by Vernor Vinge
Gorst moved quickly to the west wall, dug into the rubble. His rummaging uncovered a ladder well: we wouldn’t have to use that rope again. Brother Gorst bent over and crawled down into the hole he had uncovered. All this time Sirbat just stood looking at the floor. Gorst called to him, and he walked slowly over to the ladder.
I WAS RIGHT ABOVE TSUMO as we climbed down. Her progress was clumsy, slow. It was a good thing the rungs were set only fifteen centimeters apart. A single beam of moonlight found its way over my shoulder and onto those below me.
If I hadn’t been looking in just the right spot, I could have missed what happened then. A screaming fury hurtled out of the darkness. Gorst, who was already on the floor below us, whirled at the sound, his claws extended. Then just before the juvenile struck, he lowered his arms, stood defenseless, Gorst paid for his stupidity as the juvenile slammed into him, knocking him flat. He was dead even before he touched ground: his throat was ripped out. Now the juvenile headed for us on the ladder.
A reflex three centuries old took over, and my knife was out of my sleeve and in my hand. I threw just before the creature reached Sirbat. One thing I knew was Shiman anatomy. Still, it was mostly luck that the knife struck the only unarmored section of its notochord. My fingers were just too ripped up for accurate throwing. The juvenile dived face first into the base of the ladder and lay still. For a long moment the rest of us were frozen, too. If more were coming, we didn’t have a chance. But the seconds passed and no other creatures appeared. The three of us scrambled down to the floor. As I retrieved my knife, I noticed that the corpse’s flesh was practically parboiled. The juvenile must have been too shook up by the explosion to run off with the rest of the pack.
Sirbat walked past Gorst’s body without looking down at it. “Come on,” he said. You’d think I had just threatened his life rather than saved it.
This was the first level where the main stairs were still intact. We followed Sirbat down them, into the darkness. I couldn’t see a thing, and the stairs were littered with crap that had fallen in from the disaster area above us. Either Sirbat was a fool or he had some special reason to think we were safe. Finally, we reached a level where the electric lights were still working. Sirbat left the stairway, and we walked down a long, deserted corridor. He stopped at a half-open door, sniffed around, then stepped through the doorway and flicked on a light. “I have no doubt you’ll be safe here for this night.”
I looked inside. A bas relief forest had been cut in the walls and then painted green. Three wide cots were set near the middle of the room—on the only carpet I ever saw on Shima. And what did they use the place for? You got me.
But whatever its purpose, the room looked secure. A grated window was set in one wall—nothing was going to surprise us from that direction. And the door was heavy plastic with an inside lock.
Tsumo stepped into the room. “You’re not staying with us?” she asked Sirbat.
“No. That would not be safe.” He was already walking from the room. “Just keep memory, that you have to be up two hours before sunrise in order to get to the death place on time. Have your…machines ready.”
The arrogant bastard! What was “safe” for us was not safe enough for him. I followed the Shiman into the hall, debating whether to shake some answers out of him. But there were two good arguments against such action: 1) he might end up shaking me, and 2) unless we wanted to turn ourselves over to Earthpol, we didn’t have any choice but to play things his way. So I stepped back into the room and slammed the door. The lock fell to with a satisfying thunk.
Tsumo sat down heavily on one of the cots and pulled the ’mam’ri from its pouch. She played awkwardly with it for several seconds. In the bright blue light, her bruise was a delicate mauve. Finally she looked up. “We’re still undetected. But what happened tonight is almost certainly f’un. There hasn’t been a smashout from that particular school in nearly three years. If we stay here much longer, our…‘bad luck’ is going to kill us.”
I grunted. Tsumo was at her cheery best. “In that case, I’ll need a good night’s sleep, I don’t want to have to do that job twice.” I hit the light and settled down on the nearest bunk. Faint bands of gray light crossed the ceiling from the tiny window. The shadowed forest on the wall almost seemed real now.
