The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  Miri stared at him for several seconds.

  William’s begoggled face had turned from one of them to other like a spectator at a tennis game. He spoke into the silence, and for once sounded a little surprised: “So what are you doing now, Miriam?”

  Juan had already guessed: “She’s watching the fog, and listening.”

  Miri nodded. “If Orozco is sneaking out on wireless, I’d hear it. If he’s using something directional, I’d see sidescatter from the fog. I don’t see anything just now.”

  “So maybe I’m squirting micro pulses.” Juan’s words came out all choked, but he was trying to sound sarcastic; any laser bright enough to get through the fog would have left an afterglow.

  “Maybe. If you are, Juan Orozco, I will figure it out—and I’ll get you kicked out of school.” She turned back to look over the drop off. “Let’s get going.”

  THE STEPS GOT EVEN STEEPER; eventually they reached a turn and walked on almost level ground for about sixty feet. The other side of the gorge was less than fifteen feet away.

  “We must be close to the bottom,” said William.

  “No, William. These canyons go awfully deep and narrow.” Miri motioned them to stop. “My darn battery has died.” She fumbled around beneath her jacket, replacing a dead battery with one that was only half dead.

  She adjusted her goggles and looked over the railing. “Huh. We have a good view from here.” She waved at the depths. “You know, Orozco, this might be the place to do some active probing.”

  Juan pulled the probe gun from the sling on his back. He plugged it into his equipment vest. With the gun connected, most of the options were live:

  BAT:LOW

  SENSORS

  BAT2:LOW

  PASSIVE

  ACTIVE

  VIS AMP

  OK

  GPR

  OK

  NIR

  OK

  SONO

  OK

  >

  TIR

  OK

  XECHO

  OK

  SNIFF

  NA

  GATED VIS

  OK

  AUDIO

  NA

  GATED NIR

  OK

  SIG

  NA

  “What do you want to try?”

  “The ground penetrating radar.” She pointed her own gun at the canyon wall. “Use your power, and we’ll both watch.”

  Juan fiddled with the controls; the gun made a faint click as it shot a radar pulse into the rock wall. “Ah!” The USMC goggles showed the pulse’s backscatter as lavender shading on top of the thermal IR. In the daylight pictures that Juan had downloaded, these rocks were white sandstone, fluted and scalloped into shapes that water or wind could not carve alone. The microwave revealed what could only be guessed at from the visible light: moisture that etched and weakened the rock from the inside.

  “Aim lower.”

  “Okay.” He fired again.

  “See, way down? It looks like little tunnels cut in the rock.”

  Juan stared at the pattern of lavender streaks. They did look different than the ones higher up, but—“I think that’s just where the rock is soaking wet.”

  Miri was already hurrying down the steps. “Toss out more dungballs.”

  DOWN AND AROUND another thirty feet, they came to a place where the path was just a tumble of large boulders. The going got very slow. William slopped and pointed at the far wall. “Look, a sign.”

  There was a square wooden plate spiked into the sandstone. William lit his flashlight and leaned out from the path. Juan raised his goggles for a moment—and got the dubious benefit of William’s light: everything beyond ten feet was hidden behind the pearly white fog. But the faded lettering on the sign was now visible: “FAT MAN’S MISERY.”

  William chuckled—and then almost lost his footing. “Did you ever think? Old-fashioned writing is the ultimate in context tagging. It’s passive, informative, and present exactly where you need it.”

  “Yeah, sure. But can I point through it and find out what it thinks it means?”

  William doused his flashlight. “I guess it means the gorge gets even narrower further on.”

  Which we already knew from Miri’s maps. At the trailhead, this had looked like a valley, one hundred feet across. It had narrowed and narrowed, till now the far wall was about ten feet away. And from here…

  “Scatter some more dungballs,” said Miri. She was pointing straight down.

