by Vernor Vinge
“Don’t worry about it, Boss. They don’t want the truth.” She and the Fantaisie editor were standing at the railing of the top editorial deck. Except for the masts and Jespen Tarulle’s penthouse, this was as high as you could get on the Barge. It was one of Cor’s favorite places: a third of the Barge’s decks were visible from here, and the view of the horizon was not blocked by rigging and sails. It was early and the morning bustle had not begun. A cold salt wind came steadily from the east. That air was so clean—not a trace of tarry smoke. White tops showed across miles of ocean. Nowhere was there sign of land. It was hard to imagine any place farther from the Village of the Termite People.
Rey didn’t answer immediately. He was watching something on the print deck. He drew his jacket close, and looked al her. “It doesn’t matter. We can write the truth. They won’t understand. Anyone who wasn’t there, won’t understand.” Cor had been there. She did understand…but wished she didn’t.
Rey turned back to watch the print deck, and Cor saw the object of his interest. The man wore ordinary fatigues. He wandered slowly along the outer balcony of the deck. He was either lonely, or bored—or fascinated by every detail of the railing and deck. Cor suspected the fellow wasn’t bored: part of the Hrala fraud had been the demand that the Termiters replace her damaged “property” (the dead from Brailly’s party and the Science). It seemed unwise to retract the demand completely, so five unfortunate Villagers were taken aboard.
This was one of them; he had been a Termiter priest—their spokesman/interpreter. Cor had talked to him several times since the rescue; he made very good copy. He turned out to be a real innocent, not one of the maniacs or hard core cynics. In fact, he had fallen from favor when the cynics pushed for trial by combat. He had never left the Village before; all his Spräk came from reading magazines and talking to travelers. What had first seemed a terrible punishment was now turning out to be the experience of his lifetime. “The guy’s a natural scholar, Boss. We drop the others off at the first hospitable landing, but I hope he wants to stay. If he could learn about civilization, return home in a year or so…he could do his people a lot of good. They’ll need to understand the outside world when the petroleum hunters come.”
Rey wasn’t paying attention. He pointed further down the deck.
It was Tatja Grimm. She was looking across the sea, her tall form slumped so her elbows rested on the railing and her hands cupped her chin. The ex-priest must have seen her at that instant. He came to an abrupt halt, and his whole body seemed to shiver.
“Does he know?”
Rey shook his head. “I think he does now.”
In many ways the girl was different from that night at the Village. Her hair was short and red. Without the fake bust, she was a skinny pre-teener—and by her bearing, a discouraged one. But she was nearly six feet tall, and her face was something you would never forget after that night. The priest walked slowly toward her, every step a struggle. His hands grasped the railing like a lifeline.
Then the girl glanced at him, and for an instant it seemed the Termiter would run off. Instead, he bowed…and they talked. From up on the editorial deck, Cor couldn’t hear a word. Besides, they were probably speaking Hurdic. It didn’t matter. She could imagine the conversation.
They were an odd combination: the priest sometimes shaking, sometimes bowing, his life’s beliefs being shot from under him; the girl, still slouched against the railing, paying more attention to the sea than to the conversation. Even during the Welcoming Back she had been like this. The praise had left her untouched; her listless replies had come from far away, punctuated by an occasional calculating look that Cor found more unsettling than the apathy.
After several minutes, the priest gave a final bow, and walked away. Only now, he didn’t need the railing. Cor wondered what it must be like to suddenly learn that supernatural fears were unnecessary. For herself, the turn of belief was in the opposite direction.
Rey said, “There’s a rational explanation for Tatja Grimm. For years we’ve been buying Contrivance Fiction about alien invaders. We were just too blind to see that it’s finally happened.”
“A visitor from the stars, eh?” Cor smiled weakly.
“Well, do you have a better explanation?”
“…No.” But Cor knew Tatja well enough to believe her story. She really was from the Interior. Her tribe’s only weapons were spears and hand axes. Their greatest “technical” skill was sniffing out seasonal springs. She’d run away when she was eight. She moved from tribe to tribe—always toward the more advanced ones. She never found what she was looking for. “She’s a very quick learner.”
