The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  “Shove off, Bertie,” said Miri.

  He gave her a little bow. “My two minutes are almost up, anyway. I’m gone.” His image vanished.

  Miri frowned at the empty space where Bertie had been. “Do what you want with Bertie’s dungballs, Juan. But even if they’re totally organic, I’ll bet they’re still banned by park rules.”

  “Yes, but that would just be a technicality, wouldn’t it? These things won’t leave trash.”

  She just gave an angry shrug.

  William had picked up the half-crushed mailing carton. “What are we going to do with this?”

  Juan motioned him to set it down. “Just leave it. There’s a FedEx mini-hub in Jamul. The carton should have enough fuel to fly over there.” Then he noticed the damage tag floating beside the box. “Caray. It says it’s not airworthy.” There were also warnings about flammable fuel dangers and a reminder that he, Juan Orozco, had signed for the package and was responsible for its proper disposal.

  William flexed the carton. Empty, the thing was mostly plastic fluff, not more than two or three pounds. “I bet I could bend it back into its original shape.”

  “Um,” Juan said.

  Miri spelled things out for the Goofus: “That would probably not work, William. Also, we don’t have the manual. If we broke open the fuel system…”

  William nodded. “A good point, Miriam.” He slipped the carton into his bag, then shook his head wonderingly. “It flew here all the way from Cambridge.”

  Yeah, yeah.

  The three of them resumed their walk down to the ranger station, only now they were carrying a bit more baggage, both mental and physical. Miri grumbled, arguing mainly with herself about whether to use Bertie’s gift.

  Even with the fog, Bertie’s “breadcrumbs” could give them a real edge in surveilling the park—if they could get them in. Juan’s mind raced along that line, trying to figure what he should say at the ranger station. At the same time he was watching William. The guy had brought a flashlight. The circle of light twitched this way and that, casting tree roots and brush into sharp relief. Come to think of it, without Miri’s Marine Corps gear, a flashlight would have been even more welcome than the jackets. In some ways, William was not a complete fool. In others…

  Juan was just glad that William hadn’t pushed the FedEx mailer back at him. Juan would have been stuck with carrying it around all night; the carton counted as toxic waste, and it would surely rat on him if he left it in an ordinary trash can. Ol’ William had been only mildly interested in the breadcrumbs—but the package they came in, even busted, that fascinated the guy.

  THE PARK’S ENTRANCE AREA still had fairly good connectivity, but the ranger station was hidden by the hillside and Juan couldn’t get a view on it. Unfortunately, the State Parks web site was under construction. Juan browsed around, but all he could find were more out-of-date pictures. The station might be uncrewed. On an off-season Monday night like this, a single 411 operator might be enough to cover all the state parks in Southern California.

  As they came off the path, into direct sight of the station, they saw that it wasn’t simply a rest point or even a kiosk. In fact, it was an enclosed office with bright, real lighting and a physically-present ranger—a middle-aged guy, maybe thirty-five years old.

  The ranger stood and stepped out into the puddle of light. “Evening,” he said to William; then he noticed the heavily bundled forms of Miriam and Juan. “Hi, kids. What can I do for you all?”

  Miri glanced significantly at William. Something almost like panic came into William’s eyes. He mumbled, “Sorry, Munchkin, I don’t remember what you do at places like this.”

  “S’okay.” Miri turned to the ranger. “We just want to buy a night pass, no camping. For three.”

  “You got it.” A receipt appeared in the air between them, along with a document: a list of park regulations.

  “Wait one.” The ranger ducked back into his office and came out with some kind of search wand; this setup was really old-fashioned. “I shoulda done this first.” He walked over to William, but was talking to all three of them, essentially hitting the high points of the park regs. “Follow the signs. No cliff climbing is allowed. If you go out on the seaside cliff face, we will know and you will be fined. Are you vision equipped?”

  “Yes, sir.” Miriam raised her goggles into the light. Juan opened his jacket so his equipment vest was visible.