  “Okay.” They still had plenty of them. He carefully dropped six breadcrumbs where Miri indicated. They stood silently for a moment, watching the network diagnostics: the position guesstimate on one crumb was twenty-five to thirty feet further down. That was darn near the true bottom of the gorge. Juan took a breath. “So, are you ever going to tell us what precisely we’re looking for, Miri?”

  “I don’t precisely know.”

  “But this is where you saw the UCSD people poking around?”

  “Some, but they were mainly south of this valley.”

  “Geez, Miri. So you brought us here instead?”

  “Look you! I’m not keeping secrets! I could see the hills above this canyon from the tourist scopes on Del Mar Heights, In the weeks after the UCSD guys left, there were small changes in the vegetation, mostly over this valley. At night, the bats and owls were at first more active and then less active than before…And now tonight we’ve spotted some kind of tunnels in the rocks.”

  William sounded mystified. “That’s all, Miriam?”

  The girl didn’t blow up when it was William asking. Instead she seemed almost abashed. “Well…there’s context. Feretti and Voss were behind the trips to the park in January. One is into synthetic ethology; the other is a world-class proteomics geek. They both got called to San Diego all at once, just like you’d expect for a movie teaser. And I’m sure…almost sure…they’re both consulting for Foxwarner.”

  Juan sighed. That wasn’t much more than she’d said in the beginning. Maybe Miri’s biggest problem wasn’t that she was bossy—it was that she was too darn good at projecting certainty. Juan made a disgusted noise, “And you figure if we just poke around carefully enough, solid clues will show up?” Whatever they may be.

  “Yes! Somebody has to be the first to catch on. Using our probe gear and—yeah—Bertie’s dungballs, we’re not going to miss much. My theory is Foxwarner is trying to top what Spielberg/Rowling did last year with the magma monsters. This will be something that starts small, and is overtly plausible. With Feretti and Voss as advisors, I’ll bet they’ll play it as an escape from a bioscience lab.” That would certainly fit the San Diego scene.

  The new breadcrumbs had located their nearest neighbors. Now the extended network showed as diamond-sharp virtual gleams scattered through the spaces both above and below. In effect, they had twenty little “eyeballs,” watching from all over the canyon. The pictures were all low-resolution stuff, but taken together that was too much data to forward all at once across the breadcrumb net to their wearables. They would have to pick through the viewpoints carefully.

  “Okay then,” said Juan. “Let’s just sit and watch for a bit.”

  The Goofus remained standing. He seemed to be staring upward. Juan guessed that he was having some trouble with the video Juan was forwarding to him. Things were going to get pretty dull for him. Abruptly, William said, “Do either of you smell something burning?”

  “Fire?” Juan felt a flash of alarm. He sniffed carefully at the damp air. “…Maybe.” Or it might just be something flowering in the night. Smells were a hard thing to search on and learn about.

  “I smell it too, William,” Miri said. “But I think things are still too wet for it to be a danger.”

  “Besides,” said Juan, “if there was fire anywhere close, we’d see the hot air in our goggles.” Maybe someone had a fire down on the beach.

  William shrugged, and sniffed at the air again. Trust the Goofus to have one superi
or sense—and that one useless. After a moment, he sat down beside them, but as far as Juan could tell, he still wasn’t paying attention to the pictures Juan was sending him. William reached into his bag and pulled out the FedEx mailer; the guy was still fascinated by the thing. He flexed the carton gently, then rested the box on his knees. Despite all Miri’s warnings, it looked like the Goofus wanted to knock it back into shape. He’d carefully poise one hand above the middle of the carton, as if preparing a precise poke…and then his hand would start shaking and he would have to start all over again.

  Juan looked away from him. Geez the ground was hard. And cold. He wriggled back against the rock wall and cycled through the pictures he was getting from the breadcrumbs. They were pretty uninspiring…But sitting here quietly, not talking…there were sounds. Things that might have been insects. And behind it all, a faint, regular throbbing. Automobile traffic? Maybe. Then he realized that it was the sound of ocean surf, muffled by fog and the zigzag walls of the canyon. It was really kind of peaceful.

