The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  If I wanted to build a future-history series, it seemed that I was stuck with honest extrapolation and a very quick end to human history—or a series that was overtly science-fictional, but secretly a fantasy since it would be based on the absence of the scientific progress that I see coming. I was stuck; the dilemma lasted about two years.

  Eventually I found a solution, one that was faithful to my ideas about progress but which still allowed me to write fiction with human-sized characters and interstellar adventure. The solution? Basically I turned my extrapolations sideways, as you will see in this next story. “The Blabber” was a test flight into the universe of my Zones of Thought novels.

  ____________________

  Some dreams take a long time in dying. Some get a last-minute reprieve…and that can be even worse.

  It was just over two klicks from the Elvis revival to the center of campus. Hamid Thompson took the long way, across the Barkers’ stubbly fields and through the Old Subdivision. Certainly the Blabber preferred that route. She raced this way and that across Ham’s path, rooting at roach holes and covertly watching the birds that swooped close on her seductive calls. As usual, her stalking was more for fun than food. When a bird came within striking distance, the Blab’s head would flick up, touching the bird with her nose, blasting it with a peal of human laughter. The Blab hadn’t taken this way in some time; all the birds in her regular haunts had wised up, and were no fun anymore.

  When they reached the rock bluffs behind the subdivision, there weren’t any more roach holes, and the birds had become cautious. Now the Blab walked companionably beside him, humming in her own way: scraps of Elvis overlaid with months-old news commentary. She went a minute or two in silence…listening? Contrary to what her detractors might say, she could be both awake and silent for hours at a time—but even then Hamid felt an occasional buzzing in his head, or a flash of pain. The Blab’s tympana could emit across a two-hundred-kilohertz band, which meant that most of her mimicry was lost on human ears.

  They were at the crest of the bluff. “Sit down, Blab. I want to catch my breath.” And look at the view…And decide what in heaven’s name I should do with you and with me.

  The bluffs were the highest natural viewpoints in New Michigan province. The flatlands that spread around them were pocked with ponds, laced with creeks and rivers, the best farmland on the continent. From orbit, the original colonists could find no better. Water landings would have been easier, but they wanted the best odds on long-term survival. Thirty klicks away, half hidden by gray mist, Hamid could see the glassy streaks that marked the landing zone. The history books said it took three years to bring down the people and all the salvage from the greatship. Even now the glass was faintly radioactive, one cause for the migration across the isthmus to Westland.

  Except for the forest around those landing strips, and the old university town just below the bluff, most everything in this direction was farmland, unending squares of brown and black and gray. The year was well into autumn and the last of the Earth trees had given up their colored leaves. The wind blowing across the plains was chill, leaving a crispness in his nose that promised snow someday soon. Hallowe’en was next week. Hallowe’en indeed. I wonder if in Man’s thirty thousand years, there has ever been a celebration of that holiday like we’ll be seeing next week. Hamid resisted the impulse to look back at Marquette. Ordinarily it was one of his favorite places: the planetary capital, population four hundred thousand, a real city. As a child, visiting Marquette had been like a trip to some far star system. But now reality had come, and the stars were so close…Without turning, he knew the position of every one of the Tourist barges. They floated like colored balloons above the city, yet none massed less than a thousand tonnes. And those were their shuttles. After the Elvis revival, Hallowe’en was the last big event on the Marquette leg of the Tour. Then they would be off to Westland, for more semi-fraudulent peeks at Americana.

  Hamid crunched back in the dry moss that cushioned the rock. “Well, Blabber, what should I do? Should I sell you? We could both make it Out There if I did.”

  The Blabber’s ears perked up. “Talk? Converse? Disgust?” She settled her forty-kilo bulk next to him, and nuzzled her head against his chest. The purring from her foretympanum sounded like some transcendental cat. The sound was pink noise, buzzing through his chest and shaking the rock they sat on. There were few things she enjoyed more than a good talk with a peer. Hamid stroked her black and white pelt. “I said, should I sell you?”