Tomorrow was going to be tricky. I would be using unfamiliar equipment—Tsumo’s ’mam’ri—out-of-doors and at a relatively great distance from the dying. Even an orgy of death would be hard to analyze under those conditions. And all the time, we’d have Earthpol breathing down our necks. Several details needed thorough thinking out, but every time I tried to concentrate on them, I’d remember those juveniles scrambling up the church steeple at us. Over the last couple of centuries I’d had contact with three nonhuman races. The best competition I’d come across were the Draelings—carnivores with creative intelligence about 0.8 the human norm. I had never seen a group whose combined viciousness and cunning approached man’s. Until now: the Shimans started life by committing a murder. The well-picked skeletons in the alley showed the murders didn’t stop with birth. The average human would have to practice hard to be as evil as a Shiman is by inclination.
Tsumo’s voice came softly from across the room. She must have been reading my mind. “And they’re smart, too. See how much Sirbat has picked up in less than two years. He could go on learning at that rate for another century—if only he could live that long. The average is as inventive as our best. Fifty years ago there wasn’t a single steam engine on Shima. And you can be sure we in Earthgov didn’t help them invent one.”
In the pale light I saw her stand and cross to my bunk. Her weight settled beside me. My frostbitten hand moved automatically across her back.
“Money is no good if you are dead—and we’ll all die unless you fail tomorrow.” A soft hand slipped across my neck and I felt her face in front of mine.
She tried awfully hard to convince me. Toward the end, there in the darkness, I almost felt sorry for little Miss Machiavelli. She kept calling me Roger.
SOMEONE WAS SHAKING ME. I woke to find Tsumo’s face hovering hazily in the air above me. I squinted against the hellishly bright light, and muttered, “Whassamatter?”
“Sirbat says it’s time to go to the cemetery.”
“Oh.” I swung my feet to the floor, and raised myself off the bunk. My hands felt like hunks of flayed meat. I don’t know how I was able to sleep with them. I steadied myself against the bed and looked around. The window was a patch of unrelieved darkness in the wall. We still had a way to go before morning. Tsumo was dressed except for hood and veil, and she was pushing my costume at me.
I took the disguise. “Where the devil is Sirbat, anyway?” Then I saw him over by the door. On the floor. The Shiman was curled up in a tight ball. His bloodshot eyes roved aimlessly about, finally focused on me.
My jaw must have been resting on my chest. Sirbat croaked, “So, Professor, you have been getting knowledge of Shiman life all this time, but you did not ever take note of my condition. If it wasn’t for the special substances I’ve been taking I would have been like this days ago.” He stopped, coughed reddish foam.
O.K., I had been an idiot. The signs had all been there: Sirbat’s relative plumpness, his awkward slowness the last few hours, his comments about not being with us after the morning. My only excuse is the fact that death by old age had become a very theoretical thing to me. Sure, I studied it, but I hadn’t been confronted with the physical reality for more than a century.
But one oversight was enough: I could already see a mess of consequences ahead. I slipped the black dress over my head and put on the veil. “Tsumo, take Sirbat’s legs. We’ll have to carry him downstairs.” I grabbed Sirbat’s shoulders and we lifted together. The Shiman must have massed close to seventy-five kilos—about fifteen over the average adult’s weight. If he had been on drugs to curb the burrowing instinct, he might die before we got him to the cemetery—and that would be fatal all the way around.
Now we had a new reason for getting to that cemetery on time.
We hadn’t gone down very many steps before Tsumo began straining under the load. She leaned to one side, favoring her left hand. Me, both hands felt like they were ready to fall off, so I didn’t have such trouble. Sirbat hung between us, clutching tightly at his middle. His head lolled. His jaws opened with tiny whimpering sounds, and reddish drool dripped down his head onto the steps. It was obviously way past burrowing time for him.
Sirbat gasped out one word at a breath. “Left turn, first story.”
Two more flights and we were on the ground. We turned left and staggered out the side door into a parking lot. No one was around this early in the morning. A sea fog had moved in and perfect halos hung around the only two street lamps left alight. It was so foggy we couldn’t even see the other side of the lot. For the first time since I’d been on Shima, the air was tolerably clean.
