by Vernor Vinge
“I’m willing to start with the version for five-year-olds.”
“Okay.” The faintest of smiles crossed her face. It was everything he’d guessed it would be. He wondered how he could make her do it again. “‘Once upon a time,’” the smile again, a little wider! “there was a very wise and good man, as wise and good as any mere human or human equivalent can ever be: a mathematical genius, a great general, an even greater peacemaker. He lived five hundred years’ subjective, and half that time he was fighting a very great evil.”
The Tines put in, “Just a part of that evil chewed up my race for breakfast.”
Ravna nodded. “Eventually it chewed up our hero, too. He’s been dead almost a century objective. The enemy has been very alert to keep him dead. Tines and I may be the last people trying to bring him back…How much do you know about cloning, Mr. Thompson?”
Hamid couldn’t answer for a moment; it was too clear where all this was going. “The Tourists claim they can build a viable zygote from almost any body cell. They say it’s easy, but that what you get is no more than an identical twin of the original.”
“That is about right. In fact, the clone is often much less than an identical twin. The uterine environment determines much of an individual’s adult characteristics. Consider mathematical ability. There is a genetic component—but part of mathematical genius comes from the fetus getting just the right testosterone overdose. A little too much and you have a dummy.
“Tines and I have been running for a long time. Fifty years ago we reached Lothlrimarre—the back end of nowhere if there ever was one. We had a clonable cell from the great man. We did our best with the humaniform medical equipment that was available. The newborn looked healthy enough…”
Rustle, hiss.
“But why not just raise the—child—yourself?” Hamid said. “Why hire someone to take him into the Slow Zone?”
Ravna bit her lip and looked away. It was Tines who replied: “Two reasons. The enemy wants you permanently dead. Raising you in the Slow Zone was the best way to keep you out of sight. The other reason is more subtle. We don’t have records of your original memories; we can’t make a perfect copy. But if we could give you an upbringing that mimicked the original’s…then we’d have someone with the same outlook.”
“Like having the original back, with a bad case of amnesia.”
Tines chuckled. “Right. And things went very well at first. It was great good luck to run into Hussein Thompson at Lothlrimarre. He seemed a bright fellow, willing to work for his money. He brought the newborn in suspended animation back to Middle America, and married a woman equally bright, to be your mother.
“We had everything figured, the original’s background imitated better than we had ever hoped. I even gave up one of my selves, a newborn, to be with you.”
“I guess I know most of the rest,” said Hamid. “Everything went fine for the first eight years—” the happy years of loving family—“till it became clear that I wasn’t a math genius. Then your hired hand didn’t know what to do, and your plan fell apart.”
“It didn’t have to!” Ravna slapped the table. The motion pulled her body up, almost free of the foot anchors. “The math ability was a big part, but there was still a chance—if Thompson hadn’t welshed on us.” She glared at Hamid, and then at the pack. “The original’s parents died when he was ten years old. Hussein and his woman were supposed to disappear when the clone was ten, in a faked air crash. That was the agreement! Instead—” she swallowed. “We talked to him. He wouldn’t meet in person. He was full of excuses, the clever bastard. ‘I didn’t see what good it would do to hurt the boy any more,’ he said. ‘He’s no superman, just a good kid. I wanted him to be happy!’” She choked on her own indignation. “Happy! If he knew what we have been through, what the stakes are—”
Hamid’s face felt numb, frozen. He wondered what it would be like to throw up in zero gee. “What—what about my mother?” he said in a very small voice.
Ravna gave her head a quick shake. “She tried to persuade Thompson. When that didn’t work, she left you. By then it was too late; besides, that sort of abandonment is not the trauma the original experienced. But she did her part of the bargain; we paid her most of what we promised…We came to Middle America expecting to find someone very wonderful, living again. Instead, we found—”
“—a piece of trash?” He couldn’t get any anger into the question.
She gave a shaky sigh. “…no, I don’t really think that. Hussein Thompson probably did raise a good person, and that’s more than most can claim. But if you were the one we had hoped, you would be known all over Middle America by now, the greatest inventor, the greatest mover since the colony began. And that would be just the beginning.” She seemed to be looking through him…remembering?
Tines made a diffident throat-clearing sound. “Not a piece of trash at all. And not just a ‘good kid,’ either. A part of me lived with Hamid for twenty years; the Blabber’s memories are about as clear as a tines fragment’s can be. Hamid is not just a failed dream to me, Rav. He’s different, but I like to be around him almost as much as…the other one. And when the crunch came—well, I saw him fight back. Given his background, even the original couldn’t have done better. Hitching a ride on a raw agrav was the sort of daring that—”
“Okay, Tiny, the boy is daring and quick. But there’s a difference between suicidal foolishness and calculated risk-taking. This late in life, there’s no way he’ll become more than a ‘good man.’” Sarcasm lilted in the words.
“We could do worse, Rav.”