  The purring stopped, and for a moment the Blab seemed to give the matter thoughtful consideration. Her head turned this way and that, bobbing—a good imitation of a certain prof at the University. She rolled her big dark eyes at him, “Don’t rush me! I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” She licked daintily at the sleek fur at the base of her throat. And for all Hamid knew, she really was thinking about what to say. Sometimes she really seemed to try to understand…and sometimes she almost made sense. Finally she shut her mouth and began talking.

  “Should I sell you? Should I sell you?” The intonation was still Hamid’s but she wasn’t imitating his voice. When they talked like this, she typically sounded like an adult human female (and a very attractive one, Hamid thought). It hadn’t always been that way. When she had been a pup and he a little boy, she’d sounded to him like another little boy. The strategy was clear: she understood the type of voice he most likely wanted to hear. Animal cunning? “Well,” she continued, “I know what I think. Buy, don’t sell. And always get the best price you can.”

  She often came across like that: oracular. But he had known the Blab all his life. The longer her comment, the less she understood it. In this case…Ham remembered his finance class. That was before he got his present apartment, and the Blab had hidden under his desk part of the semester. (It had been an exciting semester for all concerned.) “Buy, don’t sell.” That was a quote, wasn’t it, from some nineteenth-century tycoon?

  She blabbered on, each sentence having less correlation with the question. After a moment, Hamid grabbed the beast around the neck, laughing and crying at the same time. They wrestled briefly across the rocky slope, Hamid fighting at less than full strength, and the Blab carefully keeping her talons retracted. Abruptly he was on his back and the Blab was standing on his chest. She held his nose between the tips of her long jaws. “Say Uncle! Say Uncle!” she shouted.

  The Blabber’s teeth stopped a couple of centimeters short of the end of her snout, but the grip was powerful; Hamid surrendered immediately. The Blab jumped off him, chuckling triumph, then grabbed his sleeve to help him up. He stood up, rubbing his nose gingerly. “Okay, monster, let’s get going.” He waved downhill, toward Ann Arbor Town.

  “Ha, ha! For sure. Let’s get going!” The Blab danced down the rocks faster than he could hope to go. Yet every few seconds the creature paused an instant, checking that he was still following. Hamid shook his head, and started down. Damned if he was going to break a leg just to keep up with her. Whatever her homeworld, he guessed that winter around Marquette was the time of year most homelike for the Blab. Take her coloring: stark black and white, mixed in wide curves and swirls. He’d seen that pattern in pictures of ice-pack seals. When there was snow on the ground, she was practically invisible.

  She was fifty meters ahead of him now. From this distance, the Blab could almost pass for a dog, some kind of greyhound maybe. But the paws were too large, and the neck too long. The head looked more like a seal’s than a dog’s. Of course, she could bark like a dog. But then, she could also sound like a thunderstorm, and make something like human conversation—all at the same time. There was only one of her kind in all Middle America. This last week, he’d come to learn that her kind were almost as rare Out There. A Tourist wanted to buy her…and Tourists could pay with coin what Hamid Thompson had sought for more than half his twenty years.

  Hamid desperately needed some good advice. It had been five years since he’d asked his father for help; h
e’d be damned if he did so now. That left the University, and Lazy Larry…

  BY MIDDLE-AMERICAN STANDARDS, Ann Arbor Town was ancient. There were older places; out by the landing zone, parts of Old Marquette still stood. School field trips to those ruins were brief—the pre-fab quonsets were mildly radioactive. And of course there were individual buildings in the present-day capital that went back almost to the beginning. But much of the University in Ann Arbor dated from just after those first permanent structures: the University had been a going concern for 190 years.

  Something was up today, and it had nothing to do with Hamid’s problems. As they walked into town, a couple of police helicopters swept in from Marquette, began circling the school. On the ground, some of Ham’s favorite back ways were blocked off by University safety patrols. No doubt it was Tourist business. He might have to come in through the Main Gate, past the Math Building. Yuck. Even after ten years he loathed that place: his years as a supposed prodigy; his parents forcing him into math classes he just wasn’t bright enough to handle; the tears and anger at home, till he finally convinced them that he was not the boy they thought.