“The red one,” said Sirbat. Tsumo and I half dragged the Shiman over to a large red car with official markings. We laid Sirbat on the asphalt and tried the doors. Locked.
“Gorst’s opener, in here.” His clawed hand jerked upward. I retrieved the keys from his blouse, and opened the door. Somehow we managed to bundle Sirbat into the back seat.
I looked at Tsumo. “You know how to operate this contraption?”
Her eyes widened in dismay. Apparently she had never considered this flaw in our plans. “No, of course not. Do you?”
“Once upon a time, my dear,” I said, urging her into the passenger seat, “once upon a time.” I settled behind the wheel and slammed the door. These were the first mechanical controls I had seen in a long time, but they were grotesquely familiar. The steering wheel was less than thirty centimeters across. (I soon found it was only half a turn from lock to lock.) A clutch and shift assembly were mounted next to the wheel. With the help of Sirbat’s advice I started the engine and backed out of the parking stall.
The car’s triple headlights sent silver spears into the fog. It was difficult to see more than thirty meters into the murk. The only Shiman around was a half-eaten corpse on the sidewalk by the entrance to the parking lot. I eased the car into the street, and Sirbat directed me to the first turn.
This was almost worth the price of admission! It had been a long time since I’d driven any vehicle. The street we were on went straight to the river. I’ll bet we were making a hundred kilometers per hour before three blocks were passed.
“Go, go you—” the rest was unintelligible. Sirbat paused, then managed to say, “We’ll be stopped for sure if you keep driving like a sleepwalker.” The buildings on either side of the narrow street zipped by too fast to count. Ahead nothing was visible but the brilliant backglow from our headlights. How could a Shiman survive even two years if he drove faster than this? I swerved as something—a truck, I think—whipped out of a side street.
I turned up the throttle. The engine tried to twist off its moorings and the view to the side became a gray blur.
Three or four minutes passed—or maybe it wasn’t that long. I couldn’t tell. Suddenly Sirbat was screaming, “Left turn…two hundred meters more.” I slammed on the brakes. Thank God they’d taught him English instead of modern Japanese—which doesn’t really have quantitative terms for distance. We probably would have driven right through the intersection before Sirbat would come up with a circumlocution that would tell me how far to go and where to turn. The car skidded wildly across the intersection. Either the street was wet or the Shimans made their brake linings out of old rags. We ended up with our two front wheels over the curb. I backed the car off the sidewalk and made the turn.
NOW THE GOING GOT TOUGH. We had to turn every few blocks and there were some kind of traffic signals I couldn’t figure out. That tiny steering wheel was hell to turn. The skin on my hands felt like it was being ripped off. All the time Sirbat was telling me to go faster, faster. I tried. If he died there in the car it would be like getting trapped in a school of piranha.
The fog got thicker, but less uniform. Occasionally we broke into a clear spot where I could see nearly a block. We blasted up a sharply arched bridge, felt a brief moment of near-weightlessness at the top, and then were down on the other side. In the river that was now behind us, a boat whistled.
From the back set, Sirbat’s mumbling became coherent English: “Earthman, do you have knowledge…how lucky you are?”
“What?” I asked. Was he getting delirious?
Ahead of me the road narrowed, got twisty. We were moving up the ridge that separated the city from the ocean. Soon we were above the murk. In the starlight the fog spread across the lands below, a placid cottony sea that drowned everything but the rocky island we were climbing. Earthpol’s gunboat skulked north of us.
Finally Sirbat replied, “Being good is no trouble at all for you. You’re…born that way. We have to work so…hard at it…like Gorst. And in the end…I’m still as bad…as hungry as I ever was. So hungry.” His speech died in a liquid gurgle. I risked a look behind me. The Shiman was chewing feebly at the upholstery.
We were out of the city proper now. Far up, near the crest of the ridge, I could see the multiple fences that bounded the cemetery. Even by starlight I could see that the ground around us was barren, deeply eroded.