“We must do far better, and you know it! See here. It’s two years’ subjective to get out of the Zone, and our suspension gear is failed. I will not accept seeing his face every day for two years. He goes back to Middle America.” She kicked off, drifted toward the tines that hung over Hamid.
“I think not,” said Tines. “If he doesn’t want to go, I won’t fly him back.”
Anger and—strangely—panic played on Ravna’s face. “This isn’t how you were talking last week.”
“Heh heh heh.” Lazy Larry’s cackle. “I’ve changed. Haven’t you noticed?”
She grabbed a piece of ceiling and looked down at Hamid, calculating. “Boy: I don’t think you understand. We’re in a hurry; we won’t be stopping any place like Lothlrimarre. There is one last way we might bring the original back to life—perhaps even with his own memories. You’ll end up in Transhuman space if you come with us. The chances are that none of us will surv—” She stopped, and a slow smile spread across her face. Not a friendly smile. “Have you not thought what use your body might still be to us? You know nothing of what we plan. We may find ways of using you like a—like a blank data cartridge.”
Hamid looked back at her, hoping no doubts showed on his face. “Maybe. But I’ll have two years to prepare, won’t I?”
They glared at each other for a long moment, the greatest eye contact yet. “So be it,” she said at last. She drifted a little closer. “Some advice. We’ll be two years cooped up here. It’s a big ship. Stay out of my way.” She drew back and pulled herself across the ceiling, faster and faster. She arrowed into the hallway beyond, and out of sight.
Hamid Thompson had his ticket to the Outside. Some tickets cost more than others. How much would he pay for his?
EIGHT HOURS LATER, the ship was under ram drive, outward bound. Hamid sat in the bridge, alone. The “windows” on one side of the room showed the view aft. Middle America’s sun cast daylight across the room.
Invisible ahead of them, the interplanetary medium was being scooped in, fuel for the ram. The acceleration was barely perceptible, perhaps a fiftieth of a gee. The ram drive was for the long haul. That acceleration would continue indefinitely, eventually rising to almost half a gravity—and bringing them near light speed.
Middle America was a fleck of blue, trailing a white dot and a yellow one. It would be many hours before his world and its moons were lost from
sight—and many days before they were lost to telescopic view.
Hamid had been here an hour—two?—since shortly after Tines showed him his quarters.
The inside of his head felt like an abandoned battlefield. A monster had become his good buddy. The man he hated turned out to be the father he had wanted…and his mother now seemed an uncaring manipulator. And now I can never go back and ask you truly what you were, truly if you loved me.
He felt something wet on his face. One good thing about gravity, even a fiftieth of a gee: it cleared the tears from your eyes.
He must be very careful these next two years. There was much to learn, and even more to guess at. What was lie and what was truth? There were things about the story that…How could one human being be as important as Ravna and Tines claimed? Next to the Transhumans, no human equivalent could count for much.
It might well be that these two believed the story they told him—and that could be the most frightening possibility of all. They talked about the Great Man as though he were some sort of messiah. Hamid had read of similar things in Earth history: twentieth-century Nazis longing for Hitler, the fanatics of the Afghan Jihad scheming to bring back their Imam. The story Larry got from the ansible could be true, and the Great Man might have been accomplice to the murder of a thousand worlds.
Hamid found himself laughing. Where does that put me? Could the clone of a monster rise above the original?
“What’s funny, Hamid?” Tines had entered the bridge quietly. Now he settled himself on the table and posts around Hamid. The one that had been the Blab sat just a meter away.
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
They sat for several minutes in silence, watching the sky. There was a wavering there—like hot air over a stove—the tiniest evidence of the fields that formed the ram around them. He glanced at the tines. Four of them were looking out the windows. The other two looked back at him, their eyes as dark and soft as the Blab’s had ever been.
“Please don’t think badly of Ravna,” Tines said. “She had a real thing going with the almost-you of before…They loved each other very much.”
“I guessed.”
The two heads turned back to the sky. These next two years he must watch this creature, try to decide…But suspicions aside, the more he saw of Tines, the more he liked him. Hamid could almost imagine that he had not lost the Blab, but gained five of her siblings. And the big-mouth had finally become a real person.
The companionable silence stretched on. After a moment, the one that had been the Blab edged across the table and bumped her head against his shoulder. Hamid hesitated, then stroked her neck. They watched the sun and the fleck of blue a moment more. “You know,” said Tines, but in the femvoice that was the Blab’s favorite, “I will miss that place. And most of all…I will miss the cats and the dogs.”
Though it was written first, “The Blabber” is a sequel to both A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. In this future, the centuries after the twentieth are very interesting—but discouraging and mystifying to tech optimists such as myself. Computer power increases, but somehow never produces the sentient entities we expect. In the twenty-first century, the AI gurus of the twentieth are seen as old fogies whose wild predictions never came true. Time passes. Humankind spreads through the solar system and then to the nearby stars. Some of our descendants never learn the truth. Others, whose slow boats and relativistic rockets take them galactic outward, eventually reach the Beyond. (Still others, on missions toward the galactic center, end in mindless destruction…or maybe not: the most tragic situation of all might be a colony at the edge of the Unthinking Depths, where even the brightest humans are retarded.)