“Yeah. A quick learner. Tredi Bekjer said that, too. It’s the key to everything. I should have caught on the minute I heard how Jimi found her ‘praying’ to the noontime shadow of her quarterstaff. There she had reproduced one of the great experiments of all time—and I put it down to religion! You’re right; there’s no way she could be from an advanced civilization. She didn’t recognize my telescope. The whole idea of magnification was novel to her…Yet she understood the principle as soon as she saw the mirror.”
Cor looked down at the print deck, at the girl who seemed so sad and ordinary. There had been a time when Cor felt the start of friendship with the girl. It could never be. Tatja Grimm was like a hydrofoil first seen far astern. For a while she had been insignificant, struggling past obstacles Cor scarcely remembered. Then she pulled even. Cor remembered the last day of rehearsals; sympathy had chilled and turned to awe—as Cor realized just how fast Tatja was moving. In the future, she would sweep into a far away Coronadas Ascuasenya could never imagine. “And now she understands us, and knows we are just as dumb as all the others.”
Rey nodded uncertainly. “I think so. At first she was triumphant; our toys are so much nicer than any tribe’s. Then she realized they were the product of centuries of slow invention. She can search the whole world now, but she won’t find anything better.”
So here she must stop, and make the best of things. “I-I really do have a theory, Boss. Those old stories of fate and gods, the ones you’re so down on? If they were true, she would fit right in, a godling who is just awakened. When she understands this, and sees her place in the world…She talked to me after the Welcoming Back. Her Spräk is good now; there was no mistaking her meaning. She thanked me for the Hrala-coaching. She thanked me for showing her the power of fraud, for showing her that people can be used as easy as any other tool.”
For a long while, Rey had no response.
FAST TIMES AT FAIRMONT HIGH
The last story in this collection has not been published before. In fact, I just finished it (August 2001). “Fast Times at Fairmont High” is intended as a fairly conservative look at our near future. I hope to build it out to novel length eventually.
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Juan kept the little blue pills in an unseen corner of his bedroom. They really were tiny, the custom creation of a lab that saw no need for inert fillers, or handsome packaging. And Juan was pretty sure they were blue, except that as a matter of principle he tried not to look at them, even when he was off-line. Just one pill a week gave him the edge he needed…
FINAL EXAM WEEK was always chaos at Fairmont Junior High. The school’s motto was “Trying hard not to become obsolete”—and the kids figured that applied to the faculty more than anyone else. This semester they got through the first morning—Ms. Wilson’s math exam—without a hitch, but already in the afternoon the staff was tweaking things around: Principal Alcalde scheduled a physical assembly during what should have been student prep time.
Almost all the eighth grade was piled into the creaky wooden meeting hall. Once this place had been used for horse shows. Juan thought he could still smell something of that. Tiny windows looked out on the hills surrounding the campus. Sunlight spiked down through vents and skylights. In some ways, the room was weird even without enhancement.
Principal Alcalde marched in, looki
ng as dire and driven as ever. He gestured to his audience, requesting visual consensus. In Juan’s eyes, the room lighting mellowed and the deepest shadows disappeared.
“Betcha the Alcalde is gonna call off the nakedness exam.” Bertie Todd was grinning the way he did when someone else had a problem. “I hear there are parents with Big Objections.”
“You got a bet,” said Juan. “You know how Mr. Alcalde is about nakedness.”
“Heh. True.” Bertie’s image slouched back in the chair next to Juan.
Principal Alcalde was into a long speech, about the fast-changing world and the need for Fairmont to revolutionize itself from semester to semester. At the same time they must never forget the central role of modern education, which was to teach the kids how to learn, how to pose questions, how to be adaptable—all without losing their moral compass.
