsumo frowned. “Dead—ducks?” she said. “What dialect do you speak?”

  “English, damn it!” Youngsters are always complaining about my language.

  Sirbat hustled around the rear of the sports car to the sidewalk. “Go quick,” he said and grasped my wrist with bone-crushing force. “I hear police coming.” As we ran toward a narrow alley, I glanced up the street. The place was right out of the dark ages. I’d like to take some of these young romantics and stuff them into a real, old-fashioned slum like that one. The buildings were better than three stories high, and crushed up against each other. Windows and tiny balconies competed in endless complication for open air. Fresh-laundered rags hung from lines stretched between the buildings—to become filthy in the sooty air. The stench of garbage was the only detail the scene seemed to lack.

  The moment of stunned shock passed. Some Shimans ran wildly around while others sat and gnawed at the curbing. This was panic, and it made their previous behavior look tame. The buildings were emptying, and the screams of the trampled went right through the walls. If we had been just ten meters farther away from that alley, we’d never have made it.

  We huddled near the end of the hot cramped alley amid the crumbling remains of a couple of skeletons, and listened to the cries from beyond. Now I could hear the police sirens, too—at least that’s what I assumed the bass boohoohoo to be. I turned my head and saw that it was just centimeters from the saurian immensity of Sirbat’s fangs.

  The Shiman spoke. “You may be all right. At one time I had good knowledge of this part of the city. There is a place we may use long enough for you to make good on your agreement with Shima.” I opened my mouth to tell this nightmare he was an idiot if he thought I could make progress with nothing more than paper and pencil. But he was already running back the way we had come. I glanced at Tsumo. She sat motionless against the rotting wall of the alley. Her face wasn’t visible behind the thick veil, but I could imagine the flat, hostile glare in her gray eyes. The look that sank a thousand ships.

  I drew the sticker from my sleeve and tested its edge. There was no telling who would come back for us. I wouldn’t have put anything past our toothy friend—and Earthpol was as bad.

  What a screwed-up mess. Why had I ever let Samuelson persuade me to leave New London? A guy could get killed here.

  SUNRISE. THE DISK BLAZED pale orange through the fog, and momentarily the world seemed clean, bright.

  Silence. For those few seconds the muted sounds of the city died. The sun’s warmth pressed upon the ground, penetrated the moist turf, and brought a call of life—and death—to those below.

  The Shimans stood tense, and the silence stretched on: Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Then:

  A faint wail. The sound was joined by another, and another, till a hundred voices, all faint but together loud, climbed through the register and echoed off nearby hills.

  The dying had discovered their mouths.

  Near the middle of the green field, one cross among the thousands wavered and fell.

  It was the first.

  The fog blurred the exact form of the grayish creatures that spilled from the newly opened graves. As grave after grave burst open, the wailing screams died and a new sound grew—the low, buzzing hum of tiny jaws opening and closing, grinding and tearing. The writhing gray mass spread toward the edge of the field, and the ground it passed over was left brown, bare. A million mouths. They ate anything green, anything soft—each other. The horde reached the hedgework. There it split into a hundred feelers that searched back and forth through the intricate twisting of the maze. Where the hedge wall was narrow or low, the mouths began to eat their way through.

  A command was given, and all along the crest of the hill the machine scatterguns whirred, spraying a dozen streams of birdshot down on those points where the horde was breaking out. The poisoned shot killed instantly, by the thousands. And tens of thousands were attracted by the newly dead into the field of fire.

  Only the creatures which avoided the simplest branches of the maze escaped death by nerve poison. And most of those survivors ran blindly into dead ends, where claymore mines blasted their bodies apart.

  Only the smartest, fastest thousand of the original million reached the upper end of the maze. These had grown fat since they climbed from their fathers’ graves, yet they still moved forward faster than a man can walk. Not a blade of grass survived their passage.

  I’LL SAY ONE THING about my stay on Shima: it cured me once and for all of any nostalgia I had felt for pre-millennium Earth. Shima had the whole bag: the slums, the smog, the overpopulation, the starvation—and now this. I looked down from our hiding place at the congregation standing below. The Shimans sang from hymnals, and their quacking was at once alien and familiar.

  On the dais near the front of the room was a podium—an altar, I should say. The candelabra on the altar cast its weak light on the immense wooden cross that stood behind it.