The Beyond is an interesting place, almost like the wild interstellar playgrounds of 1930s science fiction, except that there are the Transhuman Reaches just a little further out, beckoning empires to remove themselves from human ken. Traders into those Reaches would be very strange beings…when they come back at all.
In particular, what about Hamid and the Blab? How did the tines race get zapped, and what about the Great Man who Hamid isn’t? When I think of other writers’ fictional universes, I imagine that they must be fully formed, and that stories simply explore an already existing place in the writer’s mind. That’s not the case with my writing. I do have ideas—but too many and not consistent, A Fire Upon the Deep was molded by “The Blabber”—but now A Fire Upon the Deep constrains my work to expand “The Blabber” into a full-length novel!
WIN A NOBEL PRIZE!
In 1999 and 2000 there was a remarkable market for short-short science fiction stories; Nature, a weekly magazine which—depending on who is talking—is the first or second most prestigious research science journal in the world. Biological sciences editor Henry Gee persuaded science fiction authors from all over the world to write 900-word stories looking forward into the next millennium. For more than a year, Nature printed a new story almost every week. I think every-one—writers, readers, and editors—had great fun with the stories. I know I had fun with my contribution.
(Note: Nature has full color interiors. I took advantage of this, using blue ink to imply that certain words and phrases were clickable links. It was a trick that will look very old very soon, but for me it was a novel way to imply backstory! In this present “black and white” edition, I have used the tags
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WIN A NOBEL PRIZE!
WEALTH, CHICKS, THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE—
THEY CAN ALL BE YOURS
Dear Johann—
I was sorry to learn that you have been passed over for tenure. I hope you won’t give the bums on your committee another chance to abuse you.
This was going to be an ordinary letter. Then I realized that you probably don’t remember
In fact, writing this ad has been a lark. Yes, it’s over the top…but it’s also the absolute truth. Working with us, you can win a Nobel Prize, and that is just the beginning. So in just a few words, I have to convince you to take the next step:
I know you read outside your field, Johann. That’s one reason why unimaginative drudges get tenure and you don’t. Have you been following the news about MRI-with-transfection? The enabling mechanism is an HIV transfection of the subject’s glial cells. The inserted genetic material expresses proteins which can be signaled by a 10-Gauss modulation of the MRI’s gradient magnets. Synched with the RF pulses, they promote the production of selected neurotransmitters. If it’s done right, the experimenter can trigger from an alphabet of about twenty neurotransmitters—at a spatial resolution only twice as coarse as the MRI’s imaging resolution.
The neuroscience guys have fallen in love with this. And right behind them are the psych people: with whole-brain MRI/t scans, researchers could induce almost any psychopathology. In public, that possibility is just ominous speculation. In secret, at least three research labs already have whole-brain MRI/t. We have such systems ourselves, and though we haven’t abused them, they are more scary than the editorials. One of the most horrifying mind-sets is something we call ‘specialist fugue state.’ When applied to a researcher, it creates an idiot savant, without a life beyond short-range research goals.
This is not what I’m selling you, Johann! But beware. Several labs are recruiting specialists for just this nightmare. Maybe they’re getting fully-informed volunteers; more likely they are getting duped victims. Either way, the public will soo
n be seeing all sorts of research productivity that is secretly based on this modern form of slavery. Don’t you get trapped by such a scam.
No, if you work for us, you’ll be running the biotech show. Johann, you are brilliant and well-trained and…well, we’ve studied you pretty carefully. You can name your price. We have major financing from a small but wealthy nation state. If you buy in, you’ll have resources that rival the CDC: a 10-Petaflops computer with a storage area network that mirrors the largest dynamic proteomics sites. All this—and the support staffs—will be fully dedicated to your personal use.
So what’s our secret? Well, we’ve improved the MRI/t trigger mechanism to respond on millisecond time scales. We can induce direct brain I/O with the look and feel of memory and thought. For fifty years, people have been predicting mind/machine symbiosis. Now we’ve actually done it, Johann! You’ll want to talk to Wardner. He’s our first success, a perfect fit for the technique, though his specialty is strategic planning. With our MRI/t technique, Wardner is like a god.
You know how your field is these days: more breakthroughs than ever before—but it’s dull, dull. A modern cell mechanics lab is like an old-time genomics site—a quietly-humming data factory. The same thing has happened in the non-bio sciences. Some theoreticians think this is heaven, but take a look at the
You can change that, Johann. Your mind will interact directly with our world-class automation. You’ll solve protein dynamics problems as easily as ordinary people plan a day at the beach.
Your working conditions? They can be almost anything you want—except that you’ll have to relocate. We’ve already built a large