It was very old stuff. Juan listened with a small part of his attention; mostly, he was looking around the audience. This was a physical assembly, so almost everybody except Bertie Todd was really here. Bertie was remote from Chicago, one of the few commuter students. His parents paid a lot more for virtual enrollment, but Fairmont Schools did have a good reputation. Of the truly present—well, the fresh thirteen-year-old faces were mostly real. Mr. Alcalde’s consensus imagery didn’t allow cosmetics or faked clothes. And yet…such rules could not be perfectly enforced. Juan widened his vision, allowed deviations and defacements in the view. There couldn’t be too much of that or the Alcalde would have thrown a fit, but there were ghosts and graffiti floating around the room. The scaredy-cat ones flickered on-and-off in a fraction of a second, or were super-subtle perversions. But some of them—the two-headed phantom that danced behind the principal’s podium—lasted gloating seconds. Mr. Alcalde could probably see some of the japery, but his rule seemed to be that as long as the students didn’t appear to see the disrespect, then he wouldn’t either.
Okay, platitudes taken care of, Mr. Alcalde got down to business: “This morning, you did the math exam. Most of you have already received your grades. Ms. Wilson tells me that she’s pleased with your work; the results will make only small changes in the rest of this week’s schedule. Tomorrow morning will be the vocational exam.” Oh yeah. Be ready to learn something dull, but learn it very, very fast. Most kids hated that, but with the little blue pills, Juan knew he could whack it. “Soon you’ll begin the two concurrent exams. You’ll have the rest of finals week to work on them. I’ll make the details public later in this assembly. In general terms: There will be an unlimited exam, where you may use any legally available resources—”
“All right!” Bertie’s voice came softly in Juan’s ear. All across the hall similar sentiments were expressed, a kind of communal sigh.
Mr. Alcalde’s dark features creased in a rare smile. “That just means we expect something extraordinarily good from you.” To pass the exam, a team had to bring in three times tuition per team member. So even though they could use any help they could recruit, most students didn’t have the money to buy their way to a passing grade.
“The two concurrent exams will overlap the usual testing in visual communication, language, and unaided skills. Some of your parents have asked for more concurrency, but all the teachers feel that when you’re thirteen years old, it’s better to concentrate on doing a few things well. You’ll have plenty of time for jumble lore in the future. Your other concurrent exam will be—Miss Washington?”
Patsy Washington came to her feet, and Juan realized that she, like Bertie, was only present as imagery. Patsy was a San Diego student so she had no business being virtual at a physical assembly. Hmm. “Look,” she said. “Before you go on about these concurrent exams, I want to ask you about the naked skills test.”
Bertie gave Juan a grin. “This should be interesting.”
The Alcalde’s gaze was impassive. “The ‘unaided skills’ test, Miss Washington. There is nothing whatsoever naked about it.”
“It might as well be, mister.” Patsy was speaking in English now, and with none of the light mocking tone that made her a minor queen in her clique. It was her image and voice, but the words and body language were very un-Patsy. Juan probed the external network traffic. There was lots of it, but mostly simple query/response stuff, like you’d expect. A few sessions had been around for dozens of seconds; Bertie’s remote was one of the two oldest. The other belonged Patsy Washington—at least it was tagged with her personal certificate. Identity hijacking was a major no-no at Fairmont, but if a parent was behind it there wasn’t much the school could do. And Juan had met Patsy’s father. Maybe it was just as well the Alcalde didn’t have to talk to him in person. Patsy’s image leaned clumsily through the chair in front of her. “In fact,” she continued, “it’s worse than naked. All their lives, these—we—have had civilization around us. We’re damned good at using that civilization. Now you theory-minded intellectuals figure it would be nice to jerk it all away and put us at risk.”
“We are putting no one at risk…Miss Washington.” Mr. Alcalde was still speaking in Spanish. In fact, Spanish was the only language their principal had ever been heard to speak; the Alcalde was kind of a bizarre guy. “We at Fairmont consider unaided skills to be the ultimate fallback protection. We’re not Amish here, but we believe that every human being should be able to survive in reasonable environments—without networks, even without computers.”
“Next you’ll be teaching rock-chipping!” said Patsy.