  They walked around the Quad, Hamid oblivious to the graceful buttresses, the ivy that meshed stone walls into the flute trees along the street. That was all familiar…what was new was all the Federal cop cars. Clusters of students stood watching the cops, but there was no riot in the air. They just seemed curious. Besides, the Feds had never interfered on campus before.

  “Keep quiet, okay?” Hamid muttered.

  “Sure, sure.” The Blab scrunched her neck back, went into her doggie act. At one time they had been notorious on campus, but he had dropped out that summer, and people had other things on their minds today. They walked through the main gate without comment from students or cops.

  The biggest surprise came when they reached Larry’s slummy digs at Morale Hall. Morale wasn’t old enough to be historic; it was old enough to be in decay. It had been an abortive experiment in brick construction. The clay had cracked and rotted, leaving gaps for vines and pests. By now it was more a reddish mound of rubble than a habitable structure. This was where the University Administration stuck tenured faculty in greatest disfavor: the Quad’s Forgotten Quarter…but not today. Today the cop cars were piled two deep in the parking areas, and there were shotgun-toting guards at the entrance!

  Hamid walked up the steps. He had a sick feeling that Lazy Larry might be the hardest prof in the world to see today. On the other hand, working with the Tourists meant Hamid saw some of these security people every day.

  “Your business, sir?” Unfortunately, the guard was no one he recognized.

  “I need to see my advisor…Professor Fujiyama.” Larry had never been his advisor, but Hamid was looking for advice.

  “Um.” The cop flicked on his throat mike. Hamid couldn’t hear much, but there was something about “that black and white off-planet creature.” Over the last twenty-years, you’d have to have been living in a cave never to see anything about the Blabber.

  A minute passed, and an older officer stepped through the doorway. “Sorry, son, Mr. Fujiyama isn’t seeing any students this week. Federal business.”

  Somewhere a funeral dirge began playing. Hamid tapped the Blab’s forepaw with his foot; the music stopped abruptly. “Ma’am, it’s not school business.” Inspiration struck: why not tell something like the truth? “It’s about the Tourists and my Blabber.”

  The senior cop sighed. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say. Okay, come along.” As they entered the dark hallway, the Blabber was chuckling triumph. Someday the Blab would play her games with the wrong people and get the crap beat out of her, but apparently today was not that day.

  They walked down two flights of stairs. The lighting got even worse, half-dead fluorescents built into the acoustic tiling. In places the wooden stairs sagged elastically under their feet. There were no queues of students squatting before any of the doors, but the cops hadn’t cleared out the faculty: Hamid heard loud snoring from one of the offices. The Forgotten Quarter—Morale Hall in particular—was a strange place. The one thing the faculty here had in common was that each had been an unbearable pain in the neck to someone. That meant that both the most incompetent and the most brilliant were jammed into these tiny offices.

  Larry’s office was in the sub-basement, at the end of a long hall. Two more cops flanked the doorway, but otherwise it was as Hamid remembered it. There was a brass nameplate: PROFESSOR L. LAWRENCE FUJIYAMA, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSHUMAN STUDIES. Next to the nameplate, a sign boasted implausible office hours. In the center of the door was the picture of a piglet and the legend: “If a student appears to need help, then appear to give him some.”

  The police officer stood aside as they reached the door; Hamid was going to have to get in under his own power. Ham gave the door a couple of quick knocks. There was the sound of footsteps, and the door opened a crack. “What’s the secret password?” came Larry’s voice.

  “Professor Fujiyama, I need to talk to—”

  “That’s not it!” The door was slammed loudly in Hamid’s face.

  The senior cop put her hand on Hamid’s shoulder. “Sorry, son. He’s done that to bigger guns than you.”

  He shrugged off her hand. Sirens sounded from the black and white creature at his feet. Ham shouted over the racket, “Wait! It’s me, Hamid Thompson! From your Transhume 201.”