  The ranger laughed. “Wow. I haven’t seen those in a while. Just don’t leave the batteries lying around in the park. That’s—” he turned away from William and swept his wand around Miriam and Juan “—That’s very important here, folks. Leave the park as you found it. No littering, and no networking. Loose junk just piles up, and we can’t clean it out like you can other places.”

  The wand made a faint whining sound as it passed over Juan’s jacket pocket. Boogers. It must have gotten a ping back. Most likely Bertie’s prototypes didn’t have a hard off-state.

  The ranger heard the noise, too. He held the wand flat against Juan’s jacket and bent to listen. “Damn false alarm, I bet. What do you have in there, son?”

  Juan handed him the bag of dark, brownish balls. The ranger held it up to the light. “What are these things?”

  “Trail mix.” William spoke before Juan could even look tongue-tied.

  “Hey, really? Can I try one?” He popped the bag open as Juan watched in wide-eyed silence. “They look nice and chocolaty.” He picked one out of the bag, and squeezed it appraisingly. Then the smell hit him. “Dios!” He threw the ball at the ground and stared at the brown stain that remained on his fingers. “That smells like…that smells awful.” He jammed the bag back into Juan’s hands. “I don’t know, kid. You have odd tastes.”

  But he didn’t question their story further. “Okay, folks. I think you’re good to go. I’ll show you the trailhead. I—” He stopped, stared vacantly for a second. “Oops. I see some people coming into Mount Cuyamaca Park, and I’m covering there tonight, too. You wanna go on ahead?” He pointed at a path that led northward from his station. “You can’t miss the trailhead; even if it’s down, there’s a big sign.” He waved them on, and then turned to talk to whoever he was seeing at the park in the mountains.

  BEYOND THE TRAILHEAD, the park was completely unimproved, a wilderness. For a hundred feet or so, Juan had wireless connectivity but even that was fading. Miri checked in with the exam proctor service to certify that their team was going local; since the wilderness was very soon going to isolate them from the worldwide net, they might as well get official credit for the fact!

  But yuk. Just knowing you can’t go out in the wide world for answers was a pain. It was like having a itch you can’t scratch or a sock with lump in it, only much worse. “I’ve cached a lot of stuff about the park, Miri…but some of it is kinda old.” Which would have been no problem, but now he couldn’t just go out and search for better information.

  “Don’t worry about it, Juan. Last week, I spent a little money and used a 411 service. See?” A few gigabytes flickered on laser light between them…She was prepared. The maps and pictures looked very up-to-date.

  Miri confidently picked one of several trails and got them on a gentle path that zigzagged downward toward the northwest. She even persuaded William to use the third pair of goggles instead of his flashlight. The Goofus moved awkwardly along. He seemed limber enough, but every four or five paces there was random spikey twitching.

  It made Juan uncomfortable just to watch the guy. He looked away, played with his goggles’ menu. “Hey, Miri. Try ‘VIS AMP.’ It’s pretty.”

  They walked silently for a while. Juan had never been to Torrey Pines Park except with his parents, and that was when he was little. And in the daytime. Tonight, with VIS AMP…the light of Venus and Sirius and Betelgeuse came down through the pine boughs, casting colored shadows every which way. Most of the flowers had closed, but there were glints of yellows and reds bobbing among the manzanita and the l
ow, pale cactus. The place was peaceful, really beautiful. And so what if the goggles’ low-res pics only showed the direction you were looking at. That was part of the charm. They were getting this view without any external help, a step closer to true reality.

  “Okay, Juan. Try laying out some of Bertie’s dungballs.”

  The breadcrumbs? “Sure.” Juan opened the bag and tossed one of the balls off to the side of the path. Nothing. He popped up some low-layer wireless diagnostics. Wow. “This is a quiet place.”

  “What do you expect?” said Miri. “No networks, remember.”