The Alcalde ignored the interruption. “Our graduates must be capable of doing well in outages, even in disasters. If they can’t, we have not properly educated them!” He paused, glared all around the room. “But this is no survivalist school. We’re not dropping you into a jungle. Your unaided skills test will be at a safe location our faculty have chosen—perhaps an Amish town, perhaps an obsolete suburb. Either way, you’ll be doing good, in a safe environment. You may be surprised at the insights you get with such complete, old-fashioned simplicity.”
Patsy had crossed her arms and was glaring back at the Alcalde. “That’s nonsense, but okay. There’s still the question. Your school brochure brags modern skills, and these concurrent exams are supposed to demonstrate that you’ve delivered. So how can you call an exam concurrent, if part of the time your students are stripped of all technology? Huh?”
Mr. Alcalde stared at Patsy for a moment, his fingers tapping on the podium. Juan had the feeling that some intense discussion was going on between them. Patsy’s pa—assuming that’s who it was—had gone considerably beyond the limits of acceptable behavior. Finally, the principal shook his head. “You miss-take our use of the word ‘concurrent.’ We don’t mean that all team members work at the same time all the time, but simply that they multitask the exam in the midst of their other activities—just as people do with most real-world work nowadays.” He shrugged. “In any case, you are free to skip the final examinations, and take your transcript elsewhere.”
Patsy’s image gave a little nod and abruptly sat down, looking very embarrassed; evidently her pa had passed control back to her—now that he had used her image and made a fool of her. Geez.
Bertie looked faintly miffed, though Juan doubted this had anything to do with sympathy for Patsy.
After a moment, Mr. Alcalde continued, “Perhaps this is a good time to bring up the subject of body piercings and drugs.” He gave a long look all around. It seemed to Juan that his gaze hung an instant in his direction. Caray, he suspects about the pills! “As you know, all forms of body piercings are forbidden at Fairmont Schools. When you’re grown, you can decide for yourself—but while you are here, no piercings, not even ear- or eye-rings, are allowed. And internal piercings are grounds for immediate dismissal. Even if you are very frightened of the unaided skills test, do not try to fool us with implants or drugs.”
No one raised a question about this, but Juan could see the flicker of communications lasers glinting off dust in the air, muttered conversation and private imagery bein
g exchanged. The Alcalde ignored it all. “Let me describe the second of the concurrent exams, and then you’ll be free to go. We call this exam a ‘local’ project: You may use your own computing resources and even a local network. However, your team members must work physically together. Remote presence is not allowed. External support—contact with the global net—is not permitted.”
“Damn,” said Bertie, totally dipped. “Of all the artificial, unworkable, idiotic—”
“So we can’t collaborate, Bertie.”
“We’ll see about that!” Bertie bounced to his feet and waved for recognition.
“Ah, Mr. Todd?”
“Yes, sir.” Bertie’s public voice was meek and agreeable. “As you know, I’m a commuter student. I have lots of friends here, people I know as well as anyone. But of course, almost none of that is face to face since I live in Chicago. How can we handle my situation? I’d really hate to be excused from this important part of the finals just because I lack a physical presence here in San Diego. I’d be happy to accept a limited link, and do my best even with that handicap.”
Mr. Alcalde nodded. “There will be no need, Mr. Todd. You are at a disadvantage, and we’ll take that into account. We’ve negotiated a collaboration with the Andersen Academy at Saint Charles. They will—”
Andersen Academy at Saint Charles? Oh, in Illinois, a short automobile drive for Bertie. The Andersen people had long experience with team projects…back into prehistory in fact, the twentieth century. In principle they were far superior to Fairmont, but their academy was really more like a senior high school. Their students were seventeen, eighteen years old. Poor Bertie.
Juan picked up the thread of Mr. Alcalde’s speech: “—They will be happy to accommodate you.” Glimmer of a smile. “In fact, I think they are very interested in learning what our better students can do.”
Bertie’s face twisted into a taut smile, and his image dropped back onto the chair beside Juan. He made no additional comment, not even privately to Juan…
