by Vernor Vinge
“I’d say I’m on good terms with three of the Outsiders. But there are least five Tour Guides that can put on a better show. And you know the Tourists managed to revive four more corpsicles from the original Middle America crew. Those guys are sure to get tickets Out, if they want ’em.” Men and women who had been adults on Old Earth, two thousand light years away and twenty thousand years ago. It was likely that Middle America had no more valuable export this time around. “If they’d just come a few years later, after I graduated…maybe made a name for myself.”
Larry broke into the self-pitying silence. “You never thought of using the Blabber as your ticket Out?”
“Off and on.” Hamid glanced down at the dark bulk that curled around his feet. The Blab was awfully quiet.
Larry noticed the look. “Don’t worry. She’s fooling with some ultrasound imagers I have back there.” He gestured at the racks behind Hamid, where a violet glow played hopscotch between unseen gadgets.
The boy smiled. “We may have trouble getting her out of here.” He had several ultrasonic squawkers around the apartment, but the Blab rarely got to play with high-resolution equipment. “Yeah, right at the beginning, I tried to interest them in the Blab. Said I was her trainer. They lost interest as soon as they saw she couldn’t be native to Old Earth…These guys are freaks, Professor! You could rain transhuman treasure on ’em, and they’d call it spit! But give ’em Elvis Presley singing Bruce Springsteen and they build you a spaceport on Selene!”
Larry just smiled, the way he did when some student was heading for academic catastrophe. Hamid quieted. “Yeah, I know. There are good reasons for some of the strangeness.” Middle America had nothing that would interest anybody rational from Out There. They were stuck nine light years inside the Slow Zone: commerce was hideously slow and expensive. Middle American technology was obsolete and—considering their location—it could never amount to anything competitive. Hamid’s unlucky world had only one thing going for it. It was a direct colony of Old Earth, and one of the first. Their greatship’s tragic flight had lasted twenty thousand years, long enough for the Earth to become a legend for much of humankind.
In the Beyond, there were millions of solar systems known to bear human-equivalent intelligences. Most of these could be in more or less instantaneous communication with one another. In that vastness humanity was a speck—perhaps four thousand worlds. Even on those, interest in a first-generation colony within the Slow Zone was near zero. But with four thousand worlds, that was enough: here and there was a rich eccentric, an historical foundation, a religious movement—all strange enough to undertake a twenty-year mission into the Slowness. So Middle America should be glad for these rare mixed nuts. Over the last hundred years there had been occasional traders and a couple of tourist caravans. That commerce had raised the Middle American standard of living substantially. More important to many—including Hamid—it was almost their only peephole on the universe beyond the Zone. In the last century, two hundred Middle Americans had escaped to the Beyond. The early ones had been government workers, commissioned scientists. The Feds’ investment had not paid off: of all those who left, only five had returned. Larry Fujiyama and Hussein Thompson were two of those five.
“Yeah, I guess I knew they’d be fanatics. But most of them aren’t even much interested in accuracy. We make a big thing of representing twenty-first-century America. But we both know what that was like: heavy industry moving up to Earth orbit, five hundred million people still crammed into North America. At best, what we have here is like mid-twentieth-century America—or even earlier. I’ve worked very hard to get our past straight. But except for a few guys I really respect, anachronism doesn’t seem to bother them. It’s like just being here with us is the big thing.”
Larry opened his mouth, seemed on the verge of providing some insight. Instead he smiled, shrugged. (One of his many mottos was, “If you didn’t figure it out yourself, you don’t understand it.”)
“So after all these months, where did you dig up the interest in the Blabber?”
“It was the slug, the guy running the Tour. He just mailed me that he had a party who wanted to buy. Normally, this guy haggles. He—wait, you know him pretty well, don’t you? Well, he just made a flat offer. A payoff to the Feds, transport for me to Lothlrimarre,” that was the nearest civilized system in the Beyond, “and some ftl privileges beyond that.”
“And you kiss your pet goodbye?”
“Yeah. I made a case for them needing a handler: me. That’s not just bluff, by the way. We’ve grown up together. I can’t imagine the Blab accepting anyone without lots of help from me. But they’re not interested. Now, the slug claims no harm is intended her, but…do you believe him?”