I pulled down my veil and turned the throttle to full. We covered the last five hundred meters to the open gates in a single burst of speed. The guards waved us through—after all, their job was to keep things from getting out—and I cruised into the parking area. There were lots of people around, but fortunately the street lights were dimmed. I parked at the side of the lot nearest the graveyard. We hustled Sirbat out of the car and onto the pavement. The nearest Shimans were twenty meters from us, but when they saw what we were doing they moved even further away, whispered anxiously to each other. We had a live bomb on our hands, and they wanted no part of it.
Sirbat lay on the pavement and stared into the sky. Every few seconds his face convulsed. He seemed to be whispering to himself. Delirious. Finally he said in English, “Tell him…I forgive him.” The Shiman rolled onto his feet. He paused, quivering, then sprinted off into the darkness. His footsteps faded, and all we could hear were faint scratching sounds and the conversation of Shimans around us in the parking lot.
For a moment we stood silently in the chill, moist air. Then I whispered to Tsumo, “How long?”
“It’s about two hours before dawn. I am sure Earthpol will penetrate my evasion patterns in less than three hours. If you stay until the swarming, you’ll probably be caught.”
I turned and looked across the rising fog bank. There were thirty billion people on this planet, I had been told. Without the crude form of birth control practiced at thousands of cemeteries like this one, there could be many more. And every one of the creatures was intelligent, murderous. If I finished my analysis, then they’d have practical immortality along with everything else, and we’d be facing them in our own space in a very short time…which was exactly what Samuelson wanted. In fact, it was the price he had demanded of the Shimans—that their civilization expand into space, so mankind would at last have a worthy competitor. And what if the Shiman brain was as far superior as timid souls like Tsumo claimed? Well then, we will have to do some imitating, some catching up. I could almost hear Samuelson’s reedy voice speaking the words. Myself, I wasn’t as sure: ever since we were kids back in Chicago, Samuelson had been kinda kinky about street-fighting, and about learning from the toughs he fought—me for instance.
“Give me that,” I said, taking the ’mam’ri from Tsumo’s hand, and turning it to make my preliminary scan across the cemetery. Whether Samuelson and I were right or wrong, the next century was going to be damned interesting.
THE SUN’S DISK STOOD well clear of the horizon. The mazes and dead-falls and machine guns had taken their toll. Of the original million infants, less than a thousand had survived. They would be weeded no further.
Near the front of the pac
k, one of the smartest and strongest ran joyfully toward the scent of food ahead—where the first schoolmasters had set their cages. The child lashed happily at those around it, but they were wise and kept their distance. For the moment its hunger was not completely devastating and the sunlight warmed its back. It was wonderful to be alive and free and…innocent.
I wrote “Original Sin” around 1970. For many years, it was my favorite of all my stories. I thought I had said something about basic “human” issues. I liked the tantalizing glimpses of our future civilization (“remember spaceships?”). I deliberately wrote it without reference to any real technologies beyond 1940—the idea being that 1940 jargon should probably be as accurate as 1970 jargon in explaining the far future. The word-hacker in me was also intrigued by the Basic English vocabulary the aliens used. (It turned out to be surprisingly difficult to write in that vocabulary. Once I saw the Gettysburg address re-done in Basic English; it seemed about as eloquent as the original. I didn’t realize until I was writing this story what a feat that was.)
Nevertheless, I had more trouble selling “Original Sin” than almost anything I’ve written. The early versions were just too cryptic. It bounced and bounced and bounced. But usually the editors liked parts of it, and often they told me what they didn’t like. Between the kind advice of Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova, I eventually wrote something that could sell.
THE BLABBER
In my novel Marooned in Realtime, I had a brush with the Singularity. After I finished that book, I felt a bit marooned myself. The closer my stories came to the Singularity, the shorter the timescales and the less opportunity for the kind of adventure stories that I grew up with. Any future history following these events would be a short run over a cliff, into the abyss…with no human equivalent aliens, no intelligible interstellar civilizations.