  Juan leaned down to inspect the breadcrumb. The park ranger had gotten a faint response with his wand, but now that Juan wanted a ping response, there was nothing. And Bertie hadn’t told them an enable-protocol. Well, maybe it doesn’t matter. Juan was a packrat; he had all the standard enablers squirreled away on his wearable. He blasted the breadcrumb with one startup call after another. Partway through the sequence, there was a burst of virtual light in his contacts. “Hah. This one’s live!” He turned and caught up with Miri and William.

  “Good going, Juan.” For once, Miri Gu sounded pleased with him.

  The path was still wide and sandy, the gnarled pines hanging fists of long needles right above his head—and right in the Goofus’s face. Amid the park trivia that Juan had downloaded was the claim that this was the last place on earth these pines existed. They rooted in the steep hillsides and hung on for years and years against erosion and draught and cold ocean breezes. Juan glanced back at William’s gangly form shambling along behind them. Yeah. Ol’ William was kind of like a human “Torrey Pine.”

  They were in the top of the fog now. Towering and silent, pillars of haze drifted by on either side of them. Starlight dimmed and brightened.

  Behind them, the node Juan had left was dimming toward a zero data rate. He picked out a second breadcrumb, gave it correct startup call, and dropped it to the side of the trail. The low-layer diagnostics showed its pale glow, and after a second it had picked up on the first node, now bright again. “They linked…I’m getting data forwarded from the first node.” Hah. Normally you didn’t think about details like that. The gadgets kind of reminded Juan of the toy network his father had bought him, back when Pa still had a job. Juan had been only five years old, and the toy nodes had been enormous clunkers, but laying them down around the house had engaged father and son for several happy days—and given Juan an intuition about random networks that some grown-ups still seemed to lack.

  “Okay, I see them,” said Miri. “We’re not getting any communication from beyond the dungballs, are we? I don’t want anything forwarded out to the world.”

  Yeah, yeah. This is a local exam. “We’re isolated, unless we punch out with something really loud.” He threw out five or six more breadcrumbs, enough so they could figure their relative positions accurately; in his diagnostic view, the locator gleams sharpened from misty guesstimates to diamond-sharp points of light.

  Fog curled more thickly over them, and the starlight grew hazy. Ahead of him, Miri stumbled. “Watch your step…You know, there’s really not enough light anymore.”

  In patches, the fog was so thick that VIS AMP was just colorful noise.

  “Yeah, I guess we should switch back to thermal IR.”

  They stopped and stood like idiots, fiddling with manual controls to do something that should have been entirely automatic. Near infrared was as bad as visual: for a moment he watched the threads of NIR laser light that flickered sporadically between the data ports on their clothes; in this fog, the tiny lasers were only good for about five feet.

  Miri was ahead of him. “Okay, that’s a lot better,” she said.

  Juan finally got his goggles back to their thermal infrared default. Miri’s face glowed furnace-red except for the cool blackness of her goggles. Most plants were just faintly reddish. The stairstep timber by his feet had three dark holes in the top. Juan reached down and discovered that the holes felt cold and metallic. Ha, metal spikes holding the timber in place.

  “C’mon,” said Miri. “I want to get down near the bottom of the canyon.”

  The stairs were steep, with a heavy wood railing on the dropoff side. The fog was still a problem, but with TIR, you could see out at least ten yards. Dim reddish lights floated up through the dark, blobs of slightly warmer air. The bottom was way down, farther than you’d ever guess. He threw out a few more breadcrumbs and looked back up the path, at the beacons of the other nodes. What a bizarre setup. The light of the breadcrumb diagnostics was showing on his contact lenses, where he normally saw all enhancements. But it was the USMC goggles that were providing most of the augmentation. And beyond them? He stopped, turned off his wearable enhancement, and slipped the goggles up from his face for a moment. Darkness, absolute darkness, and chill wet air on his face. Talk about isolation!

  He heard William coming up behind him. The guy stopped and for a second they stood silent, listening.

  Miri’s voice came from further down the steps. “Are you okay, William?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  “Okay. Would you and Juan come down by me? We wanna stay close enough to keep a good data rate between us. Are you getting any video off the dungballs, Juan?” Bertie had said they contained basic sensors.