“Ah, the slug’s slime is generally clean. I’m sure he doesn’t know of any harm planned…and he’s straight enough to do at least a little checking. Did he say who wanted to buy?”
“Somebody—something named Ravna&Tines.” He passed Larry a flimsy showing the offer. Ravna&Tines had a logo: it looked like a stylized claw. “There’s no Tourist registered with that name.”
Larry nodded, copied the flimsy to his display flat. “I know. Well, let’s see…” He puttered around for a moment. The display was a lecture model, with imaging on both sides. Hamid could see the other was searching internal Federal databases. Larry’s eyebrows rose. “Hmhm! Ravna&Tines arrived just last week. It’s not part of the Caravan at all.”
“A solitary trader…”
“Not only that. It’s been hanging out past the Jovians—at the slug’s request. The Federal space net got some pictures.” There was a fuzzy image of something long and wasp-waisted, typical of the Outsiders’ ramscoop technology. But there were strange fins—almost like the wings on a sailplane. Larry played some algorithmic game with the display and the image sharpened. “Yeah. Look at the aspect ratio on those fins. This guy is carrying high-performance ftl gear. No good down here of course, but hot stuff across an enormous range of environment…” He whistled a few bars of “Nightmare Waltz.” “I think we’re looking at a High Trader.”
Someone from the Transhuman Spaces.
Almost every university on Middle America had a Department of Transhuman Studies. Since the return of the five, it had been a popular thing to do. Yet most people considered it a joke. Transhume was generally the bastard child of Religious Studies and an Astro or Computer Science department, the dumping ground for quacks and incompetents. Lazy Larry had founded the department at Ann Arbor—and spent much class time eloquently proclaiming its fraudulence. Imagine, trying to study what lay beyond the Beyond! Even the Tourists avoided the topic. Transhuman Space existed—perhaps it included most of the universe—but it was a tricky, risky, ambiguous thing. Larry said that its reality drove most of the economics of the Beyond…but that all the theories about it were rumors at tenuous secondhand. One of his proudest claims was that he raised Transhuman Studies to the level of palm reading.
Yet now…apparently a trader had arrived that regularly penetrated the Transhuman Reaches. If the government hadn’t sat on the news, it would have eclipsed the Caravan itself. And this was what wanted the Blab. Almost involuntarily, Hamid reached down to pet the creature. “Y-you don’t think there could really be anybody transhuman on that ship?” An hour ago he had been agonizing about parting with the Blab; that might be nothing compared to what they really faced.
For a moment he thought Larry was going to shrug the question off. But the older man sighed. “If there’s anything we’ve got right, it’s that no transhuman can think at these depths. Even in the Beyond, they’d die or fragment or maybe cyst. I think this Ravna&Tines must be a human-equivalent intellect, but it could be a lot more dangerous than the average Outsider…the tricks it would know, the gadgets it would have.” His voice drifted off; he stared at the forty-centimeter statue perched on his desk. It was lustrous green, apparently cut from a flawless block of jade. Green? Wasn’t it black a minute ago?
&n
bsp; Larry’s gaze snapped up to Hamid. “Congratulations. Your problem is a lot more interesting than you thought. Why would any Outsider want the Blab, much less a High Trader?”
“…Well, her kind must be rare. I haven’t talked to any Tourist who recognized the race.”
Lazy Larry just nodded. Space is deep. The Blab might be from somewhere else in the Slow Zone.
“When she was a pup, lots of people studied her. You saw the articles. She has a brain as big as a chimp’s, but most of it’s tied up in driving her tympana and processing what she hears. One guy said she’s the ultimate in verbal orientation—all mouth and no mind.”
“Ah! A student!”
Hamid ignored the Larryism. “Watch this.” He patted the Blab’s shoulder.
She was slow in responding; that ultrasound equipment must be fascinating. Finally she raised her head. “What’s up?” The intonation was natural, the voice a young woman’s.