  There was a popping sound very nearby. Juan looked up and saw that William had done it again, smashed the mailer. Only now, it didn’t look so bent—and a little green light had replaced the warning tag.

  “You fixed it, William!” said Miri.

  William grinned. “Hah! Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better.” He was silent for a second and his shoulders slumped a little. “Well, different anyway.”

  Juan looked at the gap in the canyon walls above them. There should be enough room. “Just set it on the ground and it will fly away to Jamul,” he said.

  “No,” said William. He put the carton back in his bag.

  O-kay, so the box is cool. Have a ball, William.

  They sat listening to the surf, cycling through the video from the breadcrumbs. There were occasional changes in the pictures, quick blurs that might have been moths. Once, they saw something bigger, a glowing snout and a blurry leg.

  “I bet that was a fox,” said Miri. “But the picture was from above us. Route us more pictures from the bottom of the canyon.”

  “Right.” There was even less action down there. Maybe her movie theories were vapor, after all. He didn’t pay as much attention to the movies as most people did—and just now, he couldn’t do any background research. Dumb. On the way to the park, he had cached all sorts of stuff, but almost nothing about movie rumors.

  “Hey, a snake,” said Miri.

  The latest picture was from a breadcrumb that had landed in a bush just a few inches above the true bottom of the canyon. It was a very good viewpoint, but he didn’t see any snake. There was a pine cone and, beside it, a curved pattern in the dark sand. “Oh. A dead snake.” Viewed in thermal IR, the body was a barely visible as a change in texture. “Or maybe it’s just a shed skin.”

  “There are tracks all around it,” said Miri. “I think they’re mouse tracks.”

  Juan ran the image through some filters, and pulled up a half dozen good foot prints. He had cached pictures from nature studies. He stared at them all, transforming and correlating. “They’re mouse tracks, but they aren’t pocket mice or white foot. The prints are too big, and the angle of the digits is wrong.”

  “How can you tell?” suspicion was in her voice.

  Juan was not about to repeat his recent blunder: “I downloaded nature facts earlier,” he said truthfully, “and some fully cool analysis programs,” which was a lie.

  “Okay. So what kind of mice—”

  A new picture arrived from the breadcrumb in question.

  “Whoa!” “Wow!”

  “What is it?” said William. “I see the snake carcass now.” Apparently he was a couple of pictures behind them.

  “See, William? A mouse, right below our viewpoint—”

  “—staring straight up at us!”

  Glowing beady eyes looked into the imager.

  “I bet mice can’t see in the dark!” said Juan.

  “Well, Foxwarner has never been strong on realism.”

  Juan gave top routing priority to pics from the same breadcrumb. C’mon, c’mon! Meantime, he stared at the picture they had, analyzing. In thermal IR, the mouse’s pelt was dim red, shading in the shorter fur to orange. Who knew what it looked like in natural light? Ah, but the shape of the head looked—

  A new picture came in. Now there were three mice looking up at them. “Maybe they’re not seeing the dungball. Maybe they’re smelling the stink!”

  “Shhh!” William whispered.

  Miri leaned forward, listening. Juan pushed up his hearing and listened, too, his fists tightening. Maybe it was just his imagination: were there little scrabbling noises from below? The gleam of the breadcrumb beacon was almost thirty feet below where they were sitting.

  The breadcrumb gleam moved.

  Juan heard Miri’s quick, indrawn breath. “I think they’re shaking the bush it’s on,” she said softly.

  And the next picture they saw seemed to be from right on the ground. There was a blur of legs, and a very good head shot.

  Juan sharpened the image, and did some more comparisons. “You know what color those mice are?”

  “Of course not.”

  “White—maybe? I mean, lab mice would be neat.”