  “Nope,” Juan replied. He slipped the goggles back on and walked down to her. Any breadcrumb video would have shown up on his contacts, but all he was getting was diagnostics. He started another breadcrumb and tossed it far out, into the emptiness. Its location showed in his contacts. It fell and fell and fell, until he was seeing its virtual gleam “through” solid rock.

  He studied the diagnostics a moment more. “You know, I think they are sending low data rate video—”

  “That’s fine. I’ll settle for wireless rate.” Miri was leaning out past the railing, staring downwards.

  “—but it’s not a format I know.” He showed her what he had. Bertie’s Siberian pals must be using something really obscure. Ordinarily, Juan could have put out some queries and had the format definition in a few seconds; but down here in the dark, he was just stuck.

  Miri made an angry gesture. “So Bertie gave you something that could be useful, but only if we punch out a loud call for help? No way. Bertie is not getting his warty hands on my project!”

  Hey, Miri, you and I are supposed to be a team here. It would be so nice if she would stop treating him like dirt. But she was right about Bertie’s tactics. Bertie had given them something wonderful—and was holding back all the little things that would make it useable. First it was the enable-protocol, now it was this screwball video format. Sooner or later, Bertie figured they’d come crawling to him, begging him to be a shadow member of the team. I could call out to him. His clothes had enough power that he could easily punch wireless as far as network nodes in Del Mar Heights, at least for a few minutes. Getting caught was a real risk; Fairmont used a good proctor service—but it was impossible for them to cover all the paths all the time. This afternoon, Bertie had as much as bragged they would cheat that way.

  Damn you, Bertie, I’m not going to break isolation. Juan reviewed the mystery data from the breadcrumbs. There seemed to be real content; so given the darkness, the pictures were probably thermal infrared. And I have lots of known video I can compare them to, everything that has been seen through my goggles during the last few minutes! Maybe it was time for some memory magic, the edge he got from his little blue pills: If he could remember which blocks of imagery might match what the breadcrumbs could see, and pass that to his wearable, then conventional reverse engineering would be possible…Juan’s mind went blank for a few seconds, and there was a moment of awesome panic…but then he remembered himself. He fed the picture pointers back to his wearable. It began crunching out solutions almost immediately. “Try this, Miri.” He showed her his best guess-image, and sharpened it over the next five seconds as his wearable found more correlation spikes.

  “Yes!” T
he picture showed the roots of the big pine a dozen yards behind them. A few seconds passed and there was another picture, black sky and faintly glowing branches. In fact, each breadcrumb was generating a low-resolution TIR image every five seconds or so, even though they couldn’t all be forwarded that fast. “What are those numbers all about?” Numbers that clustered where the picture detail was most complex.

  Oops. “Those are just graphical hierarchy pointers.” That was true, but exactly how Juan used them was something he didn’t want pursued. He made a note to delete them from all future pics.

  Miri was silent for several seconds as she watched the pictures coming in from the crumbs above them on the trail, and from the one that he’d dropped way down. Juan was on the point of asking for payback, like some straight talk about exactly what they were looking for. But then she said, “This picture format is one of those Siberian puzzles, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like,”

  Those formats were all different, created by antisocials who seemed to get a kick out of not being interoperable. “And you untangled it in fifteen seconds?”

  Sometimes Juan just didn’t think ahead: “Yup,” he said, blissfully proud.

  The uncovered part of her face flared. “You lying weasel! You’re talking to the outside!”

  Now Juan’s face got hot too. “Don’t you call me a liar! You know I’m good with interfaces.”

  “Not. That. Good.” Her voice was deadly.

  Caray. The right lie occurred to Juan a few seconds too late: He should have said he’d seen the Siberian picture format before! Now the only safe thing to do was “confess” that he was talking to Bertie. But Juan couldn’t bear to tell that lie, even if it meant she would figure out what he had really done.