“Some people think she’s just a parrot. She can play things back better than a high-fidelity recorder. But she also picks up favorite phrases, and uses them in different voices—and almost appropriately…Hey, Blab. What’s that?” Hamid pointed at the electric heater that Larry had propped by his feet. The Blab stuck her head around the corner of the desk, saw the cherry glowing coils. This was not the sort of heater Hamid had in his apartment.
“What’s that…that…” The Blab extended her head curiously toward the glow. She was a bit too eager; her nose bumped the heater’s safety grid. “Hot!” She jumped back, her nose tucked into her neck fur, a foreleg extended toward the heater. “Hot! Hot!” She rolled onto her haunches, and licked tentatively at her nose. “Jeeze!” She gave Hamid a look that was both calculating and reproachful.
“Honest, Blab, I didn’t think you would touch it…She’s going to get me for this. Her sense of humor extends only as far as ambushes, but it can be pretty intense.”
“Yeah. I remember the Zoo Society’s documentary on her.” Fujiyama was grinning broadly. Hamid had always thought that Larry and the Blab had kindred humors. It even seemed that the animal’s cackling became like the old man’s after she attended a couple of his lectures.
Larry pulled the heater back and walked around the desk. He hunched down to the Blab’s eye level. He was all solicitude now, and a good thing: he was looking into a mouth full of sharp teeth, and somebody was playing the “Timebomb Song.” After a moment, the music stopped and she shut her mouth. “I can’t believe there isn’t human equivalence hiding here somewhere. Really. I’ve had freshmen who did worse at the start of the semester. How could you get this much verbalization without intelligence to benefit from it?” He reached out to rub her shoulders. “You got sore shoulders, Baby? Maybe little hands ready to burst out?”
The Blab cocked her head. “I like to soar.”
Hamid had thought long about the Heinlein scenario; the science fiction of Old Earth was a solid part of the ATL curriculum. “If she is still a child, she’ll be dead before she grows up. Her bone calcium and muscle strength have deteriorated about as much as you’d expect for a thirty-year-old human.”
“Hm. Yeah. And we know she’s about your age.” Twenty. “I suppose she could be an ego frag. But most of those are brain-damaged transhumans, or obvious constructs.” He went back behind his desk, began whistling tunelessly. Hamid twisted uneasily in his chair. He had come for advice. What he got was news that they were in totally over their heads. He shouldn’t be surprised; Larry was like that. “What we need is a whole lot more information.”
“Well, I suppose I could flat out demand the slug tell me more. But I don’t know how I can force any of the Tourists to help me.”
Larry waved breezily. “That’s not what I meant. Sure, I’ll ask the Lothlrimarre about it. But basically the Tourists are at the end of a nine-light-year trip to nowhere. Whatever libraries they have are like what you would take on a South Seas vacation—and out of date, to boot…And of course the federal government of Middle America doesn’t know what’s coming off to begin with. Heh, heh. Why else do they come to me when they’re really desperate?…No, what we need is direct access to library resources Out There.”
He said it casually, as though he were talking about getting an extra telephone, not solving Middle America’s greatest problem. He smiled complacently at Hamid, but the boy refused to be drawn in. Finally, “Haven’t you wondered why the campus—Morale Hall, in particular—is crawling with cops?”
“Yeah.” Or I would have, if there weren’t lots else on my mind.
“One of the more serious Tourists—Skandr Vrinimisrinithan—brought along a genuine transhuman artifact. He’s been holding back on it for months, hoping he could get what he wants other ways. The Feds—I’ll give ’em this—didn’t budge. Finally he brought out his secret weapon. It’s in this room right now.”
Ham’s eyes were drawn to the stone carving (now bluish green) that sat on Larry’s desk. The old man nodded. “It’s an ansible.”
“Surely they don’t call it that!”
“No. But that’s what it is.”
“You mean, all these years, it’s been a lie that ftl won’t work in the Zone?” You mean I’ve wasted my life trying to suck up to these Tourists?
“Not really. Take a look at this thing. See the colors change. I swear its size and mass do, too. This is a real transhuman artifact: not an intellect, of course, but not some human design manufactured in Transhuman space. Skandr claims—and I believe him—that no other Tourist has one.”