  In fact, Juan had only just saved himself. He’d been about to say: “White, of course. Their head shape matches Generic 513 lab mice.” The conclusion was based on applying conventional software to his cached nature information—but no normal person could have set up the comparisons as fast as he had just done.

  Fortunately, Miri had some distractions: the breadcrumb’s locator gleam was moving horizontally in little jerks. A new picture came up, but it was all blurred.

  “They’re rolling it along. Playing with it.”

  “Or taking it somewhere.”

  Both kids bounced to their feet, and then William stood up too. Miri forced her voice down to a whisper. “Yeah, lab mice would be neat. Escaped super-mice…This could be a re-remake of Secret of NIMH!”

  “Those were rats in NIMH.”

  “A detail.” She was already moving down the trail. “The timing would be perfect. The copyright on the second remake just lapsed. And did you see how real those things looked? Up till a few months ago, you couldn’t make animatronics that good.”

  “Maybe they are real?” said William.

  “You mean like trained mice? Maybe. At least for parts of the show.”

  The latest picture showed cold darkness. The imaging element must be pointing into the dirt.

  They climbed down and down, trying their best not to make noise. Maybe it didn’t matter; the surf sound was much louder here. In any case, the fake mice were still rolling along their stolen breadcrumb.

  But while the three humans were moving mainly downward, the breadcrumb had moved horizontally almost fifteen feet. The pictures were coming less and less frequently. “Caray. It’s getting out of range.” Juan took three more breadcrumbs from his bag and threw them one at a time, as hard as he could. A few seconds passed, and the new crumbs registered with the net. One had landed on a ledge forward and above them. Another had fallen between the humans and the mice. The third—hah—its locator gleamed from beyond the mice. Now there were lots of good possibilities. Juan grabbed a picture off the farthest crumb. The view was looking back along the path, in the direction the mice would be coming from. Without any sense of scale, it looked like a picture from some fantasy Yosemite Valley.

  They had finally reached the bottom, and could make some speed. From behind them, William said, “Watch your head, Munchkin.”

  “Oops,” said Miri, and stopped short. “We got carried away there.” This might be a big valley for mice, but just ahead, the walls arched to within inches of each other. She bent down. “It’s wider at the bottom. I bet I could wiggle through. I know you could, Juan.”

  “Maybe,” Juan said brusquely. He pushed past her and stepped up into the cleft. He got the active probe off his back, and h
eld it in one hand as he slid into the gap. If he stood sideways and tilted his upper body, he could fit. He didn’t even have to take off his jacket. He sidled a foot or two further, dragging the probe gun behind him. Then the passage widened enough for him to turn and walk forward.

  Miri followed a moment later. She looked up. “Huh. This is almost like a cave with a hole running along the ceiling.”

  “I don’t like this, Miriam,” said William, who was left behind; no way could he squeeze through.

  “Don’t worry, William. We’ll be careful not to get jammed.” In any real emergency, they could always punch out a call to 911.

  The two kids moved forward another fifteen feet, to where the passage narrowed again, even more than before.

  “Caray. The stolen breadcrumb is off the net.”

  “Maybe we should have just stayed up top and watched.”

  It was a little late for her to be saying that! Juan surveyed the crumb net. There was not even a hazy guesstimate on the lost node. But there were several pictures from the crumb he had tossed beyond all this: every one of them showed an empty path. “Miri! I don’t think the mice ever got to the next viewpoint.”

  “Hey, did you hear that, William? The mice have taken off down a hole somewhere.”

  “Okay, I’ll look around back here.”

  Juan and Miri moved back along the passage, looking for bolt-holes. Of course there were no shadows. The fine sand of the path was almost black, the fallen pine needles scarcely brighter. On either side, the rock walls showed dark and mottled red as the sandstone cooled in the night air. “You’d think their nest would show a glow.”

  “So they’re in deep.” Miri held up her probe gun, and slipped the radar attachment back onto the barrel. “USMC to the rescue.”