  It took me all the way back to Chicago, circa 1940—when a similar scene had been weekly ritual. Funny, that was one bit of nostalgia I had never wished to part with. But after seeing
those shark-faced killers mouthing the same chants, I knew the past would never seem the same. The hymn ended but the congregation remained standing. Outside I could hear the night traffic—and the occasional rumble of military vehicles. The city was not calm. A million tons of hostile metal still sat in their sky.

  Then the “minister” walked rapidly to the altar. The crowd moaned softly. He was dressed all in black, and I swear he had a clerical collar hung around the upper portion of his neckless body.

  Tsumo shifted her weight, her thigh resting momentarily against mine. Our friend Sirbat had hidden us in this cramped space above the hall. He was supposedly negotiating with the reverends for better accommodations. The Earthpol girl peered through the smoked glass which shielded us from the congregations’s view, and whispered, “Christianity is popular on Shima. A couple of Catholic Evangels introduced the cult here nearly two centuries ago. I suppose any religion with a Paul would have sufficed, but the Shimans never invented one of their own.”

  Below us, the parishioners settled back in their pews as the minister began some sort of speech—and that sounded kind of familiar, too. I glanced back at Tsumo’s shadowed face. Her long blond hair glinted pale across her shoulders.

  “Kekkonen,” she continued, “do you know why Earthgov has quarantined Shima?”

  An odd question. “Uh, they’ve made the usual ‘cultural shock’ noises but it’s obvious they’re just scared of the competition these gooks could provide, given a halfway decent technology. I’m not worried. Earthgov has never put enough store by human ingenuity and guts.”

  “Your problem, Professor Doctor, is that you can think of competition only on an economic level: a strange failing for one who considers himself so rough and tough. Look down there. Do you see those two at the end of the pew fight to hold the collection tray?”

  The Shimans tugged the plate back and forth, snarling. Finally, the larger of the two raked his claws across the other’s face, opening deep red cuts. Shorty squealed and released the plate. The victor ponderously drew a fat wallet from his blouse and dropped several silver slugs into the tray, then passed it down the row, away from his adversary. Those near the struggle gave it their undivided attention, while from the front of the hall the minister droned on.

  “Are you familiar with the Shiman life cycle, Professor.” It was a statement.

  “Certainly.” And a most economical system it was. From birth the creatures lived to eat—anything and everything. Growing from a baby smaller than your fist, in less than two years the average Shiman massed sixty kilograms. Twenty-one months after birth a thousand embryos would begin to develop in his combined womb/ovary—no sex was necessary for this to happen, though occasionally the Shimans did exchange genetic material through conjugation. For the next three months the embryos developed in something like the normal mammalian fashion, drawing nourishment from the parent’s circulatory system. When the fetuses were almost at term the womb filled most of the adult’s torso, absorbed most of the adult’s food intake. Finally—and I still didn’t understand the timing mechanism, since it seemed to depend on external factors—the thousand baby Shimans ate their way out of the parent, and began their own careers.

  “Then you know that parricide and genocide are a way of life with these monsters. Earthgov is not the stupid giant you imagine, Professor. The challenge Shima presents us transcends economics. The Shimans are very much like locusts, yet their average intelligence is far greater than ours. In another century they will be our technological equal. You entrepreneurs will lose more than profits dealing with them—you’ll be exterminated. The Shimans have only one natural disadvantage and that is their short life span. In twenty-four months, even they can’t learn enough to coordinate their genius.” Her whisper became soft, taut. “If you succeed, Professor, we will have lost the small chance we have for survival.”

  Miss Iceberg was blowing her cool. “Hell, Tsumo, I thought you were on our side. You’re taking our money, anyway. If you’re really so in love with Earthgov policy, why don’t you blow the whistle on me?”

  THE EARTHPOL AGENT was silent for nearly a minute. At first I thought she was watching the services below, but then I noticed her eyes were closed. “Kekkonen, I had a husband once. He was an Evangel—a fool. Missionaries were allowed on Shima up to fifty years ago. That was probably the biggest mistake that Earthgov has ever made; Before the Christians came, the Shimans had never been able to cooperate with one another even to the extent of developing a language. The only thing they did together was to eat. Since they were faster and deadlier than anything else they would often come near to wiping out all life on a continent; at which point, they’d start eating each other and their own population would drop to near zero and stay there for decades. But then the Christians came and filled them with notions of sin and self-denial, and now the Shimans cooperate with each other enough so they can use their brains for something besides outsmarting their next meal.

  “Anyway, Roger was one of the last missionaries. He really believed his own myths. I don’t know if his philosophies conflicted with Shiman dogma, or if the monsters were just hungry one day: but my husband never came back.”