A transhuman artifact. Hamid’s fascination was tinged with fear. This was something one heard of in the theoretical abstract, in classes run by crackpots.
“Skandr claims this gadget is ‘aligned’ on the Lothlrimarre commercial outlet. From there we can talk to any registered address in the Beyond.”
“Instantaneously.” Hamid’s voice was very small.
“Near enough. It would take a while to reach the universal event horizon; there are some subtle limitations if you’re moving at relativistic speeds.”
“And the Catch?”
Larry laughed. “Good man. Skandr admits to a few. This thing won’t work more than ten light years into the Zone. I’ll bet there aren’t twenty worlds in the Galaxy that could benefit from it—but we are definitely on one. The trick sucks enormous energy. Skandr says that running this baby will dim our sun by half a percent. Not noticeable to the guy in the street, but it could have long-term bad effects.” There was a short silence; Larry often did that after a cosmic understatement. “And from your standpoint, Hamid, there’s one big drawback. The mean bandwidth of this thing is just under six bits per minute.”
“Huh? Ten seconds to send a single bit?”
“Yup. Skandr left three protocols at the Lothlrimarre end: ASCII, a Hamming map to a subset of English, and an Al scheme that guesses what you’d say if you used more bits. The first is Skandr’s idea of a joke, and I wouldn’t trust the third more than wishful thinking. But with the Hamming map, you could send a short letter—say five hundred English words—in a day. It’s full-duplex, so you might get a good part of your answer in that time. Neat, huh? Anyway, it beats waiting twenty years.”
Hamid guessed it would be the biggest news since first contact, one hundred years ago. “So…uh, why did they bring it to you, Professor?”
Larry looked around his hole of an office, smiling wider and wider. “Heh, heh. It’s true, our illustrious planetary president is one of the five; he’s been Out There. But I’m the only one with real friends in the Beyond. You see, the Feds are very leery of this deal. What Skandr wants in return is most of our zygote bank. The Feds banned any private sale of human zygotes. It was a big moral thing: ‘No unborn child sold into slavery or worse.’ Now they’re thinking of doing it themselves. They really want this ansible. But what if it’s a fake, just linked up to some fancy database on Skandr’s ship? Then they’ve lost some genetic flexibility, and maybe they’ve sold some kids into hell—and got no
thing but a colorful trinket for their grief.
“So. Skandr’s loaned them the thing for a week, and the Feds loaned it to me—with close to carte blanche. I can call up old friends, exchange filthy jokes, let the sun go dim doing it. After a week, I report on whether the gadget is really talking to the Outside.”
Knowing you, “I bet you have your own agenda.”
“Sure. Till you showed up the main item was to check out the foundation that sponsors Skandr, see if they’re as clean as he says. Now…well, your case isn’t as important morally, but it’s very interesting. There should be time for both. I’ll use Skandr’s credit to do some netstalking, see if I can find anyone who’s heard of blabbers, or this Ravna&Tines.”
Hamid didn’t have any really close friends. Sometimes he wondered if that was another penalty of his strange upbringing, or whether he was just naturally unlikable. He had come to Fujiyama for help all right, but all he’d been expecting was a round of prickly questions that eventually brought him to some insight. Now he seemed to be on the receiving end of a favor of world-shaking proportions. It made him suspicious and very grateful all at once. He gabbled some words of abject gratitude.
Larry shrugged. “It’s no special problem for me. I’m curious, and this week I’ve got the means to satisfy my curiosity.” He patted the ansible. “There’s a real favor I can do, though: so far, Middle America has been cheated occasionally, but no Outsider has used force against us. That’s one good thing about the Caravan system: it’s to the Tourists’ advantage to keep each other straight. Ravna&Tines may be different. If this is really a High Trader, it might just make a grab for what it wants. If I were you, I’d keep close to the Blabber…And I’ll see if the slug will move one of the Tourist barges over the campus. If you stay in this area, not much can happen without them knowing.
“Hey, see what a help I am? I did nothing for your original question, and now you have a whole, ah, shipload of new things to worry about…”