  The door came open again. Larry stepped out, glanced at the cops, then looked at the Blabber. “Well, why didn’t you say so? Come on in.” As Hamid and the Blab scuttled past him, Larry smiled innocently at the Federal officer. “Don’t worry, Susie, this is official business.”

  Fujiyama’s office was long and narrow, scarcely an aisle between deep equipment racks. Larry’s students (those who dared these depths) doubled the man could have survived on Old Earth before electronic datastorage. There must be tonnes of junk squirreled away on those shelves. The gadgets stuck out this way and that into the aisle. The place was a museum—perhaps literally; one of Larry’s specialties was archeology. Most of the machines were dead, but here and there something clicked, something glowed. Some of the gadgets were Rube Goldberg jokes, some were early colonial prototypes…and a few were from Out There. Steam and water pipes covered much of the ceiling. The place reminded Hamid of the inside of a submarine.

  At the back was Larry’s desk. The junk on the table was balanced precariously high: a display flat, a beautiful piece of night-black statuary. In Transhume 201, Larry had described his theory of artifact management: Last-In-First-Out, and every year buy a clean bed sheet, date it, and lay it over the previous layer of junk on your desk. Another of Lazy Larry’s jokes, most had thought. But there really was a bed sheet peeking out from under the mess.

  Shadows climbed sharp and deep from the lamp on Larry’s desk. The cabinets around him seemed to lean inwards. The open space between them was covered with posters. Those posters were one small reason Larry was down here: ideas to offend every sensible faction of society, A pile of…something…lay on the visitor’s chair. Larry slopped it onto the floor and motioned Hamid to sit.

  “Sure, I remember you from Transhume. But why mention that? You own the Blabber. You’re Huss Thompson’s kid.” He settled back in his chair.

  I’m not Huss Thompson’s kid! Aloud, “Sorry, that was all I could think to say. This is about my Blabber, though. I need some advice.”

  “Ah!” Fujiyama gave his famous polliwog smile, somehow innocent and predatory at the same time. “You came to the right place. I’m full of it. But I heard you had quit school, gone to work at the Tourist Bureau.”

  Hamid shrugged, tried not to seem defensive. “Yeah. But I was already a senior, and I know more American Thought and Lit than most graduates…and the Tourist caravan will only be here another half year. After that, how long till the next? We’re showing them everything I could imagine they’d want to see. In fact, we’re showing them more than there really is to see. It cou
ld be a hundred years before anyone comes down here again.”

  “Possibly, possibly.”

  “Anyway, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve met almost half the Tourists. But…” There were ten million people living on Middle America. At least a million had a romantic yearning to get Out There. At least ten thousand would give everything they owned to leave the Slow Zone, to live in a civilization that spanned thousands of worlds. For the last ten years, Middle America had known of the Caravan’s coming. Hamid had spent most of those years—half his life, all the time since he got out of math—preparing himself with the skills that could buy him a ticket Out.

  Thousands of others had worked just as hard. During the last decade, every department of American Thought and Literature on the planet had been jammed to the bursting point. And more had been going on behind the scenes. The government and some large corporations had had secret programs that weren’t revealed till just before the Caravan arrived. Dozens of people had bet on the long shots, things that no one else thought the Outsiders might want. Some of those were fools: the world-class athletes, the chess masters. They could never be more than eighth rate in the vast populations of the Beyond. No, to get a ride you needed something that was odd…Out There. Besides the Old Earth angle, there weren’t many possibilities—though that could be approached in surprising ways: there was Gilli Weinberg, a bright but not brilliant ATL student. When the Caravan reached orbit, she bypassed the Bureau, announced herself to the Tourists as a genuine American cheerleader and premier courtesan. It was a ploy pursued less frankly and less successfully by others of both sexes. In Gilli’s case, it had won her a ticket Out. The big laugh was that her sponsor was one of the few non-humans in the Caravan, a Lothlrimarre slug who couldn’t survive a second in an oxygen atmosphere.