  I almost whistled. “OK, so you don’t like Shimans—but hating them won’t bring your husband back. That would take the skills of a million techs and the resources of…” My voice petered out as I remembered that that was about the size bribe Samuelson had offered her. “Hm-m-m, I guess I’m getting the picture. You want things both ways: to have your husband back, and to have a little vengeance, too.”

  “Not vengeance, Professor Doctor. You are just rationalizing your own goals. Remember the things you have seen on Shima: The cannibalism. The viciousness. The constant state of war between the different races of the species. And above all the superhuman intelligence these monsters possess.

  “You think it ridiculous for me to accept money on a project I want to fail. But never in a thousand years will I have another chance to make such a fortune—and you know a thousand years is too long. It would be so terribly simple for you to fail. I’m not asking you to give up the rewards promised you. Just make an error that won’t be apparent until after the rejuvenation treatments are started and you have been paid.”

  If nothing else, Tsumo had the gall of ten. She was obviously an idealist: that is, someone who can twist his every vice into self-righteous morality. “You’re nearly as ignorant as you are impudent. S.E. won’t buy a pig in a poke. I don’t get a cent till my process has boosted the Shiman life span past one century.” That’s the hell of immortality—you can’t tell until the day after forever whether you really have the goods. “This is one cat you’ll have to skin yourself.”

  Tsumo shook her head. “I intend to get that bribe, Kekkonen. The human race is second with me. But,” she looked up and her voice hardened, “I’ve studied these creatures. If their life span is increased beyond ten years, there won’t be any Samuelson Enterprises to pay you a century from now.” Ah, so self-righteous.

  The discussion was interrupted as a crack of light appeared in the darkness above us. Sirbat’s burred voice came faintly. “We have moved the Bible classes from this part of the building. Come out.” The light above silhouetted some curves I hadn’t noticed before as Tsumo crawled through the tiny trap. I followed her, groaning. I never did learn what they used that cramped box for. Maybe the reverends spied on their congregations. You could never tell about those cannibals in the back pews.

  We followed Sirbat down a low, narrow corridor into a windowless room. Another Shiman stood by a table in the center of the room. He looked skinny compared to our guide.

  Sirbat shut the door, and motioned us to chairs by the table. I sat, but it was hardly worth the effort. The seat was so narrow I couldn’t relax my legs. Shimans are bottom heavy. They don’t really sit—they just lean.

  SIRBAT MADE THE INTRODUCTIONS. “This is Brother Gorst of the Order of Saint Roger. He keeps the rules at this church, by the authority o
f the Committee in Senkenorn. Gorst’s father was probably my teacher in second school.” Brother Gorst nodded shyly and the harsh light glinted starkly off his fangs. Our interpreter continued, “For this minute we are safe—from Shiman police and army forces. The Earth Police spaceship is still hanging over the water, but only Miss Tsumo can do anything about that. Gorst will help us, but we may not use these rooms for more than three days. They are needed for church purposes later this eightday. There is another time limit, too. You will not have my help after tomorrow morning. Naturally, Gorst has no knowledge of any Earth languages, so—”

  I interrupted, “The devil you say! There’s no such thing as half a success in this racket, Sirbat. What’s the matter with you?”

  The Shiman leaned across the table, his claws raking scratches in its plastic surface, “That is not your business, Worm!” he hissed into my face. Sirbat stared at me for several seconds, his jaws working spasmodically. Finally, he returned to his chair. “You will please take account of this. Things would not be so serious now if you had only given care to the Earthpol danger. If I were you I would be happy that Shima is still willing to take what you have to offer. At this time our governments take Earthpol’s orders, but it is safe to say they hope by Christ’s name that you are out of danger. Their attempts to get you will not be strong. The greatest danger still comes from your people.”

  The blond Earthpol agent took the cue. “We have at least forty-eight hours before Ohara locates us.” She reached into a pocket. “Fortunately I am not so poorly equipped as Professor Kekkonen. This is police issue.”

  The pile she placed on the table had no definite form—yet was almost alive. A thousand shifting colors shone from within it. Except for its size, her ’mam’ri seemed unremarkable. Tsumo plunged her hand into it, and the device searched slowly across the table. Brother Gorst squeaked his terror, and bolted for the exit. Sirbat spoke rapidly to him, but the skinny Shiman continued to tremble. Sirbat turned to us. “The fact is, it’s harder for me to talk with Gorst than with you. His special word knowledge has to do with right and wrong, while my special knowledge is of language. The number of words we have in common is small.”